International New York Times số ra ngày 25/2/2014

BY DAVID E. SANGER

BY DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Not long after the uprising in Syria
turned bloody in the late spring of 2011,
the Pentagon and cyberwarriors at the
National Security Agency developed a
battle plan that featured a sophisticated
cyberattack on the Syrian military and
President Bashar al-Assad’s command
structure.
The military’s ability to launch airstrikes was a particular target, along
with missile production facilities. ‘‘It
would essentially turn the lights out for
Assad,’’ said one former official familiar
with the planning.
For President Obama, who has been
adamantly opposed to direct, boots-onthe-ground intervention in a worsening
crisis in Syria, cyberweapons would
seem to be an obvious, low-cost, lowcasualty alternative. But while he was
briefed on variants of the plans — most
of which were part of traditional strikes
as well — he turned them down.
Syria was not a place where he saw
the strategic value in American intervention, and even covert cyberattacks
— of the kind he had ordered against
Iran during the first two years of his
presidency — involved range of risks.
The strategic considerations that
have stopped Mr. Obama from reaching

for offensive cyberweapons his administration has spent billions helping develop — in large part in hopes that they
can help avoid the need for more traditional military attacks — reflects the
larger concerns about a new and untested form of warfare.
Just as the introduction of the airplane changed the nature of warfare in
World War I a century ago, the Obama
administration has been engaged in a
largely secret, behind-the-scenes debate about whether cyberweapons can
be deployed as an ordinary weapon, a

Ukraine’s acting interior minister said
on Monday that the authorities were in
pursuit of the ousted president, Viktor F.
Yanukovych, who was believed to be in
Crimea, in the south of the country, and
that if found he would be arrested on
charges of mass murder in the killings of
dozens of the antigovernment protesters
who chased him from power last week.
The pursuit of Mr. Yanukovych, a man
now widely despised even by many of
his former supporters, came as the Parliament continued its efforts to rebuild
the government, with hopes of appointing an acting prime minister and having
the rest of a provisional government in
place on Tuesday.
Former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, freed from prison on Saturday, has said she does not want to be
considered for the post. So speculation
on the premiership is now focusing on
her ally Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, who has
been a leader of the anti-Yanukovych
street protests since they began in late

November.
Western officials on Monday continued to praise the developments in
Ukraine, saying that Parliament had
successfully filled a power vacuum, and
that democratic institutions had functioned successfully. Russia, however,
stepped up its criticism after recalling
its ambassador from Kiev on Sunday.
‘‘Today, I see no legitimate Ukrainian
partners for dialogue,’’ the Russian
prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev,
said in Sochi, a day after the close of the
Winter Olympics, according to the Interfax news service. ‘‘If people crossing
Kiev in black masks with Kalashnikov
rifles are considered a government, it
will be difficult for us to work with such
a government.’’
In fact, the security situation in the
Ukrainian capital seemed to improve on
Monday, with regular law enforcement
bodies and some antigovernment fighters sharing responsibility for guarding
government buildings and directing

BY ANDREW HIGGINS

As Ukraine’s Parliament moved to fill a
power vacuum left by the ouster of
President Viktor F. Yanukovych, Irina
Nikanchuk, a 25-year-old economist,

stood outside the elected Legislature on

Monday to give voice to a widespread
feeling here: throw the bums out.
Waving a banner calling for early
elections to a new Parliament, Ms. Nikanchuk poured scorn on current members and opposition politicians like
Yulia V. Tymoshenko who have so far
become the principal beneficiaries of a
revolution driven by passions on the
street and bubbled with disgust at
Ukraine’s entire political elite.
Parliament has moved swiftly since
Mr. Yanukovych’s flight on Saturday to

BY STEPHEN CASTLE
AND STANLEY REED

A statue based on one by Leonardo da Vinci guards a Milan
racetrack, but some residents are urging a more prominent home for it.

They have argued over whether an independent Scotland could retain the British
pound as its currency. They have sparred
over whether Scotland would remain in
the European Union if it votes in September to leave the United Kingdom. And on
Monday, two of the most prominent advocates of the arguments for and against
Scottish independence — Alex Salmond,

restore a semblance of normal government, endorsing interim ministers and
giving expanded powers to its new
speaker, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, an
ally of Ms. Tymoshenko, empowering
him to carry out the duties of the president until a new election is held in May.

But the prospect of a new order dominated by established opposition parties,
almost as discredited in the eyes of many
Ukrainians as Mr. Yanukovych’s Party
of Regions, has left a bitter feeing that
what comes next could end up disappointing as much as the government that

followed the 2004 Orange Revolution.
‘‘We need new people who can say no
to the oligarchs, not just the old faces,’’
Ms. Nikanchuk said, referring to the billionaires who control blocs of votes in
Parliament but who, with a few exceptions, hedged their bets until the end
about which side to support in a violent
struggle between Mr. Yanukovych and
his opponents.
‘‘Tymoshenko is just Putin in a skirt,’’
Ms. Nikanchuk added, likening the
newly freed former prime minister to

Scotland’s first minister, and David
Cameron, the British prime minister —
turned to another crucial economic issue
at stake in the battle: the future of the
still-substantial oil and gas reserves in
the North Sea.
In a staged but striking symbol of their
differences, Mr. Cameron brought the
British government’s cabinet to Aberdeen, a once gritty port that is now the
wealthy hub of North Sea oil and gas,
only the second time in 90 years the government had met in Scotland. He announced a new investment to support the
energy industry and asserted that Britain’s economic size and clout are vital to

keeping the profits flowing from oil and
gas in the decades to come.
‘‘The broad shoulders of one of the top
10 economies in the world has really got

behind this industry,’’ he said of North
Sea oil and gas, adding that being part of
Britain also reduces the impact of sudden drops in energy prices.
In nearby Portlethen, Mr. Salmond
met separately with the Scottish government’s cabinet ministers. He suggested that an independent Scotland
could follow the example of Norway
which has built a large sovereign wealth
fund from its natural resources.
He also highlighted his knowledge of
the energy industry, noting that he was
an oil analyst in the 1980s when Mr.
Cameron was still at Eton, the elite English school — a continuation of political
attacks on Mr. Cameron as elitist and
out of touch with average voters.
With a referendum on Scottish inde-

The surprise move by the interim prime
minister, Hazem el-Beblaw, could be
intended to pave the way for the
country’s military chief to leave his post
and run for president. WORLD NEWS, 8

Harold Ramis, best known for his roles
in ‘‘Ghostbusters’’ and ‘‘Stripes,’’ died
on Monday from complications of

autoimmune inflammatory disease. He
was 69.

In recent cases, the United States
Supreme Court has been asked to
overrule important precedents and will
soon review a case on a 1988 securities
fraud decision. WORLD NEWS, 8

The Russian president is watching to
see what happens next in Kiev now that
his ally has been ousted.

Under Jim DeMint, the Heritage
Foundation, long known as an
incubator for Republican policy ideas,
has become more of a political
organization feeding off the Tea Party
movement.

President Obama may have been right
to keep a low profile on criminal justice
reform until there was a bipartisan
consensus. That time is now. OPINION, 6

BUSINESS, 17

The Barcelona club paid 13.5 million
euros in hopes of settling a dispute over
the signing of Neymar. SPORTS, 15

The Federal Reserve extended
hundreds of billions to central banks
from Sweden to Singapore. BUSINESS, 16
CURRENCIES

’:HIKKLD=WUXUU\:?a@c@m@f@k"

— Euro
s Pound
s Yen
— S. Franc

NEW YORK, MONDAY 12:30PM

€1=
£1=
$1=
$1=

$1.3740
$1.3740
$1.6640
$1.6610
¥102.440 ¥102.520
SF0.8880 SF0.8880

The capture of the world’s most wanted
man, El Chapo, upended assumptions
about the impunity of Mexican

mobsters.

For decades, the F.B.I.’s vehicles were
off limits to New York City tow trucks.
Not any more.
STOCK INDEXES

MONDAY

s The Dow 12:30pm 16,288.03
s FTSE 100 close
6,865.86
t Nikkei 225 close
14,837.68
OIL

+1.15%
+0.41%
–0.19%

NEW YORK, MONDAY 12:30PM

s Light sweet crude

$103.18

+$1.35

ch au me t. co m

Addressing Parliament, Prime Minister
Matteo Renzi pledged to push through
political and electoral reforms, and to
revive the economy. WORLD NEWS, 5

Liens, the new Chaumet watch


See what readers are talking about and
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As train No. 17 left Pixley, near Delano,
California, last evening [Feb. 24], five
men boarded it. Two went on the engine
and covered the engineer with revolvers.
About two miles from the station the train
was brought to a stop. The other three
men entered the express car and ordered
the messenger to open the box, and dynamite bombs were exploded under the
car. In the excitement several passengers
ran towards the front of the train. Two of
them were shot — E.S. Bentley, of Modesto, who is probably fatally wounded,
and Charles Gabert, of Poso, who was
killed instantly. The amount secured by
the robbers is unknown.

Soviet Premier Nikita S.
Khrushchev says that if it were not for
heavy military spending, the Soviet
people could have the world’s highest

living standard. ‘‘Rockets and guns are
not butter, meat, milk, bread or kasha
(buckwheat),’’ Mr. Khrushchev said in a
preface to a collection of his foreign
policy statements, soon to be published
in Italy. ‘‘Were it not for the necessity of
increasing the might of our armed forces
we could have steeply raised the living
standard of our people and in the near
future made it the highest in the world.’’
Find a retrospective of news from 1887 to
2013 in The International Herald Tribune
at

BY MARGALIT FOX

Terry Adkins, a conceptual artist whose
work married the quicksilver evanescence of music to the solid permanence
of sculpture, died on Feb. 8 at his home
in Brooklyn. He was 60.

The cause was heart failure, his dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn said.
A sculptor and saxophonist, Mr.
Adkins was at his death a professor of
fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. His genre-blurring pieces, which might combine visual
art, spoken-word performance, video
and live music in a single installation,
had lately made him ‘‘a newly minted
breakaway star’’ on the international
art scene, as The New York Times described him in December.

Mr. Adkins’s work — cerebral yet viscerally evocative, unabashedly Modernist yet demonstrably rooted in African traditions — has been exhibited at
museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
His art is in the collections of the Hirsh-

horn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
part of the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and the Museum of Modern Art in New
York; and the Tate Modern in London.
His work will be shown this year as
part of the Whitney Biennial, which runs
from March 7 to May 25 at the museum.
‘‘Terry always saw object and sound
and movement and words and images all
as the material for his art,’’ Thelma
Golden, the director and chief curator of
the Studio Museum in Harlem, said in an
interview on Friday. ‘‘He was so deeply
inspired by aesthetics, philosophy, spirituality, music, history and culture, and
he had such a fertile and generative
mind, that he was always able to move
between many different ideas and create
a lot of space and meaning in a work.’’
To his sculpture, Mr. Adkins sought to
bring the fleeting impermanence of music, creating haunting assemblages of
found objects — wood, cloth, coat
hangers, spare parts from junkyards —
that evoked vanished histories.
To his improvisational, jazz-inflected
music, he brought the muscular physicality of sculpture, forging immense, curious instruments from assorted materi-

als. Many were playable, including a set
of 18-foot horns he called arkaphones.
The sculpture and the music were
meant to be experienced in tandem, and
with his band, the Lone Wolf Recital
Corps, Mr. Adkins staged multimedia
performance pieces that fused the visual and the aural. Many were homages to
pathbreaking figures in African-American history, among them the abolitionist
John Brown, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., and the musicians Bessie
Smith, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix.
‘‘Meteor Stream: Recital in Four
Dominions,’’ for instance, was one of a
cycle of works in which Mr. Adkins
honored Brown. In that piece, performed in 2009 at the American
Academy in Rome, he explored Brown’s
storied past through an amalgam of music, sculpture, video, drawing and readings from Brown’s own writings.
In an installation devoted to Hendrix,
Mr. Adkins homed in on lesser-known aspects of his subject’s personal history, including his service in the early 1960s as a
paratrooper in the Army’s 101st Airborne
Division. To research a piece on the life of
the African-American explorer Matthew
Henson, who accompanied Robert Peary
on several expeditions, including the one

Peary said reached the North Pole in
1909, Mr. Adkins traveled to the Arctic to
experience Henson’s milieu firsthand.
At its core, all of Mr. Adkins’s work

was about how the past suffuses the
present and vice versa.
Terry Roger Adkins was born in
Washington on May 9, 1953, into a musical household. His father, Robert, a teacher, sang and played the organ; his mother, the former Doris Jackson, a nurse,
was an amateur clarinetist and pianist.
As a young man, Mr. Adkins planned

to be a musician, but in college he found
himself drawn increasingly to visual art.
He earned a bachelor’s in printmaking
from Fisk University in Nashville, followed by a master’s in the field from
Illinois State University and a master of
fine arts degree in sculpture from the
University of Kentucky.
Mr. Adkins, who also maintained a
home in Philadelphia, is survived by his
wife, Merele Williams-Adkins, whom he
married in 1992, along with a son and
daughter.
His work was the subject of a major
retrospective in 2012 at the Frances
Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art
Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga
Springs, N.Y. It has also been featured at
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now
MoMA PS1) in Queens, the LedisFlam
Gallery in Brooklyn and elsewhere. In
an interview with the website
danaroc.com, Mr. Adkins spoke of his desire to reconcile the temporal imperatives of music with the spatial ones of art.
‘‘My quest has been to find a way to

make music as physical as sculpture
might be, and sculpture as ethereal as
music is,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s kind of challenging to make both of those pursuits do
what they are normally not able to do.’’

Two weeks
ago, voters here vented their frustration at the changes happening around
them and voted overwhelmingly to put
a stop to mass immigration.
At 63.1 percent, the ‘‘yes’’ vote from
Schwyz — one of the three founding
cantons of the original 13th-century
Swiss Confederation — was one of the
highest in Switzerland, in striking contrast to the next-door urban canton of
Zurich, where only 47.3 percent of
voters supported the initiative, whose
victory nationwide shook up Europe.
Evidently, the good citizens of
Schwyz — all 150,000 of them — are
particularly upset about the steady influx of foreigners who’ve been flocking
to their region of lakes and mountains.
For the most part, these are not poor
immigrants from different continents
and cultures, whose presence elsewhere
in Europe has roiled a spreading rightwing reaction. In Schwyz, the new arrivals — about 2,000 to 3,000 a year —
are mostly well-off,
well-educated Europeans, an estimated
40 percent of them
German, who have
come to take specialized jobs the Swiss

labor force can’t fill.
An inflow of German-speaking specialists coming to work in a Germanspeaking region of Switzerland, where
unemployment is 1.3 percent, hardly
seems justification for populist outrage.
Yet, according to Kurt Zibung, a
member of Schwyz’s governing council
and head of its economic department,
people here voted on Feb. 9 ‘‘with their
heart and their feelings.’’
‘‘We have a very conservative area,’’
explained Mr. Zibung, member of a
political party that opposed the referendum. ‘‘The vote was not against the
foreigners. People are just afraid that
they will destroy our culture.’’
The Feb. 9 referendum — narrowly
approved by 50.3 percent of Swiss
voters — sent shock waves across
Europe, throwing into question interlocking treaties between the European
Union and Switzerland, a nonmember,
in effect since 2002. One allows citizens
of European Union countries to work in
Switzerland, and vice versa. Yet, most
experts attribute Switzerland’s recent
economic boom to the package deal
with the Union that opened the door to
European job seekers.
‘‘We’ve never been as rich as we are
now,’’ said Peter Fischer, economics editor at Neue Zürcher Zeitung, an authoritative economic newspaper. ‘‘We have
an open, healthy economy for which,
yes, it is hard to find qualified people.’’

The vote on Feb. 9 revealed a divided
country, with one half looking outward
and the other half clinging to nostalgic
notions defined by cows, Alps and picture-postcard villages. ‘‘In the last two
decades, Switzerland has changed, and
there is now a gap between identity
and reality,’’ Mr. Fischer said.
The fact is Switzerland has been
faced recently with the daunting task
of absorbing 80,000 foreigners a year, a
lot for a country of eight million. Today,
more than 20 percent of Swiss residents are foreigners, of which 85 percent are European, with Germans and
Portuguese the largest groups.
In a place like Schwyz, this puts a
strain on the local population. According to Mr. Zibung, housing prices have
doubled, traffic has increased, and
young families are moving out.
In the village of Muotatal, the conservative epicenter of the canton, one voter
— a music teacher who declined to give
her name — said she had voted for the
immigration referendum without fully
understanding its consequences.
‘‘It was just getting to be too much,’’
she said. ‘‘When the Swiss feel overwhelmed, we can’t manage.’’
Josef Gwerder, a shop owner in
Muotatal, said that about 10 of the 23
apartments in his building were occupied by Austrians or Germans, many of
them working in the local hospital or
retirement homes.
Mr. Gwerder voted against the initiative, but he said many of his neighbors

felt disregarded by their own government and by extension, by the European
Union. ‘‘Voting ‘yes’ was another way of
voting ‘no’ to what’s going on,’’ he said.
This sense of powerlessness is a sensitive subject in a country that prides
itself on a tradition of direct democracy.
‘‘We are always a little bit afraid that
other people are giving us rules that we
don’t accept,’’ Mr. Zibung explained.



BY STEVEN LEE MYERS

The sudden collapse of the Kremlinbacked government in Ukraine has for
now delivered a profound setback to
President Vladimir V. Putin’s strategy
to deepen political and economic ties
with the country and thus keep it from
embracing Europe.
Even as Russia celebrates the closing
of Olympic Games that defied some dire
expectations, Mr. Putin now faces the
task of reasserting Russia’s influence in
a country that it considers a fraternal
ally, one with deep cultural, social and
political connections that bind it to Moscow’s orbit regardless of its new government.
Russia still has enormous leverage
and close allies in Ukraine, particularly
in the east and on the Crimean Peninsula, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet
and a sizable ethnic Russian population

that views the leaders of the political uprising that toppled President Viktor F.
Yanukovych with disdain.
That has raised fears that Russia
would use the disenchanted populations
there as a pretext to intervene to reverse Ukraine’s new trajectory — even
militarily, as the Kremlin did in two ethnic enclaves in 2008 in another former

traffic. A sense of workaday calm
seemed to return to the city, even as barricades still surrounded the main
protest sites.
But it was the chase for Mr. Yanukovych that gripped the nation.
The acting interior minister, Arsen
Avakov, who was appointed by Parliament on Saturday, wrote on his Facebook page that he was personally involved in the manhunt, perhaps in
hopes that someone would find the fugitive, much as Iraqis and United States
forces hunted for Saddam Hussein in
2003, or Libyans for Col. Muammar elQaddafi nine years later.
Apparently fearing their fate — Mr.
Hussein was hung after a peremptory trial, Colonel Qaddafi shot by opponents
while on the run — Mr. Yanukovych fled
Kiev on Friday night by helicopter.
Mr. Avakov said that he had traveled
to the Crimean city of Sevastopol on
Sunday night hoping to intercept Mr.
Yanukovych at the airport there, but
that the deposed president had not
turned up as expected. He said Mr. Yanukovych had then fled in an unknown
direction, traveling by car, and with a diminished security detail.
As Mr. Yanukovych’s public persona
morphed from feared strongman to detested fugitive, any last vestiges of support for him seemed to vanish even in the
pro-Russia eastern and southern parts

of the country, which had historically
provided his base of political support.
Mr. Yanukovych’s own Party of Regions, which had supported him until
lawmakers began defecting over last
week’s mass killings in Kiev, issued a
statement on Sunday saying the country
had been deceived, robbed and betrayed. ‘‘All responsibility for this lies
with Yanukovych,’’ the party wrote. ‘‘We
condemn the flight and cowardice of Yanukovych. We condemn the betrayal.’’
Mr. Yanukovych and his family were
known to have accumulated vast wealth
during his time in office, and he was believed to have access to at least one yacht
that might ferry him out of Ukraine.

BY ALAN COWELL

Brushing aside Western threats and
outrage, President Yoweri Museveni of
Uganda significantly strengthened
Africa’s antigay movement on Monday
by signing into law a bill imposing harsh
sentences for homosexual acts, including life imprisonment in some cases, according to government officials.
The move came weeks after Mr.
Museveni’s counterpart in Nigeria,
Goodluck Jonathan, took similar steps,
threatening offenders with 14-year prison terms. The Ugandan law seemed
even tougher, threatening life terms on
charges such as ‘‘aggravated homosexuality,’’ referring to homosexual acts
with a minor, a disabled person or
someone infected with H.I.V.

Alluding to Western pressure to reject
the bill, Mr. Museveni said, according to
The Associated Press: ‘‘We Africans
never seek to impose our view on others. If only they could let us alone.’’
He signed the legislation at his official
residence at Entebbe, near the capital,
Kampala, in front of government officials, journalists and a team of Ugandan
scientists who had said they found no genetic basis for homosexuality — a conclusion that Mr. Museveni cited in support of

Soviet republic, Georgia.
The fears have been so palpable —
and the subject of endless speculation in
Ukraine and here in Russia — that President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, warned in a television interview on Sunday that it ‘‘would
be a grave mistake’’ for Russia to use
force. ‘‘It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence return and the situation escalate,’’ Ms. Rice said on NBC’s ‘‘Meet the
Press.’’
How exactly Russia will respond remains to be seen, but the turmoil is certain to further strain relations with
Europe and the United States, which officials here have denounced as meddling in Ukraine at the expense of Russia’s vital interests. At the same time,
the United States and Europe have accused Russia of trying to impose its will
there.
Mr. Putin’s envoy refused to sign the
agreement mediated on Friday by three
European foreign ministers to end two
days of carnage in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, only to have the agreement
overtaken by a political upheaval that
threatens to undercut Russia’s influence over any new government.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S.
Peskov, complained on Sunday that
while Mr. Yanukovych had honored the
terms of the agreement — which called

On Facebook, Mr. Avako, the acting
interior minister, said that after
abandoning his residence near the capital, Mr. Yanukovych had flown by helicopter to Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine,
where he prepared a video statement on
Saturday declaring that he remained
president. Then he went to the airport in
Donetsk, where he and several companions sought to flee the country on Falcon
airplanes.
Border police officers at the airport
prevented the planes from flying, Mr.
Avakov said, and Mr. Yanukovych then
departed in a motorcade for the south.
After learning that Parliament had
voted to strip him of power, Mr. Yanukovych began avoiding government
residences, including a presidential
country house in Crimea where he had
been expected to seek shelter.
In addition to the murder charges,
there have been calls for the prosecution
of Mr. Yanukovych on corruption
charges after the discovery of astonishing trappings of wealth at his abandoned
presidential residence in a national park
outside of Kiev. Throughout the weekend, curious and angry members of the
public streamed to the compound to
gawk at the collections of expensive
modern and antique cars, the private
zoo and other gauche accouterments.
As journalists scoured the compound,
sorting through a trove of documents

that had been partly burned or dumped
in a river, the local news media began reporting allegations of embezzlement and
corruption, and new details about Mr.
Yanukovych’s personal life emerged.
The Kyiv Post, a newspaper here, said
that it had found evidence that Mr. Yanukovych, 63, was living at the residence with a 39-year-old girlfriend and
her 12-year-old daughter from a prior
relationship. Mr. Yanukovych has been
married for 42 years, but his wife, Lyudmila, has long lived in Donetsk and typically has not performed the duties of
first lady.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting
from Moscow.

the new law, The A.P. said.
While Western gay-rights campaigners have accused American evangelical
Christian groups of promoting antigay
sentiment in Uganda, Mr. Museveni accused ‘‘arrogant and careless Western
groups’’ of seeking to draw Ugandan
children into homosexuality.
The Ugandan government spokesman, Ofwono Opondo, said Mr. Museveni wanted to sign the bill ‘‘with the full
witness of the international media to
demonstrate Uganda’s independence in
the face of Western pressure and provocation.’’ Mr. Opondo announced on
Twitter that Mr. Museveni had signed
the bill, which drew condemnation from
rights groups and Ugandan activists.
‘‘It’s a gloomy day, not just for the gay
community in Uganda but for all
Ugandans who care about human rights,
because this law will affect everybody,’’

Julian Peppe Onziema, an advocate for
gay rights in Uganda, told Reuters.
The Ugandan Parliament approved
the law in December, saying it was
aimed ‘‘at strengthening the nation’s
capacity to deal with emerging internal
and external threats to the traditional
heterosexual family.’’
Gay-rights activists in Uganda have
vowed to oppose the law, which could
jeopardize hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial Western aid.

for new elections and a return of constitutional powers to the Parliament — his
political opponents had not. Instead, the
Parliament has effectively seized power
and is now rushing through an series of
votes that have provoked rage among
Russian lawmakers and commentators.
‘‘It’s a confusing situation,’’ Mr.
Peskov said in a telephone interview
from Sochi, where Mr. Putin attended
the closing ceremony of the Olympic
Games. ‘‘We have to figure out what we
are facing there. Is it a coup or what?’’
Mr. Putin has not yet made any public
statements about the latest events, as is
often the case when he is confronted by
unexpected challenges or crises. ‘‘Let’s
wait and see,’’ Mr. Peskov said.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Yanukovych have

spoken several times in recent weeks to
discuss the situation, but Mr. Peskov
said he did not know whether they had
spoken since Saturday, when Mr. Yanukovych’s legitimacy evaporated and
he fled Kiev.
It is clear that Mr. Putin has followed
the crisis intently, even as he attended to
the Olympic festivities that he clearly
has relished as a symbol of a new Russia.
On Friday he met with his national security advisers and a day later dispatched
two Russian lawmakers to a regional
party congress in eastern Ukraine that
had been called to rally opposition to the

new political authorities in Kiev.
Vladimir Lukin, the envoy Mr. Putin
sent to Kiev at Mr. Yanukovych’s request during the negotiations with the
Europeans, returned to Moscow and
criticized the European foreign ministers as siding with ‘‘the nationalist-revolutionary terrorist Maidan,’’ referring
to the square that has been the nucleus
of the protests, and not the ‘‘legitimate
government that they recognized.’’
Only hours before the closing ceremony in Sochi, Mr. Putin spoke by telephone with Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany. The Kremlin said in a statement only that they discussed the situation in Ukraine, but Germany’s foreign
office went further, saying that the two
leaders agreed that ‘‘the territorial integrity of Ukraine must be preserved.’’
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V.
Lavrov, spoke with Secretary of State
John Kerry for a second time in two
days, and Russia later announced that it

had recalled its ambassador in Kiev because of ‘‘the deteriorating situation’’ in
the country. The State Department released a statement saying that Mr.
Kerry expressed support for the votes
in Ukraine’s Parliament and called on
Russia to support the transition now underway.
Patrick Reevell contributed reporting.


President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. In
2009, as prime minister, Ms. Tymoshenko engineered a natural gas deal with
the Kremlin that helped Ukraine avoid a
catastrophic energy shortage but left
the country paying an exorbitant price
for its natural gas supplies.
Ms. Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned by Mr. Yanukovych after losing the 2010 presidential election, had
been put forward as one of three candidates for the post of prime minister, but
she issued a statement on Sunday saying she had not been consulted on it and
did not want to be considered for the position. Still, it left open the possibility
that she will run for president.
‘‘The problem is that the old forces
are trying to come back to take their old
chairs,’’ said Vasily Kuak, a shipping
broker who stood outside the Parliament building waving a sign that read,
‘‘Revolution, Not a Court Coup!’’
In Kiev, at least, nobody is publicly
challenging the ouster of Mr. Yanukovych and his government, although Russian-speaking regions in the
east of the country are far from enthusiastic about a new order they fear could
veer toward hard-line nationalist forces.
One of the first acts of Parliament after
the flight of Mr. Yanukovych, himself

from eastern Ukraine, was to nullify a
law that provided for the use of Russian
as a second official language.
But even the Party of Regions, which
is particularly strong in the east, has
now thrown its lot in with the forces of
change, denouncing the former president as it scrambles to keep itself relevant and avoid being punished for its
former loyalties.
All the same, the sight of luxury cars’
dropping off members of Parliament at
the legislature, a grand colonnaded
building now guarded by ‘‘self-defense’’
units that previously battled government forces around Independence
Square, has stirred dismay and anger.
‘‘Again we see Mercedes and BMWs
bringing deputies who are supposed to
represent the people,’’ said Mr. Kuak,
the shipping broker. ‘‘We don’t want to
see these people again. We want to see
people from the square, from the revolution.’’
But as with any revolution, the question of who should represent the turbulent forces that created it is a difficult one.
The heroes are the squads of helmeted
young men with clubs who risked their
lives to hold back government forces as
they tried early last week to seize Inde-

A Russian court handed down prison
sentences Monday of up to four years
for seven people who took part in a 2012
demonstration against Vladimir V.

Putin. An eighth defendant received a
suspended sentence.
Hundreds of their supporters
gathered outside the courthouse to condemn the trial and the Kremlin’s crackdown on opposition. The police detained about 200 of them, accusing
them of violating public order. Among
those detained were two members of
the punk protest band Pussy Riot who
had spent nearly two years in prison as
punishment for their own anti-Putin
protest.
The defendants sentenced on Monday were among 28 people rounded up
after the protest on May 6, 2012, on the
eve of Mr. Putin’s inauguration for a
third presidential term. The rally
turned violent after the police restricted access to Bolotnaya Square, across
the river from the Kremlin, where the
protesters had permission to gather.
The eight defendants were found guilty
last week, but sentencing was postponed until Monday. (AP)

pendence Square, known as Maidan. The
center of Kiev is now scattered with
shrines to those who died, each one piled
with flowers left by grateful residents.
‘‘We need people from Maidan, not
people like you,’’ an angry woman
screamed as Volodymyr Lytvyn, a
former speaker of the Parliament with a
reputation for shifting with the wind, left
the legislature. As he tried to answer

questions from the crowd, protected by
two bodyguards and a solid wrought iron
fence, a cry went up clamoring for ‘‘lustration of everybody,’’ a term usually associated with the purge of officials and

politicians suspected of serving Communist regimes before the revolutions of
1989 across Eastern and Central Europe.
Peppered with angry demands that
Parliament raise pensions, reopen
closed hospitals and find work for the
jobless, Mr. Lytvyn struggled to respond but essentially called for patience, a virtue that is likely to be in
short supply if the interim government
does not manage to convince Ukrainians that people it is working to improve
their lives, not line its own pockets.
Mr. Turchynov, the speaker and effectively Ukraine’s interim president until

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elections, is receiving credit for swiftly
shepherding legislation through Parliament to establish the legal basis for a
post-Yanukovych order. But few see him
as representing the revolution.
‘‘He knows parliamentary routines
but he does not have the support of the
people,’’ said Nikita Kornavalov, a 29year-old teacher who left a job in Norway to support what he hopes will be a
new era free of the corruption and brutality that have marred Ukraine since
independence in 1991.
But even many of those who want a
decisive break with a political class seen

as corrupt and self-serving acknowledge that the heroes of the street might
not make the best rulers. One of the
most prominent leaders of the street
forces is Dymtro Yarosh, the head of
Right Sector, a coalition of previously
fringe nationalist groups. But his elevation to government would terrify many
Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the
east and accelerate the risk of a dangerous break-up.
‘‘Yarosh would be good in the stage
security service or the police,’’ said Ms.
Nikanchuk, the economist, ‘‘but not as a
minister.’’

