CANCER DRUGS SPYING ON SATURN
THE REAL COST FIERY END NEARS
OF DEVELOPMENT FOR SPACE ROBOT
PAGE 7 | BUSINESS
From 9/11
to Humpty
Dumpty
Roger Cohen
OPINION
I watched my president perorate at the
Pentagon and all I could think as he
held forth about heroism on the 16th
anniversary of 9/11 was how did we end
up with Humpty Dumpty.
It was Humpty Dumpty, of course,
who declared: When I use a word, it
means just what I choose it to mean
neither more nor less. At least
Humpty Dumpty said it without that
repetitive thumb-to-stubby-forefinger
gesture of our esteemed leader.
Words cascade from that pinched
mouth and they mean nothing, be-
cause when a
For Americas man of moral
emptiness tries
attackers, the to exhort a na-
biggest success tion to moral
has been the greatness the
injection of only thing com-
municated is
fear into pitiful, almost
the national comical, hypocri-
psyche. sy.
Between a
hero and a huck-
ster, between speaking and mouthing,
the distance is great. Watching the
esteemed leaders head turning jerkily,
like an old electric fan, from
teleprompter to teleprompter, I almost
felt pity. His is the Age of Indecency.
President Trump seems lonely in his
evident unfitness. Between him and his
wife Melania I imagine what John
Lanchester once described as one of
those silences which can only be incu-
bated by at least two decades of attri-
tional intimacy. Well, theyve known
each other for 19 years.
Weve had a big fall. For the perpe-
trators of the attack on America, the
biggest success has been the injection
of fear into the national psyche. Not
even they could imagine how social
media could turn fear into contagion
and how the politics of fear would help
propel a buffoon with feral instincts to
the White House.
Looking back over the years since
the attack that bright September
morning it was my daughter Adeles
4th birthday and she had just recov-
ered from an infection so serious I had
to hold her little body while doctors
performed a spinal tap I am re-
minded of lines from Hemingways
The Sun Also Rises.
How did you go bankrupt? Bill
asked.
Two ways, Mike said. Gradually
and then suddenly.
First, there was the downward glide:
COHEN, PAGE 15
Belgian soccer a magnet for foreign cash
TUBIZE, BELGIUM
Overseas investors grab
second division teams
from Tubize to Leuven
BY RORY SMITH
There is something incongruous about
the pregame razzmatazz at the Stade
Leburton, about Michael Buffers catch-
phrase Lets get ready to rumble!
crackling out of the loudspeakers, and
the pulsing, earsplitting techno sound-
track that follows.
Tubizes greatest claim to fame in soc-
cer is as the hometown of Eden Hazard
the star of the English club Chelsea
grew up just a few streets away and
its second is as the site of the Belgian
soccer federations training base. Its 64-
year-old club, A.F.C. Tubize, ranks a dis-
tant third.
There are only a thousand or so fans
here today, for the opening game of the
NEWSSTAND PRICES
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +@!"!$!%!_
Andorra 3.60
Antilles 3.90
Austria 3.20
Bahrain BD 1.20
Belgium 3.20
Bos. & Herz. KM 5.50
PAGE 9 | SCIENCE
Nasser, a taxi driver who has been sober for three years, serving tea at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Tehran. Alcohol has been banned in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
Iran admits to alcohol problem
TEHRAN
Drinking is still a crime,
but private and public
rehab clinics are opening
BY THOMAS ERDBRINK
For most of his life, alcohol rehab for
Mehdi consisted of regular stretches in
prison and lashings that left dark marks
on his back. Now, at 36, he has prema-
turely gray hair, but with the help of an
Alcoholics Anonymous group, he
swears he has finally stopped drinking.
In recent years, Iran, where alcohol
has been illegal since the 1979 revolution
and is taboo for devout Muslims, has
taken the first step and admitted that,
like most other nations, it has an alcohol
problem.
Since 2015, when the Health Ministry
ordered addiction treatment centers to
care for alcoholics, dozens of private
clinics and government institutions
have opened help desks and special
wards for alcoholics. The government
has also allowed a large and growing
network of Alcoholics Anonymous
groups, modeled after those in the
Opening day at the Stade Leburton in Tubize, Belgium. Tubize is one of six teams out
of eight total in the Belgian second division that are owned by foreign investors.
Cameroon CFA 2600 Egypt EGP 20.00
Canada CAN$ 5.50 Estonia 3.50
Croatia KN 22.00 Finland 3.20
Cyprus 2.90 France 3.20
Czech Rep CZK 110 Gabon CFA 2600
Denmark Dkr 28 Great Britain 2.00
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
United States.
The relaxing of prohibition has al-
lowed addicts like Mehdi to emerge
from the shadows and embrace a new
circle of friends recovering alcoholics
who greeted him as he entered a West
Tehran apartment one recent evening.
Ive given up the bottle for 12 days now,
said Mehdi, a tall computer specialist
who requested anonymity because of
the stigma still attached to alcoholism in
Iran. To cheers and hoots, he added,
This is a big step for someone who was
drunk most of the time.
The government is even running pub-
lic campaigns warning Iranians not to
drink and drive, something it never
would have done in the past.
Along roads leading to the Caspian
Sea, a favorite holiday destination, bill-
boards showing bottles of whiskey and
crashed cars surprised many drivers.
The Iranian police still organize media
events where bulldozers squash thou-
sands of bottles and cans confiscated
from smugglers. But in contrast to the
past, when the official line was that
there was no drinking problem because
no one drank, they now provide officers
with breathalyzers.
President Hassan Rouhani, who came
to power in 2013, has been trying to in-
sert realism into Irans often strict ideol-
ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Greece 2.50 Kazakhstan US$ 3.50 Norway Nkr 30
Germany 3.20 Latvia 3.90 Oman OMR 1.250
Hungary HUF 880 Lebanon LBP 5,000 Poland Zl 14
Israel NIS 13.50 Lithuania 5.20 Portugal 3.20
Israel / Eilat NIS 11.50 Luxembourg 3.20 Qatar QR 10.00
Italy 3.20 Malta 3.20 Republic of Ireland 3.20
Ivory Coast CFA 2600 Montenegro 3.00 Reunion 3.50
Jordan JD 2.00 Morocco MAD 30 Saudi Arabia SR 13.00
Reza Konjedi often brings his son to the rehab meetings he runs in Tehran. He said Iran
is no longer treating alcoholics as criminals, but as patients who need treatment.
ogy. The decision to open more alcohol
treatment clinics came from the Health
Ministry, and reflects the way many so-
cial changes are introduced in Iran: qui-
etly ordered and carried out by local
governments under the radar.
Belgian second division season, and
many of them are housed in one of only
two permanent grandstands. Occasion-
ally, a train will rattle past on the tracks
that run behind the field. Conversations
pause for it to pass, then resume.
This is what small-town, small-time
soccer has always looked like, not only
here but in thousands of similar places
across Europe: low-key games between
low-key teams in low-key leagues.
But beneath the surface of this sleepy
commuter town south of Brussels, and
in a dozen or so other small towns and
minor cities across Belgium, something
has changed.
There has been, and continues to be, a
seismic shift in the landscape of Euro-
pean soccer. Longstanding, independ-
ent clubs are being subsumed into conti-
nentwide networks, used as vehicles for
the ambitions of wealthy foreign invest-
ors, or hijacked by agents looking for an
edge in the transfer market, when play-
ers change clubs.
Here, in Tubize, one can see the fault
lines between the simple past and the
BELGIUM, PAGE 12
Issue Number
Senegal CFA 2600 The Netherlands 3.20 No. 41,835
Serbia Din 280 Tunisia Din 4.800
Slovakia 3.50 Turkey TL 9
Slovenia 3.00 U.A.E. AED 12.00
Spain 3.20 United States $ 4.00
Sweden Skr 30 United States Military
Switzerland CHF 4.50 (Europe) $ 1.90
Syria US$ 3.00
WORLD HERITAGE SITES
A MIX OF THE PANORAMIC
AND THE PROVOCATIVE
BACK PAGE | TRAVEL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARASH KHAMOOSHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Tourism Council, supporting more than
The change in attitude by those in
power is driven by changing realities in
Iranian society. Official statistics show
that at least 10 percent of the population
uses alcohol in the Islamic country. For
IRAN, PAGE 6
..
Caribbean
faces a
slow road
to recovery
GUSTAVIA, ST. BARTHLEMY
Tourism could take years
to bounce back from
Hurricane Irma damage
BY AZAM AHMED
AND KIRK SEMPLE
The pace is frantic. Residents with shov-
els clean the streets. Dump trucks laden
with the stumps of storm-ravaged trees
rumble back and forth along narrow
streets. Construction crews clear
downed telephone poles and debris
from houses and businesses in a race to
restore the lifeblood of this small Carib-
bean island tourism.
Those who live on St. Barthlemy
working in the islands restaurants,
building its homes, fishing its seas
know there is nothing without it. And
Hurricane Irma, which plowed through
this part of the Caribbean, killing more
than two dozen people and seriously
damaging or destroying the majority of
structures on some islands, also struck a
devastating blow to the industry so
many rely on.
We dont have a choice, said Jordan
Laplace, a fisherman whose family has
lived on the island for generations.
Tourism is the only way to live. We
dont have anything else.
The storm leveled hotels, eroded
beaches and turned marinas into grave-
yards for scuttled yachts. Islands that
were hit are still trying to assess the hur-
ricanes economic impact, wondering
how and even if they will be able to re-
store the islands to the former tourist
magnets they were before Irma.
Theres a lot at stake. Travel and tour-
ism account for a higher share of the Ca-
ribbean regions gross domestic product
than they do in any other region in the
world, according to the World Travel &
2.3 million jobs.
The areas of greatest concern, indus-
try officials said, included Anguilla, the
British and United States Virgin Islands,
and St. Martin, all of which have robust
tourism economies and suffered exten-
sive damage.
It will be a long road for some, even
years. An estimated 95 percent of the
CARIBBEAN, PAGE 5
IN DEFENSE OF A CLIMATE DISCUSSION
The American E.P.A. chief said talk of
global warming after hurricanes is
insensitive. Experts say its not. PAGE 5
THE MONSTER SURGE THAT WASNT
A bit of meteorological luck meant that
Irmas flooding was not as bad as
forecast on Floridas Gulf Coast. PAGE 5
SEEING A DARK SIDE TO AN ASSIST
Tesla extended the driving range for
vehicles in the storm zone. Not all
customers were pleased. PAGE 8

2 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
page two
Debate swirls over Macaus identity
MACAU JOURNAL
MACAU
Fate of 60s hotel raises
question of what sites
represent regions history
BY MIKE IVES
What will become of Lady Luck?
In 2015, officials in Macau announced
that they planned to redevelop the 1962
Hotel Estoril, the former Portuguese co-
lonys first modern-style casino resort,
which features a mosaic on its concrete
facade depicting Fortuna, the Roman
goddess of chance.
But the redevelopment plan has been
stalled for two years, mostly because of
opposition from young activists. And the
fate of the hotel has prompted an unusu-
ally acrimonious debate over which
sites best represent Macaus history and
identity and which are worth preserv-
ing amid a recent flurry of urban re-
development projects.
Theres a general sentiment that Ma-
cau has changed too fast in the past 10, 15
years, a period in which the construc-
tion of several enormous casino resorts
has transformed the citys skyline and
character, said Sulu Sou, 26, the vice
president of the New Macau Associa-
tion, one of the civic groups that is fight-
ing to save the Estoril and its mosaic.
The Estoril and other unprotected
sites that face redevelopment in Macau
were very important in our childhood,
Mr. Sou added. And thats why a lot of
young people feel a sense of urgency
about them being lost.
The Estoril was built for Stanley Ho,
the tycoon who helped make Macau, a
city on the southern coast of China, into
the worlds largest gambling market.
Neither the building nor its mosaic is
among Macaus 22 officially recognized
historic sites.
Some prominent architects say de-
molishing the hotel would be just fine
because they do not see much artistic or
historic value in the structure, which
has been abandoned since the 1990s, and
has weeds and wildflowers growing in
its mildewed crevices.
The hotel was designed by a Macau-
born Portuguese architect, Alfredo Vic-
tor Jorge lvares. The mosaic, which
overlooks Tap Seac Square and Macaus
historic center, was designed by Oseo
Acconci, a builder and sculptor from Ita-
ly who moved to the city in the 1940s. Mr.
Acconcis work is emblematic of Italian
Futurism, an artistic movement that
emphasized geometric abstraction. A lo-
cal magazine described his rendering of
Fortuna as Macaus Futurist Woman.
The Estoril site, which included
restaurants and a municipal swimming
pool, marked a transition in Macau from
opium-filled gambling dens to the kind
of integrated casino resorts that are
common now, said Melody Lu, a sociolo-
gy professor at the University of Macau
who studies gambling in Asia.
Ms. Lu said some Macau residents felt
an emotional connection to the Estoril
because it was the first touch of moder-
nity they experienced after arriving
from the Chinese mainland in the years
after the 1949 Communist revolution.
Some younger residents have seized
on the Estoril, she added, as an expres-
sion of the Chinese experience here a
Influential rock experimenter with the German band Can
HOLGER CZUKAY
1938-2017
BY GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Holger Czukay, a guiding force in the
German experimental rock group Can,
one of the most influential bands of the
1970s, has died at his home studio in
Weilerswist, Germany. He was 79.
Mr. Czukay died Sept. 5. Irmin
Schmidt, a fellow member of Can, con-
firmed the death. He did not give a
cause.
As Cans bassist, Mr. Czukay was aus-
tere: His lines often consisted of just one
or two notes, locked into a merciless
drone with the drummer Jaki Liebezeit.
But Mr. Czukay was also the groups ma-
jor sound architect, responsible for engi-
neering and producing its recordings
and thickening them with innovative
electronics.
He used everything from shortwave
radios and tapes to early drum ma-
chines in service of a sound that was
raw, recombinant and woozy, even as
Mr. Liebezeit pounded out a metronom-
ic pulse.
Can tended to begin recordings with a
clean slate, improvising on tape for
hours and building what Mr. Liebezeit
who died in January called a geome-
try of people. Mr. Czukay, who doubled
on bass and live electronics, would then
splice together the most potent parts of
the recordings.
Films are made like that: You shoot
the scenes, and shoot it several times,
and later you put it together by these dif-
ferent takes, Mr. Czukay told EST mag-
azine in 1994. This is the way I make my
music. And suddenly, I found out as well
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The Hotel Estoril, which was built in 1962, marked a transition in Macau from opium-filled gambling dens to casino resorts that were aimed at a wider public.
Sulu Sou, vice president of the New Macau Association, one of the civic groups that is
fighting to save the Estoril and its mosaic.
that the music creates a certain sort of
vision; it has a visual character.
On albums like Monster Movie
(1969), Tago Mago (1971) and Ege
Bamyasi (1972), the result was an elec-
trified postmodern squall that cast a dis-
tant line to avant-garde jazz, West Afri-
can drumming and contemporary Ger-
man classical music.
A leading ensemble in Germanys
Krautrock movement, Can also drew
upon the cyclical sounds of American
minimalism but had no time for its medi-
tative ambitions. And though rampant
with provocation, Can lacked the self-
conscious guile of much Western experi-
mentalism. Its gestures had follow-
through and blind abandon, laying
groundwork for such gritty, confronta-
tional bands as Einstrzende
Neubauten and Public Image Ltd, and
the bristling post-punk of Talking Heads
and Sonic Youth.
Can began as a partnership between
Mr. Czukay and Mr. Schmidt, a key-
boardist, both of whom had studied with
the avant-garde German composer and
electronic music pioneer Karlheinz
Stockhausen. They soon joined up with
Mr. Liebezeit, the guitarist Michael
Karoli, the vocalist Malcolm Mooney
and, briefly, the flutist David C. Johnson.
Mr. Liebezeit said the bands name stood
for communism, anarchism and nihil-
ism.
Can was one of the first bands to over-
see all aspects of its own recording
process, a practice guided by Mr.
Czukay. Its first studio and rehearsal
space was in a castle outside Cologne,
but in 1971 the group relocated to the
nearby village of Weilerswist, where
they converted an abandoned movie
house into a sonic lab. They called the
studio Inner Space.
We didnt build up a control room, so
that the studio was more of a temple, like
a church, Mr. Czukay said in the EST in-
terview. Everything that happened
there was recorded straight, and edited
later. It was the beginning of sampling,
you can say.
One of the first things Can recorded at
Inner Space was Spoon, a television
theme song that reached No. 1 in Ger-
many. On that recording Mr. Czukay
used a Farfisa rhythm machine, which
provided stock drumbeats usually
meant to accompany bar pianists, in
teasing partnership with Mr. Liebezeits
live drumming.
We didnt build up
a control room, so
that the studio was more
of a temple, like a church.
Holger was able to create in the most
improvisational way, to edit forms
which didnt exist before, Mr. Schmidt
said.
After a string of artistic triumphs, Can
signed in 1975 with the British label Vir-
gin Records, which gave them bigger
budgets and access to a broader audi-
ence. It began using multitrack mixers
a move that Mr. Czukay would call
the beginning of the end, because it led
the band away from its signature open-
ended improvisations. Can scored an-
other hit with I Want More, from the
album Flow Motion, but Mr. Czukay,
frustrated with the groups changing
identity, left in 1976.
He resumed a solo career that had be-
gun quietly in 1969 with Canaxis, an al-
Buildings in Macau. The Estoril redevelopment plan has been stalled for two years,
mostly because of opposition from young activists.
bum of tape loops that presaged the am-
bient work of artists like Brian Eno. His
next solo album, Movies, came out in
1980; across more than a dozen later al-
bums, he incorporated elements like
found sounds, half-spoken vocals and
sundry percussion. Rome Remains
Rome (1987) was a highlight.
Mr. Czukay continued working in the
Inner Space building after leaving Can,
recording various projects there. He
worked often with the bassist Jah Wob-
ble, of Public Image Ltd, and Mr. Eno, on
whose albums he sometimes played
bass.
Information on Mr. Czukays sur-
vivors was not available. His wife, Ursu-
la Kloss, an artist known as U-She, died
in July.
Mr. Czukay was born Holger Schring
on March 24, 1938, to German parents
living in the Free City of Danzig, which
would later become part of Poland and is
now known as Gdansk. He changed his
name to Czukay, an approximation of
the Polish word for search, because
Stockhausen had often called him a
searcher. In 1945, as World War II drew
to a close, his family fled to Berlin.
As a teenager he worked at a radio re-
pair shop, dissecting small stereos and
developing an affinity for the sonic qual-
ities of broadcasts. He briefly played
bass in jazz bands, then spent three
years studying with Stockhausen.
In 1968 he began teaching at a high
school in Switzerland, where students
introduced him to music by the Beatles,
Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix; he
struck up a close connection with one
student, Mr. Karoli, who became a char-
ter member of Can.
A few months later, Can recorded its
debut album, Monster Movie, whose
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAM YIK FEI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Holger Czukay, left, with Can in the early 1970s. As the groups chief sound architect, Mr.
Czukay used everything from shortwave radios and tapes to early drum machines.
clanging churn betrayed the influence of
John Cale of the Velvet Underground.
But the group had its own distinctive
traits. The album begins with a chirrup-
ing synthesizer from Mr. Czukay; on the
final track, You Doo Right, the group
maunders through a 20-minute jam.
Mr. Mooney left the band soon after
the album was recorded and was re-
placed by Damo Suzuki, a Japanese vo-
calist whom Mr. Czukay discovered
busking on the street in Munich. When
Mr. Suzuki departed in 1973, the group
kept on course without a lead vocalist
and quickly released another strong al-
..
Some architects say demolishing
the hotel would be fine because
they do not see much artistic or
historic value in the structure.
heritage they argue is obscured by the
attention the government pays to Ma-
caus colonial past.
But the Estoril is not universally ad-
mired. A local teachers union, for exam-
ple, has criticized the mosaic in which
Fortunas midriff and pelvic area are ob-
scured, respectively, by a red shawl and
a green leaf as lewd.
Alexis Tam, Macaus secretary for so-
cial affairs and culture, told reporters in
2015 that, after meeting with educators
and civic groups, he felt it would be in-
appropriate to retain the mosaic if the
government carried out a plan to re-
place the hotel with a youth recreation
center and performance spaces.
The Estoril has also been criticized by
Docomomo Macau, a nonprofit organi-
zation that presses for the preservation
of some of the citys Modernist struc-
tures. Rui Leo, an architect and the
groups chairman, called the Estoril a
huge mess, partly because it sits awk-
wardly in a crowded lot and is visually
unappealing.
The government initially planned to
hire lvaro Siza, a renowned Por-
tuguese architect, to design the replace-
ment for the Estoril. Mr. Leo, who sup-
ported that plan, said this would have
raised the citys architectural profile.
But officials appeared to suspend the
project after Root Planning, a Macau or-
ganization devoted to heritage preser-
vation, petitioned them to reconsider.
Hoi Ian Lei, 34, an urban planner and
a co-founder of Root Planning, said her
group did not ask the government to
preserve the building per se, but merely
to conduct a full heritage assessment of
it as a matter of procedural justice.
We are extremely concerned about
the preservation policies for modern ar-
chitecture in Macau, she said.
People involved in the debate over the
Estoril say it is now unclear whether the
government will demolish or just re-
model the hotel, and whether it will pre-
serve the mosaic. A spokeswoman for
Macaus Department of Cultural Her-
itage declined to comment.
Last year, the president of the New
Macau Association, Scott Chiang, was
arrested after he draped a black banner
over the mosaic that accused Mr. Tam,
the citys cultural secretary, of being a
heritage killer.
Giulio Acconci, one of the mosaic
sculptors 15 children, said that while he
did not consider the mosaic a master-
piece, he still would love to see it pre-
served as a facade for whatever new
building replaces the hotel, or perhaps
even as a floor for the adjacent swim-
ming pool. People in Macau are senti-
mental thats our characteristic, he
said, adding that he remembered play-
ing in Tap Seac Square as a child. This
is a sentimental thing.
Alex Lei, 17, said he firmly opposed
demolition, even if he considered the
mosaic only so-so.
But Mona Chu, 50, said she would like
to see the Estoril replaced with a com-
munity center. Asked about the mosaic,
she grimaced slightly.
Its not so special, she said.
KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES
bum, Soon Over Babaluma. It was a
testament to the bands improvisational
ethic that no singer ever comman-
deered its identity.
Mr. Czukay told EST in 1994 that the
returns from his records allowed him to
live comfortably. Creating music that
was ahead of its time, he said, had given
him a kind of speculative financial secu-
rity.
I dont need expensive insurances,
he said. If I make a good album and the
people understand it more in 10 years or
20 years than now, this is my life insur-
ance.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 3

