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MISSILE SABOTAGE LARS VON TRIER THE GALÁPAGOS

SECRET U.S. PLAN PRECIOUS GEMS, TOURISM THREATENS
TO HOBBLE IRAN BASED ON FILMS TO DISRUPT ECOSYSTEM
PAGE 5 | WORLD PAGE 15 | CULTURE BACK PAGE | TRAVEL

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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019

Just pretend Conviction

climate is all doesn’t stem
about aliens flow of drugs
at the border
Even without El Chapo,
Sinaloa cartel still has a
Farhad Manjoo broad footprint in the U.S.
BY ALAN FEUER

OPINION The conviction this week of the Mexican

crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera was
“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David one of the most visible victories for
Wallace-Wells is the most terrifying American law enforcement since the
book I have ever read. Its subject is war on drugs began in the 1970s, a tri-
climate change, and its method is scien- umph over a cartel leader who had sur-
tific, but its mode is Old Testament. The vived — and thrived — for decades on
book is a meticulously documented, his business skills, brutal violence and
white-knuckled tour through the cas- bottomless bribes to Mexican officials.
cading catastrophes that will soon And yet on Jan. 31, the same day that
engulf our warming planet: death by the trial of Mr. Guzmán — known to the
water, death by heat, death by hunger, world as El Chapo — ended in a federal
death by thirst, death by disease, death courtroom in New York City, border offi-
by asphyxiation, death by political and cials in Arizona made an announce-
civilizational collapse. ment: They had just seized the largest
And should they escape death, your load of fentanyl ever found in the United
children and grandchildren might States, a haul that had been hidden in a
subsist instead truck carrying cucumbers on its way
Even for through proto- through the Nogales port of entry, a
apocalyptic ruin. crossing that Mr. Guzmán’s organiza-
people who There is a strong tion, the Sinaloa drug cartel, has tradi-
believe in chance that warm- tionally run for years.
global ing will reduce The fentanyl seizure — enough for 100
warming, global economic million lethal doses — was a clear signal
acting as if the output by more than PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIANFRANCO TRIPODO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES that even after the hard-fought task of
Earth is under 20 percent and a José Enrique Alvarez has been working as a butcher in Madrid since losing his job as a human resources director. Sales are down because other Spaniards, too, are economizing. convicting Mr. Guzmán on drug conspir-
attack is a neat chance that output acy charges, the authorities have far to
mental trick. could fall by half — a go in their attempts to dismantle Mexi-

Barely holding on in Spain

toll you might better
describe as at least
one, and possibly
two or three, Great Depressions. War
will not merely break out; a continuing,
all-out resource war might be the
steady-state of the next chapter of
human civilization.
In 2017, when Mr. Wallace-Wells, a
writer at New York Magazine, pub-
lished similarly dire projections in a
blockbuster article, he was criticized
even by some climate scientists for
reveling in the bleakest case. But his
piece was one of the first articles I’d
read that honestly drew out the most
horrific possibilities of climate change,
and in the two years since — years of
hurricane and monsoon, fire and flood,
mud slides, heat waves, the polar vortex
— Mr. Wallace-Wells’s imagine-the-
worst approach has become prescient.
The Earth keeps surpassing all su-
perlatives, right before our eyes. “The
weather is cooperating,” Mr. Wallace-
Wells told me recently.
We should expect it to continue co-
operating. I read this book with an
unfolding mix of horror and hopeless-
ness, the way you might learn of a termi-
nal diagnosis that affects yourself and
your family and everyone else you
might ever hope to know. My Google
searches over the past few weeks in-
clude queries like “global warming best
MANJOO, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
MADRID
The country’s middle class
is shrinking, and workers
say they’ve been forgotten
BY LIZ ALDERMAN
Raquel Navarro downed an early-morn-
ing coffee, kissed her husband goodbye
and hurried from her family’s spacious
brick home in a suburb north of Madrid,
the Spanish capital.
The successful events business she
had owned for a decade slowly crum-
bled when Europe’s financial crisis hit.
Now, after dropping her two young chil-
dren at school, she would board the sub-
way to her desperately needed job as a
secretary, working for just above min-
imum wage.
Moments later, her husband, José En-
rique Alvarez, walked out the door to a
charcuterie, where he is a self-employed
butcher. The 56-year-old was once the
human resources director of a Spanish
plant nursery that downsized, laying off
him and half the company’s other 300
workers in 12 months.
After decades of living comfortably in
Spain’s upper middle class, the middle-
aged couple are struggling with their de-
thirds of the European Union, parallel-
ing a similar decline in the United States
and reversing two decades of expan-
sion. While middle-class households are
more prevalent in Europe than in the
United States — around 60 percent,
compared with just over 50 percent in
America — their vulnerability is daunt-
ing.
For people in this group, which econo-
mists define as those earning between
two-thirds and double their country’s
median income, the risk of falling down
the economic ladder is greater than the
chances of moving up.
“The progress of the middle class has
halted in most European countries,”
said Daniel Vaughan-Whitehead, a sen-
ior economist at the International Labor
Organization in Geneva. “Their situa-
tion has become more unstable, and if
something happens in the household,
Raquel Navarro has degrees in law, management and business but works as a secretary. they are more likely to go down and stay
“We’re people who had worked our way up, and now we’re tumbling down,” she said. down.”
The barriers to keeping their status,
or recovering lost ground, are made
cline. Spain’s economy, like the rest of “We’re people who had worked our higher by post-recession labor dynam-
Europe’s, is growing faster than before way up, and now we’re tumbling down,” ics. The loss of middle-income jobs and
the 2008 financial crisis and creating Mrs. Navarro said tearfully. “The econ- weakened social protections, along with
jobs. But the work they could find pays a omy seems to be improving, but we’re skill mismatches, have reduced eco-
fraction of the combined annual income not benefiting.” nomic mobility and widened income in-
of 80,000 euros, or more than $90,000, Millions of Europeans are in that pre- equality. Automation and globalization
that they once earned. carious position. are deepening the divides.
By summer, they figure, they will no Since the recession of the late 2000s, Europe’s social safety nets have tradi-
longer be able to pay their mortgage. the middle class has shrunk in over two- SPAIN, PAGE 8
co’s infamous cartels. The verdict
against the kingpin on Tuesday may, in
the end, have little lasting impact on ei-
ther Mr. Guzmán’s group or the wider ef-
fort to stem the flow of drugs into the
United States.
Even without its former leader, the Si-
naloa cartel is a major threat and main-
tains among its competitors “the most
expansive footprint in the United
States,” according to the Drug Enforce-
ment Administration’s most recent as-
sessment of the drug trade. While Mr.
Guzmán’s guilty verdict disrupted the
relationships and smuggling agree-
ments he forged in his career, the au-
thorities say his empire remains intact
and is now being run by his sons and his
wily longtime partner, Ismael Zambada
García.
Drugs, of course, have never stopped
crossing the border.
In 2016 and 2017, the years when Mr.
Guzmán was most recently arrested
and sent for prosecution in New York,
Mexican heroin production increased 37
percent and seizures of fentanyl in
places like Nogales more than doubled,
the D.E.A. has said.
According to the State Department,
90 percent of all cocaine smuggled into
the United States still enters the country
from Mexico. And global production of
cocaine reached a record 1,410 tons in
2016, up 25 percent from the previous
year, according to a 2018 report by the
United Nation’s Office on Drugs and
Crime.
President Trump has suggested that
this vast tide of narcotics could be
DRUGS, PAGE 4

Mind your grammar, or he will

PROFILE
A longtime editor offers
a playful but no-nonsense
guide to better writing
BY SARAH LYALL
With his finely tuned editing ear, Ben-
jamin Dreyer often encounters things so
personally horrifying that they register
as a kind of torture, the way you might
feel if you were an epicure and saw
someone standing over the sink, slurp-
ing mayonnaise directly from the jar.
There is “manoeuvre,” the British
spelling of “maneuver,” for example,
whose unpleasant extraneous vowels
evoke the sound of “a cat coughing up a
hairball,” Dreyer says. There is “reside,”
with its unnecessary stuffiness. (“You
mean ‘live’?”) There is the use of quota-
VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES tion marks after the term “so-called,” as
The new book by Benjamin Dreyer, an executive at Random House, comes as social in “the so-called ‘expert,’” which just
media is spawning a generation of people who seem to think punctuation is optional. looks stupid.
And there are the words Dreyer cur-
rently dislikes most, even more than he
dislikes “munch” and “nosh” and other
distasteful eating-adjacent terms. Sit-
ting recently in his book-crammed office
at Penguin Random House, where he is
vice president, executive managing edi-
tor and copy chief for Random House —
a division within the larger company —
Dreyer scribbled “smelly” and “stinky”
on a card and slid it speedily across the
desk, as if the card itself were emitting a
foul stench. “I can’t say them out loud,”
he said.
His new book, “Dreyer’s English: An
Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and
Style,” is the climax (so far) of his nearly
three decades in the copy-editing busi-
ness, and it shows his playful sense of
humor as well as his deep appreciation
for clear writing and good language.
The book is full of no-nonsense pro-
nouncements on matters like the Oxford
comma (use it) and the word “literally”
(use it at your peril). It is also idiosyn-
cratic, because writing style is highly
personal, subject to an individual’s taste
DREYER, PAGE 2

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2 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
page two
A female black leopard, as the panthers are also known, was photographed in Laikipia County, Kenya. The dark coloration of its coat is attributed to a recessive gene.
Rare glimpse of black panther
First documented sighting
in Africa since 1909 made
by researchers in Kenya
BY ILIANA MAGRA
It’s a scientific coup to warm the heart of
any superhero fan: the first docu-
mented sightings of a black panther in
Africa in about 100 years, not far from
Marvel’s fictional setting for its Oscar-
nominated “Black Panther.”
A team from the Institute for Conser-
vation Research of the San Diego Zoo
Global and the Loisaba Conservancy in
Kenya confirmed the existence of black
leopards — as the animals are also
known — in Laikipia County, an area
north of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
“It is certain black panthers have
been there all along, but good footage
that could confirm it has always been
absent until now,” Nicholas Pilfold, a bi-
ologist at the San Diego Zoo institute,
said in an Instagram post this week.
“Black panthers are uncommon, only
about 11 percent of leopards globally are
black,” he added. “But black panthers in
Africa are extremely rare.”
The researchers’ findings were pub-
A guide to better writing from a guardian of grammar
DREYER, FROM PAGE 1
and whim. That’s why “could care less”
might bug you, but does not bug him. (“I
appreciate its indirect sarcasm.”) It is
why, by his own admission, he is per-
haps overly fond of parentheses and of
the word “quite,” and also why he ap-
plauds a nice semicolon. (“The best
thing to know about semicolons is that
Shirley Jackson liked them,” he said, of
the author of “The Haunting of Hill
House.” “End of discussion.”) As he
writes, “If the English language itself is
notoriously irregular and irrational,
why shouldn’t its practitioners be, too?”
Dreyer, 60, was born in New York and
raised nearby in Albertson on Long Is-
land. He did not set out to be a writing
guru; he set out to be an actor, but actu-
ally became a waiter. In Manhattan in
the early 1990s, facing the prospect of
the middle-of-the-night shift at Forty
Four, the Royalton Hotel’s restaurant, he
instead took a job as a freelance proof-
reader for St. Martin’s Press after claim-
ing to his future boss that he owned a
copy of the ninth edition of the Merriam-
Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which
was true, and that he was familiar with
standard proofreading symbols, which
was not. (Luckily, they were set out right
there in the dictionary, under “P,” and he
is a quick study.)
He loved the job, and the job loved
him. “It’s like a treasure hunt and the
treasure is bad,” he explained. “It turns
out that I have a very good ear, and a
nose for finding mistakes.”
He then expanded his repertoire into
copy-editing, which involves an inti-
mate dance between editor and author,
with the editor’s job being to enhance,
not override, the authorial voice. The
copy editor might suggest that a writer
tighten up a particular passage, ditch
unpleasant punctuation, switch a sen-
tence around or — taking into account
lished in the African Journal of Ecology
in January.
The leopard, scientific name Panthera
pardus, is more commonly found with a
black coat in tropical and humid South-
east Asia. But, apparently, melanism —
the cause of the dark coloring — can also
be displayed in semiarid climates, like
that of Laikipia, according to the paper.
There have been a few reported ob-
servations of this phenomenon in Africa,
but, until now, only one had been con-
firmed, in Addis Ababa, the capital of
Ethiopia, in 1909.
“It is certain black panthers have
been there all along, but good
footage that could confirm it has
always been absent until now.”
Following unconfirmed reports of a
black leopard in Laikipia County, the re-
search team installed eight cameras
around the Laikipia Wilderness Camp,
focusing on water sources, such as
swimming pools and natural springs,
and on animal trails.
From February to April 2018, five of
the cameras recorded footage of a young
female black leopard. She appeared
that we all sometimes unconsciously fa-
vor certain words — stop using “spatu-
late” all the time.
Eventually, he was hired full time. He
rose through the ranks to his current po-
sition, in which he does very little active
copy-editing himself but presides as the
style-arbiter-of-last-resort over several
hundred original titles a year. By mutual
agreement, he personally copy-edits the
books of just one author, the novelist
Elizabeth Strout, in the manner of an ac-
countant who now runs the company
but still prepares taxes for a beloved cli-
ent.
Strout calls him Dr. B. for his magical
ability to ferret out inconsistencies,
eradicate inaccuracies and fix convo-
luted sentences. “Benjamin is all about
the ear,” she wrote in an email. “I think
the guy is astonishing, truthfully.” So do
his 23,600 followers on Twitter — which
he calls “the agora of the 21st century”
— who know him for his snappy lan-
guage-related interventions.
This is an excellent time for someone
to tell us how to think about these things.
Social media has spawned a generation
of un-Strunk-and-White-ified people
who appear to believe that punctuation
is optional, that grammar is for the eld-
erly and that ending a sentence with a
period is a deliberate act of aggression.
Meanwhile, the president of the
United States thinks “seperation” is a
word, once referred to his own wife on
Twitter as “Melanie” instead of “Mela-
nia” and has explained his personal phi-
losophy of capitalization by declaring:
“I capitalize certain words only for em-
phasis, not b/c they should be capital-
ized!” (He also uses exclamation points
like a text-crazed teenager, but that is
another issue.)
The president, whose name Dreyer
also would prefer not to say (or to write
down), comes in for some deft shade-
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
alone in four nighttime videos — drink-
ing water or carrying remains of her
prey — but in the only daytime video,
she was following an adult female leop-
ard with normal markings.
“Unconfirmed observations from
September 2017 from the two leopards
together suggest that this nonmelanis-
tic female might be the mother of the
black leopard,” according to the re-
search paper, which added that in previ-
ous sightings, the black leopard was
“smaller in size, and in closer proximity
to her mother.”
Word of the camera observations
brought forth another high-quality im-
age of a black leopard from the Ol Ari
Nyiro Conservancy, also in Laikipia,
which was taken in May 2007.
“Collectively, these images are the
first reported in nearly 100 years that
confirm the existence of black leopard in
Africa, and the first in Kenya,” the paper
said.
The dark coloration of the melanistic
leopards’ coat is attributed to a reces-
sive gene. Despite being called black,
they are usually very dark brown and
have the same pattern of spots as other
leopards, according to the Out of Africa
Park in Arizona, which hosts two black
leopards, named Enoch and Silhouette.
A tip from Benjamin Dreyer: Don’t use “curate” for “what you’re doing when you organize a playlist of motivating songs for gym use.”
throwing in several places in the book,
as when “unprecedented” is included in
a list of sometimes misspelled words.
“How hard was that?” Dreyer writes,
and Oval Office watchers will recognize
an allusion to the president’s “unpresi-
dented” tweet.
Similarly, Dreyer takes The New
Yorker, which he refers to as “a certain
magazine,” to task for its insistence on
using a dieresis — two dots above a let-
WILL BURRARD-LUCAS/CAMTRAPTIONS
But there are also theories suggesting
that melanism could have an envi-
ronmental factor.
“Melanism is hypothesized to be an
adaptation to environments in which a
dark coloration provides camouflage
from predators or prey,” Dr. Pilfold said
in the paper.
Until recently, leopards — reclusive,
adaptable and territorial — were consid-
ered to exist in relative abundance.
But a study published in May 2016
suggested that leopards had lost 75 per-
cent of their range since 1750. They were
then classified as “vulnerable” on the
Red List of threatened species of the In-
ternational Union for Conservation of
Nature.
Three subspecies of the leopard are
classified as “critically endangered” and
two others as “endangered.”
“I think the biggest threat to the leop-
ard on a global scale is that it’s been just
under the radar,” Philipp Henschel, the
lion program survey coordinator for
Panthera, a global wild cat conservation
organization, told The New York Times
in 2016.
“Nobody really cared about the leop-
ard,” he said, “because everybody as-
sumed they were really abundant and
widespread.”
ter — in words with double vowels, like
re-elect (“reëlect”) or pre-existing
(“preëxisting”).
“That certain magazine also refers to
adolescents as ‘teen-agers,’” i.e. with
the clunky inclusion of a hyphen in
there, he writes. “If you’re going to have
a house style, try not to have a house
style visible from space.”
“Dreyer’s English” not only lays down
rules, but it also offers tips for writers
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Author who wrote
‘Flower Drum Song’
C. Y. LEE
1915-2018
BY KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
The manuscript had been rejected by
more than a dozen publishing houses.
Finally, an elderly man who was screen-
ing new books for what was then Farrar,
Straus & Cudahy read it and liked it.
Too ill to write a full critique, he just
scrawled, “Read this.” And then he died,
the manuscript beside him on his bed.
“Without those two words, the novel
would have never been published,” C. Y.
Lee, the manuscript’s author, told The
Associated Press in 2002.
The novel was “The Flower Drum
Song,” a story of generational and cul-
tural conflict among newly arrived
Asians in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It
was published in 1957 and became a best
seller. It was adapted as a Broadway
musical, which received six Tony nomi-
nations, and then as a movie, which was
nominated for five Academy Awards.
With “The Flower Drum Song,” Mr.
Lee, who died on Nov. 8 at 102, became
one of the first Asian novelists to find
commercial success in the United
States.
Mr. Lee’s daughter, Angela Lee, said
he died from complications of kidney
failure under hospice care at her home
in Los Angeles. Word of his death ap-
peared at the time in Chinese-language
newspapers; Ms. Lee said the family did
not think to reach out to the English-lan-
guage news media. The Washington
Post recently learned of the death and
became the first English-language news
outlet to report it.
Mr. Lee, who was born in China, wrote
other books, including “China Saga”
(1987) and “Gate of Rage” (1991), about
the 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square.
But none achieved the fame of “The
Flower Drum Song,” which Richard
Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II
turned into a musical, directed by Gene
Kelly.
The first big Broadway show with
Asian-American actors in leading roles,
“Flower Drum Song,” as the adaptation
was known, ran from 1958 to 1960. The
next year it became a movie, with a cast
that included Nancy Kwan, Miyoshi
Umeki (who also starred in the stage
version), Jack Soo and James Shigeta. It
was among the first major Hollywood
productions with a mostly Asian-Ameri-
can cast.
But for all the commercial success of
the play and the movie, and the pride felt
by many Asian-Americans at seeing
Asian actors, the reviews were mixed.
Critics complained that the story line —
more nuanced in the novel — was sim-
plistic and dated in the adaptations, and
that all three versions perpetuated ster-
eotypes about Chinese immigrants. As
time went on, the story was also seen as
sexist. And some dismissed the music as
second-tier Rodgers, not on a par with
“South Pacific” or “The King and I.”
The criticism did not bother Mr. Lee,
as he said in an interview published in
2004 for the Society for the Study of the
Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States. He said he had been writing
about a particular period, when people
were more traditional. And he was
happy with changes made for the dra-
matic versions; his real desire, his
daughter said in a telephone interview,
was to be successful.
“Dad really liked being popular,” Ms.
VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
who want to be clear and elegant as well
as correct. Common pitfalls in fiction,
Dreyer writes, include muddled time-
lines and geographic sloppiness; using
fancy synonyms for “said”; and giving
similar names to too many characters —
it has always annoyed him, he says, that
“Downton Abbey” needlessly features
two people named Thomas. He also
doesn’t like writing with show-offy allu-
sions to “underappreciated novels, ob-
..
Lee said. “He wasn’t trying to be a high-
brow literary author. He just wanted to
reach the widest audience possible.”
The playwright David Henry Hwang,
best known for “M. Butterfly,” was a
longtime fan of Mr. Lee’s novel and
spearheaded a revival of the musical in
2001. He updated the original libretto,
written by Mr. Hammerstein and Jo-
seph Fields, and tweaked the characters
and the plot. He felt the novel had a bit-
tersweet tone that had been lost in other
adaptations.
“C. Y. brought complexity and hu-
manity to Chinese-American characters
and stories during a period when Ameri-
can culture portrayed Asians as carica-
tures: oversexualized women and men
to be ridiculed or killed in battle,” Mr.
Hwang said in an email.
After opening successfully in Los An-
geles, the revival moved to Broadway in
2002, where reviews were mixed. It re-
ceived three Tony nominations and ran
for 169 performances.
Chin Yang Lee was born on Dec. 23,
1915, in Hunan Province, the youngest in
a family of eight boys and three girls.
Ms. Lee and her brother, Jay, said that
his father was essentially a feudal lord.
“The family called our grandfather a
‘philosopher king’ because he never
worked,” Jay Lee said. “He walked
around the property writing poetry and
contemplating nature.” The family was
well off until the Communist revolution
in 1949, when they lost everything.
C. Y. Lee, who had enrolled at Shan-
dong University in Jinan, was often on
the run from military clashes that took
place during the second Sino-Japanese
War of 1937-45. He graduated from Na-
tional Southwestern Associated Univer-
sity, in Kunming, in 1942.
GINO DOMENICO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
C. Y. Lee in 2002. His novel was about
Chinese immigrants in San Francisco.
He worked for a time as a secretary
for a maharajah on the border between
China and Burma, now Myanmar. He
said in the interview in 2004 that this
was the best year of his life. In China, he
said, “I was a refugee all the time,” es-
caping bombing, war, bandits and fam-
ine, but on the border, “life was so re-
laxed, the countryside so beautiful.”
Mr. Lee came to New York in 1943 af-
ter fleeing the Japanese on the Burma
Road on foot, with a pen and a typewrit-
er, his children said.
Later, while living in California, Mr.
Lee struggled as a writer for many
years in San Francisco, working for Chi-
nese-language newspapers and barely
making a living when he began “The
Flower Drum Song.”
When no one would publish it, his
agent suggested he try another profes-
sion. And, as the often-recounted story
has it, his career as a writer might have
ended then, if not for the unnamed man
who read the manuscript on his death
bed.
scure foreign films, or cherished indie
bands.”
“A novel is not a blog post about Your
Favorite Things,” Dreyer notes.
Other tips: Cut back on “suddenly”
and “began to.” Be vigilant for such
phrases as “Rob commuted to his job,”
with its amusingly jarring inadvertent
rhyme. Don’t use “curate” “to portray
what you’re doing when you organize a
playlist of motivating songs for gym
use.” And: “Go light on exclamation
points in dialogue. No, even lighter than
that. Are you down to none yet? Good.”
What does Dreyer like? He likes the
word “defenestrate,” he said, with its
vivid meaning of being thrown from a
window. “It’s just so weirdly specific,” he
said. He likes it when people omit the
word “very” and spell “fuchsia” cor-
rectly. He likes discussing matters of
style and usage with people who care
about and appreciate those things. He
once fell out with a friend he was editing
when the friend insisted that if you fin-
ish a sentence with a reference to the
musical “Oklahoma!,” you should use a
period after the exclamation point.
“I thought, ‘Good for him, but we’re
not doing this,’” Dreyer recalled. “It’s
the end of a sentence, and it needs only
one piece of terminal punctuation.”
Dreyer’s book is his own, and the edi-
tors who worked on it had to defer to him
in matters of taste, just as the copy edi-
tors who work for him have to allow
their authors the final say. In the course
of his career, Dreyer recalled, he has re-
ceived all manner of authorial push-
back, including insults, frank admis-
sions of irrationality and gentle teasing.
Once he wrote in the margin of one of
Strout’s manuscripts that “perhaps this
is a somewhat tenuous connection,” he
recalled.
To which Strout responded: “Too bad.
Ha ha ha.”
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 3