Being overweight is so common in
Europe that it risks becoming ‘‘the new
norm,’’ with around a third of teenagers now heavier than is recommended for their health, the World Health
Organization said on Monday.
In a report on obesity levels in 53

countries, the agency, an arm of the
United Nations, said as much as 27 percent of 13-year-olds and 33 percent of 11year-olds were overweight. Obesity
rates among 11-year-old boys and girls
were highest in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain, the report found.
‘‘Our perception of what is normal
has shifted; being overweight is now
more common than unusual. We must
not let another generation grow up with
obesity as the new norm,’’ said Zsuzsanna Jakab, regional director for the
agency. (REUTERS)

pendence due in September, Mr. Cameron has rationed his visits to Scotland
knowing that, as an Englishman leading
a Conservative Party that is unpopular
with Scots, he is not the most effective
advocate for the anti-independence
campaign. But at stake in September’s
vote is the future of the United Kingdom,
its place on the world stage and the reputation of Mr. Cameron, who does not
want to become the prime minister who
presided over the breakup of Britain.
Because of its wider ramifications the
referendum is being watched in other regions in Europe with aspirations for independence, such as Catalonia, and
questions have been raised over whether
Scotland would remain in the European
Union and what currency it would use.
Most opinion polls show the majority
of Scots want to stay part of Britain,
though the gap may be narrowing.
Though he appealed to sentiment in

one recent speech, Mr. Cameron hopes
that hard-headed economics will prove
decisive in September’s poll, in which
those age at least 16 and who live in
Scotland can participate.
Mr. Cameron’s message on Monday
boiled down to the idea that Britain
could better manage the remaining
North Sea oil and gas reserves. The British government on Monday announced
a 100 million pound, or $166 million, investment in a gas-fired carbon capture
and storage facility at Peterhead. It also
promised a new energy regulator and a
change so that licenses for exploitation
would be awarded in order to maximize
recovery of remaining energy supplies.
But supporters of Scottish independence say that resources have been
poorly managed in London, and Mr. Salmond told the BBC that there had been
16 tax changes affecting the industry in
10 years and that 14 different ministers
had been in charge of policy in 17 years.

A day of announcements began with
Mr. Cameron visiting an oil rig where he
appeared for TV cameras in all-weather
jacket and safety helmet. He did not meet
Mr. Salmond let alone hold the face-toface debate Mr. Salmond has demanded.
Both men know that the economy is a
crucial battleground and Scots have
been warned by the three main British
political parties that they would lose the

pound as their currency if they opt for
independence. Mr. Salmond disputes
that and has accused his critics of ‘‘bullying.’’ He also argues that an independent Scotland would automatically remain a member of the European Union
— though that assertion has been rejected by Jose Manuel Barroso, president
of the European Commission, the executive of the 28-nation bloc.
Though that may alarm voters, some

pollsters believe that such warnings
may backfire by making the ‘‘no’’ campaign seem negative.
Most of Britain’s remaining oil and
gas resources lie off the northern part of
the country in the North Sea or the Shetland Islands. Lindsay Wexelstein, an
analyst at Wood Mackenzie, an Edinburgh market research firm, estimates
that 85 percent of Britain’s remaining oil
and gas lies under Scottish waters.
One Scottish government study estimates that Scotland would have been
entitled to 94 percent of the oil and gas
tax receipts of about 11 billion pounds
for the 2011 and 2012 fiscal year.
While an estimated 42 billion barrels,
a very large amount, has already been
produced, there may still be as much as
24 billion barrels left, which could be
worth more than $2 trillion.

in public since spending three months in
a French hospital after a stroke last
April. His cabinet ministers, and occasional visitors, say his mind is unaffected and his health is improving, but
he has not addressed the country in 18
months and has only been shown on

state television sitting down.
Nevertheless, he has shown a tenacity
during his convalescence, replacing a
number of cabinet ministers and regional officials, even removing high-level
members of the powerful intelligence
service. Analysts have interpreted the
moves as an effort to consolidate support for his re-election campaign.
Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal announced Mr. Bouteflika’s candidacy at a
news conference in the city of Oran on

Sunday, The Associated Press reported.
Since a devastating civil war in the
1990s, Algeria has been guided by a
tightly controlled state, dominated by the
army and intelligence forces. Political
parties and social movements are given
limited freedom to operate, and social
tensions are defused by a mixture of police control and payments from the state.
Yet as controls over the printed news
media have loosened and political
parties have been allowed to operate,
criticism has grown against the president and his aging circle, a generation of
leaders who have ruled Algeria since it
won independence from France in 1962.
Several independent candidates have
announced their intention to run for president, but few expect the vote to be fair.

BY CARLOTTA GALL

Algerian officials have announced that

the country’s ailing president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been largely
incapacitated since a stroke last year,
intends to run for a fourth term in an
election scheduled for April 17.
The announcement on Sunday ended
months of speculation about the leadership of Algeria, one of the most important countries in North Africa, a region
in upheaval as it deals with political
changes inspired by the Arab Spring as
well as the spread of terrorism.
Mr. Bouteflika, 76, has governed Algeria for 15 years, but he has not appeared


BY ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Thousands of years after the citizens of
Troy learned about the complications
posed by outsize equine sculptures, the
modern residents of Milan find themselves embroiled, again, in a debate
about how to make the most of a gift
horse: a colossal bronze steed presented by a group of American donors.
Inspired by an uncompleted statue designed by Leonardo da Vinci (the sole
clay cast was destroyed in 1499), the stallion arrived in Milan in 1999, by way of a
foundry in Beacon, N.Y., and was positioned in a pedestrian piazza at the city’s
racetrack in the San Siro district.
For its admirers, installing the sculpture in a site where it gets few visitors
aside from bettors — whose interest in
static horses is understandably limited
— has been tantamount to putting it out
to pasture.
Now, with the opening of the World

Exposition in Milan less than 15 months
away, calls have intensified to move the
horse to a more visible position and even
to make it a symbol of the city during the
fair, which officials hope will draw millions of visitors to the Lombardy capital.
The bronze horse ‘‘would be a landmark,’’ a cultural monument akin to the
Statue of Liberty, said Carlo Orlandini,
president of the Committee for the
Great Horse, a volunteer group that has
lobbied for years to transfer the steed to
a more decorous post.
‘‘We need to persuade people that the
current solution is not dignified and
doesn’t correspond to the spirit in which
the gift was given,’’ said Mr. Orlandini,
whose group is encouraging the public
debate on the statue, which was
broached in recent weeks by the Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily.
Conceived nearly four decades ago by
a retired airline pilot, Charles C. Dent, of
Allentown, Pa., as a contemporary substitute for Leonardo’s original, the
bronze statue was intended as a gift
from the American people to their Italian counterparts ‘‘to honor Leonardo da
Vinci and Italian Renaissance,’’ a
plaque on the pedestal explains.
Before he died in 1994, Mr. Dent involved dozens of donors to raise more
than $6.5 million to cast the horse, which
stands more than seven meters, or 24
feet, tall and weighs 15 tons. In 1999, it
was shipped to Milan and inaugurated

with much fanfare at the San Siro
racetrack, far from the city center.

BY JIM YARDLEY
AND ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

Making his first appearance before Parliament since becoming prime minister,
Matteo Renzi on Monday called for lawmakers to have the ‘‘courage’’ to make
‘‘radical change,’’ pledged to push
through political and electoral reforms,
and promised bold, innovative measures to revive the moribund economy.
Mr. Renzi, 39, the youngest prime minister in Italy’s history, spoke for roughly
an hour before the Senate, which was expected to hold — and approve — a confidence vote on his new government later
on Monday evening. A second confidence vote is scheduled Tuesday in the
lower house, where Mr. Renzi’s Democratic Party holds a comfortable majority
and passage is considered a certainty.
For Mr. Renzi, the former mayor of
Florence who was sworn in Saturday
after forcing out a sitting prime minister
from his own party, Monday’s speech
was his first formal presentation of his
early priorities. It also provided a taste
of his jaunty, confident style. He seemed
to relish verbally jousting with lawmakers of the opposition Five Star
Movement and gave no hint of being
awed by a chamber in which he has never served.
‘‘Our country is rusty, bogged down,’’
he said, ‘‘immobilized by an asphyxiating bureaucracy, by rules, norms and
codicils that paradoxically don’t elimi-

There, it has effectively ‘‘been abandoned,’’ Mr. Orlandini said.
A cultural and educational park that
the city had agreed to build at the track
as part of the donation agreement never
materialized, ‘‘which was a disappointment,’’ said Peter C. Dent, Charles
Dent’s nephew, who has been on the
board of several institutions ‘‘that look
after the interests of the horse.’’
Over the years, attempts to move the
horse have faced a variety of obstacles,
including a vociferous residents’ committee in San Siro that wants the statue
to stay. City Hall also dragged its feet, if
only because finding an alternative site
has been a municipal brainteaser.
Now the citywide preparations for the
World Expo, which starts in May 2015,
have offered the steed’s supporters
fresh hope that it will find a new home, if
only for the six months of the expo’s run.
‘‘I say let’s talk about it,’’ said Giangiacomo Schiavi, deputy editor of the
Corriere della Sera, who recently
opened a debate in the newspaper about
moving the statue, which he said should
be valued as a ‘‘symbol of Milan’s welcoming reception’’ for all visitors.
Showcasing the horse could also highlight Leonardo’s underexplored ties to
Milan, he said. After all, Leonardo lived
in the city for nearly 20 years, leaving
his masterpiece ‘‘The Last Supper’’ as
the best-known testament of his stay.
His uncompleted horse was intended to

honor a powerful 15th-century Milanese
duke, Francesco Sforza. Had French
soldiers occupying the city not used the
clay model for target practice in 1499, it
would have been the largest bronze
horse in existence.
The publicity over moving its modern
successor (no easy feat in itself ) would
once again focus attention on that historical link, even as the story of Charles
Dent and his dream to resuscitate Leonardo’s lost horse stands as ‘‘a symbol
of overcoming the impossible,’’ Mr.
Schiavi said.
But the debate on this horse’s mixed
pedigree has riled some critics, described by Mr. Orlandini as ‘‘purists,’’
who say that the American horse’s links
with Leonardo’s lost work are questionable at best.
When Charles Dent engaged on his
quest to rebuild Leonardo’s horse, he created a model based on the artist’s extant
writings and drawings. When his clay
model was enlarged, however, it manifested various proportional and anatomical distortions, so in 1996 the backers
drafted the American sculptor Nina

nate illegality.’’ He argued that the desires and ambitions of ordinary Italians
had surpassed the performance of Parliament. ‘‘It is ahead of us, and it is up to
us to catch up,’’ he added.
Focusing foremost on the economy,
Mr. Renzi outlined four immediate priorities: repayment of unpaid government debts to private firms by using a
state investment and loan fund; support
for small and medium enterprises
squeezed by the credit crunch; reductions in income and labor taxes; and a

comprehensive reform of the justice
system, including changes to make doing business easier.
He also pushed for passage of a
sweeping electoral reform package that
he has already brokered with Silvio Berlusconi, the opposition leader and
former prime minister. That package
would change Italy’s complex voting
system to favor bigger parties and coalitions and better produce working parliamentary majorities. Mr. Renzi also is
pushing to amend the Constitution to
drastically reduce the powers of the
Senate so that lawmaking authority is
concentrated in the lower house.
‘‘I’d like to be the last prime minister
to ask this chamber for a vote of confidence,’’ he said.
Perhaps that goal is one reason the
assembled senators only occasionally
broke into meaningful applause. Marco
Damilano, a political commentator for
the weekly magazine L’Espresso, said
that Mr. Renzi deliberately emphasized
his role as an outsider to the political
circles of Rome and that the radical
changes he promised were the same
things he has been talking about when
he politicked nationally while serving as
mayor of Florence.
‘‘He acted as the mayor of Italy, but

Akamu to complete the project. She started from scratch, and her version, while
inspired by Leonardo, ‘‘is not intended to

be a recreation of his sculpture,’’ she
wrote in her artist’s statement.
‘‘We treat it and try to talk about it for
what it is,’’ said Joseph Antenucci
Becherer, vice president and chief curator of the Sculpture Program at the
Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture
Park in Grand Rapids, Mich., which has
its own version of the statue. ‘‘It is an
original work of art by Nina Akamu,

he’s now prime minister in a ring where
the rules have remained the same,’’ Mr.
Damilano said during a televised interview, arguing that the blasé reception to
the speech by many senators portended
a bumpy ride.
‘‘They listened with a certain slyness: Sure, you can come and make all
the promises you want, but you still
have to pass through us,’’ he said.
Analysts say Mr. Renzi is likely to face
difficulties in achieving every one of his
goals, including his plans to rein in the
entrenched managers of Italy’s public
administration. ‘‘He will face a significant opposition, by trade unions to begin with,’’ said Stefano Manzocchi, professor of international economics at
Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.
‘‘But if he starts at the top levels, he’d
have a lot of popular support.’’
Mr. Renzi has been regarded as a
rising star in Italian politics, especially
after he was elected leader of the Democratic Party in a nationwide primary
last December. But his ascension to

prime minister came rapidly and unexpectedly, amid growing frustrations
over the inability of former Prime Minister Enrico Letta and his coalition government to approve major reforms.
Earlier this month, Mr. Renzi called
an emergency meeting of the Democratic Party, in which members voted to
remove Mr. Letta, a party member, and
replace him with Mr. Renzi. He now
must push through his ambitious
agenda with the same fractious coalition of left and right parties that at times
stymied Mr. Letta.
Mr. Renzi, a skilled communicator
comfortable with social media and attuned to the power of television, has
cast himself as a symbol of generational
change in Italy. Last weekend, he
named a 16-person cabinet evenly divided between men and women — a
first in Italy — with an average age of 47.
The youngest cabinet members, Maria
Elena Boschi and Marianna Madia, are
both 33.
In his speech Monday, Mr. Renzi cautioned that Italy’s economic malaise is
dragging down the country’s younger
generation ‘‘who can’t afford to go out
for pizza.’’ He said gross national
product had dropped sharply since 2008
while youth unemployment had nearly
doubled to 41.6 percent.
‘‘These are the numbers of a crisis,’’
he said. ‘‘They are the numbers of a collapse.’’
He also said that the country had an
opportunity to send a signal to the rest
of Europe, assuming Parliament can

pass major reforms before Italy assumes its rotational turn holding the
presidency of the European Union in
June.
‘‘We won’t be credible if we aren’t
able to arrive at the European semester
without sorting out the things we have
to sort out,’’ he said.

though it’s been difficult to get that
across to people.’’ He called the horse ‘‘a
monument to creativity.’’
Critics of the horse are quick to underscore its modern aesthetics, deemed to
be post-Leonardesque. ‘‘Nina’s horse,
with all due respect, would never have
been accepted, because it’s a contemporary work, and it’s a bit banal,’’ said
Marco Castelli, a retired businessman
and an artistic-heritage promoter who
has written a book about the horse.
There is as yet no official decision on

the statue’s future. Milanese officials
seem receptive to a new location with
the expo approaching. But much may
depend on whether the Great Horse
committee will pay the transportation
bill, estimated, conservatively, at
around $412,000.
The complicated logistics of moving
the horse in one piece would involve
various municipal departments, as it

could involve cutting tram and electrical cables along the route and ensuring
that roads could support the weight.

One possible alternative site, City
Hall says, would be in front of the Sforza
Castle, in an area where the expo’s information center is being built. Some
city lawmakers, however, argue that
moving the horse just for the six-month
event is a waste of resources and money
at a moment when the city should be focusing on other priorities.
‘‘It would be better to keep the horse
at the racetrack,’’ said Enrico Fedrighini, a Milan Council member. ‘‘And
send expo visitors there.’’


The list of infectious diseases that could leap from remote
areas of the world to strike countries thousands of miles
away is growing. A warning of what can happen occurred a
decade ago when an outbreak in China of a mysterious
new viral disease, known as SARS, or severe acute
respiratory syndrome, was covered up by the Chinese
authorities, allowing infected airline passengers to carry
the virus to more than two dozen other countries. The
disease killed nearly 800 people and caused large
economic losses in Asia and Canada.
Now worries that such deadly viruses as Ebola might be
carried from Africa to the United States and elsewhere
have been joined by new concerns. These include, among
others: potentially dangerous strains of avian flu recently
detected in China; an often lethal lung disease, known as

Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which has so
far been found mostly in Saudi Arabia; multidrug-resistant
strains of tuberculosis that are very difficult to treat; and a
mosquito-borne viral disease known as Chikungunya
fever, which was first detected in Africa, spread to Asia
and Europe, and recently invaded the Caribbean.
It made good sense, then, when the Obama
administration, after meeting last week with
representatives of three United Nations agencies and 26
countries, announced an ambitious plan to improve the
surveillance and treatment of infectious diseases over the
next five years in up to 30 countries. Although 196 countries
have signed an international agreement, reached in 2005, to
report outbreaks promptly to the World Health
Organization and take steps to control them, the vast
majority have not fully complied. The odds for
improvement this time around may be better. The health
systems in poor countries, though still fragile, have
improved thanks to international programs to combat AIDS
and other diseases, and those systems could be expanded.
The Defense Department and Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention are spending a combined $40
million this year to help detect and contain infectious
disease threats in 10 countries. The administration said it
would propose an increase of $45 million in the C.D.C.
budget for 2015 to help additional countries. Congress
ought to approve that money. A five-year program to
extend assistance to 30 countries to protect their
populations could cost the United States up to $1.5 billion,
which would be worth spending if the initial projects prove

successful. Other advanced nations need to contribute
money and expertise, too.

In Southern Florida, five Sri Lankan men were held
without bond for more than three years as they sought
asylum, saying they had been promised leniency in return
for aiding a federal investigation of the smuggling ring that
brought them into the country illegally. In Springfield,
Mass., a federal district judge in January ordered a bond
hearing for a Jamaican immigrant and military veteran
who had been held in Massachusetts jails, fighting
deportation, for more than 15 months without ever
receiving a bond hearing.
Last April, the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit, in California, upheld a lower court’s order
requiring the government to grant bond hearings to
immigrants who have been held six months without such a
hearing. These rulings reflect the growing understanding
— in the federal courts, if not at Immigration and Customs
Enforcement — that the constitutional guarantee of due
process demands that a detainee have a hearing within a
‘‘reasonable’’ time and that more than six months is not
reasonable by any definition.
The Obama administration, in expanding the surge of
immigration enforcement begun under President George
W. Bush, has detained and deported nearly two million
people. The majority are dealt with swiftly, without ever
receiving a hearing before an immigration judge. Others
who challenge their deportation, like the Sri Lankans, wait
for years to get a resolution of their cases. Automatically

granting bond hearings to immigration detainees, many of
whom pose no threat, is the least the government can do.
President Obama, who has promised to do more to fix
the broken immigration laws, can ensure that the sixmonth rule is adopted in immigration courts nationwide.
Beyond granting bond hearings, the government should
use more humane and cost-effective alternatives to
detention, like ankle bracelets and home monitoring.
Locking people up indefinitely is not a path to a more
rational immigration system.

Like all Americans, we
strongly hope that the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts lead to the
peaceful dismantling of Iran’s nuclear
weapons program. To achieve this key
national security goal, we support a
policy that complements the current
negotiations with a range of congressional actions that threatens greater
economic and diplomatic pressure on
the Iranian government.
Some opponents of such a policy
crudely characterize its proponents as
warmongers, and fret that Tehran will
walk away from the table. But the critics have it backward.
The approach we outline offers the
best chance to avoid military conflict
with Iran. In fact, diplomacy that is not
backed by the threat of clear consequences poses the greatest threat to
negotiations — and increases prospects
for war — because it tells the Iranians
they have nothing to lose by embracing

an uncompromising position.
Successful negotiations between adversaries rest on the confluence of interests and goals. Iran came to the negotiating table because it sought the
abrogation of sanctions; we came to the
table to reach an agreement that, in the
words of President Obama, would
‘‘make it impossible’’ for Iran to develop nuclear weapons.
Our message to Tehran should be

I doubt any president has been as well
equipped as Barack Obama to appreciate the vicious cycle of American crime
and punishment. As a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, he
would have witnessed the way a system
intended to protect the public siphoned
off young black men, gave them an advanced education in brutality, and then
returned them to the streets unqualified
for — and too often, given the barriers
to employment faced by those who have
done time, disqualified from — anything but a life of more crime. He would
have understood that the suffering of
victims and the debasing of offenders
were often two sides of the same coin.
It’s hard to tell how deeply he actually absorbed this knowledge. In the
Chicago chapters of his memoir,
‘‘Dreams From My Father,’’ Obama
notes that in the low-income housing
projects ‘‘prison records had been
passed down from father to son for
more than a generation,’’ but he has
surprisingly little to say about the shadow cast by prisons on the families left
behind, about the way incarceration became the default therapy for drug addicts and the mentally ill, about the abject failure of rehabilitation.

Still, when the former community organizer took office, advocates of reform
had high expectations.
In March I will give up the glorious
platform of The New York Times to
help launch something new: a nonprofit journalistic venture called The
Marshall Project (after Thurgood Marshall, the great courtroom champion of
civil rights) and devoted to the vast and
urgent subject of our broken criminal
justice system. It seems fitting that my
parting column should address the
question of how this president has lived
up to those high expectations so far.
I’ll begin by making his excuses. The
president’s powers in this area are limited. The action (and there is a lot of it
right now) is mostly at the state level.
His first term was entangled in economic crisis and health care. This president
has faced tireless and often petty resistance from the Republican House on almost every initiative. Historically Democrats have risked being Willie-Horton’ed
if they don’t maintain a tougher-thantough-on-crime posture. And AfricanAmerican constituents — who are also
disproportionately the victims of crime
— are not necessarily bleeding-heart
voters. In short, it was probably naïve to
assume that Obama was going to be the
Criminal Justice Reform President.
And yet Obama took office at a time
of tidal shifts. The economics of imprisonment, the ebbing of crime rates, the
horror stories of overcrowded penitentiaries and the persistent activism of reform advocates had begun to generate
a public consensus that merely caging
people is not a crime-fighting strategy.
Fiscal conservatives alarmed at the

clear: It will not achieve its objectives
unless it satisfies ours.
Unfortunately, Iran’s leaders are acting as if they have not received that
message. In recent weeks, President
Hassan Rouhani has declared that his
government will not dismantle a single
centrifuge. Tehran also went beyond
words by testing long-range ballistic
missiles that could reach American military bases in the Middle East, as well
as our ally Israel. It has even dispatched warships to sail close to the
maritime borders of
the United States in
the Atlantic Ocean.
We also know the
Iranians have
worked to deceive us
in previous rounds of
negotiations. In 2003,
when Mr. Rouhani
was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator,
Tehran issued a declaration that it was suspending uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities. Last year, as he ran for president,
Mr. Rouhani even boasted that Iran had
flouted the agreement.
Offering inducements is not enough.
Diplomacy must be backed by a clear
choice for the Iranian government:
Either it dismantles its nuclear program so that it lacks a pathway to
weapons capability or it faces greater
economic sanctions and international
isolation. Without this clarity, no one

can be surprised if Iran rejects diplomatic overtures.
The partial recovery of Iran’s econo-

high cost of incarceration, evangelicals
shocked by the waste of lives, and libertarians who spotted another realm of
government power abused have
clambered onto what was once a liberal
bandwagon. (How much those conservatives will be willing to invest in alternative ways of protecting the public —
drug treatment, more intensive parole
and probation programs, job training
and so on — is another question.)
In his first term Obama did not make
this a signature issue; he rarely mentioned the subject. But his proxy, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., was outspoken from the start. Six months into
the first term, he was already at the
Vera Institute of Justice in New York
talking about the social costs of mass
incarceration and pressing for policies
that would divert low-level drug offenders to treatment and ease the re-entry
of former prisoners into a productive
life. In the last five years, Holder has
become increasingly bold, and encountered little backlash. This month
he exhorted states to repeal policies
that deny felons the right to vote,
policies that disenfranchise 5.8 million
Americans, including nearly one in 13
African-American adults. He framed it
not just as an act of compassion but as a
way of re-engaging prodigal souls.
‘‘By perpetuating the stigma and isolation imposed on formerly incarcerated individuals, these laws increase
the likelihood they will commit future

my in recent weeks, thanks to the relaxation of sanctions, in tandem with its
continuing advanced research and development of centrifuges, highlights
our concerns. If Iran can achieve such
progress without dismantling any part
of its nuclear program, why should it
make concessions?
We strongly believe that the assertion by Congress of its historic role in
foreign policy can, in fact, complement
and enhance the administration’s efforts by forcing Iran to recognize the
stark implications of intransigence. The
president should welcome such congressional initiatives, which would actually strengthen, not weaken, the hand
of his administration in negotiations.
Thus we urge Congress to outline for
Iran the acceptable terms of a final accord. This must include, at a minimum,
the dismantling of its nuclear program,
so that Iran has neither a uranium nor a
plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon.
Second, Congress should exercise
oversight to ensure that Tehran understands that our existing core sanctions
architecture will remain in place for the
full duration of the negotiations. Third,
Congress must oversee continual implementation of the interim agreement:
We cannot permit Iran to violate trust
again by advancing its nuclear program even as it joins negotiations.
Finally, we support the Nuclear
Weapon Free Iran Act, sponsored by the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s
chairman, Senator Robert Menendez,
Democrat of New Jersey, and by Senator

Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois. This
bill would present Iran with a menu of

crimes,’’ Holder said.
‘‘All that sounds very good,’’ said
Michelle Alexander, the legal scholar
who wrote ‘‘The New Jim Crow,’’ a
scorching 2010 indictment of the racialized war on drugs. ‘‘And it is good, because for decades the rhetoric was running in the other direction. But if the
rhetoric is not matched with action ...
then it is fair to wonder whether the
shift in rhetoric reflects significant shifts
in public opinion in recent years, rather
than a real commitment to these issues
and a willingness to take political risks.’’
In practice, the administration’s record has been more incremental than
its rhetoric.
By the crudest metric, the population
of our prisons, the Obama administration has been unimpressive. The famously shocking numbers of Americans
behind bars (the U.S., with 5 percent of
the world’s people, incarcerates nearly
a quarter of all prisoners on earth)
have declined three years in a row.
However, the overall downsizing is
largely thanks to California and a handful of other states. In overstuffed federal prisons, the population continues to
grow, fed in no small part by Obama’s
crackdown on immigration violators.
The administration has some achievements to tout. Obama signed the 2010
Fair Sentencing Act, and has put some
muscle behind the Smarter Sentencing
Act, two measures aimed at making

drug-sentencing laws less absurd. Hold-

consequences, including new sanctions
— if, and only if, the talks fail. Earlier this
month, we agreed with Mr. Menendez on
delaying a vote in the Senate, but we remain committed to the bill’s passage.
Historically, presidents have resisted
congressional involvement that would
affect or constrain their diplomatic efforts. Over the past two decades,
however, both Republican and Democratic administrations have opposed
Iran sanctions legislation only to embrace it later as their own. At this moment, we must not allow Iran to dictate
the appropriate role of Congress.
As long as Mr. Rouhani can brazenly
declare that he will not dismantle a
single centrifuge as part of a final
agreement, the United States Congress
should proclaim that Iran will pay a
steep price for its recklessness. America’s elected representatives are not the
problem; the unelected theocrats of
Iran are.
Next week, more than 14,000 Americans from all walks of life will carry this
bipartisan message to Capitol Hill as
part of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference. We support the president’s diplomatic effort to prevent Iran from
acquiring a nuclear weapon. We also
believe the best chance for success in
this purpose lies with continued congressional pressure on Iran throughout
the negotiations.
is the president, and
is the chairman of the
board, of the American Israel Public

Affairs Committee.

er has issued guidance to prosecutors to
avoid routinely seeking maximum sentences for low-level offenders — though
it’s not clear yet whether prosecutors
are going along. The administration created an Interagency Reentry Council
that uses federal guidance to whittle
away at the barriers to employment,
housing and education so that released
prisoners have some hope of becoming
productive citizens.
At the same time, long after the War
on Drugs has been recognized as a failure, there has been little serious effort
to cut the number of federal drug prosecutions, or to shift money from incarceration to drug treatment. Alexander
cites as a significant disappointment
the continued federal reluctance to decriminalize marijuana, despite
Obama’s acknowledgment to David
Remnick of The New Yorker that pot is
less harmful than alcohol and that the
laws are mostly enforced against poor
minorities. Another
missed opportunity:
He could have
pushed more aggressively to fill district
and circuit court vacancies with judges
who would buck the
status quo.
Obama has also
been the stingiest of
recent presidents in

using his powers of
pardon and commutation to undo the
damage of the crack panic and of sentencing that keeps prisoners in lockup
long past the age when they represent a
danger. Marc Levin, director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas
Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank with a justice reform
agenda, points out that in his first term
Obama pardoned one in 50 applicants
while Ronald Reagan pardoned one in
three. Late last year Obama commuted
the sentences of eight drug offenders,
out of more than 8,000 federal convicts
serving time under outdated crack laws.
Obama is, we know, a cautious man,
leery of getting ahead of public opinion
and therefore sometimes far behind it.
And some reform advocates argue that
it made sense for Obama to keep a low
profile until a broad bipartisan consensus had gathered. That time has
come. Now that Obama-scorners like
Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee and
even Ted Cruz are slicing off pieces of
justice reform for their issue portfolios,
now that red states like Texas, Georgia,
South Carolina, Missouri and Kentucky
have embraced alternatives to prison,
criminal justice is one of those rare
areas where there is common ground to
be explored and tested.
The Obama presidency has almost

three years to go, and there is reason to
hope that he will feel less constrained,
that the eight commutations were not
just a pittance but, as he put it, ‘‘a first
step,’’ that Holder’s mounting enthusiasm for saner sentencing is not just talk,
but prelude, that the president will use
his great pulpit to prick our conscience.
‘‘This is something that matters to
the president,’’ Holder assured me last
week. ‘‘This is, I think, going to be seen
as a defining legacy for this administration.’’
I’ll be watching, and hoping that
Holder’s prediction is more than wishful thinking.