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4 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
World
London fire survivors outrage
LONDON
Many are in housing limbo
as officials say process
could take up to a year
BY CEYLAN YEGINSU
It has been almost three months since
the inferno that tore through Grenfell
Tower, a public housing complex, killing
at least 80 people and leaving hundreds
more homeless. Yet, in that time, only 24
households out of 158 have been placed
in permanent housing.
The survivors frustration at the slow
pace, building through meeting after in-
conclusive meeting of the local govern-
ing council, boiled over late last month.
Traumatized by the loss of family mem-
bers and neighbors, they told the offi-
cials at a meeting they were looking for
help rebuilding their lives but finding lit-
tle or none.
Where is the support? one man
shouted, pointing his finger at the leader
of the local council. When will we get
our lives back?
The outrage grew, finally becoming so
fierce that the councilors just fell silent,
staring at their feet.
Recently, government officials com-
mitted around $90 million to finding and
buying properties to meet the needs of
survivors, but said the whole allocation
process could take up to a year.
Meanwhile, hundreds of survivors re-
main in limbo in 49 hotels scattered
across London, and tempers already
roused by smoldering class resent-
ments have grown short.
They say they will listen to our
needs, take us into consideration, give
us what we want. But each week we
come back from these meetings with
nothing, said Rachel Layton, whose
Indonesia gets assertive against Chinas sea claims
JAKARTA, INDONESIA
BY JOE COCHRANE
When Indonesia recently and quite
publicly renamed the northernmost
waters of its exclusive economic zone in
the South China Sea despite Chinas
claims to the area, Beijing quickly dis-
missed the move as meaningless.
It is proving to be anything but.
Indonesias increasingly aggressive
posture in the region including a mili-
tary buildup in its Natuna Islands and
the planned deployment of naval war-
ships comes as other nations are be-
ing more accommodating to Chinas
broad territorial claims in the South
China Sea.
The two countries had three maritime
skirmishes in 2016 involving warning
shots, including one in which Indone-
sian warships seized a Chinese fishing
boat and its crew.
Indonesia is challenging China, one of
its biggest investors and trading part-
ners, as it seeks to assert control over a
waterway that has abundant resources,
particularly oil and natural gas reserves
and fish stocks.
The pushback from Indonesia takes
direct aim at claims within the nine-
dash line, which on Chinese maps delin-
eates the vast area that Beijing claims in
the South China Sea. It also adds a new
player to a volatile situation that has
seen the United States Navy challeng-
ing Chinas claims with naval maneu-
vers.
Indonesia is already a party to the
disputes and the sooner it acknowl-
edges this reality the better, said Ian J.
Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore,
where he researches South China Sea is-
sues.
The dispute largely centers on the
Natuna Sea, a resource-rich waterway
north of Indonesia that lies close to Viet-
nams exclusive economic zone.
Before naming part of the contested
waterway the North Natuna Sea to
make it sound more Indonesian, Mr.
Storey said, Indonesia last year began
beefing up its military presence in the
Natunas. That included expanding its
port on the main island to handle bigger
ships and lengthening the runway at its
air force base there to accommodate
larger aircraft.
Indonesias official policy has for dec-
ades been that it is not a party to any ter-
ritorial disputes with China in the South
China Sea, unlike its neighbors Brunei,
Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Last year, however, Indonesia and China
had the three maritime skirmishes
within Indonesias 200-nautical-mile ex-
clusive economic zone off the Natuna Is-
lands, which lie northwest of Borneo.
After the third skirmish, in June 2016,
Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs is-
sued a statement in which it claimed for
the first time that its nine-dash line in-
cluded traditional fishing grounds
within Indonesias exclusive economic
zone.
The administration of the Indonesian
president, Joko Widodo, whose top pri-
orities since taking office in October
mother lived in Grenfell Tower and sur-
vived the fire and whose sister is still
missing. If all the residents had been
rich, this would have been sorted by
now.
In another recent meeting with coun-
cil representatives, a chair was flung to
the floor, dozens of people stormed out
and one woman started hyperventilat-
ing in what she said was the start of a
panic attack.
Why, many fumed, was the local gov-
erning body, the 50-member council rep-
resenting the Royal Borough of Kens-
ington and Chelsea one of the wealthi-
est in the country unable to to provide
even a firm time frame for when they
would be rehoused?
The responsible authorities, whether
with the local council or the national
government, say they are doing every-
thing they can, working at a pace set by
the individual families, trying to identify
all their needs so that they can be as-
signed top quality housing that matches
their needs.
Many Grenfell families have turned
down housing offers because the prop-
erties are either too far from their local
community or because they are too trau-
matized to go back to go living in a high-
rise building.
Some survivors are still so distraught
by the deaths of their loved ones that
they have not been able to submit their
preferences for a new home.
Elizabeth Campbell, the council
leader who in past meetings had been
called on to resign, after providing what
residents said were unsatisfactory or in-
complete answers to their questions and
concerns explained that housing was
being allocated through a priority sys-
tem that put survivors who lost family
members first.
All of them have seen houses now
and have had the opportunity to go in
and say, This is what I want; this is
what I dont want, Ms. Campbell ex-
South China Sea
VIETNAM
The Nine-Dash Line
Chinas historical
territorial claim
BRUNEI
YSIA
SIA Nor
Natuna
atuna
tuna
Islands
slands
SINGAPORE
Indian Ocean
INDONESIA
Jaka
Jakarta
akar
Top, Susi Pudjiastuti, minister of Indonesias Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, waving to a crowd on the Natuna Islands. Above right, patrolling the seas around the Natunas.
2014 include transforming his country
into a maritime power, has ordered the
authorities to blow up hundreds of for-
eign fishing vessels seized while ille-
gally fishing in Indonesian waters.
Mr. Joko, during a visit to Japan in
2015, said in a newspaper interview that
Chinas nine-dash line had no basis in in-
ternational law. He also presided over a
cabinet meeting on a warship off the
Natunas days after last years third na-
Almost three months after the fire at the Grenfell Tower that killed at least 80 people,
only 24 households out of 158 have been placed in permanent housing.
plained at the meeting last month. The
next in the order of priority are those
who have got disabilities, whether they
are mental or physical. The next will be
families with children.
The initial emergency response to the
fire was handled so poorly by the council
that the national government had to
take over in an effort to contain an out-
pouring of public outrage.
Much of the anger was directed
against the inequality in a borough that
encompasses some of the wealthiest
and the poorest sections of the city. That
economic disparity was brought into
sharp focus after it became clear that
cheap flammable cladding and insula-
tion had been used on the exterior of the
building as a cost-saving measure dur-
ing a recent renovation.
Many residents who have attended
the council meetings week after week
have called the one-year time frame to
Hong
Hong Kong
TAIWAN
300 Miles
Pacific Ocean
PHILIPPINES
Celebes Sea
Celebes
val skirmish a move analysts viewed
as a show of resolve to Beijing.
In July, Indonesias Ministry of Mari-
time Affairs and Fisheries held a con-
spicuously high-profile news confer-
ence to release its first national territori-
al map since 2005, which included the
unveiling of the newly named North
Natuna Sea. The map also included new
maritime boundaries with Singapore
and the Philippines, with which Indo-
ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
house all the families unacceptable and
have started to look for properties on
their own.
Other survivors and community
members are angry at how much money
the council is spending on hotels. So far,
the Kensington and Chelsea Council has
spent more than $5 million on hotel ex-
penses.
Its such a waste of money for a com-
munity that really needs help, said Ms.
Laytons husband, Adam, a local resi-
dent and social housing activist. There
are so many risky towers like Grenfell
that need urgent attention. The whole
social housing system could use that
money.
The council has offered residents tem-
porary accommodations in the area, but
most survivors have said that they
would rather not move twice and are
choosing to stay in the hotels, said a
spokesman for the Grenfell Response
nesia had concluded agreements in 2015.
Arif Havas Oegroseno, a deputy min-
ister at Indonesias Coordinating Min-
istry of Maritime Affairs, told journal-
ists that the new Indonesian map of-
fered clarity on natural resources ex-
ploration areas.
That same day, the Indonesian Na-
tional Armed Forces and the Ministry of
Energy and Mineral Resources signed a
memorandum for warships to provide
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Team, a group of local and regional gov-
ernment representatives.
Asma Kazmi flinched on a recent
evening here as she walked out of the
community center meeting and came
face to face with the charred remains of
the Grenfell tower. The reality stung:
She was homeless.
Turning her back to the building, she
described her final moments in her
apartment on June 14, when she was
mixing batter and rolling pastries with
her three children as they prepared for
the pre-dawn Ramadan meal.
Then her neighbors fridge exploded,
setting off the ferocious blaze that
ripped through the 24-story building,
filling the corridors and apartments
with thick black smoke and trapping
dozens of people inside.
The kitchen was the heart of our
household, and thats what I miss the
most, Ms. Kazmi, 38, said as she walked
away from the devastated building.
Now, I dont even own a spoon. We lost
everything, every single thing that we
built.
Since the fire, Ms. Kazmi, her hus-
band and children have been living in a
double room at a four-star hotel on a
busy street in northwest London. The
room is made up of two double beds, a
single bed, a desk, television, mini-
fridge, kettle and a large bathroom. In
the corner of the room was a large pile of
donations, including clothes, pots, pans
and toiletries.
What do I do with all this stuff? Ms.
Kazmi asked on a recent evening. I
dont have a kitchen, I cant cook. Every
day we eat junk outside, she said. I
dont want my children to get used to
this. I dont want to dress my children in
other peoples clothes. I dont want to do
my washing in the sink. I just want my
home and dignity back.
On Thursday members of the council
took survivor families on a tour of the
latest properties they had acquired in
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ULET IFANSASTI/GETTY IMAGES
security for the lucrative fishing
grounds and offshore oil and gas pro-
duction and exploration activities
within the countrys exclusive economic
zone near the Natunas.
Gen. Gatot Nurmantyo, the com-
mander of the armed forces, said at the
time that offshore energy exploration
and production activities have often
been disturbed by foreign-flagged ves-
sels which some analysts took as a
..
the North Kensington area. The apart-
ments were bright and spacious, with
high ceilings and a modern finish. But
one of the greatest challenges, accord-
ing to one councilor, is finding enough
good quality properties in proximity to
one another.
We are dealing with a very closely
knit community, and they do not want to
be split up, especially now in the after-
math of this trauma, the councilor said.
They want to be close to their schools,
friends, community centers and
thats tough when there are so many
people.
This explanation rubs some former
Grenfell residents the wrong way. At a
recent council meeting, one shouted at
the councilors, saying there were plenty
of properties close together listed at lo-
cal real estate agents. Just cough up the
money and do it privately, he said.
The council says it is doing all that and
more, searching for properties with lo-
cal agents as well as developers, land-
lords and housing associations.
Back in her hotel room, Ms. Kazmi
had put her children to bed. She asked
me to whisper so I didnt wake them, and
joked that we could go and speak in the
bathroom, the only other room in her
new house.
For the first month they cried every
night and couldnt sleep, she explained.
They are children; they dont under-
stand what is going on. All they want to
do is go home.
Ms. Kazmis husband, Ceramah, said
his eldest daughter, 10, had started to
come to terms with what had happened,
but his sons, 8 and 5, ask every day when
they are going to go home.
Yesterday, for the first time, I told
them the truth. I said, Were not. We will
find a new home. I think only Alihan, my
older son, understood. He hasnt spoken
to me since.
Iliana Magra contributed reporting.
reference to China.
Although several countries take issue
with Chinas territorial claims in the
South China Sea, few do so publicly, and
the administration of President Trump
has recently sent mixed signals about
how willing it is to challenge China on its
claims. That has made the Indonesian
pushback more intriguing.
Frega Ferdinand Wenas Inkiriwang,
a lecturer at the Indonesian Defense
University, said Indonesias public nam-
ing of the North Natuna Sea means that
Indonesia indirectly becomes a claim-
ant state in the area.
Its in the vicinity of the Natunas, he
said, and the Natunas contain natural
resources which are inherited and will
be beneficial for Indonesias develop-
ment.
Analysts say the Indonesian Navy
would be no match for the Chinese Navy
in a fight, although the first of last years
clashes involved only a Chinese Coast
Guard ship and an Indonesian maritime
ministry patrol boat. It is unlikely that
the two countries navies would clash
within Indonesias economic zone, ac-
cording to analysts.
Members of the 10-state Association
of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean,
have repeatedly expressed concern
about Chinas aggressive posture in the
South China Sea. Asean members have
pointed to Chinas land reclamation
projects in disputed areas and the sta-
tioning of military personnel and sur-
face-to-air missiles in the Paracel Is-
lands which are controlled by China
but are also claimed by Taiwan and Viet-
nam.
Indonesia, the groupings largest
member and de facto leader, had in the
past remained on the sidelines of the
various South China Sea disputes and
offered to help mediate between Asean
members and Beijing.
Given that China is among Indo-
nesias biggest investors and trade part-
ners, some analysts say Jakarta will go
only so far in challenging Chinas territo-
rial claims, at least publicly.
It doesnt make Indonesia a claimant
state, said Aaron Connelly, a research
fellow at the Lowy Institute for Interna-
tional Policy in Sydney, Australia, who
follows the South China Sea disputes.
Theyve never accepted the legitimacy
of the nine-dash line, which is why they
say theres no overlap with its exclu-
sive economic zone.
China says it has traditional fishing
rights, but Indonesia is doing things in a
legalistic way right now, Mr. Connelly
said. This is a more effective way of
challenging it.
Evan A. Laksmana, a senior re-
searcher on security affairs at the Cen-
ter for Strategic and International Stud-
ies in Jakarta, agreed that the naming of
the North Natuna Sea was not specifi-
cally done to trigger a dispute with
China.
But the international legal basis un-
derpinning Indonesias new map is
clear, he said.
We do not recognize Chinas claims
in the Natuna waters we dont feel like
we should negotiate our map with Bei-
jing or ask their consent, Mr. Laksmana
said.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Scientists defend climate discussion after storms
WASHINGTON
E.P.A. chief called timing
insensitive, but experts
say time to talk is now
BY LISA FRIEDMAN
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the En-
vironmental Protection Agency, says it
is insensitive to discuss climate change
in the midst of deadly storms.
Toms Regalado, the Republican
mayor of Miami whose citizens raced to
evacuate before Hurricane Irma, says if
not now, when?
This is the time to talk about climate
change. This is the time that the presi-
dent and the E.P.A. and whoever makes
decisions needs to talk about climate
change, Mr. Regalado told the Miami
Herald. If this isnt climate change, I
dont know what is. This is a truly, truly
poster child for what is to come.
For scientists, drawing links between
warming global temperatures and the
ferocity of hurricanes is about as contro-
versial as talking about geology after an
earthquake. But in Washington, where
science is increasingly political, the fact
that oceans and atmosphere are warm-
ing and that the heat is propelling
storms into superstorms has become as
Floodwaters below Interstate 95 on Monday in Jacksonville, on Floridas east coast. Though Irma hit some places hard, the state was largely spared a devastating storm surge.
The monster surge that wasnt
NAPLES, FLA.
Hurricane Irmas flooding
was lower than expected
on Floridas Gulf Coast
BY HENRY FOUNTAIN
AND BRAD PLUMER
Across coastal Florida, the dreaded
storm surge from Hurricane Irma
caused when ferocious winds pile up
ocean water and push it onshore was
not as bad as forecast. While some areas
were hard hit, notably the Florida Keys
and Marco Island, residents of neigh-
borhoods north to Fort Myers, Sarasota
and Tampa Bay were expressing relief.
That bit of good fortune was the prod-
uct of some meteorological luck.
Because a hurricanes winds blow
counterclockwise, the precise path of
the storm matters greatly for determin-
ing storm surge. Had Irma lingered far
enough off Floridas Gulf Coast, its east-
ern wall, where the strongest winds oc-
cur, could have shoved six to nine feet of
water into parts of Fort Myers and Na-
ples, while swamping Tampa Bay and
St. Petersburg as well.
At the last minute, Irma unexpectedly
veered inland right before it got to Na-
ples, taking its eastern wall safely away
from the ocean. That meant that as the
storm tracked north over Naples, Fort
Myers and Tampa Bay, the winds at the
head of the storm were moving west and
actually pulling water away from the
shoreline. In Tampa, water levels
dropped five feet below normal, and be-
wildered spectators walked out to see
beaches sucked dry. In Sarasota, a man-
atee became stranded.
Then, once the eye of the hurricane
had passed through those areas, the
back side of the storm hit, pulling water
east toward the coast. But by this point,
sensitive as talking about gun control in
the wake of a mass shooting.
To have any kind of focus on the
cause and effect of the storm versus
helping people, or actually facing the ef-
fect of the storm, is misplaced, Mr.
Pruitt said to CNN in an interview ahead
of Hurricane Irma, echoing similar sen-
timents he made when Hurricane Har-
vey made landfall in Texas two weeks
earlier. To use time and effort to ad-
dress it at this point is very, very insensi-
tive to the people in Florida, he added.
Ben Kirtman, a professor of atmos-
pheric science at the University of Mi-
amis Rosenstiel School of Marine and
Atmospheric Science, said he believes
failing to discuss climate change hurts
Florida and the entire country.
Its precisely the conversation that
we should be having right now. Im not
sure whats insensitive about that, said
Dr. Kirtman, who evacuated from Flor-
ida on Wednesday. Its really important
to direct resources and funds to the cri-
sis on the ground at the moment, of
course. But I dont see why whats caus-
ing these storms and whats contribut-
ing to making it worse is necessarily
mutually exclusive.
To be sure, people nailing plywood to
their windows or stuffing emergency
provisions into a suitcase are not in a po-
sition to dwell on the causes behind the
storms. But Leonard Berry, the former
director of the Center for Environmen-
the storms winds were weakening, and
the resulting surge was not nearly as
strong as feared.
That weakening was readily apparent
in Fort Myers. When it passed over the
city at about 7:15 p.m., the center of the
storm, rather than being a well-formed
eye, was a jumbled mass of thinner
clouds. This suggested that the hurri-
canes cyclonic structure was beginning
to come apart.
Some parts of Fort Myers and Naples
saw sea levels surge four to five feet
above normal levels a damaging
flood, but less than early warnings had
suggested.
When Peter Falisi, his father and
other family members went to check on
the restaurant they were renovating
Monday, they were not sure what they
would find.
The neighborhood, near the Naples
airport, had been forecast to get a storm
surge of up to six feet above ground.
That would potentially cause cata-
strophic flooding at the business, Two
Guys Kitchen and Catering, which they
hoped to open in a month.
When they arrived, there was little
sign of any flooding. Although there was
some water in the building, it was not
from the surging ocean: Irmas winds
had peeled off paneling from a roof over-
hang and broken a water pipe.
The only water we have inside is
from the broken sprinkler system, Mr.
Falisi said.
Along the southwest Florida coast,
only Marco Island, south of Naples, ap-
peared to have suffered from significant
flooding. Police officers on Monday
went door to door on the island, check-
ing on residents who stayed behind to
ride out the storm. No deaths or serious
injuries were reported.
In Fort Myers early Monday morning,
there were few signs of flood damage.
Across the Caloosahatchee River in
North Fort Myers, residents returned to
mobile home parks to find them dry and
tal Studies at Florida Atlantic Univer-
sity who rode out Hurricane Irma in his
home in Boca Raton, Fla., said policy
makers have an obligation to talk about
it if they hope to protect citizens from in-
creasingly powerful storms going for-
ward.
Immediately afterward weve got to
say Come on guys, lets really see if this
is a harbinger of the future. And it
clearly is to those of us who have looked
even generally at the issue, he said.
One should be sensitive, but not
stupid.
Dr. Kirtman and Dr. Berry are among
a group of Florida scientists who con-
fronted Governor Rick Scott in recent
years for his refusal to acknowledge that
human-made greenhouse gases are
driving climate change. Last year they
wrote a letter to then-candidate Donald
J. Trump asking for a meeting to discuss
the consequences of climate change in
Florida. They said the Trump campaign
never responded.
President Trump has derided climate
change as a hoax. Mr. Pruitt has de-
clared that carbon dioxide emissions
from cars, power plants and other
sources are not the primary contributor
to global warming, despite overwhelm-
ing scientific evidence to the contrary.
The E.P.A. has removed many mentions
of climate change from its website and is
rolling back regulations aimed at curb-
ing carbon dioxide emissions.
intact, with what damage there was
coming largely from wind, not water.
And in East Naples neighborhoods,
where inundation maps suggested as
much as nine feet of water, at most
homes there was little more than a foot
or two, shallow enough to only lap at the
front steps.
Tampa and St. Petersburg saw just
two to three feet of storm surge, accord-
ing to data from Hal Needham, a storm
surge expert and founder of the private
firm Marine Weather & Climate.
That initial draining of water acted
as a crucial buffer, said Rick Luettich,
director of the University of North Car-
olinas Institute of Marine Sciences and
Irmas turn inland kept damage
low in several cities. But sea-level
rise caused by climate change
worsened the storm surge that
did occur in many areas.
an expert on storm surge. By the time
the back side of Irma hit, the storm was
further inland and not quite as strong.
Yet because Irma was so unusually
large, its fierce winds also extended all
the way to the east coast of Florida,
pushing water inland there. Dr. Need-
ham estimated that salt water levels
rose four feet above normal in Miami
the 10th highest level seen since 1880.
That produced a river of water pour-
ing into downtown Miami and Brickell,
the citys financial district.
The surge also caused flooding in the
enclaves of Coral Gables and Palmetto
Bay.
As Irma, now a tropical storm, trav-
eled farther north Monday, its eastern
winds continued to push water up into
the coasts of eastern Florida and Geor-
gia, with parts of the region facing seven
feet of storm surge.
In Jacksonville, coastal surges and
Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said, To have any
kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people is misplaced.
In Florida, scientists say, Gov. Scotts
aversion to even the words climate
change have prompted scientists to
self-censor their work.
If you write a proposal and it talks
about fixing some infrastructure be-
cause of climate change, its not going
JOHNNY MILANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
heavy rains have swamped the central
business district and swelled the nearby
St. Johns River.
Sea-level rise caused by climate
change also worsened the storm surge
that did occur in many areas. In Miami,
sea levels have risen roughly 10 to 12
inches in the past century.
That may not sound like a big deal,
but when combined with a four-foot
surge, it can mean the inundation of
thousands of more buildings, Dr. Need-
ham said.
Still, the damage could have been far
worse. Chuck Watson, a disaster mod-
eler for Enki Research in Savannah, Ga.,
had initially predicted total damage as
high as $150 billion to $200 billion, which
would have made Irma the costliest
storm in United States history.
But once the storm shifted inland, Mr.
Watson downgraded those initial esti-
mates to around $50 billion, which
would still make Irma one of the five
costliest hurricanes on record in the
country. While high winds and heavy
rainfall were still expected to cause ma-
jor damage to buildings, the reduced
storm surge made a big difference.
Theres always a lot of uncertainty
with storms that run south to north, Mr.
Watson said. If the storm shifts just 50
miles east or west, that can make a huge
difference in terms of damage.
Experts also warn that Floridas west
coast should not get too complacent af-
ter this bout of relative good fortune. If a
major hurricane were to travel from the
Gulf of Mexico and barrel northeast di-
rectly into Tampa Bay, that could
produce surges of 15 feet or more.
The west coast of Florida still has
plenty of disasters that are waiting to
happen, Mr. Luettich said. This was re-
ally a best-case scenario, from a track
perspective, for a storm this strong.
Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting
from Miami and Christine Hauser from
Marco Island, Fla.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 5
AL DRAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
anywhere, Dr. Kirtman said. You
spend an awful lot of effort word-search-
ing your document for the words cli-
mate and change. Its silliness.
That is one reason many scientists
maintain that it is critical to use the
megaphone that the dual devastation of
Caribbean tourism faces
a slow road to recovery
CARIBBEAN, FROM PAGE 1
structures on the island of Barbuda
were seriously damaged or destroyed.
Entire stretches of St. Martin and An-
guilla are practically uninhabitable, not
only because of the roofs peeled back
like tin cans and porches smashed to
splinters, but because of shortages of
food and water.
An estimated 90 percent of the St.
Martin economy depends either directly
or indirectly on tourism, said Jnovfa
Eche, who works in the St. Martin tour-
ism office in Paris. The destruction, she
said, is estimated at $1.43 billion.
This will take months, years before
we are at all close to our normal appear-
ance, she said.
But before the rebuilding of the tour-
ism industry could begin, officials said,
there were many immediate emergen-
cies to attend to, like restoring telephone
and electricity service, providing safe
drinking water and medical treatment,
and reopening the port and the airport.
Barbuda, with about 100 hotel rooms,
has been a small contributor to the re-
gions overall tourism economy. But the
businesspeople and workers who have
depended on that trickle of tourists now
face an uncertain future.
All the hotels have been damaged
significantly, Trevor Walker, a former
member of Parliament, said Monday.
This is going to take years. We have to
rebuild an island, rebuild an economy.
In Cuba, the long-term implications
could be even worse. The hardest hit
parts of the islands contain a significant
share of its tourist infrastructure and
bring in precious foreign currency for
the communist nation. Without that, the
country loses one of its primary sources
of income to purchase items on the
global market, including the construc-
tion materials it will need to repair the
damaged infrastructure.
The storm badly damaged dozens of
hotels on Cayo Coco and Cayo Romero,
small islands off the north coast of Cuba.
The airport that served these islands
was destroyed.
On Monday, President Ral Castro
recognized the importance of resorts to
the Cuban economy, and promised they
would be rebuilt before the start of the
peak season, which runs from Decem-
ber to April.
The target is ambitious, but with Ven-
ezuela, the islands main economic part-
ner, racked by its own crises, Cuba cant
afford to miss it. The Cuban government
announced on Monday that 10 people
had died as a result of the storm, bring-
ing the death toll in the Caribbean to at
least 37.
The hurricanes impact was felt
broadly across all economic sectors.
While the Bahamas generally avoided
the worst of the destruction, the Morton
Salt company, on Great Inagua, suffered
significant damage to its production
A man surveying damage in his collapsed apartment building in Havana on Monday.
world
Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma
has provided. People, they note, are fi-
nally paying attention.
We know that as humans, we are all
too good at pretending like a risk, even
one we know is real, doesnt matter to
us, Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric
scientist at Texas Tech University, wrote
in an email as Harvey lashed the Texas
coast.
When we try to warn people about
the risks, theres no news hook. No one
wants to listen. Thats why the time to
talk about it is now, Dr. Hayhoe said.
The most pernicious and dangerous
myth weve bought into when it comes
to climate change is not the myth that it
isnt real or humans arent responsible.
Its the myth that it doesnt matter to me.
And that is exactly the myth that Har-
vey shatters.
Its unclear whether powerful storms
will change minds. A 2015 study pub-
lished in the journal Climatic Change
found Americans experiencing extreme
weather events are not necessarily
more concerned about climate change.
Last week E&E News interviewed sev-
eral Republican lawmakers whose con-
stituents were hit by Hurricane Harvey
and most said they had not considered
the issue of climate change.
Dr. Hayhoe said that scientists have to
keep communicating the risks. We
need to understand whats at stake, be-
cause if not, we wont act, she said.
plant, where it employs 145 workers and
is the main economic driver.
Theresa Lewis, 50, who has worked as
a security guard at the plant for more
than a decade, fled Inagua last week
with her entire family and holed up in a
shelter in Nassau. She fears she may be
out of work for months.
If things are closed down for long, I
will have to depend on what I can make
from the little arts and crafts that I sell
bags, jewelry, slippers until the
plant reopens, Ms. Lewis said. I just
finished building my house a couple of
months ago and I have no idea what I
will meet when I get there or when I will
work again.
Frank J. Comito, chief executive offi-
cer of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism
Association, said the region will need
sustained participation by both the
public and private sector to ensure a
complete recovery. His group has part-
nered with Tourism Cares, a nonprofit,
to raise relief and rebuilding assistance
from the hotel chains, credit card com-
panies and any other enterprises in-
volved in the Caribbean tourism indus-
try.
The well-being of employees whose
livelihoods are now threatened is of par-
ticular concern.
How do we get our tourism product
back up and running? he said. How do
we make sure our employees get in-
volved in the industry again and get em-
ployed?
Giles Cadman, a businessman who di-
vides his time between Canada and the
British Virgin Islands, said people were
doing what they could to bring aid to the
affected communities in Tortola, the
largest island in the British territory.
While the islands are known as play-
grounds for the wealthy, he said, there
are many residents who survive there
on modest incomes from cleaning boats,
serving food and working in shops.
In St. Barthlemy, there is an ambi-
tious plan, shared by nearly everyone
on the island: restore the hotels, shops
and restaurants fast enough to catch at
least part of the winter high season.
Bruno Magras, the president of the lo-
cal government, said the largest impact
was on private homes and public infra-
structure, like the fire station and gov-
ernment offices. Hotel capacity also has
been hit.
Obviously that will have an eco-
nomic impact, he said. Tourism is ev-
erything to us. Its the only economic ac-
tivity we have. We import everything
and export nothing.
Azam Ahmed reported from Gustavia
and Kirk Semple from Mexico City. Alissa
J. Rubin and Aurelien Breeden contribut-
ed reporting from Paris, Ed Augustin
from Havana, Cuba, Erica Wells from
Nassau, Bahamas, and Carl Joseph from
St. Johns, Antigua.
DESMOND BOYLAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