World
Watching for a purge of Brexit dissenters
STAMFORD, ENGLAND
Grass-roots Conservatives
at odds with a lawmaker
who opposed a harder line
BY ELLEN BARRY
The British lawmaker Nick Boles stood
at the altar of a 15th-century church,
gazing out at the people who held his po-
litical future in their hands.
They lingered last week at the back of
the church in Stamford, England: a clus-
ter of men and women in their 60s,
mostly white-haired and wearing sensi-
ble coats. They were the leaders of the
local Conservative association who
would decide whether to expel Mr. Boles
from his seat for attempting to block a
no-deal Brexit. Party leaders see the
threat of leaving without a deal as a key
lever in last-minute negotiations with
Europe.
Mr. Boles is wry, self-deprecating and
sophisticated. His jokes got laughs. His
arguments got applause. But not, it
seemed, from the people who mattered.
“He has let us down badly,” said Philip
Sagar, the head of the Grantham and
Stamford Conservative Association.
“Selfish,” said Matthew Lee, the leader
of the district council. “Individualistic,”
said Nicholas Turner, a longtime party
member.
On Monday, the leaders of the associa-
tion voted to begin a protracted process
that could result in deselection, which
would prevent Mr. Boles from seeking
reelection as a Tory. His fate is being
watched closely as a bellwether of
whether Conservative groups will purge
other members who do not support their
Brexit strategy.
Deselections are rare in British poli-
tics, but for lawmakers they linger as a
threat. In the Conservative Party, they
are carried out by a political force that
rarely draws attention: roughly 100,000
local activists who are both older — half
are over 65 — and more fiercely pro-
Brexit than the electorate as a whole.
They are considered the Tories’ grass
roots and feel positively about leaving
the bloc without a deal. They are skepti-
The Conservative Party lawmaker Nick Boles, center right, at a public meeting at St. Martin’s Church in Stamford, England, where he was fighting for his political life.
cal of warnings that this could set off an
economic shock and shortages of food
and medicine.
Mr. Boles is one of the few Tories to
openly challenge them on the conse-
quences of a no-deal Brexit, a decision
that, he acknowledged, is likely to end
his career in politics. “I’m the fattest tar-
get, yes,” he said.
In British politics, he added, “if you’ve
burnt your bridges with whatever of the
two parties you’re elected by, you’ve
probably burnt your bridges, full stop.”
When asked about his decision, Mr.
Boles pivots to a biographical episode.
At 53, he has survived two bouts of can-
cer, the second a brain tumor that, he
told the BBC, “was quite likely to get
me.” In 2016 he left an oncology ward in
a wheelchair, bald and wearing a medi-
cal mask, to vote for Britain to leave the
European Union. He was unsure how
long he would remain in politics, he said,
a shift that coincided with a “radicaliza-
tion process among Brexiters” who in-
creasingly favored a no-deal exit.
“People have become entrenched in
their views and radicalized in their
views,” he said. “So the friction isn’t just
a normal rubbing along friction, it’s a
clash of one heavy force against another,
and so it’s more violent.”
He added, “I wasn’t in the mood to
buckle under pressure.”
In the British political system, candi-
dates must be approved by the party as-
sociation in their constituency, a group
sometimes described as the selectorate.
In the Conservative Party, in particular,
ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
these groups are both influential and
very small. The party membership has
shrunk steadily since the early 1950s,
dropping from around three million to
roughly 100,000 now.
Two-thirds are men, nearly all are
white and most describe themselves as
“very right wing,” according to research
by the Party Members Project. They are
significantly more hard-line on Brexit
than are Parliament as a whole or the
Conservative government of Prime
Minister Theresa May.
Tim Bale, who leads the Party Mem-
bers Project, was surprised in Decem-
ber when a poll of Conservative mem-
bers found that 57 percent of those sur-
veyed preferred leaving without a deal
to the deal Mrs. May made with the Eu-
ropean Union.
Though the members have no formal
say on party policy, Mr. Bale said, they
can “exert considerable moral pressure
on lawmakers,” who are expected to
maintain close ties with the grass-roots
activists who do the bulk of on-the-
ground campaigning.
Lawmakers are “very risk-averse,”
he added. “They will, to be honest, be
scared of losing their seat, and no
amount of polling by pointy-headed ex-
perts will convince them otherwise.”
Mr. Boles’s constituency is solid Tory
territory, an agricultural region that this
month voted to erect a 20-foot statue of
its most famous daughter, Margaret
Thatcher. Though voters there have po-
litely accepted Mr. Boles — an openly
gay Oxford graduate and party modern-
izer who pushed through legislation on
gay marriage — he, like many lawmak-
ers recommended by party headquar-
ters, has no roots in the area. Local ac-
tivists are demanding a bigger role in
this process, said Tony Travers, a pro-
fessor of government at the London
School of Economics.
“Major parties would helicopter in
some barrister from London, saying,
‘This would be a good constituency for
you,’ they would doff their caps, get
elected and go straight back to London,”
he said.
In the churn of Brexit, he said, both
parties are moving toward a model in
which lawmakers take instruction from
voters and cease to make decisions
based on their own judgment.
If Mr. Boles is deselected over his
Brexit stance, it will mark a sharp move-
ment in that direction. The process re-
quires Mr. Boles to seek reselection
from the constituency leadership — he
has 21 days from Monday’s vote to do so
— and could take weeks or months, cul-
minating in a secret ballot of the local
party association’s executive commit-
tee.
Anna Schaverien contributed reporting
from London.

Rift over ‘dirty money’ list ADVERTISEMENT

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U.S. angered after E.U.
tells banks to scrutinize
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BY JACK EWING
AND ALAN RAPPEPORT
The United States has assailed the Euro-
pean Union for adding American territo-
ries to its “dirty money” list, opening a
new rift in a relationship that has grown
increasingly fractious amid disputes
over trade and Iran sanctions.
Four United States territories, includ-
ing Puerto Rico, were added to a money
laundering blacklist that will require
European banks to apply greater scru-
tiny to transactions in those regions.
That prompted an angry rebuke from
the Trump administration, which criti-
cized the methodology used by the bloc
to add those regions and said American
officials were not consulted ahead of
their inclusion.
The blacklist, released on Wednesday,
lumped Puerto Rico, American Samoa,
Guam and the United States Virgin Is-
lands with the likes of North Korea, Lib-
ya and Yemen as havens where drug
dealers, terrorists and corrupt dictators
can launder ill-gotten gains.
Saudi Arabia was also added to the list
despite its efforts to demonstrate that it
was cracking down on illicit financial ac-
tivity. That decision could further com-
plicate Europe’s relations with the king-
dom, which already faces scrutiny for its
role in the murder of a dissident Saudi
journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
Along with the United States, Saudi
Arabia leads the Terrorist Financing
Targeting Center, based in the Saudi
capital of Riyadh. Steven Mnuchin, the
United States Treasury secretary, has
made combating illicit financial activity
a priority and has twice visited the cen-
ter since it opened in 2017.
European officials said the decision
was made to prevent illicit financing in
areas that are considered risks for such
activities.
“Dirty money is the lifeblood of orga-
nized crime and terrorism,” Vera
Jourova, the European commissioner
for justice, said at a news conference in
Strasbourg, France, on Wednesday.
“It was high time for Europe to act,”
she said. “The times when we would be
maybe too naïve about this are over.”
The Treasury Department appeared
to have been blindsided by the an-
nouncement. Shortly after the list was
released, the department issued a state-
ment condemning the list as flawed and
The United States “should accept
that in America there are
obvious deficiencies in the fight
against money laundering.”
saying American banks should ignore
any suggestions from the European
Commission to apply greater scrutiny to
transactions based on its list. The Euro-
pean Union can apply its rules only to
banks operating in Europe.
The department also suggested that
the European list was unnecessary be-
cause a global body, known as the Finan-
cial Action Task Force, sets interna-
tional standards for countering illicit fi-
nance. And it complained that it had not
been brought into the discussion ahead
of the European action.
“The Treasury Department was not
provided any meaningful opportunity to
discuss with the European Commission
its basis for including the listed U.S. ter-
ritories,” the statement said.
FRANCOIS LENOIR/REUTERS
American officials took the absence of
European countries on the list as a sign
that it was more political exercise than
rigorous review.
Sven Giegold, a member of a special
committee on money laundering and fi-
nancial crimes in the European Parlia-
ment, said the blacklist was not a poli-
tical lever intended to win concessions
in other areas.
“This has nothing to do with Trump
and negotiating strategies,” said Mr.
Giegold, a German member of the
Green Party. He noted that the United stories to watch out for ...
States has taken a hard line with Euro-
pean banks accused of money launder- on February 18th
ing, including Deutsche Bank, the larg-
est bank in Germany.
“Internationally, the U.S. plays a
strong role in money laundering. I wel-
come that,” Mr. Giegold said. “But it
should accept that in America there are
Birth rate Lost in space and time
obvious deficiencies in the fight against
money laundering.”
The four United States territories
shows
made the blacklist because they “are at-
tractive for tax crimes and exposed to a steep fall
higher threat of money laundering
linked to tax crime,” the European Com-
mission said in documents published
Wednesday.
Some of the territories have also al-
lowed companies to conceal their true
owners, and lacked criminal penalties
for lawyers or accountants that help
criminals launder money, the commis-
sion said.
American Samoa, Guam and the Vir-
gin Islands are already on the European Number fell sharply last year
Union’s list of places considered havens after births rose when country adopted Display of outdated items illustrates the progress
for companies and individuals trying to two-child policy three years ago country has made since reform and opening-up
illegally avoid taxes.
The European Commission did not re-
spond directly to the Treasury Depart-
ment statement. As the list was being
formulated, “we had a very constructive Museums look Economy set to pick up
discussion with the U.S. authorities as
we reached out to them about the U.S. to cash in
territories that are on the list,” a Euro-
pean Commission spokesman said in an
email.
The United States was not the only
country to express frustration with the
move. Panama, which was included on
the list, rejected the decision and called
on Europe to clarify its concerns.
“The government of the Republic of
Panama strongly rejects the proposal of
the European Commission to include
the country in a list of jurisdictions of
high-risk third countries with strategic
deficiencies in its regime in the fight As government policies take shape
against money laundering and the fight and new growth drivers emerge,
against the financing of terrorism,” said Products with designs or images of ancient objects
growth is likely to recover, experts say
Miguel Verzbolovskis, Panama’s am- are a big selling point in souvenir market
bassador to the European Union.
The blacklist faces a formal approval
process in Brussels and will not prohibit See our special advertising supplement in The New York Times on Monday, February 18th
banks from doing business with clients
in the places on the list. It merely re-
quires them to exercise more scrutiny.

Vera Jourova, the European commissioner for justice, said during a news conference in Jack Ewing reported from Frankfurt, CHINADAILY
Strasbourg, France, that “it was high time for Europe to act” on money laundering. and Alan Rappeport from Washington.

4 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
world
Left, Traunstein, Germany, where false rumors spread about an attack by refugees; top right, Andreas Guske, a police inspector who hunts down rumors on Facebook; above right, Mayor Andreas Hollstein of Altena, who was stabbed in an attack linked to social media.
Door-to-door fight against Facebook rumors
THE INTERPRETER
TRAUNSTEIN, GERMANY
German police inspector
seeks to contain damage
inflicted by social media
BY MAX FISHER
AND AMANDA TAUB
The rumor began, as so many do these
days, on Facebook.
A group of Muslim refugees in south-
ern Germany, it was claimed, had
dragged an 11-year-old girl to a pedes-
trian underpass and raped her. When
the police denied the claim, it was said
that politicians beholden to the Euro-
pean Union had ordered them to cover
up the assault.
The rumor proved unfounded, but it
provoked waves of fear and anger as it
was pushed out across Germany by
Facebook’s News Feed. Users worked
one another up into fits, concluding
that these dangerous refugees, and the
duplicitous politicians who shielded
them, would all have to be thrown out.
In most of the world, rumor-fueled
meltdowns are taken as a fact of life, a
product of Facebook’s propensity for
stirring up people’s worst impulses.
But Andreas Guske, a trim, steely-
eyed police inspector in the refugee-
heavy Bavarian town of Traunstein,
where the rumor circulated, didn’t
think his community could afford
complacence. Attacks on refugees
were already rising. And southern
El Chapo is behind bars, but drugs still flow from Mexico
DRUGS, FROM PAGE 1
stanched by building a wall along the
southwest border, but extensive testi-
mony at Mr. Guzmán’s trial — from traf-
fickers themselves — indicated that a
wall would have little effect: Most illegal
drug loads cross the border at official
checkpoints, not in remote stretches
where a barrier would stop them.
By any definition, Mr. Guzmán’s
three-month trial was a monumental en-
deavor, the culmination of more than a
decade of investigative work by Ameri-
can prosecutors and law enforcement
agents who acted in concert with sev-
eral foreign governments in Latin
America.
Like Joseph Valachi’s congressional
testimony in the United States in 1963,
which revealed to the public the inner
workings of the Mafia, Mr. Guzmán’s
prosecution detailed his cartel’s opera-
tions and demystified an outlaw who for
decades enjoyed a kind of folk-hero sta-
tus around the world.
“The trial put a big spotlight on the
power of the Sinaloa cartel, giving the
public insight into how it really operates
and functions,” said Raymond P. Dono-
van, the special agent in charge of the
D.E.A.’s New York office who played a
leading role in Mr. Guzmán’s capture.
“Prior to the trial, people had heard the
legend of El Chapo, but now they have
the reality: the violence, the manipula-
tions, the drug trafficking — what we, in
law enforcement, have known for
years.”
But several security experts said that
convicting and imprisoning the kingpin
for the most part sends a symbolic mes-
sage. “Catching Chapo is important be-
cause it is a signal but nothing else,” said
Christian Ehrlich, who works for
Riskop, a risk analysis firm in Mon-
terrey, Mexico. “In terms of logistics,
there may be a superficial change, but
these organizations know how to adapt
very quickly.”
Germany is a front line in Europe’s
battle over identity and immigration.
“Facebook is not just like a pinboard
where people hang things and others
read them,” Mr. Guske said. “Facebook,
with its algorithm, influences people.”
Researchers agree, finding that the
platform surfaces negative, primal
emotions and that it can even distort
users’ sense of right and wrong.
And rumors, noted Mr. Guske, head
of the police department’s communica-
tions office, travel faster in the age of
social media, often growing more
dangerous as they spread.
“That was not the case before Face-
book,” he said.
So the police inspector and his two
deputies set to work. Their goal:
Through shoe-leather police work and
door-to-door outreach, they would
eradicate the rumor online and off,
taking it as seriously as a pandemic or
a new street drug.
Mr. Guske’s team members do not
arrest people who post inflammatory
rumors, or fine them. Instead, they act
more like public health workers, inocu-
lating communities from viral misin-
formation and its consequences.
Their efforts reflect rising concern
among governments that Facebook is
spinning up violence and extremism.
They also reflect a lack of faith in the
company to address the problem.
“We see that peoples’ feelings of
safety and their actual safety are mov-
ing apart, like a pair of scissors that
are opening,” Mr. Guske said. “We’re
trying to close those as much as we
can. Hate can arise from this, which
UNITED STATES DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Mexican crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, in 2017. Right, a load of fentanyl that entered America from Mexico the same day Mr. Guzmán’s trial ended.
Even before Mr. Guzmán’s arrest in
2014 at a hotel in Mazatlán, Mexico, and
his eventual recapture in 2016 after a
prison break, the approach of hunting
for and prosecuting top drug criminals
— the so-called kingpin strategy — did
not halt violence or drug trafficking in
the country. In recent years, collabora-
tion between the United States and
Mexico succeeded in killing or jailing
many of Mexico’s best-known narco
lords, including Mr. Guzmán’s cousin,
Alfredo Beltrán-Leyva, and the heir ap-
parent to the Sinaloa empire, Vicente
Zambada Niebla, along with dozens of
their lieutenants — all with little meas-
urable effect.
Instead, fragmented groups have bat-
tled over smuggling routes and moved
into new businesses, leading to a record
33,341 murders in Mexico last year. “In
the same territory there are small and
large organizations,” said Eduardo
Guerrero, a security expert for Lantia
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
we’ve seen can turn the population
against migrants and refugees.”
A Facebook spokeswoman said the
company had been “working closely
with German authorities” and had
“trained hundreds of German officers
over the past years on how to use our
tools.”
The company says it has taken steps
to curb hate speech, instituting special
rules against anti-refugee posts. It also
works with fact-checking organiza-
tions, including in Germany, to debunk
false information on the platform.
Facebook enlists thousands of mod-
erators to scrub posts that break its
rules. It is a scalable solution that fits
the company’s business strategy. But it
does little to address Facebook’s real-
world impact or to curb hate and mis-
information that fall within the rules,
like many of the rumors making the
rounds in Traunstein.
Mr. Guske takes a more on-the-
ground approach.
To stop the rumor about the sup-
posed rape of the young girl at the
underpass, Mr. Guske started by iden-
tifying local residents who had shared
it on Facebook. Then he traced the
story as it jumped between the social
network and offline rumor mills — a
reminder that Facebook moderators,
who monitor only the platform itself,
cannot stop misinformation’s spread
into the real world.
Mr. Guske had two goals: to per-
suade the rumor’s progenitors to pub-
licly disavow their claims, and to find
whatever kernel of truth had grown
into the tall tale. Showing local resi-
Consultores, a consulting firm based in
Mexico City.
“The large try to absorb the small,
and the small try to remain independ-
ent,” he said. “This is very unstable.”
The American authorities say the Si-
naloa cartel’s most notable current rival
is the Jalisco New Generation cartel,
which Mr. Guzmán once used as his
front-line soldiers in a war against an-
other rival group, Los Zetas.
After breaking from Mr. Guzmán sev-
eral years ago, Jalisco New Generation
started branching out into activities
such as extortion, kidnapping, migrant
smuggling and gasoline theft — a crime
that has cost Mexico as much as $3 bil-
lion a year, government officials say.
The man regarded as the Jalisco
leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes,
known as El Mencho, is still at large in
Mexico, but faces an indictment filed in
2014 in Washington that closely resem-
bles the one used to try Mr. Guzmán.
KSENIA KULESHOVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
dents how Facebook had distorted
reality, he believed, was the only way
to persuade them to reject what they
had seen there as false.
The rumor began, they found, when
the police arrested an Afghan citizen
accused of groping a 17-year-old girl
two towns over, and pulling up some of
her clothes.
As Facebook users shared accounts
of the incident, they added spurious
detail. One assailant became several. A
groping became a
“Hate can rape. And a 17-year-
old victim became an
arise from 11-year-old.
this, which The police posted
we’ve seen a statement recon-
can turn the structing the rumor’s
population spread. But Mr.
against Guske knew a sober
migrants.” fact-check would
never rise as high as
a salacious rumor on
Facebook’s News
Feed, which promotes content based in
part on its ability to keep users en-
gaged.
So his team showed up at the homes
of users who had first spread the ru-
mor, showing them evidence that they
had gotten it wrong. All but one re-
moved or corrected their posts.
Karolin Schwarz, who runs a Berlin-
based organization that tracks social
media misinformation, said she often
worked with German police depart-
ments to combat misinformation on
social media. Mr. Guske’s team in
Traunstein is, she said, “by the far the
best I’ve seen.”
Indeed, the two prosecutors named
on El Mencho’s case file served on Mr.
Guzmán’s trial team.
In a remarkable — if coincidental —
bit of timing, Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, the president of Mexico, two
weeks ago reiterated his administra-
tion’s reluctance to embrace the kingpin
strategy, even as a prosecutor was deliv-
ering the United States government’s
summation at Mr. Guzmán’s trial in New
York City.
“We haven’t arrested capos, because
that isn’t our main function,” Mr. López
Obrador said at a news conference, re-
ferring to cartel bosses. “The main func-
tion of the government is to guarantee
public security. The strategy of opera-
tions to arrest capos is over.”
Historically, prosecutions of kingpins
like El Chapo and El Mencho have done
little to affect the viability of their for-
mer organizations.
In 1997, a federal judge in Houston
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
“Police departments should do this
more,” Ms. Schwarz said. “It’s kind of
great.”
Most law enforcement officials, she
said, take the view that “it’s only the
internet.” Even those who take the
threat seriously rarely act quickly
enough to stop a rumor’s spread.
Mr. Guske lamented that Facebook,
a $500 billion company, left it to over-
worked police departments to manage
the risks created by its platform.
Last fall, a police chief in the south-
ern Indian town of Gadwal drew atten-
tion for taking on an approach much
like Mr. Guske’s to fight social media
rumors. Countries in Asia and Africa,
which represent the future of Face-
book’s business, have proved most
susceptible to violence linked to the
platform, experts say.
Yet few police departments there
have the resources of one in a German
resort town like Traunstein.
Other police departments in Ger-
many, where skepticism of Facebook
runs deep, are taking a harder look at
social media.
Gerhard Pauli, a state prosecutor in
Hagen, a small city in the country’s
postindustrial northwest, said his
department was seeing more cases of
violence that seemed to trace back to
Facebook and other platforms.
When Andreas Hollstein, the mayor
of neighboring Altena, was stabbed by
an angry resident, the police concluded
that social media outrage over the
mayor’s pro-refugee policies had
helped provoke the attacker.
“This is a danger we’ve always had
MAMTA POPAT/ARIZONA DAILY STAR, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
sentenced Juan García Ábrego, a boss of
the Gulf cartel, to 11 life terms in prison.
At the time, the lead prosecutor on the
case said of the cartel: “If it’s not the
end, it’s near the end. They’re mortally
wounded.”
But more than 20 years later, the Gulf
cartel remains alive in Matamoros,
Mexico, directly across the border from
Brownsville, Tex. At least one former
prosecutor who worked on the investi-
gation that led to Mr. García’s indict-
ment said he had no regrets about going
after kingpins.
“There was a time when they felt in-
vulnerable, impervious, that they were
above any kind of sense of justice,” the
former prosecutor, Kenneth Magidson,
said. “That sense of imperviousness has
been removed from the equation. Not
only are they touchable, but we’ve
touched every one of them.”
Mr. Donovan, who runs the D.E.A.’s
New York office, said the capture and
..
KSENIA KULESHOVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
INA FASSBENDER/DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
in the history of humanity,” he said.
“But nowadays, the technical capabili-
ties are exploding.”
Though Facebook has worked with
Germany’s regulation-prone govern-
ment, Mr. Pauli said the German police
still struggled to get the company’s
attention.
Asked if he coordinated with Face-
book, Mr. Guske said: “No, not really.
That’s hard. It’s a problem.”
Mr. Guske is not an obvious sleuth
for the digital age. He is a gray-haired
police veteran, his 29 years of service
mostly spent as a police inspector and,
later, a liaison with local youth.
He settled into communications
work, thinking that it would be quieter.
Then the Group of 7 summit came to
Bavaria in 2015.
Protesters came as well, and Mr.
Guske’s role overseeing department
social media brought him into contact
with online rumors and posts whipping
up outrage.
The next year, when Facebook ru-
mors seemed to rise in concert with
attacks on refugees, he retooled his
team to track and try to halt the ru-
mors. Though some dismissed the link
as a coincidence, research released last
year strongly suggests that online
speech contributed to the violence.
Every rumor, Mr. Guske believes,
undermines the credibility of officers
like him who try to debunk it.
“It’s hard to prevent fake news,
because once Facebook pushes it —”
he trailed off, shaking his head and
slapping his palm on the table. “What
more can you do?”
prosecution of Mr. Guzmán was “the
first of its kind” because so many law en-
forcement agencies — the F.B.I., the
D.E.A., Homeland Security Investiga-
tions — mostly worked together and
“put their egos aside.”
“It’s the model for how to go after peo-
ple moving forward,” he said.
But some former law enforcement
agents wondered why the federal gov-
ernment never sought to leverage the
overwhelming evidence it had against
Mr. Guzmán to persuade him to cooper-
ate and provide information on the car-
tel’s relationships with politicians,
bankers and lawyers — or about his for-
mer partner, Ismael Zambada, who has
never been arrested. (Mr. Guzmán’s
lawyers have said he was never offered
a plea deal and might have refused one
even if it was offered.)
“Twenty years ago, the unwritten rule
was you don’t get anyone at the highest
levels to cooperate because it’s dirty,”
said Derek Maltz, a former director of
the D.E.A.’s special operations division.
Mr. Maltz said that extraditing king-
pins to the United States was “the one
thing that works.”
But he also noted that with the cartel’s
advancements in communications, its
increasingly sophisticated financial sys-
tems and the role it has played in the opi-
oid crisis, “Maybe we should start think-
ing about creative cooperation deals.
The same old ways just aren’t working
that well.”
In a famous interview he gave to
Rolling Stone before his final arrest in
2016, Mr. Guzmán was asked if he felt re-
sponsible “for the fact that there are so
many drugs in the world.”
“No, that’s false,” he said. “Because
the day I don’t exist, it’s not going to de-
crease in any way at all.”
Elisabeth Malkin, Manny Fernandez
and Mitchell Ferman contributed report-
ing.
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..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 5

world

U.S. reinvigorates plan to cripple Iran’s missiles

WARSAW

Two launching attempts

failed in the past month,
but Tehran is undeterred
BY DAVID E. SANGER
AND WILLIAM J. BROAD