Any sentient being who walks the byways of northern Europe, so placid now
with their glistening poplar trees and
villages clustered around church
spires, must occasionally feel the intrusion of the painful thought that beneath
the soil lie the corpses of millions,
young men sacrificed for the gain of a
few meters, and often in Kipling’s
phrase only known unto God.
World War I erupted at a time when
much of humanity was persuaded that
rapid technological development, scientific progress and accelerated communications (connectivity in today’s
parlance) had consigned warfare to the
past. It was sparked by a single gunshot in Sarajevo, made possible by strategic miscalculation, and ended with
the collapse of several empires, the
world of yesterday demolished in an

unimaginable bloodbath whose unsettled scores would soon produce another cataclysm.
In the very banality of the chain of
events that led to slaughter, in its apparent unnecessariness, the Great War
(in the British phrase) offers an eternal
warning to those inclined to take peace
for granted. Peace is hard work. Its alternative is never far beneath the surface.
It being the centennial of the outbreak of the war, numerous commemorations are planned. But memorializa-

tion diverges. Germans, when they
think about World War I, see nothing
‘‘great’’ in it. Rather they see the seeds
of Hitler’s rise, and it is to his war
above all that they have devoted their
anguished reckonings. The French
who, like the British, call it ‘‘La Grande
Guerre,’’ have a different view; they
stopped the Germans racing to Paris,
as in 1871. Glory is a word that surfaces
in Paris and London, notwithstanding
Wilfred Owen’s dismissal of the ‘‘old
lie’’: That in youth’s prime ‘‘Dulce et
decorum est pro patria mori.’’
I decided a few weeks ago to bow my
head to the dead by visiting the
cemetery at St. Symphorien in Belgium,
where the first British soldier killed on
the Western Front is
buried, and also what
are thought to be the
last Commonwealth

soldiers killed. In all
284 German and 230
Commonwealth servicemen find their
final resting place here.
The cemetery, watched over by wind
turbines, was deserted. I was the only
visitor. The German graves are in gray
stone, the British in white. I read the
names of the conscripts. An ‘‘Unteroffizier Rolf Berger’’ from Hamburg, a
‘‘Musketier Otto Finke’’ from Kiel: German kids cut down. It crossed my mind
that perhaps the Finke family, after
their loss, would end up fleeing Hitler.
The British and Commonwealth
graves are set out in lines: Lt. D.C.C.
Sewell, aged 20, with the inscription
‘‘Thy Will Be Done.’’ W.G. Bathgate,
Highlanders, 23 August 1914, ‘‘Dulce et
Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori.’’ And
that most devastating of all epitaphs:
‘‘A Soldier of the Great War, Known
Unto God.’’
Among the crosses was a single Star

of David, on the grave of Private P.
Goldberg of the Middlesex Regiment,
died Aug 23, 1914. I was reminded of my
great-grandfather’s brother, Michael
Adler, a distinguished rabbi who compiled the 1916 Prayer Book for Jewish
Sailors and Soldiers at the front during
World War I and served as chaplain to

Jewish soldiers.
I have a precious copy of the prayer
book. It begins with a ‘‘prefatory note’’
signed by my forbear: ‘‘It is hoped that
this book will meet the wants of the very
large number of English Jews who are
taking part in the present Great European War.’’ The first prayer for the 16,000
British Jews on active service includes
this line: ‘‘Fill our hearts with courage
and steadfastness that we may perform
our duty to our King and Country for the
honor of Israel and the Empire.’’
The word order suggests Adler’s attempt to balance loyalties: first King,
then Israel (not yet reborn as a modern
state), then Empire. Jewish allegiance
to the crown had been questioned:
Thousands of Yiddish-speaking East
European Jews were not yet naturalized and so could not serve. In November 1915, The Jewish Chronicle reported
examples of recruiting officers saying,
‘‘Lord Kitchener does not want any
more Jews in the Army.’’ But Jews
clamored to prove their loyalty.
Adler initially encouraged them. By
the end of the war, however, having
seen the carnage, he had other
thoughts. On July 6, 1918, he wrote, ‘‘All
this colossal upheaval will have been in
vain unless civilized mankind resolves
once and for all that every effort should
be made that war shall cease henceforth.’’

His words went unheeded. Europe
would plunge again into horror. And
Iron Crosses for valor at the Somme did
nothing to keep German Jews from the
gas.

Although the word turbulence doesn’t exist in Turkish, it is probably the best description of the state of
politics in Turkey these days. But we
have other words, many of them, that
denote ‘‘tension,’’ ‘‘masculinity’’ and
‘‘polarization,’’ all of which afflict the
Turkish state.
Turkey is a liquid country, a watercourse of conflicts and contradictions.
The mood changes weekly, sometimes
daily. Until recently the country was
seen as a successful combination of Islam and Western democracy, a power
broker in the Middle East. That view is
rapidly fading, and the river that is Turkey is running faster than ever.
With local, presidential and general
elections coming, this is a year of loud
polemics and quiet concerns. Citizens
glance through websites dozens of
times daily to see what else has
happened. During a vote that gave the
government greater control over the judiciary, members of Parliament exchanged blows; a bloody nose was a
testament to our bruised democracy.
Nothing reflects the tempest better
than the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeatedly accused outsiders of
being behind the protests in Gezi Park

last summer, which left six people dead
and 8,000 injured. Several government
officials insinuated that dark forces were
operating behind the scenes, including
the Jewish diaspora, the C.I.A., the BBC,
CNN and the interest-rate lobby, a term
for a cabal of domestic and foreign banks
that officials believe want to harm Turkey to further their own interests. A
Turkish BBC reporter was openly accused of being a foreign spy. Protesters
in Taksim Square were called terrorists.
The German airline Lufthansa, it was

suggested, was trying to scuttle an important new airport for Istanbul.
On social media there are endless rumors about ‘‘deep state within deep
state.’’ Gradually, Turkey is turning into a nation in the grip of paranoia.
Nobody takes anything at face value
anymore. There is a growing public
suspicion that the news is filtered, if not
manipulated. Recently leaked tape recordings revealed that opinion polls
published in a major newspaper might
have been tampered with to please the
government. Journalists have marched
to protest curbs on press freedom.
In a country where freedom of expression is curtailed and media diversity has shriveled, social media is
the only alternative platform of communication, information and misinformation. A new Internet law passed by
Parliament further threatens freedom
of opinion, though President Abdullah
Gul, who said he would approve it, has
conceded that parts are problematic.
If the Gezi riots fueled conspiracy theories, the recent corruption investigation fanned the flames. Government officials talk constantly about foreign plots.

Turkey has done too well, they say, and
now hidden actors want to stop it from
growing. These accusations resonate
with some segments of society.
Why are we so in need of contriving
conspiracy theories?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that
Turkey is still not a mature democracy
and its politics are masculinist, aggressive and polarized. Turkey’s polarization affects every layer of social, cultural and economic life. When checks and
balances, separation of powers and media diversity are all at risk, those in
power become too powerful.
And part of the answer lies in old
fears that go back to our upbringing.
One of the songs from my childhood
went: ‘‘One, two, three ... long live the
Turks ... four, five, six, Poland
plummeted ... seven, eight, nine, Russians are traitors ... ’’ We children mer-

rily sang this song on the streets, declaring that the Italians were cunning,
the Germans pigs. We grew up believing that Turkey was surrounded on
three sides by water and on four sides
by enemies. The Greeks aspired to reconquer Istanbul and make it Constantinopolis. The Arabs were untrustworthy. The Russians plotted to seize
the Bosporus. Everybody wanted a
piece of Anatolia, our land, and a Turk’s
only friend was another Turk.
In the past, one of the strengths of
Mr. Erdogan’s party, Justice and Development, was a foreign policy of ‘‘zero
problems with neighbors.’’ That policy
has not been sustained.
This government,

which liberal intellectuals once supported
in the hope that it
would push Turkey
to join the European
Union, restrict the role of the military
and enact democratic reforms, is
nowadays reviving overused rhetoric.
When Mr. Erdogan speaks he addresses the nation’s subconscious. He
speaks to our primordial fears and
xenophobia. And without realizing, we,
millions of us, become children again,
waiting in the school courtyard for the
headmaster, the baba, to tell us how illintentioned every foreigner is and how
united we must stand against the
world.
Yet, at the same time, this warped
mentality no longer entices. Times
have changed. The youth are far more
open to the world than the previous
generations, and the people are ahead
of their politicians.
As much as we tend to buy into conspiracy theories, we Turks have also
grown very, very tired of them.
is the author of nine novels,
including ‘‘The Bastard of Istanbul’’ and
‘‘The Forty Rules of Love.’’

It was not without reason
that President Bill Clinton lavished
praise on African leaders like President

Yoweri Museveni of Uganda back in the
late 1990s.
Mr. Museveni, like Meles Zenawi of
Ethiopia, had come to office through
the barrel of a gun, a depressingly familiar means of gaining power in Africa
during the first three decades of independence. But after ending a cycle of
murderous rule by despots steeped in
human rights abuses and financial corruption, the young leaders proved to be
different from their predecessors. Both
introduced rational governance structures, presided over economic turnarounds and brought much-needed stability to their countries.
‘‘One hundred years from now your
grandchildren and mine will look back
and say this was the beginning of an African renaissance,’’ Mr. Clinton said in
Accra, Ghana, in March 1998, praising a
‘‘new generation’’ of African leaders
that — along with Mr. Meles and Mr.
Museveni — included Isaias Afewerki
of Eritrea, Paul Kagame of Rwanda,
Jerry Rawlings of Ghana and Thabo
Mbeki of South Africa.
But Mr. Clinton spoke too soon. If one
of the greatest tests of revolutionaries
is their capacity to voluntarily give up
power, Mr. Museveni and Mr. Meles
(who died in office in 2012) proved to be
cut from a different cloth from such illustrious statesmen as Nelson Mandela
and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, justly
celebrated for resisting the temptation
to be presidents for life. Or, for that
matter, from Mr. Mbeki, who stepped

down in 2008 after losing a battle for
leadership of the African National Congress, and Mr. Rawlings, who relinquished his office in 2001, thus becoming the first leader in African history
who had seized power by force to yield
peacefully to the democratic process.
Mr. Afewerki and Mr. Kagame, on the
other hand, are still in power.
As for Mr. Museveni, after pledging
to retire following his election in 2001,
the Ugandan leader abolished term limits ahead of elections in 2006 and offered
himself for re-election again in 2011.

Many had hoped that would be his last
election. But Mr. Museveni, now 69, is
determined to run again. As autocrats
often do, he is clothing his ambitions as
a response to the ‘‘will of the people.’’
On Feb. 11, a governing party caucus of
members of Parliament ‘‘strongly’’ appealed to the president to run again.
This is bad news for Uganda and for
East Africa. Autocratic rule has the obvious effect of weakening a country’s
institutions, with profound consequences for its citizens.
Uganda is a poor country with a percapita income of only $598 in 2012, according to the United Nations. A functional government in such circumstances would have sought to speed up
the process of commercial production
of the substantial oil reserves discovered in the country in 2006, which
the World Bank estimates have the potential of accounting for 10 to 25 percent
of gross domestic
product.
Instead, the process has been tightly
controlled by the
State House — the

president’s official
residence. Thus,
while Uganda remains far away from
fully developing its oil
industry, the comparatively well-run West
African country of Ghana, which discovered its own oil reserves a year after
Uganda, has already began commercial
production.
Meanwhile, Mr. Museveni continues
to implement ever-harsher laws aimed
at stifling domestic dissent, including
the much derided Public Order Management Bill, which requires that if
three or more people are to gather in
public to address political issues, they
need permission from the police.
What is to be done? Uganda is a major regional American ally with its
troops having played a vital part in
ousting the militant Al Shabab group
from the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
Public pressure on the Ugandan leader
is unlikely to have the desired effect,
however, and can help him play the nationalist card to serve his domestic
agenda.
Instead, the Obama administration
should privately make it clear to Mr.

Museveni that Uganda’s interests
would be better served if he oversees a
democratic transition and that relations will not remain the same if he
clings to power. A precedent exists. In

Kenya, the United States ambassador
to Nairobi, Johnnie Carson, played an
important role in urging President
Daniel arap Moi to give up power in
2002, at a time when there were attempts to amend the Constitution to allow him another run for the presidency.
But rather than put pressure on Mr.
Museveni to step down, the Obama administration has been focusing criticism on the anti-homosexuality law
that Mr. Museveni has thrown to his
supporters. This emphasis by Washington is misplaced, and will only serve the
Ugandan leader’s ends.
Ultimately, though, only Ugandans
can rid themselves of Mr. Museveni’s
long rule and stop their country from
being left behind in the wave of progress sweeping Africa.
Civil society and the opposition
should threaten a boycott of the next
elections unless a set of changes — including the creation of an independent
and impartial electoral commission,
amendment of laws that restrict freedom of assembly, and the introduction
of curbs on spending of state resources
during campaigns — are implemented.
In his reformist days, President
Museveni wrote a statement that he
will never live down: ‘‘The problem of
Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who
want to overstay in power.’’
Today, his refusal to step down, even
though his increasingly corrupt and
autocratic rule is ruining his nation’s
prospects, is selfish and damaging.

It was a former Ugandan president,
Godfrey Binaisa, who with refreshing
honesty told his people that he was reluctant to give up power for purely selfinterested reasons. ‘‘Enno entebe
ewooma,’’ he said, quoting a Luganda
proverb that means ‘‘This chair is
sweet.’’
President Museveni clearly agrees.
But he should accept that his determination to keep his grip on Uganda’s seat of
power for life is the last thing his country and Africa need in the 21st century.
is an editor at the Nation
Media Group in Kenya.

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BY ADAM LIPTAK

Here is a good way to get a belly laugh
from Justice Clarence Thomas: Suggest
to him that the Supreme Court’s decisions should seldom be overruled.
‘‘You are the justice who is most willing to re-examine the court’s precedents,’’ Judge Diane S. Sykes told him in
November, in a public conversation at an
annual dinner sponsored by the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group.
Justice Thomas responded with a
deadpan statement that the audience
could tell was a joke. ‘‘That’s because of
my affinity for stare decisis,’’ he said, using the Latin term for ‘‘to stand by things
decided.’’ Then he let out a guffaw.
‘‘Stare decisis doesn’t hold much
force for you?’’ Judge Sykes asked.
‘‘Oh, it sure does,’’ Justice Thomas responded. ‘‘But not enough to keep me
from going to the Constitution.’’
He was still laughing. The audience
gave him a standing ovation.
Justice Antonin Scalia was present,
and he could not have been surprised.
‘‘He does not believe in stare decisis,
period,’’ Justice Scalia once told one of
Justice Thomas’s biographers.
The current Supreme Court term has
been a master class in stare decisis. In

cases argued in the last few months, the
justices have been asked to overturn or
modify important precedents concerning campaign finance, abortion protests,
legislative prayer and union organizing.
And on March 5, the court will consider a request to overrule a 1988 securities fraud decision. If the court does so,
it will do away with most class actions
for securities fraud.
As is his custom, Justice Thomas has
not participated in the arguments this
term. Indeed, Saturday was the eighth
anniversary of the last time he asked a
question from the bench.
Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker recently called Justice Thomas’s silence
‘‘downright embarrassing.’’ But the
real work of the Supreme Court is done
in written opinions, and there Justice
Thomas has laid out a consistent and
closely argued judicial vision.
Consider his most recent statement on
stare decisis. It came in his majority
opinion in June in Alleyne v. United
States, which overruled a 2002 decision
on the jury’s role in criminal sentencing.
Overturning the earlier decision was
permissible, Justice Thomas said, because the power of precedent is ‘‘at its
nadir in cases concerning procedural
rules that implicate fundamental constitutional protections.’’ He added that the
2002 ruling was at odds with ‘‘the original meaning of the Sixth Amendment.’’
In dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
wrote that ‘‘the court’s decision creates

a precedent about precedent that may
have greater precedential effect than the
dubious decisions on which it relies.’’
The case to be argued next week, Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, No. 13317, adds an important wrinkle to the
usual analysis of whether a precedent
deserves to survive. That is because the
decision in peril interpreted a federal
law, the Securities Exchange Act, rather
than the Constitution.
In constitutional cases, the Supreme
Court has the last word. If it is wrong,
nothing short of a constitutional amendment can change things. That suggests,
as Justice Thomas told Judge Sykes,
that the court should be open to addressing its errors.
Cases in which the court interprets
statutes are different. In them, Congress
has the last word. If lawmakers disagree
with the court’s interpretation of a law,
all they need to do is say so in a new law.
If Congress fails to act, it may be said to
agree with the court’s decision.
Letting lawmakers have the last word
‘‘arises from the respect owed to the
legislative branch and the reality that
Congress is often better suited to evaluate whether an existing statutory rule
or interpretation should be abandoned
in light of changed circumstances of
policy judgments,’’ Charles Fried, who
served as United States solicitor general in the Reagan administration, wrote
in a supporting brief urging the justices

to leave the 1988 precedent alone.
Justice Thomas seems to agree. In a
1994 concurrence, he wrote that ‘‘considerations of stare decisis have ‘special
force’ in the area of statutory interpretation.’’
According to the plaintiffs in the new
case, the Supreme Court has not overruled a statutory precedent in an area in
which Congress has been active since
1961, in a tax case.
But lawyers for the defendants said
the 1988 decision was entitled to
‘‘lessened precedential weight’’ because it was ‘‘largely a procedural and
evidentiary construct.’’
Justice Thomas agreed that the decision ‘‘is questionable.’’ Since he will
almost certainly ask no questions at the
argument next week, we will have to
wait until the court decides the case,
probably in June, to see how just how
weak his ‘‘affinity for stare decisis’’ is.

BY KAREEM FAHIM
AND MAYY EL SHEIKH

Afghan Army soldiers on Monday carrying the coffin of one of 21 comrades shot and killed in their sleep on Sunday by Taliban insurgents at a remote base
in Kunar Province. The authorities said the guards on duty were apparently Taliban sympathizers. It was the worst loss of life for the army since 2010.

rarely used covert tool or something
that should be reserved for extraordinarily rare use, against the most sophisticated, hard-to-reach targets.
And looming over the issue is the
question of retaliation — whether a cyberattack on Syria’s air power, its electric grid or its leadership would prompt
Syrian, Iranian or Russian retaliation in

the United States.
It is a debate Mr. Obama has never
spoken about publicly. Because he has
put the use of cyberweapons largely into the hands of the National Security
Agency, which operates under covert
authorities, there is little of the public
discussion that accompanied the arguments over nuclear weapons in the
1950’s and 1960’s, or the kind of roiling
argument over the wisdom of using
drones, another classified program that
Mr. Obama only began to discuss publicly in the past 18 months.
But to many inside the administration, who declined to speak on the record
about discussions over one of America’s
most highly-classified capabilities, Syria puts the issue back on the table. Mr.
Obama’s national security council met
on Thursday to explore what one official
called ‘‘old and new options.’’
One of the central issues of the debate
is whether a cyberstrike on Syria would
be seen as a justified humanitarian intervention — less likely to cause civilian
casualties than airstrikes — or whether
it would only embolden American adversaries who have been debating
themselves how to use cyberweapons.
Jason Healey, the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic
Council, said it was ‘‘worth doing to
show that cyber operations are not evil
witchcraft but can be humanitarian.’’
Others caution whether that would be
the perception.
‘‘Here in the U.S. we tend to view a cyberattack as a de-escalation — it’s less

damaging than airstrikes,’’ said Peter
W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings In-

stitution who has published a book on
cyberdefense and offense, ‘‘Cyber Security and Cyber War: What Everyone
Needs to Know.’’
‘‘But elsewhere in the world it may
well be viewed as opening up a new
realm of warfare,’’ he said.
Internally, Mr. Obama has made no
secret of his concerns about using cyberweapons. He narrowed ‘‘Olympic
Games,’’ the program against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, to assure that it did not cripple civilian facilities, like hospitals.
What he liked about the program was
that it was covert, and that, if successful,
it could help buy time to force the Iranians into negotiations. That is exactly
what happened. But when a technological error resulted in the broadcast of the
‘‘Stuxnet’’ virus around the world, ultimately leading to the revelation of the
program’s origins with the cyberwarri-

ors at the N.S.A. and Israel’s Unit 6200,
Mr. Obama’s hopes of keeping such programs at arm’s length were dashed.
Since then, there has been no overt
evidence that the United States has
used cyberweapons in another major
attack. (It was considered during the
NATO attacks on Libya in the spring of
2011, but dismissed after Mr. Obama’s
advisers warned him that there was no
assurance they would work against
Muammar al-Qaddaffi’s antiquated,

pre-Internet air defenses.)
The director of the N.S.A, Gen. Keith
B. Alexander, said in an interview last
year that cyberweapons had been used
only a handful of times in his eight-year
tenure.
But Syria is a complicated case, raising different issues than the attack on

Iran did. In Syria, the humanitarian impulse to do something — without putting Americans at risk or directly entering the civil war — is growing inside the
administration. Most of that discussion
focuses on providing more training and
arms for ‘‘moderate’’ rebel groups. But
in the conversations about stepping up
covert action, cyber is one tool under
discussion.
Part of the argument is that Syria is a
place where America could change its
image using its most advanced technology for a humanitarian purpose.
‘‘The United States has been caught
using Stuxnet to conduct a covert cyber
campaign against Iran as well as trawling the Internet with the massive Prism
collection operation,’’ Mr. Healey wrote
recently. ‘‘The world is increasingly seeing U.S. cyber power as a force for evil in
the world. A cyber operation against
Syria might help to reverse this view.’’
Yet that would require openly taking
credit for a cyberattack — something
the United States has never done.
Even if the United States wanted to
act covertly, a cyberattack on Syria

would be hard to keep secret. Anything
that grounded the air fleet, or turned out
the lights at key facilities in Damascus
and at major military outposts, would be
instantly noticed — and would not necessarily be accomplished quickly.
United States military planners concluded after putting together options for
Mr. Obama over the past two and a half
years that any meaningful attack on
Syria’s facilities would have to be both
long enough to make a difference and
targeted enough to keep from making
an already suffering population even
worse off.
For those and other reasons there are
doubters throughout the military and
intelligence establishment. ‘‘It’d be of
limited utility, frankly,’’ one senior administration official said.
For instance, a cyberattack could disrupt or shut down the navigational systems for Syria’s aircraft, including the

BY ASHLEY PARKER

Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan and the longestserving member of Congress in history,
announced on Monday that he would
not seek re-election at the end of his current term.
Mr. Dingell’s retirement, first announced by Detroit newspapers and
confirmed by Democratic leadership
aides, will come at the end of this year —
the end of his 29th full term — and represents the end of a historic tenure in
the House that began in 1955. That year,
Mr. Dingell, at the age of 29, succeeded

his father after he died.
Mr. Dingell, 87, who amassed considerable power as the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, in June
became the longest-serving member of
Congress with 20,997 days as a representative. Until then, the record had
been held by Senator Robert C. Byrd,
Democrat of West Virginia. Mr. Dingell
has served under 11 presidents.
Mr. Dingell asserted jurisdiction over
vast expanses of federal policy as the intimidating chairman of the energy committee. In 2008, his fellow Democrats
ousted him from the committee chairmanship, where he had reigned as the
top Democrat for nearly 30 years.
Mr. Dingell, 6 feet 3 inches tall, had

grown stooped in his later years, walking with the help of a cane (from Harrods in London) or wheeling around on
a motorized scooter (with a plaque proclaiming him ‘‘the Dean’’ of the House).
But Mr. Dingell said his retirement had
as much to do with the changing nature
of the body in which he served as with
any health concerns.
He had recently begun to bemoan the

current culture of Congress — its members’ inability to work together and
compromise — and in an interview with
The Detroit News, he was even more
pointed: ‘‘I find serving in the House to
be obnoxious,’’ he told the newspaper.
‘‘It’s become very hard because of the
acrimony and bitterness, both in Congress and in the streets.’’
Mr. Dingell’s retirement is also anoth-

Russian-designed Mi-8 and Mi-17 helicopters that are carrying out many of
the so-called barrel bomb attacks
against civilians in Homs and Aleppo.
But Syrian commanders would most
likely shift to other weapons in their arsenal, such as array of rockets and missiles, including longer-range Scud missiles, that Mr. Assad’s forces have
already employed with deadly affect.
Syria is no stranger to cyberattacks,
either on the receiving or the giving end.
Israel’s September 2007 strike that destroyed a nuclear reactor being built in
the Syrian desert was accompanied by
an ingenious cyberattack that blinded
the country’s air defenses.
When the Syrian military awoke the
next morning, the reactor being built
with North Korean help was a smoking
hole in the ground, as were some associated facilities.
On the offensive end, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, which follows cyberissues, assembled evidence in a report published late last year that the
Syrians had used an old ‘‘spear phishing’’ scam that gets their target to click
on a link in an email, in this case videos
of war atrocities, to identify people who
are aiding the rebel groups and get inside their computer systems.
And the Syrian Electronic Army,
which American intelligence officials
suspect is actually Iranian, has conducted strikes against targets in the United
States over the past year, including the
website of The New York Times. Mostly,
these have been denial of service attacks, annoying and disruptive, but not
truly sophisticated.
The chances that Syria could manage

a significant cyber-response is low,
American officials and outside experts
said. But the precedent could free up the
Russians and the Iranians — who also
have stakes in the Syrian war, and far
more capability — into a new and rapidly escalating form of warfare.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

er blow for Representative Nancy
Pelosi of California, the minority leader,
who has lost several of her key liberal allies to retirement. Earlier this year, Representatives George Miller and Henry
A. Waxman, both of California, also announced their retirements.
Mr. Dingell became famous for his socalled Dingell-grams, the elaborate
written requests for information from
people or agencies he planned to investigate, and he considered his committee’s oversight powers to be far-reaching, often pointing to a map of the Earth
when asked what his jurisdiction was.
He also became well-known for his
support of progressive causes. He voted
for the 1964 Civil Rights Act — a vote he
considers his most important — and
presided over the passage of Medicare.
(The gavel he used still sits on his desk.)
Following the lead of his father, John,
who introduced his own national health
care legislation at the beginning of
every Congress, Mr. Dingell continued
the tradition, and voted in favor of President Obama’s signature health care
law.
His wife of more than three decades,
Deborah, is a power in her own right in

Washington. She has served as an auto
industry executive and is a close adviser to her husband. She recently considered, but ultimately decided against,
a Senate bid. There is speculation that
she might run for her husband’s seat.

Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi abruptly announced the resignation of his
government on Monday after seven turbulent months of trying to contain
Egypt’s political unrest and growing
criticism of the cabinet’s performance.
Mr. Beblawi was installed as prime
minister last July by the military soon
after it removed the country’s Islamist
president, Mohamed Morsi. His resignation on Monday fueled speculation
that it was intended to clear the way for
Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the
defense minister and the dominant figure in the government, to announce his
candidacy for president.
The interim government led by Mr.
Beblawi has faced persistent questions
about its authority and legitimacy. During its tenure, the military and the security services embarked on a ferocious
campaign to suppress Mr. Morsi’s supporters and other rivals, resulting in the
worst mass killings in modern Egyptian
history.
Despite infusions of cash from Persian Gulf states meant to prop up
Egypt’s economy, a wave of labor
strikes emerged as the latest challenge
to Mr. Beblawi, affecting a number of
crucial groups, including police officers,
textile workers, doctors and transportation employees.
Even though the government was under considerable pressure, one minister

said the announcement came as a surprise. It was made after a cabinet was
convened a day earlier than had been
scheduled. ‘‘I walked in this morning;
the resignation statement was read; I
left,’’ the minister said.
Speaking on television afterward, Mr.
Beblawi complained about the strikes
and ‘‘personal interests.’’ He also said,
‘‘This is the time to put the country’s interests above everyone.’’
While he allowed that the government
had not achieved ‘‘complete success’’ in
his tenure, he asserted that the state’s
‘‘prestige’’ had been restored, mention-

ing the ratification of a new Constitution.
‘‘The police and the armed forces impose the power of law on everybody,’’ he
added. ‘‘That doesn’t mean that there
aren’t disruptions here and there, but
this is a normal in a fierce confrontation
with a side that doesn’t want good
things for the country.’’
It was not clear who would replace the
ministers who had resigned. The state
news media reported that they would
continue to oversee their ministries until a new government was seated.
Field Marshal Sisi, who is seen as
Egypt’s most popular political figure, has
yet to formally declare that he will run for
president, but people who have met with
him recently speak of his candidacy as a

foregone conclusion. When an Egyptian
delegation visited Russia this month,
President Vladimir V. Putin wished Field
Marshal Sisi luck in his campaign.

• An article in the Saturday/Sunday editions about the founders of WhatsApp,
the text messaging service acquired by
Facebook, misstated the number of employees WhatsApp had last summer. It
was 40, not 30.
• An obituary on Feb. 13 about Marty
Plissner, a longtime political director for
CBS News, referred incorrectly to the
origin of the phrase ‘‘too close to call.’’ It
has been in use at least since 1933, when
The New York Times used it in a sports
column; it was not, as Mr. Plissner
claimed, ‘‘invented at CBS’’ in the early
1960s, although that was when CBS
News began using the phrase in its coverage of elections. (His erroneous claim,
as noted in the obituary, also appeared
in one of William Safire’s ‘‘On Language’’ columns in The Times, in 1996.)
• An article in the Feb. 15/16 editions
about the actor Andy Karl, who plays
the lead in the new Broadway musical
‘‘Rocky,’’ misidentified the musical in
which he met his wife, the actress Orfeh.
It was ‘‘Saturday Night Fever,’’ not
‘‘Legally Blonde.’’
• An article on Friday about disillusionment among Libyans on the eve of a vote
to elect members of a constitutional assembly quoted incorrectly from a law

passed by Libya’s General National
Congress in December. It declared that
Shariah should be ‘‘the source of legislation,’’ not ‘‘above the constitution.’’