6 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
world
Talking after an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The government is running campaigns warning Iranians not to drink and drive, something it never would have done in the past.
Iran admits to an alcohol problem
IRAN, FROM PAGE 1
some among the countrys urban middle
classes, drinking has become as normal
as it is in the West. The Iranian news me-
dia have reported that those Iranians
who do drink tend to do so more heavily
than people even in heavy-drinking
countries like Russia and Germany.
One reason is that alcohol is relatively
easy to procure. There are alcohol sup-
pliers anyone can call, and they will de-
liver whatever you want to your
doorstep. Dealers receive their goods
through a vast illegal distribution net-
work that serves millions with alcohol
brought in from neighboring Iraq.
To some extent, the sheer availability
of alcohol is driving the changes in offi-
cial attitudes.
These days there is so much alcohol
available, simply punishing everybody
and using force is no longer working,
said Reza Konjedi, 36, a former alcoholic
who runs several Alcoholics Anony-
mous support groups in Tehran. Drink-
ing and bootlegging used to be viewed
as equal crimes, and people would be
lashed for being abusers. Now, security
officials, the municipality, they all view
alcoholics not as criminals, but as pa-
tients who need treatment.
Before the revolution, Irans national
spirit was aragh sagi, or dog spirit,
which was distilled from raisins and
contained 65 percent ethanol. It remains
popular and is typically sold in four-gal-
lon jerrycans.
Bootlegging is also a major problem;
dozens of people die from alcohol poi-
soning every year after consuming low-
quality moonshine 135 in 2013, the lat-
She aided a disabled Afghan. He shot her.
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
Polio patient had gotten
19 years of treatment
at Red Cross facility
BY MUJIB MASHAL
He was a polio patient, for 19 of his 21
years receiving treatment at an ortho-
pedic center in northern Afghanistan
run by the International Committee of
the Red Cross. The organizations seven
rehabilitation centers around the coun-
try are often the last hope for a new leg
or arm for the thousands who have lost
legs and arms to the long war.
She was an experienced physiothera-
pist with more than a decade of humani-
tarian work, on her first mission in the
country. Her specialty: the patient work
of helping crippled children, men and
women with disabilities learn how to
walk again.
Shortly after 10 Monday morning, he
arrived in a wheelchair, supposedly for
another therapy session. Instead he
pulled out a Russian pistol and fired one
shot. The physiotherapist was struck in
the chest a fatal wound.
In an emotional statement, the Red
Cross identified the therapist as Lorena
Enebral Prez, 38, of Spain. She had
been in Afghanistan for more than a
year, shuttling between the organiza-
tions different centers in the north and
west. Now she has become the latest re-
minder of the risks to aid workers in Af-
ghanistan as the violence in the country
intensifies.
Energetic and full of laughter, Lore-
na was the heart of our office in Mazar,
said the Red Crosss head of delegation
in Afghanistan, Monica Zanarelli, refer-
est year for which official statistics are
available.
In July, after three people died and
dozens were poisoned in the city of Sir-
jan, a former police chief went so far as
to publish an open letter calling for an
end to the taboo on alcohol.
Mehdi was brought into the group by
Mr. Konjedi, after nearly a decade of
run-ins with the law. He said he drank to
forget. Money problems, he said. The
economy is not good here. Whenever I
would feel pressure, I would get a bottle
and drink it.
Mr. Konjedis wife, Samin they met
through A.A. said she needed at least
two meetings a day to prevent her from
taking up the bottle. Its like chemo-
therapy, she said. I constantly need a
dose to cure my disease.
A.A. and another group, Aware Anon-
ymous, sponsor groups across the coun-
try, Mr. Konjedi said, adding that there
were dozens in Tehran alone and over a
thousand nationwide.
A week earlier we met around 7 a.m.
at a regular A.A. meeting in a municipal
building in the western part of town.
Next to the room, which was provided
rent-free, were a kindergarten and a
room for Quran classes. Inside were 15
men and women who nearly every day
would meet to help one another stay so-
ber.
Local governments across the coun-
try are asking for our help, and facilitat-
ing our groups, because they are seeing
that our work is effective, Mr. Konjedi
said.
The only thing lacking is an official
permit, something even groups fighting
The Red Cross center in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, where the physiotherapist was
shot. Her specialty was helping crippled children, men and women learn how to walk.
ring to the capital city of Balkh Province.
Today, our hearts are broken.
Ms. Zanarelli added: The violent
fluctuations of life seem particularly
cruel today.
By the end of Monday, only the most
basic sketch of the gunman, identified
by the police as Mohammed Nasim, 21,
had emerged, but little of his motives.
None of the militant groups in Afghan-
istan, neither the Taliban nor the Islamic
State, claimed responsibility.
Gen. Abdul Razaq Qaderi, the deputy
police chief of Balkh Province, said Mr.
Nasim, who was arrested, came from
neighboring Baghlan Province, from the
restive Dand-e-Ghori area, which is
largely controlled by the Taliban.
He was a polio victim and he was un-
der treatment in the hospital since he
Leaving an A.A. meeting. Official statistics show 10 percent of Iranians drink alcohol.
drug addiction have. That is because the
Quran mentions the evils of wine but has
nothing to say about drugs.
In fact, some Iranians, especially in
larger cities, view alcohol as something
completely normal. On a recent mid-
week evening, eight Iranians met on a
rooftop, where the red wine, vodka and
aragh sagi flowed freely.
One guest said he had been arrested
for drunken driving and was now await-
ing lashings. Another said he, like many
others, had developed liver problems
because of regular drinking. Some peo-
ple joked that they were alcoholics.
NANA MEDIA/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
was 2 years old, General Qaderi said.
He was always coming to the hospital
and had visited the day before as well.
The episode was as brief as it was
deadly.
He fired only one bullet, General
Qaderi said. After the first bullet, peo-
ple and the guards tackled him and did-
nt allow him to fire more.
Rais Abdul Khaliq, a member of the
Balkh provincial council, said a second
man, a patient of 12 years, had been ar-
rested as an accomplice. Both had polio
and were paralyzed, Mr. Khaliq said.
They defamed the name of Afghans.
This is a terrorist attack.
Before arriving in Afghanistan in May
2016, Ms. Enebral had helped patients
with disabilities for years in Malawi,
Ethiopia and Tanzania. I believe that
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARASH KHAMOOSHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Konjedi said that he had seen the
number of people with alcohol problems
increase over the years, from a decade
ago when he himself was homeless and
drinking hard. We need more bill-
boards, more groups, to help them, he
said.
He did not want to comment on
whether the nearly 40-year prohibition
was the best way to prevent people from
drinking.
At least our officials are now taking
the right steps to deal with those who
are suffering, Mr. Konjedi said. We
should be happy with that.
the quality and warmth in the work I do
is essential and one of my most impor-
tant virtues, she wrote on her LinkedIn
profile.
Her vision seemed to match that of Al-
berto Cairo, a local icon of sorts who
leads the orthopedic service in Afghani-
stan and was one of the earlier Interna-
tional Red Cross staff members to come
here. He arrived in 1989 and has stayed
in the country since. Last May, around
the time Ms. Enebral arrived in Afghani-
stan, she shared a 2014 profile of Mr.
Cairo on her Facebook page.
People losing a leg, a limb some-
times they lose much more than that,
Mr. Cairo said. They lose this self-es-
teem, they dont consider themselves
complete person anymore. Thats some-
thing we have to work very hard for. Its
essential. You can give a leg, you can
give an arm, but if you cannot put to-
gether heart and mind and dignity, the
job is not done.
The Red Cross is one of the longest-
serving medical aid organizations in Af-
ghanistan, for more than three decades
making sure lifesaving services reach
areas few dare to go. The seven rehabili-
tation centers around the country pro-
vide more than 19,000 artificial legs,
arms and other devices every year. In
2016, about 136,000 patients received
physical rehabilitation at the centers.
As Afghanistan has turned more vio-
lent in recent years, space has shrunk
for aid work, with movement restricted
and staff members often singled out. In
February, six Red Cross staff members
were killed in the north and two were ab-
ducted. They were released last week af-
ter more than six months of captivity.
Our staff are humanitarian workers
who seek only to improve the lives of
victims of war, the Red Cross statement
announcing Ms. Enebrals death said.
We are #NotATarget.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Pakistan Rohingya angry
over violence in Myanmar
KARACHI, PAKISTAN
From squalid urban slums,
calls for global pressure
and an end to local abuse
BY MEHREEN ZAHRA-MALIK
It was happening again, but worse than
ever: Hundreds of thousands of ethnic
Rohingya Muslims were fleeing Myan-
mar while under attack by the security
forces, and the deaths kept mounting.
Everybody in the vast Arkanabad
slum of Karachi has family members
who were affected by the government
raids that started last month.
Outside Myanmar, and perhaps now
Bangladesh, Pakistan is home to the
highest concentration of Rohingya in
the world, from a previous exodus of Ro-
hingya in the 1970s and 80s. A vast ma-
jority live in neighborhoods that are dis-
tressingly impoverished even by Kara-
chis standards.
Now they are angry that Pakistan is
not doing more to stop the killing in
Myanmar, no less to improve the condi-
tion of the estimated 500,000 Rohingya
who live in this country.
The government needs to do more:
Send them more aid, send them food,
and break ties with Myanmar com-
pletely! said Noor Hussain Arkani,
who leads the Pakistan chapter of a
charity in the Rohingya community, the
Rohingya Solidarity Organization. We
need world pressure behind us to end
this violence, this hell. Just issuing
statements isnt enough.
Pakistan was among the earliest and
most strident in condemning the Myan-
mar government for its offensive, which
started after Rohingya militants killed
members of the security forces.
But even as politicians and civil soci-
ety in Pakistan are up in arms over how
the Buddhist majority in Myanmar is
abusing the Muslim Rohingyas there,
hundreds of thousands of Rohingya mi-
grants here continue to live in despera-
tion.
Across the Arkanabad slum named
after the old designation for Myanmars
present-day Rakhine State decrepit
shanties with temporary walls, often
with no doors and windows and un-
steady corrugated roofs, serve as
homes to more than 100,000 Rohingya.
The men mostly work as fishermen,
while a small number weave carpets or
are employed in garment factories. Mal-
nutrition and diarrhea are common
among children who have little access to
schools and spend their days playing in
rivers of garbage.
Residents said that up to 30 families
shared a single tap of water. But even
where running water is available, it of-
ten flows for fewer than four hours a day.
There are no hospitals in these slums,
and at least six Rohingya women spoke
of having a relative die giving birth be-
cause she had been denied admission to
government hospitals.
Still, what people complained of the
most in interviews last week was rou-
tine harassment by the police. Many
spoke grimly of a Burma Cell, a special
police division responsible for cracking
down on Rohingya migrants. (Burma
was the former name of Myanmar.)
Many Rohingya have carried Paki-
stani national ID cards for years. but
since the authorities started cracking
down on fake ID cards in 2014, many in
the community have found it hard to get
their cards renewed. And the second
generation is being denied cards alto-
gether, they said.
Without cards, we are blocked out of
Hoor Bahar, 60, lives in the Arkanabad slum in Karachi, one of the estimated 500,000
ethnic Rohingya in Pakistan from an exodus in the 1970s and 80s.
CORRECTIONS
An article on Sept. 5 about the singer
Taylor Swift, who previewed a new
song, Ready for It?, during the broad-
cast of the Alabama-Florida State col-
lege football game, misidentified the
television network that showed the
game. It is ABC, not ESPN.
The 36 Hours column in the Aug. 26-27
editions, about Brussels, misidentified
the painter of The Fall of the Rebel An-
gels, which is on display at the Old Mas-
ters Museum there. The work is by
..
jobs, our children cant apply for admis-
sion in high schools and we cant access
government hospitals, said Mr. Arkani,
of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization.
In the slum of Burmi Colony, many
residents spoke of being forbidden by
the police to leave to go fishing. Moham-
mad Younis, a fisherman in his 30s, said
he had not worked for half a year and his
monthly salary of around $600 had
shrunk to less than $60.
When I try and take my nets and go
out, I get stopped by police who ask for
my ID, said Mr. Younis, whose docu-
ments expired six months ago. I show
them documents to prove I am trying to
renew my ID card, but they dont even
let me leave the colony.
He added, We will die, trapped here
without access to our means of liveli-
hood.
Residents described arrests of people
without ID cards who were then held ei-
ther on impossible bail or until they paid
a bribe directly to officers.
Malik Ishfaque, the station house
master at the police station under whose
jurisdiction many of the Rohingya-ma-
jority slums fall, said that the police
were required to crack down on anyone
who did not possess valid documents.
And while he acknowledged that the
Burma Cell within the police used to ex-
ist, he said it had been dismantled.
When asked about instances of har-
assment and intimidation by the police
that were described by the Rohingya
community, Mr. Ishfaque said: We act
We need world pressure behind
us to end this violence, this hell.
Just issuing statements isnt
enough.
against these people because they are a
group of thieves, complaining that
crimes from pick-pocketing to robbery
in the surrounding area are mostly com-
mitted by the Rohingya.
Though they have little, the Rohingya
here have been trying to directly help
their people back in Myanmar.
Mr. Arkani said the community had
raised money to send meat from 30 cows
for the new wave of refugees in Bangla-
desh, as no new refugees were being al-
lowed into Pakistan. The Rohingya Soli-
darity Organization had also set up a
glass donation box, but it was almost
empty.
We are so poor already, but even then
we try to raise whatever little money we
can among ourselves, he said. But we
need more help from Pakistani people
who are rich, who have resources.
Though they feel strongly about their
people, many who live here cannot even
officially identify themselves as Rohing-
ya. To avoid persecution and be ac-
cepted as naturalized citizens, many
pretended to be Bengalis who migrated
from East Pakistan before the 1971 war of
independence, after which it became
Bangladesh.
You ask if we have enough to eat or
drink, but I ask you: What is our condi-
tion when we cannot even say we are
Burmese? said Noor Jabbar, a commu-
nity elder whose ID card expired three
months ago but who has not been suc-
cessful in renewing it.
They wont let me be a citizen, be-
cause then they have to give me rights,
and they wont call me a refugee be-
cause then they have to give me aid,
said Khalid Saifullah, a 70-year-old who
migrated to Pakistan from Myanmar
four decades ago and showed the high
school diploma he had received from a
school in Karachi. I am not a citizen or a
refugee. I am an illegal alien. I am noth-
ing.
AKHTAR SOOMRO/REUTERS
Pieter Bruegel the Elder not by his
son Jan Brueghel the Elder.
A caption with an article Monday
about a collection of art owned by
Claude Monet described imprecisely
the status of Still Life With Milk Jug
and Fruit by Paul Czanne. Though the
National Gallery of Art in Washington,
which now owns the painting, has indi-
cated that it once belonged to Monet, the
Muse Marmottan in Paris said its re-
cent research suggested that it did not.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 7

Business
Examining the cost
of cancer drugs
Development expense
is not as high as previously
thought, according to study
BY GINA KOLATA
What does it really cost to bring a drug
to market?
The question is central to the debate
over rising health care costs and appro-
priate drug pricing. President Trump
campaigned on promises to lower the
costs of drugs.
But numbers have been hard to come
by. For years, the standard figure has
been supplied by researchers at the
Tufts Center for the Study of Drug De-
velopment: $2.7 billion each, in 2017 dol-
lars.
Yet a new study looking at 10 cancer
medications, among the most expensive
of new drugs, has arrived at a much
lower figure: a median cost of $757 mil-
lion per drug. (Half cost less, and half
more.)
Following approval, the 10 drugs to-
gether brought in $67 billion, the re-
searchers also concluded a return of
more than sevenfold on investment.
Nine out of 10 companies made money,
but revenues varied enormously. One
drug had not yet earned back its devel-
opment costs.
The study, published Monday in
NICOLAS ASFOURI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE GETTY IMAGES JAMA Internal Medicine, relied on com-
Construction workers at a building site in Beijing. Chinas economic data suggest growth is steady, if less rapid than it was two years ago. Its stock market is rising again. pany filings with the Securities and Ex-
change Commission to determine re-
search and development costs.
the company was developing to receive
F.D.A. approval. The companys re-
search and development costs for their
four drugs were $388 million, the com-
panys S.E.C. filings indicated.
After it was approved, Janssen
Biotech acquired the drug for $21 billion.
That is a 50-fold difference between
revenue post-approval and cost to de-
velop, Dr. Prasad said.
Accurate figures on drug develop-
ment are difficult to find and often dis-
puted. Although it is widely cited, the
Tufts study also was fiercely criticized.
One objection was that the re-
searchers, led by Joseph A. DiMasi, did
not disclose the companies data on de-
velopment costs. The study involved 10
large companies, which were not
named, and 106 investigational drugs,
also not named.
But Dr. DiMasi found the new study
irredeemably flawed at a fundamental
level.
The sample consists of relatively
small companies that have gotten only
one drug approved, with few other
drugs of any type in development, he
said. The result is substantial selection
bias, meaning that the estimates do not
accurately reflect the industry as a
whole.
Ninety-five percent of cancer drugs
that enter clinical trials fail, said Mr.
Seaton, of the biotech industry group.
The small handful of successful drugs
those looked at by this paper must
be profitable enough to finance all of the
many failures this analysis leaves unex-
amined.

Optimism over China

ernments own confidence, it eliminated
BEIJING
two policies over the weekend that
made it more expensive for investors to
bet that the renminbi would weaken,
Problems havent faded, measures adopted after money began to
leave the country two years ago.
but investors are finding Maybe China is the black swan and
reasons for reassurance everything we know does not apply to
China, said Zhu Ning, a Tsinghua Uni-
money can be sent abroad and has
clamped down on what a growing num-
ber of the countrys leaders considered
wasteful corporate purchases. The gov-
ernment has even resorted to strategies
like face recognition software at auto-
mated teller machines in Macau, a Chi-
nese-controlled territory and gambling
mecca that has its own, more readily
the value of its currency, it allows the
renminbi to move up or down by a cer-
tain amount in its local currency market.
After falling to almost 7 to the dollar at
the end of last year, the renminbi has re-
bounded. On Monday morning, Chinas
central bank set the currency slightly
stronger than 6.5 to the dollar for the
first time since May 2016.
It seems like they have done a When the rare event occurs that a
thoughtful and rigorous job, said Dr. company does win approval, he added,
Aaron Kesselheim, director of the pro- the reward must be commensurate
gram on regulation, therapeutics and
the law at Brigham and Womens Hospi-
tal.
It provides at least something of a re-
ality check, he added.
The figures were met with swift criti-
cism, however, by other experts and by
representatives of the biotech industry,
who said that the research did not ad-
equately take into account the costs of
the many experimental drugs that fail.
Its a bit like saying its a good busi-
ness to go out and buy winning lottery JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY KEITH BRADSHER
For those who worry about the state of
the world economy, China has long been
a major reason to lose sleep. Its financial
system labors under a mountain of
loans, while weaker growth has
prompted many Chinese people and
companies to move their money over-
seas in recent years.
China still faces hefty debt and slow-
ing growth. But even some vocal
naysayers say the country has found
ways to contain its problems at least
for now.
That improving outlook is, in part, re-
flected in Chinas currency. The ren-
minbi has surged in value in recent
weeks, helped by growing confidence in
the countrys economic prospects and
by a political push for stability.
On Monday, Beijing set the currencys
value at its strongest level in nearly a
year and a half. While China keeps a
firm grip on its value, investor interest
in the renminbi helps strengthen it.
Other signs point to Chinas steadying
its course after a stock market crash and
surprise currency devaluation two
years ago shook the financial world and
brought the countrys long-term prob-
lems to the fore. Chinas economic data
suggest growth is continuing at a
steady, if less heady, pace. Its stock mar-
ket is rising again.
China has not solved its problems. But
investors and economists say its efforts
to keep the economy under control have
restored some faith in the countrys eco-
nomic stewardship. In a sign of the gov-
versity economist who published a book
last year critical of how the government
has managed rising bank debt.
In terms of his earlier worries about
Chinas debt, he added, Im having
doubts about what I believed as well.
The currency, which is one of the main
ways the government controls the econ-
omy, is a gauge of the countrys health
and a source of tension for the United
States and other trading partners. As
the economy boomed, the renminbi
largely strengthened. When growth fal-
tered in recent years, money flooded out
of the country, putting pressure on the
currency.
The currencys ups and downs play to
the debt concerns.
China relied on a huge wave of lending
to power its economy after the global fi-
nancial crisis nearly a decade ago. While
the strategy worked, it pushed China to
debt levels similar, relative to the size of
its economy, to those of the United
States and other developed countries.
It did so in an extremely short amount
of time, ringing alarm bells in Wall
Street and elsewhere. As recently as
May, Moodys Investors Service, a rat-
ings firm, lowered its credit rating on the
countrys debt, saying Chinas spending
spree would hurt long-term growth. The
currency devaluation and market crash
in 2015 also reduced confidence in Bei-
jing.
Since then, the authorities have taken
a number of steps that appear to be
keeping the short-term problems at bay,
though doing little for the longer term.
Beijing has strictly limited how much
convertible, currency and that has long
had a reputation for money laundering.
The government has also kept lend-
ing from sources it trusts, like the coun-
trys state-run banks. The push has been
strong enough to maintain growth, even
as officials have cracked down on other
types of lending that they see as poten-
tially disruptive. The stock market has
begun to recover from its rout two years
ago as rising real estate prices reassure
investors about the health of Chinas de-
velopers, and resilient economic growth
suggests that corporate profits may
rise.
Charlene Chu, a China analyst at Au-
tonomous Research, a global company
advising hedge funds and other interna-
tional money managers, has long wor-
ried that Chinas debt accumulation was
becoming unsustainable. Now, she said,
Beijing has the ability to postpone its
problems.
What I appreciate now is there are
just no independent actors here, Ms.
Chu said. There is no bank that is going
to say in November that our economic
outlook is not good were going to con-
tract our loan book. They can muddle on
for a while.
But Ms. Chu and others see Beijings
efforts as stopgaps: If it does not ad-
dress its debt, China risks a long period
of low growth, as in Japan. Some eco-
nomic indicators suggest that Chinas
growth will begin to slow in the second
half of this year.
But Chinas surging currency sug-
gests investors are not as worried as be-
fore. While China keeps a tight grip on
The market has turned around sig-
nificantly its bearish view on the Chi-
nese currency, said Zhou Hao, an econo-
mist in the Singapore office of Com-
merzbank.
The currencys rally is partly political.
China is preparing for a twice-a-decade
Communist Party Congress to begin in
Beijing on Oct. 18. President Xi Jinping
has made clear that he wants stability
until then in practically every aspect of
the countrys life, including the econ-
omy.
Other currency moves particularly
the United States dollar are contribut-
ing to the renminbis strength. The dol-
lar has weakened as the Federal Re-
serve has been slow to raise rates be-
cause the American economy has grown
a little less vigorously than anticipated
and as inflation in particular has fallen
short of expectations.
In Europe, which is finally recovering
from the global economic crisis, the euro
has staged a powerful rally against the
dollar over the past year. So while the
renminbi has strengthened against the
dollar, it has weakened against the euro.
That blunts the impact of a stronger cur-
rency in Chinese factories when they ex-
port goods, as a strong currency makes
them less competitive.
China can win some political gains
from its stronger currency. President
Trump, who has long criticized Chinas
economic policies, has accused Beijing
of keeping its currency artificially weak
an accusation that was true once but
is not today. It could also ease its limit on
money outflows, if it chooses.
tickets, Daniel Seaton, a spokesman for
the Biotechnology Innovation Organiza-
tion, said in an email.
Dr. Jerry Avorn, chief of the division of
pharmacoepidemiology and pharma-
coeconomics at Brigham and Womens
Hospital, predicted that the paper would
help fuel the debate over the prices of
cancer drugs, which have soared so high
that we are getting into areas that are
almost unimaginable economically, he
said.
A leukemia treatment approved re-
cently by the Food and Drug Adminis-
tration, for example, will cost $475,000
for a single treatment. It is the first of a
wave of gene therapy treatments likely
to carry staggering price tags.
This is an important brick in the wall
of this developing concern, he said.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at Or-
egon Health and Science University, and
Dr. Sham Mailankody, of Memorial
Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, arrived
at their figures after reviewing data on
10 companies that brought a cancer drug
to market in the past decade.
Since the companies also were devel-
oping other drugs that did not receive
approval from the F.D.A., the re-
searchers were able to include the com-
panies total spending on research and
development, not just what they spent
on the drugs that succeeded.
One striking example was ibrutinib,
made by Pharmacyclics. It was ap-
proved in 2013 for patients with certain
blood cancers who did not respond to
conventional therapy.
Ibrutinib was the only drug out of four
A researcher at Pharmacyclics in Sunny-
vale, Calif., which developed a cancer
drug that was sold for $21 billion.
with taking on the multiple levels of risk
not seen in any other industry if drug de-
velopment is to remain economically vi-
able for prospective investors.
Cancer drugs remain among the most
expensive medications, with prices
reaching the hundreds of thousands of
dollars per patient.
Although the new study was small, its
estimates are so much lower than previ-
ous figures, and the return on invest-
ment so great, that experts say they
raise questions about whether soaring
drug prices really are needed to encour-
age investment.
The new study has limitations, noted
Patricia Danzon, an economist at the
University of Pennsylvanias Wharton
School.
It involved just 10 small biotech com-
panies whose cancer drugs were aimed
at limited groups of patients with less
common diseases.
For such drugs, the F.D.A. often per-
mits clinical trials to be very small and
sometimes without control groups.
Therefore development costs may have
been lower for this group than for drugs
that require longer and larger studies.
But, Dr. Danzon said, most new can-
cer drugs today are developed this way:
by small companies and for small
groups of patients. The companies often
license or sell successful drugs to the
larger companies.

ASilicon Valley effort to thwart Trump Publication Notice

Trumps opponents. But how effective a
SAN FRANCISCO
Silicon Valley approach to political
change can be is a question and Mr.
Hoffman has run into stumbling blocks
Founder of LinkedIn before.
In 2014, he invested personally in
using start-up tactics Change.org, an online petition start-up.
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE that the Court-appointed Receiver for Stanford International Bank,
Ltd. (SIB) and related entities (Stanford Entities), and certain Plaintiffs, have reached an
agreement to settle all claims asserted or that could have been asserted against Hunton &
Williams LLP relating to or in any way concerning SIB (the Settlement Agreement). As part of
the Settlement Agreement, the Receiver and Plaintiffs have requested orders that permanently
enjoin, among others, all Interested Parties, including Stanford Investors (i.e., customers of SIB,
who, as of February 16, 2009, had funds on deposit at SIB and/or were holding certificates of
deposit issued by SIB), from bringing any legal proceeding or cause of action arising from or
relating to the Stanford Entities against Hunton & Williams, LLP or the Hunton Released Parties.
Complete copies of the Settlement Agreement, the proposed bar orders, and settlement

as shield against agenda Last fall, the company laid off more than
documents are available on the Receivers website http://www.stanfordfinancialreceivership.com
All capitalized terms not defined in this Notice are defined in the Settlement Agreement.
a third of its employees after burning
Interested Parties may file written objections with the United States District Court for the Northern
BY KATIE BENNER through more than $40 million in ven- District of Texas on or before November 7, 2017.
ture capital. Years of mismanagement,
Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn Mr. Hoffman said, had essentially atro-
and a billionaire Silicon Valley venture phied the start-up and it was always
capitalist, has made a half-dozen or so running a deficit.
investments in recent months with a In the spring, Mr. Hoffman pumped
specific aim: to counteract the influence almost $30 million in new financing into
of President Trump. Change.org and installed new board The world's most
The venture-style investments in- members, to try again.
clude starting a new group, Win the Fu- Im optimistic about where we can
trusted perspective.
ture, whose self-described goal is to get to, he said, but it doesnt mean its
make the Democratic Party relevant not a bumpy road.
again. He also invested $1 million in Cor- Debra Cleaver, a former Change.org
tico, a start-up that encourages online
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

discourse between people with oppos-
ing political views. And he invested hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars in Vote-
.org, which has a goal of getting all eligi-
ble Americans to vote; Higher Ground
Labs, a start-up for progressive poli-
ticians; and the Center on Rural Innova-
tion, which is working for economic im-
provements in rural areas.
My approach to political investing is
Reid Hoffman has increased his political investments since President Trumps election employee who now runs Vote.org, said it Get unlimited digital access
was important to pursue innovative
in an effort to counteract the presidents policies.
ways for achieving change. But, she to The New York Times.
added, politically driven investments
the Silicon Valley approach, Mr. Hoff- spread his cash this year by financing can be more successful when they are Save 50%.
man, 50, said in an interview. Find and groups that want to restore dialogue and treated with the same level of account-
back powerful entrepreneurs. inclusion to politics. The moves put him ability as traditional venture capital in-
Mr. Hoffman has emerged as Silicon at the vanguard of a political awakening vestments. nytimes.com/globaloffer
Valleys prime behind-the-scenes poli- of technology leaders, who are emerg- Mr. Hoffman is motivated by a sense
tical influencer. A Democrat with a net ing as a potential West Coast power cen- that people are morally obliged to par-
worth of more than $3 billion, he has ter that could help invigorate Mr. HOFFMAN, PAGE 8
 ..
8 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

business

Thwarting
president
the Silicon
Valley way
HOFFMAN, FROM PAGE 7
ticipate in civic society, said Peter Thiel,
the Silicon Valley investor and a founder
of the digital payments company Pay-
Pal. Mr. Thiel, a supporter of Mr. Trump,
has known Mr. Hoffman since both at-
tended Stanford University in the 1980s.
I would describe Reid as left of cen-
ter, with a very strong sense of empathy
for those who are less fortunate, Mr.
Thiel wrote in an email. Its more of a
character trait than an ideological posi-
tion.
Unlike many of his tech peers, who
are only now becoming more politicized,
Mr. Hoffman has long been interested in
government. A native of Palo Alto, Calif.,
he attended boarding school in Vermont
and graduated from Stanford, where he
was an ultraliberal member of the Stu-
dent Senate alongside his conservative
classmate Mr. Thiel. He later attended
Oxford University on a Marshall Schol-
arship.
In 2000, he joined Mr. Thiel as an exec-
utive at PayPal, a stint that made Mr.
Hoffman a millionaire. He founded
LinkedIn, the career-oriented social net-
work, in 2003, spurred by trying to con-
nect people and the openness of online
communities.
While continuing to lead LinkedIn as
chairman, he joined the venture capital
firm Greylock Partners in 2009 to invest
in start-ups. LinkedIn went public two
years later, making Mr. Hoffman a bil-
lionaire. He added to his fortune last
year when Microsoft bought LinkedIn
for $26.2 billion.
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By then, he had become involved in
policy. During President Barack Oba- Empty shelves at a supermarket in Florida. Supplies went quickly as Hurricane Irma approached, and more than 8,000 complaints of price gouging were lodged with the authorities through the weekend.
mas administration, Mr. Hoffman nur-
tured ties with the White House and

Price gouging: Really a good thing?