The Trump White House has acceler-

ated a secret American program to sab-
otage Iran’s missiles and rockets, ac-
cording to current and former adminis-
tration officials, who described it as part
of an expanding campaign by the United
States to undercut Tehran’s military and
isolate its economy.
Officials said it was impossible to
measure precisely the success of the IRANIAN PRESIDENCY OFFICE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

classified program, which has never
been publicly acknowledged. But in the
past month alone, two Iranian attempts
to launch satellites have failed within
minutes.
Those two rocket failures — one that
Iran announced on Jan. 15 and the other,
an unacknowledged attempt, on Feb. 5
— were part of a pattern over the past 11
years. In that time, 67 percent of Iranian
orbital launches have failed, an aston-
ishingly high number, compared with a 5
percent failure rate worldwide for simi-
lar space launches.
The setbacks have not deterred Iran.
This week, President Hassan Rouhani
singled out Tehran’s missile fleets as he
vowed to “continue our path and our
military power.”
The Trump administration maintains
that Iran’s space program is merely a
cover for its attempts to develop a ballis-
tic missile powerful enough to send nu-
clear warheads flying between conti-
nents.
Hours after the Jan. 15 attempt, Secre-
tary of State Mike Pompeo noted that
Iran’s satellite launchers have technolo-
gies “virtually identical and inter-
changeable with those used in ballistic
missiles.”
Mr. Pompeo is in Warsaw this week
with Vice President Mike Pence to lead
a meeting of 65 nations on encouraging
stability in the Middle East, including by
expanding economic sanctions against
Iran. It is largely an appeal to European
allies who, while continuing to oppose
President Trump’s decision to abandon
the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, also
agree that the missile tests must stop.
The launch failures prompted The
New York Times to seek out more than a
half-dozen current and former govern-
ment officials who have worked on the
American sabotage program over the
past 12 years. They spoke on the condi-
tion of anonymity because they were not
authorized to publicly discuss the covert
program.
The officials described a far-reaching
effort, created under President George
W. Bush, to slip faulty parts and ma-
terials into Iran’s aerospace supply
chains. The program was active early in
the Obama administration but had
eased by 2017, when Mr. Pompeo took
over as the director of the Central Intelli-
gence Agency and injected it with new
resources.
The covert actions against Iran’s mis-
sile and rocket program are being taken
through countries and companies that
supply Tehran’s aerospace operations.
French and British officials have joined
the United States in calling for ways to
counter Iran’s missile program.
At the Pentagon last month to unveil a
new missile defense strategy, Mr.
Trump noted the Jan. 15 failed space
launch. Had it succeeded, he said, it
would have given Tehran “critical infor-
mation” it could use “to pursue intercon-
tinental ballistic missile capability, and a
capability, actually, of reaching the
United States.”
“We’re not going to have that hap-
pen,” Mr. Trump said.
THE IRANIAN TARGET
Under Mr. Bush, two covert programs
against Iran rose in tandem: one fo-
cused on nuclear materials, the other on
missiles.
The C.I.A., with help from the Na-
tional Security Agency, searched for
ways to subvert factories, supply chains
and launchers.
It did not take much, according to offi-
cials from both the Bush and Obama ad-
ministrations. Flight disruption could
take no more than a small design change
in a critical valve, a modest alteration in
an engine part or guidance system, or a
contaminated alloy for making launcher
fins, crucial for aerodynamic stability.
American military officials urged
Congress to put more money into pro-
grams they obliquely hailed in open tes-
ARASH KHAMOOSHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
timony as “left of launch” techniques —
so called because they rely on sabotag-
ing launchers before they are fired.
In Iran’s case, that meant identifying
the networks of suppliers and subcon-
tractors who sold aerospace parts and
materials to Tehran.
The key insight, as several partici-
pants described it, was to subvert test
launches of new missiles. If the tests
failed, Iran would hesitate to embark on
mass production.
President Barack Obama quickened
the clandestine war with disruptions
aimed not only at missiles but also at a
newly emerging target — space launch-
ers.
When Mr. Pompeo arrived at the
C.I.A., there was relatively little nuclear
activity underway in Iran. Most of
Tehran’s centrifuges had been disman-
tled under the 2015 agreement, and 97
percent of the country’s nuclear fuel had
been shipped to Russia.
But Iran had ramped up its missile
and space program. Mr. Pompeo imme-
diately focused on the supply chain for
rockets and missiles, a world he knew
intimately.
Left, long-range missiles on display in Tehran. Above, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran,
left, at a space exhibition, has vowed to “continue our path and our military power.”
EVIDENCE OF MANIPULATION
Iran first succeeded in putting a small
satellite into orbit in 2009, just as it was
ramping up its nuclear program. It did
so again in 2011, 2012 and 2015. Jonathan
McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who
publishes “Jonathan’s Space Report”
and specializes in orbital monitoring,
noted that those four launches were the
only clear successes out of a dozen.
At least once, an Iranian rocket ex-
ploded on the launchpad, leaving dam-
age so extensive that satellites passing
overhead could make out blast scars,
burned wreckage and a blackened
rocket transporter. Iranian officials kept
silent on that disaster, in 2012.
So far, Iran has failed to successfully
test the newest generation of its satellite
launcher — a more powerful rocket
known as Simorgh. The vehicle, roughly
nine stories tall, debuted in April 2016.
Iran wrapped the test flight in secrecy,
and sky monitors know for sure only
that no satellite went into orbit.
In July 2017, another Simorgh roared
off a launchpad at the Imam Khomeini
Space Center, a complex east of Tehran
named for the nation’s first supreme
leader. Iran called it a success. But once
again, no satellite was seen. Reports
said Washington concluded there was a
“catastrophic failure.”
In January, Mr. Pompeo warned Iran
against launching a Simorgh that spy
satellites had detected was in prepara-
tion. After it lifted off, on Jan. 15, Iranian
officials declared that it suffered what
they called a third-stage failure.
“Sometimes life does not go as ex-
pected,” Iran’s minister of telecommuni-
cations, Mohammad Javad Azari
Jahromi, said in a Twitter post.
Some experts attributed Iran’s poor
performance to other factors, including
trade embargoes that block the best
technology. “It’s not a great record, but
it’s not out-of-the-family, especially giv-
en the sanctions,” said Dr. McDowell,
the Harvard astronomer. “It makes it
harder to get parts.”
A WARSAW WARNING
In Warsaw, Mr. Pompeo is expected to
repeat his warnings about the danger of
Tehran’s missile program and to press
European and Arab states to expand
sanctions and missile defenses aimed at
Iran.
There will almost certainly be no ref-
erence to the United States’ secret sabo-
tage efforts. But when Mr. Trump spoke
at the Pentagon last month, he said
nothing about Russia, China or North
Korea as missile threats. He spoke only
of Iran.
“Our strategy,” Mr. Trump said, “is
grounded in one overriding objective: to
detect and destroy every type of missile
attack against any American target,
whether before or after launch.”
David E. Sanger reported from Warsaw,
and William J. Broad from New York.

Venezuela insurgents blocked

CÚCUTA, COLOMBIA
Food shipment arranged
by opposition is stopped
by government at border
BY NICHOLAS CASEY
AND ANATOLY KURMANAEV
The battle over the legitimate leader-
ship of Venezuela — which has included
rallies of thousands, international diplo-
macy and oil sanctions — is now focused
on a single heavily guarded shipment of
humanitarian aid.
Venezuela’s opposition, which has rel-
ished a month of victories in its effort to
challenge President Nicolás Maduro
and take over as the country’s legiti-
mate government, brought the donated
supplies of food and medical kits to the
country’s border with Colombia.
Its goal was to bring the supplies into
Venezuela, forcing a confrontation with
Mr. Maduro, who has refused the help.
This would cast Mr. Maduro in a bad
light, opposition leaders said, and dis-
play their ability to set up a government-
like relief system in a nation where the
crumbling economy has left many
starving, sick and without access to
medicine.
But there was no dramatic confronta-
tion.
Instead, Mr. Maduro’s administration
status quo, with Mr. Maduro still in con-
trol.
“The whole country is waiting to see
what Mr. Guaidó does next,” said Carlos
Andrés Taborda, an opposition organ-
izer in the small Venezuelan border
town of Ureña, as he marched to de-
mand the release of humanitarian aid.
“Whether this remains a massive move-
ment depends largely on him.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Guaidó raised the
stakes, telling supporters that he would
open a “humanitarian corridor” to allow
aid to flow into the country by Feb. 23.
The pledge increased tensions at the
border, raising expectations on both
sides and setting a deadline to meet
them. But the obstacles ahead were
clear.
At the heavily guarded warehouse in
Cúcuta, Colombia, where supplies have
sat for nearly a week, workers packed
bags with medical kits or with vegetable
oil, flour, lentils and rice.
“The opposition has created
immense expectations.”
More donations were being prepared
in Miami and Houston for deployment.
A short drive away, Mr. Maduro’s im-
provised barrier spread across the
bridge’s lanes, blocking passage.
Freddy Bernal, Mr. Maduro’s envoy to
the Colombian border region of Táchira,
called the aid “trash” that “can’t even
lombia, said one of the goals was to force
the military, which has remained loyal to
the government, to choose between Mr.
Maduro and feeding the Venezuelan
people.
“Popular pressure to break the mili-
tary — this is what we’re working to-
ward,” she said.
In recent days, opposition lawmakers
have traveled to the United States,
Brazil and a second location in Colombia
to talk with the local authorities about
setting up similar warehouses before
the push on Feb. 23.
In Cúcuta, members of the opposition
say they are considering options to
physically force the shipment into Vene-
zuela.
Omar Lares, a former opposition
mayor in exile in Cúcuta, said organ-
izers want people to surround an aid
truck on the Colombian side and accom-
pany it to the bridge. A crowd of thou-
sands would be gathered on the other
Marrakech
side to push through a security cordon,
move the shipping containers blocking
the bridge, and accompany the aid into
Venezuela. 23 — 25 FEBRUARY
Lorena Valero, an activist on the Ven-
ezuelan side of the border, staged a pro-
test two years ago to call for the flow of
LA MAMOUNIA
food and supplies.
She said she would be willing to par-
ticipate again, should Mr. Guaidó call to
storm the bridge.
“We’re not afraid. We are certain that
it will enter,” she said.
Still, all the uncertainty has some ob-
SOMERSET HOUSE

erected a crude, but effective blockade
across the bridge at the border between
Venezuela and Colombia.
The move brought the relief effort to a
feed a small shantytown.”
Surrounded by six bodyguards with
bullet-resistant vests, he repeated
claims that the aid delivery was a ploy to
servers questioning the consequences if
the opposition cannot make good on its
promises.
“The opposition has created immense
3 — 6 OCTOBER

halt, and left the opposition and its
leader, Juan Guaidó, at a standstill,
aware that each passing day dampens
its considerable momentum toward
winning the trust of Venezuelans and
the recognition of other governments. A
delay could also mean reverting to the
destabilize Mr. Maduro’s government.
Mr. Bernal said that there was no stand-
off at the border.
“There’s complete normality here —
there’s peace and folk music,” he said.
Gaby Arellano, an opposition law-
maker in charge of the shipment in Co-
expectations, and it’s not at all clear they
have a plan for actually fulfilling them,”
said David Smilde, a Venezuela analyst
at the Washington Office on Latin Amer-
ica. “Furthermore, the opposition and
the U.S. have not been clear that this aid,
even if allowed in, will make a signifi-
cant dent in Venezuela’s humanitarian
N e w Yo r k
crisis.”
Some Venezuelans have put off buy-
London

ing medication, expecting that the

American donations will arrive across
3 — 5 M AY
the border soon, Mr. Smilde said.
The heightened expectations have
managed to bring together what has
INDUSTRIA
been a fractured opposition, giving Mr.
Maduro the first challenge to his rule in
years. Mr. Guaidó — now recognized as
Venezuela’s legitimate president by doz-
ens of countries — has emerged as a
leader. And the aid corridor has given
the opposition a common project to pro-
mote.
For those on the border, a sense of ur-
gency prevailed.
At an opposition rally on Tuesday in
Ureña, spirits remained high, but pro-
testers were becoming impatient for
concrete results.
2 0 1 9
MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES “We can’t let those containers sit
Venezuelan security forces standing near a border bridge blocked by the government. there for so long,” said Linda Acosta, an
The opposition leader said he would open a “humanitarian corridor” to let in aid. Ureña resident.

6 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
world
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were killed last year. Students from the school pressed for gun legislation and school safety measures.
A massacre’s force for change
One year after Parkland,
where do gun control and
school safety stand in U.S.?
BY MARGARET KRAMER
AND JENNIFER HARLAN
On Feb. 14, 2018, a former student
slaughtered 17 people at Marjory Stone-
man Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla.
The next day, David Hogg, a student
who survived the attack, expressed his
frustration at the pattern of political in-
action that seems to follow mass shoot-
ings in the United States. He was not
surprised that there had been another
school shooting, he said, and that fact
alone “says so much about the current
state that our country is in, and how
much has to be done.”
“We need to do something,” he said. In
the course of the next year, students
would change the way the nation han-
dles mass shootings, spurring new gun
legislation and school safety measures,
and holding to account the adults they
felt had failed them.
Here’s a look at where they made
those changes happen, and where they
were disappointed.
STUDENTS TAKE THE LEAD
With Parkland, it was the students who
set the agenda. Their openness about
their pain made them formidable lead-
ers of the movement for gun control, and
their displays of strength and utter grief
struck a chord with a nation numbed by
repeated acts of violence.
In the weeks after the shooting, bus-
loads of Stoneman Douglas students
took their case to the Florida capital and
to Washington. With a rallying cry of
“Never Again,” they gathered support
from other young people and activists,
and their March for Our Lives campaign
spurred huge rallies and hundreds of
protests, including a nationwide school
walkout. The students’ pleas reached
the White House, imploring President
Trump to better protect schools and lim-
it access to guns.
And the movement brought youth ac-
tivism to a new age — finding global
power in social media and pushing pub-
lic officials to acknowledge their ac-
countability.
Three months after the massacre in
Parkland, 10 people were killed in yet
another school shooting, this one in
Santa Fe, Tex., compounding the Stone-
man Douglas students’ outrage and re-
solve and placing them in a new role:
consoling those who were suffering as
they were. “Something about Parkland
has been different,” said Melissa Strass-
ner, a survivor of the Columbine school
shooting in 1999. “They truly have in-
spired a nation.”
ADULTS ARE HELD TO ACCOUNT
Stoneman Douglas students and par-
ents were outraged by what they viewed
as gross incompetence on the part of
school and law enforcement officials.
Video showed that a sheriff’s deputy as-
signed to the school did not enter the
building as the attack unfolded. Seven
other deputies remained outside as gun-
shots rang out, a state commission
found. And another officer prevented
paramedics from entering.
The school district also appeared to
have missed several warning signs
about the former student charged in the
massacre, Nikolas Cruz. The parents of
two 14-year-old students who were
killed decided to run for the school board
to fix what they thought went wrong.
One of them won.
And in January, Florida’s new Repub-
A March for Our Lives event in San Francisco. Stoneman Douglas students began a movement that brought youth activism to a new age.
lican governor, Ron DeSantis, sus-
pended Sheriff Scott Israel for his “ne-
glect of duty” and “incompetence.” Mr.
Israel, who is a Democrat and a vocal op-
ponent of the National Rifle Association,
continues to insist that the criticism of
him is politically motivated and that
“there was no wrongdoing on my part.”
Multiple deputies have also been sus-
pended, and one ultimately resigned.
NEW FOCUS ON MENTAL HEALTH
In the case of Mr. Cruz, the warning
signs were many. There were the boasts
about killing animals, the expulsion, the
stalking of a female classmate, the re-
peated calls from his mother to the po-
lice. School counselors and a sheriff’s
deputy decided at one point that he
should be forcibly committed for psychi-
atric evaluation, only to apparently
change their minds the next day. Multi-
ple tips to the F.B.I. were left uninvesti-
gated — one woman told the bureau’s tip
line she was worried about Mr. Cruz go-
ing “into a school and just shooting the
place up.”
At that time, there was no law in Flor-
ida that would have prevented Mr. Cruz
from buying a gun or would have al-
lowed the police to take away his weap-
on. A gun control bill the state passed in
March now allows law enforcement —
with judicial approval — to bar a person
deemed dangerous from owning guns
for up to a year. Florida courts granted
more than 1,000 such orders in the first
nine months after the law took effect, ac-
cording to The Associated Press. Eight
other states have passed similar “red
flag” laws in the last year, bringing the
total with such laws to 14. Several more
states are expected to take up measures
in 2019.
GUN CONTROL AT NATIONAL LEVEL
State legislatures, both Republican- and
Democratic-controlled, passed 76 gun
control laws in the past year — including
bans on bump stocks, caps on magazine
sizes, new minimum-age requirements
and expanded background checks.
Among the victories for gun control ad-
vocates was an omnibus bill in Florida
that raised the minimum age to pur-
chase a firearm in the state to 21 and ex-
tended the waiting period to three days.
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In all, more than half the states passed
at least one gun control measure in 2018,
with Washington and New York joining
the trend in 2019.
At the same time, there were signifi-
cantly fewer new state laws expanding
gun rights in 2018 than the year before,
according to an end-of-year report by
the national advocacy group Giffords.
Data provided by the N.R.A. also indi-
cated that the number of enacted gun
control measures outnumbered pro-gun
measures for the first time in at least six
years.
But at the federal level, any momen-
tum for change was quickly stymied by
partisan gridlock. Republican leaders in
Congress remained silent as their Dem-
ocratic colleagues called, once again, for
changes in the wake of a mass shooting.
The White House flip-flopped on prom-
ises to raise the minimum age to pur-
chase rifles and to enforce universal
background checks. And the N.R.A.
pressed lawmakers, including the presi-
dent, to give priority to the interests of
gun owners.
In the end, the only significant na-
tional change was a ban on bump stocks
— which members of both parties had
been calling for since the Las Vegas
shooting in October 2017. The House of
Representatives, where Democrats
took power in January, has now made
gun safety a priority — but with a Re-
publican Senate and president, the
chances of any such legislation moving
beyond the House are virtually nil.
IMPROVING SCHOOL SECURITY
In the days after Parkland, a flood of
threats and false alarms heightened the
focus on school security nationwide.
Schools have turned to an array of
measures: hiring armed guards, requir-
ing students to carry clear backpacks,
arming teachers with baseball bats.
Some campuses have added more cam-
eras and metal detectors or hired com-
panies to monitor students’ social media
for potential threats — all of which has
created a lucrative market for school se-
curity.
The president voiced support in the
days after Parkland for arming teachers
with guns as a way to prevent further
massacres. It was an early indicator of
EVE EDELHEIT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
the tack that he and congressional Re-
publicans would take in addressing the
shooting. In March, Mr. Trump an-
nounced the creation of a federal com-
mission to examine school safety pro-
posals, including raising the minimum
age for buying certain firearms. But two
months later, Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos informed a Senate commit-
tee that the commission would not look
at the role guns play in school violence.
Its final report played down the role of
guns, and advised schools to improve
mental health services and train school
personnel to use firearms.
FROM PROTESTS TO THE POLLS
When it became clear that Congress
would not act on guns, the Parkland stu-
dents turned their attention to rallying
young voters and increasing turnout in
the midterm elections in November.
Madison Leal, a student at Stoneman
Douglas, said in March about politicians
who would not take action: “I’m going to
vote them out of office. And so is my en-
tire generation. And they’ll be sorry
then.”
In the summer, a busload of students
traveled the country on a Road to
Change tour aimed at registering young
voters. In tandem with various voter
groups and celebrities promoting regis-
tration, the Parkland students helped
spike record numbers for young voter
registration, registering thousands of
voters at their rallies. The March for Our
Lives campaign reported a 10 percent
increase in youth turnout in 2018, com-
pared with the previous midterm elec-
tions in 2014.
Two dozen pro-gun candidates were
defeated in contests for House seats,
though 88 of the 129 candidates backed
by the N.R.A. did win. Gun control fea-
tured prominently as an issue in the
midterms, and underdog candidates
like Lucy McBath of Georgia, Jason
Crow of Colorado and Abigail Span-
berger of Virginia won seats in the
House after campaigning strongly for
gun control measures.
One thing was clear from the
midterms: Young voters were ener-
gized. The results of that may continue
to be felt in the years and decades to
come.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Trump tries to put
wall deal in good light
NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON
Border agreement was
arguably most punishing
defeat he has experienced
BY PETER BAKER
AND MAGGIE HABERMAN
In pursuit of a wall, President Trump
ran into one. A single-minded drive to
force Congress to finance his signature
campaign promise has left Mr. Trump
right back where he started, this time
seeking a way to climb over the political
barrier in his way after trying to charge
through it did not work.
As he inched closer to reluctantly ac-
cepting a bipartisan spending compro-
mise without the money he demanded
for his border wall, Mr. Trump offered no
acknowledgment this week that his
pressure tactics had failed even as aides
sought to minimize the damage by
tamping down criticism on the right.
One call was made to Lou Dobbs, a fa-
vorite of Mr. Trump’s whose Fox Busi-
ness Network show he often tries to
catch live. Another was placed to Sean
Hannity, the Fox host who regularly
talks with the president. The message:
Mr. Trump deserved support because he
still forced concessions that he would
never have gotten without a five-week
partial shutdown of the government.
Even so, it was arguably the most
punishing defeat Mr. Trump has experi-
enced as president, and it left the White
House scrounging for other ways to pay
for a wall on the southwestern border
and rethinking its approach to a Con-
gress now partly controlled by Demo-
crats. Mr. Trump’s inability to reach a
satisfying deal despite the negotiating
experience he regularly touted on the
campaign trail suggested that any aspi-
rations of collaboration across party
lines may be even more elusive than he
had imagined.
“We shut down the government for 35
days, we put America through this cri-
sis, we jeopardized our economy — for
what?” said Senator Richard J. Durbin
of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat
in the upper chamber and a member of
the House-Senate committee that nego-
tiated this week’s spending deal. “To-
tally unnecessary.”
The agreement that lawmakers
produced this week would allocate
$1.375 billion for fencing along the bor-
der, even less than was on the table at
one point last year. Mr. Trump would not
say whether he would sign it, but he
seemed to be leaning toward it in the in-
terest of avoiding another government
shutdown at midnight Friday.
“With the wall, they want to be
stingy,” Mr. Trump complained about
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other con-
gressional Democrats during an en-
counter with reporters on Wednesday.
“But we have options that most people
don’t really understand.”
Those options involve diverting
money from other programs and poten-
tially declaring a national emergency to
access further funds. In the end, aides
said, Mr. Trump may even secure more
money than Congress denied him. But
those options were just as available to
Mr. Trump in December before the
showdown that closed federal agencies.
While acknowledging disappoint-
ment in the agreement, the president
and his aides characterized it as better
than it seemed, citing money it would
provide for overall border security. Mr.
Trump argued that the shutdown had
been useful because it educated the
country about troubles at the border
and, if nothing else, he has framed the
national debate on his terms.
That did not completely assuage con-
servatives.
Representative Mark Meadows, Re-
publican of North Carolina and the
chairman of the House Freedom Cau-
President Trump offered no acknowledgment that his pressure tactics had failed, and
aides sought to minimize the damage by tamping down criticism on the right.
CORRECTIONS
• An article on Feb. 1 about Russian in-
fluence in Venezuela referred incom-
pletely to the countries in Latin America
that support President Nicolás Maduro.
In addition to Nicaragua and Cuba, Bo-
livia and Suriname also support him.
• An article on Tuesday about a new
..
cus, contradicted the White House line
and declared that the agreement was “a
bad deal for the president.”
“Only in Washington, D.C., can we
start out with needing $25 billion for bor-
der security measures and expect ap-
plause at 1.37,” he said Tuesday on Fox
News. “I mean, only in D.C. is that a win-
ning deal.”
Mr. Meadows and his allies were
among those targeted by the White
House in hopes of avoiding a more
threatening conservative revolt. A
meeting with members of his Freedom
Caucus in the Oval Office was partly
aimed at urging them to hold their fire in
television interviews when talking
about the bill, according to a person
briefed on the effort.
And indeed, despite his complaints
about the bill, Mr. Meadows made a
point on Wednesday of not blaming Mr.
Trump. “I think he handled it as well as
anybody could handle it, given a dys-
functional Congress,” Mr. Meadows told
reporters.
Among those involved in the out-
reach, according to the person briefed
on the discussions, was Bill Shine, a
White House deputy chief of staff and
former Fox executive who in the West
Wing is seen as adept at getting some
hosts at Fox to respond to White House
concerns.
“With the wall, they want to be
stingy. But we have options.”
Since coming to office, Mr. Trump has
missed several opportunities to make
more progress on the wall. Instead of
Mexico paying for a $25 billion, 1,000-
mile concrete barrier, as the president
once said would happen, he has been
seeking partial installments from Con-
gress, arguing that his new trade agree-
ment with Mexico will ultimately pay off
enough to offset the cost. The partial in-
stallments have generally gone to re-
placing or repairing existing barriers,
not to building the new concrete or steel
walls Mr. Trump wants.
At one point last year, the president
and Democrats were close to a deal in
which he would get all $25 billion for the
wall in exchange for protections for 1.8
million young immigrants brought to
the country illegally as children. But Mr.
Trump ultimately turned away because
he also wanted cuts to legal immigration
that Democrats would not accept.
In his budget request for this year, Mr.
Trump asked for $1.6 billion, and the
Senate Appropriations Committee
agreed on a bipartisan basis to give him
that last summer. But the measure
stalled until after the midterm elections
in November.
By the time Mr. Trump met with Ms.
Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer of
New York, the Democratic leader, in De-
cember, they offered $1.375 billion. The
president then insisted on $5.7 billion,
and when he did not get it, much of the
government was left without the fund-
ing to keep the doors open.
During the shutdown, Ms. Pelosi took
an even harder line, saying she would
not spend a single dollar on Mr. Trump’s
wall, although she said she would pro-
vide money for other border security.
The deal reached this week returned
to the same $1.375 billion available in
December to pay for 55 miles of fencing
along the border, although not walls
based on the new steel or concrete
prototypes Mr. Trump has promoted.
Mr. Trump and his aides claimed vic-
tory because they had gotten more than
Ms. Pelosi’s zero dollars, and they noted
that the agreement also included $23 bil-
lion for Immigration and Customs En-
forcement and Customs and Border
Protection, an increase from $21 billion
last year.
But Democrats said much of the in-
crease would go to their priorities, like
more customs agents and humanitarian
aid, not to Mr. Trump’s.
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
business venture by Les Moonves, the
former chief executive of CBS, referred
imprecisely to the payment of legal fees
incurred by Mr. Moonves.
Although CBS paid some of Mr.
Moonves’s legal fees, it is not paying
them amid an arbitration fight over his
severance.