.=IDEE=

To be both peaceful and forceful in fashion is a special achievement. And who
but
could have made an
entire collection out of subtly redrawn
silhouettes colored only in the softest
green, shaded to gray? Those colors enveloped the show that closed the Milan
collections on Monday.
‘‘The force of green,’’ said the designer as he stood among his models after
the show’s end. The lineup told the
whole story: a crescent moon of outfits
from tailored coats, cut in the round, to
long dresses. Among the choices was a
fresh asparagus color, with the model’s
bare legs striding out of a back slit,
wearing flat pumps in celery green.
The color focus in the collection
seemed to embrace nature and the city,
almost as though the designer were
telling a story of a woman trapped in
town who escapes to green fields. The
opening pieces were smart and urban,
mostly pants, but they were slightly
cropped and loose. The same ease was

found in the shorter rounded jackets
made in soft flannel fabrics that dominated the collection.
The changes to the Armani silhouette
seemed so insignificant — and yet they
did so much. The proportions worked
fine for both flat and high heels, and when
the color was gray, a handbag might be
green and sparkling, a twinkling surface
that also appeared on some dresses.
The ability to change so subtly, yet to
stay yourself, is the mark of a great designer. So, once again, Mr. Armani’s
draft of lime has earned him that status.
SUZY MENKES

If you can’t tell the boys’ clothes from
the girls’, that is just fine with Angela
Missoni.
Like so many designers this season,
she hit the sweet fashion spot by using
simple, sporty shapes while putting her
energy into extraordinary textures.
It helped that three-quarters of the
show was in knit of some kind,
although it was hard to believe that an
apparently tweedy coat was, in fact,
knitted.
That same reaction applied to many
inventive effects of looped intarsia and
chevron pattern.
Then there were the colors — juicy

and joyous, as sunflower yellow and
orange with a dash of swimming pool
blue appeared on coats, pants and
sweaters in this excellent collection.
Texture is fashion’s ongoing story for
winter 2014. For the duo behind
the concept is often
drawn from the richness of the past, a
time when it was normal to mix tweed
and velvet, sprinkle an outfit with appliquèd roses or use fur buttons on a flannel jacket.
Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi cited their inspiration as graphic
Art Deco and the lush beauty of the
films of Luchino Visconti. But the collection, with its pleated skirts or wafts of
organza around the knees, caught the
meld of fabrics that seems modern.
One way to define autumn 2014 fashion is the ‘‘feel’’ of winter — meaning
both the fabrics and their effect.
told his story
graphically, like a black and white
movie. Inspired by the watercolors of
the German artist Joachim Bandau, the
designer used a kind of shadow play to
give a third dimension to streamlined
clothes. Degradations of color, as black
moved to gray, had a gentle, painterly
effect.

Cobblers, heads down, molding leather
around a last, worked under the soaring
stone ceiling of the Brera Academy of

Fine Arts in Milan.
They were demonstrating the art and
craft of
and the
company’s famous footwear in an exceptional setting. Fifty historic shoes
from its Florentine museum were displayed in the academy’s scenography
department, where miniature buildings
from small homes to vast cathedrals
had been created by students.
The focus on Ferragamo shoes, the
core of the brand, came at an interesting
point in the company’s development:
The fashion show held earlier as part of
the autumn 2014 Milan season was probably the most convincing collection yet
from the designer Massimiliano
Giornetti.
Starting with misty gray and white


checks for tailoring rounded at the
shoulders, the designer focused on intense craftsmanship within a clearly
drawn silhouette.
The textures of furry mohair sweaters or knife-pleated leather skirts created extra dimensions, as did animal
prints partly saturated with black, as if
paint had been thrown at them.
The effect of dripping color became
more dramatic when lemon yellow or a
pinky purple were added. Both the sur-

face decoration, achieved with jacquard

and needle punching, and the urban
sportiness of the clothes were striking.
And don’t forget the footwear.
‘‘I loved those little boots,’’ said Hilary Swank, referring to ankle-high
shiny bootees. The actress said she
would be confident of their comfort because that was part of Salvatore Ferragamo’s original aesthetic.
Take the shoes or the clothes? That is
a pertinent question now that Italian accessory designers are following in the
platform-soled steps of earlier design
generations like Gucci and Prada. Both
those brands developed renowned shoe
and bag houses into luxury fashion
brands back in the 1990s.
Twenty years on, can it be done
again?
Diego Della Valle believes so. The
president and chief executive of the Tod
empire has built fashion into the line
and now has offered a surprise from
this season. Along with the footwear, with its buckled boots, knee-high
in soft leather or laced high tops with
splashy patterns, the designer Simon
Holloway created a full collection of
clothes.
While his men’s wear in January had

A rusty orange gleaming from the surface of a purse and another, very different shade of flamingo pink were rare
flourishes from
.
This bag company was built on discretion — and on the practical effects that

the designer Álvaro González has
worked inside the purse.
He rightly understands that Valextra’s customers are looking for useful
additions rather than flashy inventions.
Mr. González is, therefore, interested in
the ergonomics of leather goods, producing, for example, a wallet big enough to
hold money, credit cards and a space to
slide in a digital tablet.
The aim is to make living and traveling easier. And when Mr. González
works the brushed surface of a burnt
orange bag with embossing, the effect is
as discreet as it is elegant.
How many aluminum drink cans will
the public throw into recycling bins? It
cannot be too many for Ilaria Venturini
Fendi, whose imaginative use of the
cans’ metal tabs seem to know no
bounds.
They appear in many guises to decorate her
bags, giving a
sharp style to compare with the sportier
and malleable bags that Ms. Fendi has
handmade in Africa.

The wolves howled, that particular cry
across the frozen steppes that creates
shivers — even if these wild animals
were just on video screens, part of a
stage set.
‘‘Little Red Riding Hood,’’ said

backstage, following that
name with a list of artists, poets and
writers who focused on wolves and their
fictional, scary variations in fairy tales.
It seemed an unlikely fashion inspiration but it was extremely effective in
drawing the designer away from his
tendency to embrace the past as a path
to a magical collection.
The wolves were there from the start:
two animals, necks stretched, tongues
hanging, as they cried toward the moon
— and all this just above the hem of a
rounded and regular winter coat.
So the embellishment went on, with

been focused on tough biker stuff, this
Hogan collection was whimsical, using
the drawings of the artist Julie Verhoeven to suggest the 1970s as it moved to
the ’80s.
Bold, fur-trimmed jackets in chalky
whites or perhaps a fiery plum pink
complemented the printed chiffon hippie-de-luxe dresses.
Why move into fashion when accessories are the cash cow of so many
companies?
‘‘The idea is to complete our story,’’
said Mr. Della Valle, explaining that
while the focus may be on accessories
now, companies need a wide offering.
Hence his brother Andrea, the group’s
vice president, is expanding the range

of Fay, another Tod’s brand, along with
Hogan.
‘‘The difference today is that we have
our shops to fill. Before we had to sell
things to stores,’’ said Mr. Della Valle to
explain the strategy. Tod’s, for example,
already has 200 stores worldwide.
Yet this strategy is not universally accepted.
has moved in the opposite
direction, putting more focus on its core
products and its new but experienced
shoe and bag designer, Pablo Coppola.
He has concentrated on quality, intriguing surface treatments and a distinct Bally look that does not require
bold logos.
A super-glossy treatment for leather,
giving it the sheen of a rubber boot but
keeping a luxurious softness, was one
example, made in gum pink and a rich
red. The same colors appeared on a red
suede bag with snakeskin handles while
other unexpected shades for bags included a light pistachio green and
shrimp pink.
‘‘Ready-to-wear is a compliment to
the total look, but craftsmanship is our
brand DNA,’’ said Frédéric de Narp,
Bally’s chief executive.
That attitude was reflected in a lineup
of classic court shoes: a Bally signature
from pointed toe to pin-thin heel. SUZY

the wolf and his teeth particularly effective on a chunky sweater as a bold symbol on the chest is now all the fashion
rage.
The color palette was perfect: a sanguine red, but the dark tones contrasting with flashes of pink and pale turquoise. For embellishment, there was
lace paneling, shearling and brocade —
but none of those gave a heaviness to
the clothes.
The finale was dramatic as the models mounted a scaffolding so that, as Mr.
Marras explained, they could get closer
to the moon. SUZY MENKES

Suzy Menkes talks with Antonio
Marras about wolves, Sardinia and a
designer’s dreams

MENKES

The textures had a similar trajectory,
with craft difficult to define from a distance, but adding to the feeling that
handwork is one of the important features of Italy’s promising young designers.
The winter 2014 show by
was one indication why LVMH
Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton announced on Monday that it is taking a
minority stake of about 45 percent in the
designer’s company.
Pietro Baccari, chairman and chief
executive of the LVMH brand Fendi,
was at the show. Mr. de Vincenzo has
been designing for Fendi for about 13

Another recent creation is the light

switch bag. It has nothing to do with
casting a beam on a purse’s interior (although that would be a smart invention). Instead, old switches are put to
use decorating bags — one of the many
inventive ways that Carmina Campus
reuses castoffs. SUZY MENKES

years. This is a young Roman designer
whose skill with fur and leather is exceptional.
Working on the surface of fabrics, Mr.
de Vincenzo sent waves of material
rolling down the front of a dress while
the same dramatic effect was achieved
on other garments with chevron work.
These patterns ran diagonally or on
angles, making it difficult on the runway
to identify the base material.
But the designer is also capable of creating simple clothes for his generation,
like a blazer jacket with Lurex highlights melding into one another on the
dress underneath.
Craft, imagination and originality

make him a rising star at Milan Fashion
Week.
, another name to watch,
took a turn out of Africa for her new collection, focusing instead on knitwear
done in Italy. Each of the giant coats
with bold patterns that opened the show
required more than 100 hours of handwork, said the designer, Stella Maria
Jean Novarino.
But like so much of this collection, Ms.

Novarino kept tripping over her own
feet — literally, in the case of models in
sky-high stilettos. She is especially successful with print and, though the show
notes talked about inspiration from the
Kabuki theater of Japan, what really

For the men’s wear collection last
month,
designers put their
models inside a penitentiary. For the
women’s show Monday, it was a madhouse — and it was hard to decide which
presentation was more discomforting.
As with the men’s show, the clothes
were quite interesting, especially as the
designers Dean and Dan Caten appear
to have moved toward an early 1960s
style and also offered full-on long evening gowns.
The story seemed to go something
like this: mentally disturbed women, remembering their past of glamorous
parties, were hanging out in an all-white
medical area complete with wire
caging. They were then accompanied
by two nurselike figures, in all white
with helmets, which looked like André
Courrèges outfits from the 1960s.
The design duo were on message with
this nod to the A-line tailoring of the prehippie era. In fact, some of the day wear
had a faint resonance with this season’s
Gucci collection.
It may be smart to extend

DSquared2’s style beyond sportswear.
Yet the show seemed to be pushing
boundaries of decency — not on the runway, but in the presentation.
The duo behind the label
looked as upbeat and excited when
they took their bow as their wacky and
whimsical clothes did on the runway.
The idea of highlighting Eurotrash

worked were the bold African-style wax
prints on which she established her collection.
Intriguingly, it turned out that the
geometric patterns on tailored pieces
with clean lines were the ‘‘made in
Africa’’ part of the collection, handwork
from Burkina Faso.
The clothes for the designer’s ‘‘urban
Madame Butterfly’’ were just too fancy
in cut and decoration. Ms. Novarino
needs to step back, reassess her
strengths and remember that modern
women should be striding, not teetering. SUZY MENKES

girls was only the beginning, for these
feisty females seemed to have a penchant for cute animals, preferably cats
and dogs, printed side by side. The animals even appeared as intarsia treatment on furs.
The energy and sense of fun even
made prints of lips, common since the
era of Salvador Dali, seem fresh.
SUZY MENKES

R A L P H L A U R E N C O L L E C T I O N . C O M
N E W

Y O R K

M I L A N

L O N D O N

P A R I S

C A N N E S

M U N I C H

I S T A N B U L

M O S C O W

D U B A I


BY ZACHARY WOOLFE

The nightmares evoked by the title of
Georg Friedrich Haas’s new ‘‘dark
dreams,’’ which the Berlin Philharmonic played with its chief conductor, Simon Rattle, on Saturday evening at the
Philharmonie here, involve repetition

and circling back: the ominous sense
that even as things change, they remain the same.
This was also the lesson, of sorts, to
be learned from Mr. Haas’s 2000 masterpiece, ‘‘in vain.’’ A 70-minute work
for chamber orchestra, ‘‘in vain’’ hovers in the air, rising to burning climaxes

BY ROSLYN SULCAS

The dancer Misty Copeland has performed with the singer Prince and the
pop group TLC. She has appeared in
commercials for Diet Dr Pepper and
Coach handbags, is national youth of the
year ambassador for Boys & Girls Clubs
of America and has a contract with the
Under Armour sports clothing brand.
She has her own dance wear line, and
next month Simon & Schuster will publish her memoir, ‘‘Life in Motion: An
Unlikely Ballerina.’’
But on a mild January day at Ameri-

but always slithering free of them,
chastened, and returning to hushed
stasis. The feeling is one of uncertainty,
as it is also in ‘‘dark dreams,’’ which is
permeated by the sound of string players making quivering trills while sliding up their instruments’ fingerboards:
instability atop instability.
The new score is full of swift rises
and equally swift falls in volume. The
tempo is firmer — at 60 beats a minute

for most of the 23-minute piece, the fundamental pace has the steady click of a
clock’s second hand — but the instruments blur around it, tending to speed
up just as the music seems to have
reached stillness, as if a reminder that
things inevitably fall apart. At one point
a passage of blissed-out, golden joy, all
brass and bronzed strings, suddenly
dissolves as the strings accelerate into
hysteria.
If Mr. Haas, 60, has previously composed music of Wagnerian intensity,
with touches of the Alpine brass of
Strauss’s tone poems, then ‘‘dark
dreams’’ shifts the emphasis a bit. (The

can Ballet Theater’s studios, she looked
as anxious as a novice when she put her
toes to the floor and, supported by her
partner, Herman Cornejo, tried to rise
gracefully from a kneeling position to a
straight leg. ‘‘Try it again,’’ urged the
coach Susan Jaffe, who was rehearsing
Ms. Copeland, a soloist at Ballet Theater, for her debut in the principal role of
Swanhilda in Nicholas Sergeyev’s
‘‘Coppélia,’’ which she will perform during the company’s spring season at the
Metropolitan Opera House.
Ms. Copeland and Mr. Cornejo tried it
again. And again and again. By the end
of the rehearsal, the passage, just a few
seconds long, was slightly better.
‘‘You have to be so strong to be a professional ballet dancer,’’ Ms. Copeland,

31, said a day later, in an interview at an
Upper West Side restaurant close to her

orchestra will bring the work to Carnegie Hall in October.) We are now in the
world of the lurid excesses of Strauss’s
Expressionist operas, ‘‘Salome’’ and
‘‘Elektra,’’ with sound juxtapositions
like the curt chop of a woodblock and
the roar of a horn, as if by a rearing
horse. Later, the basses briefly scuffle,

as in the angry passage just before the
head of John the Baptist is presented to
Salome.
Insistent and yet ultimately, as its
title indicates, a paean to futility, ‘‘in
vain’’ was intended as a protest
against, or at least an elegy about, the
victory of far-right factions in the 1999
Austrian elections. Ears alert to Mr.
Haas’s political interests (he is Austrian) will spot a battle-ready passage in

‘‘dark dreams’’: a beat first in the
woodblock, then the drum, then the
timpani that evokes the Prussian-style
marches of his 2004 Cello Concerto.
In ‘‘dark dreams,’’ the moment is
quickly engulfed by more of those sliding trills; even to call it a protest —
against militarism, fascism, whatever —
seems an overstatement of the helpless

modesty of the reference. Mr. Haas, like
many of us, seems sadly resigned to being able merely to glance at injustice and
pain before turning his attention elsewhere.
As throughout Mr. Haas’s body of
work, the score uses microtones — the
sounds between the traditional Western octave’s 12 notes — but the impact
of ‘‘dark dreams’’ is far more macro
than micro, sometimes to its detriment.
Not long before the work ends, it builds
into orgiastic overload; in the strings
alone, 18 lines play simultaneously,
rhythms completely out of joint. There
is another passage that alternates
somber brasses and a mass of answering strings, like an ancient rite.

Some of Mr. Haas’s classic works, like
‘‘in vain’’ and his Third String Quartet
(2001), are long and immersive, even
placing audience members and performers in extended stretches of darkness to heighten their perceptions. But
in a more compressed work like ‘‘dark
dreams,’’ the very loud and very soft
passages tended to feel unearned, grandiose rather than grand. The extremes
were less riveting than relentless,
capped, after so many climaxes, by a
melancholy anticlimax, perhaps another nod to the great nightmare of political
powerlessness: a forlorn tuba solo over
a quiet, complex string chord grounded
in a low C sharp. Then silence.
The orchestra gave an excellent performance of a very good piece of music,
which was particularly vivid in the

theater-in-the-round architecture of the
Philharmonie and was brilliantly programmed just before Debussy’s ‘‘La
Mer.’’ The two works have nearly
identical orchestral forces, and the
opening of the Debussy — involving
two harps, quivering scales in the

apartment. ‘‘You have to push yourself
and push yourself, and it’s never perfect. And to be different means you may
even have to be stronger.’’
Ms. Copeland, petite, pretty and polished, is different among ballerinas because she is a black woman in a world
that is very largely white. While a number of black men have made prominent
names for themselves in ballet — Arthur Mitchell, Albert Evans, Carlos
Acosta — few black women, outside
Dance Theater of Harlem, have become
principals at major American ballet
companies. A mere handful have made

strings and a timpani roll — is like a 30second summary of ‘‘dark dreams.’’
‘‘La Mer,’’ too, involves a delicate balance between true power and mere
garishness. Mr. Rattle avoided the latter by conducting the work with a feverish edge and abrupt bendings of the
tempo that kept it sounding unexpected
and fresh. He emphasized the same intensity in Brahms’s Third Symphony,
which opened the concert: The end of
the first movement was a burst of released tension, and even the noble pastoral of the Andante had raw emotion.
I have never heard an effect quite like
the vocal quality Mr. Rattle drew from
the strings in the exhalations near the
end of ‘‘La Mer.’’ It was, simply, as if an
invisible choir were singing from the

orchestra: astonishing. The passage is
marked ‘‘calmer and very expressive,’’
but this was deeper than that, a peace
which passeth understanding.

Read up-to-the-minute news on the
ArtsBeat blog.

it to the rank of soloist, and Ms. Copeland is only the second black woman in
Ballet Theater’s history to hold that position. New York City Ballet has only
had one black female soloist: Debra
Austin, in the 1970s.
There are complex reasons for this:
economics and access to ballet performances and classes, stereotypes about
black women and — most worryingly
for black female dancers — stereotypes
about what a ballerina should be: white
and waiflike.
‘‘I think when I joined Ballet Theater,
there were people on the staff who did
not want to see a brown person in the
corps onstage,’’ Ms. Copeland said.
In ‘‘Life in Motion,’’ written with
Charisse Jones, Ms. Copeland recounts
her upbringing in San Pedro, Calif.,


It’s been far too long — choreographically speaking — since France invaded
New York in the spring of 2001 with
France Moves, a festival programmed

by Yorgos Lukos, the artistic director of
the Lyon Opera Ballet. This spring ushers in Danse: A French-American Festival of Performance and Ideas, which begins May 1 and affords a rare
opportunity for an immersion into
French dance. Fourteen venues will host
16 United States premieres and one New
York premiere, including the poetically
searing work of
— one of
his two productions will be performed
by the Lyon Opera Ballet — and the choreographic duo of
and
. — Gia Kourlas

where she and her five siblings were
raised by her mother, Sylvia DelaCerna,
and a string of her husbands and boyfriends. When Ms. Copeland was 2, she
writes, ‘‘our family began a pattern that
would define my siblings’ and my childhood: packing, scrambling, leaving —
often barely surviving.’’
She was 13 — an anxious, perfectionist student who was captain of her
school drill team — when she happened
to glimpse a ballet class at the San
Pedro Boys & Girls Club of America,
where Ms. Copeland and her siblings
spent their after-school hours. The
teacher, Cynthia Bradley, persuaded
her to join, and despite beginning ballet
many years later than most dancers,
Ms. Copeland proved to have extraordinary aptitude. Soon, after Ms. Bradley
offered her a scholarship to her own

school, she was training there every
day. Eventually, she moved in with Ms.
Bradley and her family to focus on her
ballet training, escaping the motel room
where her mother and siblings were living.
Two years later, however, her mother
demanded that she return home; Ms.
Bradley’s response was to suggest that
Ms. Copeland sue for emancipation.
A court battle ensued, placing Ms.
Copeland, her family and the Bradleys
in a glare of publicity. Ms. Copeland
dropped her emancipation request, and
a judge eventually found in Ms. DelaCerna’s favor. ‘‘But the battle in my
mind and spirit raged on,’’ Ms. Copeland

writes in her book.
These experiences, she said, have
been fundamental to her development.
‘‘I think that I came into this profession
with something that most of the dancers
didn’t have. As hard as it all was, it
helped me from a young age to become
a character, to feel certain emotions
when dancing.’’
After winning a scholarship to Ballet
Theater’s summer program, she joined
the company’s junior Studio Company
in 2000, then the senior troupe the following year.

BY FAREED ZAKARIA

‘‘All conservatism begins with loss,’’ Andrew Sullivan writes. ‘‘If we never knew
loss, we would never feel the need to
conserve.’’ That’s why the first and still
canonical conservative text is Edmund
Burke’s ‘‘Reflections on the Revolution

in France,’’ a lamentation on the uprooting of that country’s monarchical order.
And that’s why America, as an experiment in modernity, hasn’t had many
genuine conservatives in its history.
The so-called conservative founding
fathers, John Adams and Alexander
Hamilton, were in fact creators of a new
and radical system of government. The
19th-century Whigs — Webster, Clay
and Calhoun — sometimes seen as conservatives, were aggressive proponents of capitalist development.
Even many Southerners who argued
for slavery were advocating an economic system that kept them rich, enthusiastically embracing the trade and
modern technology that made slavery
so profitable. And contemporary conservatism — which began as a reaction
to the progressive era and the New
Deal — has always mixed dynamic
capitalism with moralism.
Given this background, ‘‘The Kennan
Diaries’’ is an illuminating, fascinating
and sometimes disturbing book.
George F. Kennan was the most celebrated diplomat-intellectual of the 20th
century, the brilliant author of the
strategy of containment that the United

States adopted and that won the Cold
War. For most of his life he was seen as
a strategist and — because he was
dovish on most foreign policy issues —
a liberal. As these diaries make clear,
he spent much of his life thinking about
political philosophy. And his instincts
and insights were deeply conservative,
but in a way that doesn’t really fit into
today’s left-right categories.
‘‘I cannot help but regret that I did
not live 50 or 100 years sooner,’’ he
wrote in one of his entries. ‘‘Life is too
full in these times to be comprehensible.
We know too many cities to be able to
grow into any of them ... too many
friends to have any real friendships, too
many books to know any of them well,
and the quality of our impressions gives

The
hat that
earned
much attention at the Grammy Awards last month is
for sale on eBay. With six days to go, the
high bid stood at $12,500 on Monday, with
68 bids so far. Proceeds are to benefit
From One Hand to Another, a nonprofit
that Mr. Williams founded in 2008 to support community centers and education.
For the third weekend in a row, ‘‘The

Lego Movie’’ was the top draw at North
American theaters, while the volcano adventure ‘‘Pompeii’’ blew its chance at
profitability. ‘‘The Lego Movie’’ (Warner
Brothers) took in an estimated $31.5 million, for a domestic total of $183.2 million,
according to Rentrak, which compiles
box-office data. The action crime drama
‘‘3 Days to Kill’’ (Relativity Media), starring
, arrived in second
place, with ticket sales of about $12.3 million. ‘‘Pompeii’’ (Sony Pictures Entertainment), with
, had estimated ticket sales of $10 million, a
terrible result for a film that cost $80 million to produce and millions more to market. — Brooks Barnes

‘‘When I first saw her, I almost
laughed, she was just so coordinated
with such amazing facility,’’ said Kevin
McKenzie, the artistic director of Ballet
Theater. ‘‘I have seen her grow up
through injury and difficulties. I think,
to some degree, the racial issue has got
to be a driving force, because there
really haven’t been that many dancers
of color who have reached this level in a
classical art form. She has kept her connection to her community and accepts
being a symbol and has kept her eye on
what it means to excel.’’

way to the quantity, so that life begins to
seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off
our field of perception, gone before we
have time to consider them.’’

It’s a vivid expression of a deep, instinctual conservatism, especially
when you consider that it was written
in December 1927.
In keeping with a long tradition of
conservatism, Mr. Kennan mourned
the loss of small communities with their
sense of common purpose. In 1938,
while working at the State Department,
he took a brief leave and bicycled
through rural Wisconsin, the state he
grew up in, and recalled how the small
villages he moved through had often
rallied together, in the wake of floods,
hurricanes and war, and how modern
life, with its emphasis on individualism,
was eroding that sense of solidarity.
Seventeen years later, he surveyed his
country — the booming, urbanizing
America of the 1950s — with disgust: ‘‘I
could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set
faces behind the windshield, the
chrome, the asphalt, the advertising,
the television sets, the filling stations,
the hot-dog stands, the barren business
centers, the suburban brick boxes, the
country clubs, the bars and grills, the
empty activity.’’
He saw a dark side in almost all the
advances of modern life, especially cars
and airplanes. On the former: ‘‘The

best thing is travel by turnpike — at
night, a wholly useless exercise, to be
sure — hours of death subtracted from
the hours of life, but better than seeing
anything.’’ ‘‘Flying (but particularly
the airports) puts me into the nearest
thing to a wholly psychotic depression,’’ he explained. His reaction to the
explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 was to note that he would
gladly trade ‘‘the entire American
space program, in all its forms military
and civilian, for a good national telegraph system and railway transportation network such as we used to have.’’
His views were rooted in history,
philosophy and — somewhat surprisingly to me — faith. Writing on Good
Friday, 1980, he composed a beautiful
paean to the life and legacy of Jesus
Christ: ‘‘Most human events yield to
the erosion of time. ... The greatest,
most amazing, exception to this generalization... occurred ... on the hill of
Golgotha.... A man, a Jew, some sort of
dissident religious prophet, was crucified in company with two common

Although Ms. Copeland was given
solo roles and won critical plaudits — ‘‘a
breakthrough season,’’ Anna Kisselgoff
wrote in The New York Times of her
2004 performances in William Forsythe’s ‘‘workwithinwork’’ — she
began to feel that she didn’t fit in, she
said, adding, ‘‘Suddenly I felt aware of
being black, that I was never going to
get those classical parts.’’

Eventually, she said, the feelings of
isolation and exclusion strengthened
her resolve. In 2007, she was promoted
to soloist; she has subsequently performed principal roles in ‘‘La Bayadère,’’ ‘‘Le Corsaire’’ and Alexei Ratmansky’s ‘‘The Firebird,’’ as well as in
more contemporary work. In 2009 came
a surprise early-morning call asking
whether Prince could have her phone
number. ‘‘I was half-asleep,’’ she said.
‘‘I was, like, ‘Prince who?’’’ She filmed

a music video with him, then performed
a number of times during subsequent
Prince concerts at Madison Square
Garden.
The publicity brought her new media
opportunities, contracts and appearances. (She has a second book, for children, coming out in the fall, and a documentary about her life is being made:
‘‘A Ballerina’s Tale,’’ by Nelson
George.) Ballet Theater started Project
Plié, a diversity program that offers
scholarships to promising minority dancers and asked Ms. Copeland to be its
face.
‘‘Everything I do is about bringing
ballet to more people,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s incredible to get these letters from girls
who have seen the Dr Pepper ads and
say, she is brown like me. I hear criticism of what I do in the ballet world, but
these opportunities show ballet to

thieves. ... In the teachings of this man
were two things: first the principle of
charity of love ... but secondly, the possibility of redemption in the face of selfknowledge and penitence. ... The combination of these two things: charity

and redemption ... inspired an entire
vast civilization, created a great art,
erected a hundred thousand magnificent churches, ... shaped and disciplined the minds and the values of
many generations — placed, in short,
its creative stamp on one of the
greatest of all flowerings of the human
spirit.’’
Mr. Kennan’s conservatism was poetic, comprehensive and utterly imprac-

the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once
emerged.’’ Instead, he predicts, Americans are destined to ‘‘melt into a vast
polyglot mass, ... one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocrity and drabness.’’
Mr. Kennan at times displayed conventional racism. His views on South
Africa were strongly shaped by his feeling that blacks were simply not capable
of handling liberty and democracy. ‘‘I
would expect to see within five or 10
years’ time,’’ he wrote in 1990, ‘‘only
desperate attempts at emigration on
the parts of whites, and strident appeals for American help from an African regime unable to feed its own
people from the resources of a ruined
economy.’’ But for the most part, Mr.
Kennan’s racism was a product of his
conservatism, which is to say that he
was profoundly mistrustful of the modern multiethnic nation-state with its
‘‘mingling of the races.’’ He did not look
down on the Chinese, Indians, Russians
or Jews, believing that they would succeed better in their own coherent communities than in a mixed-up melting
pot. The tone of his ‘‘A Guest of My
Time’’ comments about nonwhites,
however, always has a sharp and derisory edge.