Democratic politicians like Senator
Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Reid was among the top leaders in
Silicon Valley to whom we looked for
good counsel on issues like immigra-
tion, said Valerie Jarrett, a former senior
adviser to Mr. Obama.
Mr. Hoffman was involved with Hilla-
ry Clintons presidential campaign and
spoke out against Mr. Trump. At one
point, he offered to donate up to $5 mil-
lion to veterans groups if Mr. Trump
would release a copy of his tax returns.
Mrs. Clintons defeat forced Mr. Hoff-
man to recalibrate in various ways es-
pecially in his view of social media. Red-
dit, Facebook and Twitter had given Mr.
Trump and his supporters vast plat-
forms, and tech companies like Face-
book had given mass distribution to mis-
information campaigns.
Mr. Hoffman decided the tech indus-
try had to confront the challenges creat-
ed by social networks, including their
potential to undermine democracy. He
said the industry would at some point
need to regulate itself with a standards
body like the Motion Picture Associa-
tion of America.
Mr. Trump also embodied a specific
cause of anxiety for Mr. Hoffman.
Mr. Hoffman has since used his cash
and connections to shape the organiza-
tions and start-ups that support the is-
sues where he wants to exert the most
influence. He has also tried to persuade
the tech industry to take responsibility
for the way its products are used.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
DEALBOOK
When a devastating hurricane like
Irma or Harvey arrives, stories about
price gouging inevitably spread
quickly. Last week, a one-way coach
flight from Miami to Phoenix jumped
in price from $547.50 to $3,258.50,
prompting immediate outrage. In
Houston, a picture of a case of water
being sold for $42.96 at Best Buy did
the same. (Best Buy apologized and
said it was a big mistake by a few
employees.)
Over all, more than 8,000 complaints
of price gouging on items like gas, food
and ice were lodged with the Florida
attorney generals office through the
weekend.
On its face, the very idea of price
gouging, especially during a natural
disaster, feels outrageous. Indeed, 34
states have anti-gouging laws meant to
protect consumers.
However, in a small slice of the
world of economists and businesses,
there is a fascinating debate about the
topic with many arguing that price
gouging is actually a good thing.
Yes, you heard that correctly.
This is surely heartless, and may
offend our sense of decency. But sev-
eral respected economists from the
Milton Friedman school of free-market
theory take it seriously. They contend
that anti-gouging measures, by effec-
tively enacting price controls during
emergencies, remove the incentive for
consumers to conserve essential sup-
plies. They also say that the incentive
for suppliers to bring goods to danger-
ous areas or keep extra stock on-
hand before disasters becomes
distorted in ways that hurt people.
Price caps discourage extraordi-
nary supply efforts that would help
bring goods in high demand into the
affected area, Michael Giberson, an
instructor with the Center for Energy
Commerce in the Rawls College of
Business at Texas Tech University,
wrote in an opinion piece from several
years ago that was widely circulated
around parts of Wall Street this week-
end. Meanwhile, he suggested, You
discourage conservation of needed
goods at exactly the time they are in
high demand.
He added, In a classic case of unin-
tended consequences, the law harms
the very people whom lawmakers
intend to help.
Consider this scenario, as described
by Matt Zwolinski, the director of the
Center for Ethics, Economics, and
Public Policy at the University of San
Diego: If a hotel that normally charges
$50 per room were allowed to double
the price to $100 a night during an
emergency, a family that might have
chosen to rent separate rooms for
parents and children at $50 per night
will be more likely to rent only one
room at the higher price, and a family
whose home was damaged but in
livable condition might choose to tough
it out if the cost of a hotel room is $100
rather than $50.
The result, he contended in a paper
titled The Ethics of Price Gouging, is
that allowing higher prices increases
the available supply as a result of
consumers economizing behavior,
more hotel rooms are available to
individuals and families who need
them most.
Of course, these arguments may
make sense in the most theoretical
context, but when it comes to trying to
protect the poorest among us, who
cant afford the most basic of goods,
they seem like an inhumane affront to
our sensibilities.
Still, Tyler Cowen, an economics
professor at George Mason University,
believes that something even more
insidious can happen during national
emergencies: a sort of black market,
made worse by anti-gouging laws and
businesses that fear a viral outcry if
they increase prices.
If the store doesnt raise prices,
attentive customers may buy up the
whole stock, resell it during the emer-
gency and price gouge themselves, he
wrote last week. Or store employees
may funnel the scarce goods to their
friends and relatives. Dont think the
alternative to corporate price gouging
is necessarily a fairer outcome, but
that subtle point doesnt always trans-
late well to social media.
That may or not be true. But the fact
remains that there is a gaping hole in
the price-gouging-is-good argument:
how to make resources available to
poor individuals and families, many of
whom may barely be able to afford
normal prices, said Joe Carter, a sen-
ior editor at the Acton Institute, a
right-wing think tank.
One idea that has gained currency in
this camp would be to create surge-
pricing vouchers backed by the gov-
ernment.
Prior to a natural disaster, Mr.
Carter wrote in a blog post last week,
individuals and families could apply
to receive government-provided
vouchers that would cover the cost
difference between the normal price
and the emergency surge price for a
specific basket of essential goods and
services.
Businesses would be reimbursed the
difference in price by the government
by submitting the voucher.
That might seem like a sensible idea
at first blush, but it gets complicated
quickly: Will the poor and elderly
really go through the hurdles of getting
vouchers in advance of a storm? Thats
hard to believe. More ominously, there
could emerge a black market for the
vouchers.
Maybe theres something to be
learned in this thought experiment, but
national emergencies are the ultimate
distortion in daily economic activity
and, as appealing as the free market
may be in certain circumstances, it will
likely make economic distortions dur-
ing a disaster worse, not better.

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Customers see dark side to Tesla assist
Company effort to aid
in evacuations raises
questions on its oversight
BY TIFFANY HSU
Tesla drivers in Florida got an unexpect-
ed assist over the weekend as they
scrambled to evade Hurricane Irma.
Owners of certain Model S sedans and
Model X S.U.V.s noticed that the battery
capacity of their electric cars had in-
creased, giving them as much as 40 ex-
tra miles of range to outrun the deluge.
Range anxiety the fear that an elec-
tric vehicle will run out of charge before
reaching its destination can be mag-
nified in emergency situations.
Tesla confirmed that it had remotely
enabled a free software upgrade for ve-
hicles in the path of the storm, motivat-
ed by one customer who requested the
change while making evacuation plans.
The free upgrade will expire on Satur-
day.
Many Tesla owners cheered the tem-
porary enhancement ahead of Irma,
which made landfall in Florida on Sun-
day.
Some, though, said the company was
kneecapping vehicle range under nor-
mal circumstances in pursuit of profit.
Others were concerned that the mag-
nanimous move overshadowed the trou-
bling extent to which Tesla can com-
mand customers cars.
Most other auto manufacturers sell
vehicles that are incapable of learning
and improving and are highly vulnera-
ble to obsolescence, Adam Jonas, an
analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in July.
But not Tesla, which has become an in-
dustry leader in whats known as over-
the-air vehicle upgrades the ability to
make instant fixes without being any-
where near the car.
A Tesla approaching a nonfunctioning traffic light in Miami. Tesla enabled a free software upgrade for vehicles before the storm.
Its an efficient method: Wirelessly
communicating improvements to a dig-
itally equipped vehicle means that
customers dont have to come in for ev-
ery small tuneup. But some updates,
like a strict speed cap that Tesla rolled
back this year, also raise concerns about
consumer privacy and control.
Starting in 2016, Tesla produced a run
of Model S and X cars equipped with bat-
tery packs built to have 75 kilowatt-
hours of capacity but constrained by
software to have access to only 60 to 70
kilowatt-hours of power. The company
began producing cars this way to
streamline manufacturing; it could
produce the same type of battery but
provide different price points, charging
customers up to $9,500 for an upgrade to
full capacity.
Tesla has since stopped offering the
software-limited batteries.
A spokeswoman for Tesla declined to
comment and did not specify how many
Tesla owners had benefited from the up-
grade.
For Chris Forman, a pilot, the $6,000
discount for a 60-kilowatt-hour battery
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
instead of a 75-kilowatt-hour version
was enough to persuade him to spend
roughly $70,000 on his Model S in No-
vember.
I never thought I was paying for a
car that was neutered I was paying
less to get less range, he said.
Mr. Forman, who lives in Broward
County, Fla., had flown to St. Louis for
work on Friday when he checked his
Tesla app and saw that his car, plugged
in at home, had reached 242 miles of
range and was still charging. He had
never seen the vehicle exceed 215 miles.
He said he was impressed with Teslas
initiative, especially given that the com-
pany is ramping up production of its
Model 3 mass-market vehicle.
I was totally blown away. It was su-
per awesome of them to do that, Mr.
Forman said of the software upgrade.
Tesla is always thinking outside the
box.
Tesla owners said lines for the compa-
nys roadside Supercharger charging
network were uncommon over the
weekend. Drivers said they were wor-
ried about reliability of the Florida elec-
trical grid during the hurricane.
But at least they could avoid gas sta-
tions, which ran out of fuel quickly.
Tesla, which sent emails to affected
customers citing the exceptional cir-
cumstances, joined many other compa-
nies trying to help Irma evacuees. Wire-
less carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile
and Verizon waived overage charges for
data customers in Florida. Nearly 200
Airbnb hosts opened their homes to
evacuees for free.
But some critics said Teslas upgrade
was less about good will than it was
about greed. And even as Irma weak-
ened, customers worried about Teslas
ability to alter their vehicles on its own
from afar.
That has raised security concerns. As
cars become more connected, the ability
of criminals to remotely hack into them
has also improved.
The Irma upgrade was the first wire-
less enhancement that Tesla conducted
for a particular event, said Colin Rusch,
a managing director at Oppenheimer,
the investment bank. More may come.
Youre bringing a consumer elec-
tronics mentality to a durable-goods
product, Mr. Rusch said. Adding incre-
mental functionality is an ongoing
process for Tesla. Well see them contin-
ue to participate in that over-the-air
market.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
science
Lessons for hurricane survivors
NEW ORLEANS
Young adults afflicted
by storm 12 years ago
agree on need for anchor
BY BENEDICT CAREY
The children upended by Hurricane Ka-
trina have no psychological playbook
for the youngsters displaced by Harvey
or those in the path of Irma, the hurri-
cane plowing into Florida.
In the aftermath of Harvey, more than
160 public school districts and 30 charter
schools have closed in the sprawling
Houston metropolitan area. Families
have scrambled to higher ground, some
to other cities like Dallas or San Antonio,
others into shelters. Thousands of chil-
dren will have to adjust on the fly, bused
for hours to new schools from makeshift
housing. Texas officials are scrambling
to coordinate mental health support;
the states psychology board is issuing
temporary licenses for out-of-state ther-
apists.
In a series of interviews in New Or-
leans, 12 years after Katrinas devastat-
ing floods, young survivors, now in their
early 20s, agreed only that overcoming
the mental strain of displacement is like
escaping the rising water itself a mat-
ter of finding something to hold onto,
one safe place or reliable person, each
time you move.
Everything else is up for grabs, in-
cluding the meaning of home itself. I
was so homesick, I moved back here
soon as I could, right after graduating
high school, Craig Jones, 22, a freelance
graphic designer and musician, said in
an interview near Pigeon Town, the
working class neighborhood of modest
homes, diners and shaded porches
where he grew up. I got here and it was
the same place but not the same, if you
feel what Im saying.
A 5th-grader when Katrina hit, he
spent the intervening years on the
move, living in hotel rooms and finally
settling in Houston with his family.
When he moved back to New Orleans in
his late teens, the streets of his child-
hood had a new mix of people and an un-
dercurrent of menace he couldnt place.
He became anxious; then began having
panic attacks, seemingly at random. He
was home-sick, as well as homesick.
I was walking around with my eyes
bugged out, he said. They wanted to
put me on Xanax, but I wanted no part of
that. He moved away for a time and the
anxiety subsided.
Therapists and social scientists have
been trying to characterize the effects of
all variety of traumas for more than a
century. They have found no equations,
no way to predict who will be laid low,
who will adjust or who will become
stronger.
But they do recognize some distinc-
tive effects of hurricanes. Unlike an
earthquake or a fire, flooding from a
storm like Katrina or Harvey leaves
many houses and buildings still physi-
cally standing but uninhabitable, simul-
taneously familiar and strange, like a
loved one sinking into dementia. Sur-
veys done in the first seven years after
Katrina found that the rate of diagnos-
able mental health problems in the New
Orleans area jumped by 9 percent a
sharper spike than after other natural
disasters and the effects did not dis-
Cassini flies toward fiery death on Saturn
Out There
DENNIS OVERBYE
The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited
Saturn for the last 13 years would
weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22
feet high, is somewhat longer and
wider than a small moving van tipped
on its rear. Bristling with cameras,
antennas and other sensors, it is one of
the most complex and sophisticated
spy robots ever set loose in interplan-
etary space.
On Friday morning, the whole world
will hear it die.
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
California, the scientists of the Cassini
mission will figuratively ride their
creation down into oblivion in the
clouds of Saturn. They will be col-
lecting data on the makeup of the
planets butterscotch clouds until the
last bitter moment, when the space-
craft succumbs to the heat and pres-
sure of atmospheric entry and be-
comes a meteor.
So will end a decades-long journey of
discovery and wonder.
The Cassini-Huygens mission, as it
is officially known, was hatched in the
1980s partly to strengthen ties between
NASA and the European Space Agency
and partly because, well, where else in
the solar system would you want to
go? With mysterious, mesmerizing
rings and a panoply of strange moons
(62 and counting), Saturn was the last
outpost of the known planets before
the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune
and Pluto.
As launched in 1997, the spacecraft
consisted of two parts: an orbiter, built
by NASA, and a lander, the Huygens
Craig Jones, who grew up in New Orleans, was in 5th grade when Hurricane Katrina forced him and his family out. He returned after
high school, in 2013. I got here and it was the same place but not the same, if you feel what Im saying, he said.
Jordan Bridges, now 29, left with his mother and siblings before the storm but now works for a New Orleans social justice nonprofit,
and sings in a band. Going through those things, I know nothing can put my light out, he said.
criminate much by race or income.
Our reading of that is that the stress-
ors were so severe they overwhelmed
the coping skills of most kids, said Kate
McLaughlin, director of the Stress and
Development Lab at the University of
Washington, who led the research team.
Lacey Laurence, now 22, escaped Ka-
trinas waters on an air mattress, as po-
lice officers shoved away bodies with
oars.
I was at this new school, my friends
were gone, and kids would be saying
things about my old neighborhood,
probe, built by the European Space
Agency to explore Saturns largest
moon, Titan. The names were a testa-
ment to a golden age of European
Renaissance astronomy.
Giovanni Domenico Cassini was a
sharp-eyed 17th century astronomer
who first discerned a dark gap in Sat-
urns enigmatic rings and then discov-
ered four moons. Christiaan Huygens
discovered Titan and recognized Sat-
urns rings for what they are.
The orbiter and lander arrived in
July 2004 like wide-eyed tourists at
Saturn, the realm of mystery and
rings. Shortly thereafter, in December
2004, Huygens departed the mother
ship and made the first landing on an
alien moon, touching down in the
hydrocarbon slushes of Titan three
weeks later.
Cassini was just settling in for a long
stay, circling Saturn like a pesky inter-
planetary paparazzo.
A list of its greatest hits would in-
clude movies of the six-sided storm
that hugs the planets north pole;
detailed views of Saturns spidery
golden rings, woven into warps, braids
and knots by the gravity of tiny moon-
lets; the discovery of plumes that look
like snow-making machines shooting
from the surface of the moon Ence-
ladus. Not to mention postcards of
lakes and seas on Titan.
NASA, not shy about sharing its
accomplishments, recently released a
blizzard of numbers summarizing the
mission: 4.9 billion miles traveled, 294
orbits of Saturn completed, 2.5 million
commands executed, 635 gigabytes of
science data collected, 453,048 images
taken, 3,948 science papers published,
27 nations participating and two
oceans discovered.
To which must be added: $2.5 billion
to build and launch Cassini and Huy-
gens, split among NASA, E.S.A. and
about my family, Ms. Laurence said. I
was getting into fights; real fights, vio-
lent ones. That was something I never
did before, ever. But you lose everything
and you dont know how to deal with it
no one prepares you for that.
She finished school and now teaches
young children precisely those skills:
how to stay safe; how to manage emo-
tions; how to stay focused on what they
can control, and adjust to what they can-
not.
In the years after Katrina, a pair of so-
ciologists, Alice Fothergill and Lori
NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
Among the images Cassini has sent back are a view of a wave structure in Saturns rings, left, and a view of the moon Enceladus.
the Italian Space Agency, and another
$1.4 billion to run them for 20 years in
flight.
Like other great scientific endeav-
ors, Cassini raised as many questions
as it answered. What, for example, is
going on in those oceans on Titan and
Enceladus?
Titan, the only moon in the solar
system to have a thick atmosphere
even thicker than the Earths is now
the only body in the universe known to
have liquid on its surface. That liquid is
not water, but methane and ethane
hydrocarbons. The air on Titan is
almost pure nitrogen. In addition, there
may be an ocean of water or some
other liquid substance deep under the
surface.
If you think that Life As We Dont
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNIE FLANAGAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
was a fire-shower of emotion.
Peek, made regular trips to New Or-
leans, interviewing hundreds of people
who had been hit hard and tracking their
lives over time, checking in repeatedly.
After seven years, the pair identified a
rough pattern among displaced chil-
dren: some had not regained their foot-
ing, losing years of schooling and later
sinking into unemployment; others
adapted, even thrived; and there was a
third group, of young people who were
keeping themselves upright but un-
steadily, managing lingering effects,
like depression or anxiety.
Quite Know It could be based on some
liquid other than water a possibility
suggested by Steven Benner, a bio-
chemist at the Foundation for Applied
Molecular Evolution in Florida Titan
has the potential to be Exhibit Number
One. In recent years, proposals have
been floated to send balloons, boats
and even a submarine to Titan to check
out whatever chemistry might be
going on in its frigid wastes.
Other astronomers have seized on
Enceladus as the most likely place to
find extraterrestrial critters. The
plumes erupting from its southern
region suggest that there is a warm
salty ocean beneath the ice. Where
there is water, so the mantra goes,
there may be life.
Microbes might be hitching a ride to
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 9
Those in the first group tended to
have few resources to start with and lost
them all. Its a cumulative vulnerabil-
ity, in which for instance the family
struggled before the storm, then could
not get out, and the child lost the fragile
supports he or she had, said Dr.
Fothergill, a professor at the University
of Vermont.
Dr. Peek, a professor at the University
of Colorado, said that those children who
adapted fastest typically had family and
networks with resources that held to-
gether through Katrina, or acquired
strong allies along the way: teachers,
pastors, shelter workers who fought for
help on the childs behalf.
The third group fluctuating equi-
librium, the sociologists called it usu-
ally had lost virtually everything but
had one solid anchor: a mother, a father,
a teacher, an older sibling.
Dr. Fothergill and Dr. Peek published
a book laying out their thinking, Chil-
dren of Katrina, told through the lives of
several children.
Five years later, as those children
have moved into young adulthood, its
clear that trajectories are not always
smooth lines. Jordan Bridges, 29, evacu-
ated with his mother and siblings ahead
of Katrina to a friends place near Wash-
ington, D.C. His father stayed behind to
work. Mr. Bridges life in Washington
My mom was overwhelmed. I had to
get my little brother to school every
day; it was like every day I woke up and
had to forget everything that had hap-
pened the day before, said Mr. Bridges,
who now works for a New Orleans social
justice nonprofit, and sings in a band,
Melomania. Homework forget it.
Nothing.
Although trauma can mean many
things and is generally considered de-
structive its demands can force people
to learn what their abilities are and
which are most useful when all seems
lost. Studies by Roxane Cohen Silver, a
psychology professor at the University
of California, Irvine, and others have
found that adults who report having tak-
en no serious hits like, say, the death
of friend, a serious illness, a natural dis-
aster generally do not score as highly
on measures of well-being as people
who have survived traumatic events.
People who have been through at least
two traumas, and fewer than six, score
highest.
After returning to Louisiana, Mr.
Bridges said he got blindsided again,
this time in Baton Rouge, where he got a
degree in biology from Louisiana State
University. He and his brother tried to
stop a fight, he said, but they never got
the chance. The police arrived and beat
them both, he said, and shattered his
jaw. He spent months in the hospital
with his jaw wired shut.
I honestly believe that having been
through Katrina helped me get through
that, he said. Im an optimist, he add-
ed. Going through those things, I know
nothing can put my light out.
This city still bears visible scars of Ka-
trina, buildings that stand empty, crip-
pled monuments to the flooding. But the
young men and women interviewed for
this story had one thing in common.
They all came back.
They returned not home, but to a per-
mutation of it, one with an existential
uncertainty that is no abstraction.
You look over your shoulder here,
they said, literally and mentally. And
you watch the weather forecast.
NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
space on those plumes, free for the
taking by a spacecraft designed to
detect them. Which Cassini was not.
Nevertheless, Cassini flew right
through one of the plumes in October
2015 and found evidence that chemical
and thermal reactions deep in the
ocean were producing energy in the
form of hydrogen gas. Similar envi-
ronments on Earth, like deep-sea
vents, are hotbeds of microbial activity.
Thanks to Cassini, then, the far
worlds of Saturn have leapt to the top
of the lists of alien-life hunters. Re-
cently NASA circulated a call for pro-
posals for future missions out there.
But nothing lasts forever. The scien-
tists could have left Cassini for dead
when its time came, a derelict in space.
But that would have risked contamina-
New regions
face hazard
of infection
by mosquito
Global Health
DONALD G. MCNEIL JR.
A mounting number of citations on a
popular disease-tracking website
suggests that mosquitoes may be
moving into new ecological niches with
greater frequency.
The website, ProMED mail, has
carried more than a dozen such re-
ports since June, all involving mos-
quito species known to transmit hu-
man diseases.
Most reports have concerned the
United States, where, for example,
Aedes aegypti the yellow fever
mosquito, which also spreads Zika,
dengue and chikungunya has been
turning up in counties in California and
Nevada where it had never, or only
rarely, been seen.
Other reports have noted mosquito
species found for the first time on
certain South Pacific islands or in parts
of Europe where harsh winters previ-
ously kept them at bay.
ProMED, the Program for Monitor-
ing Emerging Diseases, is overseen by
the International
Society for Infec-
From Southern tious Diseases.
California Its moderators
to the South disseminate
Pacific, reports alerts coming in
from members,
of infestation news media,
by nonnative government
species are releases and
increasing. other sources,
with notes that
put these reports
in context and
separate the truly alarming from the
merely alarmist.
Over the years, the site has chroni-
cled Public Health Englands hard-
fought battle to keep a new invader,
Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mos-
quito, out of the scepterd isle that
Shakespeare in Richard II called
this fortress built by Nature for her-
self against infection.
Aedes albopictus established itself in
Italy and southern France, where it
has spread chikungunya a painful
fever known as bending up disease.
The British health authorities now
have more than 30 surveillance sta-
tions at ports, airports and truck stops,
on guard against the mosquito.
In August, The Daily Express news-
paper said officials had blitzed a
clutch of notorious tiger mosquitoes
suspected to have made their way into
Britain through the Eurotunnel.
In 2014, ProMED noted, Public
Health England debunked false alarms
that the mosquito had landed. In 2016,
officials acknowledged finding 37
Aedes albopictus eggs at a truck stop
in Kent.
Also in August, ProMED reported
that Aedes albopictus appeared to
have established itself in Gibraltar, a
British territory on the southern edge
of Spain.
tion on Saturns pristine and now very
interesting moons, should the space-
craft hit them. So it had to go, and
anyway there was still more to be
learned by crashing it into Saturn.
On Monday, Cassini was to get one
more goodbye kiss from Titan, a last
fatal gravitational nudge directing the
spacecraft into Saturn itself.
The cameras will turn off on Thurs-
day, after one final look around the
environs Cassini has called home for
the last 13 years. But most of the space-
crafts instruments will keep working,
gathering and analyzing samples of
the planets atmosphere as the space-
craft blazes into the clouds, which
should tell us something about how the
giant planet formed and evolved. Have
the rings always been there, or are
they a more recent addition?
Scientists and the news media, in all
its social media glory, will assemble at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to wit-
ness the demise of Cassini, estimated
to happen Friday about 7:54 a.m. East-
ern Daylight Time. Last week Cassini
sent back what Carolyn Porco, of the
Space Science Institute in Boulder,
Colo., and imaging team leader on the
project, called one of our last best
looks at Enceladus...that small moon at
Saturn with the big possibilities.
Brace yourselves, she added in an
email. The end is near.
The news for all those gathered will
arrive as a sudden silence. Cassini will
break up and burn like a meteor into a
wisp of stray atoms lost in the clouds.
Dr. Porco said that the entry point
would be visible from Earth and that
some amateur astronomers were
hoping to see some sign of Cassinis
entry.
But the odds are against them. And
so Cassini will wave goodbye with a
flash of unearthly light that no hu-
mans, at least, may ever see.
 ..
10 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

I knew that if
we could get technology
to work for women,
it would have a huge
impact on the world.
Ida Tin, Co-Founder of Clue, Germany

While travelling, Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin became aware of the health issues
faced by women across the world. She decided to build an app called Clue to help women
understand their bodies and take control of their health. Androids flexible open-source
nature enabled Clue to continuously innovate and reach 5 million users in just 3 years.

Watch the mini-documentary about

the app that is breaking a taboo: g.co/androidstories
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 11
 ..
12 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports
Belgian clubs a magnet for foreign money
BELGIUM, FROM PAGE 1 Louvaniste fan group, but even he ad- played but not been able to make it as
complex present, between what soccer mits to hopes that King Power can do professionals, and brought them here.
has always been and what it threatens to the same as they did at Leicester. Sixteen episodes aired on KBS, Koreas
become. Tubize is now owned by a South King Power is merely the latest for- national broadcaster.
Korean marketing firm. Its visitor on eign investor to decide a Belgian second Millions tuned in to watch; two years
opening day, K.S.V. Roeselare, is backed division team is the must-have acces- later, Tubizes Korean Facebook page
by Chinese money. Of their six rivals in sory, following in the footsteps of Sporti- still has more than 10,000 followers.
the Belgian second division, four are the zen (the South Korean owner of Tubize), Tubize still has four South Korean play-
playthings of foreign investors: the Thai Wadi Degla (Egypt, Lierse), Xiu Li ers for them to track.
owners of Leicester City, an English Hawken (China, Roeselare), Monacos
club; the Russian billionaire who has owner Dmitri Rybolovlev (Russia, Cer- AN AGENT IN CHARGE
bankrolled A.S. Monaco, a French team; cle Brugge) and Jrgen Baatzsch (Ger- Perhaps the most cautionary tale,
a German entrepreneur; and a wealthy many, Royal Union St.-Gilloise). In the though, is at first division Mouscron. Of-
Egyptian who now backs three separate Jupiler League, there is the Aspire ficially, since 2015, the club has been
clubs in Africa and Europe. Academy (Qatar, KAS Eupen), Vincent owned by two Maltese companies: Gol
In Belgiums top division, the Jupiler Tan (Malaysia, K.V. Kortrijk) and the Football Limited, which paid 8.5 mil-
League, there are clubs owned by repre- case of Zahavi, and a couple of Maltese lion to rescue the club from bankruptcy
sentatives of Qatar and Malaysia, and companies, at Royal Excel Mouscron. in 2015, and Latimer International Lim-
another with close links to Pini Zahavi, There is one common thread for why ited, which bought it a year later for
one of the most powerful agents in the the foreign investors have come: Bel- 10. Both companies are connected to
game. All of them are now invested, to gium, perhaps unknowingly, offers the Zahavi, an Israeli agent, and his son and
varying degrees, in Belgian soccer. perfect climate to nurture a vision of nephew, Gil and Adar, sit on the
It has all left many here asking one what soccers future might look like. Mouscron board.
question: Why? Take Lierse, as one example. Since Zahavi together with a busi-
Matthias Hendrix can still reel through ness associate, the Germany-based
FOREIGN EXCHANGE the names of Lierses team from 20 agent Fali Ramadani became in-
A couple of hours after Roeselares years ago: Bob Peeters and Eric Van volved at Mouscron, eight players have
match at Tubize, on the other side of Meir and Stanley Menzo. To Hendrix, a arrived on loan from Apollon Limassol
Brussels, the clouds burst over the lifelong fan, that 1997 squad was special: of Cyprus, another club where Zahavi
pretty university town of Leuven. The It was the team, largely homegrown, al- has strong connections.
downpour lasts only a few minutes, but most entirely unheralded, that last That has triggered concerns that the
it is intense enough to drench almost ev- made Lierse the champion of Belgium. club is not being run for its own benefit,
erybody at Den Dreef, Leuvens home By 2007, though, the club was in dire but for that of Zahavi, Ramadani and
stadium, and it means that for the first straits. A European Court of Justice rul- their clients, a place where they can
ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
half-hour of Leuvens game with Lierse, ing that let players freely leave at the showcase players in the hope of earning
the ball spends much of its time coming end of their contracts had broken up that Forward Lee Jae-gun, center, is one of four South Korean players on the roster of A.F.C. Tubize. The Belgian second-division clubs a move, or a base from which they can
to rest in puddles. team long before then, and denied Li- Korean Facebook page has more than 10,000 followers. loan them out to other clubs each time
It is hard not to feel sorry for John erse the chance to collect fat fees for for a fee in a bid to circumvent FIFA
Ledwidge, Leicester Citys grounds- their transfers. A match-fixing scandal rules on agents owning the economic
keeper, and his team. They have spent uncovered in 2006 plunged the team place for African players, in particular. the media suite at the Stade Leburton. rights of players.
much of the summer making sure the deeper into chaos. Belgium, perhaps unknowingly, And finally, there are the low costs. In First is Brussels, but after that it is Everyone knows what is going on at
field is in pristine condition, and now That year, the Egyptian businessman offers the perfect climate to the Netherlands, any team planning on Tubize, and that is all thanks to the TV Mouscron, one former club employee
one storm has undone much of their Maged Samy was looking for a Euro- nurture a vision of what soccers registering a non-E.U. player must pay show. said. Gil Zahavi, an instructor in Modern
hard work. pean club to buy. He had considered For- him at least 300,000 euros a year, over Shim, through his company Sporti- Hebrew at Oxford University, did not re-
Ledwidges expertise is just one of the tuna Sittard, across the border in the
future might look like. $360,000. In Belgium, it is just 80,000 zen, bought Tubize three years ago; he spond to a request for comment. Pini Za-
benefits provided to Leuven by its new Netherlands, and Royal Antwerp, but or 90,000, including bonuses, Franois serves as the clubs chairman and chief havi could not be reached.
owners, the King Power group of Thai- Lierses desperation made it an appetiz- team in recent years, and the strong rep- said. There are the tax breaks, too: executive. His aim when he arrived, he Franois acknowledged that his orga-
land. Also the owners of Leicester, King ing prospect. Belgian clubs are quite utation the country has for youth devel- Franois pointed out that when a club is said, was to build a bridge between Eu- nization had to be careful to avoid an-
Power confirmed in May that it had cheap, Hendrix said. Lierse was in opment. This is a place where larger, sold, the profit is not taxed under Bel- rope and Asia: His club would give other situation like Mouscron, which
completed a deal to take control of Leu- trouble. It was an easy target. richer clubs from England, Germany gian law. young Korean, Japanese and Chinese has been forced to make changes to its
ven, and it has taken a hands-on ap- That so many smaller Belgian clubs and France habitually shop for players. All of that, though, only answers part prospects a platform on which to per- structure to obtain a license to compete
proach, setting out not just to improve are available for comparatively small Then there is the fact that there are of the question. It might explain why form in Europe. In return, South Korean in the Belgian league. Other league
the quality of the playing field but also sums is only one of the reasons that out- very few restrictions on players, Belgium is so attractive, but it does not soccer would benefit from the methods, rules are being rewritten to ensure that
the team (a flurry of new players ar- side investors have flocked here. Pierre Franois said. Only eight players on clarify the motivations of the countrys particularly in marketing, he found in the ultimate beneficiary of a club is not
rived this summer) and the stadium it- Franois, the general director of the or- each team of 25 has to be homegrown, new investors. Europe. an agent, Franois said, no matter how
self (now known as the King Power at ganization that oversees Belgiums do- meaning teams can import huge num- And he hoped to advertise his plan many companies are set up to obscure
Den Dreef ). The plan, initially, is to win mestic competitions, the Pro League, bers of foreigners. Even more enticingly, REALITY SHOW through a television show. ownership.
promotion to the top tier of Belgian soc- can offer three others off the top of his for players from outside the European In South Korea, Tubize is the second- In 2015, we made a show, similar to Under the new rules, he said,
cer. We will have to wait and see, said head. First, there is the good image Union, Belgium offers a fast track to Eu- best-known city in Belgium, Shim Americas Got Talent, Shim said. I Mouscron would not receive its li-
Marc Van Eylen, the chairman of the created by the success of the national ropean citizenship, making it an ideal Chan-koo said proudly, staring out from collected many former players, who had cense.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1989