..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
Australia’s top tech moguls make some noise
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Start-up’s founders call
for action on climate
change and immigration
BY NELLIE BOWLES
Atlassian is a very boring software com-
pany. It develops products for software
engineers and project managers, with
hits like Jira (for software project man-
agement and bug tracking) and Fisheye
(a revision-control browser). And who
could forget Confluence (an enterprise
knowledge management system)?
So why are its two founders house-
hold names in Australia?
Because Scott Farquhar and Mike
Cannon-Brookes, both 39, are the coun-
try’s first start-up-to-I.P.O. tech billion-
aires. And because in the last year they
have started to make noise.
Until recently, they largely stayed out
of the public eye, even as Atlassian grew
to become a $20 billion company. Now,
as Australian politics tilt toward the
right on global issues like immigration,
cybersecurity and climate change, they
are emerging as new political voices,
getting in Twitter spats and lobbying
Parliament.
The other reason they are now house-
hold names: In 2017, Mr. Farquhar
bought the most expensive home in Aus-
tralia, a historic Sydney estate that sold
for 73 million Australian dollars, or $52
million.
In December, Mr. Cannon-Brookes
broke that record when he closed on the
house next door.
MONEY AND RESPONSIBILITY
I met the Atlassian founders for a few
days in Sydney. Over brunches, a ferry
ride and a birthday party, they told me
about their new roles in public life and
what it feels like to be the first tech bil-
lionaires in a country where wealth usu-
ally comes from mining or banking.
“People are interested now in what
we’re saying,” Mr. Cannon-Brookes
said. “We have a voice. We have a sense
of responsibility.”
The two met as undergraduates at the
University of New South Wales, where
both were in a business scholarship pro-
gram sponsored by Australian compa-
French journalists harassed female peers
PARIS
BY AURELIEN BREEDEN
The rumors had been out there for
years: A private Facebook group that in-
cluded many up-and-coming French
male journalists was behind waves of
online insult, mockery and harassment
aimed at women in the business.
Now, with confirmation that a group
that called itself the Ligue du LOL ex-
isted, there is a moment of reckoning
about sexism in the French news media,
an insular and still male-dominated in-
dustry in a country where the #MeToo
movement has met with some resist-
ance.
Some of the men behind the group,
whose name means the League of LOL,
have issued apologies, and several have
been suspended from their jobs.
In one case, a member of the group
made a pornographic photo montage of
a feminist writer and circulated it on
Twitter. In another, a member of the
group made a prank phone call to a
woman, pretending to be a media execu-
tive with a job offer, and then put the
conversation online.
“For six years, we asked ourselves if
we should speak out, and we didn’t dare
at first because we knew that what we
wanted to say wouldn’t be understood,”
said Léa Lejeune, a French journalist at
the business magazine Challenges.
Writing about her experience on
Slate.fr, Ms. Lejeune said that from 2011
to 2013, members of the group left insult-
ing comments on her feminist blog and
falsely suggested that she had slept with
her boss.
But today, Ms. Lejeune said, “there
has been a huge change.”
“It’s similar to #MeToo, in the sense
that victims speaking out are finally be-
ing heard,” she said.
While the movement has been met
with skepticism in France, there have
been recent signs of shifting attitudes.
Figures published this month, for in-
stance, showed that the French police
received drastically more reports of sex-
ual crimes last year because victims
were more willing to come forward — a
change officials attributed in part to
#MeToo.
The newspaper Libération reported
on Monday that in December, HuffPost
France had fired three journalists who
were part of an all-male private discus-
sion channel called “RBF” — as in “Ra-
dio Beer Soccer” — where sexist, racist
and homophobic comments were com-
monplace.
And the weekly magazine L’Express
reported on Monday that two Vice
France employees were fired in 2017 af-
ter a similar message group was uncov-
ered.
Scott Farquhar, left, and Mike Cannon-Brookes at the headquarters of their $20 billion company, Atlassian, in Sydney, Australia. They are Australia’s first tech billionaires.
nies. They were encouraged to join one
of those companies after graduating,
but instead the two friends founded At-
lassian, shocking their teachers and
friends.
It was 2002. Doing a start-up was un-
usual.
“It was disbelief, really — why would
A march in Paris last year against sexual violence. Recent figures show more French women are willing to report sexual abuse.
The Ligue du LOL Facebook group
had about 30 members, many of whom
are now established journalists, adver-
tising executives, podcasters or blog-
gers. Rumors about it had circulated in
the French media for years. But its ex-
istence was made public only last week,
when Libération’s fact-checking depart-
ment published a piece documenting its
activities.
Over a dozen people soon took to so-
cial media to say they had been targets.
Victims of the harassment, many of
whom were young, aspiring journalists,
say that members of the group repeat-
edly mocked them, especially on Twit-
ter, denigrating their work or making
lewd jokes and crude photo montages at
their expense.
One target, a feminist writer who goes
by the name Daria Marx, wrote on her
blog on Sunday that harassment against
her had peaked when she created an on-
line fund-raiser for her birthday to buy a
scooter, which she shared on Twitter.
“I received a flood of hatred like never
before,” she wrote, including death
threats and harassment by phone. “I
would wake up at night to see if the har-
assment had stopped, I went to bed with
insults, and I woke up with 40 new foul
mentions.”
On Monday, several former members
of the Ligue du LOL were suspended by
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you not go with a sponsor company?”
said Christine Van Toorn, the program’s
director and a lecturer at the school.
They relied on credit cards for initial
financing. They advertised by going to
developer meetups, buying beer for the
room and putting Atlassian stickers on
the bottles.
CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
their employers after the outpouring of
accusations.
Among them were Alexandre Her-
vaud, a senior web editor at Libération,
and David Doucet, the editor in chief of
the cultural magazine Les Inrocks.
Stephen des Aulnois, who admitted
making a pornographic photo montage
of Ms. Marx, stepped down as editor in
chief of the erotic web review Le Tag
Parfait.
Many of the group’s former members
who now work at publications or on pod-
casts perceived as progressive or femi-
nist posted apologies on Twitter.
Vincent Glad, a journalist who fre-
quently worked with Libération, ac-
knowledged that he had created the
group in 2009. He said that the original
intent had been to share private jokes
and have fun, not harass women, but
that the group had become “a monster
that completely escaped from me.”
“We would talk of trolling, it was har-
assment,” Mr. Glad said in an apology on
Monday. At the time, he said, he failed to
see the “profoundly male chauvinistic”
side of their humor.
“I was not bold enough to say in a
clear way that sometimes, really, we
went too far,” he said. Libération has
stopped working with him for now.
Mr. Glad said his opinions on femi-
nism had radically changed.
The company took off almost immedi-
ately.
“Within three years we went from pa-
riah to sponsoring the program our-
selves,” Mr. Farquhar said.
The products they created were
cheap and easy to use. They sold by
word of mouth (the company employs
Aude Lorriaux, a freelance journalist
and spokeswoman for Prenons la Une, a
group that advocates for gender equal-
ity in the media, said that what mem-
bers of the league considered harmless
jokes had a very real impact on careers.
Many of the women lost self-confi-
dence, she said, and some left social net-
works — which have become a key part
of a journalist’s ability to showcase work
and keep a public profile.
“What happened is that these men
built their careers at the expense of
women,” Ms. Lorriaux said. “They built
their careers on this men’s club, where
you reinforce each other at the expense
of others.”
Mélanie Wanga, a French journalist
and podcaster who was targeted, said
the men were protected by a “culture of
impunity” because they were young, tal-
ented professionals who had mastered
the “ins and outs” of social media. It was
also long before issues like cyberbully-
ing were publicly acknowledged.
But many women say harassment
will be fully curbed only when more
women rise to positions of leadership in
the media.
“Today, I would like to no longer see
these kinds of ‘boys clubs’ take shape,”
Ms. Wanga said.
Juliette Hirsch contributed reporting.
MATTHEW ABBOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
few sales representatives). But Silicon
Valley paid them little mind. When their
friend Didier Elzinga, founder of Culture
Amp, was at a venture capital dinner in
Palo Alto, Calif., an investor asked why
people should care about Atlassian.
“And I said, ‘O.K. Tell me a company in
the Valley that listed with a $5 billion
U.S.-China relationship
at ‘dangerous crossroads’
WASHINGTON
In new report, scholars say
there’s a smarter way for
Trump to counter Beijing
BY EDWARD WONG
To compete with a more assertive China,
the United States should invest in alli-
ances and multilateral institutions,
which President Trump and his admin-
istration have rejected or undermined, a
report issued this week by prominent
scholars and former top White House,
State Department and trade officials
working on China concluded.
In addition, the Trump administration
should take firm stands against China
on its malign policies, whether mercan-
tilist measures or military expansion-
ism, but should avoid overreacting to
hard-line actions by President Xi Jin-
ping and the Communist Party while
searching for areas of cooperation with
Beijing, the report said.
The United States and China “find
their bilateral relationship at a danger-
ous crossroads,” said the report, issued
by the Asia Society and the 21st Century
China Center at the University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego. “The United States
and China are on a collision course. The
foundations of good will that took dec-
ades to build are rapidly breaking
down.”
The report was overseen by Orville
Schell of the Asia Society and Susan L.
Shirk, a professor at the University of
California, San Diego, who worked on
China policy as a deputy assistant secre-
tary of state under President Bill Clin-
ton. The two spent Monday in Washing-
ton briefing policymakers at the White
House and State Department on what
they call “smart competition.”
The report, issued Tuesday, is the sec-
ond written by the group of China ex-
perts. The 17 authors “are all on this es-
calator away from the idea that engage-
ment is functional and that things were
generally heading in a convergent direc-
tion despite setbacks,” Mr. Schell said in
an interview. “That’s a startling change
that has pulled the floor out from under-
neath many of our old assumptions.”
Ms. Shirk said the group agreed that it
was “good to get tougher with China and
call out the Chinese policies that are not
keeping with global norms and detri-
mental to U.S. values.” But, she said, “we
feel more strongly that the Trump ad-
ministration is going about this in the
wrong way.” She added, “The way
they’re going about it is whack ’em and
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 7
market cap and where the two founders
own 75 percent,’” Mr. Elzinga said.
“They didn’t need Silicon Valley.”
First they confused Silicon Valley.
And then they confused Australia.
“The orthodoxy amongst the Austral-
ian tech companies is to stay away from
politics,” said Alan Jones, the founder of
M8 Ventures, an Australian venture
capital firm. “And then now there’s these
guys.”
Their approach to policy is an exten-
sion of how they run a business together
and live next door to each other: by rely-
ing on their differences.
Mr. Cannon-Brookes’s father was the
chief executive of Citigroup Australia.
His son wears his hair long, usually un-
der a trucker hat. He has a shaggy beard
and swears casually.
Mr. Farquhar’s roots are more work-
ing class: His father worked at a service
station, and his mother worked at Mc-
Donald’s. He is quieter, with close-
cropped, sandy brown hair.
He was recently upset that he hadn’t
finished a marathon in under four hours
(it was four hours and two minutes).
When his green smoothie almost over-
flowed its glass (but didn’t), Mr. Far-
quhar immediately thought of lenses:
“Positive meniscus!” he exclaimed.
In their political activism, Mr. Can-
non-Brookes is often the public face,
posting on Twitter and talking to the
news media, while Mr. Farquhar focuses
on Canberra, Australia’s capital —
where this week he caused a stir by con-
demning a new law under which tech
companies can be required to build tools
that help law enforcement get around
encryption in their products.
“Sometimes we try the front door,
sometimes we need to blow up the side
door,” Mr. Cannon-Brookes said of their
political activities.
LOBBYING FOR CHANGE
Both became more interested in Aus-
tralian politics after policies took a
sharp turn toward the parochial, with
the governing coalition abandoning ef-
forts to address climate change and
stoking fears around immigration.
That presented a problem for a com-
pany that needs to hire talented engi-
neers, often from abroad. And so ini-
tially, the founders’ main goal was basic:
to make Australia more tech-friendly
and its politicians more tech-aware.
AUSTRALIA, PAGE 8
push back for the sake of pushing back.”
The group includes Charlene Barshef-
sky, former United States trade repre-
sentative; Winston Lord, former ambas-
sador to China; and Evan S. Medeiros,
former senior director for Asia in Presi-
dent Barack Obama’s National Security
Council.
The report, titled “Course Correc-
tion,” noted that the current period of
tensions was the worst in 40 years, even
as the two nations’ “economic and mili-
tary capabilities have become more
evenly matched, making the dangers of
overt conflict far greater.”
“The Trump administration has exac-
erbated these dangers by undervaluing
two of the United States’ greatest ad-
vantages: our network of allies and
partners and the global multilateral in-
stitutions on which we all depend,” the
report said, adding that such moves
have “tarnished the U.S. image as a bea-
con of liberal values on the world stage.”
President Trump should take
firm stands against China but
avoid overreacting to hard-line
actions, the report said.
The authors pointed to Mr. Trump’s
abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Part-
nership, a trade agreement that Mr.
Obama had helped forge to push China
to conform to stricter norms in trade re-
lations. Eleven nations — including al-
lies Japan, Canada and Australia — re-
negotiated the agreement without the
United States last year and are using it
to address Mr. Trump’s protectionist
policies as well as those of China.
As for Mr. Trump’s trade war, his sig-
nature policy on China, the authors ad-
vised shifting the focus from tariffs to
forcing Beijing to change industrial pol-
icy measures that violate international
norms. These include state subsidies,
forced technology transfer, intellectual
property theft, cyberespionage and the
barring of foreign companies from fair
market access.
The United States should also work
with other nations to strengthen World
Trade Organization rules and punish
China for violations, the report said.
On the security front, the United
States must continue to invest in its East
Asian alliances, especially Japan, even
though Mr. Trump constantly questions
expenditures on those kinds of military
commitments, the report said.
The authors list a few areas of poten-
tial cooperation between the United
States and China, including global pub-
lic health, climate change and prevent-
ing nuclear proliferation.

8 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
business
Barely holding on in Spain
SPAIN, FROM PAGE 1
tionally offered protection, but even
these are being reduced as deficit-re-
duction policies required by the Euro-
pean Union kick in. That unraveling ex-
plains, in part, the populist discontent in
Europe.
“Politicians haven’t created measures
to help those of us in the middle get back
on our feet, and we’re a big group,” said
Mrs. Navarro, her frustration clear.
“What happened to me has happened
to many people I know,” she said, citing
friends and neighbors who had confided
their problems. “When we get together,
we call ourselves ‘los invisibles’ — the
invisibles,” she added. “We are the for-
gotten ones.”
ONCE SEEN AS A MODEL
In Spain, it seems as if this should not be
happening. The country was praised by
European policymakers as a model for
the recovery, having tightened its belt to
get out of a deep recession. An overhaul,
which included sweeping labor law
changes in 2012 that gave employers
more flexibility to fire and hire, helped
revive the economy.
Spain’s economy grew faster, at an an-
nual pace of 3 percent, than those of
France and Germany last year. Unem-
ployment fell last month to 14.4 percent,
the lowest level in a decade and down
from a staggering 27 percent in 2013.
But interviews with over a dozen
workers revealed a deep-seated disillu-
sionment with the recovery and the
quality of jobs emerging from it.
Changes in labor laws have weakened
job protections, as well as earnings.
With millions looking for work, employ-
ers can offer lower salaries, making it
harder for people to regain or maintain
living standards.
Mrs. Navarro and her husband were
among the better off. With degrees in
law, management and business, she
owned the events promotion company,
employing around 50 people on and off
for projects.
In 2006, some of her clients suddenly
stopped paying. Two years later, she had
to close shop. She found a managerial
job at a nonprofit foundation that paid
€2,500 a month (about $2,800), less than
before but enough to help maintain the
family’s lifestyle.
Then the foundation went under in
2012 — the same year the labor legisla-
tion took effect. Mrs. Navarro could not
find a new job. Because the foundation
had required her to register as self-em-
ployed, a tactic that allows employers to
avoid paying high social taxes, she re-
ceived no unemployment compensa-
tion.
Her husband lost his job the same
year and collected unemployment bene-
fits as he looked for work. He eventually
took over the charcuterie stand once
owned by Mrs. Navarro’s father in a
dimly lit produce market, becoming self-
employed. But his sales are down be-
cause other Spaniards, too, are econo-
mizing. Mr. Alvarez now earns €1,000 a
month, but after taxes and social securi-
ty, he takes home only about a third of
that.
Mrs. Navarro spent several years
sending out a stream of résumés, to no
avail, while also caring full time for her
grade-school children. “It wasn’t just
difficult, it was almost impossible,” she
said. “I got not one single interview.”
Finally, she was hired in 2017 for
€1,200 a month at a trade association for
entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Though a secretary in title and in pay,
she spends most of her time providing
legal advice to struggling business own-
ers.
With their lower incomes, the couple
Australia’s first tech billionaires make some noise
AUSTRALIA, FROM PAGE 7
First, they hosted a coding class for
elected officials and started working to
get engineering into more curriculums.
“It was like organizing the world’s
worst wedding,” Mr. Cannon-Brookes
said.
Still, it earned them some respect.
“They do some wonderfully creative
things,” said Julie Bishop, who was dep-
uty leader of the Liberal Party from 2007
to 2018. “Mike and Scott have an enor-
mously influential role to play.”
Australia just passed Switzerland as
the richest country in the world, as
measured by household median wealth,
and Mr. Cannon-Brookes thinks its reli-
ance on mineral wealth has made the
country slower to make tech investment
or long-term economic change a pri-
ority.
Mr. Cannon-Brookes is especially pas-
sionate about climate change. As Prime
Minister Scott Morrison has walked
back Australia’s renewable energy am-
bitions, Mr. Cannon-Brookes has be-
come a staunch critic.
“You’ve made me mad & inspired me,”
he told the prime minister on Twitter,
adding an expletive for emphasis.
Along with goading Elon Musk to
bring Australia the world’s largest bat-
tery to help solve its power problems,
Mr. Cannon-Brookes has been gather-
ing others in the Australian business
community to push Canberra. Peter
Dutton, the home affairs minister, has
told the Atlassian founders to “stick to
their knitting.”
“His knitting is running the country
well, and he doesn’t seem to be doing it,”
Mr. Cannon-Brookes said.
He personally invests in alternative
fuel and food sources, and he is espe-
The Madrid suburb where Raquel Navarro and her husband, José Enrique Alvarez, are raising their two children. They figure they’ll
be unable to pay their mortgage by summer. “The economy seems to be improving, but we’re not benefiting,” Mrs. Navarro said.
David Sahara lost his job in 2017 as a senior electrician at the carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroën. He and his partner had to move to a
tiny apartment in Madrid’s outskirts and they’re now kept afloat by unemployment benefits.
are straining to pay household bills.
Mrs. Navarro said she didn’t know what
she’d do when their savings dried up in a
few months.
“My father taught me to work hard,
but he didn’t teach me that life can just
cut you down,” she said.
WORSENING INEQUALITY
The gap between people slipping toward
the bottom and those at the top shows no
sign of narrowing. Wealth divisions be-
tween Europe’s lower- and middle-in-
come families and its upper-income
Working inside a cubicle, left, and walking through a neon tunnel at Atlassian’s headquarters in Sydney. The company’s founders said that running a tech company in Australia was
a challenge, and recruitment is difficult. Two-thirds of Atlassian’s work force is in San Francisco.
cially interested in controlled-envi-
ronment agriculture.
“My wife and I have a big belief in the
future of insects as a food source,” Mr.
Cannon-Brookes said over brunch (gra-
nola, not insects).
Mr. Farquhar tends to focus on the is-
sues aligned with Atlassian’s fortunes:
cybersecurity (he says the new encryp-
tion law has cost the company
customers) and immigration (he argues
that the government is hurting recruit-
ment and innovation by aiming to cut
Australia’s immigration intake).
It is not at all clear whether he can in-
fluence the encryption law: Potential
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“I’ll take any kind of job. What’s
clear is that whatever I get next
won’t be as well paid as what I
was doing before.”
households are at their greatest, accord-
ing to the Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development.
The median income for middle-class
families has also fallen, especially in
Southern Europe, eroding purchasing
amendments were scheduled to be de-
bated in Parliament this week, but no
changes were expected.
But on immigration, Atlassian’s
founders have moved the needle. After
Australia’s skilled worker program cut
several technology roles (including web
developer) from its approved visa cate-
gories, Mr. Farquhar and Mr. Cannon-
Brookes lobbied Parliament to change
course and add more opportunities for
international recruitment.
On a ferry ride to work, Mr. Farquhar
pointed out the two founders’ houses,
estates set in a lush Sydney hillside. Be-
fore they bought the properties, plans
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIANFRANCO TRIPODO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
power and feeding discontent that has
driven populist protests like the Yellow
Vest movement in France. Political po-
larization is growing in Spain, where
Vox, a right-wing nationalist party, re-
cently won parliamentary seats in An-
dalusia, the country’s biggest region.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has
taken heed. A Socialist leader, hegained
power last summer with the fragile
backing of Podemos, the left-wing anti-
austerity party. Warning of middle-class
frustrations, his embattled government
ordered a 22 percent increase in the
had been made to tear down the houses
and develop the lots.
Mr. Cannon-Brookes and his family
moved in a few weeks ago. He and Mr.
Farquhar opened a hole in the fence so
their children could play together. One
day a week, the founders pick up their
children at school together and take the
ferry home.
“It’s a changing of the guard,” Mr. Far-
quhar said, referring to the houses.
“They were owned by two newspaper
families. It used to be newspaper dynas-
ties, and now it’s technology dynasties.”
It was a symbolically significant tran-
sition. The Fairfax family, a newspaper
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
minimum wage in January and has
vowed to reverse some labor laws, in-
crease social spending and raise taxes
on companies and the rich. Spanish law-
makers rejected his budget on Wednes-
day, however, and Mr. Sánchez now may
have to call new elections.
For David Sahara and his partner, Ra-
chel Murillo, the prime minister’s efforts
appeal to a sense of injustice. They re-
cently moved to a tiny rental apartment
in Madrid’s outskirts. The couple’s fi-
nances have worn dangerously thin
since Mr. Sahara, 45, lost his job in 2017
as a senior electrician at the carmaker
PSA Peugeot Citroën.
Over 24 years, he rose from the fac-
tory floor to become a quality control su-
pervisor, netting €1,600 a month. Ms.
Murillo, 47, earned €2,000 a month as a
vocational teacher. They lived in a
trendy Madrid neighborhood.
Then Mr. Sahara, who had expected a
promotion, learned his job was on the
line. Labor law changes had made it eas-
ier for employers to shed workers when
profits fell; Peugeot Citroën decided to
cut over 400 permanent jobs, he said.
Mr. Sahara learned he was being re-
assigned to the factory floor. “It was
completely demoralizing,” he said. “I
felt like I’d been discarded.” He ended up
negotiating a buyout.
Unemployment benefits keep the cou-
ple afloat. But that state money, with
budget cuts, now lasts 18 months, down
from 24.
“I’ll take any kind of job,” Mr. Sahara
said. “What’s clear is that whatever I get
next won’t be as well paid as what I was
doing before.”
While some workers can find jobs
with equal or better pay, those with in-
termediate skills are more vulnerable.
“They might get back into a worse
type of employment and find them-
selves out of pocket, due to reduced
earnings,” said Stefano Scarpetta, the
director for employment, labor and so-
cial affairs at the Organization for Eco-
nomic Cooperation and Development.
“It gets much harder to be a part of the
middle class.”
JOBS THAT LAST HOURS
Young people face higher hurdles. For
the first time, a generation of European
youths can’t envision living the middle-
class lives of their parents. They face a
dearth of stable jobs and a rise in tempo-
rary and part-time contracts that slice
work into weeks, days and hours.
When used as intended — to offer ex-
perience — these contracts can lead to
steady work and better incomes.
But companies and Europe’s public
sector have mostly used them to dodge
protections for permanent employees.
In Spain alone, 90 percent of new jobs in
2017 were temporary; a third lasted less
than a week, according to Caritas, a so-
cial support organization.
Javier Lopez, 30, supervises baggage
handlers at Madrid’s Barajas Airport
who work on contracts of two to eight
hours. In summer, interns work three
months unpaid, learning how to move
suitcases, he said.
Mr. Lopez is one of the lucky ones: he
has a full-time job with an airport sub-
contractor, earning €1,000 a month. But
his salary doesn’t cover his €800 rent
and other living costs since his wife, a
flight attendant, went on maternity
leave.
So Mr. Lopez is training for a second
job as one of the part-time baggage
handlers he oversees.
“When I end my shift supervising
these people,” he said, “I’ll become one
of them.”
Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW ABBOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
dynasty, had owned the properties since
1901.
"It was an establishment family, a
very conservative family, very commit-
ted members of the Congregational
Church, and they were mainstays of
Sydney’s exclusive eastern suburbs,”
said Bridget Griffen-Foley, a professor
of media at Macquarie University in
Sydney. “So it’s quite symbolic that the
fortunes of the old media dynasty have
been so affected by digital disruption,
and now you’ve got tech billionaires tak-
ing over.”
This is a big change for Australia,
where software entrepreneurs do not
..
Surveys find
hints of
renewed
optimism
Government shutdown
and stock market tumult
had eroded confidence
BY STEPHEN GROCER
The government shutdown and tumult
in the stock market late in 2018 eroded
confidence in the United States econ-
omy among business owners and con-
sumers alike last month.
Now that the stock market has rallied
and the government has reopened, will
optimism about the economy rebound,
or is the recent slide an indication of a
more lasting shift?
In January, both the optimism index
for small businesses of the National Fed-
eration of Independent Business and
the consumer sentiment index of the
University of Michigan declined to their
lowest levels since at least November
2016. And over the past few months, the
Conference Board’s index of consumer
confidence posted its steepest decline
since 2011.
Those three indexes had jumped in
the months after Donald J. Trump was
elected president on optimism that his
pro-business agenda of reduced taxes
and regulation would ignite economic
growth. The indexes peaked last year as
the stock market marched to record
highs, and despite the recent pullback,
they remain at historically elevated lev-
els.
Businesses, policymakers and invest-
ors often use sentiment surveys to eval-
uate the direction of the economy.
If confidence is high, the thinking
goes, business owners and consumers
are more likely to open their wallets to
make purchases, hire employees and
expand their operations. If those same
groups are worried about the future,
they are more likely to curtail their
spending.
But upward swings in sentiment do
not necessarily translate into increased
spending and economic growth. The
economy, for instance, remained slug-
gish for more than a year after con-
sumer and business confidence jumped
in the months after the 2016 election.
Such indexes are also sensitive to
short-term moves in the stock market
and political developments that have lit-
tle effect on spending.
Indications that sentiment is set to re-
bound are beginning to appear. Eco-
nomic confidence recovered in a poll
conducted in early February for The
New York Times by the online research
firm SurveyMonkey.
The University of Michigan releases a
preliminary version of its survey
roughly halfway through each month
and then its final report at the end. Last
month, the final figure, although the low-
est since October 2016, showed a slight
uptick from the preliminary version,
which was released during the shut-
down.
Also, the survey’s personal financial
expectations index, considered a better
indicator of household spending than
the overall index, held up during the pe-
riod.
The university will release its prelimi-
nary consumer sentiment index for Feb-
ruary on Friday.
Ben Casselman contributed reporting.
“The orthodoxy amongst the
Australian tech companies is
to stay away from politics. And
then now there’s these guys.”
have the kind of cultural sway they have
in the United States and elsewhere.
“Most of the mansions owned by the
neighbors are offshore billionaires or re-
ally old Australian money — mineral
money, gold rush money,” said Mr.
Jones, the venture capitalist. “It’s been
100 years since most of the families on
Sydney Harbor made their money.”
Money notwithstanding, running a
growing tech company in Australia is a
challenge, the founders said. Recruit-
ment is hard.
Two-thirds of Atlassian’s work force is
in San Francisco.
The founders have formed a cohort of
friends with big tech companies outside
Silicon Valley, including Daniel Ek, the
Swedish chief executive of Spotify, and
Ryan Smith of Qualtrics, who is based in
Utah.
“We’ve got all the same problems,”
Mr. Cannon-Brookes said.
And so every two years the Atlassian
founders have hosted a private retreat,
inviting every Australian start-up val-
ued over $100 million, which is about a
dozen.
They hike and fish. Families are invit-
ed. The goal is to encourage camarade-
rie and share best practices.
It is one of many reasons the two men
say they would not leave Australia for
Silicon Valley.
“I know the U.S. very well, and I know
Australia very well,” Mr. Farquhar said.
“And I think we’ve got it better here.”