With time, Mr. Kennan’s lamentations grew in scope, encompassing the
environment, overpopulation and the
rape of the earth’s limited natural resources. ‘‘The danger of collective catastrophe ... is so great as to be in part a
certainty,’’ he wrote in 1968. He worried
about nuclear weapons for much of the
1970s and 1980s, believing firmly that
they would lead to war and therefore a
global cataclysm of unimaginable proportions. As late as 1988, as Mikhail S.
Gorbachev was bringing the Cold War
to a close, he wrote, ‘‘I have no hope
that a nuclear disaster can be avoided.’’
For years, Mr. Kennan had been deeply
critical of American foreign policy for
its militarization, imperial reach, arrogance and aggression. The end of the
Cold War, in a manner he had largely
predicted in 1946 and 1947, brought him
no joy or sense of vindication. He worried about the dynamic and disruptive
changes taking place across Europe
and hence was skeptical about the reunification of Germany.
I realize that at this point he sounds
like a cranky old man, trapped in nostalgia and ideology. How, then, to explain the extraordinary brilliance of
Kennan the strategist? From his earliest days as a diplomat, he was an acute

tical. In 1979, he outlined the kind of politics he would favor. ‘‘In addition to being
a political isolationist, I am a believer in
autarky. Not only do I believe that the
healthy national society would rigidly
eschew the importation of foreign labor
... but I consider that it should restrict to
a minimum its economic and financial

involvements with other peoples.’’ To
some readers, this may sound like North
Korea, but Mr. Kennan’s celebration of
the character, coherence and moral superiority of small communities has a
rich pedigree in European thought. It
also informs what can only be described
as Mr. Kennan’s racism.
Writing on a flight to Los Angeles in
1978, Mr. Kennan thinks about how few
white faces he will see when he lands
and laments the decline of people ‘‘of
British origin, from whose forefathers

people who would never see it otherwise.’’
Whether Ms. Copeland will become a
principal at Ballet Theater is a question
that hangs over her career (although
the promotion may not make much difference to her popularity).
‘‘She wants to do the big classical
roles, and she can, because she is very
strong and clear, with an incredible
amplitude,’’ said Ms. Jaffe, a former Ballet Theater ballerina who is now the
dean of dance at the University of North
Carolina School of the Arts. ‘‘But I think
she is a new kind of dancer.’’
‘‘There is so much untapped potential
there. With the right choreographer, she
could do anything.’’

KEVIN COSTNER, KIT HARINGTON,

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD , PHARRELL WILLIAMS

A slideshow of Alexei Ratmansky’s
works.

observer of the world — and we see this
in the diaries. He arrived in Russia in
December 1933, with the first American
ambassador to the Soviet Union, and
quickly grasped the cruel realities of
the Soviet system, while many Westerners were still in awe of it. Describing
a tea at the American Embassy in Moscow in September 1934, with British liberals, including a founder of Fabian socialism, Sidney Webb, he noted that
British liberals ‘‘think very abstractly
and find it easy to be enthusiastic about
Communism because their attitude is a
complete pose. In their hearts, they
never dream of being Bolshevistic or
anything else except plain British.’’
This acute sense of realism pervades
all of Mr. Kennan’s diplomatic observations. In 1944, having dinner with the
Polish prime minister, who had received encouraging words of support
from the Russians for the country’s independence, Mr. Kennan was sure that
no matter what anyone said, the Poles

would end up badly. ‘‘The jealous and
intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies, and the neighbors of Russia, if
they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other.’’
Similarly, Mr. Kennan’s critique of
American plans for a postwar peace upheld by international organizations was
shaped by his historical perspective.

‘‘These structures have always served
the purpose for which they were designed just as long as the interests of
the Great Powers gave substance and
reality to their existence,’’ he wrote.
‘‘The moment it became in the interests of one or the other of the Great
Powers to alter the status quo, none of
these treaty structures ever stood in
the way of such alteration.’’ Few were
as prescient about the United Nations
in 1944. In 1945, he was almost alone in
predicting that Russia would take control of Eastern Europe and that Franklin Roosevelt’s faith in Stalin was misguided and naïve. He was also, along
with some others, farsighted in predicting in the late 1940s that China and the
Soviet Union, though tight Communist
allies, would split apart.
What then explains Mr. Kennan’s

strange mixture of prescience abroad
and obtuseness at home? I think it lies
in his own admission that he felt like a
stranger in his own country, ‘‘a guest of
my time and not a member of its household.’’ Mr. Kennan’s genius was to perceive accurately the essence of other
countries, often far more traditional
than America — and to connect them to
their past. For example, in his famous
5,500-word ‘‘Long Telegram,’’ which argued for containment of the Soviet Union instead of military confrontation,
his seminal contributions were to show
how Stalin’s policies were largely a continuation of an older Russian strategy
— and why the modern, imposed Soviet
system would eventually wither. His
analysis of Poland, the United Nations,

China, all drew on a similar understanding of history, continuity and culture.
What Mr. Kennan could not really
comprehend was modernity. Technology, capitalism, trade, immigration, all
created so much change that Mr. Kennan could not see in them anything but
danger and disaster. America, the center of these forces of dynamism, became the locus of his worst fears.
In 1994 (at the age of 90 ) Mr. Kennan
wrote an entry in which he tried to put
Russia’s foreign policy into context,
pointing out that seven decades of
Communism had distorted a great civilization and that one must have sympathy for this ‘‘tragically injured and
spiritually diminished country’’ to understand its fitful moves on the international stage. He then went on to reflect
on America, for which he could muster
no empathy at all. He saw in it a land
consumed by ‘‘unrestrained decadence,’’ a ‘‘pathological preoccupation
with sex and violence, the weird efforts
to claim for homosexuality the status of
a proud, noble and promising way of
life’’ and, finally, perhaps most menacing for him, the curse of political correctness, which meant ‘‘the total loss of
a sense of humor.’’ That was his reaction to the booming 1990s.
George Kennan shined a powerful
light on the world beyond. But in his
own land, from the beginning to his last
days, he remained a bewildered guest.
Fareed Zakaria is the host of ‘‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’’ on CNN and the author of
‘‘The Post-American World.’’

Read reviews, profiles of authors and
more at

The closing ceremony
of the Sochi Games was a celebration of
everything Russian, and everything
that Russia does so well.
A pianist filled Fisht Olympic Stadium
with Rachmaninoff as dozens of grand
pianos floated around the stage Sunday
night. Ballet dancers twirled and leapt so
expertly that they surely could have won
a gold medal for their efforts. Massive
photos of the country’s best writers —
Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky — were
greeted with wild applause.
The entire night provided a showcase
for Russia’s many success stories, and
like it or not, hosting an Olympics is
now among them.
Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president

of the Sochi organizing committee, told
me that he considered these Olympics
‘‘impeccable,’’ and purely from an athletic standpoint, I have to agree. As the
two of us stood outside the main hockey
arena, we looked out at the Olympic
Park, which sits on the Black Sea, and
marveled at what Russia had built,
turning a crumbling summer vacation
spot filled with Stalin-era sanitariums
into a compact collection of state-ofthe-art sporting venues.
In a lot of ways, these Games were

better than Olympics past. The venues,
the transportation, the setting, the security — all winning. Sure, soft snow
and a few unfinished hotels upset some
athletes and visitors, but most of the
competitors raved.
‘‘I have not heard one bad thing from
anyone,’’ said the hockey player Julie
Chu, who won a silver medal and was
the flag-bearer for the United States at
the closing ceremony.
So why might there be some reluctance to acknowledge that these Games
were so good? Maybe because the suc-

cess of them also stands as a symbol of
the power and influence of President
Vladimir V. Putin.
Putin lobbied Olympic officials to
give these Games to Sochi, which has
long been his personal getaway. They
did, and seven years later they were
confronted with the makings of a grim
sporting event. Terrorist threats kept
some fans and athletes’ families away.
Putin’s politics turned attention before
the Games to human rights violations
instead of athletics. His disturbing record of quashing voices of dissent and
his law criminalizing the spread of ‘‘gay
propaganda’’ to children made the
Olympics difficult for many to enjoy
without reservation.

But as the Games went on, athletes
were treated with respect, and none
who wanted to express their opinions
about politics were silenced, according
to those I spoke with. That’s what made
these Games so special, said Thomas
Bach, the International Olympic Committee’s new president.
‘‘By living together under one roof in

the Olympic Village, you send a powerful message from Sochi to the world, a
message of a society of peace, tolerance
and respect,’’ Bach said in his closing
ceremony speech, which may or may
not have been scripted with Putin in
mind. He continued, ‘‘I appeal to everybody implicated in confrontation, oppression or violence: Act on this

Olympic message of dialogue and
peace.’’
From his office overlooking the
Olympic Park, Bach had told me that he
did his best to keep Putin’s politics —
and all politics — from marring the
spirit of the competitions, or the events
themselves. He basically said he was
annoyed that he had to play referee between countries and leaders who kept

trying to inject politics into these
Games.
While he did not name those world
leaders, he said he did not ‘‘appreciate

when governments sent political messages on the backs of their athletes.’’ It
was easy to guess to whom he was referring: Putin and President Obama,
who declined to attend these Olympics
and sent a delegation with several
openly gay members instead, presumably to make a point.
‘‘This is exactly what the I.O.C.
doesn’t need,’’ Bach told me, referring
to the attempt to politicize the Games.
I asked him why the I.O.C. had
chosen Sochi to host the Games, particularly when the city is in one of the
most restive areas of the world. He said
it was because Russia did not have
winter sports facilities after the dissolution of the Soviet Union — those facilities had been based outside Russia —
and because the I.O.C. wanted to help a
great winter sports country build an infrastructure for winter sports.
That seemed like a feeble reason. But

double-gun anti-salute, if you will — behind Ahn’s back as the two crossed the
finished line. Now, he’ll be remembered
for something else: being the first athlete from the Netherlands to win a
medal of any kind in short track. At a
news conference afterward, Knegt
beamed, as elated as any third-place finisher has ever looked. DAVID SEGAL

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The 2014 Winter Olympics might be
over, but lasting impressions remain
with the people who covered the Games
on the slopes of Krasnaya Polyana, Russia, and in the arenas in Sochi.

There was a ski-rental shop at the base of
the gondola. In exchange for 1,400 rubles
(about $40) and temporary custody of
my American driver’s license, I got skis,
poles, boots and a helmet for the day.
My Olympic credential got me on the
gondola and the next one and the next
one, until there were no more mountains to climb and the view was all
downhill. Through the snow-capped
peaks, the Black Sea was a dark shadow
on the horizon.
I had an hour to kill before I met
Danny Davis and Greg Bretz, American
snowboarders who had agreed to let me
ski with them to see how they unwound
after the halfpipe competition. I wove
past the downhill course and a slalom
training session. The slopes were virtually empty.
I got to our prescribed meeting point
at the top of the first gondola. It was hot,
and I stripped off my jacket and sat in
the shade.
A man approached. He wore a backpack that had a tube protruding, and he
poured himself a malty-looking beverage. There was a bit of foam at the top. He
took a sip. He pointed to it and raised his
eyebrows, the international gesture to
ask if I wanted a cup, too. In broken English, he said that it made him ski better.
I used two of the three Russian words
I knew: Nyet, spasibo. No, thank you.
The last thing I needed at 10:30 in the

morning was a beer.
A woman came along, and the man
cheerfully poured her a beverage.
Funny: A guy just hands out beers on
the slopes in the morning. But then she
stepped into the cool shade, and I saw
steam rising from her cup. I looked at
her quizzically. The woman raised the
plastic cup.
‘‘Chai,’’ she said. I knew another word
after all. It was tea.
I turned to the man. Yes, of course.
Please. Spasibo. JOHN BRANCH
Mikaela Shiffrin had won the Olympic
gold medal in slalom, been saluted by
the finish-line grandstand crowd in a
flower ceremony, held a huge news conference before an international gathering of journalists and found time to hug
countless
teammates,
opponents,
coaches and friends.
With her face flushed and her eyes
wide, Shiffrin was well aware she was
living a shining, definitive moment in a
young life.
But as she left the Alpine skiing area
late Friday night and headed out into a
new world of celebrity, there was still
one little ritual to complete, something
Shiffrin had been doing after ski races

since she was in grade school.
She wanted to pose for a picture with
her parents.
In visits to the Shiffrin home in the
last year, I saw dozens of these kinds of
snapshots: Shiffrin with her parents,
Eileen and Jeff, at the bottom of innumerable racecourses in Colorado, New
Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Utah,
Canada and Europe. In the earliest photos, she was half as tall as her parents.
Slowly, in more ways than one, she
began to progress in stature.
But on the night she became the
youngest Olympic slalom champion,
and with the athletic world buzzing over
the possibilities of an 18-year-old budding ski queen, Shiffrin abruptly
stopped the whirlwind enveloping her.
With the slope where she had just made
history behind her, Shiffrin threw an
arm around each parent, handed over a
cellphone and smiled for another picture. This was important.
The photo, a twinkling image from the
mountains of southern Russia late on a

if the goal of the Olympics is to increase
the participation in Olympic sports,
they must have succeeded this time.
There were other, more important
benefits to having the Games here.
More than 25,000 volunteers were
needed to conduct these Olympics.

Many of them appeared sullen when
the Games began but were smiling and
dancing in the Olympic Park by the
end. Walking to my hotel after the closing ceremony on Sunday, I saw several
of them crying in celebration. The ones
I spoke to over the past few weeks said
working for free had been a new
concept for them, as it was for many
people in Russia.
Similarly, if the Games had not been
held here, the uproar about Russia’s
antigay law — among other oppressive
laws — would not have been heard by
so many around the world.
Putin got the Olympics, and his country thrived. A less endearing side of
Russia was exposed in the process,
which might prove to be the most important success of the Games here.

Friday night, will look good in the family
album. BILL PENNINGTON
There is a good chance Andi Langenhan
does not remember me. But for a few moments early in the Olympics, he provided
some much-needed inspiration.
Ill, freezing and questioning my decision to make the trip, I waited for Langenhan, a German luger, to walk
through the mixed zone, where reporters can speak to the athletes after their
races. My assignment was to find the
fourth-place finisher, and Langenhan
had missed a medal by 558-thousandths
of a second, so he was my target.
Many athletes in this situation can

barely hide their disappointment and
dish out bromides about their respect
for those ahead of them.
Langenhan was different. He said
that he had hoped to win a medal but
that he was pleased that he had improved on his fifth-place finish at the
Vancouver Games. Bouncing with energy, he seemed eager to start training
for the 2018 Games.
‘‘The little man in my head always
says go on, go on, go harder, for sure,’’
Langenhan, 29, said after the men’s
singles competition. ‘‘But I know I can
do it. All the other guys who are unknown who come to the top 10 can reach
a medal for sure, and everybody is getting older and knows what to do.’’
It dawned on me that if Langenhan
could see the bright side in his dispiriting near miss, then I should be able to do
the same. Thanks to Langenhan, my
stride gained a step, and my gloom lifted. KEN BELSON
Yuzuru Hanyu had just become the first
Japanese man to win a gold medal in figure skating. It was an unlikely victory.
Three years earlier, Hanyu had been
skating at his home rink in Sendai, near
the epicenter of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck northeast Japan.
As the ice rumbled and pipes burst,
Hanyu fled the rink, running outside in
his skates, ruining his blades.
It might have been tempting to

(AP)

Toronto. He knew that his victory could
not really help anyone recover in
Sendai. He felt helpless, he said, as if he
were ‘‘not making any contributions.’’
But now he had a gold medal. It was at
least a starting point. ‘‘Perhaps,’’
Hanyu said, ‘‘there is something I can
do going forward.’’ JERÉ LONGMAN

ascribe some civic inspiration to his
gold-medal-winning performance. But
Hanyu, 19, self-aware beyond his years,
was not a man of sentimentality. He
knew the limits of sport just as he had
reached its zenith.

After his victory, Hanyu was solemn
instead of celebrative. He expressed
gratitude to those who had lent his career financial and spiritual support. At
the same time, he hinted that he felt
guilty for leaving home to train in

Gold gets the glory, but sometimes it is
the fight for the lesser medals that impresses the most.
In the finals of the men’s 1,000-meter
short-track race, two Russians, Victor
Ahn and Vladimir Grigorev, took the
lead by the third lap and never lost it.
Sjinkie Knegt of the Netherlands, who
was in last with five laps to go, slipped

into third with two laps remaining, but
in the crucial final turn of the last lap, he
was edged to the outside of the track by
Sin Da-woon of South Korea. The phrase
‘‘at the wrong place at the wrong time’’
was never more apt.
Knegt and Sin bumped each other a
bit, and then it was a three-stride dash
to the line. Just before they crossed,
Knegt jutted out his right leg. And that
was the difference — a perfectly timed
lunge of the foot.
Until that moment, Knegt was best
known as the skater disqualified from
the European championships for making an obscene gesture — a kind of

There’s an old Norwegian fairy tale in
which a huge, snarling troll challenges a
lost little boy to an eating contest.
They sit down at a table for porridge,
and the boy somehow matches the troll
spoon for spoon, and then bowl for bowl.
And then the boy pulls ahead, putting
away a bathtub’s worth of porridge
while the troll struggles to take another
bite. The boy wins (and the troll soon
dies a gruesome death).
How did he do it? Well, it was a bit of a
cheat: The boy dumped the porridge into a bottomless bag secretly taped to his
stomach. But that’s not the point.

‘‘The point is, he never seems full;
he’s always hungry,’’ said Ole Kristian
Stoltenberg, one of Norway’s most
prominent biathlon commentators.
‘‘And that’s Bjorndalen.’’
At the Sochi Games, Ole Einar
Bjorndalen, the undisputed king of
biathlon, won two gold medals, the 12th
and 13th Olympic medals of his career.
If it’s possible to strut on cross-country skis, Bjorndalen did as he flew past
the competition in race after race, his
poles jauntily jutting out behind him like
Fred Astaire’s umbrella.
At 40, Bjorndalen is old enough to be
the father of some of the biathletes he
dominated in the Sochi Games.
Benjamin Weger, a 24-year-old Swiss
biathlete, remembers the first time he
found
himself
racing
against
Bjorndalen. ‘‘That was really a great
feeling to compete with him,’’ he said.
‘‘That moment was so great.’’
Weger didn’t seem too upset at being
trounced by his boyhood idol. ‘‘For me,
biathlon is Bjorndalen, and Bjorndalen
is biathlon,’’ he said.
Bjorndalen assumed folk-hero status

so long ago that now, as he enters
middle age, even his injuries have assumed a mythic grandeur. In 2011, reports said he hurt his back while he was
helping a friend chop firewood.
In Bjorndalen’s hometown, Simostranda, Norway, there’s a 10-foot
bronze statue of him racing on skis.
King Harald V attended the unveiling.
The statue’s dimensions — Herculean
thighs, broad shoulders — are generous. Bjorndalen is surprisingly small,
more elfin than titan. When he takes the
rifle off his back and removes the laurels
from his neck, he could pass as a
friendly high school gym teacher.
But Bjorndalen is adored like few other winter athletes. In Sochi, he was one
of the few foreigners whom Russian
fans unequivocally embraced.
‘‘He’s so amazing; he’s so determined,’’ said Tiril Eckhoff, 23, a teammate on the Norwegian team. ‘‘He’s so
old, too.’’
In this age of tarnished heroes, anyone who wins gold medals into his 40s
has to be looked at askance. Is he doping?
Stoltenberg, the Norwegian commentator who has long tracked Bjorndalen’s
every race, seemed offended by the
question.
‘‘If he tested positive for doping, I
would quit my work,’’ Stoltenberg said.
He seemed to mean it.
The biathlon press corps has shown
Bjorndalen a reverence that would
make world leaders seethe with envy.
After Bjorndalen won his first gold
medal of these Games, a reporter

asked him what amounted to ‘‘You’re
not the type of athlete to give up, are
you?’’
At another news conference, after another gold medal, a reporter wanted to
know what it felt like to win more
medals than any Winter Olympian before him.
Bjorndalen sighed. ‘‘Your first feeling
is tiredness,’’ he said. SAM DOLNICK


BY RAPHAEL MINDER

BY HARVEY ARATON

After a Boston Celtics game last season,
inside the locker room, Coach Doc
Rivers singled out Jason Collins for
missing a defensive assignment, for being out of position.
Rivers told Collins, a veteran 7-foot

center, ‘‘I thought you were in the
wrong spot, and that’s why I got on you
in the game.’’
At which point Kevin Garnett, a surefire Hall of Famer, interjected: ‘‘He ain’t
ever in the wrong spot. Are you kidding?’’
Rivers subsequently looked at the
game video and realized that he, in fact,
had been mistaken. Collins was right
where he should have been.
The story, which Rivers shared with

me in October in Los Angeles, where he
now coaches the Clippers, came to mind
with the announcement Sunday that
Collins was finally in the position he
imagined for himself last spring: the
first openly gay and active athlete in one
of the four major American professional
sports leagues.
Collins, 35, agreed to a 10-day contract
with the Nets — by no coincidence Garnett’s new team and the one coached by
Jason Kidd, Collins’s longtime teammate when the franchise was stationed
in New Jersey.
For this historic moment — at the end
of a Winter Olympics noxiously anticipated because of a repressive law by the
host country, Russia, against lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender citizens —
let’s note that it was a team owned by a
Russian, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, that
signed Collins four months into the
N.B.A. season.
John Amaechi, who played five seasons in the N.B.A. and whose final game
was in 2003, came out in 2007. Who would
believe there have not been others?
However many there were — or are —
the jock fraternity world as we know it
did not end, for those clinging to ignorant notions about locker room sanctity.
When I had lunch with the unsigned
Collins in October in Los Angeles, he

SUDOKU

openly L.B.G.T. people in their lives.’’
Taylor added, ‘‘What we’re seeing
now is a critical mass of straight allies.’’
In the Nets’ case, it’s hard to imagine
that Kidd, 40, and Garnett, 37, were not
important allies, once it became clear
that the team could not sign Glen Davis,
a younger and better player. They knew
Collins well enough to base their decision on the fundamental realization
that in addition to height, you can’t
quickly teach 12 years of experience
playing smart positional defense.
The Nets were the perfect team for
Collins to walk into. He broke into the
N.B.A. playing alongside Kidd, and had
earned the trust of Paul Pierce and Garnett in Boston, and Joe Johnson in Atlanta. His brother was a teammate of
Deron Williams and Andrei Kirilenko in
Utah.
‘‘Guys already know what to expect
from me,’’ Collins said. ‘‘I’m not going to
magically have a 40-inch vertical and
shoot 3s.’’

Collins, white tape wrapped around
his left wrist, stretched and ran through
layup lines with his new teammates
Sunday in Los Angeles before a game
against the Lakers.. With Garnett sitting
out because he rarely plays in games on
consecutive nights, Collins’s opportunity figured to come sooner than later.

It arrived with 10 minutes 28 seconds
left in the second quarter, when he
stripped off his sweats and approached
the scorer’s table.
Far from a distraction or liability,
Collins can be counted on as an adult
who embraces his role, no matter how
few minutes he gets or how many weeks
he lasts. From the end of the bench, he
will be ready to plant himself in the lane,
grab a rebound, give a hard foul.
Rivers also said in October that
Collins was a ‘‘really, really tough’’ guy.
Except Rivers used a noun much
more colorful than ‘‘guy,’’ speaking the
foul language of the locker room and
making clear that Collins is the right
man at the right time to be in the
groundbreaking position he’s in, openly
gay and back in the game.
Billy Witz contributed reporting from
Los Angeles.

some remorse over landing his beloved
soccer club in a legal quagmire. He has
also called on others to question the legality of some big recent soccer transfers,
notably last summer’s record purchase
by Real Madrid of the Welsh star Gareth
Bale from the London club Tottenham.
Real Madrid and Tottenham diverged

slightly at the time about what value
they disclosed for Bale’s transfer, worth
at least ¤90 million. Including back
taxes, however, it is now possible that
Neymar, in fact, broke the world record
for the world’s most expensive soccer
transfer.

No. 2502

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

8
7

8

said, ‘‘I feel there are players in the
league right now that, quite frankly, I’m
better than.’’
At the league office, Commissioner
David Stern and Adam Silver, who succeeded Stern this month, monitored the
situation closely. They wanted their
league to move forward, to follow the
popular and legal trends in the United
States, the way the N.F.L. probably will,

or should, with Michael Sam.
In a telephone interview, Silver said he
was ‘‘incredibly proud’’ for the league
and ‘‘happy for Jason to have found a fit
— poetic that he’s returning to the Nets.’’
But he added: ‘‘I’m cautious about celebrating it too much because where
sports has led in so many ways, this is
one of the places where we’ve trailed.
This should have happened long ago.’’
Hudson Taylor, the executive director
of Athlete Ally, a gay rights group, has
worked with incoming N.B.A. players
for two years, helping them to understand the issues better.
‘‘The overwhelming sense I’ve gotten
is that for the young players, this was no
big deal,’’ Taylor said by telephone.
‘‘The average age of a person coming
out in the 1990s was 25. Now it’s 16. They
are living in a world where there are

F.C. Barcelona said on Monday that it
had paid 13.5 million euros in back taxes
relating to the transfer last year of the
Brazilian soccer star Neymar in an attempt to settle a legal dispute that had
highlighted the opaque and convoluted
system of payments used by soccer
clubs to sign players.
The additional tax payment, the
equivalent of about $18.6 million, which
Barcelona described as voluntary,

comes after the club’s president, Sandro
Rosell, resigned last month, a day after
a Spanish judge accepted a lawsuit accusing him of misappropriating funds
as part of Neymar’s transfer. The judge,
Pablo Ruz, then extended the case last
week to Barcelona, indicting the club for
suspected tax fraud.
Barcelona said on Monday that it had
not violated any law when it signed
Neymar last summer and would continue to defend itself in the case. ‘‘The club
has scrupulously fulfilled its fiscal obligations in line with its awareness at the
time of the contracts and agreements
signed in good faith,’’ Barcelona said in
a statement published after a board
meeting.
It is unclear whether the voluntary
tax payment will be sufficient to draw a
line under the Spanish court case. The
dispute has snowballed into separate legal action in Brazil by Santos, the
Brazilian club that sold Neymar to Barcelona. Santos has accused Neymar’s
father of keeping the club in the dark
about a separate financial deal that he
struck with Barcelona to transfer his
son to the Catalan club.
Barcelona said it had agreed to pay
the Ô13.5 million to the Spanish Treasury ‘‘to cover any potential interpretation made concerning the contracts
signed in the transfer process for Neymar, although we remain convinced
that the original tax payment was in line
with our fiscal obligations.’’
That amount, however, is more than

what the prosecution in the case had demanded last week. In its filing, the prosecutor, José Perals, estimated that Barcelona had defrauded the Spanish
Treasury of Ô9.1 million by using multiple parallel contracts and ‘‘financial
engineering’’ to reduce Barcelona’s tax
liability.

The signing of Neymar last June was
seen as a coup for Barcelona. Neymar,
the rising star of Brazilian soccer, had
been targeted by several other European clubs, including Barcelona’s archrival, Real Madrid.
At the time of the signing, Barcelona
said it had paid Ô57 million for Neymar.
But after Rosells abrupt departure, the
club’s new management disclosed that
bringing Neymar to Barcelona had cost
at least Ô86 million, including Ô40 million
paid to a company directly managed by
Neymar’s father, Neymar da Silva.
The court case was triggered by a
lawsuit filed last year by a Barcelona
club member, Jordi Cases, who accused
Rosell of covering up the actual terms of
the transfer of Neymar, a prolific scorer
whose full name is Neymar da Silva
Santos Júnior.
Since then, Mr. Cases has expressed

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Fill the grid so that Solution
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No. 2402
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Test your defense in today’s deal (reported by Barry Rigal) from the ACBL
Fall Championships. Cover the South
and West cards.
Against four hearts, West leads the ace
of clubs, and dummy tables a minimum
hand (I would say subminimum) for the
three-spade overcall. West continues
with the three: jack, ruff by you. West’s
lowest club is ‘‘suit preference’’ to show
strength in diamonds, the low-ranking
side suit. If West had a spade void, he
would have led a high club at Trick Two.
How do you defend as East?

34 Foot-pound?
36 Remote button
1 Where Matisses
37 Driver’s license
hang in N.Y.C.
datum
5 Sun and moon,
38 Tomato and lettuce
poetically
pickers’ org.
9 Sacred Egyptian
bird
39 ERNE
13 Sarcasm, informally 42 Energy
15 Paper quantity

43 Computerconnecting system,
16 Madrid tidbit
for short
17 John known as the
44 Wheel connector
“Teflon Don”
45 Tortilla chip dip
18 Big do
47 EMIR
19 Med. student
course
51 Barack’s re-election
20 EPEE
opponent
23 Discourteous
52 Pirate’s quaff
26 Asian-American
53 Makeshift shelters
basketball sensation 55 What this puzzles
Jeremy
capitalized clues
27 Lets ___!
are, both by
definition and pun
28 ETUI

Across

ọ
ì

à
ồ
ọ
ì
à
ồ

ọ
ì
à
ồ
ọ

ì
South is likely to have diamond length;
µ
his pattern may be 1-6-4-2 or 1-5-5-2. In
å
either case, to cash the ace of spades
may gain and won’t cost: South will get
two discards on the K-Q of spades, but
å
ä
×
unless he has the A-K of diamonds, he
will still have a diamond loser.
å
At the table East shifted to a diamond.
South took the ace, picked up the
trumps, threw his spade loser on the king of clubs and conceded a diamond, making

four.
Did you beat the contract?
You hold: ọ
ì
à
ồ
Your partner opens one
heart, you respond one spade and he bids two clubs. The opponents pass. What do you
say?
You certainly must commit to game. A jump-preference to three hearts
would be invitational, not forcing. You would choose that action if your king of clubs
were a low club. With your actual hand, bid four hearts. If partner has extra strength
and wants to try for slam, fine.
Tribune Content Agency

Solution to February 24 puzzle
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60 Jupiter, to the
Greeks
61 Relative of a
bassoon
62 N.B.A. Hall-ofFamer Thomas
66 Actress Hathaway
67 Guns, as an engine
68 Burn a bit
69 Reels’ counterparts
70 Putin put-down?

71 Once more

Down
1 Abbr. on Chinese
menus
2 Lennon’s love
3 Gymnast’s surface
4 Highbrow theater
screening
5 Seer
6 New mortgage deal,
informally
7 Place for an owl
8 What can take your
breath away in
L.A.?
9 Bold alternative
10 Fountain treat with
cherries on top
11 Apple tablet
12 Fill to excess
14 Chicken ___
21 Diarist Anaïs
22 Runs, as a color

13

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PUZZLE BY MATTHEW E. PARONTO AND JEFF CHEN

23
24
25
29
30
31
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33

Bond girl Andress
Relatively near
Be a goof
Many a Persian Gulf
war correspondent
It makes MADD
mad
Photocopier setting:
Abbr.
Takes care of
Yanks living abroad,
e.g.