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 1309

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

KENKEN CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Fill the grid so Solution No. 1209
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 34 Corrida cheers 66 Wine may leave one 13 14 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or 1 Hairdressers 37 Start of a selecting 67 Blackthorn fruit
box contains column, and so that the digits challenges rhyme
17 18 19
within each heavily outlined box 68 Org. certifying albums
each of the 5 On-screen word in a 40 *Repeated lyric in La as gold or platinum
numbers will produce the target number Batman episode Bamba
20 21 22

1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 69 When said three

8 Brilliance 43 Less feral times, blah blah blah
once. subtraction, multiplication or 23 24 25 26

division, as indicated in the box. 13 Cynical rejoinder 44 Like cat videos, 70 Massachusetts Cape
typically 27 28 29
For solving tips A 4x4 grid will use the digits 14 Shades ___
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. 16 Figurine on many a 45 Golda of Israel 71 Philosopher Immanuel 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
www.nytimes.com/ wedding cake 46 Side dish at a
sudoku
For solving tips and more KenKen 17 *Breakfast, in barbecue Down 40 41 42
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ Burgundy 48 Dada pioneer 1 Otiss feline pal
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ 20 Davis of Jungle Fever 50 Affordable Care Act 43 44 45
2 Portly plus
kenken.com option, briefly
21 Fed 3 Drink with a Wild
52 See 23-Across 46 47 48 49
22 One throwing shade? Cherry variety
KenKen is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. 58 21,728-pg. work that 4 The Autobiography of
Copyright 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 23 *With 52-Across, is constantly updated
50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57
1787 Mozart Alice B. Toklas author
composition 59 Sticker component
5 Golden ratio symbol 58 59 60 61
26 ___ Plaines, Ill. 60 Boating hazard
Answers to Previous Puzzles 6 Unconscious
62 Theyre what really 62 63 64 65
27 Title for Gandhi 7 It provides
count, so its said
28 Book after or a hint to the more loft than a 9-iron 66 67 68
II Chronicles multilingual answers 8 Name in A Christmas
30 Vivacity to the starred clues Carol 69 70 71

Solution to September 12 Puzzle 9 French vineyard

10 The Cha Cha Slide, for PUZZLE BY DANIEL MAUER
H I P S E N D O W S H A H one 29 Paper purchase 39 Listen here! 56 Ancient region
O M R I V E R D I H O N E
11 Skyfall singer, 2012 30 Good-news-to-bad- 41 Fizzy citrus beverage where the style of an
news transition
M I S T R E S S E S A T T A
E N T U S S E S P I E D 12 Robert Byrd served 42 ___ warfare architectural column
L A U D S C I S T E R N S nearly nine of these in 31 Genetic stuff 47 Poet Whitman originated
the Senate 32 OMG, my parents
A W N U T S O N T O O N E
49 Encourage 57 Justice who joined
B E T E P R O D R A N A T 15 Prefix with final or are gonna ground me
L I F E L I N E S formal forever! 50 ___-totsy the bench in 2010
S P A S M T E A R S L I M 18 Pro shop purchases 33 Volkswagen 51 Zubin formerly 61 Aspiring D.A.s exam
A R T H O A R C R E E P O competitor of the New York
19 TVs ___ the Virgin 63 Hat, informally
V I E W I N G S U T A H N
35 End of a freshmans Philharmonic
24 McDonalds founder 64 Time it takes for paint
new email address 53 Shares of profits
A V I A T E J A B D O O
G Y N T D I V E R S I O N S Ray
36 Assail 54 Very, in slang to dry, seemingly
E T T E G L A D E T R E K 25 State flower of New
D O O R E L L I S D E S I Hampshire 38 XXX divided by X 55 Avoid, as work 65 X
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 13

Opinion
Stumbling toward a nuclear holocaust
President Jeffrey Bader
Trump and Jonathan D. Pollack
Kim Jong-un
are engaged
in an For the first time in a generation, there
is widespread anxiety about the possi-
increasingly bility of nuclear war, stimulated by the
dangerous extreme tensions between North Ko-
showdown. rea and the United States. Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson has advised Ameri-
New rules cans that they can sleep safely at
are needed night, a reassurance that most people
to prevent probably wish they did not need to
hear.
nuclear war. Mr. Tillerson offered his soothing
counsel to deflate media hype about
recent threats and counterthreats
exchanged between Pyongyang and
Washington. His words also reflect
profound unease about the tempera-
ment and judgment of the two leaders
who could trigger inadvertent war:
President Trump and Kim Jong-un.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim appear to
believe that bombast serves their
domestic needs. Both seem to think
that they can dominate and intimidate
through the direst of threats. However,
words can easily have consequences
that neither leader seems to grasp.
Should we be living in a world where
two leaders can stumble into a nuclear
holocaust? North Koreas accelerated
pursuit of nuclear weapons clearly
requires a much-enhanced contain-
ment and deter-
rence policy by
Congress can the United States
prevent and its allies to
hair-trigger prevent Mr. Kim
from undertak-
responses to ing ever-riskier
provocation. options. But
what can be done
to constrain the
actions of an American president
whose stability is now openly ques-
tioned, even by the Republican chair-
man of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Bob Corker of Tennessee?
To limit the possibilities of an almost
unimaginable conflict, there is a need
to pursue a long overdue legislative
remedy.
Under Article I of the Constitution,
only Congress can declare war. Yet
during Americas numerous wars since
World War II, presidents have never
sought such authorization. The major
reason? Nuclear weapons. There was
widespread agreement that the presi-
dent needed maximum flexibility to
respond to a Soviet attack and that
involving Congress would cause undue
delays in a moment of crisis. As a
result, the president has had essen-
tially unchecked power to wage war,
including launching a nuclear strike.
However, strategic planners under-
stood the risks of enabling a single
officer in a silo in North Dakota, per-
haps under the most stressful condi-
tions imaginable, to initiate a nuclear
strike. The nuclear command-and- ADAM MAIDA

control system therefore entailed a

two key system requiring simulta-
neous actions by two officers to acti-
vate a launch.
The time is long overdue to intro-
duce comparable checks at the highest
levels of the executive branch. The
strategic circumstances faced by the
United States today are altogether
different from those during the Cold
War. Despite heightened tensions
triggered by Russian revanchism in
Ukraine and elsewhere in Central and
Eastern Europe, the real risk of nucle-
ar war emanates from a rogue actor,
and North Korea heads the list. Almost
casual presidential invocations of fire
and fury have rendered circumstances
far more dangerous.
The United States should in no way
diminish its ability to respond to a
nuclear or conventional attack by
North Korea against United States
territory or the territory of an ally.
However, we should put in place a
system of constraints to ensure that a
preventive or pre-emptive nuclear
strike by the United States must be
evaluated through a careful, delibera-
tive process.
Congress should therefore amend
the War Powers Act to cover the possi-
bility of preventive or pre-emptive
nuclear strikes. This would ensure that
the president could not simply provide
the codes to his military aide carrying
the nuclear football and launch such
an attack on his own authority.
Legislation should provide for a
small group of officials, possibly in-
cluding the vice president, the secre-
tary of defense, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and the four lead-
ers of the House and Senate, to give
unanimous consent to any such nucle-
ar strike. It would ensure that multiple
sets of eyes, equipped with stable
emotions and sound brains, would be
able to prevent such a nuclear strike
undertaken without appropriate delib-
eration.
This proposal would raise difficult
constitutional questions. All presiden-
tial administrations have deemed the
War Powers Act to be unconstitutional.
Giving officers appointed by the presi-
dent and subject to his direction formal
veto power over military decisions
could be problematic and precedent
setting.
If so, confining the veto power to the
congressional leadership might be a
preferable alternative.
Even during the Cold War, there was
great risk in ceding to one person the
ability to kill millions in a flash. There
is no good reason to enable an Ameri-
can president to retain absolute au-
thority in circumstances completely
unlike those faced during the Cold War.
Assurances that nuclear weapons
remain an option of absolute last re-
sort, to be considered only after the
concurrence of leaders from the execu-
tive branch and from the Congress,
would also calm the nerves of United
States allies deeply troubled by loose
talk about the resort to nuclear weap-
ons.
This is not to suggest that President
Trump nurses some secret desire to
launch a nuclear attack. However, the
United States needs to act very pru-
dently in dealing with an isolated and
uniquely adversarial state. For its part,
Congress has the power to prevent
hair-trigger responses or impulsive
actions that could lead to nuclear war.
JEFFREY BADER was a senior adviser to
President Barack Obama on Asia from
2009 to 2011. JONATHAN D. POLLACK is a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institu-
tion, specializing in Korea and China,
and was a professor at the United
States Naval War College.

Equifaxs maddening unaccountability

I dont doubt Zeynep Tufekci
the company Contributing Writer
regrets what
happened.
But I dont
Last week, Americans woke up to
think it news of yet another mass breach of
cares that their personal data. The consumer
much either.
credit reporting agency Equifax re-
vealed that as many as 143 million
Americans Social Security numbers,
dates of birth, names and addresses
may have been stolen from its files
just the kind of information that allows
for identity theft and other cyber-
crimes.
I dont know about you, but Ive lost
count of the number of times in recent
years that Ive been informed by a
corporation of such a breach. We
regret to inform you . . . . I dont doubt
that companies regret these things,
but I dont think they care that much
either. To them it means just a few
days of bad press and at most a fine
that amounts to a minuscule portion of
their profits. With penalties like that,
why would companies bother to make
things better?
There are technical factors that
explain why cybersecurity is so weak,
but the underlying reason is political,
and its pretty simple: Big corporations
have poured large amounts of money
into our political system, helping to
create a regulatory environment in
which consumers shoulder more and
more of the risk, and companies less
and less.
This is a general feature of our lop-
sided world, but software businesses
(and the technology sides of other
companies) have acquired perhaps the
greatest degree of impunity. Informa-
tion technology arrived on the scene
only recently, so it has faced fewer of
the kinds of regulations that con-
sumers and citizens, in more progres-
sive eras, managed to impose on other
industries.
Today, almost every piece of soft-
ware comes with a disclaimer on its
user license that basically says that
the product may not work as intended
and that its maker may stop support-
ing it at any time, and thats the users
problem. Its a wonder companies
dont insert nyah nyah nyah nyah
into the tiny-print legalese.
Dont get me wrong: Im a former
programmer; Im not unsympathetic
to the needs of software developers.
Some number of unexpected errors great for the industry as well as con-
bugs are unavoidable in computer sumers. The software industry should
programs. It would be unreasonable to be no different.
allow a consumer to sue a software Perhaps the most maddening part of
company every time a program suf- the Equifax breach is that the credit-
fered a glitch. rating industry is itself unforgiving in
But the situation was different when its approach to even the smallest error.
the industry was younger and wasnt Im still dealing with the damage to my
rolling in billions credit rating that resulted when I
of dollars, as it is forgot to return a library book and a
The Equifax now. Most soft- collection agency was called in (for a
executives who ware failures and paltry sum). The Equifax executives
data breaches who let my data be stolen will probably
let my data
arent inevitable; suffer fewer consequences than I will
be stolen they are a result for an overdue library book. Even if
will probably of neglect and they do get fired, it is likely that they
suffer fewer underinvestment will be sent off with millions of dollars
in product reli- in severance, which is common prac-
consequences
ability and secu- tice for executives. (I would like to
than I will for rity. note that I am available for such pun-
an overdue No software ishment any time.)
library book. system can be Ive taught at a wide range of uni-
free from bugs versities. Ive found that institutions
(or intruders), serving less-advantaged students tend
and users must to have less-forgiving policies for late
be mindful of the risks. But the inher- papers, missed exams, casual drug use
ent lack of perfect automotive safety and so forth, whereas more elite insti-
doesnt mean we dont try to make tutions tend to be more forgiving. All at the School of Information and Li-
cars safer. Obviously, people should young people deserve compassion,
drive more carefully, but seatbelts, second chances and flexibility but
airbags and better car design reduce the poorer ones even more so, since
injury enormously, and that has been they have fewer resources with which
to combat adversity when it strikes.
Yet the reality is the opposite.
Along with news of the breach came
reports that three Equifax executives
sold $2 million worth of stock shortly
after the breach was discovered in
July. In their defense, Equifax said that
the executives were not aware of the
breach and that the amount was
only a small percentage of their
Equifax shares. Its almost as if the
company is saying: Come on, would
we engage in insider trading for a
mere $2 million?
As long as impunity for corporations
and their executives is the norm, data
breaches will continue to happen.
What should you do? Its easy: Just
make sure to change your name, Social
Security number and home address
regularly and dont go crying if you
neglect to do that and suffer the conse-
quences of your actions. Its not as if
youre are a rich executive.
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI, an associate professor
brary Science at the University of North
Carolina, is the author of Twitter and
Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of
Networked Protest.
 ..
14 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Why Shaw had a crush on Stalin

one bracing imperative: the duty to be a crowds crying, Hail, Shaw! An enor- This hope was not as fanciful as it may
ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR., Publisher A.G. SULZBERGER, Deputy Publisher Fintan OToole skeptic. He challenged his readers and mous banquet was held to celebrate now seem: In the late 19th century,
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
audiences to burst bubbles of conven- Shaws 75th birthday. And Stalin himself when Shaws political and artistic con-
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
tional wisdom on almost every issue granted Shaw a two-hour-long private sciousness was being formed, Russian
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director PHILIPPE MONTJOLIN, Senior V.P., International Operations
imaginable, from the rightful place of audience at which his guest found the music, drama and literature were at the
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising DUBLIN Shortly after midnight on Nov. women to the pretensions of empires, dictator in charmingly good-humored leading edge of modern Western cul-
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor
2, 1950, when the Cold War was well from the glory of war to the treatment of mood. ture. As he later wrote to Maxim Gorky,
ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor underway, all the illuminated signs on animals, from homosexuality to chil- In part, too, Shaws insistence on I myself am as strongly susceptible as
CHANTAL BONETTI, V.P., International Human Resources
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Broadway and Times Square were drens rights, from religious doctrine to seeing the Soviet Union as the harbin- anyone to the fascination of the Russian
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
dimmed in salute to the most prominent the treatment of the poor. When Shaws ger of the great socialist utopia can be character as expressed by its art and
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
Western admirer of Stalin. The Irish demolitions of received ideas provoked explained by the disappointments of personally by its artists.
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
dramatist George Bernard Shaw had outrage and obloquy, he courageously democracy. He had fought for decades The creation of G.B.S. owes almost as
SUZANNE YVERNS, International Chief Financial Officer
just died, and the tribute reflected the defended his intellectual independence. to establish universal adult suffrage, much to Russia as it does to Ireland or
fame of plays such as Pygmalion, He abhorred cruelty and made mince- especially for women and the working England. He learned much of his poli-
Man and Superman and Saint Joan. meat of propaganda. class. Like many tical style from anti-czarist exiles in
But Shaws plays were nothing if not And yet, he was devoted to one of the radical intellectu- London, especially the anarchist Peter
cruelest figures in the bloody annals of The radical als, he was dis- Kropotkin and the nihilist Sergius Step-
political, and few of his American admir-
WANT TO MAKE A DEAL, MR. TRUMP? ers could have been in doubt that his
tyranny, and he was a willing dupe of the playwright mayed to find niak. Arguably Shaws greatest play,
propaganda that projected the Soviet George that many of Heartbreak House, is subtitled A
politics included support for Commu-
Was President Trumps bipartisan hurricane relief/debt Union as a workers paradise. The great these new voters Fantasia in the Russian Manner on
If President
nism in general and for Stalin in particu-
skeptic allowed all his skepticism to Bernard Shaw preferred king- English Themes and was greatly influ-
ceiling/government funding deal last week simply a lar. That he was nonetheless honored in imagined a
Trump melt away when he looked at the picture and-country enced by Chekhov.
bipartisan moment, as the House speaker, Paul Ryan, the United States is a reminder that the
of Stalin he kept by his mantelpiece. utopia ruled by conservatism to Above all, Shaw was caught up in the
continues to put it? Probably, given this presidents pattern of poor great divide of the Cold War was never His support was unwavering. Neither a great leader the socialism great wave of enthusiasm for Tolstoy
as simple as it seemed. Beneath Shaws
work with impulse control and of reverting to base politics. But its
infatuation with Stalin, moreover, was a
the Great Purge nor the Ukrainian
who embodied they were sup- that broke over the English-speaking
famine, nor even the pact between posed to support. world in the mid-1880s when War and
Democratic tempting nevertheless to imagine what Mr. Trump force that is still with us: a desire to see Stalin and Hitler, seem to have troubled Russias soul. Especially as the Peace, Anna Karenina and most of his
leaders, what might achieve if he could see beyond momentary, tacti- in Russia all the qualities that the West- his faith in the genius and historic recti- Great Depression other works appeared in translation.
cal wins. Hints of bipartisan consensus are popping up ern democracies lack.
other deals tude of the Soviet dictator. To under- took hold, parlia- Shaw called Tolstoy the master. His
in Congress around enough significant issues to suggest On the face of it, Shaws idolization of stand this contradiction, we have to ments and political parties seemed own insistence on the didactic purpose
might be Stalin is a great puzzle. The man known remember the power of wish fulfillment utterly ineffectual. Stalins apparent of art and his forging of a sage-like
possible? that a determined, strategically minded president around the world by his initials G.B.S. and the way Russia became for many ability to move mountains and trans- persona are pure Tolstoy.
yes, we know, but bear with us could strike a number was not just a great playwright; he was Westerners not a place but an idea, not a form society with triumphant five-year This was not just a matter of artistic
of important deals. arguably the single most influential mere reality but a fantasy. plans offered an antidote to his impa- influence. Russia became, for Shaw, a
The legislation Mr. Trump signed on Friday provides public intellectual of the first half of the In part, Shaws inability to challenge tience with the frustrations of democra- kind of alternate universe, an imagina-
20th century. At Shaws death, Jawahar- the myth of Stalin as a great friend of cy. tive field in which grandiosities that he
$15 billion for hurricane and flooding victims and in-
lal Nehru, the first prime minister of humanity can be explained by flattery. But underlying all of this, there was would otherwise have delighted in
cludes measures to keep the government funded until independent India, said, He was not When he visited the Soviet Union in 1931 an even stronger impulse: the fantasy puncturing were given free rein. He
Dec. 8, instead of Sept. 30, and to extend the nations only one of the greatest figures of his (accompanied by the American-born of Russia itself. Long before the Bolshe- would have made devastating fun of
borrowing authority. The extension delays the type of age, but one who influenced the thought Conservative member of Parliament vik Revolution gave the dream a very anyone writing about the Irish soul, or
Tea Party-led showdown over spending and debt that of vast numbers of human beings during Nancy Astor), he was greeted in Mos- particular political content, Shaw was the English soul, but he was happy to
two generations. cow by a military guard of honor, ban- primed to expect a global spiritual write without irony of the soul of the
has shut down the government before, but it also forces That influence could be summed up in ners emblazoned with his portrait and resurrection that would begin in Russia. Russian people. When Kropotkins
Republicans to engage in this politically damaging fight daughter told him that the Russians
on the eve of an election year. would give the world back its lost soul,
Mr. Trump struck this bargain under the disapprov- Shaw did not scoff. Rather, as he wrote
to Gorky, I quite understand that; it is
ing noses of his partys own leaders, Mr. Ryan and the
not at all ridiculous to me.
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, in an Oval It was, of course, Marx who wrote
Office meeting with his new pals Chuck and Nancy: that everything in history happens
the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the twice, the first time as tragedy, the
second time as farce. There is some-
House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi. Gleeful at media
thing tragic in Shaws journey from
coverage of his shockingly bipartisan move, Mr. Trump Tolstoy to Stalin, from seeing Russia as
called Mr. Schumer last week to talk about keeping up the place to give the world back its lost
the good work. So how could these unlikely allies actu- soul to his eventual embrace of the
Soviet project as the only hope of the
ally make headway? Here are a few areas where capital
world. But perhaps this same impulse
insiders believe progress is possible: is now with us in full-on farcical mode.
Vladimir Putin is no Stalin, and the
NATIONAL FLOOD INSURANCE PROGRAM This seasons devastat- white nationalists around Donald
ing hurricanes in two states that voted for Mr. Trump Trump are certainly no Shaws. But
make this an obvious prospect. Last weeks deal some of the same impulse is still at
work: the tendency to fantasize about
granted an extension until December of this inefficient,
Russia as the vigorous counterweight to
heavily indebted program, which was set to lapse on a supposedly decadent West. There is
Sept. 30. Given that Florida and Texas will require bil- the same impatience with the messiness
lions in payouts, this is a ripe moment for Congress and and inefficiency of democracy, and it
leads to the same crush on the strong-
Mr. Trump to get behind an overhaul of an outmoded
man leader who can cut through the
program that does nothing to discourage people from irrelevant natterings of parliaments and
building, and rebuilding, in areas prone to catastrophic parties.
flooding. They could take steps to put the program on Shaws infatuation with Russia be-
firmer financial footing by better tying premiums to came a full-on love affair with a Soviet
autocrat, whereas the Trump bromance
risk, buying out homes susceptible to repeated cata- with President Putin appears uncon-
strophic flooding, updating mapping to reflect current summated. But they share a fatal attrac-
climate and flooding patterns, and helping policyhold- tion that both preceded and survived
ers finance improvements, like raising their homes, that the Soviet Union: the allure of a faraway
place where the great leader is obeyed
would reduce payouts later. because he embodies a peoples soul.
HEALTH CARE Congress must vote by Sept. 30 to extend
FINTAN OTOOLE is a columnist for The
the Childrens Health Insurance Program, which pro- Irish Times and the author, most re-
vides coverage for nine million low-income children. cently, of Judging Shaw.
Democrats see the legislation as a vehicle for an
amendment to extend for a year Affordable Care Act This is an essay in the series Red Cen-
subsidies that reduce deductibles and co-pays for lower- ASSOCIATED PRESS
tury, about the history and legacy of
income enrollees. Conservatives would normally have Communism 100 years after the Rus-
little interest in this, but state governors of both parties George Bernard Shaw at home, on his death bed. Among the framed pictures on the mantelpiece is a portrait of Joseph Stalin. sian Revolution.
are demanding that Congress extend the A.C.A. subsi-
dies now. Insurers must sign Obamacare participation
contracts by Sept. 27, and action before then would
encourage insurers to re-up, and help stabilize rates.
Senator Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Com-
mittee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, fa-
vors extending the subsidies. Instead of following
through on his threat to blow up Obamacare by with-
The South doesnt own slavery
holding them, Mr. Trump could sign on, and choke off a continually unearthing an ugly truth: county seats. The Detroit journalist Bill perhaps more dangerous because we
Tiya Miles American slavery had no bounds. It McGraw began a catalog of these names cannot see it upon a first glance. In
pointless partisan fight on an issue hes already lost. penetrated every corner of this country, in his 2012 article Slavery Is Detroits Detroit and across the country, slave-
materially, economically and ideolog- Big, Bad Secret Macomb, Campau, holder names plastered about com-
DREAM ACT Mr. Trumps announcement last week that he ically, and the unjust campaign to pre- Beaubien, McDougall, Abbott, Brush, memorate a social order in which elite
intends to rescind President Barack Obamas Deferred ANN ARBOR, MICH. The violent furor that serve it is embedded in our built envi- Cass, Hamtramck, Gouin, Meldrum, white people exerted inexorable power
Action for Childhood Arrivals order, protecting 800,000 erupted this summer over the removal ronments, North and South, East and Dequindre, Beaufait, Groesbeck, Liver- over black and indigenous bodies and
young undocumented immigrants brought to the United of Confederate monuments in several West. Detroit is a surprising case in nois, Rivard. And thats just a start. lives. Places named after slaveholders
cities was a stark reminder that Ameri- point. Belle Isle, for instance, was named for who sold people, raped people, chained
States as children from deportation, was widely unpop- cans remain trapped in the residue of Detroits legacy is one of a free city, Isabelle Cass, a daughter of Lewis Cass, people, beat people and orchestrated
ular. The DACA program will now expire in six months, slavery and racial violence. In con- a final stop on the Underground Rail- a Detroit politician and governor of sexual pairings to further their financial
plunging these immigrants into limbo, and so far, Con- fronting this difficult truth, our attention road before Canada, known by the code Michigan in the early 1800s. Lewis Cass, ends slip off our tongues without pause
gress has done nothing but talk about helping them. is naturally drawn to the South. And word Midnight. Yet its early history is a supporter of slavery, negotiated the or forethought.
rightfully so: The South was the hotbed mired in a slave past. Near the start of sale of a woman he had enslaved named Yet these memory maps make up
Democrats see some hope in Mr. Trumps seeming lack of race-based labor and sexual exploita- the Revolutionary War, William and Sally to a member of the Macomb family what the University of Michigan histori-
of commitment to his own draconian edict last week, tion before and after the Civil War, and Alexander Macomb, Scots-Irish traders in 1818, according an Matthew Countryman has called
Nancy persuaded him to tweet reassurance to those the caldron of a white supremacist from New York, illegally purchased to his biographer, moral maps of the places that we
affected. Its a slim reed, but they hope he will pressure ideology that sought to draw an inviola- Grosse Isle from the Potawatomi peo- Rooting out Willard Carl inhabit together.
Republicans to act on the Dream Act, a 16-year-old
ble line between whiteness and black- ple. William Macomb was the largest racial injustice Klunder. The It is our duty to confront our ugly
ness, purity and contagion, precious slaveholder in Detroit in the late 1700s. only in former Cass family name history in whole cloth. Confederate
proposal to resolve these immigrants legal status per- lives and throwaway lives. He owned at least 26 black men, women is attached to a monuments in the South, in all of their
manently. Republicans, no doubt aware how it would As the author of three histories on and children. He kept slaves on his Confederate county in Michi- artistic barbarity and weighty symbol-
look to subject 800,000 young people to deportation in a slavery and race in the South, I agree Detroit River islands, which included States ignores gan as well as one ism, are but one kind of commemoration
congressional election year, say theyre working on it,
that removing Confederate iconogra- Belle Isle (the current city park) and Americas true of Detroits best of slavery and white power among
phy from cities like New Orleans, Balti- Grosse Isle, and right in the heart of the history. public schools, many that shape our everyday envi-
but on Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee post- more and Charlottesville, Va., is neces- city, not far from where the Interna- Cass Tech. De- ronments, influence our collective
poned a hearing on the issue. Congress is deeply divid- sary and urgent. tional Underground Railroad Memorial troiters and identities and silently signal what our
ed over immigration policy, but the DACA deadline However, in our national discourse on now rises above the river view. When visitors alike national culture validates.
slaverys legacy and racisms persistent Macomb died, his wife, Sarah, and their speak and elevate the names of these While the past does not change, our
should stir decisive action. grip, we have overlooked a crucial fact: sons inherited the family fortune, later slaveholders whenever they trace their interpretations of it as we gain new
Our history of human bondage and becoming along with other Detroit fingers across a map or walk the streets evidence and insight can and should.
Mr. Trump and his new Democratic friends could white supremacy is not restricted to the slaveholding families among the first in search of the nearest Starbucks. Collectively determining what we val-
work on more. They could agree that a wall on the South. trustees of the University of Michigan. Detroit is just one example of the orize in the public square is the respon-
Mexican border is a dumb idea. By turning the South into an island of The Macomb surname and those of hidden historical maps that silently sibility of the people who live in these
historical injustice separate from the numerous Detroit slave sellers, slave- shape our sense of place and communi- stained places now.
Given the continuing Russia investigations, biparti- rest of the United States, we misunder- holders and indigenous-land thieves ty. Place names, submerged below our We can and must recover them.
san bitterness, the limitations of the legislative calendar stand the longstanding nationwide cover the regions map. Men who com- immediate awareness, may make us
and Mr. Trump himself, we have no real reason to ex- collusion that has produced white su- mitted crimes against humanity in their feel that slavery and racial oppression TIYA MILES is a professor of American
pect his bipartisan impulse to harden into practice. But premacist organizers in Fargo, N.D., fur trade shops and private homes, on have faded into the backdrops of cities, culture and history at the University of
and a president from New York City who their farms, islands and Great Lakes and our history. Yet they do their cultur- Michigan and the author of the forth-
we still hope that the president who has said making
thinks further research is needed to trading vessels, are memorialized al and political work. coming book The Dawn of Detroit: A
deals is how I get my kicks might want to turn last determine the aims of the Ku Klux Klan. throughout the metropolis, on street The embedded racism of our Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the
weeks one-off into a streak. Historians of the United States are signs, school buildings, town halls and streetscapes and landscapes is made City of the Straits.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 15