..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Opinion
How religion dominates Indonesia’s politics
The next Eka Kurniawan
election
is in April,
but the JAKARTA, INDONESIA When Joko
Islamists have Widodo, the incumbent president of
Indonesia, last year chose Ma’ruf Amin
already won. as his running mate for the general
election this April, it became clear that
Indonesian politics is now backed into a
corner. Mr. Ma’ruf is an Islamic cleric
and scholar, and Mr. Joko was perhaps
hoping to dampen attacks from conser-
vative and radical Islamic groups that
have called him anti-Islam (even
though he is Muslim himself). Instead,
he has built a Trojan horse for his oppo-
nents outside the walls of his own city.
The presidential race, in which Mr.
Joko is again facing Prabowo Subianto,
a ex-army general and former son-in-
law of the dictator Suharto, looks like a
replay of the 2014 contest. Back then,
Mr. Joko won by a small margin, on a
platform promising a grand maritime
strategy for Indonesia and to revitalize
the economy partly through major
infrastructure projects. This year, it
seems, the decisive issue will be the
candidates’ professed commitment to
Islam.
Mr. Joko and Mr. Prabowo are sched-
uled to meet for their second debate on
Feb. 17, and the agenda will focus on
natural resources, infrastructure and
the environment. But soon enough, the
main issue of this election — religion —
will return to the
Early fore.
In the last four
marriage years, Mr. Joko has
prevents offered a modicum
adultery, says of hope to progres-
one cleric. sive and pro-demo-
Vaccines are cratic groups. He is
not halal, goes not an ideal figure
one fatwa. and has been slow in
dealing with human
rights issues like
military violence
against civilians. But there is no other
choice. With opposition parties — the
Great Indonesia Movement Party, the
National Mandate Party (PAN), the
Prosperous Justice Party — increas-
ingly supported by conservatives and
radicals, including some who wish for
the Suharto family’s return to power,
any hope for a more democratic society
has been placed on Mr. Joko’s shoul-
ders.
Polarization has deepened since
Jakarta’s gubernatorial election two
years ago. Mr. Joko supported the
incumbent Basuki Tjahaja Purnama
against Anies Baswedan, a former
education minister of Arab descent. Mr.
Basuki, being of Chinese and Christian
heritage, became an easy target for a
campaign based on ethnic and religious
differences. Mr. Basuki wasn’t just
defeated in the election; Mr. Anies’s
supporters also succeeded in sending
Mr. Basuki to prison on charges of
blasphemy against Islam. (He was
released only last month.)
Mr. Prabowo and the rest of the oppo-
sition evidently learned a lot from Mr.
Basuki’s downfall. In 2014, they ran an
antiquated campaign based on the
supposed resurgence of communism
and the Indonesian Communist Party,
and failed. The Jakarta election has
taught them that tapping Muslim val-
ues is an effective way to galvanize
popular support.
Rally Alumni 212, one of the move-
Justice in Saudi Arabia: My father faces the death penalty
The Abdullah Alaoudh
kingdom’s
judiciary is
being pushed Despite the claims of Prince Moham-
far from any med bin Salman and his enablers, Saudi
Arabia is not rolling back the hard-line
semblance religious establishment. Instead, the
of the rule kingdom is curtailing the voices of
of law and moderation that have historically com-
bated extremism. Numerous Saudi
due process. activists, scholars and thinkers who
have sought reform and opposed the
forces of extremism and patriarchy
have been arrested. Many of them face
the death penalty.
Salman Alodah, my father, is a 61-
year-old scholar of Islamic law in Saudi
Arabia, a reformist who argued for
greater respect for human rights within
Shariah, the legal code of Islam based
on the Quran. His voice was heard
widely, partly owing to his popularity as
a public figure with 14 million followers
on Twitter.
On Sept. 10, 2017, my father, who was
disturbed by regional tensions after
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab
Emirates and Egypt imposed a block-
ade on Qatar, spoke obliquely about the
conflict and expressed his desire for
reconciliation. “May Allah mend their
hearts for the best of their peoples,” he
tweeted.
A few hours after his tweet, a team
from the Saudi security services came
to our house in Riyadh, searched the
house, confiscated some laptops and
took my father away.
The Saudi government was appar-
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
ments behind the campaign that put Mr.
Basuki in jail, and the Islamic Defend-
ers Front, an Islamist pressure group
that sometimes acts as a sort of Islamic
morality police, held the forum of Is-
lamic scholars that recommended Mr.
Prabowo as a presidential candidate.
But these religious conservatives don’t
much care that Mr. Prabowo doesn’t
actually have a strong Muslim back-
ground: “We are pretty laid back about
religion,” he has said, referring to his
multidenominational family. They care
ently angered and considered his tweet
a criminal violation. His interrogators
told my father that his assuming a
neutral position on the Saudi-Qatar
crisis and failing to stand with the Saudi
government was a crime.
He is being held in solitary confine-
ment in Dhahban prison in Jidda. He
was chained and handcuffed for months
inside his cell, deprived of sleep and
medical help and repeatedly interro-
gated throughout the day and night. His
deteriorating health — high blood pres-
sure and cholesterol that he developed
in prison — was ignored until he had to
be hospitalized. Until the trial, about a
year after his arrest, he was denied
access to lawyers.
On Sept. 4, a specialized criminal
court in Riyadh convened off-camera to
consider the numerous charges against
my father: stirring public discord and
inciting people against the ruler, calling
for change in government and support-
ing Arab revolutions by focusing on
arbitrary detention and freedom of
speech, possessing banned books and
describing the Saudi government as a
tyranny. The kingdom’s attorney gen-
eral sought the death penalty for him.
Saudi Arabia has exploited the gen-
eral indifference of the West toward its
internal politics and presented the
crackdown against reformist figures
like my father as a move against the
conservative religious establishment.
The reality is far from their claims.
My father is loved by the Saudi people
because his authority and legitimacy as
an independent Muslim scholar set him
apart from the state-appointed schol-
WILLY KURNIAWAN/REUTERS
that he is the only viable competition to
Mr. Joko and that he welcomes their
support.
The strategy of attacking Mr. Joko by
manipulating religious sentiment has
begun in earnest. Unlike Mr. Basuki, he
is Muslim — but that doesn’t mean
religion can’t be used against him, too.
The harshest accusation he has faced so
far is that his policies are anti-Islam or
against the ulema, Muslim scholars.
Here is one example of that, suppos-
edly: The Joko government’s decision
FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH
The author’s father, Salman Alodah, has
been in solitary confinement since 2017.
ars. Using Islamic principles to support
his arguments, he championed civil
liberties, participatory politics, the
separation of powers and judicial inde-
pendence.
For almost two decades, he has vo-
cally led the campaign against terror-
ism in Saudi Arabia. He has called for
renewing religious discourse and ar-
gued for moderate Islam. I wonder
whether he was arrested because of his
popular, progressive stances, because
since the ascent of Prince Mohammed
bin Salman, nobody else is allowed to be
seen as a “reformer.”
to dissolve Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a
pan-Islamist political organization that
supports the creation of a worldwide
caliphate. Another purported sign of
the government’s anti-Islam bend is a
subpoena that was issued two years
ago against Rizieq Shihab, an imam
from the Islamic Defenders Front,
whom the police suspected of sexting
and violating anti-pornography laws.
The voices of Islamic groups have
seemed amplified of late, but, to be
honest, they have been sounding for
quite a long time, both in politics and
throughout society. The 1998 Reformasi
movement, which ended Suharto’s
32-year dictatorship and brought de-
mocratization, didn’t just allow for
political liberalization; it also opened up
a space for Islamic political ideas.
The Prosperous Justice Party, for-
merly known as the Justice Party, was
born from on-campus spiritual groups,
but it now openly promotes the applica-
tion of Islamic law. PAN, at first an
inclusive nationalist party, has moved
closer to conservative Islamist groups.
Amien Rais, one of PAN’s founders,
doesn’t hesitate to call it “the party of
Allah” — and to call Mr. Joko’s Indone-
sian Democratic Party of Struggle “the
devil’s party.”
In the late 1990s, when you went to a
public school, you rarely came across a
female student or teacher who was
wearing a head scarf; today, it’s the
opposite. Same for employees in gov-
While reformers like my father sit in
prisons, Saudi Arabia has embraced
hard-liners like Saleh al-Fouzan, an
influential state-sponsored cleric and a
member of the Council of Senior Schol-
ars. In 2013, Mr. al-Fouzan denounced a
future where women would drive and
claimed that the Shia and other Mus-
lims who do not follow Wahhabi beliefs
are infidels and that anyone who dis-
agrees with that interpretation is an
infidel. He has also pronounced all-you-
can-eat buffet restaurants forbidden
because they strike him as akin to gam-
bling, which is banned in Islam.
In August, Mr. al-Fouzan was seated
between King Salman bin Abdulaziz
and Prince Mohammed at the royal
court to signal his authority and impor-
tance. A few months earlier, during a
meeting, the crown prince told Mr.
al-Fouzan, “You are like my father.” In
September, Mr. al-Fouzan issued a
fatwa urging the state to kill political
dissidents who promote sedition
against the ruler. A month later, my
friend Jamal Khashoggi was murdered.
In such a culture of fear, there is little
hope for justice. The judiciary is being
pushed far from any semblance of the
rule of law and due process.
Even some judges from the special-
ized criminal court, which is trying my
father, have themselves been detained
after they declined to impose harsh
penalties recommended by the attorney
general in certain cases. A judge told me
that judges recently appointed to the
specialized criminal court live with fear.
Yet there are some judges in Saudi
Arabia who have not submitted to the
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 9
BAGUS INDAHONO/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
ernment offices. Of course, this doesn’t A poster in Jakar-
mean that these women necessarily ta last month
support the political opposition, and it showing the
can’t be assumed that they are conser- Indonesian presi-
vative, much less radical. The head dential candidate
scarf might be a simple expression of Joko Widodo, left,
individual piety. Still, the trend can’t be and his running
ignored either. mate, Ma’ruf
Regional ordinances to accommodate Amin. Left, ballots
Shariah law have multiplied, the result printed for the
of the relative autonomy of some re- April election at a
gions. The specifics vary, ranging from factory in Jakarta.
the call for city officials to wear Muslim
dress to the ban on the sale, distribution
and consumption of alcohol. More
absurd — and more frightening — are
the movements for underage marriage
and against vaccines. Both are quite
shrill, and both use religious explana-
tions to justify their stances: Early
marriage prevents adultery, the popu-
lar cleric Ustaz Arifin Ilham has said,
and according to one fatwa, vaccines
are not halal. Idioms like “hijrah” —
meaning to improve one’s life by con-
forming to Islam — are heard more and
more frequently.
With the Islamization of Indonesian
society now evidently being mobilized
toward political ends, Mr. Joko must
proceed with caution. Yet he may have
gone too far.
To give a good impression to Muslim
voters, Mr. Joko has been presenting
himself as a pious leader who worships
diligently. He has even become a prayer
KURNIAWAN, PAGE 11
total control the monarchy seeks. In
2013, around 200 judges signed a public
petition calling for real legal and judicial
reforms, and condemned the “over-
whelming crackdown and suppression
of the real and patriotic voices.” They
wanted the independence of the judicia-
ry.
Those judges were intimidated, and
some were referred for investigation by
the Saudi Ministry of Justice. Muham-
mad al-Issa, the minister of justice at
the time, promised a “corrective cam-
paign” that would rid the judiciary of
these “corrupted judges.” Two judges
were fired and the rest quietly resumed
their work.
On Feb. 3, the Saudi government
postponed my father’s trial for the third
time without explanation and continues
to keep him in prison. My family has
been incessantly harassed since his
arrest; 17 members of my family are
barred from travel, including children;
our house and my personal library were
searched without warrant; my uncle
was arrested after tweeting about the
incident; and my assets have been
frozen without justification.
The murder of Mr. Khashoggi demol-
ished the myth of a reforming crown
prince running Saudi Arabia. But the
world needs to raise its voice to support
the Saudis actually fighting for reform
— people like Salman Alodah, my father,
for whom the Saudi attorney general
has sought the death penalty.
ABDULLAH ALAOUDH is a senior fellow at
the Center for Muslim-Christian Under-
standing at Georgetown University.
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..
10 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Iran’s 40 years of darkness

and assassination campaign stretching fighters to commit atrocities in Syria. unpaid while singing the “Death to
from Buenos Aires to Berlin. Rafsanja- German intelligence officials have also America” theme song.
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher
ni’s successor, Mohammad Khatami, accused Iran of trying to acquire nucle- The overarching goal of Western
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
was supposed to be a moderate. That ar materials in 2016, after the nuclear policy cannot be to appease Iran into
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
didn’t stop the bloody crackdown on deal went into effect. making partial and temporary conces-
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising
student protests in 1999 or Iran’s illicit These are countries that want better sions on its nuclear program, pur-
pursuit of a nuclear weapons program relations with Iran, and have made chased at the cost of financing its other
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
Bret Stephens during his tenure. efforts to steer a course independent malignant aims. The goal must be to
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one from the Trump administration. put an end, finally, to 40 years of
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Iranian leader who got little interna- Tehran’s behavior gives the lie to the Persian night.
SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
tional sympathy. Yet even under him idea that it matches conciliation with This should not be a military cam-
Western reporters penned flattering conciliation. It matches conciliation paign. But it can be a campaign of
From its beginning 40 years ago this tributes to Iran’s purported openness with contempt. economic pressure, to put Iran’s lead-
week, the Islamic Republic of Iran has — right up until the moment the re- Donald Trump’s foreign policy has ers to a fundamental choice between
enjoyed the open backing of, or at least gime stole the 2009 election and bru- mostly been shambolic, but credit their ideological ambitions and the
the generous benefit of the doubt from, tally suppressed the failed, if inspiring, where it is due: needs of their people. It can be a cam-
FLASHING YELLOW LIGHT IN FRANCE credulous fellow travelers in the West.
History hasn’t been kind to their sym-
Green Movement that followed.
Next was Hassan Rouhani, a man
Other than the stun-
ning folly of the
paign of diplomatic pressure, to under-
score that a regime that routinely
An oppor-
The Yellow Vests have been coming out to demonstrate pathy. the West imagined it could do business tunity for announced with- flouts the rules of civilized countries
Their numbers in Paris and other large French cities for 13 straight
“The depiction of him as fanatical, with. Business it did, in the form of the
conservatives drawal of U.S. forces can’t be treated as one itself. It can be
reactionary and the bearer of crude Iran nuclear deal and — until the from Syria, where an intelligence campaign, to continue
are dwindling, Saturdays now, bedeviling the government of President prejudices seems certainly and happily Trump administration put an end to it and liberals they could help to expose and subvert Iran’s efforts to
but the Yellow Emmanuel Macron with the vagueness of their de- false,” wrote Princeton’s Richard Falk — the lifting of sanctions. to stand check Tehran’s re- acquire and field strategic arms.
Vest protesters of the Ayatollah Khomeini in an op-ed Yet as goodwill flowed toward Iran, together on gional ambitions, he Above all, it has to be a human-
mands and the lack of a leadership to negotiate with. for The Times on Feb. 16, 1979. “Having malice flowed out. In 2015 the govern- the side of has gotten Iran rights campaign. Liberals and progres-
continue to How it plays out could have consequences well beyond created a new model of popular revolu- ment executed close to 1,000 people, freedom. mostly right. sives should not find it difficult to join
bedevil the France’s borders. tion based, for the most part, on nonvi- roughly double the figure of 2010. Last America’s with- conservatives in championing the
government The size of the protests has been shrinking, and Mr.
olent tactics, Iran may yet provide us month, it publicly hanged a 31-year-old drawal from the rights of women in Iran, particularly
with a desperately-needed model of man on charges of kidnapping and nuclear deal has not women removing their headscarves in
of Emmanuel Macron’s approval ratings have been creeping back up humane governance for a third-world having sex with another man; he’s one led Iran to resume its nuclear program public and courageously facing the
Macron. from a devastatingly low 23 percent in December, after country.” of an estimated 5,000 gays and lesbi- (despite some gesturing to that effect). consequences. Nor should it be difficult
A decade later, after a reign of unbri- ans killed by the Islamic Republic. A tougher U.S. tone is likely behind the for liberals and conservatives alike to
the demonstrators first emerged, initially to protest a dled terror that culminated with the Abroad, and not just in the Middle sharp drop in Iranian harassment of call attention to the plight of Iran’s
rise in the tax on gasoline, which already costs more infamous fatwa against Salman East, Iran and its proxies continue to U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf. political prisoners, much as both sides
than $6 a gallon in France. But the Yellow Vests show Rushdie and the 1988 mass murder of plot violence. An Iranian attempt to The resumption of sanctions has put were once moved to action by the
thousands of political prisoners, includ- bomb the meeting of an opposition Iran under acute economic stress. plight of political prisoners in the Sovi-
no sign of ending their weekly invasions of the capital ing children, there was another false group near Paris was foiled last sum- Most importantly, ordinary Iranians et Union or China or South Africa.
anytime soon, and polls show that a majority of the dawn. Several, in fact. mer. In October, Copenhagen recalled know where to pin the blame. Last Back when there was an idea of some-
Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who its ambassador to Tehran after another summer, social media captured Iranian thing called the free world, led by the
French continue to support them.
became Iran’s president after Khomei- Iranian assassination attempt was protesters chanting “Death to Pales- United States, Americans cared about
The number of protesters who showed up in Paris ni’s death, was viewed as a reformer. prevented in Denmark. In January, tine,” “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon,” and such things, and were willing to act. It is
and in cities in southern France was lower this past In truth he was a kleptocrat who or- Germany banned Iran’s Mahan Air “Leave Syria and think of us.” These not too late for Americans to do so again,
chestrated an international bombing because of its role in ferrying arms and are people sick of going hungry and when so many are still in the dark.
weekend than in previous weeks. About 50,000 people
demonstrated across France on Saturday, according to
the police, compared to an estimated 250,000 who par-
ticipated in the first Yellow Vest demonstration, in
mid-November. Some 84,000 took to the streets in mid-
January, according to official estimates.
Their protests have morphed into a popular move-
ment, an uprising of provincial towns and villages —
what urban French idealize as “la France profonde,”
the deep, timeless France — against a sense of being
forgotten in their picturesque countryside with in-
comes that barely stretch to the end of each month.
Though organized protests by unions, students or
other groups of the left or right are a fixture of French
public life, the Yellow Vests are something new and
unfamiliar in their absence of an organization, defined
demands or ideology. Violent fringe groups have
latched onto the weekly protests, clashing with the
police, setting cars on fire and smashing store win-
dows, but a large majority of the Yellow Vests are nei-
ther violent nor radical.
Mr. Macron, elected by a decisive majority less than
two years ago but now a central target of the protests,
has made considerable concessions — including the
lifting of the gas tax increase that set off the protests —
and has begun what his government calls a “great
debate,” a nationwide series of town hall meetings to
air grievances. Mr. Macron himself has attended some,
rolling up his sleeves and responding to complaints for
hours on end.
That is meant to address one of the major sources of
discontent behind the protests — that the urban, self-
perpetuating elites running the country from their
ornate government palaces have no idea about what’s
going on in the rest of France. To the demonstrators,
MASOUD SHAHRESTANI/TASNIM NEWS AGENCY, VIA REUTERS
Mr. Macron and his economic programs have become
the embodiment of that arrogance. An Iranian woman carrying a picture of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during a ceremony to mark the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran.
The grievances may be specifically French, but the
sense of alienation is very much a part of the grass-
roots discontent behind the vote for Brexit in Britain
and for President Trump in the United States, and the
populist movements pulling Europe apart.
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
That was underscored last week when contacts be- ambition for one resolution. which is one of our president’s favorite manded that it be discussed in endless
tween the Yellow Vests and the populist government in But the sponsors — Senator Edward things in the entire world. “A tremen- detail. Senator Cotton claimed that the
Markey of Massachusetts and the dous form of energy in the sense that in media, by failing to continue obsessing
Italy caused a serious diplomatic rift. It happened increasingly famous Representative a military way — think of it — coal is over it, was “complicit in the Stalin-like
when Luigi Di Maio, leader of Italy’s anti-establish- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Queens — indestructible,” he babbled last year, as or 1984 technique of disappearing it,
ment Five Star Movement and a deputy prime min- added, among other things, the cre- he announced an end to President sending it down the memory hole.”
ation of “economic security for all Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. (Truly, there is almost nothing he does-
ister, met with a group of Yellow Vests in France and Gail Collins people of the United States” and “re- Go wind! Ocasio-Cortez — who once n’t like that won’t get compared to
declared that “a new Europe is being born” of them. An pairing historic oppression” of 12 dif- headlined a clean energy sit-in at Stalin or Nazism. At the very beginning
outraged French government called its ambassador ferent groups, ranging from “indige- Nancy Pelosi’s office — could certainly of his maiden Senate speech, Cotton
nous peoples” to women to “depopulat- lead a march of several hundred little claimed limits in defense spending
back for “consultations,” the first time that has hap- ed rural communities.” kids carrying windmills and chanting: reminded him of how “Adolf Hitler had
pened since 1940, when Mussolini declared war. Your challenge for today is to build All good thoughts, but maybe too “Blow away climate change!” taken power in Germany.”)
your own Green New Deal. much of an agenda for one press re- And, of course, we’d want to throw in Trump loved the cows and planes
Mr. Di Maio had come to discuss elections to the
You may have heard of the first one, lease. Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most solar power. Very efficient, very clean angle. He told a rally in Texas that the
European Parliament scheduled for May, in which which we’ll call Green for short. It’s a talented tweeters in Congress. You’d and Donald Trump hates that, too. Democrats wanted to “shut down a little
some Yellow Vests, despite the absence of any organi- 15-point proposed House resolution think she’d know we live in a world Much more of a thing called air travel!” This was at the
with no force of law, but the Republi- that has trouble focusing on more than Of Stalin, conversation-start- same gathering when he wandered off
zation or platform, are planning to run. That pleases
cans have been sniping at it as if it’s a 280 characters. er than the Green on a rant about how German shepherds
the Italian populists, who want to turn the elections blueprint for the elimination of every- How about just one really important
Hitler and New Deal, which is were better at sniffing out drugs than
thing from sidewalks to free speech. climate-control thought? How about environmental great but way more any technology. Calmer heads might
into a Europe-wide revolt against the European estab-
“The Democrats’ ‘Green New Deal’ windmills? If the country really threw protection. complicated. For have then proposed that we simply line
lishment. That is another establishment Mr. Macron brings to mind an insight from Church- itself into wind power, we could, er, instance, it calls for the Mexican border with German shep-
embodies. ill: Socialism may begin with the best breeze toward our goals on that alone. more investment in herds, but instead the president just told
Among the Yellow Vest candidates for the European of intentions, but it always ends with Wind turbines are clean, they work well high-speed rail just when the governor the audience that he loved dogs and
the Gestapo,” tweeted Senator Tom in places like the plains states that are of California is basically throwing in the wished he could have one.
Parliament on a preliminary list released this week Cotton of Arkansas. As only he could. flat and in need of economic develop- towel on the dream of a high-speed rail We are mentioning this in order to
were an accountant, a judge, a stay-at-home mother, a Mitch McConnell, who generally ment. And you can put them way out in service from San Francisco to Los point out that Donald Trump does not
local bureaucrat and a forklift operator. They ranged in doesn’t like to let the Senate consider the water and still get all the energy you Angeles. (“There simply isn’t a path. love dogs, has never had a dog, and in
Democratic ideas more substantive need. “So far offshore you wouldn’t be . . . I wish there were.”) Green also fact has apparently never had any pet,
age from 29 to 53. than post-office-naming, gleefully able to see them from Mar-a-Lago,” said included a gabby, rather unfortunate even a goldfish, his entire life.
Mr. Macron’s “great debate” with the Yellow Vests announced he was going to schedule a Scott Faber of the Environmental Work- memo that explained the goal of zero If the Democrats were as good as
has thus become a great debate on the future of Eu- vote on the whole Green package. ing Group. greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years Republicans at making a huge issue out
Democrats from conservative states, Actually, we don’t care about Mar-a- had to be tweaked a bit because “we of something totally off the point, they
rope, with the May elections looming as a major test. or coal-mining states, or just neurotic Lago. One of the other nice things aren’t sure that we will be able to fully would be spending the rest of the week
The 41-year-old president is right to stick to his reforms states, softly moaned. about wind power is that Scotland put a get rid of, for example, emissions from discussing the president’s dislike of his
and his vision of European unity, but if they are to Green is super idealistic. It calls for turbine across from one of Donald cows or air travel before then.” first wife’s poodle.
“net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” Trump’s golf courses, and he’s hated The memo — which seemed to have But we can talk about wind power
survive, he must convince his own heartland that he by 2030, which is totally commendable. the idea ever since. Although his real been accidentally released — was instead. It’s lean, it’s practical, and
really feels its pain. And you’d think more than enough problem is that wind can replace coal, taken down, but Republicans de- extremely tweetable.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 11