35 Sacred songs
40 Computer file
extension
41 Pie ___ mode

46 Overused plot
device in soaps
48 Hearty kisses
49 Firstborn
50 Riddle-me-___
54 Yard sale
caveat

63

71
THE NEW YORK TIMES

55 Peter the Great or
Ivan the Terrible
56 Clinton attorney
general Janet
57 Threadbare
58 Follow orders
59 Wander about
63 Holiday ___
64 Grow long in the
tooth
65 Chop


Maastricht
The Fair
that Defines Netherlands
Excellence

in Art
14-23 MARCH
WWW.TEFAF.COM

BY NEIL IRWIN

Tuesday morning, Sept. 16, 2008, was
perhaps the darkest time for the United
States economy in modern memory —
even if nobody knew it quite yet. It was
barely 24 hours removed from the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and a few
hours before the government would rescue the insurer American International
Group.
Events had been set in motion that
would drive the unemployment rate to
double digits and cause half a decade of
economic misery.
But before they would confront any of
that, the men and women of the Federal
Reserve received an urgent briefing on
Norway.
A few minutes into the meeting of the

Fed’s policy committee, according to
newly released transcripts, William C.
Dudley, then the head of the markets
desk at the New York Fed, brought dangerous tidings from across the Atlantic.
‘‘I have just sketchy details based on
a phone call,’’ Mr. Dudley said, ‘‘But my
understanding is that this morning Norway put in place a facility by which they

are going to offer their banks dollars, up
to $5 billion,’’ adding that ‘‘the fact that
Norway is doing this suggests that the
situation has broadened quite a bit further.’’
In conversations with counterparts at
the European Central Bank, Mr. Dudley
said, he learned that there was ‘‘quite a
bit of interest’’ in ‘‘an open facility
where European banks could come and
get dollars.’’
So began what would become the
biggest United States government bail-

out that most people do not know anything about.
The new transcripts, released Friday
after a customary five-year delay, shed
light on one of the most significant but

least understood parts of the Fed’s expansive rescue efforts in the crisis.
While reporters and lawmakers focused on the bailouts of American financial institutions, the Fed was quietly
pumping hundreds of billions of dollars
to bolster global banks when dollars
were in short supply. European banks
were particularly heavy beneficiaries.

At their peak in December 2008, these
‘‘liquidity swap lines’’ totaled $580 billion. The money was extended to 14 central banks from Sweden to Singapore,
which, in turn, lent it to private banks.
The bailout of A.I.G., which attracted
bigger headlines and louder public fulmination, was a comparatively paltry

$85 billion.
‘‘The crisis was global,’’ said
Francesco Papadia, who helped engineer the program as markets chief at
the European Central Bank and is now
an affiliate fellow at Bruegel, the Belgian research organization, ‘‘and the
central banks had to get global to answer the crisis.’’
The root of the problem was this:
Global banks did lots of business in dollars — buying up United States mortgage-backed securities, financing international trade between companies

operating around the world, and more.
But at that moment in 2008, private
lending markets were essentially shut
down. Banks did not trust one another
enough to lend freely the way they
might in normal times. Everybody was
hoarding dollars at once.
In the United States, the Fed, the one
entity in the world that can create dollars out of thin air, addressed the dollar
shortage with the time-honored practice of serving as the ‘‘lender of last resort,’’ making emergency loans to
banks and other financial institutions,
as central banks have done for hundreds of years.
But the Fed was in no position legally
to extend the same courtesy to international banks. (Their United States affiliates were a different matter — during
this period the American arms of Euro-

BY JULIA WERDIGIER

As it reported a profit for last year on
Monday that missed analysts’ estimates, HSBC laid out how it was changing its compensation for senior executives, becoming the first major bank in
London to describe how it would circumvent a new European Union cap on

bonuses.
HSBC, which is based here, said it
would award 665 of its senior managers
— including its chief executive, Stuart T.
Gulliver, and its chief financial officer,
Iain Mackay — a fixed-pay allowance as
part of their compensation. The allowance, which qualifies neither as salary
nor bonus, would be exempt from European Union rules that limit bonuses to
twice a top employee’s salary.
Banking giants in London, including
Barclays and the offices of the American
firms Goldman Sachs and Bank of
America Merrill Lynch, have been seeking new ways to compensate senior staff
since the industry failed to persuade
Brussels not to impose the bonus rules.
HSBC also reported Monday that it
had missed some of its own cost-cutting
targets as revenue fell. HSBC’s shares
closed down 2.8 percent in London.
HSBC, one of Europe’s largest
lenders, said pretax profit for 2013 rose 9
percent, to $22.6 billion from $20.7 billion
in 2012. A group of analysts surveyed by
Bloomberg had expected earnings to
rise to $24.6 billion. Revenue fell 5.4 percent in the year.
‘‘The results were at the lower end of
expectations, with difficulties in Latin
America taking their toll,’’ said Keith
Bowman, an analyst here at the stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown. ‘‘Furthermore, some management efficiency
targets were missed.’’

Mr. Gulliver has closed or sold 63
businesses or investments since 2011 to
focus on corporate finance products and
services for faster-growing markets, including Asia and Latin America. As part
of the cost-cutting measures, the bank
has eliminated about 40,000 jobs.
But lowering costs is taking more time
than the bank and analysts expected. Return on equity, a measure of profitability,
was 9.2 percent in 2013, short of Mr. Gulliver’s own goal of more than 12 percent.
The bank said it would continue with
the strategy it announced in 2011 to cut
costs, increase dividends, and improve
its risk and compliance controls to avoid
any potential threat from financial misdeeds. HSBC said it planned further
cost savings of $2 billion to $3 billion by
improving some of its processes and
procedures.
The earnings ‘‘reflected the good progress we have made in implementing
the strategy that we set out in 2011,’’ Mr.
Gulliver said in a statement.
HSBC said it paid Mr. Gulliver a bonus of 1.8 million pounds, or $3 million,
for last year. That compares with
£700,000 for 2012, when HSBC agreed to
pay a $1.9 billion fine in the United
States to settle charges that the bank
had helped drug cartels launder money.
HSBC, which generates most of its
earnings from Asia, said the ‘‘sharp selloff’’ in some emerging markets was
more ‘‘a reflection of specific circumstances rather than a generalized
threat.’’ But it predicted developing

economies would experience ‘‘greater
volatility in 2014 and choppy markets as
adjustments are made to changing economic circumstances and sentiment.‘‘
HSBC’s business in Latin America
was hurt by slower economic growth
last year. But Mr. Gulliver said he remained ‘‘optimistic about the long-term
prospects of emerging markets and the
opportunities for HSBC.’’
‘‘HSBC should benefit from the continuing growth in international trade as
well as increasing wealth in Asia, Latin
America, and the Middle East,’’ Shannon
Stemm, an analyst at the brokerage firm
Edward Jones in the United States, said.

BY KAREN STABINER

The joint is jumpin’: Three mixologists in
striped dress shirts, dark slacks and suspenders pour drinks almost as fast as
three shuckers send platter after platter
of raw oysters to their fate. A bluesy
soundtrack wafts over the standingroom-only din as patrons sip and slurp,
oblivious to the crowd that has gathered
outside for what can be a 90-minute wait.
It feels like 9 o’clock on a Saturday
night. It is 4:30 on a dank weekday afternoon.
This is oyster happy hour at Maison
Premiere in Brooklyn — a selection of 15
different kinds of oysters, most of them
for $1 each, with a handful at $1.25 because they had to fly in from the West
Coast. Krystof Zizka, a co-owner of the

restaurant, said he doesn’t make a
penny on the oysters, though they are
one of the reasons his three-year-old
restaurant is so successful.
The cheap late-afternoon oyster is to
an American restaurant what a liter
bottle of Coca-Cola is to a supermarket:
the loss leader that gets customers in
the door, at which point they buy something else at full price. It’s a nationwide
binge, attributable in great part to the
rapid growth of oyster farms on the East
and West Coasts. East Coast production
alone has doubled in five years, even as
wild oyster reefs approach extinction.
Happy-hour oysters make up 60 percent of Maison Premiere’s oyster sales,
which range from 11,000 a week in
winter months, when the back courtyard is closed, to a high of 14,000 a week
in better weather. To wash them down,
customers may order a $15 glass of
Chablis or one of dozens of cocktails in
the $10-to-$14 range, Mr. Zizka said.
Because oysters are not filling, people
often order more food from the full-price
menu, where small plates run in the low
teens. ‘‘That’s where we make our
money,’’ he said. ‘‘The people who come
in aren’t cheap.’’
Cultivated oysters make up about 90
percent of raw-bar sales, and they show
up as far inland as Chicago, St. Louis

and Minneapolis-St. Paul. They have
the artisanal cachet attached to small
suppliers; most are locally sourced, and
the ones that are not local still come
from small farmers, albeit on another
coast. They’re a low-calorie chunk of
protein, and they’re a year-round crop,
because careful temperature and bacteria monitoring has retired the old rule
about avoiding them in the summer.
Diners between 18 and 34, with money
to spend and a lifetime of food preferences to develop, are a perfect fit for
oysters on the half shell, said Ron Tanner, a vice president at the Specialty
Food Association — more likely than
other age groups to buy specialty foods.
‘‘It’s a generation that uses food to
impress others,’’ Mr. Tanner said.
‘‘That’s probably behind the trend.’’
Oysters acquire their distinctive flavor based on the water in which they
grow, so they give people a lot to talk
about. ‘‘They’re coming from great
growers who are developing their own
terroir, like wine growers,’’ said Jeffrey
Hubbeling, general manager of Shaw’s
Crab House in Chicago. Fans can sound
knowledgeable expounding on the relative brininess of a Sunken Meadow from
Massachusetts and a Fanny Bay from
British Columbia.
Two hours east of happy hour, at the
muted, monochromatic edge of

Southold Bay on Long Island, Karen
Rivara, an oyster farmer, works in a si-

lent world on land owned by the Peconic
Land Trust. She has spent a 30-year career surrounded by flasks and incubator tubs and strainers and nets. Her office suite includes a tarp-skinned, iglooshaped greenhouse, an underground
hatchery and an oyster barn that sits at
bay’s edge, its seawater floor crisscrossed with planks for walking.
In 2000, she formed the Noank
Aquaculture Cooperative with eight other shellfish growers. Today, the cooperative sells 500,000 to 750,000 oysters a year,
about double the volume of 10 years ago,
with plans to increase the yield to 900,000

to one million this year. Ms. Rivara’s own
oysters include two trademarked
brands: the Mystic, a regular on the
Maison Premiere menu, and the smallerrun Peconic Pearl, which Mr. Zizka
rarely orders because of its higher price.
Farms like Ms. Rivara’s have supplanted the wild oyster population,
which has been decimated in the past
century by pollutants and disease, but
farms are vulnerable to environmental
threats as well: Pacific Northwest and
Chesapeake Bay oyster crops have been

damaged in recent years by higher acidity in the water as a result of fossil fuel
emissions. Ms. Rivara blames increased
population density and overtaxed septic
systems for occasional bacteria-count
spikes in her area. (State inspectors do
regular testing.) Being a successful

farmer requires not just vigilance, but
also a measure of good luck.
It’s a painstaking, multistep process:
Cooperative members start out growing
four million to five million oysters but
end up taking no more than 750,000 to
market.
If not for Ms. Rivara, Mr. Zizka said,
there would be no thriving local oyster
industry. If not for oyster happy hour,
there would be no Karen Rivara, at least
not in her current expansionist mode.
Recently, she had begun to think about
life beyond oysters; she and her husband just moved out of the land trust’s
house and into town rather than be on
site 24 hours a day. But happy hour has
made her the focus of a lot of attention,
and the promise it holds is irresistible.
Most restaurateurs fill otherwise
empty seats with a less extravagant
menu than Mr. Zizka’s. Kevin Faerkin,
general manager of the Grand Central
Oyster Bar and Restaurant in Manhattan, said business exploded when the restaurant started serving happy-hour Blue
Points for $1.25, requiring him to hire two
extra servers and another shucker.
On the West Coast, David Lentz, chef
and owner of the Hungry Cat chain in
California, had similar success with a
small selection of half-price oysters on
what had been quiet Monday nights. He

now sells a total of 40 to 60 dozen oysters
at his two Los Angeles locations on
Mondays, double his old numbers.
The Lobster Place, which supplies
hundreds of New York City restaurants,
has had a 20 to 30 percent increase in
wholesale oyster sales over the past
year, both from existing clients who increased their orders and from new restaurants, said Brendan Hayes, president of the company’s retail and
restaurant division. ‘‘Every month,’’ he
said, ‘‘we’re contacted by a new local
oyster farmer about where and what
they’re farming and the nuance of flavor from one variety to the next.’’
As Ms. Rivara put it: ‘‘Happy hour’s
good for us.’’

BY JIM YARDLEY

Five global clothing brands and retailers have become the first contributors
to a new fund raising $40 million for victims of the Rana Plaza factory disaster
in Bangladesh, and activists also are
campaigning to pressure other brands
to make donations.
The collapse of the Rana Plaza building on April 24, killing more than 1,100
workers, was the deadliest disaster in
the history of the garment industry. It
focused global attention on the unsafe
working conditions in some Bangladeshi factories, the rock-bottom wages
earned by workers and the lack of accountability and oversight in the supply
chains for many global brands.
Compensating the victims or their

families has been an especially complicated issue, involving months of negotiations among clothing companies, labor
groups, Bangladesh’s government and
Bangladeshi factory owners. Those negotiations produced the Rana Plaza
Donors Trust Fund, which on Sunday
night reported the names of the first five
companies to contribute: El Corte
Inglés; Inditex, which includes the brand
Zara; Loblaw; Mango; and Mascot.
On Monday, labor groups in Bangladesh were expected to hold public
events to draw attention to the hardships faced by Rana Plaza victims with
the anniversary of the accident two
months away. Ineke Zeldenrust, the international coordinator of the Clean
Clothes Campaign, a European antisweatshop group, said labor groups
were also pushing for companies like
Walmart, Children’s Place and Benetton
— which have been linked to Rana Plaza
— to make contributions so that payments can begin as soon as possible.
Dan Rees, a representative of the International Labor Organization, which
is managing the fund, said formulas and
a claims process had been established
to pay lost wages, medical bills and other compensation to the roughly 4,000
victims, including survivors of the factory collapse, those who were injured and
the families of the dead.
‘‘The significance of this is we have a
mechanism that the whole industry can
support,’’ Mr. Rees said. ‘‘We haven’t
been able to say that before. What we
had before was the blame game.’’
Much of the finger-pointing has
centered on the question of what responsibility global brands should bear for accidents that occur in the factories that

produce their garments. Some brands
have been concerned that agreeing to
participate in a compensation fund for
Rana Plaza victims could be interpreted
as an admission of guilt and become a
vulnerability if litigation arises.
Mr. Rees said the Donors Trust Fund
was designed so that donations would
be voluntary and would not imply any
legal responsibility for the accident.
Moreover, the fund is open to any company, organization or individual, meaning that brands not linked to the Rana
Plaza factories can also contribute.
Donations can be public or anonymous.
It was not yet clear how much money
the five companies had contributed.
Among those five companies, Mango,
a Spanish brand, had initially signaled
that it would not pay compensation. In
the months after the accident, company
executives argued that Mango had
placed only a sample order with a factory inside Rana Plaza, and that work on
the order had not yet begun, thus absolving the brand of responsibility.
In December, The New York Times
reported that work had already begun
on the Mango order, citing interviews
with factory supervisors and workers.
‘‘There was an urgency among the
bosses,’’ said one of the workers, Mohammed Mosharuf Hossain. ‘‘The managers told us to finish the Mango
products urgently.’’
In an interview Friday, a Mango representative confirmed the company would

contribute to help the victims but characterized the fund as having a ‘‘charitable background’’ and said the money
should not be considered compensation.
Nor has the company changed its position on its relationship to the factories in
Rana Plaza, the representative said.
Ms. Zeldenrust applauded Mango and
others that had agreed to pay into the
fund but said more brands also must
contribute to reach $40 million, the estimated amount deemed necessary
needed to provide full compensation.
She said two other retailers, Primark
and Bonmarché, had signaled their intent to contribute, and Primark has
already spent more than $3 million for
short-term assistance to victims. But
Ms. Zeldenrust argued that many others, including those not linked directly
to Rana Plaza, must pitch in.
‘‘It is a $48 billion industry worldwide,’’ she said. ‘‘This is nothing.’’


BY MARK SCOTT

like Apple and Samsung have displaced
the Finnish firm as the world’s largest
maker of high-end cellphones.
The aim is to attract consumers in
countries like India and Brazil who are
looking to buy their first smartphone to
access applications like Facebook and
Skype, according to Mr. Elop of Nokia.
Yet analysts said the new phones
would compete directly with low-cost

Windows Phone handsets. That could
limit Microsoft’s ability to compete with
Android competitors like Samsung because it may not attract enough customers on phones using either the Windows

Phone or Android operating system.
Mr. Elop on Monday defended his decision in 2011 to scrap Nokia’s own operating systems to focus on building a relationship with Microsoft and its
Windows Phone.
Analysts say the choice tied Nokia to
Microsoft just when the rival Android
operating system was starting to gain
traction with users. Now, Android
powers roughly 78 percent of worldwide
smartphones, while Windows Phone
holds less than 4 percent of the market,
according to data from Gartner.
‘‘Our Windows Phone decision was to
create a third ecosystem with Microsoft,’’ Mr. Elop said.
While the Android operating system
will power Nokia’s new phone, the
Finnish company has adjusted the software to include using its Here software
in lieu of Google Maps, and creating a
tiled effect on the home screen that
mimics the company’s other phones.
Nokia said consumers would have access to Android app stores, including its
own and those from rivals like the Russian search engine Yandex. Mr. Elop
added, however, that some Android apps
used with Google’s services might not
work smoothly with Nokia’s new phone.
Analysts said Nokia’s Android-based
phone could offer consumers greater

choice compared to the growing number of phones that rely on Google’s version of Android. Many cellphone makers
have been struggling to profit from the
growing demand for smartphones because competition among makers has
kept profit margins razor thin.
‘‘It definitely shakes up an industry
that has become fixated on incremental
advances,’’ said Tony Cripps of the technology research firm Ovum. ‘‘Nokia’s
strength in developing markets will be a
major catalyst for sales.’’

Major announcements from WhatsApp,
the Internet messaging services, are
like city buses: You can wait a long time
for one, then two show up at once.
On the heels of its $16 billion deal to be
bought by Facebook, WhatsApp announced on Monday that it would start
offering free voice services this year —
diversifying beyond its main messaging
service into phone calls.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, the tech
company’s chief executive, Jan Koum,
said users in the second quarter would
be able to make Internet calls through
their smartphones similar to services
that are already available on rival Internet messaging offerings like Kakao of
South Korea and Viber of Cyprus.
WhatsApp’s voice service is expected
to be available first on Google’s Android
and Apple’s iOS operating systems,
then expand to others like Windows

Phone and Blackberry, he added.
Mr. Koum, who was born in Ukraine
and moved to the United States as a
teenager, also said on Monday that
WhatsApp would launch a mobile brand
in a partnership with the German cellphone carrier E-Plus.
The WhatsApp chief executive said
the mobile brand would initially be
available only in Germany, though he
did not provide any more specifics on
the product, which is expected to be
launched by the end of the year.
‘‘The world is moving to data very
quickly,’’ Mr. Koum said in a speech.
‘‘Data is the next generation in what is
driving the mobile industry.’’
WhatsApp’s push to offer its 465 million monthly users Internet voice calls is
the first announcement since Facebook
agreed to buy the San Francisco-based
tech company last week for $16 billion.
The final price may rise to $19 billion
with WhatsApp employees and
founders receiving an additional $3 billion in restricted stock, which would
vest over the next four years.
Currently, the messaging service has
more than 40 million users in India, and
38 million in Brazil, according to the company. The start-up also has 31 million
users in Germany, though it did not
provide numbers on its American user
base.

Mr. Koum played down rumors that
the deal with Facebook would lead to
major changes to how WhatsApp operates, including the potential addition of
advertising and other revenue-generating services. ‘‘For WhatsApp to be successful, it has to stay independent,’’ Mr.
Koum said on Monday. ‘‘There are no
planned changes.’’
By expanding into voice, WhatsApp is
going head-to-head with the likes of
Skype and traditional cellphone operators like AT&T and Deutsche Telekom.
Analysts say the move also could lead
Facebook to revamp its own mobile offerings, which have centered on software called Home that has won few fans
since launching last year.
Before Mr. Koum took the stage on
Monday, Sirgoo Lee, the co-chief executive of the rival South Korean messaging company Kakao, spoke to the
audience about his company’s growth
from its Asian roots to now offering Internet messaging to its global users in 14
languages.

each reporter is paired with an analyst
— called a ‘‘data ninja’’ by the company
— who uses the software to gather extensive amounts of information and
then analyzes it for patterns.
Pairing new data-collection techniques
with old-fashioned reporting is where
Vocativ excels, said Scott Cohen, the
company’s chief executive and former
head of The Daily News’s website.
In a recent demonstration, an analyst
recreated a search that had yielded several stories out of Egypt.
The analyst had pulled all the public

social traffic — Twitter feeds, Facebook
posts, activity in public forums — originating from a small area in Cairo over

the course of two hours.
After analyzing the data several different ways, the analyst noticed that the Arabic phrase for ‘‘hunger strike’’ had been
repeated an unusual number of times. By
following up, a reporter discovered that a
group of female university students imprisoned for their support of the Muslim
Brotherhood party were conducting a
hunger strike. It became an article.
In another instance, Vocativ discovered online chatter among Egyptian
youth about parkour, an extreme sport
that can involve jumping between buildings. It may become a video segment.
For now, Vocativ, which has 80 employees, takes no advertising and is financed entirely by Mr. Kochavi and his
partners. The plan is to make money
through syndicating content or through
deals like the one with MSNBC, a partnership that both side expect to grow.
Vocativ’s video business represents
only about 20 percent of its product, but
it is growing rapidly, said Noah Kotch,
the company’s chief content officer and
a former producer at NBC’s ‘‘Today’’
show and onetime writer at ABC News.
The company says that its edge
comes from an ability to secure videos
from places that other news organizations might never reach. Mr. Griffin, the
head of MSNBC, was thrilled by a segment about an abandoned office tower
in Caracas, Venezuela, taken over by
squatters that contained video footage
from the squatters themselves.

Yet Vocativ’s technique of plumbing
the so-called deep web for information
has raised questions about whether it is
improperly snooping on unsuspecting
citizens. Company executives said that

they delve only into the publicly accessible parts of the web, but acknowledged
that they occasionally enter open chat
rooms and do not present themselves as
reporters.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst in
the American Civil Liberties Union’s
Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, says that users of social media must
realize that what might seem like an intimate discussion among friends is
really a public performance. He also
noted the special First Amendment protections afforded journalists.
‘‘As a policy matter, we have an interest in not having our government
looking over our shoulders, even if it is
public, unless there is reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing,’’ Mr. Stanley said.
‘‘But the idea of restricting journalists
from access to anything that is public is
an idea we would scrutinize much more
closely.’’
For first show, Mr. Farrow, 26, the son
of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen (from
whom he is estranged), planned a segment on the legalization of marijuana
nationwide because new budget numbers in Colorado indicate that
marijuana taxes could add more than
$100 million a year to state coffers.
As part of the package, the show

planned to run a Vocativ video about
marijuana dealers evading taxes on
their drug sales. The dealers get their
supplies, Vocativ learned through the
Internet, by picking through cuttings
disposed of in Dumpsters outside licensed marijuana growers.
The video, said Lauren Skowronski,
an MSNBC spokeswoman, certainly
presents ‘‘a unique facet of the issue.’’

BY BROOKS BARNES

There are no new ‘‘Shrek’’ movies.
‘‘Shrek: The Musical’’ closed on Broadway. ‘‘Shrek 4-D’’ at Universal Studios
Florida now plays second fiddle to a
newer animation-based attraction:
‘‘Despicable Me Minion Mayhem.’’
Fade the ogre? Not if DreamWorks
Animation can help it.
The studio and Merlin Entertainments announced on Monday a chain of
‘‘interactive entertainment experiences,’’ the first of which will open in
summer 2015 in London and be called
‘‘Shrek’s Far, Far Away Adventure.’’
The introduction of the chain will include five similar attractions to be built
in other cities over nine years, said Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks Animation’s chief executive.
‘‘We see this as a fantastic way to take
our world-class characters and repurpose them into new lines of business,’’
Mr. Katzenberg said in a telephone interview.
Mr. Katzenberg described the envisioned DreamWorks-Merlin chain as
‘‘living theater.’’ Groups of 40 people

will go on 90-minute walk-through tours
of themed rooms, where actors — some
in costume as ‘‘Shrek’’ characters —
will perform a comedic script that includes lots of audience participation.
Merlin operates a similar chain called
The Dungeons, which are a bit like elaborate haunted houses.
Mr. Katzenberg has been on a crusade
over the last two years to diversify his
independent and publicly traded animation company, which has historically relied almost entirely on two hit movies a

BY MARK SCOTT

year — a risky proposition that can lead
to dramatic swings in the stock price.
DreamWorks Animation is pushing
hard into television and consumer
products. It recently announced a
branded line of tablet computers for
children and a publishing effort. Its next
film, ‘‘Mr. Peabody & Sherman,’’ comes
out March 7.
Merlin Entertainments, based in
Poole, England, is the world’s No. 2 operator of themed attractions after the
Walt Disney Company. Merlin brands
include the Legoland parks, the Eye
Ferris wheels in London and Sydney,
and Madame Tussauds. Merlin notably
wants to expand deeper into the United
States.
Although ‘‘Shrek’’ by some measures

is the most successful animation franchise of all time, the last movie in the
series, ‘‘Shrek Forever After,’’ came out
four years ago. (A spinoff film, ‘‘Puss in
Boots,’’ was released in 2011.) Is the
ogre still enough of a draw?
Certainly, said Mr. Katzenberg, noting that the ‘‘Shrek’’ attraction will be
built next to the London Eye, one of
Europe’s most heavily visited tourist
sites. ‘‘Shrek is the torchbearer of our
company,’’ he said. ‘‘This keeps him
fresh, fun and relevant.’’

BY LESLIE KAUFMAN

When Ronan Farrow, the young human
rights lawyer with a Hollywood lineage,
debuted as a host on MSNBC on Monday, he had some prodigious computing
power backing him up.
MSNBC has struck a partnership
with Vocativ, a digital news start-up, to
provide the new program — ‘‘Ronan
Farrow Daily’’ — with up to three taped
video segments a week. Vocativ mines
the Internet for exclusive news and other content with data-collection software
traditionally used by governments and
corporations.
Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC,
said Vocativ’s blend of big data and conventional reporting was an innovative
approach to journalism. ‘‘It is an additional tool for us,’’ he said. ‘‘And who
knows where it is going to go for the entire NBC News group.’’

News organizations are in a mad rush
to team with new companies that they
hope can give them an edge in finding
story leads. In forming alliances, they
are also seeking to attract younger
viewers who are more likely to get their
news from sites like Twitter and Facebook than from the evening news.
In recent months, News Corporation
acquired Storyful, a company that digs
up and verifies news from sources like
YouTube and Instagram. And CNN
struck a deal with Dataminr, a company

Nokia, in its final weeks as an independent company, made a remarkable final
display of independence on Monday.
Seeming to fly in the face of the mobile
phone strategy of Microsoft, which is on
the verge of completing a $7.2 billion
takeover of Nokia’s handset business,
Nokia announced its three-phone X
series — its first based on the Android
operating system. Android software, of
course, is a rival to Microsoft’s Windows Phone system.
Nokia’s chief executive, Stephen Elop, said the new devices, which are
aimed at emerging markets, would help
drive users to Microsoft services like
email and cloud storage.
But analysts questioned whether Microsoft would continue to offer the Android-based phone after it completed its
takeover of the Nokia handset division
by the end of next month.

Microsoft has spent billions of dollars
on its own operating system, Windows
Phone, and it remains unclear whether
the tech giant will support a phone that
runs on a competitor’s software.
‘‘I struggle to see where the Android
phone fits into Microsoft’s long-term
strategy,’’ said Roberta Cozza of the
technology research firm Gartner in
London. ‘‘It may solve a short-term
need to offer a low-cost phone, but Microsoft may struggle to convince people
to use its Windows Phone software.’’
Microsoft may not see the wisdom of

that has developed a Twitter-based tool
used by reporters to detect developing
news.
Meanwhile, NBC’s news operation
has been especially aggressive in investing in next-generation journalism
outfits. Last month, NBC invested in
NowThis News, a company specializing
in short news clips, and announced a
stake in ReCode, a technology news and
conference business.
Certainly, Vocativ has a different pedigree than most journalism organizations. Its founder, Mati Kochavi, also
started AGT International, a global security firm that uses technology to gather information and perform analysis for
governments and corporations.
The software at the heart of Vocativ,
known as Open Mind, was developed as
a tool for corporations to identify

threats to their business. Open Mind
searches social media, chat rooms, documents and other public interactions on
what it calls ‘‘the deep web’’ — areas often overlooked by search engines like
Google.
The Hollywood talent agency William
Morris Endeavor, which in recent years
has made several digital media investments, is in negotiations for a minority
stake in the company.
‘‘As soon as I saw its technology, I
wanted to be involved,’’ said Ari
Emanuel, William Morris’s co-chief executive.
At first, Mr. Kochavi sold his Open
Mind software to governments and corporations through a company called 3iMind. Then, inspired by the Arab Spring
uprisings, when many of the protests
surfaced on social media, Mr. Kochavi

the move, either.
The day before Nokia introduced the
new phone at a packed press conference
at the Mobile World Congress trade show
in Barcelona, Joe Belfiore, who runs the
Microsoft Windows Phone division, said
of Nokia: ‘‘There are some things they
do that we are excited about, and other
things that we are not so excited about.’’
On Monday, Mr. Elop of Nokia focused
on how the new devices — under the
Nokia X brand — would help to spur
sales of the company’s handsets, especially in emerging markets.
The new phone’s ties to Android will

offer users far more applications than
they can access with handsets running
on Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system.
The cellphones, which will be priced
at 89 euros to 109 euros, or $122 to $150,
will be aimed at customers in emerging
markets, and use Nokia’s own services
like maps instead of those offered by
Google in the standard Android software. There are no plans to sell the
handsets in North America.
The first, low-cost version will be
available immediately in certain developing economies, while two other versions with more capabilities will ship
from the second quarter of the year.
‘‘It introduces new customers around
the world to Microsoft’s services,’’ Mr.
Elop said at a news conference.
‘‘There’s a real opportunity in growth
markets to take advantage of existing
app ecosystems.’’
The decision, however, could prove
short-lived. While Nokia, which is based
in Espoo, Finland, will remain an independent company until the deal with Microsoft closes by the end of the quarter,
the American giant will control the sales
and marketing all of Nokia’s handsets
once the takeover is completed.

got the idea to also use the technology
for journalism. He eventually wound
down 3i-Mind, and many of that company’s analysts joined Vocativ.
Vocativ’s technological prowess is not

readily apparent from its tabloid-style
home page, which in addition to stories
on the tumult in Ukraine and Venezuela
has articles on topless skiers and the
1990s slacker film ‘‘Reality Bites.’’ Driving its coverage is a team of longtime
journalists from The Daily News, ABC,
NBC and other news outlets.
But Vocativ’s executives said that
most of its stories start with high-tech
data mining. At the company’s
headquarters in Midtown Manhattan,

In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft
said it welcomed the inclusion of many
of its services like Skype and Outlook on
Nokia’s new phone. It did not say if it
would continue to produce the handset.
‘‘Our primary smartphone strategy
remains Windows Phone,’’ Microsoft
said, ‘‘and our core device platform for
developers is the Windows platform.’’
The uncertainty over Nokia’s new
phones could potentially hamper sales
of the Android-based devices, as consumers wait to see if Microsoft will support the handsets.
The tension will be most intense in
emerging markets.
Like Nokia and other cellphone
makers, Microsoft also has focused much
of its attention on fast-growing developing economies that are expected to be the
main driver for growth in the industry.