opinion

Fixing the person you love

Eli J. Finkel
At the heart of the American ideal of
marriage lurks a potential conflict. We
expect our spouse to make us feel
loved and valued, while also expecting
him or her to help us discover and
actualize our best self to spur us to
become, as Tom Cruises titular charac-
ter in Jerry Maguire puts it, the me
Id always wanted to be.
The problem is that what helps us
achieve one of these goals is often
incompatible with what helps us
achieve the other. To make us feel
loved and valued, our spouse must
convey appreciation for the person we
currently are. To help us grow, he or
she must emphasize the discrepancy
between that person and the person
we can ideally become, typically by
casting a sober, critical eye on our
faults.
look to different people to help us
achieve each of those goals. Maybe our
MARION FAYOLLE
and yearning. The path from the actual
to the ideal self passes through anxiety,
frustration and humiliation. Its no
different when our spouses are helping
us get there.
Consider the married couple Katinka
Hosszu and Shane Tusup. Ms. Hosszu,
an elite Hungarian swimmer, under-
performed in the 2012 Olympics, going
roles: either making us feel loved and
valued for the person we currently are
or making us feel motivated to grow
into the person we can potentially
become.
Perhaps well conclude that we
would rather have a comfortable life
than an ambitious one, or vice versa,
and we can look to our spouse to help
us achieve that type of life. Or perhaps
well decide that we want a life of both
comfort and ambition, but that well
spouse will make us feel loved and
safe, but well count on a close friend to
help ensure that we never get so com-
fortable that we stop striving. Such a
distribution of responsibility is sensi-
ble, because the skill set that makes
somebody effective at nurturing us is
often quite different from the skill set
that makes somebody effective at
motivating us.
The second option is to go all in on

Harvey, Irma, Jose . . . and Noah

David Brooks
Is there anything we can learn from
hurricanes, storms and floods?
People have been asking that ques-
tion for thousands of years, and telling
stories that try to make sense of natu-
ral disasters. These flood myths are
remarkably similar to one another.
A researcher named John D. Morris
collected more than 200 of them, from
ancient China, India, Native American
cultures and beyond. He calculates
that in 88 percent of the tales there is a
favored family. In 70 percent, they
survive the flood in a boat. In 67 per-
cent, the animals are also saved in the
boat. In 66 percent, the flood is due to
the wickedness of man, and in 57 per-
cent the boat comes to rest on a moun-
tain top.
The authors of these myths are
trying to make sense of vast and pow-
erful forces. They are trying to figure
out what sort of world they live in. Is it
a capricious world, where cities are
destroyed for no reason? Or perhaps
its a just but merciless world, where
civilizations are wiped out for their
iniquity?
The most famous story, of course, is
the biblical story of Noah. As the story
begins, the human race is living with-
out law, and as a result is living vio-
lently and badly. But there was one
righteous man, Noah. God tells Noah
to build an ark because He is going to
wipe out the rest of humanity with a
great deluge.
What does Noah say when he hears
this? Nothing. Abraham protested to
God when the city of Sodom was under
threat of destruction. Moses protested
when God was going to harm the
Israelites. But Noah is silent. He does-
nt try to save his neighbors or argue
with his God.
Rabbis and scholars have often
judged Noah harshly for this. He is
incurious, he does not know and does
not care what happens to others,
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes. He
suffers from the
incapacity to
What the floods speak meaning-
teach about fully to God or to
ourselves and his fellow human
our world. beings.
Noah was
righteous but not
a leader, Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks observes. A leader
takes responsibility for those around
him and at least tries to save the
world, even if people are too wicked to
actually listen. Moral integrity de-
mands positive action against evil.
Noah, by contrast, opts to withdraw
from the corrupt world, in order to
remain untainted.
Noah and his family get on the ark
and Noah gently cares for the animals.
Then the rain stops and it is time to go
out and remake the earth.
What does Noah do now? Once
again, Noah is silent. He does nothing.
He sits in the ark for another seven
days twiddling his thumbs. He is wait-
ing for Gods permission to disembark.
GETTY IMAGES
home without a medal. Soon thereafter, the spouse-as-everything model, but to
Americans didnt always ask so Mr. Tusup, then her boyfriend, became do so with eyes open. This option
much of their spouse. Until around her coach. He was ferocious and un- requires that the couple continually
1850, the primary consideration for a compromising, possibly even inappro- recalibrate their behavior, adopting
Once again, the rabbis are critical of successful marriage was practical: priately so. He would publicly upbraid tenderness or tough love as the situa-
Noahs passivity. One doesnt need running a household that kept its her for subpar performances, some- tion requires. In Jerry Maguire,
permission to go build the world. You residents fed and safe. Love was a times throwing objects or kicking a Dorothy follows up her admonition
just do it. If I had been there I would luxury. After 1850, as urbanization wall to underscore his disappointment. that Jerry not make a joke of his life
have smashed down [the doors of] the afforded young people the freedom to In the 2016 with a warmhearted reminder of his
ark and taken myself out, said the make their own decisions, love increas- Its hard to make Olympics, she core values and encouragement that
second-century scholar Rabbi Judah ingly became a necessity for a success- won three golds
our spouses feel he can live up to them. Such sensitive
bar Ilai. ful marriage. Today, we expect our
valued and and a silver. She support requires not only strong com-
Now God gives Noah a covenant. spouse not only to make us feel loved, largely credits
but also to be a kind of life coach. accepted while his demanding
patibility but also significant attention
Moral laws are handed down, and and sensitivity. And with expectations
Noah is told to go off and recreate. Is this a flawed ideal or the mir- pushing them tactics for her
acle of matrimony? to be the best so lofty, the risk of disappointment is
Noah seems to flee from this responsi- success.
The answer is: It depends. The good they can be. Ms. Hosszu high.
bility. Perhaps he has survivors guilt.
news is that some marriages can do it and Mr. Tusup As such, the second option isnt for
He gets drunk. His sons find him lying
naked and passed out. all. My collaborators and I have found are an extreme the weak of will. Indeed, the spouse-as-
Noah is a good man, but his story is that affectionate partners can indeed case. But their dynamic points to a everything ideal is almost certainly
a lesson in the dangers of blind obedi- play a critical role in determining each general truth: Helping a loved one one reason the average marriage has
ence. The God of the Hebrew Bible others success in reaching their goals. achieve his or her goals can require been getting a bit less satisfying in
wants respect for authority and defer- The bad news is that receiving such criticism rather than warmth, harsh- recent decades. But building this sort
ence to law. But He doesnt want pas- support can be brutal. As the psycholo- ness rather than comfort. Its difficult of marriage places within reach a level
sive surrender. gists Nickola Overall and James Mc- to give complacency-shattering feed- of conjugal fulfillment that was largely
Rabbi Sacks writes, One of the Nulty have shown, spouses who use back while simultaneously making unavailable in earlier eras. For those
strangest features of biblical Hebrew is oppositional, even aggressive methods someone feel valued, loved and sexy. couples who can pull it off, something
that despite the fact that the Torah to inspire each others pursuit of goals When Rene Zellwegers character extraordinary awaits.
contains 613 commands there is no can increase their partners effort and Dorothy Boyd pushes Jerry Maguire to
word for obey. Instead the verb the success in the long run, but such meth- excel, she doesnt mince words: Dont ELI J. FINKEL,
a professor of psychology at
Torah uses is shema/lishmoa, to lis- ods cause distress in the short run. make a joke of your life. Northwestern University and the Kel-
ten, hear, attend, understand, internal- This shouldnt come as a surprise. In the face of this truth that the logg School of Management, is the
ize, respond. So distinctive is this word Achieving personal growth is an ardu- modern ideal of marriage is, though author of the forthcoming book The
that, in effect, the King James Bible ous process. A life characterized by the alluring, highly demanding we have All-Or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best
had to invent an English equivalent, pursuit of self-actualization trades two options. The first is that we ask Marriages Work, from which this
the word, hearken. satiation and contentment for hunger our partner to play only one of the two article is adapted.
Today we live amid many floods.
Some, like Harvey or Irma, are natural.
Others are man-made.
People are still good at acting indi-
vidually to tackle problems. Look at
how many Houstonians leapt forth to
care for their neighbors. But we have
trouble with collective action, with
building new institutions, or reviving
old ones, that are big enough to deal
with the biggest challenges.
Thats because we have trouble
thinking about authority. Everybody
seems to have an outsider mentality.
Social distrust is at record highs. Many
seem to swerve between cheap, anties-
tablishment cynicism, on the one hand,
and a lemming-like partisan obedience
on the other.
The answer is the hearken mental-
ity that Sacks describes. This is where
Abraham succeeds and Noah fails.
Abraham listens deeply to God and
derives everything from his identity on
down from Him, but pushes out ahead
of the shepherd.
To hearken is to be faithful but also
responsible, to defer to just authority
but also to answer the call of individual
conscience, to work within the system
but as a courageous, creative force.
Floods are invitations to recreate the
world. That only happens successfully
when strong individuals are willing to
yoke themselves to collective institu-
tions.

From 9/11 to Humpty Dumpty

COHEN, FROM PAGE 1
the misbegotten war, the soldiers and
shoppers, financial implosion, impunity
for the mighty, recession, anxiety and
polarization. Then Americans, and not
only Americans, decided it was better
to blow things up than have more of
the same. Thats when things precipi-
tated.
The esteemed leader won even
though Americans know he makes
stuff up and wants a victorious small-
to-medium-sized war that will allow
him to proclaim American greatness
restored. People do crazy things. They
invade Russia, for example. Just look
at history. Trump might think bombing
Iran is his ticket in 2020.
What is all the fear about? Its the
loss of sanctuary. Menace could be
anywhere since it came out of a clear
blue sky. Its the loss of victory. There
is none to be had. Its the loss of confi-
dence. Americas power is greater than
its ability to use it. Its the loss of com-
munity. Technology is a great connec-
tor but also a great isolator. Its the loss
of self-worth. Life in the Facebook age
can become an endless invitation to
feel inferior or unloved.
All of this has fed a tissue of fear and
disquiet easily exploited by the es-
teemed leader, whose instincts are
above all for human weakness.
Hence Muslims and Mexicans and
Mullahs and trade manipulators and
all the other menaces to America that
the leader deploys as needed.
In The Sun Also Rises, He-
mingway wrote something else: It is
awfully easy to be hard-boiled about
everything in the daytime, but at night
it is another thing.
Its hard to shrug off the darkening
skies. The worst of 9/11, almost a gen-
eration on, is the feeling that the per-
petrators won. They didnt buckle
Western freedom and democracy, but
they injured them. They disoriented
the West. They
sucked some of
The president the promise out
wants to build of a new century.
a wall he can The assassins
sit on to of Abraham
contemplate Lincoln and
xenophobia and Mahatma Gandhi
and John F.
Islamophobia. Kennedy and
Martin Luther
King took the
lives of great men but did not destroy
their ideas. Perhaps they reinforced
the immortality of those ideas. The
assassin of Yitzhak Rabin and the
mass murderers of 9/11 dispatched by
Osama bin Laden were, however, more
successful.
Yigal Amir, Rabins killer, uprooted
the Oslo seeds of peace by assuring
that Israeli Messianic-nationalist reli-
gious ideologues got the upper hand
over secular pragmatists. They have
never relinquished it. Bin Laden
sapped Americas confidence, wove
fear into the nations fabric, and in-
spired a metastasizing form of jihadi
fanaticism that continues to terrorize
the West in the crazed pursuit of a
restored caliphate.
And Humpty Dumpty wants to build
a wall he can sit on to contemplate
xenophobia and Islamophobia.
I broke down a couple of days after
9/11 when I saw an image of a womans
ultrasound stuck on a subway wall at
42nd Street with the words: Looking
for the father of this child. Perhaps, in
retrospect, my sobs were for all the
innocence lost that day, the dreams
unborn.
Adele was very brave through the
spinal tap. Today shes a brave young
woman. They are out there: the brave,
the stoical, the imaginative and the
decent. Despite everything, they will
have their day.
CORRECTION
An article on Sept. 11 about Indias Su-
preme Court ruling on privacy mis-
stated the dates of two court rulings in-
volving an Indian law that criminalized
same-sex relations. The law was an-
nulled by the Delhi High Court in 2009,
not 2012, and the Supreme Court over-
ruled that decision in 2013, not a few
months later.

16 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
FashionNewYork
Wrestling
with history
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
One of the weirdest things about watch-
ing fashion shows on 9/11 a juxtaposi-
tion that might in itself seem inappropri-
ate but unavoidable, and has been since
the twin towers fell 16 years ago, crush-
ing the collections along with so much
else is how few designers acknowl-
edge the date. The tragedy changed
their world in multiple ways both macro
and micro, but they largely seem in deni-
al about the conjunction. In an industry
predicated on looking forward, its as if
they are terrified to look back.
As if the past is simply a grab bag of
looks and silhouettes to be pilfered at
will (the 90s continue to be popular this
season), as opposed to a factor to be
reckoned with. This has long been true,
but it opens a chasm between the world
outside and the world of the runway that
reinforces the worst stereotypes of the
industry.
Yet its possible designers may not be
as willfully abstruse to the moment as
they seem. On Monday in many shows,
New York itself its power structures
and institutions and still-glorious land-
marks took center stage.
It began with The Row, where Mary-
Kate and Ashley Olsen were hosts of a
breakfast show in the deep-plush tea-
room of The Carlyle, the hotel synony-
mous with a certain classic uptown
swish.
It proved a fortuitous frame for their
collection, as attenuated of line and se-
rene of shade as always, but with a cer-
tain new generosity of proportion and
nod to modernity: coats pulled off the
CA RO L I NA
H E R R E RA PHOTOGRAPHS BY NOWFASHION
At de la Renta,
keeping his touch
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
In the latest installment of our series
that goes inside the private working
worlds of designers, Fernando Garcia
and Laura Kim, co-creative directors of
Oscar de la Renta, talk about taking over
the corner office, their arguments over
waists, and how Hillary Clinton helped
them at an emotional time. And thats
what didnt make it into the video. This
interview has been edited and con-
densed.
Where are we?
FERNANDO GARCIA We are in the offices of
Oscar de la Renta in Times Square. We
inherited Oscars office, which is a little
bittersweet but still amazing. Sixty per-
cent of our time is spent outside of this
particular office, working with our team
and having fittings. The other 40 per-
cent we spend here, researching or hav-
ing private meetings and things of that
sort.
LAURA KIM Arguing. Privately.
You have a complicated history with
the brand. You both worked here for
more than a decade, left to start
Monse just before Oscar died, and
returned a year later after Peter
Copping, whom he had chosen to be
GUCCI
ONLINE: THANKS, INTERNET RAGE
With Guccis support, the Harlem designer known as Dapper
Dan is reopening his studio. nytimes.com/style
OS CA R D E L A R E N TA
VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
shoulder and belted to blouse, like a
gown, at the back; halter jumpsuits tied
in a rope bow on one shoulder with a pa-
lazzo width (and no waist); space-age
suiting made from white paper, and cro-
cheted chain mail evening hoodies
poured over silk.
From there, it moved on to the Pool,
the restaurant designed by Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson
in the Seagram Building on Park Ave-
DE R E K L A M
Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia returned as creative directors at Oscar de la Renta, where they had worked for a dozen years.
his heir, resigned. Did you change
much when you moved in?
FG No. Were not the fanciest people
youll meet, so we just have our basic
necessities: my phone, my music, the
screen with Pinterest or whatever.
LK I have my gym clothes so I can run to
the gym after work.
All of Oscars pictures are still on the
walls, and his books are on the
shelves. It wasnt uncomfortable
being surrounded by constant re-
minders of Oscar?
FG We worked together for 12 years. Pro-
fessionally speaking, we grew up in this
company. I think I actually spent more
time with Oscar than with my dad.
Theres a story behind everything here
with us, so thats why it doesnt feel like
were invading Oscars office. Its team-
work I see on the walls. Like, this is a
picture of a white dress styled by Grace
Coddington with Lady Gaga. That was
my first resort collection here, so I re-
member that dress very fondly.
LK And the picture with Kate Moss with
the feathered cape is actually one of the
first Oscar images I remember as a
teenager. I was thinking: Wow, this is
pretty amazing. Who makes those
HE L M U T L A N G
nue, itself one of the first modernist sky-
scrapers, where masters of the universe
traditionally lunch. Here, Derek Lam re-
turned to the catwalk after a few sea-
sons away with a polished ode to his sig-
nature Americana: the mythology of the
70s and the Western frontier.
This outing was no exception, though
befitting its frame, it had polish built into
the seams: the jeans tailored, the
leather silver-studded, a strapless
evening jumpsuit bandanna-wrapped
twice at the torso (a nice pun on the idea
of black tie). Mr. Lams clothes are so
quietly assured they have often been
easy to overlook, but now that they are
back, its clear how much we missed
them.
And then it segued to the Sculpture
Garden at the Museum of Modern Art,
where Carolina Herrera staged the first
fashion show ever held in the space. I
have been asking to come here for
years, she said backstage before the
show. They finally said yes.
Wisely, she refrained from deciding to
have a de Kooning moment, instead opt-
ing to focus on color The only way
you can put art and fashion together is
through color, she said from daffodil
yellow to faded blue to marigold, dusty
lavender and peach, worked and re-
worked in small-waisted, mid-calf
mostly dresses and skirts, the sleeves
puffed just enough to suggest power
proportions.
kinds of clothes?
Are there other major stories atta-
ched to this office?
FG We resigned in this office, actually.
Alex [Bolen], the C.E.O., and Oscar
thought we were lying. They didnt be-
lieve that we were doing our own thing;
they just thought we were going to go
work for someone else. So they got very
mad. But the same day, Hillary Clinton
was coming to the office, and we had to
cut our departure meeting short. Laura
was crying, so I was just taking her over
to the showroom so Hillary wouldnt be
bothered. But lo and behold, Oscar
dragged Hillary over to the spot where
we were hiding.
LK He told us, Dont tell anybody that
you resigned. But then he screamed,
These people just resigned!
FG Yeah, Hillary unfortunately didnt
know how to react. She was just trying
to hug us and console us, but I remem-
ber Huma [Abedin] in back going like:
We should not be here. This is not the
right time to come into the office.
Not long after that, Oscar passed
away, right?
FG Yes, from cancer, and it was a bit of a
As it happens, Mrs. Herrera was also
one of the few designers to acknowledge
the date, noting a donation had been
made to the Fire Department of New
York in homage to its service. Oscar de
la Renta was another. In a show held at
Sothebys, the auction house on the far
East Side, the designers Fernando Gar-
cia and Laura Kim put a note on every
seat in honor of the those who died, and
those who worked so hard to make
N.Y.C. great again.
But then, Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim are
in only their second season at a house
they inherited not long after the
founders death, and the past and its re-
lationship to their present is much on
their mind.
You could see it on the runway, where
they mixed attempts to loose the moor-
ings of the brand and give it a bit more
currency in the form of silver-splashed
denim and bead-splattered white cotton
with traditional Oscarisms in a series of
tulle princess party gowns. The two
strains did not always mesh, and a se-
ries of faux-arty tulle cover-ups collaged
with laser-cut leather atop bathing suits
were just plain weird. But a new logo,
made to mimic the founders flowing
cursive signature, that squiggled over
fur and fabric gave an abstractly per-
sonal edge to the clothes that connected
what was with what they want to be.
At least Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim were
wrestling with legacy in a more substan-
CRAIG DEAN DEVINE
shock even though we did see him going
through chemo and all that. But right be-
fore Oscar passed, he asked us to help
Peter with his first collection. So we kept
our word and helped Peter with that col-
lection, and then we left.
When we were about to start on
Monse, we consulted with a couple of
companies to help strengthen Monse,
which is a very young company and
needs all the help it can get. After Alex
saw that we could handle doing a couple
of things at a time, he stepped in and
said, Why dont you guys come back,
and Ill help you run things that design-
ers are not trained to run.
After a couple of months in negotia-
tions, we came up with a good agree-
ment, and we came back to the place
that taught us everything. But it was
strange to come back to the same office
where Oscar was working. I need a shot
of tequila now.
How do you share the workload?
FG We toss ideas in the air. We both have
to like it to push it forward.
LK A lot of text messaging. We send each
other pictures and . . .
FG We sketch separately, and we just
make sure that were both focusing our
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
NINA WESTERVELT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
tive way than Shayne Oliver, the de-
signer in residence at Helmut Lang, ap-
pointed by the editor in residence
(this house is getting a little crowded
with residents) Isabella Burley to pro-
vide a one-season spin on the brand
whose eminently cool minimalism de-
fined the 1990s.
Mr. Oliver, who became famous for his
former brand Hood by Air, a post-gen-
der post-porn sartorial position paper
that subverted pretty much every sa-
cred style cow, dipped into the Lang tai-
loring archive, no question, as well as
the palette of black and white, shell pink
and cerulean.
But they were just the straight men to
his now-familiar aesthetic tricks: puz-
zle-strap-pasties that became capes at
the back; trousers transformed into
chaps to reveal the undies beneath; gi-
ant leather bras that could be worn as
shoulder bags, lots of see-through and
harness straps.
Once upon a time these kinds of not-
entirely-clothes shocked New York out
of its fashion stupor, but now they just
looked familiar in part because, a ter-
rific stiffly-oversize anorak and a little
pink dress aside, Mr. Oliver did not re-
ally seize the opportunity to make his id
wrestle with a Langian belief in the in-
delible effects of refusal.
The result was easy to forget, instead
of imbued with the power of remem-
brance.
ideas for the larger picture.
LK We sometimes resketch each others
sketches to our own liking, too. Its a
very long back and forth, back and forth.
FG And then eventually we have a board
of all of our ideas, and we filter down and
pick the favorites and build that group
further and expand it to the max. And
then thats how we give the team some
direction. When it comes to design, we
do not have a particular division of re-
sponsibilities. I think that in other facets
of the company we do divide and con-
quer.
Explain, please.
LK Im more experienced in managing
teams, so I do that a bit more than Fer-
nando. I do the calendar part, the fi-
nance part, merchandising part.
FG I focus on marketing and the P.R. and
the visuals that are put out for the com-
pany how we have cohesiveness and
universality so that a rack in a store in
Dubai is the same exact feeling you get
from one in Bergdorf. Thats what I like.
LK I think we are the opposite, person-
ality-wise. Fernandos more outgoing,
and I like to be more alone. Whatever
Im lacking, I know Fernando has.
Hes a more fun person, so I just know
there are days Im like, O.K., this is not
going anywhere, these dresses are look-
ing really boring, let me call up Fer-
nando and make it more fun.
What did you finally agree on for the
upcoming collection?
FG I think the clothes have to feel much
more relaxed than they used to. Were
making evening separates, as the sales
team calls it. That category didnt even
exist before.
LK We introduced denim and T-shirts for
resort. Im wearing Oscar jeans today.
Theres going to be a little surprise in the
spring runway; I hope it goes well.
There are going to be parts that are not
classic, clean, elegant Oscar. We sent a
classic tweed suit to a denim factory in
L.A. to get distressed.
FG I was very touched to see some writ-
ings and notes that Oscar had left
around, and it inspired us to update the
logo by making it look more relaxed by
using his actual signature. He would
handwrite it at the end of his notes, and
that led to a scribble technique that
were using for this collection so his
notes are written on every garment.
And there are dresses that have his sig-
nature everywhere as a print. Its sort of
like a cool way of showing his touch on
everything.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 17