opinion

Don’t fail Venezuela’s people

Felipe González
MADRID Venezuela has been part of
my life, both politically and personally,
for over four decades. I was a friend of
Rómulo Betancourt, the founding
father of Venezuelan democracy; of
Carlos Andrés Pérez, who governed
Venezuela during two terms; and of all
the country’s democratically elected
presidents.
My bond to the country was so
strong and close that, following the
failed coup attempt against President
Hugo Chávez in 2002, the United Na-
tions secretary general, Kofi Annan,
asked me to be his personal represent-
ative in Venezuela. As expected, Mr.
Chávez rejected the appointment.
I have always viewed the relation-
ship between Spain and Venezuela as
particularly meaningful. Venezuela
was a safe haven for political exiles
fleeing dictatorships in Latin America,
but over the years it also welcomed
hundreds of thousands of Spanish
citizens seeking refuge, whether as
exiles or immigrants. For this reason,
as both a government leader and an
ordinary citizen committed to the
values of democracy and progress, I
have dedicated time and effort to help-
ing the Venezuelan people regain their
freedoms.
Nicolás Maduro has turned Venezue-
la into a failed state. We must not fail
the Venezuelan people, and we must
help them regain the democracy they
deserve.
was right to designate Juan Guaidó as ue to intervene in Venezuela and leech
Venezuela’s interim president. Ques- off its resources.
tioning his legitimacy is tantamount to If democracy is to be restored in
questioning democracy. It is a mind- Venezuela, foreign actors need to step
boggling paradox, indeed. Mr. Madu- aside. President Donald Trump must
ro’s opposition is demanding that he stop the tough talk about a military
comply with the Bolivarian Constitu- invasion. It is ironic that Mr. Trump’s
tion established during Chávez’s lead- administration — isolationist by nature
ership, and Mr. Maduro is violating it and utterly unconcerned about promot-
at every turn. ing democracy around the world —
We now have an opportunity to would seek to turn Venezuela into the
restore democracy in Venezuela. This focal point of its foreign policy.
will not be an easy task. Mr. Maduro The United States exceeded its
wields the power of weapons, while the quota of military interventions in Latin
National Assembly has legitimacy, but America long ago — that scenario
lacks the influence and authority that would best remain a dark memory of
come from its government institutions. the 20th century. I appeal to congres-
How can this impossible imbalance be sional leaders, Democratic and Repub-
corrected? lican, to work together with their part-
First, with solid, unflinching unity. ners and neighbors in Latin America
The democratic countries that have and Europe to restore democracy in
recognized Mr. Guaidó must reinforce Venezuela legally, legitimately and
his political legitimacy as well as his peacefully.
authority over Venezuela’s economic The interim president, Juan Guaidó,
assets, both in and faces a colossal task. He must take
To restore out of the country. control of the country, put the armed
This will cut off Mr. forces at the service of democratic
democracy, Maduro’s access to institutions, disarm the Bolivarian
foreign the resources he militia, stabilize the country’s economy,
powers need uses to oppress the and deal with the humanitarian catas-
to step aside Venezuelan people, trophe and the mass exile it has
and let the and will communi- brought on.
regional cate very clearly to Mr. Guaidó’s transition government
stakeholders his supporters (par- must call for presidential elections, but
resolve the ticularly those in the first it must rebuild the National Elec-
military) that en- toral Council, free the country’s poli-
crisis. dorsing him is a tical prisoners and establish a valid
dead end. electoral registration census. Like
Second, the con- everything that is worth doing, institu-
flict must be guided back to its origi- tional reconstruction requires a great
nal, regional scale. Venezuela must not deal of time, work and patience. It
become yet another front in the new- would be shortsighted politically to

Just pretend climate is all about aliens
MANJOO, FROM PAGE 1
cities” and “prepping 101.”
What so riled me up was not just the
projected devastation but also the obvi-
ous incapacity of our political system to
even begin to comprehend the suffering
to come, let alone mitigate it. It struck
me that what we need to fight climate
change is not just some new political
plan but a whole new politics — the sort
of thorough reimagining of stakes that
humanity has only previously achieved
during times of total war.
But climate change is not war. There
is no enemy, other than ourselves. And
we are very bad, as individuals or col-
lectively, at fighting ourselves over
anything.
This thought chilled me.
Then, one late night after taking a
dose of a kind of sleep medicine that is
now widely available in California, I had
an epiphany:
Pretend it’s aliens.
“Pretend” is a strong word, but we
live in an age of delusion. People who
think vaccines are accursed; NBA
players who believe the planet is shaped
more like a Frisbee than a basketball;
full-grown adults who maintain, against
all evidence, that immigration poses an
existential threat to the United States —
every day, we encounter rivers of rank
ridiculousness. And for the most part we
have come to grudgingly accept this
ubiquity as the price of living in a digital
wonderland.
Yet if delusion can elevate the trivial
to the top of cable news, why couldn’t it
perform the same sleight of hand for the
actually important?
Last year, Avi Loeb, a renowned
astrophysicist at Harvard, co-authored
a paper speculating that a recently
discovered interstellar object named
Oumuamua “may be a fully operational
probe sent intentionally to Earth’s
vicinity by an alien civilization.” Mr.
Loeb’s suggestion has been pooh-
poohed by his academic colleagues. But
experts, schmexperts, right?
Allow yourself to imagine that
Oumuamua isn’t just space rock. What if
the thing was indeed captained by little
green people, gangly and ferocious?
And what if their leader let us know her
plans for us — perhaps via tweet?
I’m joking, sure; and I’ll admit I had a
lot of fun playing out the scenes here.
I’m picturing Logan Paul, elevated from
YouTube star into commander of the
U.S. Space Force, briefing President
Trump on a plan to turn coal-power
plants into peace museums as a way to
fight the aliens. The president is on
board, but he has one question: “Can we
save America with-
out saving the
Four degrees
earth?”
of warming But I am not spin-
will wreak ning out this yarn
devastation merely as a dumb
unparalleled joke about a blink-
in human ered president. Even
history. for people who do
believe in global
warming, pretending
that aliens are attack-
ing the earth accomplishes a neat men-
tal trick. It helps to frame the scope of
the threat — civilizational, planet-en-
compassing — while also suggesting
how we might respond: immediately,
collectively and for as long as it takes.
Before I understood the horrors that
await us, I had thought of climate
change as one of a grab-bag of impor-
tant issues on the lefty to-do list: Give
people health care, help them pay for
college, fix the climate.
The scale of potential devastation
renders such visions laughable. Mitigat-
ing climate change and attending to its
fallout isn’t going to be a policy plan
passed by the next progressive adminis-
tration. Instead, like the internet and
ROZETTE RAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Maduro has destroyed the pro-
ductive sector of this resource-rich
country, where nearly 90 percent of the
fangled mini Cold War that the United
States and Russia have been waging in
places like Ukraine and Syria. The
rush Guaidó just because the transition
is uncomfortable for certain interna-
tional partners.
nuclear weapons, the climate is going to population now lives in poverty. His United States, Russia and China must Restoring democracy in Venezuela is
be a permanent new feature of our leadership has resulted in severe avoid using Venezuela as a proxy in a possible, but the process is as delicate
politics. This will be a long-term exist- shortages of basic food and medical geopolitical power struggle. By not as the health of the Venezuelan people,
ential battle that will require remaking supplies and sparked unprecedented interfering they can prevent a stale- who have lost on average 24 pounds.
every part of society, that might con- levels of hyperinflation. His policies mate that could give Mr. Maduro time Mr. Maduro, in comparison, is well fed
sume other worthy parts of a progres- have prompted the greatest exodus in and resources to cling to power. and his cronies continue to rob the
sive agenda, that may involve costly the history of Latin America, and as Management of the Venezuelan country of its resources. Juan Guaidó
and politically unpopular changes to our such has emptied the country’s institu- crisis should be left in the hands of key as interim president, the National
way of life for years to come, and will tions of precious human resources. In regional stakeholders. The European Assembly as bearer of Venezuela’s
necessarily make some people worse off the tyrannical state he has established, Union, with the support of Canada, democratic legitimacy and the people
than if we did nothing. But that will be opponents are deprived of the most should create the space and conditions of Venezuela need the support and
justified, because we understand the basic human rights, including the right so that the Lima Group, which com- encouragement of a community of
stakes: we are fighting murderous to live. prises 14 countries from the Americas, democratic nations that is united and
aliens. The majority of democracies in the may decide a course of action. They determined to help them regain the
And all the while, the problem keeps Western world have deemed the elec- should recruit the Mexican president, freedom that they and their country
getting worse. Not long ago, a planet tions held on May 20 as fraudulent and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to deserve.
that warms by 2 degrees Celsius over illegal. The National Assembly, which support the cause of democracy in
is the only democratically elected Venezuela, and make the Cuban re- FELIPE GONZÁLEZwas prime minister of
the course of the coming century was
institution remaining in the country, gime understand that it cannot contin- Spain from 1982 to 1996.
considered an unimaginable catastro-
phe to be avoided at any cost. Today, 2
degrees — a level of warming that might
induce death from air pollution on the
order of “25 Holocausts,” Mr. Wallace-
Wells notes — is looking like our best
hope. On our current track, we’re shoot-
ing for at least 3 degrees of warming,
according to the United Nations; ac-
cording to the Trump administration,
we’re headed for at least 4 degrees.
Four degrees of warming will wreak
devastation unparalleled in human
history. Hundreds of millions will die The 55th edition of the Munich Security Conference – the world’s
prematurely, large sections of the planet leading forum for debating international security policy – will take
will be rendered uninhabitable, great place from February 15 to 17, 2019.
herds of humanity will be on the run,
and in the most prosperous remaining
places, economic growth of any kind
might be the exception rather than the
norm.
That’s the current path. Yet just about
nobody in any position of power talks
about global warming with anything
reflecting the required level of honesty
and alarm. The Green New Deal, the
high-level strategy document put out
last week by Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez of New York and her
allies, lacks any specificity for how we
might accomplish its goals. Not even
democratic socialists will frankly de-
scribe the costs of averting a warming
planet.
And the swiftness with which critics
pounced on the Green New Deal sug-
gests that even as the climate gets
undeniably less hospitable, we’ll still fall
into the same old political trap in which
climate remains a small, partisan issue
rather than the all-consuming emer-
gency it ought to be.
The whole thing is tragic and lazy,
when what we need is heroism and
bravery.
If the aliens attacked, we’d do better.
I’m sure of it.
We would understand the stakes in
the battle ahead. We would apprehend
the necessity of sacrifice and persever- The Munich Security Report 2019 serves as a companion and discussion starter
ance. We would be able to perceive what for the hundreds of senior leaders coming to Munich, as well as for security
is happening to our planet and our
species as what it plainly is: a war for professionals and the interested public around the globe.
survival.
This year celebrating its fifth edition, the report – for which we work together with
some of the world’s premier research institutions – compiles key insights and
analyses, illuminating major developments in and critical challenges to international

Religion and Indonesia’s politics security.

KURNIAWAN, FROM PAGE 9
imam and makes frequent visits to
Islamic boarding schools. He has also
closed his eyes and ears to certain cases
brought on religious grounds, knowing
that any statement could inflame grass-
roots Muslims.
Mr. Joko didn’t stand up for Mr. Ba-
suki when he was tried and then impris-
oned. He chose to stay silent when a
woman in Medan, in northern Sumatra,
was charged with blasphemy for com-
plaining about the volume of the call to
prayer. Nor did he make any comment
in a case involving the forced removal of
a cross-shaped headstone from a ceme-
tery in Yogyakarta, in eastern Java.
Last month, Mr. Joko even considered
granting an early release from prison to
the radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who
was convicted of terrorism. (Mr. Bashir
wasn’t freed in the end because he
refused to pledge allegiance to the
state.)
Mr. Joko should be upholding moder-
ate politics by standing up to the opposi-
tion, conservatives and radicals who
seek to manipulate religious sentiment;
that’s what his supporters are hoping
from him. Instead, he has agreed to
walk across a tightrope held up by his
political rivals. This has culminated in
his choice of Mr. Ma’ruf for running
mate — who just as easily could have
run with the opposition.
Mr. Ma’ruf heads the Indonesia
Ulema Council, the national clerical
body that issued the fatwa calling Mr.
Basuki a blasphemer, and he gave
incriminating testimony against Mr.
Last year’s report was downloaded tens of thousands of times and widely
Basuki in court. He isn’t just conserva-
tive; he is intolerant. He forbids the referenced in international media.
exchange of Christmas greetings. He
rejects the Ahmadiyya, an alternative
Islamic sect. He condemns L.G.B.T.
activities. He wants to limit houses of
worship for non-Muslims.
Mr. Joko might remain in power, but
we don’t have to wait until April to find VISIT THE MUNICH SECURITY
out the real outcome of this race. No REPORT SITE STAY IN TOUCH
matter who ends up being president,
conservative Islamic groups, backed by Twitter
radical groups, will win — have already
won — the election. https://www.securityconference. Follow us on Twitter: @MunSecConf
de/en/publications/munich- To contribute to the online debate,
EKA KURNIAWAN is the author of “Venge- security-report/ please use the hashtag: #MSCreport
ance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash,”
“Beauty is a Wound” and “Man Tiger.”
This essay was translated from the
Bahasa Indonesia by Annie Tucker.

12 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
well
The un-Valentine
TIES
We are made to believe
that we are failing if we
don’t have unfading ardor
BY JUDITH HERTOG
One Valentine’s Day many years ago,
my spouse, Gil, brought home a bou-
quet of roses. I am Dutch and he is
Israeli, so neither of us had grown up
celebrating Valentine’s Day. But it was
our first year as graduate students in
the United States, and one of his class-
mates, shocked that he was planning
to spend the evening at the library,
convinced him that he’d risk losing my
love if he didn’t bring me a romantic
gift.
He came home with a bouquet of
overpriced supermarket roses that
would be on sale the next day. I wasn’t
as much bothered by the price — even
though I’m Dutch — as I was offended
by his unoriginality. I threatened him
with divorce if he ever again brought
me overpriced roses or chocolates in
mid-February. Relieved to be able to go
back to his books, he agreed and has
never again tried to be romantic.
A lethal combination of Hollywood
sentimentality, Victorian romanticism
and bridal-magazine kitsch has placed
an impossible burden on love. We’re
supposed to subject our relationships
to some recipe for unfading ardor and
permanent swoon and are made to
believe we are failing if we just live in
reality.
I object to the tyranny of perfect
romance. I’d rather have a flawed
relationship of my own than the kind of
fairy tale love in which the lovers are
replaceable elements in an arrange-
ment of candlelight dinners, red roses
What the heart tells us about strenuous exercise
Fitness
GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Many middle-aged marathon runners
and other endurance athletes are
familiar with concerns from their loved
ones — and occasionally their physi-
cians — that they might be exercising
too much and straining or harming
their hearts.
For all of them, a large-scale study
published recently in JAMA Cardiology
should be mollifying. It finds that
middle-aged men who work out often
and vigorously do tend to develop
worrisome plaques in their cardiac
arteries. But those men also are less
likely than more sedentary people to
die prematurely from a heart attack or
other cause.
The findings raise the interesting
possibility, in other words, that strenu-
ous exercise may protect the heart
against the very problems to which it
also contributes.
No one doubts, of course, that our
hearts benefit from exercise. Study
after study shows that people who
meet the standard exercise guidelines,
which call for about 30 minutes a day
and walks on the beach. I prefer my
love imperfect.
Gil has never been successful at
romance. That’s what I liked most
about him when we first met. I was a
freshman at Hebrew University in
Jerusalem when a mutual friend intro-
duced him to me as someone who
could help me with my paper on witch-
craft, one of his many academic inter-
ests. He later told me he was in love
with me from the moment he saw me
in the university cafeteria. But instead
of flirting, he talked to me about
witches and the nature of magic. I
liked him because I don’t trust smooth
people.
That first day, we became so im-
mersed in our conversation that we
skipped class and talked through the
next lecture period. We both knew this
was the beginning of a love affair. But
if I’d left it up to him, we might never
have moved beyond academic discus-
sion.
“I’m going to see a movie tonight,”
he announced at the end of our conver-
sation, apparently unaware that in
conventional romance he was expected
to ask me to join him.
“I’ll come too,” I said.
We shared an interest in learning,
traveling and adventure. Two years
after we met, he received a scholarship
to study in China for one year. I went
along. As we traveled throughout the
country, we made a stop in Hong Kong
and got married at City Hall in a 10-
minute civil ceremony. Of course we
were in love, but that wasn’t why we
tied the knot. Gil was applying for
graduate school in the United States
and a marriage certificate would allow
me to join him on his student visa. I
figured that as long as we didn’t have
kids we could easily divorce.
I’m uncomfortable with the idea that
wedding vows should ensure undying
love. Such commitment is based on the
New York City Marathon runners. A new study suggests that strenuous exercise may
protect the heart against the very problems to which it also contributes.
of moderate exercise, have a reduced
risk of developing heart disease.
There have been some hints, howev-
er, that people can exercise too much,
especially if the exercise is intense. In
past studies, researchers scanning the
hearts of longtime endurance athletes,
such as marathon runners, have found
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fragile assumption that our current
selves can make promises for our
future selves. I find it almost presump-
tuous to expect such certainty of the
future. I can only take love day by day.
For more than half of our lives,
though, we have stayed together. We
went to graduate school in the United
States and traveled all over the world.
Eventually, we even had children. Our
daughter was born in Taiwan, where
Gil was completing his Ph.D. research
while I was teaching English and
writing freelance.
Our son was born
I threatened two years later in the
him with United States, where
divorce if he Gil got a job as a
ever again professor.
brought me If in all the years
we’ve been together,
overpriced
I haven’t seriously
roses. considered separat-
ing, it’s because even
at times when things
between us seemed wrong, I couldn’t
bear the thought that in ending our
relationship, I would lose Gil.
Of the two of us, I’m the more capri-
cious. I’m a flirt, easily distracted by a
meaningful glance or the touch of a
good-looking man. Gil prefers to spend
his mental energy on academic prob-
lems rather than frivolous romantic
fantasies. I’ve often developed crushes,
which Gil tends to take in stride be-
cause he mostly just finds them point-
less. When I confessed to an infatua-
tion with someone I didn’t seriously
want to be with, his response sobered
me up: “Then why are you wasting
your time?” he asked.
He really doesn’t understand the
appeal of romance. I’m a sentimental
romantic at heart, but because of him
I’ve learned to appreciate that there
are many other pursuits — raising
children, caring for the world, writing,
travel, adventure — that are more
EARL WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
scarring in those athletes’ heart mus-
cles and also hefty deposits of coro-
nary plaques, which can break free and
block arteries, causing a heart attack.
But most of those earlier studies were
small and provided a single snapshot
of the athletes’ hearts; they did not
follow people for years to see whether
YVETTA FEDOROVA
rewarding than romance. As exciting
and intoxicating romance is, it doesn’t
need to dictate our lives.
But there are times — especially
after I have watched certain romantic
movies — when I panic and think my
life is all wrong because our last
candlelight dinner consisted of cold
leftovers during an electrical blackout,
and nowadays, when Gil and I are
awake in bed, it’s most likely that we
are reading. When I look at ourselves
through a romantic lens, I see a pathet-
ically passionless couple, held together
by habit and inertia, and I start fanta-
sizing about eloping with a more ar-
dent lover.
Of course, after more than 25 years
in a relationship, the fire of passion has
dimmed to a glow of familiarity, and
now that we have children our interac-
tions are often limited to the coordina-
tion of schedules and squabbles about
the fair distribution of responsibilities.
We can fight in shorthand because
we’re so well acquainted with each
other’s grievances that we don’t need
to go through the whole argument
anymore.
But when, during my moments of
marital doubt, I look at other men as
potential lovers, I realize there aren’t
many with whom, after 25 years, I’d
still get along as well as with Gil. May-
be it’s just because we’ve grown inter-
twined, like two trees that need each
other for support.
If I have to choose between fairy tale
romance and Gil, I choose Gil.
I know him well enough now that I
can say with some certainty that this is
not a fleeting infatuation.
I love him, not only because I know
him better than any other person in
the world, but also because I’ve
learned from him to distrust romanti-
cism, and above all, because it would
never occur to him to ever again give
me a Valentine.
their heavy exercise and any subse-
quent buildup of plaques was linked to
heightened risks for heart attacks and
shorter lives.
So, for the new study, scientists at
the Cooper Institute in Dallas and
other institutions decided to delve into
just that issue.
They also happened to have a useful
trove of data readily at hand, in the
health records of tens of thousands of
people who had undergone exams at
the affiliated Cooper Clinic. Many of
these exams included scans of people’s
hearts, along with detailed question-
naires about their exercise habits.
The researchers focused on the
records of 21,758 men, most of them in
their 50s. (They did not include women
but plan to in a follow-up study.) They
categorized the men into groups, based
on how much they exercised.
Those in the sweating-the-most
group worked out vigorously for at
least five hours a week and often more.
The researchers used a mathematical
measure (known as metabolic equiva-
lent of task) to characterize the men’s
workouts. But in practical terms, these
extreme exercisers were doing the
equivalent of running about six miles a
day.
A second group completed some-
what less exercise, and a third group
finished less than half as much exer-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Is it time to put Fido
and Fluffy on a diet?
Personal Health
JANE E. BRODY
Humans are not the only residents of
the United States who are getting
fatter every year. So, unsurprisingly,
are our furry friends — the dogs and
cats that share our lives and, too often,
our tendency to overeat.
Unlike their owners, however, the
family dog or cat cannot open the
refrigerator or gain access to snacks in
high cupboards without human assist-
ance, which means the responsibility
for pet obesity rests with you-know-
who.
Veterinarians report that nearly half
the dogs they see are overweight or
obese, although only 17 percent of
owners acknowledge that their pets
are too fat.
“Others know their pet is overweight
but don’t think it’s a problem,” said
Deborah Linder, who heads the Tufts
Obesity Clinic for Animals Clinical
Nutrition Service. “Wrong!”
According to Nationwide, America’s
largest provider of pet health insur-
ance, obesity among dogs and cats has
risen for eight years in a row, along
with claims for ailments related to
being overweight. In 2017, obesity-
related insurance claims for veterinary
expenses exceeded $69 million, a 24
percent increase over the last eight
years, Nationwide reported in January.
With only 2 percent of pets covered by
insurance, the costs to owners of over-
weight pets is likely to be in the bil-
lions.
Dollars aside, the toll taken by ex-
cess weight on the animals’ health,
quality of life and longevity is far
greater than most owners probably
realize. Common obesity-related ail-
ments in dogs and cats include arthri-
tis, heart disease, bladder and urinary
tract disease, chronic kidney disease,
liver disease, diabetes, high blood
pressure and spinal disease.
A study of Labrador retrievers, a
breed especially prone to becoming
overweight, showed that excess weight
can take nearly two years off a pet’s
life. So if you love your pets even half
as much as I love mine, you should be
willing to keep them lean or, if they are
already too chubby, take the steps
veterinarians recommend to help them
trim down.
A study of 50 obese dogs enrolled in
a weight-loss program at the Univer-
sity of Liverpool demonstrated the
value of losing excess body fat. The 30
animals in the study that reached their
target weight had greater vitality, less
pain and fewer emotional issues than
the animals that remained too fat.
But as with people, prevention is the
better route. The best way to keep pets
from gaining too much weight is to
cise each week as the most avid exer-
cisers.
The researchers also looked at the
scans of each man’s heart. The degree
of plaque accumulation can generally
be assessed using a coronary artery
calcium score. Someone with a score
higher than 100 is considered to have
worrisome plaque buildup.
Comparing the groups, the re-
searchers determined that the men in
the highest-exercise group were prone
to developing plaques. They were, in
fact, about 11 percent more likely to
have a calcium score higher than 100,
compared with men who moved less.
Some of the extreme exercisers had
scores above 800.
Finally, the researchers checked
death records for a decade or so after
each man’s latest exam, to see if any
had died. And some had, particularly
from heart attacks among men with
calcium scores higher than 100.
But few of those men came from the
group that exercised the most. The
extreme exercisers turned out to have
less risk of dying prematurely than
men with the same — or higher —
calcium scores who rarely worked out.
In essence, these results suggest
that large amounts of exercise can
increase someone’s risk of developing
plaques, while also lessening the likeli-
hood that he will die from a heart
..
weigh them periodically. My Havanese
dog gets on the scale at every vet visit,
routine or otherwise. If he gains more
than half a pound, I cut back a little on
his meals and treats. Dr. Linder em-
phasized that treats should make up no
more than 10 percent of a dog’s daily
calories.
“We love our pets and want to give
them treats, but we often don’t think
about treats from a caloric standpoint,”
said John P. Loftus, veterinarian at the
Cornell University College of Veteri-
nary Medicine.
“And everything counts as a treat,
including marrow bones and rawhide,”
Dr. Linder told me, as well as scraps of
human food offered by owners or
scarfed off their plates.
Rather than overdoing treats, give
your dog love and attention by playing
ball, fetch or tug of war, which provides
some exercise that burns calories.
Cats, too, love to play with things they
can wrestle with, like a toy mouse on a
string or a ball of yarn.
Whether you feed your dog once,
twice or even four times a day, the
amount of food dished out should
always be measured. Many owners are
guided by serving sizes listed on pet
food labels, but these are just general
guidelines that tend to err on the high
side, Dr. Loftus said.
His colleague at Cornell, Joseph J.
Wakshlag, said, “Guides should say
‘Please feed at the lower end of the
feeding recommendations when start-
ing our food, and increase only if the
animal is losing weight.’”
As to whether to feed dry kibble, wet
canned food or a combination, Dr.
Loftus said, “The jury is still out as to
what’s better.”
Cats can be even more challenging
than dogs. They tend to graze, prompt-
ing owners to leave food out for them
all the time. This becomes a problem
for overweight cats. Dr. Linder said,
“I’ve never met an animal that could
free-feed and still lose weight.” For
cats that come begging for food at 4:30
a.m., she suggests using an automatic
timed feeder. Cats quickly learn when
the food will drop down and will wait at
the feeder instead of nudging their
owners, she said.
Of course, regular physical activity
— 15 to 30 minutes day — is important
for a dog’s overall well-being, but it’s
rarely enough to help an overweight
dog lose weight “unless they’re run-
ning a 5K every day,” Dr. Linder said.
The ideal weight loss goal is about 1
to 2 percent of the pet’s weight each
week. If feeding smaller amounts is not
effective, there are commercially avail-
able foods or prescription diets de-
signed for weight loss. Switch foods
gradually by increasing the proportion
of the new food over the course of a
week or two to avoid digestive upset.
And before putting any pet on a weight
loss diet, schedule a vet exam to be
sure there is no medical reason for
undue weight gain.
GRACIA LAM
attack precipitated by those plaques,
said Dr. Laura DeFina, the chief sci-
ence officer for the Cooper Institute,
who led the study.
This curious outcome probably
occurs because extreme workouts
create a particular type of plaque, she
said.
“There is some evidence that the
plaques” in highly active people “are
denser and more stable” than those in
sedentary people, she said, making
them less likely to break free and
cause a heart attack.
But that idea is speculative, she said,
and requires more study. Scientists
also aren’t sure how, at a molecular
level, strenuous exercise might prompt
the buildup of plaques, and why some
people’s arteries remain unaffected, no
matter how much they exercise.
Dr. DeFina and her colleagues hope
to look into those issues in future stud-
ies. In the meantime, she said, middle-
aged runners and other endurance
athletes should pay attention to any
heart-related symptoms, such as chest
pain or shortness of breath, and talk to
their doctors about the desirability of a
heart scan.
The good news from this study, Dr.
DeFina said, is that even if that scan
should reveal a high calcium score, it
appears that most people “safely can
and should continue to exercise.”
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..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 13