Nokia has suffered years of declining
sales for its smartphones, as companies


A panel of risk experts sees a teachable
moment in Detroit’s bankruptcy and
pension troubles.
A blue-ribbon panel of the Society of
Actuaries — the entity responsible for
education, testing and licensing in the
profession — says that more precise,
meaningful information about the
health of all public pension funds would
give citizens the facts they need to
make informed decisions.
In a report that was to be released on
Monday, the panel was to recommend
that pension actuaries provide plan
boards of trustees and, ultimately, the
public with the fair value of pension obligations and estimates of the annual cash
outlays needed to cover them. That
means pension officials would disclose
something they have long resisted discussing: the total cost, in today’s dollars, of the workers’ pensions, assuming
no credit for expected investment gains
over the years.
‘‘We think it would be a useful benchmark for plans to have,’’ said Robert W.
Stein, the panel’s chairman, who is both
an actuary and a certified public accountant. ‘‘We’re optimistic that the information would enable them to better
appreciate the future and what it might
bring.’’

Economists refer to this elusive number as the plan’s total liability, discounted at a risk-free rate. They have called
for its disclosure for years, saying it
would help pension trustees make better decisions. Economists have calculated rough approximations in recent
years for various states and cities, but
only the plan actuaries have the data
needed for precise calculations.
For all their billions, public pension
systems are largely unregulated. Actuarial standards, however obscure, may
be the closest thing the sector has to a
uniform and enforceable code.
Though the actuaries who work for
public pensions have the capacity to
spot risks and measure shortfalls with
pinpoint accuracy, it is their clients —
usually the pension trustees — who call
the shots. And plan trustees prefer to
be given traditional actuarial estimates, which are smoothed, stretched,

averaged, backloaded and otherwise
spread across time.
Such numbers generally comply with
current actuarial standards, but as Detroit shows, they can also paper over
looming disasters. Detroit’s pension
fund was said to be healthy just before
the bankruptcy, but it turned out to be
several billion dollars short.
The new liability measurement called
for by the Society of Actuaries panel
would not be the only number provided
to the public, it would provide new insight into the market risks for pension

plans and the shortfall that might have
to be made up by local taxpayers if investment returns did not measure up to
expectations.
Disclosing pension liabilities based
on risk-free discount rates, however, is
viewed with deep suspicion by plan
trustees and the unions that represent
public workers. Pension officials and
union leaders say the risk-free approach, if permitted, will be used to cast
public pensions in the worst possible
light to whip up fervor against them
and justify the termination of the plans.
So far, the only public pension actuary
who has publicly provided such numbers is Robert C. North Jr., who tracks
the five funds that make up New York
City’s vast pension system. He is also
one of the 12 members of the blue-ribbon
panel. (Other members include New
York’s former lieutenant governor, Richard Ravitch; the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s former executive director, Bradley D. Belt; and the Principal Financial Group’s chief executive,
Larry D. Zimpleman.)
For New York City’s biggest fund,
known as Nycers, the conventional
numbers show assets of about $45 billion and liabilities of $67 billion, or a lessthan-stellar funded ratio of 66 percent.
But Mr. North’s fair-value numbers,
deep in Nycers’s annual report, show
assets of $43 billion and liabilities of
$106 billion, or a funded ratio of just 40
percent — a sure sign of trouble ahead
as the city’s work force ages and retires.
The difference, $63 billion, is

Nycers’s shortfall. That money has to
be made up before today’s city workers
retire — within 14 years, on average. As
a result, New York’s contributions to
Nycers are rising every year, squeezing
the city budget and making it harder
for the city to provide public services.
Mr. North said in 2006 that he had
tried to give these numbers greater
prominence in the annual reports but
had been blocked by the plan’s outside

auditor, who said that doing so would
not comply with generally accepted accounting principles.
Detroit felt an even bigger budget
squeeze over the past decade. But, unable to see the hopelessness of its situation, the city borrowed $1.4 billion
from the bond markets, put that cash
into its pension system and declared
victory. The money was invested in assets that subsequently lost value, the
workers kept on accruing new benefits,
tax revenues continued to falter and finally, last year, that debt was the first
thing Detroit defaulted on as it hurtled
toward bankruptcy.
The city now says the borrowing
transaction was an illegal sham and has
asked the bankruptcy court to void it.
Bondholders have been told to expect
pennies on the dollar for their claims.
Pensioners’ losses in the bankruptcy
will be softened, but some of them have

been warned that their pension checks
will be docked to offset improper payouts in the past.
Detroit might have gone bankrupt in
any case, but the pain might have been
lessened if better decisions had been

made early to address the rising cost of
the benefits in the face of the shrinking
tax base.
For other places that may have the
same problem, the panel is calling for
actuaries to produce other details as
well: each pension plan’s projected annual cash payments; the estimated volatility of the fund’s investment performance; and something called a ‘‘standardized plan contribution,’’ which
would help all stakeholders assess
whether the actual contributions to a
pension fund, paid by workers and taxpayers, are reasonable and adequate.
‘‘One would think that alert trustees
would want to review this,’’ Mr. Stein
said, ‘‘and evaluate how they should respond.’’
Mr. Stein said the panel had asked
the Actuarial Standards Board to incorporate its recommendations into its
professional standards, or perhaps into
a new standard solely for public pensions.

Read more about deals and the deal
makers.

Greece resumed bailout talks
with its international lenders Monday,
hoping to end six months of wrangling

over the release of new rescue loans it
needs to avoid default.
At stake is the disbursement of funds
to repay 9.3 billion euros, or $12.7 billion, of bonds maturing in May, the
biggest single debt redemption Greece
faces in the next three decades. The review by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund has
dragged on since September, with disagreements about the extent of savings
and reforms Athens must make to comply with the terms of its bailout.
Lenders say the government is dragging its feet over reforms, like softening
employment protection and introducing
more competition, for fear of hurting
vested interests and losing voters’ support. ‘‘For six months we’ve been going
over the same issues again and again,
largely because the Greek government
can’t agree among themselves,’’ said a
source close to the lenders.
Athens, in turn, say the ‘‘troika’’ of
the European Union, the International
Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank is needlessly protracting the
negotiations by misreading economic
data, underrating Greece’s progress
and demanding unpopular measures
where none are needed.
‘‘The troika have been tragically
wrong in their forecasts, and this has
created huge problems,’’ Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said this
month, shortly before Athens predicted
it would hit a 2013 primary budget surplus of at least Ô1.5 billion, far above
troika estimates.
Despite the standoff, the review is expected to conclude, as all previous ones

since Greece was rescued in 2010.
Athens has already obtained Ô218 billion of the Ô237 billion set aside for it under the bailout, which expires this year.
The troika’s arrival in Athens is a signal that the sides have reached an outline agreement, though they may miss

a March 10 deadline when euro zone finance ministers are scheduled to meet
in Brussels to sign off on the deal.
Talks will focus on implementing proposals put forward last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development to make the Greek
economy more competitive, like removing market barriers and unnecessary
regulation in several sectors, including
building materials, food and publishing,
a Finance Ministry official said. ‘‘The
O.E.C.D. reforms and the recapitalization of banks will be the main issues in
this negotiation,’’ the official said,
speaking on condition of anonymity.
The troika will not ask for any new
austerity measures because it is
already largely convinced that Greece
will meet its fiscal targets this year, hitting a primary budget surplus of 1.5
percent of gross domestic product, the
Greek official added.
According to both officials, the sides
will probably reach an initial agreement
by March 10 that will spell out the
O.E.C.D. reforms that Athens will need
to adopt in a single law by May to obtain
the funds needed to repay the bonds.
But delays have already caused uncertainty, undermining the hoped-for
recovery, after six years of austerityfueled depression that wiped out nearly
a quarter of the economy and brought

unemployment to a record 28 percent.
A dispute between Athens and the
troika over how much more additional
bailout money Greek banks need is
hampering their ability to lend to credit-starved companies, a senior bank executive said. ‘‘The Greek banks and the
Greek economy are the victims,’’ said
Petros Christodoulou, deputy chief executive of National Bank, the country’s
biggest lender.
The fragile coalition led by Prime
Minister Antonis Samaras needs tangible signs of recovery to face off an increasingly confident anti-bailout opposition. A poor showing at municipal and
European elections in May could destabilize the government, threatening to
curtail its four-year term ending in mid2016.
Greece’s main opposition party, Syriza, has said it will try to trigger early
elections in spring 2015 by blocking the
election of a new president.
Harry Papachristou and Lefteris
Papadimas are Reuters correspondents.

NEXT CONFERENCE

18-19 NOV 2014

LONDON
BY EDWARD WYATT
AND NOAM COHEN

THE TRUST WOMEN
CONFERENCE IS GEARED
TO ACTION. LAST
DECEMBER, WE TOOK 32

STRONG COMMITMENTS
TO ACTION INCLUDING:

Launching a network of hotlines
offering support and assistance
to human trafficking victims.
Led by Polaris Project with
support from Refuge, Dasra and
Tau Investment Management
Developing standards to help
companies avoid third party
agents exploiting migrant
labourers and trapping them in
forced labour.
Led by Verite, with support
from the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development
(EBRD), Thomson Reuters
Corporation and Lexis Nexis

Supporting Syrian refugees
to overcome the effects of
psychological stress and trauma
caused by the country’s ongoing
conflict.
Led by Dr. Rola Hallam, from Hand
in Hand Syria, with the support
from the Arab Foundation of Care
for Victims of War and Torture
Launching an international

campaign to raise awareness
about violence in teen
relationships.
Led by the Everyday Sexism
Project with support from Human
Rights Watch, Girls Not Brides,
the Commission United Against
Human Trafficking in Mexico and
Moldova Anti-Trafficking in Persons

Creating the first global website
for trafficking survivors to share
their stories to raise awareness
about human trafficking
Led by Professor Pardis Mahdavi,
Pomona College, with support
from the Thomson Reuters
Foundation, Hollaback, the
Commission United against
Human Trafficking (Mexico) and
CulturePolitique
To register your interest for Trust
Women 2014, and for a full list of
Actions visit: trustwomenconf.com

Comcast, the largest United States
cable and broadband provider, and Netflix, the giant television and movie
streaming service, announced an agreement Sunday in which Netflix will pay
Comcast for faster and more reliable access to Comcast’s subscribers.
The deal is a milestone in the history

of the Internet, where content providers
like Netflix generally have not had to
pay for access to the customers of a
broadband provider.
But the growing power of broadband
companies like Comcast, Verizon and
AT&T has given those companies increased leverage over sites whose
traffic gobbles up chunks of a network’s
capacity. Netflix is one of those sites, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all Internet traffic at peak hours.
The agreement comes just 10 days
after Comcast agreed to buy Time
Warner Cable for $45 billion, an acquisition that would make Comcast the cable
provider to nearly one-third of American
homes and the high-speed Internet company for close to 40 percent. Federal regulators are expected to scrutinize whether that deal would thwart competition
among cable and Internet providers.
It is also unclear whether the deal between Comcast and Netflix violates the
principles of what is known as net neutrality, under which all content providers
have equal and free access to consumers. People close to the deal charac-

BY DAVID BARBOZA

The Sina Corporation, one of China’s
biggest Internet portals, is preparing an
initial public offering in the United
States for Weibo, its Twitter-like microblogging service, according to people
close to the matter.
The offering, which has not been formally announced, could raise up to $500
million. Goldman Sachs and Credit
Suisse have been selected to underwrite
the offering, according to the people

close to the matter. Goldman Sachs and
Credit Suisse declined to comment on
Monday, and a Sina representative
could not be reached for comment.
Sina’s push to list one of its most popular units comes at a time when Chinese
Internet companies are on a manic ac-

terize it as a common arrangement.
Content companies frequently pay a gobetween to carry traffic to a broadband
provider, which then moves through its
system and into a consumer’s home.
In a news release announcing the deal,
the companies said, ‘‘Netflix receives no
preferential network treatment under
the multiyear agreement.’’ Details were
not disclosed, but a person close to the
companies said it involved annual payments of several million dollars.
Others, including Tim Wu, a Columbia
Law School professor and advocate for
net neutrality, said the interconnection
agreement between Comcast and Netflix was one of the first such arrangements in which a broadband provider
like Comcast had extracted payment to
send specific content through the ‘‘on
ramp’’ to its network.
‘‘This is the water in the basement for
the Internet industry,’’ Mr. Wu said, the
first in what could be a flood of such
deals. ‘‘I think it is going to be bad for
consumers,’’ he added, because such
costs are often passed to the customer.

One fear is that if such deals become
common, only the wealthiest content
companies will be able to afford to pay
for them, which could stifle the next Netflix from ever getting off the ground.
The agreement follows a January ruling from a federal appeals court that
struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules,
saying the agency had overstepped its
authority. This type of deal between
Comcast and Netflix might have been
forbidden under a liberal reading of the
F.C.C.’s rules.
The announcement on Sunday confirmed reports that had trickled out last
week, as close watchers of Internet
traffic detected a more direct Internet

path of Netflix videos to Comcast users.
In recent months, Netflix reported
that delivery speed of its content to
Comcast subscribers had declined by
more than 25 percent, resulting in frequent interruptions and delays for customers trying to stream television
shows and movies delivered through
Netflix. Customers of other providers,
including Verizon, also reported delays.
Comcast, Verizon and other Internet
service providers denied that they were
playing any role in slowing down traffic.
Instead, they blamed the intermediaries that Netflix used to deliver its content to Comcast on its way to consumers. They said that those companies
were trying to shove too much data
through too small a system.
The agreement, which is expected to

be put fully into effect in the coming
weeks, had been many months in the
making, starting well before the Time

quisition spree. Over the last two years,
China’s big three Internet companies —
Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent — have
spent several billion dollars acquiring
Chinese start-ups and international online game companies. They have been
buoyed by huge stockpiles of cash and
soaring stock prices.
This year, two of China’s biggest ecommerce companies — Alibaba and
JD.com — are expected to go public in
the United States. The Alibaba offering,
which has not been finalized, could be the
biggest stock offering in history, valuing
the company at more than $100 billion.
Sina saw its fortunes rise several
years ago when microblogging services
became popular in China. Sina’s Weibo
led the way, followed by Tencent’s own
microblogging service.
Last year, Alibaba paid $586 million to
buy an 18 percent stake in Sina Weibo,

valuing the company at $3.3 billion. The
other 71 percent stake is held by Sina,
which is based in Beijing. Some analysts
now project that Sina’s Weibo unit could
be worth $5 billion, even more than its

parent, which is listed on Nasdaq.
The popularity of Sina’s microblogging service has been undermined by
government censorship and the spectacular rise of Tencent’s instant-messaging
application, WeChat, or Weixin, in
Chinese. The WeChat service bears
some resemblance to the American
start-up WhatsApp, which Facebook just
agreed to acquire for up to $19 billion.
Chinese Internet companies are goliaths in their own right. Alibaba, which
is privately owned, is now valued at
about $130 billion and Hong Kong-listed
Tencent is trading at close to $130 billion. The market value of Nasdaq-listed
Baidu is $60 billion.

Warner Cable announcement. The contours of a deal were reached after a
meeting between Brian L. Roberts, chief
executive of Comcast, and Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, at the
International Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas last month, as well as
the engineering teams of both companies, said sources close to the deal.
The arrangement will deliver an
‘‘even better user experience to consumers, while also allowing for future
growth in Netflix traffic,’’ the companies
said in their joint statement Sunday. Netflix will now deliver its content directly
to Comcast and will now essentially have
its own on ramp to Comcast customers.


BY JIM YARDLEY

Pope Francis announced a major restructuring of the Vatican’s outdated
administrative and economic bureaucracy on Monday as he established a
new agency to oversee budgets and financial planning and also created a
powerful auditor-general to guard
against fiscal mismanagement.
The changes are the latest example of
how Francis is moving to confront management problems in the Vatican as
part of his broader mandate to reform
the Roman Curia, the administration
that runs the Holy See. He has begun
shuffling personnel while also speaking
out against careerism in the Roman
Catholic Church, especially inside the
Vatican.
To lead the new Secretariat of the
Economy, Francis selected Cardinal
George Pell, the archbishop of Sydney,
who is also one of the eight cardinals
serving on a special commission advising the pope on administrative reform and other issues. Shortly before

pean banks took billions in emergency
loans.)
So the Fed and its international counterparts turned to a tool that had been
used only on a much smaller scale, for
instance during the disruptions after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The idea is simple: The Fed sends dollars to, say, the European Central Bank
in exchange for a comparable value of
euros, plus interest. The bank then
lends those dollars to European banks

against collateral. At a fixed date, the
transactions are reversed; the Fed gets
its dollars back and the European Central Bank gets its euros back.
Ultimately, the Federal Reserve and
American taxpayers profited from the
arrangement. No one had ever imagined such transactions could be used on
such a huge scale. ‘‘If I had said to the
F.O.M.C. in 1998 that 10 years later you’ll
have $600 billion in credit outstanding to
foreign central banks, they would have
said you’re nuts,’’ said Edwin M. Truman, a former head of the Fed’s international division, referring to the policy
committee, the Federal Open Market
Committee. Mr. Truman is now a senior
fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The program started with the central
banks of major industrialized nations,
including the European Central Bank,
Bank of England and Swiss National
Bank. But that fall, the Fed began mak-

ing arrangements with emerging nations’ central banks.
At the October meeting where Fed officials agreed to swap lines with Mexico,
Brazil, South Korea and Singapore,
Timothy F. Geithner, then chief of the
New York Fed, framed the decision in
part as the United States’ fulfilling its
role as issuer of the world’s most widely
used currency.
‘‘Another way to think about this is
that the privilege of being the reserve

currency of the world comes with some
burdens,’’ Mr. Geithner said during the

meeting, on Oct. 28 and 29. ‘‘Not that we
have an obligation in this sense, but we
have an interest in helping these guys
mitigate the problems they face in dealing with currency mismatches in their
financial systems.’’
That said, Fed officials, then and now,
framed the program as intended to help
the United States economy. After all, international banks were supporting
lending in the United States by buying
securities backed by Americans’ home
mortgages, credit cards and other
debts. If the dollar crisis continued,
there could be even more of a fire sale of

those securities, driving up interest
rates in the United States and making
credit even harder to obtain.
‘‘To the rest of the world, I don’t think
these transcripts are going to be very
reassuring,’’ said Eswar S. Prasad, a
Cornell economist and author of ‘‘The
Dollar Trap,’’ a book that examines the
currency swaps. ‘‘What they show is
that the U.S. policy makers are very narrowly focused on U.S. interests, and
their actions are not so much determined by any moral obligation to save
the world economy, but rather a clear
self-interest in preserving U.S. economic interests.’’

The Fed rejected some nations that
wanted dollar swaps but that were not
important enough, in Fed leaders’ judgment, to American economic interests
to warrant participation. The transcripts redact the names of those countries, but diplomatic cables released by
WikiLeaks indicate that they included
Indonesia, Turkey and the Dominican
Republic.
The Fed was approached by other
countries, Nathan Sheets, then the leader of the Fed’s international finance division, said at the October 2008 meeting.
‘‘But we have not encouraged that,’’
Ben S. Bernanke, then the Fed chairman, chimed in.
‘‘We have done everything we possibly can do discourage it,’’ Mr. Sheets
added. ‘‘We’re not advertising.’’

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Warren E. Buffett is offering a refresher
course on his approach to investing in
his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway
shareholders.
Mr. Buffett’s full letter won’t be released until Saturday, but Fortune
magazine published an excerpt of it online Monday. A writer for Fortune, Carol
Loomis, who is a longtime friend of Mr.
Buffett’s, edits his annual letter.
The billionaire uses two personal real
estate investments he made to demonstrate some of his key principles including: focus on what an investment will
produce, not its price; stick to what you
know; and don’t try to predict what the
economy or stock market will do.
‘‘You don’t need to be an expert in order to achieve satisfactory investment

returns. But if you aren’t, you must recognize your limitations and follow a
course certain to work reasonably
well,’’ Mr. Buffett wrote. ‘‘Keep things
simple and don’t swing for the fences.
When promised quick profits, respond
with a quick ‘no.’’’
The examples Mr. Buffett cited were
For online listings and past performance visit

Francis was elected pope last March,
Cardinal Pell was openly critical of mismanagement under Pope Benedict XVI
— in particular a scandal over private
letters leaked by Benedict’s butler.
‘‘It would be useful to have a pope
who can pull the show together, lift the
morale of the Curia and strengthen a bit
of the discipline there,’’ Cardinal Pell
told The Associated Press at the time.
One question that still remains unanswered is the fate of the Vatican
Bank, officially known as the Institute
for the Works of Religion. Magistrates
in Italy are investigating allegations of
money laundering linked to the bank.
Meanwhile, a management team, appointed by Benedict in the final days of
his papacy to address the problems, has
been poring over the bank’s accounts,
looking for irregularities, while also
working to bring the institution into
compliance with international norms.
Francis has not yet signaled his plans

for the bank — one possibility would be
to shut it down — and the announcement on Monday did not mention it.
‘‘We have not yet heard any decisions
or deliberations,’’ said Max Hohenberg,

a spokesman for the bank.
But Alberto Melloni, a historian of the
Vatican, said the latest changes
signaled a further diminution of the
bank, which once operated with independence and limited oversight, factors
that contributed to the recent scandals.
He said now the bank would serve essentially as ‘‘a wallet’’ while economic
decision-making would be made in the
new Secretariat of Economy. He also
said the appointment of Cardinal Pell
underscored the growing influence of
the ‘‘Group of Eight’’ cardinals over
functions once dominated by the Curia.
Francis has pledged to bring greater
transparency and collegiality to the
workings of the Vatican, and the announcement on Monday said the new
Secretariat was created to help ‘‘simplify and consolidate existing management structures and improve coordination and oversight.’’
The new auditor-general, who will be
directly appointed by the pope, will be
‘‘empowered to conduct audits of any
agency of the Holy See and the Vatican
City State, at any time,’’ the Vatican
said.

his 1986 purchase of a 400-acre Nebraska farm and his 1993 purchase of a retail property near the campus of New

York University. Both purchases were
made after prices collapsed.
Mr. Buffett said he did not know much
about farming or retail, but he knew
enough to determine that the farm near
Tekamah would remain productive and
that the retail center would keep appealing to N.Y.U. students. He also said the
largest tenant in the New York property
had an underpriced lease that would expire in nine years.
Mr. Buffett said he could tell both investments had little downside even
though he had only visited the farm
twice and had never seen the New York
retail property.
Over the years, Mr. Buffett has not
sought out any price quotes on his farm
or retail property, and he is not inclined
to sell. Mr. Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman and chief executive,
said stock investors should not be eager
to sell just because the market offers
them price quotes all the time.
Mr. Buffett compared the stock market to having a moody farm investor
shout out the price of Mr. Buffett’s farm
every day. ‘‘If his daily shout-out was ridiculously low, and I had some spare
cash, I would buy his farm,’’ Mr. Buffett
said. ‘‘If the number he yelled was absurdly high, I could either sell to him or
just go on farming.’’
Andy Kilpatrick, who wrote ‘‘Of Per-

manent Value: The Story of Warren
Buffett,’’ said the essay offered a good

summary of the techniques Mr. Buffett
used to become one of the world’s
richest men.
‘‘It was a great treatise on value investing,’’ Mr. Kilpatrick said.
Mr. Buffett said he learned the keys to
investing by reading the former
Columbia University professor Ben Graham’s book ‘‘The Intelligent Investor.’’
Mr. Buffett went on to study under Mr.
Graham and later work with him.
But for investors without the skills or
time to estimate the value of investments, Mr. Buffett repeated his standard advice: make regular purchases of
a low-cost stock index fund.
‘‘So ignore the chatter, keep your
costs minimal, and invest in stocks as
you would in a farm,’’ he said.

International Funds
For information please contact Clare Chambers
Fax +44 (0)20 7061 3529 | e-mail

www.morningstar.com/Cover/Funds.aspx

February 24, 2014
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The Independent Mark of Quality
Morningstar Analyst Research and Ratings for Funds
www.morningstar.co.uk


Walk down memory lane with me to
wintertimes in years gone by, when bad
weather routinely caused passengers
on hundreds of flights to be stranded on
airplanes that had pulled away from the
gate but then sat idled on tarmacs,
neither taking off nor returning to the
terminal, for three, five, even 12 hours
and more.
Oh, the horror stories we heard about
desperate and angry passengers, some

sick; wailing babies; overflowing toilets; wretched ventilation; frantic flight
crews. An average of 1,500 domestic
flights in each of the worst years, 2007
and 2008, were stranded on tarmacs for
three hours or longer, the Transportation Department said. During late 2006
through 2009, I often heard from stranded, angry passengers on such flights
— some of whom called on their cellphones or emailed directly from
stricken planes.
One of my favorite stories came from
a passenger named Mark Veil, who was
among the 150 stuck for over 10 hours
on an American Airlines flight diverted
by storms to Austin, Tex., on Dec. 29,
2006. As conditions on the plane
worsened, ‘‘I finally took out my cellphone, which has a function to flash an
attention light, and began signaling
SOS out my window, over and over,’’ he
said.
On another plane sitting nearby on
the tarmac, a passenger named Kate
Hanni, already horrified by the atrocious conditions on her own plane,
happened to look out her seat window
and saw Mr. Veil’s signal flashing
through the gloom. ‘‘I’m trying to figure out what the heck it was,’’ Ms.
Hanni told me later, ‘‘and then I realized: dit-dit-dit * dah-dah-dah * dit-ditdit * SOS! I don’t know Morse code, but
everybody knows SOS.’’
The SOS did not bring help, but it did
help Ms. Hanni in her determination to
take action in the weeks and years that

I grew up in the Midwest and didn’t fly
much when I was younger. Now, as a
consultant and author of ‘‘Your Network Is Your Net Worth,’’ I’m traveling
all the time. I find business travel tiring,
so I can’t say I love it. But I do love being able to support myself in a nontraditional way.
Another bright spot is that I get to
connect with people. I find people fascinating, and I really do believe in the
power of networking. So if a fellow passenger wants to talk, I’m all for it.
I met a violinist once and wound up
helping him with a benefit concert. I
met a gentleman who was a guard in an
art gallery. He was so excited to talk
about his work, because he said no one
ever talks to the guards in art galleries.
I met a young man who was raised by
his father. His father was very proud of
him, and he always wanted his son to
do better and be the first in the family
to go to college. So this young man
joined the Navy and talked to me about
what it was like living on a submarine.

Traveler’s forecast
Sh ................. Showers
S .......................... Sun
Sn ...................... Snow
SS....... Snow showers
T ........ Thunderstorms
W ...................... Windy

Tuesday
˚C
˚F
Abu Dhabi
28/17
Almaty
-6/-15
Athens
14/6
Bangkok
34/25
Barcelona
14/9
Beijing
12/3
Belgrade
12/4
Berlin
11/3
Boston
-1/-6
Brussels
10/4
Buenos Aires 22/14
Cairo
21/10
Chicago
-8/-19
Frankfurt
14/5

Geneva
12/4
Hong Kong
23/19
Istanbul
8/5
Jakarta
29/23
Johannesburg 23/12
Karachi
30/16
Kiev
1/-4
Lagos
31/25
Lisbon
16/9
London
10/5
Los Angeles 21/12
Madrid
12/2
Manila
31/24
Mexico City
26/9
Miami
29/21
Moscow
1/-8

Mumbai
32/20
Nairobi
29/16
New Delhi
24/10
New York
0/-4

82/63
21/5
57/43
93/77
57/48
54/37
54/39
52/37
30/21
50/39
72/57
70/50
18/-2
57/41
54/39
73/66
46/41
84/73
73/54
86/61
34/25

88/77
61/48
50/41
70/54
54/36
88/75
79/48
84/70
34/18
90/68
84/61
75/50
32/25

Wednesday
˚C
˚F
S
29/17
S
-6/-19
PC
14/7
S
34/25
PC
13/5
PC
13/1
S

15/4
S
11/4
PC
-2/-9
R
9/3
PC 23/13
S
21/11
PC -11/-18
C
11/3
Sh
6/-1
C
24/19
Sh
7/4
T
30/23
C
24/12
S
30/16
C
2/-5
PC 31/25
PC
15/8

PC
10/5
PC 20/13
PC
11/0
S
31/24
PC
26/9
T
29/20
S
1/-6
H
32/20
C
29/14
H
24/11
SS
-1/-7

84/63
21/-2
57/45
93/77
55/41
55/34
59/39
52/39

28/16
48/37
73/55
70/52
12/0
52/37
43/30
75/66
45/39
86/73
75/54
86/61
36/23
88/77
59/46
50/41
68/55
52/32
88/75
79/48
84/68
34/21
90/68
84/57
75/52
30/19

There is no dispute on this point, and
the group Ms. Hanni founded takes
well-deserved credit from passengers

— and blame, from the airlines.
‘‘While we are not happy about the
performance during this winter, with
the massive number of cancellations
and disruptions, the fact that we’ve had
virtually no, or very few, of these
strandings is really a success story,’’
said Paul Hudson, the president of
FlyersRights.org. ‘‘There’s always talk
about regulation being a big problem for
airline industry, but it’s hard to explain,
especially in light of
this bad weather, how
we didn’t have more
strandings this
winter.’’
Noted, said Joshua
Marks, chief executive of masFlight.
But Mr. Marks and
Mr. Hudson agree
that the issue is more
complicated than airlines’ simply fixing
the tarmac strandings because of the
threat of huge fines, including canceling flights in advance out of fear that
the weather might cause those fines.
‘‘We have compound factors at work
this winter,’’ Mr. Marks said, explaining
that the tarmac-delay rules might have
combined with new federal regulations
on the number of hours pilots could

work without rest, known as Part 117
rules, to account for some of the many
cancellations this year.
‘‘It’s hard at this point to try to single
out what was being caused by the
tarmac-delay rule and what’s been
caused by 117,’’ he said, ‘‘and in many
respects the two are linked,’’ as airlines
try to calculate the odds of prompt
sanctions in any given situation.
‘‘There’s balance between those two
factors and how much the cancellations
were caused by the fact that the weather was just terrible,’’ he said.
At present, with domestic flight cancellations since December now at a
number that exceeds the total of all
commercial flights in any three average days, passengers who need to rebook canceled flights have been experiencing difficulties.
That is because airlines have consolidated and reduced the number of
flights, while most flights continue to
take off with nearly all seats already occupied.
‘‘So there is the inconvenience of
people being delayed up to three to five
days but not being stranded,’’ Mr. Hudson said. ‘‘The biggest problem right
now is to recover from these storms,
because the airlines don’t have sufficient reserves.’’