18 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
Culture
A lyrical response to a world askew
U2s coming album,
Songs of Experience,
presents joy as defiance
BY JON PARELES
Back in March 2016, U2 was in Killiney, a
luxurious seaside suburb of Dublin, im-
mersed in sessions for the follow-up to
its 2014 album, Songs of Innocence.
The band had rented a white Victorian
mansion and outfitted it as a recording
studio, with equipment set up in the bay-
windowed parlor so the band Bono,
the Edge on guitar, Adam Clayton on
bass and Larry Mullen Jr. on drums
could jam together.
Mr. Mullen had a second kit temporar-
ily nested in a stairwell with a roaring
echo a recording technique learned
from Led Zeppelin lore that had already
paid off. The day before I visited, he and
the Edge had adapted a bass line from a
song by Haim into a stomping, start-
stop guitar riff, and Bono had immedi-
ately roughed out some lyrics.
When I arrived, U2 and one of its
producers, Jolyon Thomas, gathered to
play back the brand-new song, along
with half a dozen others destined for the
album. There was live recording to be
done, too. Bono, perpetually energetic,
announced that he had woken up at 5
a.m. with an entirely new chorus lyric
for a song. I dreamed it, so it could be
awful, he warned.
With the backup track cranked up
loud in the parlor no earphones or vo-
cal booth for Bono he sang the new
lyrics, take after quick take. A brief si-
lence, and then Bono asked those in the
room for opinions. It feels like a more
believable thing, the Edge said, and
there were nods of approval. Things
seemed to be moving along fast.
But that was more than a year ago,
and those lyrics wouldnt make the al-
bums final cut. The other songs I heard
that day would also go through many
metamorphoses before the album was
done: changes of structure, tempo, son-
ics.
And then, just as the album was all but
complete, British and American elec-
tions shook up the world, delaying the
album again and eventually bringing a
darker, more directly political cast to
some of the lyrics. We needed some dis-
tance from it, Bono said. The world
had changed. We needed to put things
on pause to take in the scale of the
change. The album, Songs of Experi-
ence, is now scheduled to arrive Dec. 1.
It appears at a moment when popular
culture is gathering its spirit of right-
eousness and resistance a moment
that could well be suited to U2, whose
pealing guitars and martial beats have,
through the years, become rocks sonic
signature of idealism. Songs of Experi-
ence merges personal reflections with
tidings from the wider world, and it calls
for compassion, empathy and rectitude.
The wickedness in the world, we just
let it perforate the album, Bono said.
But it still had to be a very personal al-
bum, not a polemic.
He added, The elections were a
shock to the system personally and a
shock to the system politically, not just
in America but in Europe. This is my
lyrical response to both of those shocks.
I leaned more on the personal than the
political, but the political is there to put
the personal songs in the context of
time, of history.
Bono was on the phone from the south
of France, about a week and a half ago.
As I look out the window, at the Medi-
terranean Sea that is so tranquil today,
he said, I see young families splashing
about. And just across, hardly a distance
at all, are people tacking their lives to
This time shes a bad mother
After Downton Abbey,
Elizabeth McGovern is
playing a Briton onstage
BY ALEXIS SOLOSKI
On a rainy morning, Elizabeth McGov-
ern, late of Downton Abbey, arrived
at a rehearsal space in New York
dressed in a pink cardigan, white capri
pants and slip-on shoes that would
appall a dowager countess. A film and
stage actress who ditched Hollywood
for London more than two decades
ago, she found midcareer fame playing
Cora Crawley, the American wife of an
English lord and a woman who can
really wear a tiara.
Rumors of a Downton Abbey film
continue to swirl. In the meantime,
most actresses might feel relieved to
have shucked off that finery. Not Ms.
McGovern. Having recently wrapped a
new Julian Fellowes project, an adap-
tation of The Chaperone, shes back
to starring as an Edwardian matriarch.
She plays Mrs. Conway in Time and
the Conways, a 1937 J. B. Priestley
drama that begins performances on
Broadway on Thursday. Im still
wearing the same dress, she joked.
With a small smile and an accent
stranded between London and her
native Illinois, Ms. McGovern, 56,
Above from left, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr., Bono and the Edge went back to work on Songs of Experience after the British and American elections. Below, the group performing at the AccorHotels Arena in Paris.
bits of wood and creating these human
flotillas to escape from what is still a war
across the way. I wanted to write about
that.
U2 released The Blackout as a per-
formance video at the end of August. Its
a buzzing, thumping rocker that begins,
Dinosaur wonders why it still walks the
earth and later wonders, Is this an ex-
tinction event; it also observes, Stat-
ues fall/Democracy is flat on its back.
In writing and rewriting the song, Bono
said, I made it about democracy, not an
aging rock star.
U2 refuses to rush its albums. Ever
more aware of its singular status as a
rock band that has started its fifth dec-
ade with its original lineup and is still
selling out arenas and stadiums the
group constantly weighs both its past
and its determination to move ahead. Its
discussed bad parenting and the thrill
of being back on Broadway. These are
edited excerpts from the conversation.
What can you tell me about Mrs.
Conway?
Im just so blatantly loving being this
woman. Shes not somebody who is
very emotionally intelligent or devel-
oped or mature. Shes not really grown
up herself, so shes an absolutely terri-
ble mother. And you see the damage
that she wreaks on her children, all
done in the most unconscious fashion,
never meaning to tear them down, to
break them apart.
So the opposite of Cora?
Who was the perfect mother always?
Yes.
Would she and Cora get along?
Yes, because Mrs. Conway is fun. I
think they would have a blast. They
both enjoy a party.
Has the play made you think about
your own experience as a mother?
Im kind of shocked at how easily Im
understanding this character. The need
to be attractive, the need to be the
center of attention, the need to be the
star, despite the fact that youre sup-
posed to be passing all that onto your
children, I can definitely relate. Im
sure my children would agree.
who wants to be in a very good band at
this point? Whatever you think of our
oeuvre, or whatever you think of the U2
group, were still attempting to get be-
yond ourselves.
When U2 released Songs of Inno-
cence, it immediately promised a fol-
low-up with the title readers of William
Blake would expect: Songs of Experi-
ence. But Songs of Experience isnt
exactly a sequel. Songs of Innocence
was as explicitly autobiographical as U2
had ever been, including one song
named after Bonos mother, Iris, and
another citing the street where he grew
up, Cedarwood Road. In contrast,
Songs of Experience returns to the
broader strokes that fill U2s catalog:
love, fear, mortality, responsibility and
STEPHANE CARDINALE/CORBIS, VIA GETTY IMAGES hope.
Many of the songs, Bono said, are like
ambitions are high-minded and grandly letters addressed to specific recipients:
scaled; its attitude remains earnest, pa- his family, his friends, the audience,
tient and craftsmanlike. America. Above all, the new album pos-
We still really believe that we can its joy as an act of defiance, Bono said.
make a great record, the Edge said last Thats the heart of rock n roll, thats its
month by telephone from Dublin, where life force.
he was pondering the final sequence of As usual, U2 worked on and worked
Songs of Experience and working on over the album with multiple
guitar sounds for the next U2 tour, built producers from various spheres and
around this album. (The bands current styles. Mr. Thomas has worked with the
worldwide stadium tour celebrating the rawboned rock duo Royal Blood; other
30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree producers included Ryan Tedder from
runs through October). Which is a very OneRepublic, Jacknife Lee and one of
different motivation to go in to make an the bands career-long collaborators,
album than thinking, Well, weve got to Steve Lillywhite. The band also sent
whip one out for the fans. some works in progress to Kendrick
Its a sentiment Bono would echo. Its Lamar, hoping to get a guest rap from
almost impossible to be great, he said. him as a kindred socially conscious mu-
Thats why we call it great. And thats sician. Instead, Mr. Lamar used a vocal
our drug of choice. Very good is the ene- line from Bono for XXX on his
my of great theres lots of that. But DAMN. album. On U2s album, the
AARON RICHTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Elizabeth McGovern, though a longtime Londoner, was born in Illinois.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
snippet is part of a full-length song
about America and its history of wel-
coming immigrants.
The new songs rove from U2s arena
anthems to celestial ambient hymns,
echoes of 1950s rock, and glimpses of
disco and new wave. All our best work
has that pull between experimental on
one hand and pop clarity on the other,
Bono said.
For Songs of Experience, U2s self-
imposed agenda was a commitment to
the fine art of songwriting, Bono said.
He and the Edge both spoke about hear-
ing more innovation outside rock than
within it: in R&B, hip-hop and pop. See-
ing the demise of a certain kind of song-
writing, particularly in rock, it made the
band determined to go there, Bono
said. Crafting songs, melodies and
modulations, and lyrics that people
could follow. Sunday Bloody Sunday
thats a big melody, and declarative, and
not trying to be cool. The problem with
rock now is that its trying to be cool. But
clear thoughts and big melodies if
they come from a true place, they not
only capture the instant, they become
eternal in a way.
The Edge offered a simpler criterion:
On this record, we went, Is it going to
be played by people in a bar in 25
years?
After decades in the public eye, U2 is
thoroughly self-conscious. Bono, who
has leveraged his rock-star renown to-
ward global initiatives that include bat-
tling HIV and AIDS and reducing ex-
treme poverty, constantly analyzes his
own efforts.
Whats the difference between Inno-
cence and Experience? he said. The Yes. Joy is an act of defiance.
Being a mother for a lot of women is
such a huge part of their estimation of
themselves, and yet nobody teaches
you how to do it. Its just something
that happens to you, and then youre
supposed to just get on with it and do
the best you can. Seeing somebody try
her hardest and just get it wrong, Im
really interested in that.
Its been more than 20 years since
youve done a play in New York. Is it
good to be back?
I am loving it. Im really in a state of
constant buzz. Im surprised by how
much energy is generated by theater
in New York right now. Really, theres a
hunger for it that I dont remember. I
can only surmise that as screens have
gotten smaller and people walk around
watching every TV show, every movie
on their iPhones, we really need that
human face-to-face contact the real
body, the real voice.
Theater aside, is this a strange time
to be back in America?
Its very, very disconcerting, but I
comfort myself with the thought that
weve been through the dark times
before and got through them. And the
message of The Conways is that life
is about darkness and light, hope and
despair. What you walk away with is:
This too shall pass. Thats my take-
away.
..
SAM JONES
core of Innocence to me is a lyric from
our second album, which says, I cant
change the world, but I can change the
world in me. The core of Experience is
and this is cheeky! I can change
the world, but I cant change the world in
me. And so you realize that the biggest
obstacle in the way is yourself. There are
things to rail against, and there are
things that deserve your rage, and you
must plot and conspire to overthrow
them. But the most wily and fearsome of
your enemies is going to turn out to be
yourself. And thats experience.
Songs of Innocence was released as
a free album that suddenly appeared in
the libraries of iTunes users worldwide,
only to be greeted by many people not as
a gift but as an invasion of their private
music collections an exercise in hu-
bris rather than generosity. Yet band
members believe that in the end, the
giveaway introduced U2 to the newer,
younger fans they see in their recent
concert audiences.
Songs of Experience is being
presented as a more old-school album,
released through standard channels
with plenty of notice. U2 has been play-
ing one of its songs, The Little Things
That Give You Away, on its Joshua
Tree tour, and it just released the al-
bums first studio single, Youre the
Best Thing About Me. Its as straight-
forward a love song as anything in U2s
repertory inspired, band members
said, by vintage Motown songs, though
it ended up sounding far different.
Youre putting out a song about your
girlfriend when the world is on fire?
Bono asked, anticipating one reaction.
After all this time away do you still
feel American?
When Im in England, I feel like I have
hay coming out of my ears all the time.
I will always be the American, no
matter what. But when I come here I
feel quite British. Always the foreigner,
I guess.
Does that mean that its still a trick to
do an English accent?
I wish I could say that its not, but even
though I have played many English
parts, theres still something about the
musculature of it, the placement of
muscles. I do have to think about it,
unfortunately.
Early in your career, you played a lot
of girlfriends. Now youre playing a
lot of mothers. Does that fact bother
you?
What can you do? I had reconciled
myself to it, to feeling very grateful for
the profession and the amount of suc-
cess Ive enjoyed, but also quite un-
challenged and bored. Not that I
wanted to complain. I was happy
enough to make a living. Last year, I
thought, Im just one of those people
who is always going to be the wife, the
mother, the girlfriend. And then sud-
denly, this year, without even kind of
really expecting it, I find myself doing
work that Im really, really loving. Go
figure.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Modernist men
ART REVIEW
The International Style
came to America by way of
two visionary curators
BY JASON FARAGO
Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr.
and Philip Johnson, at the Grey Art
Gallery in New York, is the story of
two men and a whole country. The men
are men of the Museum of Modern Art
the first museum with a curatorial
department dedicated to architecture
and design, which preached the gospel
of the International Style both in New
York and via touring exhibitions. The
country is the United States to
which they imported, wholesale, a
European industrial aesthetic meant to
wash away Prairie Style organicism
and Art Deco ornament.
That they succeeded beyond any-
ones imagination is proved by a thou-
sand StreetEasy listings, promising
contemporary apartments with
furnishings nearly a century old. If
youre reading this while seated on a
simple, unadorned sofa or chair, these
are the men you should thank.
Partners in Design plots Barrs
and Johnsons infatuation with Euro-
pean (principally German) modern
design, their advocacy of it in America,
their support of exiled Bauhaus de-
signers, and their influence on postwar
industrial design and museum pro-
gramming. The show initially ap-
peared at the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts and at the Davis Museum at
Wellesley College, though in New York
it has been shrunk to apartment size.
But the objects assembled lounge
chairs and side tables, steak knives
and chrome toasters are unfailingly
seductive, and, for better or worse,
they still look as la mode as they
were in Herbert Hoovers day.
They were just kids, at the origin.
Barr was 27, teaching the nations first
college course on modern art at
Wellesley, when he got the call to be-
come MoMAs first director in the
summer of 1929. Unlike many art histo-
The art of war
BOOK REVIEW
A RIFT IN THE EARTH: ART, MEMORY,
AND THE FIGHT FOR A VIETNAM WAR
MEMORIAL
By James Reston Jr.. Illustrated. 267 pp.
Arcade. $24.99.
BY MICHAEL J. LEWIS
If you are under 40 you know the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial as an
indispensable part of the National
Mall, as iconic as the Lincoln Memori-
al, and just as cherished. That it was
ever controversial seems laughable.
But it was, and to the point of white-
hot fury. Its design and construction
sparked what may have been the first,
and arguably the angriest, of Americas
art wars even including todays
bitter disputes over Confederate war
memorials. Curiously, it was also the
only one to leave a more united coun-
try in its wake. Such are the lessons of
A Rift in the Earth, James Reston Jr.s
definitive history of the memorial.
The broad outlines of the story are
familiar. Five years after the United
States withdrawal from Vietnam, de-
signs were solicited for a memorial to
the 58,000 American dead and missing
of the war. Maya Lin, a Yale undergrad-
uate of Chinese-American extraction,
won the competition with a project of
staggering simplicity a graceful
hollow in the earth, a stone retaining
wall and nothing else. Her great inspi-
The designer, Maya Lin, during the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1982.
rians of the period, he had an abiding
interest in architecture and design. He
gobbled up the publications of the
Bauhaus, Walter Gropiuss pioneering
design school, and in 1928 he made his
pilgrimage to Dessau, Germany, where
he met Gropius, Paul Klee and Lszl
Moholy-Nagy and also slavered
over their apartments spare, industri-
al furnishings.
The museum Barr envisioned would,
like the Bauhaus, have multiple depart-
ments for artistic disciplines. To direct
the pioneering architecture and design
division, he picked his friend Philip
Johnson, then 23 and with yet no archi-
tectural training, whom he sent off to
Europe with a list of modern buildings
to see. The Bauhaus was top of the list,
and Johnson, too, fell hard for
Gropiuss unadorned facades and
industrial fenestration. I regard it as
the most beautiful building we have
seen, of the larger than house variety,
Johnson wrote to Barr in October 1929.
A model for the Bauhaus is at the Grey,
along with publications designed by
Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. Other
buildings Johnson saw on his Euro-
pean trips included Moscow apartment
blocks and the functionalist pavilions
and restaurants of the 1930 Stockholm
Exhibition, modernisms breakthrough
in Sweden.
One of the Museum of Modern Arts
most important early exhibitions,
presented in 1932, was Modern Archi-
tecture: International Exhibition, for
which Johnson and his fellow curator
Henry-Russell Hitchcock showcased
mostly European buildings, with a
heavy emphasis on rectilinear forms;
surfaces stripped of decoration; and
glass and steel, with reinforced con-
crete construction. Modern apartment
blocks in Germany were contrasted
with slum photography from the Lower
East Side of New York. Johnson
wanted one model at least for each of
the architects included: Le Corbusier
submitted one of his Villa Savoye, in
the suburbs of Paris, and Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe was represented by the
Villa Tugendhat, in Brno. Modern
Architecture was the last show staged
in MoMAs original home in the
chteau-like Heckscher Building at 730
Fifth Avenue a dedicated building
ration was to list the names just as they
died, day by day. In the process she
turned what could easily have been a
telephone directory into a vast and
tragic timeline, which you experience
in bodily terms as you make the gentle
descent to the center, where the roster
of names begins and ends, fittingly, at a
point of repose.
None of this was apparent in Lins
bafflingly elusive drawings. Many
veterans regarded the design as an
anti-monument, violating the competi-
tion requirement that the memorial be
nonpolitical. One compared it to a
great privy, an outside urinal of Ger-
man beer garden design. They were
indignant that there were no Vietnam
veterans among the eight jurors. (The
only one with actual combat experience
was the architect Pietro Belluschi
who served in the Italian Army in own service during the war. Although
World War I.) When Ross Perot, an
early donor to the memorial, offered to
fund a new competition, to be judged by
Vietnam veterans, a hasty compromise
was struck. The abstract granite wall
would be offset by a work of traditional
sculpture, Fredericks Harts The
Three Soldiers. To Lin, Harts additions
were a mustache on the Mona Lisa,
but Reston argues convincingly that
without Harts realistic figures, her
memorial would never have been built.
There are a great many surprises
here. Reston shows how Lins su-
premely minimalist design did not
come to her in a flash, and that her
black granite wall was originally a
Above, a shelving unit by Marcel Breuer, left; table and chairs by Donald Deskey; and an armchair by Philip Johnson with Alfred
Clauss. Below left, a webbed side chair by Jens Risom, and right, Ball Wall Clock by George Nelson Associates.
was still years away and would
eventually tour across America, ac-
companied by a catalog in which
Hitchcock and Johnson came up with a
new brand: the International Style.
Why did they call it a style, and
what does it mean to treat function as
a fashion? Thats the central question
of Partners in Design, and it answers
best through a frisky intermingling of
backdrop to a sculpture of falling domi-
noes. Her instructors suggested she
remove it, freeing the work of the
hokey symbolism that afflicted most of
the other 1,420 projects, many of which
Reston illustrates, surely to the cha-
grin of their authors. The great revela-
tion here is the memorials early his-
tory. In 1979 Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam
veteran, watched The Deer Hunter
and relived his own horrific wounding.
He began a personal quest to build a
memorial, and the first artist he con-
sulted was none other than Frederick
Hart, then carving a sculpture for the
Washington National Cathedral. Far
from being the unwelcome gate-
crasher to Lins party, as he is invari-
ably depicted, Hart was actually there
from the start.
A personal epilogue recalls Restons
he was not sent to Vietnam, his best
friend from military intelligence
school, Ronald E. Ray, was. There he
died (and rather heroically) in the Tet
offensive. Reston hardly needs to spell
it out for us: When he looks at the
black granite wall, he knows that it is
only for the luck of the draw that Rays
name is there and not his. Here one
understands the emotional undertow
that runs through every page of this
superb and unexpectedly affecting
book.
Michael J. Lewis is the Faison-Pierson-
Stoddard professor of art at Williams
College.
HARRY NALTCHAYAN/THE WASHINGTON POST, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Barrs and Johnsons professional
activities and personal lives. The
shows central gallery conjures the two
mens apartments, one above the other
at the Southgate complex on East 52nd
Street; the two ate together several
nights a week, and were constantly in
and out of each others flats. Johnson,
who had family money, hired Mies and
his wife, Lilly Reich, a designer and
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | 19
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAKE NAUGHTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
architect, to strip down his apartment,
and to kit it out with a rosewood chest,
a spare tea table, and a camel-colored
Barcelona chair. (All of those pieces
are here, while the design of the bed-
room was recreated at MoMA last year
in its exhibition How Should We
Live?)
Barr, less wealthy, settled for knock-
offs. He ordered up a suite of tables
and chairs, made with steel tubular
armatures and a plastic laminate sur-
face, from a furniture catalog from
Ypsilanti, Mich. the Design Within
Reach of his day. Next to Johnsons
Mies originals, Barrs cheaper furni-
ture, made by the industrial designer
Donald Deskey, more than holds its
own. These men were modernist apos-
tles who lived their own teachings.
Barr embraced modernism as a
series of intellectual principles, pro-
pounded like a science in pedagogical
charts. Johnson treated it above all as
an aesthetic though Barr had no
problem with pretty things either. A
case in point was MoMAs fetishistic
Machine Art, a show of everyday
culture
design from 1934 that was utopian and
commercial at once. Against steel- and
linen-covered walls of Johnsons de-
sign, the show held up industrial ob-
jects as art in itself, and praised their
unadorned beauty over the Art Deco
housewares more popular at the time,
which Johnson derided as insuffi-
ciently modern and too French. (This
was just the start of MoMAs pesky
habit of treating Germany as the locus
of European modernity, and putting
France in the shade.) Cake pans, coffee
pots, cash registers, and a white Elec-
troChef stove appeared amid scientific
instruments such as steel calipers and
a brass plumb bob. Five glass boiling
flasks may put you in mind of high
school chemistry, but Johnson reported
from Dessau that Anni and Josef Al-
bers used them as wine decanters.
Soon enough, Barr was doing the
same.
The show steps gingerly around the
question of how much Johnsons design
tastes fed into his embrace of fascism
of the 1930s (he later apologized for his
youthful politics). He had already
gushed over all those blond boys in
black leather at a Hitler rally, and
after Machine Art Johnson resigned
from MoMA and designed gray shirts
for an imagined fascist party he
wanted Huey Long to lead. He soon
returned to Europe and filed anti-
Semitic dispatches for Father Cough-
lins newspaper, with such headlines as
Jews Dominate Polish Scene. Barr
deplored it all. Yet despite Johnsons
Nazi infatuation, he and Barr too
helped several Bauhauslers come to
America after the schools closure in
1933. Johnson would eventually be-
come their student: He enrolled at
Harvard in 1940, where the exiled
Gropius and Breuer were his teachers.
There is a biting irony to the history
lesson of Partners in Design: how
contemporary and covetable it all
looks. Barr and Johnson were obsessed
with the design of their time, but what
about us, who furnish our apartments
now with the exact same daybeds and
housewares? One wonders if theres
anything you could put in your house
today that would express the same
forward drive that Barr and Johnson
embraced.
 ..
20 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

travel

Unesco picks arent without controversy Making

a layover
TRENDING

Newest Heritage sites

include Palestinian city
and capital of Eritrea
BY ELAINE GLUSAC
Unesco annually expands its list of
World Heritage sites, and this years
class of inductees, announced in July, of-
fers both stimulation for travelers, with
a rich and varied group of intriguing
sites, and a reminder, especially with its
remote and more vulnerable picks, that
the list itself is not about tourism.
The World Heritage program aims to
identify and protect cultural and natural
sites around the world that demonstrate
outstanding value to humanity, ac-
cording to its website.
Those spots sometimes constitute the
most sought-after destinations for
global travel: the Great Wall of China,
the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the
Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru. Oth-
ers, though, are more obscure or hard to
reach or both, including three members
of the class of 2017: Okinoshima, a sa-
cred island in Japan; Dauria, a wild
landscape shared by Mongolia and Rus-
sia; and Asmara, the capital of Eritrea in
East Africa.
Okinoshima, for example, is off limits
to women, per ancient practice. But it is
the inclusion of Asmara, cited by Unesco
for its modernist architecture dating to
its era as an Italian colony, that is per-
haps the most controversial choice. Eri-
trea is the subject of a U.S. State Depart-
ment travel warning noting that the gov-
ernment restricts travel of foreigners to
Asmara. The United Nations has ac-
cused Eritreas government of crimes
against humanity, including enslave-
ment and murder.
Asmaras mix of local and Italian in-
fluences of the 1920s and 30s is incredi-
ble. But its very isolated, politically
and geographically, said Tom Hall, the
editorial director for Lonely Planet, the
travel media company.
The ancient city of Hebron, in the Is-
raeli-occupied West Bank, was another
controversial choice, thanks to its inclu-
sion as a Palestinian World Heritage
Site.
In a statement, Prime Minister Ben-
jamin Netanyahu of Israel described the
The Lake District of northwestern England is a Unesco World Heritage site.
decision as delusional.
Many more of the 21 new inductees,
spread among 18 cultural sites and three
natural ones, are more easily accessible
and without controversy.
At least one, the Lake District of
northwestern England, is well loved, re-
ceiving over 18 million visitors a year.
Unesco noted the combined work of na-
ture and human activity in the region,
including sheep farming on deforested
hillsides, stone villages and grand coun-
try estates.
What makes it so beautiful and dra-
matic is a lot of it is pretty barren, said
Janel Jensen, the Europe program man-
ager for REI, which runs a nine-day
walking trip, May to October, that in-
cludes hiking in the Lake District (from
$4,199 a person). You get an uninter-
rupted panorama of hills, valleys, lakes
and streams.
Tour operators working in Iran
lauded the inclusion of Yazd, a remote
city in the central Iranian plateau that
developed an underground water sys-
tem and maintains its traditional
Persian architecture and Zoroastrian
temples.
In terms of architecture, original
temples, gardens and mosques, a lot of
things are traditional and intact, said
Annie Lucas, the vice president of Mir
Corporation, which guides trips in Iran.
In French Polynesia, Taputapuatea,
an ancient ceremonial site on Raiatea Is-
land, also made the list.
Other new inductees include Aphro-
disias, a third-century Greco-Roman ar-
chaeological site in southwestern Tur-
key; the temples of Sambor Prei Kuk in
Cambodia, extolled for their forest set-
ting and lack of crowds; Los Alerces Na-
tional Park in Argentina, noted for pro-
tecting some of the last stands of native
Patagonian forest; and the 19th-century
Valongo Wharf in Rio de Janeiro, where
slaves were traded.
REI ADVENTURES
The Valongo Wharf in Rio tells a
story thats powerful, said Jonny
Bealby, the founder of Wild Frontiers, a
travel company devoted to off-the-beat-
en-path trips. It reminds us of the story
of humanity and, good or bad, gives us a
sense of our history.
The 15th-century walled city of Ah-
medabad, the former capital of the Indi-
an state of Gujarat, also made the list.
Few tourists go there, said Catherine
Heald, the co-founder and chief execu-
tive of Remote Lands, which has been
guiding trips to the city, known for its
textiles, forts and winding streets for
over 11 years.
memorable
IN TRANSIT: TRAVEL TIPS
BY SHIVANI VORA
Many fliers view layovers as an incon-
venience, but for Jaclyn Sienna India,
the owner of the New York City travel
company Sienna Charles, theyre an op-
portunity to explore. I try to make the
place where I have to change planes a
part of my vacation, she said. Often,
these side trips end up being as exciting
as my final destination.
Here, Ms. Indias advice on how to
have a memorable layover:
PLAN LAYOVERS STRATEGICALLY Have a
more diverse vacation by choosing a
stop that is in contrast to the locale
youre headed to. If youre en route to a
beach getaway in the Maldives, for ex-
ample, consider a stop in Dubai to fit in
an urban escape.
RETURN TO YOUR FAVORITE DESTINATIONS
Ms. India suggested that travelers ar-
range layovers in destinations they en-
joy visiting and give their trip that spe-
cial touch by participating in a specific
experience there. It could be a meal at a
favorite restaurant in Paris or an art
show in London. Personally, Ms. India
said, she loves stopping in Reykjavik on
her way to Europe for some relaxation
at the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa.
A SHORTER LAYOVER WORKS, TOO If you
have between eight hours and less than
a day to kill between flights, you can still
have a fantastic layover, Ms. India said.
Possibilities for activities on short lay-
overs include a tour of an art museum, a
shopping excursion in a specific neigh-
borhood and even a jog, walk or bike
ride in a scenic park.
MAKE YOUR STOP AN AFFORDABLE ONE Your
layover doesnt have to be costly. Some
airlines, Ms. India said, allow free lay-
overs sometimes with a time restric-
tion so a stop wont cost you more
money beyond your ticket price (British
Airways, for example, allows free lay-
overs with fully flexible tickets). A hand-
ful of airlines have occasional layover
promotions.

How the news should sound.