Sports
Oldest all-star is ‘going to soak it all in’
better. The goal is to finish the season
On Pro Basketball strong.
We see you going through all kinds of
in-game exercises to try to get loose
BY MARC STEIN before you check in. How big of an
adjustment has that been?
No one will be busier at the All-Star I’ve never really come off the bench in
Weekend in Charlotte, N.C., than Dirk my entire career. My first year a little
Nowitzki. bit, but other than that I’ve always
Nowitzki, the veteran Dallas Maver- been a starter.
icks forward, will serve as an honorary So every timeout I want to do some-
coach of Team World in the Rising thing. Stretch a little, quick little cross-
Stars game between rookies and soph- court run, some slides. Anything to
omores Friday night; compete in the stay halfway loose. Some of our guys
3-point contest Saturday night; and — J.J. Barea, Devin Harris — have
then become just the second 40-year- been doing that for years. I kind of
old in league history to play in the adopted that routine from them.
All-Star Game — the first was Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar. You’ve been saying for years that you
Commissioner Adam Silver recently don’t want a farewell tour — yet it
named Nowitzki and Miami Heat seems as though the whole N.B.A. is
guard Dwyane Wade special roster foisting a farewell tour upon you.
additions for the league’s 68th All-Star How comfortable (or not) have you
Game. been with all the attention you’ve
It is the perfect time, then, to catch been getting?
up with Nowitzki, who is in the midst It’s been awesome. Boston comes to
of an N.B.A.-record 21st consecutive mind, Madison Square Garden, Indi-
season with one franchise. We chatted ana. It’s obviously great to feel love
with him before his Mavericks hosted from your home crowd, but to get so
Wade and the Heat in Dallas on much appreciation and respect on the
Wednesday night. Wade led Miami road is unbelievable. Not a lot of play-
with 22 points in 22 minutes coming off ers get a standing ovation when you
the bench as the Heat won, 112-101. sub in on the road. It’s an emotional
Nowitzki scored 12 points in 16 min- feeling. I’m not going to forget that for
utes, also coming off the bench. the rest of my life. I’m truly apprecia-
tive.
How would you assess your first 25
games back? (Nowitzki had season- How ready are you for what’s coming
ending ankle surgery in April 2018. He in Charlotte?
played for the first time this season on I’m going to soak it all in. No matter
Dec. 13.) what happens next year with the
I did obviously everything I could to Mavs, this is for sure going to be my
try to be ready, but it was really rough last time on this stage. So I’m going to
those first couple weeks just to try to enjoy spending some time with our
adjust to the speed of the game. You future stars in this league — and Satur-
can practice all you want and run all day is going to be a blast.
you want, but there’s no substitute for I’ve seen the competition for the
playing games. 3-point contest and all of them are
And my last game I actually played incredible shooters. For me it’s a no-
before the surgery was in April, so I pressure situation. Just get out there
was basically out for eight months. It and hoist a few up and hopefully get
was tough for me to get going. There hot.
were frustrating times. There were It’s the same thing on Sunday; hon-
disappointing times. estly I don’t want to play that much.
But it’s been a lot better these last This is about the players who got voted
few weeks. I feel like I can move a little in and who are carrying this league
better and finally enjoy myself a little and their franchises. They deserve to
bit. I still hopefully can get a little be on that stage. If I get out there for a
On Sunday, Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks, left, will become just the second 40-year-old to play in the N.B.A. All-Star Game.
minute or two and hoist up a 3, that’ll
be a great experience.
Even though you won it once (in
2006), I never really thought the
contest suited your shooting style,
running from rack to rack and throw-
ing up quick 3s. How do you see it?
I don’t mind it. It’s different obviously
than catching and shooting during the
CARLOS OSORIO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
game. Even the year I won in Houston,
I almost got bounced in the first round
for not finishing my last rack in time.
It’s harder for taller guys. We have a
longer, slower release.
I was joking with Adam Silver that I
should get an extra 15 seconds to finish
all the racks, since I’m the elder states-
man, but I don’t think that’s going to
happen.
I heard you acknowledge recently on
Zach Lowe’s podcast that you’ve had
some “frosty” moments in the past
with D-Wade, but a lot of people will
be watching Wednesday night to see
if he asks you to exchange jerseys
after Miami plays in Dallas. Are you
ready for that?
I think everybody knows there were
some cold times between us, but I’ve
always said he made me a better play-
er by Miami beating us in ’06. I’m just
glad that in ’11 we were able to turn the
tables, but at the end of the day he’s a
great competitor and a great player
and he made me a better player.
We definitely did talk a lot about Luka
Doncic the last time we had one of
these visits, but he has an even big-
ger profile now. What are your latest
Luka observations?
Like I’ve been saying all season, for a
19-year-old, you just don’t see someone
who has so much savviness and court
vision — and the confidence to not get
discouraged by one or two mistakes.
Everybody is kind of waiting for him
to hit that rookie wall, and it just hasn’t
happened. We traded away a bunch of
our other playmakers, so now every-
thing is on his shoulders even more.
And he’s just doing it all now, even
more so than before. He’s creating
everything.
And now the Mavericks have Kristaps
Porzingis, too. I’m sure you’ve heard
that the comparisons between Luka
and Porzingis to you and Steve Nash
are already out there. What can they
become as a duo?
I think they’re going to be great to-
gether. They both fit the new style of
the N.B.A. so well. Luka is bigger than
Nashy, so he can make plays that
Nashy could never make. And Zinger
is even longer than me and more ath-
letic and shoots it super easy from
deep. He’s a good dude, hard worker —
he wants to be great. We hope to see
that combo in Dallas for a long, long
time.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1991

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 1502

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 13 14

Fill the grid so Solution No. 1402
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 29 Power unit 55 County name in five 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or 1 Misrepresents oneself 33 Highest-grossing rom- East Coast states
box contains column, and so that the digits to on the internet, in a com of the 2010s 56 Have no worries
17 18

each of the within each heavily outlined box way Days gone by
numbers will produce the target number 36 19 20
10 Place to unload
1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 37 Baseball family name Down

once. subtraction, multiplication or 15 Savory treat that is 38 Void 1 Something babies

21 22 23 24

division, as indicated in the box. often caramelized

39 Party spec do (and people do at
25 26
For solving tips A 4x4 grid will use the digits 16 Titan, once
Cheerful response
babies)
1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
40
and more puzzles: “My bad” 1/100 de un siglo
www.nytimes.com/
17 after helping 2 27 28 29 30 31 32
sudoku Keynote, maybe Selected N.F.L. stars Line on a bill
For solving tips and more KenKen 18 41 3
33 34 35
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ 19 “___ alive!” 45 Facetious superlative 4 Petrify, say
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ 20 World Series of Poker 46 Become tiresome to 5 Without a bit of sense 36 37 38
kenken.com venue in Las Vegas 47 Music genre that’s 6 Pumped
21 Thin strips used in the focus of Decibel 39 40
magazine 7 Animals whose fur
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. building construction may change color in 41 42 43 44 45
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
24 Lumberjacks, e.g. 48 Not shy away the winter
from a potential
25 Left in a hurry, with embarrassment 8 Slips 46 47
“out” Dump
Answers to Previous Puzzles 49 Composes beautifully 9
48 49 50 51 52
26 Mother of Mars, in “Yay!”
53 Little buddy 10
myth
54 Late Peabody- 11 Contracted 53 54
27 Relief pitcher? winning journalist and 12 Unit measure for chili
28 Obscure newscaster 55 56
13 Fix, as laces
Solution to February 14 Puzzle
14 Gas once used in PUZZLE BY WYNA LIU
W I G A S C O T S P B S aerosols 28 Greek island where 35 Zesty bowlful 47 Cry querulously
I P A G L I A C C I V I A L 20 Toy company whose a famous armless 39 Shots for dudes?
D O N O T E N T E R A L B A name comes from the statue was found 49 Old British sports
E D G E G O A L I N O U T Dakota Sioux word for 40 Cry after a lucky snag
29 Be successful, cars
S P E E D L I M I T “big” informally 41 Stirred
Sports Illustrated’s
L E T O C O L L A R
21 Not all there 30 “Biography” cable
42 50 Khaleda ___, first
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B O X O N E I D A L I P O
O U T O F O R D E R S I G N S 22 Don ___, “Don channel Century” female P.M. of
A I R Y T R O W E L H E Y Giovanni” role 31 Bits of hardware 43 Touches down Bangladesh (1991-
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23 Actor Burton that can fit inside
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32-Downs 44 “In general, ___ is 96, 2001-06)
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O M A R R O A D C L O S E D 26 Most popular U.S. 32 Opening for 31-Down great mistakes”: John 51 High lines
G E L S I N C O H E R E N T baby name for boys, 34 Fabric name since Ruskin
S N L B Y E N O W A T V 1999-2012 1924 45 Imbroglio 52 Machiavellian

14 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
Culture
Repulsion and seduction
ART REVIEW
Dana Schutz’s new works
have weight, substance
and a powerful allure
BY ROBERTA SMITH
Dana Schutz’s current show at Petzel
Gallery is her best in New York in a
while, maybe ever.
She has loaded up her brush again,
thickening her paint, and has min-
imized her settings. Gone are the thin
surfaces and sharp-edged shapes that
could make her work feel brittle and
too cartoony. Her protagonists have
gained weight and substance, and
appear to be isolated in bleak empty
spaces that feel mythic or postapoca-
lyptic. Several scenes are set on large
lonely rocks like those loved by Ho-
meric poets and Symbolist painters.
With her paint surfaces sometimes
verging on low relief, it is unsurprising
that, for the first time, Ms. Schutz is
also exhibiting sculpture, a frequent
subject in her paintings: five bronzes
of her characteristically gnarly figures
whose crazed textures amaze and will
surely feed back into her painting.
With her paint surfaces
sometimes verging on low relief,
it is unsurprising that Ms. Schutz
is also exhibiting sculpture.
Two years ago, Ms. Schutz was at
the center of a firestorm ignited by
“Open Casket,” one of her paintings in
the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New
York. The work was based on photo-
graphs of the battered corpse of Em-
mett Till, the teenager who was tor-
tured and murdered by two white men
in Mississippi in 1955. Till’s mother
insisted that his body be seen and
photographed so the world would
know what had befallen him, and the
resulting images helped ignite the civil
rights movement.
For many, the pain and importance
of the images made them inappropri-
ate for art-making, especially by a
white artist. Arguably another artist,
regardless of race, might have done
justice to the Till images, but not one
with Ms. Schutz’s comic-grotesque
vision and penchant for conflating
heroes and villains. As might be ex-
pected, given the frequent autobio-
graphical nature of Ms. Schutz’s work,
several of the new paintings evoke
moments of crisis, humiliation, pen-
ance and possible redemption that
seem related to her recent experience.
“Painting in an Earthquake” shows a
female artist from behind, clutching at
a painting falling off a collapsing brick
wall. In the beautiful, harrowing
“Strangers,” a figure seems to attack or
punish a second one who is bent over,
cringing, face covered, with one large
guilty, fearful eye peeking out. The arid
setting seems ancient, maybe biblical:
The ground is strewn with what look
like jawbones, possibly of donkeys, like
the one Samson used to slay a thou-
sand Philistines. Attention to Philip
Anna Paquin behaves badly, onscreen
The actress is playing
a morally questionable
celebrity publicist in ‘Flack’
BY KATHRYN SHATTUCK
Anna Paquin wants equal screen time
for equally bad behavior.
While there have been female anti-
heroes in series like “Homeland” and
“Damages,” “I could name probably 15
male protagonists that make god-
awful, morally ambiguous decisions
but are still considered the heroes of
their shows,” she said. “And you would
never go, Oh my God, I can’t watch
‘Breaking Bad,’ he deals meth! Or,
Dexter’s a serial killer!”
Which is not traditionally how wom-
en have been portrayed. “It’s boring,”
she added.
But her latest character — Robyn,
an American publicist living in London
in Pop TV’s “Flack,” starting on Feb. 21
— is anything but.
Whip-smart and freakishly control-
ling, Robyn maintains a tight leash on
her celebrity troublemakers while her
own life rocks and rolls with drugs,
adultery and deceit.
“She just happens to have this job
where there’s two very different sides
of the coin,” said Paquin, who has had
the same publicist since she was 12.
“There’s the face you present, and then
there’s the reality of who people actu-
ally are inside.”
Paquin and her husband, Stephen
Moyer, who met as the supernatural
lovers Sookie and Bill on HBO’s “True
Blood,” have found their sweet spot as
collaborators. Together, they executive
produced the London-based “Flack,”
though he was mostly shooting Fox’s
“The Gifted” in Atlanta. Moyer also
Top, Dana Schutz’s “The Visible World,” left, and “The Wanderer” at Petzel Gallery in
New York. Right, “Painting in an Earthquake,” and above, “Mountain Group.”
Guston’s late paintings, felt throughout
the show, is especially strong here, but
Ms. Schutz tends to stretch rather than
lean on it.
“The Wanderer” places a male fig-
directed Paquin — who won a best-
supporting actress Oscar at 11 for her
turn in “The Piano” — in his feature
debut, “The Parting Glass,” currently
making the festival circuit.
In a phone interview from the Venice
section of Los Angeles, where the
couple live with Charlie and Poppy,
their 6-year-old twins, Paquin, 36,
spoke about growing up in the industry
while keeping her own life out of the
public glare.
Here are edited excerpts from the
conversation.
I watched “Flack” with fascination.
Does this stuff really happen? I can’t
wait to grill the publicists I know.
I one hundred percent believe that
there are publicists that have to clean
up spectacularly horrific messes on
behalf of their clients. I am not person-
ally that client. And let’s face it — if I
was, do you really think I’d tell you?
I was just about to ask what’s the
worst thing you’ve ever done.
I’ve been doing this for 27 years.
There’s not much you can find out
about my life that a quick Google
search wouldn’t tell you. I’ve spent
most of life being kind of not interest-
ing in that tabloidy way. I work, I now
have a family, I’m married, I work, I do
CrossFit — like, yay. My publicist
doesn’t really have to spin that. I
mean, maybe someone could try to
make me sound more exciting by
creating a scandal for me, but I am
pretty good without the drama. I like
the drama to stay onscreen.
What’s it like for you and Stephen to
work together again after “True
Blood”?
We love working together. It’s our
happy place. That’s how we met, how
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ure on a dark beach with scuttling
crabs (a guess); shadows make his
body seem half white, half brown; the
white leg wears an ankle monitor.
Humiliation is especially wrenching
Anna Paquin in Pasadena, Calif., in January. “I like the drama to stay onscreen,” she says.
we found love. There’s a shorthand and
a trust thing that’s just hard to rep-
licate with other people.
How was it being directed by him in
“The Parting Glass”?
I had a very small role in as far as
screen time. I was predominately
producing, and a large amount of my
job was putting out the fires before he
had to know about them so that he
could focus on steering the ship. It was
Toronto in the middle of winter, and at
the time, I want to say Ed Asner —
in “Presenter,” where we find a female
figure with her panties around her
ankles. As pointed out by a painter
friend I ran into at Petzel, she holds a
corded clicker in one hand while stand-
ELIZABETH WEINBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
who has an enormous role in the film
and is mentally sharper than a razor
blade and amazing — was 87. And it
sounds horrible, but also kind of funny:
Every day we’d get to the end of the
day and go, “Oh my God, we’re so
relieved we’re not the ones who killed
Ed Asner.” Like, he didn’t slip on black
ice today. Literally.
No one blinks in “Flack” when it
becomes obvious that Robyn has sex
with men and women. But in 2010, it
was big news when you announced
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHTOGRAPHS BY REBECCA SMEYNE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ing in a spotlight (lusciously painted
red) and seems to pull something —
maybe words — from her mouth with
her other, much larger, blood-flecked
hand. In the black background you can
that you’re bisexual. Thoughts?
That was already in the script so I
can’t take any credit for being like, Oh
hey, let’s wave some rainbow flags.
And I guess if you’re open and upfront
and refuse to buy into the narrative
where it’s actually a big deal or even,
frankly, interesting, it normalizes
things. I’m not stupid, but I don’t on
any emotional level understand why
other people’s sexuality is anybody’s
business, other than the person that
they’re in a relationship with. And I
think the more vocal people are about
it, the more this becomes a really
mundane sort of footnote in their bio
— as opposed to the only thing that
people want to talk about.
You are playing the adult Joanie in
the upcoming final season of Show-
time’s “The Affair,” one of my favorite
shows. Can you spoil it for me?
I’m sorry, but I’ve spent so many
years with projects and series where
plot is king and spoilers are execut-
able offenses. So — good luck.
[Laughs.]
Let’s move on to Martin Scorsese’s
“The Irishman.” That’s an impressive
cast.
I have a very tiny part in it — I play
Robert De Niro’s daughter, one of
them, and he’s the Irishman [the labor
union leader and alleged hit man
Frank Sheeran]. But it is an absolutely
extraordinary experience, just getting
to be around those great sort of gods
of my craft. There’s a sequence that
takes place at a large celebration that
had every single cast member — and I
mean, like, everybody there — that
shot for a couple of weeks. You’re kind
of looking and going, I can’t quite
believe I got invited to this party.
[Laughs.] It was amazing.
..
“Washing Monsters,” one of five bronzes
in the gallery exhibition.
make out the lower edges of three red
letters T-E-D, as in TED Talks.
“Mountain Group,” the show’s larg-
est painting, depicts a monumental
peak crawling with people, including a
man with an orange comb-over who
might be Guston. But the scrum also
includes four versions of the artist,
including one of her lying on her face,
weeping, and another who is painting
an unpeopled view of mountains while
standing in a hole in the ground (she’s
starting from behind).
The rest of the show, which will be
up through Feb. 23, bounces between
the personal and the political. The
macabre “Washing Monsters” may
comment on the challenge of mother-
hood without resorting to using women
or children. In “Beat Out the Sun,” a
motley crew of warriors marches on
the sun, their torsos overlapping à la
Egyptian reliefs, as if beating out the
source of all life is the fastest, stupidest
way to destroy our planet, if not the
solar system.
The strange green-eyed woman in
“The Visible World” lies naked on a
rock in an unquiet sea. She points at
the water, which may be rising, and
also at a large bird perched on her
thigh; the giant raspberry in the bird’s
beak may be the last genetically modi-
fied fruit on earth. “Touched” would
seem to be about #MeToo and wom-
en’s anger — at its most wonderfully
scary. The female dancer-butterfly
phantasm of “Trouble and Appear-
ance,” a nocturne, puts me in mind of
the unknown, constantly expanding
scope of women’s power and thought,
whether or not you agree that the
besmirched, wounded salaryman in
the background is Donald Trump.
None of this would be too interesting
if Ms. Schutz’s way with paint, like her
way with images and details, were not
so engrossing and perplexing, and did
not provide so much to work with.
Narrative and brushwork tangle and
confuse, repel and seduce, often leav-
ing us (or at least me) not sure if
what’s going on is completely likable,
or should be. Whether this has to do
with “Open Casket” or not, she seems
to have felt compelled to prove herself
again — and she has.
So interacting with De Niro is no big
deal, right?
Yeah, and with Al Pacino [who plays
Jimmy Hoffa]. It was exactly as cool as
it sounds. I’m not going to lie.
In 2017, you wrote on Twitter, “I’ve
been in this victim grooming industry
since before I hit puberty.” Have you
seen concrete changes or is it just lip
service?
I think there’s a lot of good intentions. I
know that HBO and now Showtime
voluntarily have employees that they
call intimacy coordinators for anyone
having any kind of sexual anything. I
mean, seven and a half years [of nude
sex scenes] on “True Blood” pretty
much made me immune. But I’m glad
that that’s a thing. And I’m really
hopeful that we will put in place struc-
tures so that some of the things that
have happened to a lot of us don’t
happen to the next generation of
young, voiceless, scared people who
don’t feel like they can speak up for
themselves for fear of not just getting
fired, but of never being hired ever
again.
What kind of set rules do you main-
tain when you’re No. 1 on a call
sheet?
Even if I’m not No. 1 on the call sheet, I
pride myself on looking after the other
women on set. It makes a huge differ-
ence, and it doesn’t take that much
effort to let other people know that you
see everything, that you are on their
side and that you’re someone they can
talk to if anything happens. I don’t
want them to ever go home and feel
like they were somehow degraded or
traumatized, even if it was not inten-
tional. That matters to me very greatly.
I’m sure I don’t get it right all the time,
but I sure as hell try.

..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
A filmmaker’s flamelike gem
ANTWERP, BELGIUM
Lars von Trier designed
a specially cut diamond
to evoke one of his works
BY NINA SIEGAL
Enter, the diamond. A 12-carat white
double diamond, crafted out of two raw
stones, sits on a black plinth in a glass
vitrine in the center of a nearly empty
white-walled space in an Antwerp mu-
seum.
Next to it, a museum visitor is invited
to wear a virtual reality helmet and step
inside an enlarged rendition of the same
double diamond, and to stand for a mo-
ment inside its silent, glittering core.
This is “Melancholia: The Diamond,”
a puzzling exhibition created by the
Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, which
will run at the M HKA, the leading con-
temporary art museum in Antwerp, un-
til May 5.
It was co-produced by Mr. von Trier’s
longtime film producer, Marianne Slot,
and Leonid Ogarev, a Russian business-
man, who said that it brought together
“the oldest material that exists on Earth
and an absolutely new material.” Virtual
reality, he said, was “so young that you
don’t even know how it’s going to be
used tomorrow.”
Mr. Ogarev paid for the diamond, but
he declined to say what it was worth.
The M HKA would not provide photo-
graphs of the diamond or allow a photog-
rapher from The New York Times to take
any. A spokesman for the museum said
that Mr. von Trier insisted on this policy
because “he wants people to come and
actually experience it themselves.”
The jewel seems to be a literal
interpretation of the end of
“Melancholia”: Two great stones
collide to become a single form.
Mr. von Trier said in a Skype inter-
view from his home near Copenhagen
that the diamond serves as a meta-
phorical representation of his 2011 film,
“Melancholia.” The stone has a brilliant
cut on one side but is rough on the other
and has the filmmaker’s initials, “LvT,”
carved into it.
In the movie, a young woman’s debili-
tating depression sabotages her wed-
ding night, while a planet called Melan-
cholia hurtles fatally toward Earth. The
diamond seems to be a literal interpreta-
tion of the film’s apocalyptic denoue-
ment: Two great stones collide to be-
come a single form.
Mr. von Trier was elusive when asked
to explain how the diamond expresses
the movie’s essence. “What I’m trying to
do is to capture the mood,” he said.
He said he intended to turn all 13 of the
films he has made into diamonds and to
present them at art institutions across
the globe. He began in Antwerp, he said,
because of its centuries-long association
with the diamond trade, and because the
city continues to be one of the world’s
leading producers of cut diamonds.
The goal of the project, said Anders
Kreuger, senior curator at M HKA, was
to transform one artistic medium into
another: in this case, a film into a tiny
sculpture made of precious stone. “He’s
created an object of thought rather than
an object of entertainment,” he said. “It
makes me think about how you can re-
formulate reality from one form and lan-
guage into another.”
Mr. von Trier, 62, who is best known
for “Breaking the Waves” (1996) and
“Dancer in the Dark,” for which he won
the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2000, is fre-
quently described as a provocateur of
European cinema. His sprawling films,
such as the two-part “Nymphomaniac”
and his latest, “The House That Jack
Unafraid of Virginia Woolf
BOOK REVIEW
All the Lives We Ever Lived:
Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
By Katharine Smyth. 308 pp. Crown.
$26.
BY RADHIKA JONES
It begins with a house by the sea — not
in the Hebrides, as in Virginia Woolf’s
“To the Lighthouse,” or Cornwall, as in
Woolf’s childhood, but in the small
town of Tiverton on the Rhode Island
coast, where Katharine Smyth’s par-
ents bought a tumbledown weekend
house when she was 5. Her parents,
both architects, draw up renovation
plans, and, as she writes in her mem-
oir, “All the Lives We Ever Lived,” she
learns early that proximity to the sea
has a way of both distilling time into
postcard moments and speeding up
our perception of its effects: “We
learned quickly how bleached things
become in a house on the water, how
exhaustively salt and light leach color,
leaving behind pale blues and yellows.
The spines of books, the cork-tiled
floors, the rugs and prints and bed
linens — each became a cheerfully
bloodless version of itself.”
This portrayal of entropy gently
Above, a visitor at the contemporary art museum M HKA in Belgium wearing a virtual reality helmet to experience the inside of a
double diamond and thus the mood of “Melancholia,” a 2011 film by the Danish director Lars von Trier, top.
echoes “Time Passes,” the hallmark
section of “To the Lighthouse” in which
a decade’s worth of dramatic plot
points involving the Ramsay family are
narrated against the backdrop of their
Hebrides house’s descent through
neglect into near-ruin. And it gives us
a clue as to the terrain of “All the Lives
We Ever Lived,” that it will range over
the foundational memories of child-
hood, the heightened attachments and
grave disappointments of family, the
death of a beloved parent and the
quest to create out of all those ele-
ments a work of art that survives.
Smyth opens her memoir with a
preface that states her case for “To the
Lighthouse” as the through line for her
life, the “story of everything,” the one
among all the stories out there that
resonates most deeply with her psy-
che, even if it does not conform to the
literal contours of her family. (She is an
only child, compared with the Ram-
says’ brood of eight, and the hero
worship those Ramsay children direct
toward their mother she bestows on
her father.) Woolf’s fictional portrait of
parental adoration and loss speaks
profoundly to her from the moment she
first encounters the novel, and she
dives headfirst into the complete oeu-
vre, with productive results: Smyth
has, her Oxford University tutor tells
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Virginia Woolf, whose “To the Lighthouse” Katharine Smyth reveres, around 1928.
her during a junior year abroad, “an
intuitive sense of Woolf.”
And so, Woolf threads through her
memoir as a conduit between scenes
or emotions. A reference to “To the
Lighthouse” gives way to a brief analy-
sis of the passage, then the link to
M HKA
PICTORIAL PRESS/ALAMY
Woolf’s own biography and then
Smyth’s reading of the novel and the
ways it connects to her own life and
memories. But it’s hard to relegate a
writer as formidable as Woolf to con-
nective tissue, nor would it be fair to
ask a debut author to measure up to
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019 | 15
Built,” feature sadistic violence and
graphic sex.
This diamonds project is a departure,
and Mr. von Trier admitted he wasn’t en-
tirely sure how it fit into his career.
“It has been in a way a sideline, but
you never know where life will take
you,” he said. “When it started, I thought
it would take about two weeks to cut the
diamond and it would be interesting.”
Instead, it took five years to cut the
stone by hand.
The director said he couldn’t travel to
Antwerp for the opening, because of ill
health and a fear of flying (so severe
that he has had to make most of his films
in Denmark or Sweden).
“Right now I am trying to get off of
these pills so that I can drive again,” he
said, explaining that a new law in Den-
mark bars him from driving while tak-
ing certain prescription drugs. He said
he was taking “Valium for anxiety, and
I’ve been struggling with this since I
was 7 years old, so it’s a struggle to get
off of it.”
Mr. von Trier has been notoriously
press-shy and somewhat reclusive for
years, ever since what he called “an un-
fortunate press conference” meant to
promote the release of “Melancholia” at
the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. He jok-
ingly said “I’m a Nazi” and added that
he had sympathy for Hitler.
The uproar led to his temporary ban-
ishment from Cannes; he was charged
with defamation in French court, a
charge that carries a five-year prison
sentence. The charges were subse-
quently dropped, and he has returned to
Cannes; in 2018, he received a standing
ovation when he presented “The House
That Jack Built.”
her mature style. The lighthouse casts
too large a shadow.
As a compulsive rereader, I under-
stand the impulse behind Smyth’s
subtitle, “Seeking Solace in Virginia
Woolf.” Beloved novels do function as
comfort food, even novels as pro-
foundly unsettling as “To the Light-
house,” in the middle of which Woolf
dispatches death by illness, childbirth
and war in consecutive cruel paren-
thetical passages. We go back to our
chosen fictional touchstones time and
again, as constants against which to
cast our variables. And yet, there is
something diminishing about citing
great works of literature as emotional
support vessels — diminishing not only
to the great work but to the new one.
Smyth’s memoir is most absorbing
when it is absorbed in her own life,
especially in her portrait of her father,
whose alcoholism creeps deftly into the
narrative, first as a benign part of the
scenery (the glass of wine, refilled on
repeat), then as an open secret that his
daughter works desperately hard to
manage, and, finally, as a destructive
and self-destructive tragedy. As Smyth
grapples with the illness and decline of
the man she had thought of as godlike,
she excavates the foundation of her
parents’ marriage, their relationship
with each other and her relationship
culture
CARSTEN SNEJBJERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The fracas overshadowed and soured
the reception to “Melancholia,” he said,
although the film did receive the Best
Film prize at the European Film
Awards. Did he choose “Melancholia” as
the first for his diamond project to give it
a second shot?
“Maybe on a subconscious level,” he
said.
As for his comments about Hitler, Mr.
von Trier said that it was “a joke that did-
n’t travel well.” He didn’t believe anyone
would take him seriously, he said, add-
ing, “I’m not a Nazi.”
“It’s the only press conference I ever
had when I was sober,” he said. “It says a
lot about the value of drinking before
press conferences, otherwise you get so
nervous that you suddenly say that you
sympathize with Hitler. I wouldn’t rec-
ommend it.”
One of the things about diamonds that
Mr. von Trier said first attracted him
was Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel
“Diamonds Are Forever,” in which a
shopkeeper puts a sign in the window
with that phrase, to attract buyers.
“Of course it’s not true,” he points out.
“Diamonds can burn at 800 degrees Cel-
sius, and I think they completely disap-
pear because they’re made of pure car-
bon.”
For his next diamond, Mr. von Trier
said he planned to take his inspiration
from “Breaking the Waves,” considered
by many critics to be his masterpiece.
This time, he said, he planned to take a
less literal and “more abstract” ap-
proach, using new laser-based diamond
cutting technology.
“I hope it will take less than five
years,” he said. After all, there are still 12
films more to go.
with each of them. Her prose is so fluid
and clear throughout that it’s not sur-
prising to observe her view of her
family, its cracks and fissures, sharpen
into unsparing focus.
The truth is, I didn’t retain much of
Smyth’s commentary on Woolf. It is
insightful and reverent, but not revela-
tory, at least not to someone who has
studied her work. I do remember the
way Smyth describes the cast of the
Tiverton light on the water and how
her father pounds the table one hostile
night, breaking a plate and cutting his
hand to the bone. I remember the false
hope of his miraculous recovery at the
hospital on the afternoon Katharine is
called in to say goodbye. She is the
only one who can arrange his pillows
just the way he likes them. She faith-
fully records the incoherent dialogue of
his hallucinatory dreams. Her explora-
tion of grown-up love, the kind that
accounts for who the loved one actu-
ally is, not who you want him or her to
be, gains power and grace as her story
unfolds. I suspect her book could itself
become solace for people navigating
their way through the complexities of
grief for their fallen idols. And they will
be lucky to have it.
Radhika Jones is editor in chief of
Vanity Fair.

16 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2019
travel
Invasive species (tourists) in the Galápagos
The environmental impact
of the growing number
of visitors sets off alarms
BY ADAM POPESCU
“The archipelago is a little world within
itself,” a young Charles Darwin mused
in his London study in 1839. Four years
earlier, the aspiring naturalist had spent
five weeks on the Galápagos Islands,
some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador.
So taken by the “extreme tameness” of
the species he encountered, he wasn’t
an ideal visitor by today’s standards: He
hopped on the backs of giant tortoises
and “pushed a hawk off the branch of a
tree” with the muzzle of a gun.
These days, that “little world” is
brand-name nature, drawing an in-
creasing number of visitors from around
the world to see, among other creatures,
blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas
that swim alongside equatorial pen-
guins, and the giant tortoises for which
the islands are named. In 2017, 241,800
people visited the islands, according to
the Observatorio de Turismo de Galá-
pagos, up from 173,419 a decade earlier.
Much of the growth — more than 90
percent from 2007 to 2016 — is from
land-based tourism: visitors who fly
into airports on the islands of Baltra and
San Cristóbal, check into hotels and take
à la carte tours that are considerably
cheaper than the expensive cruises
from which most visitors have tradition-
ally seen the islands. With round-trip
flights from Quito costing as little as
$400 or so, and hostel accommodations
starting at $20 a night, the Galápagos Is-
lands are no longer just for upscale trav-
elers.
For the Galápagos National Park,
which uses a portion of the $100 fee that
visitors are required to pay ($6 for Ecua-
doreans) to oversee the 97 percent of the
islands that hasn’t been settled by hu-
mans, land-based tourism offers much-
needed funds. But that doesn’t mean
conservation groups — including Un-
esco, which lists tourism growth as one
of the primary threats to the islands —
aren’t alarmed by the lack of an en-
forced cap on land-based visitors.
(Cruise passengers, on the other hand,
are limited by the space available on ex-
pedition ships; last year, there were
some 70 ships with room for about 1,700
passengers.) More people on the islands
means more pressure on existing infra-
structure, encroachment on animal hab-
itats and a heightened risk of introduc-
ing invasive plant and animal species.
“It is simply not sustainable to have
never-ending growth in land-based
tourism in this fragile environment,”
said Jim Lutz, the president of the Inter-
national Galápagos Tour Operators As-
sociation, who expressed the same sen-
timent in a letter to Ecuador’s tourism
minister last February.
A sea turtle sharing the waters off San Cristóbal Island with a snorkeler.
On a recent visit to the islands, I ob-
served land-based tourism in action,
and spoke to naturalists, guides and oth-
ers about the effects of the travel boom,
which, along with climate change, illegal
— and legal — fishing and other threats,
make the Galápagos a microcosm of
conservation’s modern challenges.
ON THE GROUND
Along with more visitors, the islands’
permanent population (now about
30,000) has also swelled. About half of
those residents — many from mainland
Ecuador who were drawn here by the
tourism business — are in Puerto Ayora,
on the island of Santa Cruz.
In some ways, the town seems like
any other tropical locale, with coffee
shops, cafes and stores selling T-shirts;
there is even a bit of a party scene when
the sun goes down.
On an overcast Friday night in Puerto
Ayora, I sat with Ulf Torsten Hardter, an
environmental manager turned guide,
on the patio of OMG Galápagos, a cafe
with a life-size statue of Darwin sporting
a Santa Claus-like beard, popular with
the selfie set.
“The problem is that the islands lack
basic infrastructure like waste, energy,
water,” Mr. Hardter said over an iguana-
branded I.P.A. As we talked, the misty
rain called garúa started, and one of
Darwin’s finches scavenged from my
unfinished plate.
Mr. Hardter, who is originally from
Germany, came to the islands in 2006 to
build a solid waste recycling center with
the World Wildlife Fund. Today that cen-
ter processes all of Santa Cruz’s plastic
Tourists last fall on Española, an island that is part of the Galápagos archipelago. The Galápagos is a microcosm of conservation’s modern challenges.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
and organic waste. With the influx of so
many people, more environmentally re-
sponsible ways of dealing with matters
like long-term waste disposal and drink-
ing water are needed, Mr. Hardter said.
Later, I strolled past a fish market
where a 16-foot marlin dangled from a
hook, and sea lions, pelicans and frigate
birds nudged iPhone-wielding tourists.
A relative lack of predators and a curi-
ous public have made these animals
fearless — and bold. More than once I
saw someone get too close to a sea lion,
“It is simply not sustainable
to have never-ending growth
in land-based tourism in this
fragile environment.”
which barked in displeasure — even, in
one case, chasing a couple of tourists
away. (In the national park itself, vis-
itors are told to stay six feet away from
the animals. Those rules, I was told, are
routinely ignored, and my own observa-
tions bore this out.)
Not far from the market, Avenida Bal-
tra is lined with mom-and-pop stalls
serving ceviche and marinero soup, and
kiosks where tour operators hawk day
trips geared to cost-conscious visitors.
Most of these advertised eco-friendly
specials; just how eco-friendly is diffi-
cult to verify.
Sometimes, these options are, by
their very nature, the least impactful.
You can visit highland jungle trails, cof-
fee plantations or the twin volcano
craters called Los Gemelos, all just out-
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
monitor what’s going on here,” she said.
The fact that only a fraction of the ma-
rine reserve — the waters surrounding
the national park — are off-limits to fish-
ing, had to be the most confusing thing I
heard during my visit.
I knew that the government faced
pressure from local fishermen, and that
there had been incidents of violence in
the past. But shouldn’t all of this land —
and the surrounding sea — be off-lim-
its? Wouldn’t that protect this place for
years to come?
"These marine populations are being
depleted,” Enric Sala, a National Geo-
graphic explorer-in-residence, said. “If
Ecuador wants the Galápagos to contin-
ue to be a unique place that attracts vis-
itors from all around the world, and
brings in hundreds of millions of dollars
every year and supports tens of thou-
sands of people, then they have to make
a decision. Otherwise, the Galápagos
risks going from being a unique place to
being a very common place like so many
others that have been destroyed
through short-term interests."
FAILED PHOTO-OP
On my last night in Puerto Ayora, I
walked along the marina and stared
across the water. Baby white-tipped
sharks swam in schools at the water’s
edge.
A squawk turned my head — it wasn’t
wildlife, but rather a young woman in a
North Face jacket and Birkenstocks
who was having what seemed like an ar-
gument with an uncooperative sea lion.
Instead of posing for a snapshot, the sea
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSH HANER/THE NEW YORK TIMES lion kept advancing on the interloper,
perhaps expecting to be fed instead of
filmed. I watched as an opportunistic
Galapageño approached.
side town. Prices range from a few dol- “The animals and islands are the same; legs and I surfaced with an uncontrolla- “Don’t worry,” he said. “If you want to
lars for a cab ride to a few hundred dol- the options aren’t.” ble laugh: It was a sea lion. Bobbing at get real close for a good picture, we can
lars for a day on the ocean in an out- I decided to splurge on a Quasar the surface, I noticed three fishing boats go to North Seymour island for the day.
board motor boat or small yacht. Or you cruise, which departed from Baltra and with gear I later learned was illegal. Al- Just $200.”
can rent a bike for about $15 and explore took me and about 30 passengers to sev- though it is legal for these fisherman to The woman looked at her companion,
a paved road that cuts through a semiar- eral islands over the course of a week. catch tuna and other fish in much of the a young man in a tie-dye shirt who shook
id landscape to forest. A few miles away Alex Cox, a veteran Galápagos-born Galápagos Marine Reserve, Mr. Cox told his head.
in the sleepy town of Bellavista, off a dirt guide with nearly three decades of expe- me that the type of lines the fishermen “$100,” the Galapageño bargained.
road on a private farm, there are lava rience and an encyclopedic love for na- were using could accidentally snag and “On my boat, we’ll spend the whole day
tunnels sculpted by years of magma ture, pointed out volcanoes and blue- harm or kill sea lions, sharks and turtles. on the island.”
flow. White pickups double as taxis and footed boobies, and expounded on the Later, Sofia Darquea, president of the The sea lion waddled off the pier and
charge a dollar to take you anywhere in complexity of the Galápagos every Galápagos Naturalist Guides Associa- splashed off into the water. The woman’s
town, even for D.I.Y. jaunts. morning over a mug of hot water with tion, told me about the dangers of illegal eyes trailed after the departing mam-
I went on one of those jaunts, getting lemon. fishing practices. If the marine life goes, mal.
dropped off at the edge of town where On a blustery morning, Mr. Cox and I she said, so go the birds and reptiles, and “Is the boat eco-friendly?” she asked.
Avenida Baltra heads uphill and into the were snorkeling off the islet of Gen- so, too, the tourists. “The national park The operator smiled. “Of course,” he
highlands. I was in search of tortoises, ovesa. Something darted through my doesn’t have enough working boats to said. “This is the Galápagos.”
but instead I saw yapping dogs and
fences protecting corn and cattle, all of
which disrupt migratory routes of the
tortoises. Hours later, tired and wet, I
boarded a bus for 50 cents. Staring out
the window, I finally saw giant tortoises
on the side of the road — I lost count af-
ter a dozen — many being fed by tourists
(another thing that is discouraged, but
nearly impossible to enforce).
WHERE YOU SLEEP
Where you spend the night is another in-
dicator of change and the stratified op-
tions offered to visitors. Though the Ob-
We’re having an
servatorio de Turismo de Galápagos
claims there are currently limitations on
open house.
the number and size of new hotels, ac-
commodations have increased greatly And you’re invited.
over the last decade — from 65 to more
than 300 — with prices running from
backpacker rates to over $900 a night. I From urban condos to mountain castles and island
stayed in a standard room at the Ikala, getaways, discover the new International Homes
an affordable lodging just a few steps section in the Weekend edition and enjoy a fresh
from Puerto Ayora’s marina. Many ho- perspective on the global property market.
tels have eco-friendly features, or at
least claim to. At the Ikala, solar panels Starts Saturday, February 23.
heat the showers and light the garden.
Across the bay, one of the island’s old-
est hotels (and most costly — a suite re-
cently ran about $800 a night) is Finch
Bay, which feels like a slice of Malibu
and takes its eco-friendly services seri-
ously. An on-site treatment plant desali-
nates brackish seawater, a greenhouse
supplies the kitchen and all fish is
bought from locals. In 1989, Finch Bay’s
parent company helped establish the re-
cycling-center project Mr. Hardter
worked on years later.
Finch Bay’s adjacent beach is white
sand, but that’s only because the staff
cleans it every day. “You can’t imagine
how much trash we find,” said Renato
Vasconez, the quality manager at Finch
Bay. “The microplastic is the worst.”
ON THE WATER
A boat is needed to get to nearby islands,
so even land tourists may end up spend-
ing time on an expedition vessel operat-
ed by Lindblad or Quasar Expeditions.
They aren’t cheap — a week can run sev-
eral thousand dollars — but the advan-
tage is that you get the expertise of top
naturalists employed by the cruise lines.
Providers like Quasar are also plastic-
free and support the national park and
organizations like the Charles Darwin
Foundation and the Galápagos Scouts,
organizations whose researchers work
to preserve the species that attract for-
eigners. Lindblad sponsors similar
work, something smaller operators
can’t afford. Lindblad, Quasar and other
expedition cruises, are typically all-in-
clusive. Last-minute deals run as much
as 30 percent off.
The alternative is taking a day trip on
smaller vessels from Puerto Ayora that
cost as little as $100. The trade-off is that
you’re generally on the water only a few
hours, and the price might just cover gas
(food and snorkeling or diving are often
negotiated individually). Expedition subscribe.inyt.com
ships also have permits to visit islands,
that many of the day cruises do not.
“You get what you pay for: the quality of
the guide, level of English, food, boat,”
said Dominic Hamilton, a deputy tour-
ism minister turned magazine editor.