In the past two years, tarmac delays
of over three hours have ticked up
slightly — to 83 domestic flights last
year, according to the Transportation
Department. Not all such delays lead to

fines. But last October, the department
announced the largest fine yet assessed, $1.1 million against United Airlines for 13 individual delays exceeding
three hours during severe thunderstorms at O’Hare airport in Chicago.
Still, after the delay rules took effect
in April 2010, ‘‘controllable tarmac
delays all but vanished,’’ according to a
report, ‘‘Tarmac Rule: Three Years
Later’’ by the aviation data consulting
firm masFlight.

He had some amazing photographs and
told me about the sounds that whales
make. He’s now in law school in California, and I actually gave a presentation
to his class.
Sometimes you meet humble, unassuming people who help you put things
in perspective.
I was on a flight after I had given a
presentation and was seated next to an
older gentleman. Some people might
not even want to start a conversation
with someone older.
They don’t know what they’re missing.
I’m guessing the gentleman was in
his 70s because he told me he bought
his first and only new
car in 1971, and he referred to it as a
muscle car. He even
had a picture of it on
his iPad. I found out
that he had flown

from Fargo, N.D., for
a memorial service
for members of the
160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also known as
the Night Stalkers.
One of his family members was part
of this regiment and had died in the
Philippines. He pulled out a program
for the service that was filled with
names and dates for the fallen. He

SHOWERS

FINLAND

SNOW

ICE

SWEDEN
5-10

LATVIA

S
PC
C
S
Sh
PC

S
C
Sn
C
PC
S
PC
C
Sh
PC
C
T
T
S
PC
T
PC
PC
PC
PC
PC
PC
S
S
H
PC
H
Sn

RUSSIA

0-5

Meteorology by
AccuWeather.
Weather shown
as expected
at noon on
Tuesday.

BELARUS
GERMANY
10-15

POLAND
UKRAINE

CZECH. REP.
SLOV.

0-5

5-10

AUSTRIA
HUNGARY
5-10

10-15

ITALY

5-10

ALB.
10-15

10-15

GREECE

SPAIN

SYRIA

15-20
LEBANON

15-20

MOROCCO
ISRAEL

TUNISIA

JORDAN

ALGERIA

20-25

SAUDI

ARABIA

15-20

20-25

EGYPT
LIBYA

25-30

20-25

Nice
Osaka
Paris
Riyadh
Rome
San Francisco
Sao Paulo
Seoul
Shanghai
Singapore

14/8
13/4
11/3
27/16
14/7
17/10

31/22
12/1
11/9
32/25

57/46
55/39
52/37
81/61
57/45
63/50
88/72
54/34
52/48
90/77

C
PC
R
S
PC
PC
T
S
R
PC

15/8
14/7
10/2

28/15
15/9
15/10
32/23
14/4
14/5
32/25

59/46
57/45
50/36
82/59
59/48
59/50
90/73
57/39
57/41
90/77

Sh
PC
C
S
Sh
R
S
PC
C
S

2013

’14

UNITED STATES S&P 500

52-week

1,857.83

+23.7%

+21.58

EUROPE DJ Stoxx 50

3,157.31

+25.64

+22.4

–27.99

+31.2

JAPAN Nikkei 225

14,837.68

+5%
0
–5
–10

2013
€1= $1.37

closed

the impact of tightening liquidity but not
yet feeling the benefit of the recovery in
the developed economies. The euro
zone’s weak growth is not yet giving
much impetus to emerging-market exports. A rise in an American manufacturing survey in February to its highest
in four years provides reassurance on
the United States’ economy, but offers
little to global markets. As long as the
American recovery remains on track,
the Federal Reserve’s tightening of
monetary policy will continue unabated.
For global markets, this new split
looks like the opposite of its predecessor — a deflationary wave sweeping
over asset prices. A stronger dollar
seems likely. It may exert fresh pressure on commodity prices, aiding developed-economy consumers but harming emerging-market export earnings.
Stronger developed growth will eventually improve the outlook for emerging economies. But the split will not
heal soon. IAN CAMPBELL

+5.2%

YEN

+0.001

–10.7

+0.003

+9.8

POUND

£1= $1.66

For years it was emerging economies
good, developed economies bad. Now
emerging economies are in trouble
while the developed ones are slowly recovering. For global asset prices, the
combination looks the opposite of its
bubbly predecessor.
As the United States and Europe
headed into the Great Recession, the
momentum of emerging economies did
not flag. Their growth was aided by
capital fleeing developed markets and
by commodity prices driven higher by
quantitative easing and a devalued dollar. The battle by central banks in the
developed economies to avert deflation
and reverse recession at home proved
inflationary for emerging markets, and

for global asset and commodity prices.
Now the balance has shifted. Emerging economies’ steam has run out, in
part because of the gradual tightening of
American monetary policy. Chinese efforts to reduce liquidity and weaken the
renminbi are also making markets uneasy. A further concern is the serious unrest in Ukraine, Turkey and Venezuela.
Emerging economies are caught in an
awkward middle ground, reeling from

’14
52-week

EURO

¥100= $0.98

generosity. The bid puts Scanias enterprise value at Ô16.7 billion, or 12.6 times
2016 earnings before interest and taxes.
According to Starmine, that’s a 29 percent premium to the European machinery sector and a 56 percent markup
on a rival truck maker, Volvo.
Shareholders, though, will have a long
wait. Because of the truck industry’s
long product lifecycle, it will take up to
15 years for the savings to flow through.
Moreover, VW is asking its own shareholders to pitch in ¤2 billion, or almost a
third of the price of the deal, by buying
preferred shares from the company.
Minority shareholders usually deserve an incentive to sell, and Scania’s
have that. But the deal reinforces a reputation VW has for being stingy to shareholders. Despite a 14 percent dividend
increase in 2013, for example, it pays out
only 22 percent of its earnings — a third

less than Daimler and BMW. Volkswagen says it needs the capital increase,
through the sale of the preferred shares,
to protect its rating. But the company
has almost Ô17 billion of net cash. VW
should treat its own shareholders as
generously as Scania’s. OLAF STORBECK

0%

–20

–40
2013

’14

OIL Nymex light sw. crude

52-week

$103.18 a barrel

+12.1%

+0.98

GOLD New York

$1,336.70 a tr. oz.+16.60

–16.1

CORN Chicago

$4.50 a bushel

–0.04

–35.1

Data as of 1700 U.T.C.
Source: Reuters
Graphs: Custom Flow Solutions

BY KELLY DINARDO

5-10

LOW

0

Volkswagen shareholders concerned
with the here and now are about to be
hit by a truck. VW, Europe’s largest
automaker, is offering 6.7 billion euros,
or $9.2 billion, in cash to buy out
Scania’s minority owners. Not only is
that a whopping premium, it’ll also take
years for cost savings to materialize.

On top of that, Volkswagen wants its
own shareholders to dig into their pockets to help finance the deal.
Creating a leading truck maker has
long been a priority for VW. Starting in
2000, the automaker built up a 62.6 percent stake in Scania and has taken control of MAN, the German trick manufacturer. Pooling purchasing power
alone should create more than Ô200 million of synergies by the end of this year.
Volkswagen reckons it should be able
to squeeze an additional Ô650 million a
year of savings when it takes full ownership of Scania. Once taxed, capitalized and discounted at 3 percent a year,
these additional synergies are currently worth around Ô2.7 billion.
On paper, thats Ô400 million more
than the premium VW is forking over
and appears to justify the company’s

MOSTLY
CLOUDY

ESTONIA

LITH.

HIGH

+10

For more independent commentary and
analysis, visit www.breakingviews.com

STATIONARY
COMPLEX

WARM
COLD

–5-0

FLURRIES

0-5

+20

As told to Joan Raymond.

0-5

RAIN

+30%

shared some details about his family
member and I learned a lot about the
Night Stalkers. I couldn’t help but be in
awe of what people sacrifice for our
country.
And then I heard about my seatmate.
He was a farmer who at one time had
5,000 acres that he farmed with his
brothers. Now, he farms with his son —
mostly corn, soybeans and grain. He
said he loves seeing things grow, and he

loves his job feeding people.
He pulled out his iPad again and
showed me his crops, his rescue dogs
and his cars. I also learned how farming
changed. I was astounded. He uses a
GPS unit to help plant rows of crops.
Apparently, when he puts down lines of
fertilizer, all the data is stored on a
jump drive, and then, when he goes to
plant seeds, he simply pulls the data
and gets very specific calculations and
directions for his seeds. He likened it to
Google Maps.
This was one of the best business
flights I’ve ever taken. I learned so
much from him, and to be honest, I’ve
never looked at a loaf of bread the same
way again. I know the work that goes
into it. Some people might get excited
about sitting next to a celebrity. As far
as I’m concerned, this gentleman was a
celebrity. The kind that really matters.

T-STORMS

High/low temperatures, in degrees Celsius and
degrees Fahrenheit, and expected conditions.
C ..................... Clouds
F .......................... Fog
H ........................ Haze

I.............................. Ice
PC.......... Partly cloudy
R ......................... Rain

followed. Working indefatigably
through grass-roots organizing, she
started a group and a website called
FlyersRights.org that over two years
later (and despite sustained derision
from the airline industry) achieved its
goal: ‘‘passengers’ rights’’ provisions
in federal law and a federal rule that set
fines of as much as $27,000 per passenger for airlines that keep passengers
stuck for over three hours on planes
that leave the gate but remain on the
tarmac.
Let’s look now at the mess in air
travel this winter season, in which horrible weather caused airlines to cancel
a total of 95,576 flights from December
through Feb. 14, according to the flightinformation service FlightView. That is
more than twice the number of flights
canceled in the same period a year ago.
And more than 15,000 additional flights
have been canceled since Feb. 14.
Yet during this stretch of cancellations and extremely bad weather,
which directly or indirectly affected all
of the major United States airports,
there were only a few reports of excessive tarmac strandings like those that
occurred by the thousands during bad
weather from 2006 through 2009.

Stockholm
Sydney
Taipei
Tel Aviv
Tokyo
Toronto
Tunis
Vienna
Warsaw
Washington

6/0
29/20
26/17
19/12
13/3
-6/-16
18/8
12/3
7/-2
5/-2

43/32
84/68
79/63
66/54
55/37
21/3
64/46

54/37
45/28
41/28

S
PC
S
Sh
S
SS
PC
S
S
C

4/0
32/21
25/18
18/10
14/6
-9/-16
18/9
12/3
6/0
1/-8

39/32
90/70
77/64
64/50

57/43
16/3
64/48
54/37
43/32
34/18

PC
PC
PC
Sh
S
Sn
Sh
PC
S
Sn

After graduating from college, Tom Allen searched for an escape from an unfulfilling, deskbound career. A plan to
bike through a few countries snowballed into a four-year trip through 32
countries, from his home in England
through Europe, the Middle East and
down the northeastern edge of Africa.
Throughout the journey Mr. Allen, 31,
shot more than 300 hours of video,
showing him contracting malaria in Sudan and meeting his future wife in Armenia. ‘‘A lot of the time, I was just talking to the camera like an old mate,
trying to sort out my thoughts,’’ Mr. Allen said. ‘‘It was really quite raw.’’ But
on his return to England, the BBC director James Newton watched the footage,
realized there was a story to be told and
turned it into the feature-length film

‘‘Janapar: Love on a Bike,’’ available on
DVD and on iTunes, Amazon Instant
Play and Google Play. Below are edited
excerpts from a conversation with Mr.
Allen about his adventure.
We planned for about 10 months before we left, but we ended up pitching

the plans we made. We had an overall direction, but it was fun to not be rigid in
getting there. It made it more interesting. We weren’t comparing what we saw
with our eyes with what we saw on the
map. We’re in a new town, and let’s just
see. Cycling and walking are a great way
to be spontaneous. You’re not restricted
by the schedules of buses or planes.

When you go off on your own, you
have to deal with this voice in your
head who is always rabbiting thoughts
at you. It does take a bit of adjustment.
After that, it’s making good decisions.
You have to make every decision on
your own, and that can be scary. You
make a lot of mistakes. You don’t have
anyone with you to share the highs. You
end up learning a lot about yourself and
your strengths and weaknesses.
The hospitality. It was very hum-

bling, awesome. I spent hundreds of
nights in people’s homes. There were

epic views and amazing downhills, but
the people with very little means saying
come stay the night was the restoreyour-faith-in-humanity kind of stuff.

I would drop an occasional email
from an Internet cafe. I didn’t bring a
phone. Five years later mobiles have
become ubiquitous. Today, you’d be
tweeting from Sudan. I feel lucky that I
couldn’t do that. That kind of experience is about the present moment and
present place. Being half involved and
thinking this would be a nice Instagram
photo isn’t the point.

It gives you a massively broader context for how the world looks and how
you live in it. Even if the result is learning your friends and family back home
are more important. It’s always going
to be different for everyone. The real
beauty is how personal it is.


) +KJ )>LA

9)6+0-5

BY VICTORIA GOMELSKY

In October 2003, Maximilian Büsser,
managing director of Harry Winston
Rare Timepieces, was on a flight from

Singapore to Geneva when he began to
sketch the outlines of Horological Machine No. 1, a daringly original watch
that would soon herald the birth of his
own radical brand.
Mr. Büsser had not registered a name
for his company but he knew how it
would appear on the dial: B&F, for

Büsser & Friends, reflecting a concept
he had pioneered while working on Winston’s celebrated Opus series: Assemble a group of friends skilled in the
horological arts and put them to work
crafting an iconoclastic timepiece.
Dissuaded from using B&F by his
trademark attorney, who argued that he
would have to contend with lawyers
from Bell & Ross — a Swiss watch brand
that often goes by the initials B&R — Mr.
Büsser reluctantly agreed to add his first
initial to the moniker, making it MB&F.
‘‘But I really didn’t want to,’’ he said,
lamenting MB&F’s asymmetry and

over-emphasis on his contribution (as
opposed to that of his ‘‘friends’’).
There was also the name’s glaring unconventionality. Switzerland’s best
known watch names tend to pay
homage to the luminaries of watchmaking past: the Pateks, Philippes,
Breguets and Piguets of the world, men
of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries who
laid the foundation for a Swiss cottage

industry that last year exported roughly
$24 billion in watches around the globe.
To some early critics, Mr. Büsser’s
playful choice lacked gravitas.


) +76 )*8-

‘‘The first graphic designer I worked
with told me it was a crappy name,’’ Mr.
Büsser recalled. ‘‘He said, ‘You’re in
luxury — you can’t sell a $200,000 watch
with friends in the name. That’s for
Mickey Mouse.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s the
only way I can convey what I want to
convey.’ And that’s what we did. It’s
funny — success makes you sexy.’’
The history of consumer goods and
services is dominated by companies
that eschewed tradition, logic, and good
sense when choosing names for their
products. As a prime example, Steve
Manning, founder of Igor, a naming and
branding agency based in Sausalito,
Calif., cited Sir Richard Branson’s famous gamble. ‘‘If you’re crazy enough
to paint Virgin on the side of an airline,
people are going to give you the benefit
of the doubt that something different is
going on here,’’ he said.
Today, the practice of baptizing

watches with names — be they functional, experiential or evocative — is so
common that it hardly seems possible
timepieces once were sold generically.
But it took the Swiss until the 20th
century to catch on to the power of a
brand name. Once they did, the industry
spawned a bevy of iconic timepieces
whose equally iconic names hold the
keys to a parallel reading of watchmaking history.
The first Swiss brand to break with
tradition by choosing a made-up word
for its products was, paradoxically,
founded by a Bavarian living in London.
According to his memoir, Hans Wilsdorf
was riding atop a double-decker bus

when ‘‘a good genie whispered’’ in his
ear a ‘‘short yet significant word’’:
Rolex. In 1908, Mr. Wilsdorf registered
the trademark that would establish his
brand ‘‘as the international mark of success,’’ said Jake Ehrlich, editor and publisher of RolexMagazine.com.
Whether Rolex would have climbed to
the top of the watchmaking heap with a
different name is impossible to know.
‘‘It’s a chicken or egg scenario,’’ said
Amit Dev Handa, the luxury timepiece
concierge of the Mandarin Oriental in
Las Vegas. ‘‘The names of these watches
are all very easy to pronounce and they
give people a point of reference.’’ Take

what many consider to be Mr. Wilsdorf’s
greatest creation, the Rolex Oyster, the
first water-resistant watch, unveiled in
1927. Associating his luxury timepiece
with the image of a sea-dwelling mollusk, the pioneering marketer conveyed
an essential point about his product: It
concealed something rare and valuable.
When Mr. Wilsdorf added the word Perpetual to the name in 1931, denoting the
model’s first-of-its-kind self-winding
wristwatch movement, he all but sealed
its groundbreaking legacy.
Louis Cartier, a contemporary of Mr.
Wilsdorf, shared the Rolex founder’s
preference for straightforward product
names that conjured a clear image.
The first Cartier Tank watch, designed in 1917, was purportedly modeled
on the overhead view of an Allied tank:
the brancards evoked the treads of the
vehicle, while the case represented the
cockpit.
That the watch industry’s first enduring product names emerged in the years
bookending the Great War is no coincidence. At the time, ‘‘images of American soldiers smoking cigarettes, with

BY ARTHUR TOUCHOT

Although 3-D printers may be the
coolest kids on the block, most watch
brands do not want anything to do with
them.
The machines are not precise enough,

at least not yet, to print out mechanical
watch movements, according to Iain
Todd, a professor of metallurgy and materials processing at the University of
Sheffield in Britain.
Yet other watch parts can, and should,
be printed. ‘‘You can really do phenomenal things around what you put your
movement in, especially with the
cases,’’ Mr. Todd said in a phone interview this month.
A handful of industrial designers are
exploring those possibilities.
‘‘I don’t understand why the watch industry isn’t employing 3-D printing,’’
said Timur Pinar, who designed a stainless steel watch case last year using
SolidWorks, a software tool developed
by the French company Dassault..
‘‘Engineers use it to design planes, so
it’s safe to say a watch case wasn’t

these enormous strap watches on their
wrists’’ began to appear, said Michael
Friedman, historian and development
director for the Swiss brand Audemars
Piguet. It was the advent of the wristwatch era and the industry’s budding
marketers seized the opportunity to
make a name for their brands — literally.
At Jaeger-LeCoultre, for example, the
legendary 1931 Reverso had its roots in a
conversation that took place on the sidelines of a polo match in India. An officer
of the British Raj is said to have challenged the Swiss businessman César de
Trey to devise a timepiece that could
withstand the rigors of the game, said

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s artistic director
Janek Deleskiewicz.
Named for the Latin phrase ‘‘I turn
around,’’ a reference to its unique swiveling case design, the Reverso remains
a pillar of the Jaeger-LeCoultre brand.
But the name of the person who first
uttered the by-now timeless moniker
has been lost to history. When asked
who coined the name, Mr. Deleskiewicz
said, simply, ‘‘the product itself’’ — the

implication being that the Reverso and
other revered watch models emerged
from their makers with their marketing
messages wholly intact, like tiny, ticking Aphrodites.
More than just magical combinations
of syllables, however, the industry’s
lasting names are love letters to the decades in which they were conceived.
The 1952 Breitling Navitimer, a ‘‘navigational timer’’ for pilots; the 1955 IWC Ingénieur, designed explicitly for engineers; and the 1957 Omega Speedmaster,
a chronograph that went to the moon and
back, were introduced at a time when
‘‘science was considered to solve all human problems,’’ said Georges Kern, chief
executive of IWC, referring to the notions of progress and mathematical precision embodied within their monikers.
By the 1960s, watch names reflected
the era’s more cooperative spirit. In 1969,
for instance, Zenith unveiled El Primero,
the first self-winding chronograph.
While the words translate from the Spanish as ‘‘the first,’’ Zenith’s chief executive, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, maintains

that the name is actually taken from Esperanto, a constructed language that resonated with linguists of the 1960s, when it

still seemed possible that a common language could stave off world conflict.
The outlook in Switzerland turned inward with the onset of the ’70s.
The 1972 Royal Oak by Audemars
Piguet — a groundbreaking timepiece
lauded for what was then considered an
audaciously designed stainless steel
case by Gérald Genta — evoked a regal,
old world association at a time when the
Swiss were rapidly losing market share
to the upstart Japanese. The oak in
question was the tree in which King
Charles II of England supposedly hid
during the battle of Worcester in 1651,
when he evaded capture by Oliver
Cromwell’s army.
As the ‘‘Me Decade’’ gave way to the
‘‘Greed Decade,’’ the tenor of the names
shifted again. The Polo, a 1979 introduction from Piaget, channeled the ultimate
rich person’s pastime to invoke the notion of casual elegance: ‘‘Polo was a
very exclusive game matching the sort

of clientele Piaget was aiming at,’’ said
its chief executive, Philippe LéopoldMetzger.
At Patek Philippe, widely considered
the world’s most sought after watch
brand, it took until the late 1980s for the
company to codify its timepieces into
formal collections. The round watches
were labeled Calatravas, after the company’s symbol, the Calatrava Cross,
named for a 12th century Spanish order

of Cistercian knights that was meaningful to the founders, Antoni Patek and
Franciszek Czapek, both of whom were
of Polish Catholic origin.
Patek Philippe’s rectangular-shaped
watches were called Gondolos, after a
loyal Brazilian retailer, Chronometro
Gondolo, in whose honor the watchmaker once manufactured a rectangular Art Deco-style timepiece.
Among hardcore fans of the brand,
however, names play second fiddle to another form of nomenclature. ‘‘When you
go to dinner with a group of Patek collectors, they speak in numbers,’’ said John
Reardon, international co-head of
Christie’s watch department, alluding to
the mostly four-digit reference numbers
that collectors wield as if they were codes
to a private bank account — which, in a
sense, they could be, so rare and valuable
are many of the timepieces they identify.
Once the new millennium began, the
mechanical watchmaking renaissance
was in full swing and the financial crisis
was still eight years away, which helps
explain why the names conceived during this period — including the independent Mr. Büsser’s clinically titled
Horological Machines — were as bold as
the attitudes that created them.
Hublot’s Big Bang collection was the
brainchild of its chief executive, JeanClaude Biver, who was searching for a
name that captured his watchmaking
philosophy of ‘‘fusion,’’ in which traditional techniques meet technical innovation.
He referred to the collection’s signature combination of gold and rubber:
‘‘Normally, those two elements in

nature don’t belong together,’’ Mr. Biver
said. ‘‘After the Big Bang, gold was under the earth and rubber was in the tree,
but in the Big Bang, they were one.’’ Mr.
Biver said he did not struggle with the
name. On the contrary: ‘‘It was one
night, in November 2004, and it took me
a dinner with some red wine,’’ he noted.
Today, watch companies are much
more deliberate about how they choose
their names. Tudor, founded in 1946 by
Mr. Wilsdorf as a sister brand to Rolex,

much of a problem,’’ he said.
Drawing the 3-D model took a month,
after which he sent the design to Materialise, a Belgian pioneer in additive
manufacturing — the technical name for
3-D printing — to make the prototype.
Mr. Pinar said he designed a skeletonized case to exploit the properties of
laser sintering, the 3-D printing technology that uses a computer-controlled
laser beam to build complex forms by
fusing successive layers of powdered
metal into the desired shape.
‘‘It’s one of the best ways to make
such parts,’’ he said. ‘‘It helps us produce tangible models quickly.’’
Still, Mr. Pinar put an old ETA Swiss
mechanical movement into the case.
For clockwork precision, ‘‘there is a certain level of craftsmanship expected,’’
he said. ‘‘3-D printing hasn’t arrived at
that point.’’
That is particularly true at the top end

of the market, Mr. Todd said. ‘‘You’ll always need to make your own old-fashioned mechanical movement if you
want to be considered a high-end
brand,’’ he said.
Among the first brands to make
watches with 3-D printed cases on a
commercial scale is rvnDSGN, set up by
Zach Raven, a designer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2011.
‘‘It was my wife’s idea,’’ Mr. Raven
said, adding that he did not know if the
project would work when he started.

After a first, slightly crude, prototype
made in stainless steel infused with
bronze, Mr. Raven moved on to titanium, employing a variant of the process
that was far more precise.
The sintering process leaves its mark
on the surface of the case, giving it a
characteristic, resolutely modern look.
‘‘We choose to leave the subtle grain because it enhances the story of how the
watch was made,’’ Mr. Raven said in a
phone interview.

The process can also be applied to
more precious metals, including gold. In
November, the British brand Hoptroff,
which makes classic-looking watches
with unusual electronic complications,
became the first watchmaker to create
3-D printed gold cases, presented at last
year’s SalonQP London watch show.

Laser sintering ‘‘can achieve things
you simply can’t achieve with milling,’’
said Richard Hoptroff, co-founder of the
brand, which offers three wristwatch

worked with Nomen, a Paris-based
naming company, to coin the names of
its Grantour and Pelagos collections.
The former is a synthesis of the Italian
words gran turismo and describes a
sports watch designed to appeal to car
enthusiasts, while the latter is a dive
watch named after ‘‘a Greek word defining the deeper part of the sea and, in
particular, the kind of creatures that live
there,’’ said Davide Cerrato, head of
marketing and product development.
Even more painstaking was the ‘‘art
project’’ approach watchmaker Felix
Baumgartner and designer Martin Frei
employed when brainstorming the
name for Urwerk, the subversive luxury
watch brand they debuted in 1997.
‘‘Ur — it’s like going to the origin, to
the beginning of time,’’ said Mr. Frei,
who was inspired by the ancient
Sumerian city of Ur, where timekeeping
began. ‘‘The next word, werk, is of
course ‘work,’ like in English. But if you
have it with Uhrwerk, it means movement. It was a play on words, this idea of
a business that deals with the philosophical matter of time.’’

In stark contrast to Urwerk’s earnestness is the irreverence that Shinola
brought to its naming process. The
founders of the Detroit-based watch
brand were in a Dallas boardroom discussing names for their new American
watch company when someone uttered
an old-timey insult and bells went off.
The antiquated name belonged to a 19thcentury American shoe polish brand, until the company foundered in the middle
of the last century, leaving its intellectual property rights ripe for the taking.
‘‘To find a name that is part of the
common vernacular but you don’t have
any understanding of what it is — it’s
kind of amazing,’’ said the creative director, Daniel Caudill. He added that
Shinola’s choice of name underscored a
fundamental brand quality: ‘‘We don’t
take ourselves too seriously.’’ The company hammered that point home last
spring, when it came time to name its
first ladies watch, a cushion-shaped
model with a stylishly thin strap.
According to ads touting The Gomelsky, the watch was ‘‘randomly named
after the first person we met after we
couldn’t come up with anything better.’’
That the complete stranger Shinola immortalized with its ladies timepiece
happened to be a watch journalist
named Victoria Gomelsky — check the

byline of this article to appreciate the
meta-narrative — made the story only
that much better. Unknown to her, she
had walked into the brand’s booth at the
Baselworld watch fair in Switzerland

last April at the exact moment that the
company’s chief executive, Tom
Kartsotis, had issued a dictum.
‘‘The very first person who walks in
the booth, we’re going to name it after
them,’’ Mr. Caudill recalled. ‘‘It was
kind of in jest. But the reality is everyone loved it.’’ Never mind that The
Gomelsky’s namesake was born in Russia, contradicting Shinola’s Americanmade ethos, which the company expresses rather clearly in its other model
names, The Runwell, The Brakeman
and The Birdy. The story of the meetand-greet in Basel trumped all.
Still, even Mr. Caudill admits that
some names have their limits. ‘‘We have
a Runwell bike; eventually we’ll have a
Runwell bag, a Runwell shoe,’’ he said.
‘‘But no, there won’t be any Gomelsky
beer cozies.’’

models with 18-karat gold cases, priced
at 5,000 pounds, or about $8,300. A highcomplication pocket watch, the Hoptroff
No.10, is planned for introduction this
year.
Inspired by Patek Philippe’s Calibre
89 and Harrison’s Sea Watch No.1, the
No.10 has been conceived as a navigational aid, and will feature no fewer than
48 indicators, including celestial functions, temperature, pressure, humidity
and compass heading.
The particular look that results from
the laser fusion process, not unlike the
texture of a used sheet of sandpaper, is
one that ‘‘nobody else will be able to

replicate without laser sintering,’’ Mr.
Hoptroff said.
This may be one reason why large, established brands have not yet adopted
the technology, he suggested. ‘‘Larger
companies have invested in certain
looks, and in certain machinery,’’ he
said. ‘‘There’s probably very little reason for them to rush into something new
because they have an accepted brand
and look.’’
But for smaller brands manufacturing in restricted batches, the 3-D technology offers significant benefits, he
said.
‘‘Because we make only a few
watches every time,’’ Mr. Hoptroff explained, ‘‘we can easily customize
watches within a collection, or adjust for
changes between each print.’’



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