The tennis star Venus Williams said she enjoys visiting Hong Kong because I am a night person, and it is a night city.
Hong Kong tempts tennis star
IN TRANSIT: Q & A
BY SHIVANI VORA
The tennis player Venus Williams, 37,
who has won seven major singles titles
and reached the finals this year at both
the Australian Open and Wimbledon,
will tell you that one of the best parts of
her career is the chance it has given her
to see the world. I travel so much for
tennis that I dont count how often Im
on the road, but the sport has definitely
taken me to some interesting places,
she said.
Ms. Williams recently came to New
York, a destination she has visited multi-
ple times and where she won the United
States Open twice. She was in the city to
compete in the tournament and partici-
pate in Citi Taste of Tennis, a food tasting
event at the W New York hotel in late
August. She spoke to The New York
Times before the tournament and culi-
nary event from Palm Beach Gardens,
Fla., where she lives. Following are
edited excerpts.
What are some of your favorite desti-
nations that youve traveled to for ten-
nis?
I am a huge fan of Hong Kong because I
am a night person, and it is a night city. I
love to walk around at 11 or 12 in the
evening because there are restaurants
and other spots still open, and the
streets are full of people. Also, although
it is a big city with tall buildings, theres
a nature feel because youre surrounded
by mountains, water and greenery. An-
other top spot is Rome. I love the energy
of the city and have a lot of good friends
there, which makes going that much
more amazing. And earlier this year, I
went to St. Petersburg. It was my first
trip to Russia, and I was really taken by
Russian history, culture and art.
When you are traveling to compete in
tournaments, how much free time do
you typically have in a destination, and
what do you enjoy doing with that
time?
Seeing small museums always interests
me whenever I have downtime because
they feel manageable. In Paris, I en-
joyed the Muse de Cluny. It takes an
hour to get through the whole museum,
and it has cool Roman baths and medi-
eval art. In London, I like the Museum of
London, where you can learn about the
citys history, but as a tennis player, I
never want to be seeing too much of any
place where I am for a tournament, be-
cause that means Ive lost. If you leave
the city at the end of a tournament, you
may not have seen much, but at least
you won or came close to winning. Its
nice to like a city and be able to go back
and see it properly. I havent had the
chance to do that with any place yet be-
cause my work schedule is still intense,
but I will down the line.
Youve spoken previously about your
love of good food, and you are also in
New York to participate in a culinary
event. What kind of food do you seek
out when youre traveling?
I do enjoy good meals and like to call my-
self a cheating vegan, which means that
Ill normally try to seek out something
vegan, but may cheat depending on
what Im craving. In trips to Paris and
Las Vegas, I really wanted a chili dog
and found great vegan chili dogs in both
cities. One of my favorite restaurants,
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Christophers Kitchen, happens to be
near where I live. I love the raw vegeta- nytimes.com/thedaily
ble lasagna and the smoothies. On this
trip to New York, I hope to discover
some of the citys vegan restaurants.
How do you stay in top physical form to
compete when you have to combat jet
lag and the other challenges that come
with travel?
It takes some discipline, but wherever I
am in the world, whether its China or
Australia, I hit the gym the day I land
and then practice for the match. I also
dont sleep during the day and push my-
self to stay up until 10. Between the trav-
el and my training that day, Im usually
pretty tired by the evening and dont
have a hard time falling asleep.
What, for you, makes for a great hotel?
In the past, Ive liked staying at boutique
hotels with a design element, and Im
still into properties with a focus on de-
sign like the New York Edition, where I
stayed when I was in the city last time,
or the 21c Museum Hotel, where I stayed
when I was in Cincinnati. But lately, Ive
come to appreciate hotels with great
service and comfort, and I think that the
Four Seasons is a winner for both. I also
love the Lotte New York Palace, which
has such a classic New York atmos-
phere. And despite where I am staying, I
like visiting other hotels in the city and SPONSORED BY
asking to see a room so that I can get a
sense of what the property is like. My
company, V Starr Interiors, designs ho-
tel spaces, so I love to see what other ho-
tels do with their space and aesthetic.
Check-in or carry-on?
Check-in because I have my rackets,
and theyre too big to bring on board.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
New Kuwait Vision 2035, the ambitious strategy unveiled in January to diversify the economy away from oil,
aims to allow a bigger and more active role for the private sector in economic development
L ike most oil-rich nations, Kuwait has
suffered greatly from the impact of
the oil price crisis. As a result of the dra-
matic drop in oil revenues, the Gulf state
posted a budget deficit of $15.3 billion in
2015, the first budget deficit since 1999.
This deficit grew to $29 billion in 2016, but
is projected to fall to around $21 billion
in 2017, thanks to government policies
to rationalize budget spending, focusing
on development projects.
With oil making up 90 percent of state
revenues, the Kuwaiti government has
long spoken of the need to develop a sus-
tainable and diversified economy driven
by the private sector. And the fact that
the oil price is not expected to return to
pre-2014 levels any time soon has com-
pelled the government to get the wheels
in motion to build a non-oil-dependent
economy.
[Vision 2035] will
transform Kuwait into a
financial and trade center,
attractive to investors,
where the private sector
leads the economy,
creating competition and
promoting production
efficiency
Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-
Sabah, Emir of Kuwait
In January this year, the government
launched New Kuwait Vision 2035, a
comprehensive and ambitious develop-
ment plan which aims to develop a pros-
perous and diversified economy, upgrade
national infrastructure, improve the
health and education systems, reform
government administration and bureau-
cratic procedures, and enhance Kuwaits
presence on the international stage.
On the launch of the New Kuwait Vi-
sion 2035, the countrys Head of State,
Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sa-
bah, said the plan will transform Kuwait
into a financial and trade center, attrac-
tive to investors, where the private sector
leads the economy, creating competition
and promoting production efficiency, un-
der the umbrella of enabling government
institutions, which accentuates values,
This special supplement is written and produced by Haddock Media International and did not involve the reporting or editorial staff of The New York Times
New Kuwait
Vision 2035 - A Future Beyond Oil
safeguards social identity, and achieves
human resource development as well as
balanced development, providing adequate
infrastructure, advanced legislation, and
an inspiring business environment.
Other objectives include positioning
Kuwait as a global hub for the petro-
chemical industry, increasing foreign
direct investment by 300 percent, and
attracting more than $1.3 billion for in-
vestment in IT services and renewable
energy. Taking advantage of its strategic
location, Kuwait also wants to operate as
a transit hub providing significant logisti-
cal support to regional trade routes.
The New Kuwait vision translates the
Emirs outlook for activating develop-
ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT
ment, boosting the economy, diver-
sifying productivity, pressing ahead
with economic and financial reforms
through mega-projects and the lead-
ing role by the private sector, said
the countrys prime minister, Sheikh
Jaber Mubarak Al-Hamad Al-Sabah.
The government also wants Ku-
waitis to represent 40 percent of the
population by 2035, up from the cur-
rent 32 percent. To do so will require
investment in education and training
so that Kuwaitis have the skills to take
up the jobs currently filled by expa-
triates. Reform of the education sys-
tem, under Vision 2035, aims to bet-
ter prepare Kuwaiti youth to become
competitive and productive members
of the workforce.
The public sector in Kuwait current-
ly accounts for 70 percent of GDP and
employs nearly 80 percent of the to-
tal Kuwaiti workforce, highlighting the
need to build a thriving private sector-
led economy. Kuwait intends to invest
billions to increase the contribution of
the private sector to the economy, from
the current 26.4 percent to more than 40
percent by 2020. Government initiatives
such as the public-private partnership
(PPP) program, privatization law, the es-
tablishment of the Kuwait National Fund
for SMEs Development and the Kuwait
Direct Investment Promotion Authority
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | S1
#Kuwait
See this report at
www.haddockmedia.com
are aimed at increasing the share of the
private sectors contribution to GDP.
The PPP program will be crucial for in-
frastructure development, as the govern-
ment looks to tap private funding to com-
plete a string of mega-projects, some of
which have been on hold for years.
Kuwait intends to spend $15.6 billion on
infrastructure and other development-
related projects in fiscal year 2017-2018.
The government will contribute 49.3 per-
cent of the investments, 33.8 percent will
be spent by the state-owned oil sector
and 16.9 percent by the private sector
The New Kuwait vision
translates the Emirs
outlook for activating
development, boosting
the economy, diversifying
productivity, pressing ahead
with economic and financial
reforms through mega-
projects and the leading role
by the private sector
Sheikh Jaber Mubarak Al-Hamad
Al-Sabah, Prime Minister of Kuwait
in a public-private sector partnership
program, according to Dr. Khaled Mahdi,
Secretary General of the Supreme Coun-
cil for Planning and Development.
One of the highlight mega projects,
and an integral part of New Kuwait Vi-
sion 2035, is the new terminal at Kuwait
International Airport, which will be built
by Turkish company Limak Construction
at a cost of $4.2 billion. When completed
in 2022, the new terminal will allow the
airport to handle 25 million passengers
annually, triple its current capacity.
Other mega projects to be undertaken
to achieve the goals set out in the New
Kuwait Vision 2035 include: Sabah Al-
Salem University City, one of the leading
educational projects in the region; the Al
Zour refinery, which will produce 615,000
barrels of oil per day when completed in
2019; Jaber Hospital, which will be the
largest hospital in the Middle East, with
1,166 beds; and the Jaber Causeway, a
$3 billion bridge that will connect Kuwait
City to the new $100 billion Silk City pro-
jected urban area.

S2 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017
New Kuwait / P2
Reforms to reinforce transparency,
accountability and efficiency in government
The first pillar of the New Kuwait Vision 2035 aims to reduce bureaucracy, improve efficiency and extend e-government services
B ureaucratic red tape and govern-
ment inefficiency have long stifled
foreign investment and the prolifera-
tion of local companies in Kuwait. If
the country is to build a thriving private
sector driven by foreign and domestic
business as envisioned in the New
Kuwait Vision 2035 these issues
must be addressed urgently to improve
the business and investment climate.
That is why the government has set
the first pillar of Vision 2035 to target
reform of administrative and bureau-
cratic practices to reinforce transpar-
ency, accountability, and efficiency.
Comparing Kuwaits ranking with the
other member states in the Gulf Co-
operation Council (GCC) in the World
Banks Doing Business Index high-
lights the urgent need for bureaucratic
reform. In the 2017 ranking, Kuwait
dropped four places to 102nd (out of 190
countries surveyed), putting it in last
place in the Gulf region. The United
Arab Emirates (UAE) placed at 26 th,
Bahrain 63 rd, Oman 66 th, Qatar
83 rd, and Saudi Arabi 94 th.
Twenty key global indicators, and addi-
tional sub-indicators, will track and mea-
sure Kuwaits progress with the Vision
2035 plan and its performance compared
to other countries. Kuwait is aiming for a
position within the top 35 percent of all
countries by 2035. Some of these indica-
tors will be related to the government
efforts to improve the business climate.
New Kuwait Vision 2035 is not Ku-
waits first attempt at an ambitious
roadmap for development, but where
it differs is through its focus on legisla-
tion and improving the business envi-
ronment, something that was lacking
in previous plans, according to Nemr
Kanafani, a senior economist at the
National Bank of Kuwait.
In recent years, authorities un-
derstood that for Kuwaits economy
Nurturing a culture of innovation and building a
digital economy key to Vision 2035 goals
Leading Kuwaiti telecoms firm Zain Group is supporting the development of a knowledge-based, digital economy and investing in
Kuwaiti youth, in a bid to find the entrepreneurially minded leaders that will take the company forward in the future
O ne of the main goals of the New
Kuwait Vision 2035 is to create
a sustainable, diversified and non-
oil-dependent economy driven by the
private sector.
Currently,theprivatesectorcontributes
around 26 percent of GDP, and the
government aims to increase that figure
to 40 percent by 2020. This will entail
creating a more favorable environment
for private businesses to thrive, boosting
foreign direct investment, encouraging
risk-averse Kuwaitis to take up positions
in the private sector or set up their own
companies, and fostering a culture of
entrepreneurship and innovation among
its young people.
The government has established
a number of institutions to support
development of the private sector,
including the Public Private Partnership
Authority, the Direct Investment
Promotion Authority, the Capital
Markets Authority, and the National
Fund for Small and Medium-Sized
Enterprise Development. Privatization
of state-owned enterprises also forms a
major part of the governments agenda,
with Kuwaiti media reporting that
around 60 percent of public companies
will be sold off to private investors over
the coming years.
Many of Kuwaits leading private
multinational companies are supporting
the government in its Vision 2035 goals
for the private sector one of which is
Zain Group, a leading telecoms operator
with a commercial footprint in eight
countries in the Middle East and Africa
and a workforce of over 7,000. As an
ICT firm, Zain is a strong advocate for
the establishment of a knowledge-
based, digital economy and a prime
example of a Kuwaiti company investing
in youth development, innovation and
entrepreneurialism.
to be transformed, we need to focus
on rethinking the economic laws and
streamlining regulations in the pri-
vate sector. Indeed, a new company
law and efforts to simplify the rules for
businesses are key to this new initia-
tive, and those changes have already
begun, said Mr. Kanafani in a recent
interview with Forbes Asia .
Approved by parliament in April,
the amendment to the New Compa-
nies Law will ease procedures for es-
tablishing companies. Under the new
law, investors are no longer required
I believe that to diversify the economy
and strengthen the role of the private
sector, three urgent reforms are re-
quired: policy formulation; moderniza-
tion of the ICT Regulatory Framework to
encourage broadband investments and
to stimulate the digital economy; and
talent development, says Zain Groups
Vice-Chairman and CEO, Bader Nasser
Al-Kharafi.
Typically, most of the countries in
the Gulf Cooperation Council have put
in place a National Broadband Plan,
a National Digital Economy Policy, a
national cyber-security strategy, an
e-Government policy and a national
smart cities policy all designed to
set out very clear strategic directions to
foster the development of a knowledge-
based, digital economy.
In terms of talent development, Mr. Al-
Kharafi says there are two areas which
would need to be developed further
to realize the full potential of a digital
economy.
Firstly, entrepreneurship develop-
ment through the encouragement of ven-
ture capital investment, establishment of
accelerators and incubators, deployment
of smart capital and an acceleration of
the process of company formation. And
secondly, educational reforms to address
deficits in digital skills and knowledge
to ensure that graduates and others
entering into the workforce are very well
equipped to meet the challenges brought
about by the significant transformational
changes prevalent today.
Zain has introduced a number of
initiatives aimed at developing young
talent within the organization. By
investing in the potential of Kuwaiti youth,
Zain hopes to find the entrepreneurially
minded leaders that will drive the
company forward in the future, both at
home and abroad.
ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT
to deposit capital before establishing
a company. This will help to attract in-
vestments from young entrepreneurs
and support the growth of the small
and medium-sized enterprises sec-
tor. This latest amendment will also
shorten the time required to establish
a company from four days to one day
a remarkable achievement consider-
ing that it used to take 63 days before
the law was enacted.
In May, the Ministry of Commerce
and Industry launched the new One-
Window Transaction at the Kuwait
The main ambitions I wish
to accomplish regarding the
New Kuwait Vision 2035 is
to change the suppressing
culture itself. We have a
rigid culture that we need to
come out of in order to breed
innovation, creativity and
autonomy. By focusing on
developing and empowering
our youth, which we have
accomplished through
several initiatives, we
are paving the way for a
brighter, more secure and
heavily diversified Kuwait of
the future
Bader Nasser Al-Kharafi,
Vice-Chairman & Group CEO, Zain Group
Utilizing the youth of our country
will inject a fresh approach into how we
conduct business, says Mr. Al-Kharafi.
We have introduced a graduate scheme
with a focus on high GPAs to support
delivery of our strategic direction.
We have also enhanced our graduate
program to identify students with an
entrepreneurial mindset creativity and
risk takers who will work on producing
commercially viable value propositions
for Zain.
Understanding that fear and risk
aversion is rife within the organization,
we accept the root cause stems from
a younger age before university and so
we are working towards establishing a
program which focuses on creativity,
collaboration, critical thinking and
communication for children aged
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
The New Kuwait Vision
2035 will transform our
economy, create jobs,
attract foreign direct
investments and facilitate
knowledge transfer in the
fields of renewable energy,
information technology and
the services sector
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah Al-
Mubarak Al-Sabah,
Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs
Business Center, in line with the im-
plementation of the paperless gov-
ernment initiative another measure
which will significantly reduce bureau-
cracy and streamline the administra-
tive process for new investors.
Other recent initiatives are aimed
at tackling corruption, again an area
in which Kuwait ranks behind its GCC
neighbors in global indexes. In Trans-
parency Internationals latest Corrup-
tions Perceptions Index, Kuwait placed
at 75 th. By comparison, the UAE and
Qatar ranked 24th and 31st respectively,
while Saudi Arabia sits at 62 nd, Oman
at 64 th and Bahrain in 70 th position.
The Anti-Corruption Law passed in
2016 paved the way for the recent es-
tablishment of the Kuwait Anti-Cor-
ruption Authority, which is a seen as
a very positive step in the fight against
corruption. The Authority is empow-
ered to enforce financial and asset
disclosures, and has already referred
six senior civil servants and ministers
once seen as untouchable to pros-
ecution for failure to disclose financial
assets. The Anti-Corruption Law also
aims to create a protection program
between 611. This is a long-term vision
which, once realized, will be visible
through the workforce. The aim is to
create future leaders who possess these
traits to lead our organizations with
mindsets akin to those entrepreneurs
whom we hear and read about.
The main ambitions I wish to
accomplish regarding the New Kuwait
Vision 2035 is to change the suppressing
culture itself. We have a rigid culture that
we need to come out of in order to breed
innovation, creativity and autonomy. By
focusing on developing and empowering
our youth, which we have accomplished
through several initiatives, we are paving
..
for whistleblowers, and to raise aware-
ness and knowledge of corruption and
its effects.
Further mitigation of corruption,
as well as increased government ef-
ficiency, will be supported by the im-
provement of e-government services.
It is an area in which Kuwait has made
great strides under the e-Kuwait ini-
tiative. In the UNs E-Government Sur-
vey 2016, Kuwait ranked at 40 th out of
all countries surveyed, and is among
the top 10 countries in Asia, ahead of
all its GCC neighbors except Bahrain,
which placed at 24 th.
Our goal is to build a more trans-
parent government that in turn helps
achieve the ultimate strategic goal rep-
resented by e-Kuwait, where all can en-
joy quality e-services at all times wher-
ever they are, says Sheikh Mohammad
Abdullah Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah, the
Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs.
The government plan is to acquire
and develop their human resource pro-
fessionals and at the same time up-
grade the technologies in accordance
with the e-government plans.
Along with streamlined procedures,
investors will also be able to take ad-
vantage of the new proposed free trade
zones that will be built on the Kuwaiti
islands of Boubyan, Failaka, Warba,
Miskan and Auha.
Located in close proximity to the pro-
posed $100 billion Silk City project,
these five free trade zones will turn
these barren islands into a commercial
and investment hub, offering investors
a range of legal and investment in-
centives. According to Sheikh Nasser
Sabah, Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah,
Minister of Amiri Diwan Affairs: The
Vision 2035 aims to transform the north
of the Gulf area into an exceptional free
trade zone; a fertile environment to
attract investments.
the way for a brighter, more secure and
heavily diversified Kuwait of the future.
It is not just domestic firms like
Zain that are investing in innovation
and youth development and supporting
the development of a digital economy.
IBM and Huawei are world-class
organizations who have been able
to bring expertise in the areas of
enterprise cloud solutions, big data
analytics and cyber-security to the
state of Kuwait. Several strategic
collaborations are already in place
with the mobile network operators,
internet service providers and systems
integrators in the market.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
As Kuwait has grown, Ahmadiah has grown with it
Behind many of Kuwaits landmark construction projects is Ahmadiah, which since its
establishment in 1954 has helped to build the country
I t all began with a handshake. In 1954, Ab-
dulatif F. Al Thuwainy and Nagib Ibrahim
Najjar, two ambitious entrepreneurs with
a strong conviction for building projects,
shook hands in front of HH the Emir of Ku-
wait, Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah,
then-foreign minister a gesture which led
to the establishment of Ahmadiah.
It was at this time that Kuwait was expe-
riencing its first oil boom. The newfound oil
wealth that followed brought about a wave
of large-scale construction projects, many
ofwhichwere undertaken byAhmadiah.As
Kuwait grew, Ahmadiah grew, by working
with both the government and the private
sector, taking part in building the nation,
says Ayad Abdul Mohsin Al Thuwainy, Vice
ChairmanofAhmadiahContracting& Trad-
ing Company.
Over its history of more than six decades,
Ahmadiah has built everything from sky-
Kuwait investing heavily in backlog of much-needed infrastructure projects
As the nations largest and first established bank, NBK is one of the leading financiers of Kuwaits
mega projects, and will play a pivotal role in supporting the New Kuwait Vision 2035 plan
W hile other oil-rich Gulf states have
curbed spending due to the impact of
loweroilprices,Kuwaitisstillinvestingheav-
ily in a backlog of much-needed infrastruc-
tureprojects.Andhighgovernmentspending
is expected to continue, under the five-year
Kuwait Development Plan (KDP) unveiled in
2015. The KDP will see around $115 billion
invested in 500 projects, including a string of
infrastructuremega-projects,manyofwhich
will be funded by the local banks.
The high level of government expenditure
on infrastructure projects is one of the main
reasonsthatKuwaitibanksenjoythehighest
banking profitability on average in the Gulf
region. The banking systems net profits
increased 6.1 percent in 2016, compared to
the 5.1 percent net profit increase in 2015.
Profitabilityisexpectedtoremainstrongdue
to sustained levels of government spending.
The main drivers behind the high profit-
abilityoftheKuwaitibanksare thefinancing
of the construction of the current mega-
projects, the stable financial environment
An interview with the CEO of Kuwait Oil Company, Jamal Abdulaziz Jaafar
What can Kuwait offer to foreign partners in
the oil and gas upstream segment?
KOC has a cumulative experience of almost
80 years in Exploration & Production in the oil
sector in Kuwait. We have been able to main-
tain for many years a growth strategy for our
productioncapacityfromfieldsacrossKuwait,
including Burgan field, the second largest in
the world, and we are continuously overcom-
ing the increasing challenges, such as the
application of secondary recovery methods
to optimize oil and gas production.
We are able to maintain our operations at a
very low cost, among the lowest in the world.
Regarding technology applications, KOC is
implementing state-of-the-art technologies
that have been adopted to support achieving
our strategic objectives, such as the Kuwait
Integrated Digital Fields, Real-Time Drillings
scrapers,palacesandhotelstogovernment
buildings, shopping malls, and industrial
complexes. Some of the more prestigious
projects in its portfolio include the Bayan
Palace, the headquarters of Kuwait Airways
and the Arab Organization and the 75-story
Al Hamra Tower, which is Kuwaits tallest
buildingandalsotheworldstallestbuilding
with a cladded stone facade.
The company has also been behind sev-
eralcriticalnationalinfrastructureprojects,
including airport terminals, hospitals, pow-
er stations, housing projects, bridges and
highways, as well as contributing to mega-
projects such as Sabah Al Ahmad Sea City.
Generations later, the two families that
started the business, the Al Thuwainy fam-
ily and the Lebanese Najjar family, remain
strong partners to this day, affirms Mr. Al
Thuwainy. During the seven-month-long
IraqioccupationofKuwaitin1990,construc-
created by the Central Bank of Kuwait and
the increase in efficiency of Kuwaiti banks,
which have put a focus on rationalizing
costs, says Shaikha Al-Bahar, Deputy
Group CEO of NBK, the largest and first
established bank in Kuwait, and one of
the leading financiers of the nations mega
projects.
NBK is a dominant player in the project
finance market and controls more than a
75-percent market share of foreign com-
panies doing business in Kuwait, says Ms.
Al-Bahar. We have led most of the busi-
ness activity related to the governments
infrastructure development plan, and have
outperformeddomesticallywhenrealbank-
ing business is the driver of profitability.
Strongbusinessactivityhasrecentlyfueled
balance sheet growth mainly on the back of
the project finance business, leading NBK
to record a healthy net profit increase of 8.1
percentinthefirstquarterof2017,wellabove
the 6.1 percent average of the Kuwaiti bank-
ing sector.
Decision Centers and Inflow Control Devices.
Yet, KOC confronts great challenges to
continue implementing its production growth
strategyfortheyearstocomethroughthefol-
lowing initiatives: the need to develop large
heavy-oil resources; the implementation of
secondaryandtertiaryrecoveryprojectsinour
existingreservoirs;thepotentialdevelopment
ofoffshoreresources;andtheimplementation
of advanced drilling technologies. All these
initiatives are becoming opportunities for the
participation of top-quality oilfield service
companies as well as international oil com-
panies(IOCs),andwearecontinuouslylooking
forwardtoestablishingstrategicpartnerships
with those industry players.
Whatshouldbetheroleofinternationalpart-
nerships in the efforts to boost value-added
ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT
tion,likemuchelseinthecountry,groundto
a halt. During this time, Ahmadiahs activi-
ties ceased indefinitely, but it continued to
look after its employees. Following libera-
tion, despite having suffered huge losses,
the company began operating again and
helped to rebuild the country.
With the events of the Iraqi occupation
long behind it, a new vision for Kuwait
was unveiled in January. The New Ku-
wait development plan aims to transform
the country into a regional financial and
cultural hub by 2035 through numerous
strategic development programs. Among
the seven pillars of the plan is one devoted
to infrastructure, which aims to develop
and modernize the national infrastructure
to improve the quality of life for all citi-
zens. As the countrys leading construction
company, Ahmadiah will be integral to the
success of this plan.
Ms. Al-Bahar says international opera-
tions and regional growth markets (Egypt
andtheGCC)havebeenakeydriverofNBKs
performance. The bank is currently present
in15countries,withbranchesintheinterna-
tionalfinancialcentersofNewYork,Geneva,
Paris,SingaporeandLondon.Italsobecame
the first bank from the Gulf to enter China.
Diversification has always been a key ele-
ment in NBKs strategy over the years, both
geographically and by business sector.
Geographically, our presence in some
markets outside the GCC, in non-oil-depen-
denteconomies,isastrongdemonstrationof
our diversified business model. By business
segments, we focus on offering a diversified
rangeofproductstargetingdifferentmarkets
and segments, says Ms. Al-Bahar.
In2005NBKenteredtheinvestmentbank-
ingsectorbyestablishingitssubsidiaryNBK
Capital, which offers asset management,
advisory, brokerage and investment bank-
ing services. It is also active in the Islamic
banking market as the major shareholder
oil production but also in starting new off-
shore operations?
WearealreadyengagedwithIOCsinthedevel-
opment of several projects, aimed at increas-
ingtheoilandgasrecoveryfromourreservoirs
through the application of the most suitable
technologies.TheparticipationofthoseIOCsis
throughEnhancedTechnologyServiceAgree-
ments(ETSAs),whereremunerationisbased
on performance and includes the training of
Kuwaiti staff. Currently, we have ETSAs in
place with Shell for the development of con-
ventional oil, heavy oil, and non-associated
gas, and with BP to increase oil recovery in
the Burgan field. Certainly, as we progress
our future plans towards the development
of offshore resources, the implementation of
additional ETSAswithreputable IOCsis being
considered to achieve our production targets.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 | S3
New Kuwait / P3
We are looking very positively on our
future within the New Kuwait Vision 2035,
says Mr. Al Thuwainy, who is a strong ad-
vocate of deeper partnership between the
public and private sector to bring new proj-
ects to completion in the lead up to 2035.
There are many opportunities to see
greaterinternationalpartnershipinthecur-
rent investment climate in Kuwait. This is
reallyanopportunityformorepublic-private
partnerships (PPPs), which already started
successfully in Kuwait a few years ago.
Delivering high-quality projects on
time and on budget is something that We see opportunities
the 63-year-old construction firm knows in both government and
all about. Some of Ahmadiahs current private investment in
and future projects include: a 300-meter construction. We are
tower that will be the headquarters of the
National Bank of Kuwait; Kuwait Interna- looking very positively
tional Tennis Complex, which will become on our future within the
a venue for regional and international ten- New Kuwait Vision 2035
nis tournaments; the 58-story Al Assima
Tower; and the expansion of the Avenues Ayad Abdul Mohsin Al Thuwainy,
Mall, which will add around 500,000 square Vice Chairman of Ahmadiah
meters to the existing facilities. Contracting & Trading Company
of Boubyan Bank, which is the only bank in
Kuwait offering both conventional and Is-
lamic banking.
InMay,NBKsuccessfullyissued$750mil-
lionoffive-yearSeniorUnsecuredsecurities,
in a bid to further boost liquidity, diversify
funding sources and increase liability dura-
tions. This debut issuance falls under NBKs
new $3.0 billion Global Medium-Term Note
(GMTN) Program. The issued notes came
at a re-offer yield of 2.860% (mid-swap plus
100 bps).
This is the first issue since 2009 from a
Middle East bank to target the U.S. market
undertheU.S.SecuritiesAct.Thetransaction
was very well received by both regional and
international investors, with the order book Shaikha Al-Bahar, Deputy Group CEO of the
closing at $2.2 billion, translating to around National Bank of Kuwait (NBK)
2.9 times oversubscription for the deal.
U.S.-based investors dominated the deal the diversified, high-quality investor base
with a 57 percent share of the issuance, fol- are testimony to NBKs superior name in
lowed by MENA investors at 26 percent, Eu- internationalmarketsandhowitisperceived
ropeaninvestorsat13percentand4percent as being a top-quality bank by international
from Asia. The strong demand along with investors.
Overall, what are the key drivers behind the
regions highest capital expenditure on hy-
drocarbons projects?
The combination of an important market op-
portunity, together with the existence of large
oil reserves that can be produced at one of
the lowest development costs, are certainly
thedriversbehindtheregionshighestcapital
expenditureinrecentandupcomingyears.Ku-
waitiscommittedtocontinuingtobeareliable
supplier of oil to its customers, and we are
foreseeingadditionalopportunitiesingrowing
marketssuchastheFarEast,Asia,Chinaand
India.Wecontinuetodevelopalargeresource
base, which is blessed with having one of the
lowest development costs in the world. Our Jamal Abdulaziz Jaafar, CEO, Kuwait Oil Company
capitalexpendituresarefocusedonanintense
drillingcampaignandthedevelopmentofad- capacity to manage the increased oil and gas
ditional surface facilities that will provide the production from the reservoirs in Kuwait.
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S4 | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION