The new york times december 26 2016

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Trump Name Amplifies A Mom-and-Pop Empire Challenges in Addressing Conflicts Where Loyalties to Boss and Company Blur This article is by Megan Twohey, Russ Buettner and Steve Eder.

MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Yamilet Lugo in September visiting the grave of her son Kevin Lara Lugo, who died on his 16th birthday, in Maturín, Venezuela.

Poisoned by Hunger: Life and Death in Venezuela By NICHOLAS CASEY

MATURÍN, Venezuela — His name was Kevin Lara Lugo, and he died on his 16th birthday. He spent the day before foraging for food in an empty lot, because there was nothing to eat at home. Then in a hospital because what he found made him gravely ill. Hours later, he was dead on a gurney, which doctors rolled by his mother as she watched helplessly. She said the hospital had lacked the simplest supplies needed to save him on that day last July. “I have a tradition that in the morning of their birthdays, I wake up my children

and sing to them,” his mother, Yamilet Lugo, said. “How could I do that when my son was dead?” Venezuela has suffered from so many ailments this year. Inflation has driven office workers to abandon the cities and head to illegal pit mines in the jungle, willing to subject themselves to armed gangs and multiple bouts of malaria for the chance to earn a living. Doctors have prepared to operate on bloody tables because they did not have enough water to clean them. Psychiatric patients have had to be tied to chairs in mental hospitals because there was no medication left to treat their delusions. Hunger has driven some people to riot

— and others into rickety fishing boats, fleeing Venezuela on reckless journeys by sea. But it was the story of a boy with no food, who had gone searching for wild roots to eat but ended up poisoning himself instead, that seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong in Venezuela. The country’s economic crisis had spent months encircling his family, only to snatch away its second-born son. His neighborhood, on the edge of what was once a prosperous oil boomtown, had long been running out of basics like corn Continued on Page A6

When Tiah Joo Kim arrived at the Manhattan headquarters of the Trump Organization to pitch a hotel and condominium project in Vancouver, British Columbia, he expected the famous company with ventures across the globe to come with capacious offices and a staff of hundreds. Instead, he was led through a mere two floors with what appeared to be no more than a few dozen employees. “Lean,” Mr. Tiah, a young Malaysian developer, remembers thinking as he walked the halls. The first stop was a conference room, where Mr. Tiah was required to sell his vision to the boss’s three oldest children. Only after securing their support did he advance to the inner sanctum, with its sweeping views of Central Park. Mr. Tiah was not sure what to expect from the man whose face was beamed around the world through the reality television show “The Apprentice,” but the conversation that afternoon in 2012 was casual and warm. Donald J. Trump spent more time showing off a Shaquille O’Neal shoe and a Mike Tyson championship belt — prize artifacts from his display of sports memorabilia — than interrogating Mr. Tiah on the details of his business plan. “You’re a good-looking guy,” Mr. Tiah recalled Mr. Trump telling him as he gave the project his blessing. Then Mr. Trump’s lawyers and other top executives swooped in

ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

Donald J. Trump and Phil Ruffin in 2008 at Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. to play hardball — working alongside Donald Trump Jr. to negotiate the confidential agreements that would allow the Vancouver development to be branded with Mr. Trump’s name and managed by his company. The talks consumed 16-hour days for nearly a week, Mr. Tiah said, explaining: “It was tiring. They’re tough.” That is the way business has been done at the Trump Organization, a relatively small company with a big reach and a bigger selfimage that has come under intense scrutiny as its chief prepares to become president of the United States. With extensive entanglements around the world, many packaged in a network of licensing agreeContinued on Page A14

U.S. Eye in the Sky Glares at ISIS As a Pivotal Battle Brews in Syria By ERIC SCHMITT

ABOARD A JOINT STARS SURVEILLANCE PLANE, over Northern Iraq — Flying at 30,000 feet, the powerful radar aboard this Air Force jet peered deep into Syrian territory, hunting for targets on the ground to strike in the looming offensive to seize Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital. It was on a mission like this several weeks ago that analysts discovered a hiding place in the central Syrian desert where the Islamic State was stashing scores of oil tanker trucks that provide the terrorist group with a crucial financial lifeline. Acting on that tip and other intelligence, two dozen American warplanes destroyed 188 of the trucks in the biggest airstrike of the year, eliminating an estimated $2 million in oil revenue for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Even as the American-led air campaign conducts bombing missions to support Iraqi troops fighting the Islamic State in Mosul, American commanders said the

Donations Seen Influencing Aid By Kidney Fund By KATIE THOMAS and REED ABELSON

The American Kidney Fund is one of the largest charities in the country, with an annual budget of over $250 million. Its marquee program helps pay insurance premiums for thousands of people who need dialysis, a lifesaving and expensive treatment for kidney failure. The organization has earned accolades for its efficient use of the money. Under an agreement with the federal government, the Kidney Fund must distribute the aid based on a patient’s financial need. But the charity has resisted giving aid to patients at clinics that do not donate money to the fund, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The actions have limited crucial help for needy patients at these clinics. The agreement governing the relationship between the group and the companies forbids choosing patients based on their clinic. In multiple cases, the charity pushed back on workers at clinics that had not donated money, discouraging them from signing up their patients for assistance. Until recently, the Kidney Fund’s guidelines even said clinics should not apply for patient aid if the company had not donated to the charity. “I watched many patients who were not able to get that assistContinued on Page B5

air war would probably play an even greater role in Syria over the coming weeks in the battle to retake Raqqa. Newly recruited Syrian Arab militia fighters, allied with experienced Kurdish fighters, are encircling Raqqa. But they need allied bombing to weaken and dislodge enemy forces dug in there, and to cut off the ability for the Islamic State to rearm, refuel and reinforce its fighters. But with few spies in the city, American officials say assessing the enemy is difficult. “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the situation on the ground in Raqqa,” Lt. Gen. Jeffrey L. Harrigian, the air war commander, said in an interview from his headquarters in Qatar. “It’s improving. It’s still not at the level we’d like it to be.” The air operation is a pivotal component of a military campaign that has cost $12.5 million a day in Continued on Page A10

CHRIS M c GRATH/GETTY IMAGES

Christmas in Iraq A Christmas Day Mass with Iraqi and American forces at Mar Hanna Church in Qaraqosh, Iraq, outside Mosul. The town, largely Christian, was recently liberated from the Islamic State.

Pro Wrestling’s Intricate New Move: Into China By NEIL GOUGH

SHANGHAI — Wang Bin looked down. A man wearing a blue skintight unitard writhed at his feet. Mr. Wang grinned. This was the moment he had been waiting for. So, too, had Cheng Shi. When Mr. Wang lifted the writhing man and slammed him to the floor for a

three-count, it completed Mr. Cheng’s dream of watching a professional wrestler — battling in that most American of fake spectacles — who hailed from China. “I feel very proud and excited to see him onstage tonight, and so do all the fans,” Mr. Cheng, a 21-yearold student who makes fan videos for a Chinese audience, said before the match. He pointed at the screen of his smartphone to indi-

cate the thousands of people watching him on his live broadcast. “We are very, very excited.” Looking for eyeballs and new money sources, World Wrestling Entertainment — the company that brought Hulk Hogan and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson into American living rooms — has grand ambitions for a bigger but much more difficult market. It has Continued on Page A8

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George Michael Dies at 53 Mr. Michael performing in 1993. In his solo career after his duo Wham!, he chose to set pop superficiality aside. Page A19.

INTERNATIONAL A3-10

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BUSINESS DAY B1-6

Livid Netanyahu’s Dilemma

A City’s Anxiety Over Muslims

Donald Judd, Philosopher

How to Catch a Guitar Thief

2016’s Lessons for the Media

Israel’s prime minister, caught between settlements and the international comPAGE A4 munity, may have to choose.

Donald J. Trump’s remarks linking immigration to terrorist threats resonate in Hendersonville, N.C., where PAGE A11 little is known about Islam.

Years of the sculptor’s notebooks and manuscripts have culminated in “DonPAGE C1 ald Judd Writings.”

When Any News Is ‘Fake News’

Employees at a Sam Ash Music store in Manhattan spotted a guitar whose owner, a professional, didn’t know it had been stolen. Then they helped find a suspect. Crime Scene. PAGE A16

The critic Wesley Morris on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. PAGE C1

The news media is widely distrusted after a series of missteps in covering the presidential campaign. As journalists move into 2017, they must rededicate themselves to uncovering the PAGE B1 truth, Jim Rutenberg writes.

Choir Feared Lost in Jet Crash The Russian military plane went down with 92 people on board, including the famed Alexandrov Ensemble. PAGE A3

Some conservatives label any story that hurts their agenda as fabricated — and PAGE A11 the definition is expanding. SPORTSMONDAY D1-8

Nothing Left to Chance Coach Nick Saban’s football teams at Alabama recruit the best players at all PAGE D1 positions, even long snapper.

A Visit to ‘the Blacksonian’

Hurdles to Building Process An integrated contracting process for building projects, shown to save time and money by bundling together the design and construction phases, is slow PAGE A16 to catch on in New York. EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21

Paul Krugman

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Changes in the Press Room The president-elect’s advisers say some conventions of White House media coverage are outdated, and journalists PAGE B1 are bracing for adjustments.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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Inside The Times

MICHAEL KIRBY SMITH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Tallying 12 Days of Gifts MADISON AVENUE 57TH STREET SOHO SHORT HILLS AMERICANA MANHASSET 800.550.0005 CHANEL.COM

For those who gave their true loves all the gifts from “The 12 Days of Christmas,” including seven swans a-swimming, the grand total this year ran to $34,363.49. All told, the whimsical splurge rose a little less than 1 percent over last year. Page B3.

INTERNATIONAL

NEW YORK

SPORTS

Brazilian Church for Sages Now Nearly in Ruins

A Dream That Survived War and Street Life

UConn Women’s Basketball Rises Despite an Exodus

The Positivist Church of Brazil joins many structures of the country’s past that have fallen into disrepair. Rio de Janeiro Journal. PAGE A4

A man who left behind a civil war in his native Ivory Coast, and settled alone in the Bronx, relied on his ambition to become a professional soccer player to face adversity and personal challenges around the world. Neediest Cases. PAGE A17

Even after losing three superstars last season, the women’s basketball team is undefeated again, providing yet another reminder of Coach Geno Auriemma’s teaching prowess after a run of consecutive championship seasons. PAGE D1

BUSINESS

ARTS

Snopes Sees More Attacks As Its Responsibilities Grow

Treading Carefully In an Operetta’s Revival

The fact-checking website, which joined a coalition of sites that will work with Facebook to identify and flag suspicious internet content, has drawn fire from individuals online, and even inspired fake news stories about its founder. PAGE B1

Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduringly popular 1885 piece “The Mikado,” set to open at Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in Manhattan, has forced those producing it to rethink the work’s more culturally insensitivite aspects. PAGE C1

themed products misstated, in some copies, the given name of the wife of Michael Patchen, a creator of the Menorah Tree. She is Jenny, not Mary.

swimming competitions described incorrectly two people in Ireland, who in February, swimming in 40 degrees, lasted 2.05 miles in 57 minutes 45 seconds and 2.06 miles in 54:49. The swimmers were a man and a woman, not two men.

OBITUARIES

Report an Error: nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397). Editorials: letters@nytimes.com or fax (212) 556-3622. Public Editor: Readers concerned

about issues of journalistic integrity may reach the public editor at public@nytimes.com or (212) 5568044.

NATIONAL

Dozens Shot in Chicago Over Christmas Weekend At least 27 people were shot, seven fatally, in a city where homicides are up 56 percent this year. PAGE A13

OBITUARIES

George Michael, 53 He was a pop music icon who infused his work with social commentary. PAGE A19

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

‘‘

They will bury me there one day.

’’

YAMILET LUGO, an unemployed Venezuelan woman showing the empty plot next to the grave of her son, Kevin Lara Lugo, who died on his 16th birthday after hunger drove their family to eat toxic roots he had foraged from a field. [A6]

Crossword C3 Obituaries A19 TV Listings C6 Weather A12

Corrections INTERNATIONAL

WISH Genie in a bottle – Designed in 18K Gold

Available at The Shops at Columbus Circle, Bergdorf Goodman 7th Floor, Neiman Marcus and fine jewelers nationwide.

A map on Nov. 27 with an article about the struggles of the Houthis, a rebel group that has seized the Yemeni capital, Sana, and many other parts of the country, misidentified the country east of Iran in some editions. It is Pakistan, not Afghanistan. In addition, a reporting credit with the article misstated, in some editions, the given name of a contributor. He is Shuaib Almosawa, not Shuab. BUSINESS DAY

An article on Thursday about businesses that sell Hanukkah-

SPORTS

A picture caption on Dec. 2 with an article about Tiger Woods’s return to golf with his appearance in the Hero World Challenge misstated the shot Woods was shown watching in the first round. It was his third shot at the 13th hole, not his second shot at the 18th hole. An article on Dec. 18 about ice

An obituary on Friday about the playwright and screenwriter David Berry misstated how he entered the Army. He enlisted; he was not drafted.

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The Sports Year in Pictures Andy Murray of Britain after winning Wimbledon in July. Between the lines, 2016 was a year for big victories. The Chicago Cubs ended a 108-year run of futility, and the Cavaliers gave Cleveland its first major sports title in 52 years. Page D4. THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018-1405 The New York Times (ISSN 0362-4331) is published daily. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to The New York Times, P.O. Box 8042, Davenport, IA, 52808-8042. Mail Subscription Rates* 1 Yr. 6 Mos. Weekdays and Sundays...............$910.00 $455.00 Weekdays ....................................... 524.16 262.08 Sundays.......................................... 447.20 223.60

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

Neil MacFarquhar and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting from Moscow.

YEVGENY REUTOV/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Rescue workers on Sunday near the site where a military plane bound for Syria crashed in the Black Sea off Sochi, Russia.

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Assad, the leader of the lone remaining Russian ally in the region, whose forces have been fighting an insurgency for nearly six years. Russian forces have been instrumental in helping the Damascus government regain the initiative, with the final rebels expelled from the besieged city of Aleppo on Thursday. Three journalists from Channel One, Russia’s main television station, were on the plane, as were journalists from the Zvezda and NTV television networks, news reports said. Yelizaveta P. Glinka, a prominent Russian philanthropist and a member of the presidential council on human rights and civil society, was also on the list of people on board. Mr. Putin recently honored Mrs. Glinka with a state award for her human rights and charity work. Valery V. Khalilov, the ensemble’s artistic director,

was also on the plane, according to the list of passengers. Mr. Putin expressed his condolences to relatives of the victims, and he declared Monday a national day of mourning. (Christmas is not celebrated as an official holiday in Russia on Dec. 25, because the Russian Orthodox Church observes it on Jan. 7.) “First of all, I would like to express my sincere condolences to the families of our citizens, who died today, as a result of an aviation catastrophe over the Black Sea this morning,” Mr. Putin said in St. Petersburg, according to remarks published on the Kremlin’s website. He also ordered Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev to establish a state commission, headed by the transportation minister, Maxim Sokolov, to investigate the crash. The Defense Ministry said that 11 bodies had been recovered as search efforts continued, Russian news agencies reported. A memorial was installed inside the Sochi airport, and relatives of the victims were whisked away by the authorities to a specially designated zone where they were treated by psychiatrists. Mr. Sokolov told journalists inside the terminal building that the rescue effort would not stop at night. “It is premature to say anything about the causes of this tragedy,” he told reporters. More than 30 vessels were deployed in the recovery operation, Mr. Sokolov said, and the Defense Ministry said that more than 100 divers had been sent to the crash site. Founded in the Soviet era, the

Alexandrov Ensemble, which had performed in Syria earlier this year, is the official band of the Russian armed forces. It consists of an orchestra, a choir and a dance ensemble, and is one of the two Russian orchestras allowed to use the title Red Army Choir. The ensemble was founded by Aleksandr V. Aleksandrov, a prominent Soviet composer and the author of the music of the Russian anthem. His grandson Yevgeny told Meduza, a Russian news website, that “the best members of the ensemble died.” “All the best soloists, the whole choir,” he said. “Everything will collapse now. The best ones are gone.” Several independent news outlets in Russia reported that the Alexandrov Ensemble had planned to give a concert in Aleppo. Until recently, the Tu-154, designed in the 1960s, was one of the most widely used civilian aircraft in Russian aviation. The plane that crashed on Sunday was made in 1983, underwent planned maintenance work in the fall, and was operated by an experienced pilot, the Defense Ministry said. The age and reputation of the Tu-154, as well as the fact that the aircraft had flown out of secure military airfields, meant that most senior officials speaking publicly ruled out the possibility that an attack had caused the crash. But there was speculation by a few aviation experts, echoed by some officials, that terrorism could not be ruled out given the suddenness with which the plane disappeared and the size of the debris field. “For us the worst version is an act of terrorism, because if this is the case, this will mean that we have paid another bill for Aleppo,” Vadim Lukashevich, an aviation expert, told Dozhd, an independent television station. In one of Russia’s most recent air disasters, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for planting a bomb onboard a Russian civilian Airbus that crashed in Egypt in October 2015, killing all 224 people aboard. Another Russian-made military plane crashed in eastern Siberia on Monday, seriously injuring 16 of the 39 people aboard, and the aviation authorities recently grounded the country’s newest civilian airliner, the Sukhoi Superjet 100, because of concerns about metal fatigue.

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SOCHI, Russia — A Russian aircraft bound for Syria carrying a famed military band to entertain Russia’s forces there crashed into the Black Sea moments after takeoff on Sunday, and the authorities said all 92 people aboard were believed dead. The cause of the crash is under investigation, although initial Russian news media reports indicated it was a technical failure rather than terrorism. The Russian military has had only minor casualties throughout its deployment in Syria, but the country has experienced a series of setbacks in recent days. On Monday, the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at an art exhibit in Ankara, with the killer yelling, “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!” That came not long after forces from the Islamic State recaptured the storied Syrian city of Palmyra, forcing the Russian garrison that had been stationed there since helping to take the city last spring to flee. The military plane, a Russianmade Tupolev Tu-154, disappeared from radar two minutes after taking off from the resort town of Sochi. Russia’s official weather forecast agency said that conditions near the airport were “normal, easy,” the Interfax news agency reported. The airplane was technically fit, the Defense Ministry said. Wreckage of the plane, which was carrying 84 passengers and eight crew members, was found in the sea, most of it about one mile from shore, the Defense Ministry said. No survivors have been found at the crash site, Russian officials said. Passengers on the flight, which originated in Moscow and stopped in Sochi to refuel, included 64 members of the Alexandrov Ensemble, the Russian military choir, who were traveling to Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base in Syria. The band planned to serenade Russian personnel in Syria on New Year’s Eve. President Vladimir V. Putin deployed Russian armed forces in Syria in September 2015, ostensibly to fight terrorism but primarily to prop up President Bashar al-

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Russian Singers Among 92 Feared Dead in Jet Crash

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E.U. Agency in Limbo as Hidden ‘Brexit’ Costs Mount By STEPHEN CASTLE

LONDON — When it switched offices in London not long ago, the European Medicines Agency signed a 25-year lease on a shiny new building in the east of the city. Just two years later, the organization is preparing to relocate again, but this time its likely move has sent tremors through Britain’s pharmaceutical industry and raised fears over public safety. The uncertain fate of the European Medicines Agency, which, like the Food and Drug Administration, oversees the approval of drugs for use across Europe, follows Britain’s vote in June to leave the European Union. That surprise decision means the organization, a European Union agency, will almost certainly have to leave Britain, just one of the many unanticipated consequences of the vote that is forcing the country to unscramble 40 years of European integration. From the car industry to finance, that task is proving messier and more complicated than expected, with effects more farreaching than anyone imagined — in this case with worrying implications for Britain’s vibrant and successful biotech and pharmaceuticals sector and Europe’s public health. With the agency’s days in London almost certainly numbered, cities like Stockholm and Strasbourg, France, are scrambling to lure its team of experts, who license drugs and monitor their use for safety. But the uncertainty has left the agency’s executive director, Guido Rasi, “very worried” as experts start to quit and others are recruited away. “The consequence, and the direct impact on the public health, is my main concern,” Mr. Rasi said, in a room overlooking London’s old docks. Among its tasks, the agency oversees a globalized supply chain for drugs in liaison with other international regulators. “Imagine if we are late in reaction for some crisis, something going wrong, something unexpected, some quality issue,” he added. “If we are not in a position to intervene fast and efficiently,” he added, “that is a serious threat to public health.” Though not critical yet, he said, the staff problems have grown since the referendum on Britain’s exit from the bloc, known as Brexit. Mr. Rasi has already lost half a dozen experts from the agency’s 890 staff members, a noticeable number after years when resignations were rare. While well-qualified experts are being courted with job offers, uncertainty is making it difficult to attract replacements.

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Offices at the European Medicines Agency in London. The agency is likely to relocate. Most worrisome is an internal assessment suggesting that relocating the agency might mean losing up to half its personnel. That would be a big setback. In two decades, the agency has authorized about 1,000 products for use across the 28-nation European Union plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. With a full workload of applications in the pipeline, the organization is already close to the breaking point, Mr. Rasi said. If it loses more than 15 percent of its experts, he added, the agency will probably not be able to maintain current schedules for licensing new drugs and monitoring existing ones. Some pharmaceutical companies are worried, too. Moving the agency would cause “tremendous disruption,” said Andrew Witty, the chief executive of Britain’s biggest drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline. “This is a regulator who is keeping an eye on the health and safety of hundreds of millions of Europeans,” Mr. Witty told Bloomberg TV. “You don’t want them with their eye off the ball.” Little of this impinged on the acrimonious campaign ahead of Britain’s vote on June 23 to quit the bloc, during which the agency’s future — or that of the European Banking Authority, which is also in London — was barely mentioned. With the implications of Brexit sinking in, there are fears of a broader threat to Britain’s life sciences sector. “Proximity does still matter,

and the fact that the E.M.A. is here has made a difference,” Daniel Zeichner, a lawmaker for Britain’s opposition Labour Party, said. “This is a globally competitive industry, and we are really good at it, but it can go elsewhere.” Mr. Zeichner, whose Cambridge constituency has a large life sciences sector, also fears that Brexit could increase the cost of drug authorizations and slow access to new medicines for Britons. Some hope that the disruption can be avoided, and that the agency might remain where it is, with Britain continuing to participate. That seems plausible only if Britain seeks a close relationship with the European Union, as Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein did. But those countries agreed to be integrated into the single market, accepting free movement of people as well as goods, capital and services. Prime Minister Theresa May argues that Britons voted against such open borders, and is likely to resist that move. Outside the bloc, Britain might opt to duplicate the agency’s work, but at a significant cost. Drug companies might require two authorizations for new products — one British, one European — pushing up the prices of medicine. For the European Medicines Agency, Brexit creates scientific as well as logistical problems. It works closely with Britain’s domestic authority, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, and British experts take the lead in assessing about

one-fifth of drug authorizations considered by the European counterpart. If British experts withdraw after Brexit, burdens on other European nations will increase. But for Mr. Rasi, his staff members and their families, uncertainty over the headquarters is the biggest issue, one that lies in the hands of the European Union’s heads of state and government. In theory, they could make a decision speedily once Britain starts negotiations on Brexit, something it intends to do by the end of March. But history suggests that may not be easy. In all, there are 45 European Union agencies, or similar bodies, and they are considered trophies for member countries because they bring both prestige and economic benefits. The European Medicines Agency, for example, has an annual budget of a little over $300 million and generates significant revenue. Most weekdays its experts fill 350 London hotel rooms. When the European Food Safety Authority was up for grabs, Silvio Berlusconi, then the prime minister of Italy, blocked Finland’s bid to host it, saying, “The Finns don’t even know what prosciutto is.” The organization eventually went to Parma, Italy. Mr. Rasi hopes for a quick decision and that any new location has good transport links and infrastructure. The competition promises to be fierce. “That is the only nice side of the story,” he said. “It seems we are very popular. They all like us; they all want us.”

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MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

Israel Wonders if Netanyahu Will Have to Play His Hand By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — For years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a conservative, has played a double act, competing domestically with his rightwing rivals in backing the settlement project all over the occupied West Bank while professing support for a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Now, with the stinging United Nations Security Council resolution on Friday condemning Israeli settlement construction as lacking any legal validity, Israeli politicians and analysts on the right, on the left and in the political center say Mr. Netanyahu’s game may soon be up. The Israeli right, feeling empowered by the advent of the Trump administration, which is expected to be more sympathetic to Israel’s current policies, is pushing Mr. Netanyahu to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, long considered the only viable solution to the conflict. Naftali Bennett, the leader of the prosettlement Jewish Home party in Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, with whom Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud Party compete for votes, is goading him

to take on more extreme positions like annexing parts of the West Bank, adding to a sense in Israel that the real Mr. Netanyahu may have to stand up and decide which side he is on. “He has to choose between the international community and Bennett,” said Shlomo Avineri, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It is not an easy choice, but he has to make a choice,” Professor Avineri said, adding: “Is Israel going to alienate itself from the whole world for the sake of settlement activity? And it is the whole world. Is this what Zionism is about?” For a second consecutive day on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu denounced the departing Obama administration, publicly accusing it of having orchestrated Friday’s Security Council resolution, despite denials from Washington. The United States refrained from using its veto power, as it had done many times before to shield Israel, and abstained in the 14-to-0 vote. “From the information that we have, we have no doubt that the Obama administration initiated it, stood behind it, coordinated on the wording and demanded

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, on Sunday in Jerusalem, has professed support for a twostate solution with the Palestinians.

POOL PHOTO BY DAN BALILTY

that it be passed,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. Referring to the American secretary of state, Mr. Netanyahu added, “As I told John Kerry on Thursday, friends don’t take friends to the Security Council,” and he said he was looking forward to working with President-elect Donald J. Trump's administration when it takes office next month. The Foreign Ministry summoned ambassadors of countries that had voted in

favor of the resolution for personal meetings with ministry officials in Jerusalem, despite the Christmas holiday, which some of those countries celebrate. In a highly unusual move, Mr. Netanyahu, who is also the foreign minister, summoned the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro, for a meeting on Sunday night. Mr. Netanyahu also instructed his ministers to reduce their diplomatic activities and contacts with counterparts

from the countries that had voted for the resolution for the next three weeks, until the American administration changes, and to minimize travel to those countries, according to Israeli news reports. In an additional step, the defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, instructed Israel’s agencies to suspend contact with Palestinian Authority representatives on some unspecified civil matters, though the measure was not supposed to affect security coordination or meetings about water, agriculture and the economy. With the Israeli occupation in its 50th year and the peace process frozen, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official and the Palestinians’ veteran negotiator, called on Israel “to seize the opportunity, to wake up, to stop the violence, to stop settlements and to resume negotiations.” Mr. Netanyahu says he is ready for negotiations anytime, but with no preconditions. The Security Council vote seemed to have caught Israel off guard. “I hope for Netanyahu’s sake (and also for ours) that he knows the truth at least deep in his heart — it was the chronicle of a failure foretold,” Ben Caspit, a political commentator, wrote in the Maariv newsContinued on Page A8

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NADIA SHIRA COHEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A depiction of Clotilde de Vaux, with whom Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, was in love, at the crumbling Positivist Church of Brazil. RIO DE JANEIRO JOURNAL

Nearly in Ruins: A Temple for the Sages By SIMON ROMERO

RIO DE JANEIRO — Neighbors from surrounding apartment buildings toss empty beer bottles through a gaping hole in the roof of the once-majestic church. Pigeons roam the cavernous nave, their excrement piling up on the floor. A watchman guards treasures from the thieves who prey on the city’s derelict buildings. The neoclassical Positivist Church of Brazil, with its soaring columns and a cryptic sign above its entrance proclaiming, “The Living Are Forever and Increasingly Governed by the Dead,” was long a captivating sight on Benjamin Constant Street near the old city center. These days, the crumbling, graffiti-tagged church, whose freethinking founders helped modern Brazil rise from the ashes of an empire, is just another emblem of how Rio de Janeiro neglects its past, allowing grandeur to fall into ruin. “Congregants once gathered here to debate incendiary ideas originating in Paris, the holy city for the positivists,” said Christiane Souza, 48, the church’s heritage director. “Tragically, our institution now finds itself in a state of neglect, as if history is something Brazil should disdain.” Indeed, few Brazilians know much about positivism, the secular religion that was spread in Brazil in the second half of the 19th century by followers of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, except, perhaps, that two of his tenets — order and progress — remain emblazoned on the Brazilian flag. Roughly defined, Comte’s philosophy of positivism sought to reorganize society around the concept that explanations derived from science should be prized as a way of understanding the world. Positivism drew admirers in places including Mexico, Britain

A bust of Comte, left, and other sculptures were moved to the basement of the church when the building’s roof caved in. and Turkey. Taking things a step further, Comte created his own religion to spread his beliefs. Some facets of his Religion of Humanity resembled Roman Catholicism. The interior of the decaying church here in Rio still has the feel of an austere cathedral, albeit one where services stopped after part of the roof collapsed during a storm in 2009. Worshipers exalted a female icon similar to the Virgin Mary and modeled on Clotilde de Vaux, with whom Comte was in love. But Comte also told followers to worship

humanity, not God, and created a new calendar. Its starting year was 1789, when a mob stormed the Bastille in a defining moment of the French Revolution; he named months after historical titans like Gutenberg, Charlemagne, Shakespeare and Dante. Brazil, a slaveholding empire ruled by a monarchy for most of the 19th century, was fertile ground for the Religion of Humanity. Francophile adherents to the faith included leading figures in the tumultuous period after the 1889 coup that toppled Brazil’s emperor, such as Cândido Rondon, the explorer who

mapped out far-flung stretches of the Amazon rain forest with Theodore Roosevelt. In other countries, the site where such luminaries assembled might today be enshrined as a museum. Not in Rio, where the authorities last year opened a lavish Museum of Tomorrow to contemplate the future, even as Belle Époque buildings in the city waste away in various stages of decay. Still, Giovanni Fernandes, the custodian of the Positivist Church, sometimes lets a visitor or two slip inside, offering a glimpse into Brazil’s not-so-distant past. Scattered around the entrance are century-old pamphlets in Portuguese and French that the positivists once printed in the basement. The titles of the rotting booklets reflect the issues, political infighting and prejudices that used to consume Brazil: “Obligatory Vaccination and the Politics of the Republic,” “The Question of the Border Between Brazil and Argentina,” “In Defense of Brazilian Savages.” One room with a spiral staircase contains a trove of sculptures shrouded in dust, including a statue of Clotilde de Vaux cradling an infant. Decaying paintings on the wall seem to depict aristocrats in European-style attire lost in philosophical reflection. Once in a while, scholars emerge from the church with coveted discoveries, as when a mildewy drawer stuffed with old papers yielded the original sketches for Brazil’s flag, which positivists created over the objections of rivals who wanted one modeled on that of the United States. “There’s so much dust and grime in here that occasionally I tell visitors they should bring a surgical mask,” said Mr. Fernandes, 57, the church’s lonely watchman. “I’m often asked if the building is haunted, and I reply, Continued on Page A8

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Poisoned by Hunger: Life and Death in Venezuela

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Yamilet Lugo, left, breast-feeding on the porch with her daughter Kimberlit and her grandchild. Top, Ms. Lugo foraging for jobito fruit with Jesús Maestre, a 17-year-old friend of her son’s. From Page A1 flour and bread. The cutlery factory where Ms. Lugo had worked shut down in May because it could no longer obtain the materials to make plastic, joining many across the country that have gone idle. That left the family unable to buy what food was left. At the hospital, Ms. Lugo said, there was no respite. Like so many clinics throughout the country, the one in Maturín ran out of basic supplies like intravenous solutions, leaving the family to search the city and haggle with black-market sellers in the hours before Kevin died. “This boy dies this way for no reason at all,” said Lilibeth Díaz, his aunt, looking at Kevin’s grave, his name etched in wet concrete by a friend’s fingertip. Kevin is the baby in the overalls in the picture on his mother’s wall, the one who earned the perfect attendance awards. They still hang on the walls, too. The markers in the kitchen wall ticked off his growth. By 12, he was about 4 feet 11 inches; by 14, he was four inches taller. His name is scribbled in child’s writing on a light switch in the bedroom he and his mother shared. “Active Kevin” says another doodle on a cabinet there. On her cellphone, Ms. Lugo stared at a picture of her embracing her son last year, on the front porch he had painted yellow. She has changed a lot since then. Her collarbone now protrudes from her neck. “I weigh 40 kilos now,” she said, 88 pounds. Kevin was losing weight, too. By spring, everyone in the family was. Then José Rafael Castro, Ms. Lugo’s boyfriend and the only other breadwinner in the household, came home with bad news: The construction supply factory where he worked making cinder blocks had let him go because the owners could no longer find cement. First, the family ate mangoes. By summer, it had turned to yuca, which grew in a plot owned by a relative a short bus ride away. “This was our food morning, noon and night,” Ms. Lugo said. By July, there was no money even for the bus fare to the field, the family said. It started looking elsewhere. Kevin’s birthday was coming up. The family knew this would be his first without a cake, but it had devised a solution: A neighbor down the street was celebrating a birthday and had offered to set aside a slice of Jesymar Añez contributed reporting.

cake for Kevin. Still, the family needed something to eat that night. It had gone three days without food, and everyone was growing weak. There were few options. This was not the capital, Caracas, where food was often scarce in the barrios, but at least there was always another shop or black-market seller to try. Nor was it the border, where foreign products could be bought. Instead, the family lived deep in Venezuela’s interior, where even cooking oil was scarce and products like bread and corn flour vanished almost as quickly as they arrived in stores. At times chicken was available, but the price was too high. Kevin and Mr. Castro had heard about an abandoned field a 45-minute walk from their home where other neighbors had been foraging for bitter yuca. As they emerged from the field, four men with pistols surrounded them and demanded their cellphones, Mr. Castro said. It was a narrow brush with disaster, and the two men breathed a sigh of relief that they still had the yuca. They did not know the worst was to come.

The family knew the risks of bitter yuca and had tried to dry it to extract the toxins, a practice used to make a dried bread served locally. “We had nothing else to eat,” Mr. Castro said. But by 11:30 p.m. on July 25, the night before Kevin’s birthday, the family was getting sick. Mr. Castro said he was vomiting. Kevin was on the floor. Because they had no car, an hour passed before they found a neighbor’s car to take Kevin to the hospital. As he finally left, Kevin remembered the piece of cake. “I will be back tomorrow for it,” Ms. Lugo recalled him saying. Yuca intoxication is treated with gastric suction, also called stomach pumping, and intravenous solutions, among other measures. But Kevin’s family said he had waited untreated for hours in the crowded halls of the Manuel Núñez Tovar hospital, without being examined by a doctor. Dr. Luis Briceño, the hospital’s director, said it was a common situation at his hospital, which is stretched thin. Sometimes his emergency room, with a capacity for 200

Kevin Lara Lugo’s school uniform, laid out in his bedroom by his mother. “We did everything together,” she said.

people, is packed with 450 patients seeking help. “There is always someone who doesn’t receive treatment,” Dr. Briceño said. He said medical shortages were so common that patients often had to find and buy their own supplies, like intravenous solutions, though he thought the hospital probably had some the night Kevin arrived. But Ms. Lugo said a nurse had told the family to go out and buy the intravenous solution itself. Relatives found it from a blackmarket seller. The cost — about $4 — was more than they could afford. Finally, another family with extra bottles of the solution gave two to Kevin, but there was little change in his condition. Around 4 a.m. on July 26, the morning of his birthday, Kevin could barely speak. “His stomach felt like stone,” his mother said. Ms. Lugo was alone with her son. She recalled a black liquid oozing from his mouth. Then, at 4:45 a.m., Kevin was dead. The next morning, Jesús Maestre, a 17year-old friend of Kevin’s, saw his friends gathered outside the hall in Kevin’s school. They were speaking in hushed tones. “They asked, ‘Did you hear what happened to Kevin?’” he said. “Then it hit me — he was gone.” Kevin’s coffin was trailed by a long parade of friends the day of his funeral, a path his mother retraces every Sunday when she visits the grave. On a recent day, she pointed out the Catholic church where he was baptized and the street he played on as a child. A cousin of his walked by. “Look at him,” she said. “They look exactly the same.” And she said it again: “Since my mother raised me, and now with my children, we always had a tradition of singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the morning.” The day of the funeral, she sang the song before the coffin was lowered. “We did everything together,” Ms. Lugo said later, pointing to the headstone where her son’s name had been etched in wet concrete. Gesturing toward the empty plot beside it, she said, “They will bury me there one day.” But back home, there were more mouths to feed. Ms. Lugo had given birth to another child two months before. Her 13-year-old daughter, Kimberlit, had recently given birth, too. The two spent an afternoon nursing the babies together on the porch. That was the only food in the household. There was nothing in the kitchen.

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Once Grand, A Temple For the Sages Is Crumbling From Page A4

PHOTOGRAPHS BY YUYANG LIU FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Wang Bin before his W.W.E. debut in September in Shanghai. Much is riding on Mr. Wang, who is the organization’s first wrestler from mainland China.

Pro Wrestling’s Intricate New Move: Into the Chinese Market From Page A1 started a new service live-streaming Chinese-language matches and commentary. It is also combing China’s provinces for more beefy talent like Mr. Wang. China presents formidable challenges. Entertainment names like Netflix and Rupert Murdoch have taken aim at China’s population of 1.4 billion only to run afoul of the country’s tight controls over media. Wrestling’s cartoon violence and sometimes salacious story lines could attract unwanted attention from the government. And while it has its fans, Americanstyle wrestling-as-scripted-entertainment is largely unheard-of among mainland Chinese. “There is no presence of product over here,” said John Cena, the square-jawed wrestler and action movie star who has learned to speak some Chinese as part of the push. By tackling the language, he added, “I’m kind of a vehicle to leverage what we’ve done.” Wrestling’s answer is to go local — and digital. Bypassing statecontrolled broadcast television, it has teamed with a video-streaming company to reach fans though computers and mobile devices. It has also geared up efforts to introduce a new audience to the suplex, the body slam and the drop-kick. W.W.E. has hired four full-time social media directors in Shanghai to maintain local-language social media accounts for its wrestlers and executives. It is also hosting viewing parties, like one this month in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, in which locals devoured pizza and cream sodas while watching a pay-per-view wrestling match and playing the W.W.E.’s latest Xbox video game. Success requires exposing Chinese audiences to a new type of entertainment — a choreographed drama in which the outcome is known, though its danCarolyn Zhang contributed research.

Wrestling fans in Shanghai, where the W.W.E. is gearing up efforts to attract audiences. gers and injuries are sometimes shockingly real. “They’ve never really seen anything like us,” said Paul Levesque, W.W.E.’s executive in charge of talent and live events, who is also a partly retired wrestler better known as Triple H. “The athleticism is very real. The story lines and the theater part of it is where they had a hard time with the blurred line of that.” To friends unfamiliar with wrestling, “I find that the shortest way to tell them is to say it’s an American version — a global version — of the kung fu novel,” said Jay Li, a longtime executive at multinational companies in China who in April joined W.W.E. as its general manager for greater China. “They get it immediately, because they immediately have a cultural connection and a mental image of what this is about.” While a lot of attention has been placed in recent years on the expansion into Hollywood of Chinese companies like Dalian

Wanda, most foreign entertainment firms struggle to make comparable inroads in China. For some, like Disney, penetrating China has meant giving the Communist Party greater say over its business on the mainland. Sports — or something that looks like a sport — might be different. Sports enjoys thematic support from the government, which is big on hosting international events like the Olympics and promoting sports like soccer. China’s push to get soccer into schools and make the country a power in the sport has led companies to pay big sums for broadcast rights. “Sports has historically been underdeveloped in China and online, and a lot of players are looking for ways to monetize that,” said Vivek Couto, a founder and a director at Media Partners Asia, an industry research consultant. Professional wrestling could use the eyeballs. Like other media companies, W.W.E. is grappling

with the new world of cord-cutting, in which viewers drop their cable subscriptions and order shows, à la carte, via the internet. International viewers offer one potential growth area. They make up only about a quarter of the paid subscribers on W.W.E.’s digital subscription service, which is one of the biggest contributors to the company’s bottom line. As China shows, international growth isn’t always easy. In October, W.W.E. told investors it was still waiting to offer subscriptions directly to Chinese viewers. For now it works with a Chinese video company service called PPTV, which streams the company’s weekly flagship shows, called “SmackDown” and “RAW,” with real-time Mandarin commentary. (Suplex, in case you were wondering, translates as deshi beishuai, or “German-style back throw.”) PPTV subscriptions start at less than $3 per month, roughly a third of what W.W.E.’s own subscription service costs outside China, and

include movies and other shows. Much rides on Mr. Wang, W.W.E.’s first mainland wrestler. The company’s social media team works to make him a star — his verified account on the Weibo social media service recently featured videos of him training at W.W.E.’s huge facility in Orlando, Fla. Seven other mainlanders, six men and one woman, will relocate to Orlando in January. Mr. Wang, a 22-year-old native of eastern Anhui Province, was an athlete after middle school, a member of the provincial rowing team. He later moved to Shanghai and took up sparring, and caught the attention of representatives from Inoki Genome Federation, a big Japanese wrestling and mixed martial arts promotion. Mr. Wang spent three years in Japan before he was noticed by W.W.E. He signed a three-year development deal with the American company and started training in Orlando over the summer in preparation for his China debut. When the moment finally arrived in Shanghai in September, Mr. Wang entered the arena to modern Chinese music. He gave the crowd a traditional Chinese, kung fu-style greeting, pressing his right fist into his left palm. His opponent, a wrestler named Bo Dallas, was booed by the Shanghai crowd before Mr. Wang tossed him to the mat, pinning him in a three-count on the second try. Mr. Wang doesn’t yet have a defined act or character, or even a flashy name. One of the oldest such personas in W.W.E.-style wrestling is the foreign heel, or bad guy; those include personas like Mr. Fuji, a Japanese villain played by Harry Fujiwara. In an interview, Mr. Wang said he wasn’t a big believer in appealing to such nationalistic tropes. “People shouldn’t see you for your nationality or ethnic group,” he said. “It’s less about that and more about what you can do, personally, as a warrior and a figure in the ring.”

‘No, I wouldn’t work alongside any ghosts.’” Historians say the eerie emptiness of the structure, which was influenced by the Panthéon in Paris, stands in contrast with the role the Positivist Church once had as a point of rendezvous for sages seeking to drag Brazil into the modern age. Positivists staked out progressive stances on an array of issues, waging crusades against government corruption and in favor of legislation to improve working conditions for poor Brazilians. Clashing with an entrenched oligarchy, positivists campaigned for Brazilian abolition in 1888. José Murilo de Carvalho, 77, an eminent Brazilian historian, said positivists had despised slavery so much that they had forbidden well-heeled congregants to own slaves and promoted the glorification of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian slave revolution. “Imagine how that went over in a slaveholding country on edge over any whisper of uprisings,” Mr. Carvalho said. “The positivists were extremely forward-looking for their time.” Still, while Comte’s Religion of Humanity had more sway in Brazil than in many other countries, the faith never really caught on among Brazilians beyond a core group of adherents thought to number in the hundreds in Rio and the southern cities Porto Alegre and Curitiba. Some scholars say potential converts chafed at facets like a ban on remarrying after one’s spouse died and the religion’s treatment of women, who were to draw a salary for raising children but were prohibited from finding jobs outside the home. Then there was the sense of bewilderment over certain posi-

Meager funds to keep a church from collapsing altogether. tions by Comte, like his belief that the brain is an organ through which dead people influence the living — hence the enigmatic sign that once adorned the church’s gate. Until around a decade ago, a dwindling group of about 10 congregants still convened in the church for services, before the roof collapse. Now the descendants of devotees donate their own time and meager funds to keep the building from collapsing altogether. “We have thousands of rare books in here, not to mention statues, paintings, banners, ledgers, correspondence and who knows what else,” said Ms. Souza, the heritage director, whose father, Danton Voltaire Pereira de Souza, led the church until his death in 2014. “It saddens me to think we may be among the last of the positivists,” she said, leaning on scaffolding that was part of an abandoned restoration effort. “Sometimes it feels like we are standing against oblivion.”

Afghans Dismiss Female Pilot’s Safety Fears Israel Wonders How Long Netanyahu

Can Back Settlers and 2-State Solution

By JAWAD SUKHANYAR

KABUL, Afghanistan — Contending that her “life isn’t at risk at all,” military officials in Afghanistan have asked that the United States reject the asylum case of Capt. Niloofar Rahmani, the first female fixed-wing pilot in the Afghan Air Force. On Thursday, Captain Rahmani revealed that she had applied for asylum this summer, saying she felt unsafe in Afghanistan, where she and her family have received death threats. For the last 15 months, she has been training at air bases in Arkansas, Florida and Texas. Captain Rahmani said that her Afghan male colleagues in the air force treated her with contempt and that she felt at risk. “Things are not changing” for the better in Afghanistan, Captain Rahmani said in an interview on Friday. “Things are getting worse and worse.” Gen. Mohammad Radmanish, a Defense Ministry spokesman, disputed her claims of being in danger. “I am sure she lied by saying she was threatened, just to win the asylum case,” General Radmanish said on Sunday. “It is baseless that she claimed her life was at risk while serving in the Afghan Air Force.” “Since Captain Rahmani’s claim

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Capt. Niloofar Rahmani is seeking asylum in the United States. is new, we expect her to change her mind and return to her own country and continue serving as a pilot,” the general said. “We request from our American friends and government to reject her asylum case and send her back, because knowing the truth, Captain Rahmani’s life isn’t at risk at all.” The American government has celebrated Captain Rahmani as an example of its success in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan. In 2015 the State Department honored her with its annual Women of Courage award, and Michelle Obama praised her

courage. In Afghanistan, few supported her decision, and there were worries that her asylum request would affect the process of training Afghan pilots outside the country. “Captain Rahmani’s claim that she was harassed in the workplace is not true, because in the air force all the pilots and staff are well-educated and highly trained people,” said Col. Ayan Khan, a helicopter pilot in the Afghan Air Force. “How can they harass their female colleague who serves along them?”

paper on Sunday. Many commentators said the Security Council vote partly reflected a history of conflict between Mr. Netanyahu and President Obama over the settlements and Mr. Netanyahu’s anger over the Iranian nuclear deal. They also pointed to Mr. Netanyahu’s increasingly vocal backing of the settler cause. That includes his advancement of highly contentious legislation, known as the Regulation Bill, that would retroactively legalize settler outposts and homes built on privately owned Palestinian land and force the owners to accept compensation. Mr. Netanyahu and his attorney general had warned that the bill, which recently passed a first reading in Parliament, contravenes international law and could land Israeli officials in the defendant dock of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. “After he said it, he rushed to vote in favor of the bill. Why?” Mr. Caspit wrote. “Because of Bennett. The fear of the possibility that he would not be able to siphon seats from Bennett next time on Election Day caused him to act

like a small-time grocery owner, instead of a national leader.” Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister and a leader of the center-left Zionist Union, wrote on Facebook after the Security Council vote, “The Security Council decision is bad for Israel and it is the result of Netanyahu’s surrender

A U.N. resolution that condemns settlements could force a leader to make a choice. to the extreme right.” Even Haggai Segal, a prominent settler and the editor in chief of a right-wing newspaper, Makor Rishon, wrote in recent months that the Regulation Bill had “no chance” because it would be invalidated by Israel’s Supreme Court and would be used by the International Criminal Court “to incriminate Israel for war crimes.” Mr. Segal, who served jail time as a member of the Jewish Underground that maimed and killed

Palestinians in the 1980s, wrote this summer, “The wise thing now is to make do with what it is possible to do, and not lose it all by insisting on impossible goals.” Mr. Bennett did not seem deterred. In a statement to reporters on Sunday at the Western Wall in the Old City in East Jerusalem, Mr. Bennett said, “It’s time to decide between two alternatives: surrendering our land or sovereignty.” He added that steps would be taken in the near future to try to apply Israeli law in Judea and Samaria, the biblical terms for the West Bank. But some Israelis were skeptical that Mr. Netanyahu, in his third consecutive term in office, and fourth over all, would choose one side over the other. “Bennett knows that Netanyahu is not going to make a decision,” said Shmuel Sandler, a professor of political science at BarIlan University, near Tel Aviv. “He may say he will go with both. So far, it worked. It is easier for Bennett because he is not the prime minister. Netanyahu wants to enjoy both of the worlds.”

Do not forget the Neediest!

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Weakened ISIS Still Able To Sow Deadly Mayhem Inspiring Attacks Despite Battlefield Losses By ROBERT F. WORTH

In the past few weeks, the Islamic State has sustained a string of military defeats: ousted from its refuge on the Libyan coast, struggling to maintain its hold on the Iraqi city of Mosul, and losing ground in Syria. Yet as the deadly truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin made clear, those losses do not diminish the group’s extraordinary power to inspire terrorist mayhem around the world, and may even help fuel it. In just the past year, even while under near continuous bombardment by the American-led coalition, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for more than three dozen attacks, stretching across 16 countries on four continents. That figure does not include the organization’s home terrain in Syria and Iraq, where it has lost 50,000 fighters in the past two years, according to the Pentagon — nearly as many dead as the United States lost in the Vietnam War. Many of the attacks beyond the Middle East were carried out by assailants who cited their inability to reach the group’s Syria refuge, its self-proclaimed caliphate, as a motive for acting at home. At the core of the Islamic State’s global success — and vulnerability — is a peculiar blend of theological boldness and criminal opportunism, something Al Qaeda, its predecessor and rival, never achieved. “ISIS’ claim to represent the caliphate has clearly been a trump card,� said Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, referring to the group by one of its acronyms. “It stirs deep sentiments, even among those who are not converts to the cause, about a utopian and powerful Muslim empire, and one

that seemed, for a while at least, to be unstoppable militarily.� At the same time, the Islamic State has cannily lowered the bar for what passes as an attack. The Berlin truck rampage — like the deadly attack in Nice, France, in July — is a case in point. Both were as simple as it gets: The attackers commandeered trucks and plowed them into crowds of pedestrians. No weapons were needed (although the Tunisian suspected in the Berlin attack, who was killed in a shootout in Italy on Friday, is believed to have used a weapon to steal the truck). Al Qaeda began promoting exactly such a truck or car attack seven years ago, complete with illustrations, through a slick English-language internet publication called Inspire. But there were no takers. “For years, this kind of low-tech stuff was sniffed at,� said William McCants, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. “U.S. counterterrorism officials were long confused as to why this wasn’t happening. But ISIS has succeeded in doing what Al Qaeda never did — it’s an open invitation to wreak havoc.� The Islamic State has had its share of good luck: The Syrian conflict that began in 2011 created a vast ungoverned zone that was virtually an invitation to seize and hold terrain, much as other jihadist groups had done for much shorter periods in Yemen and Afghanistan in years past. The emergence of the Islamic State came just as social media was in full bloom, and it benefited from an inflow of Western jihadist militants who could give its propaganda more reach and polish than any previous insurgent group. The Islamic State was also endowed with an unusual mix of mil-

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Fire crews worked to extinguish an oil well fire set by retreating Islamic State fighters on the outskirts of Qayyarah, Iraq, on Friday. itary expertise — many of its core members were former Iraqi officers with plenty of battlefield experience — and religious erudition. Arriving when the Arab world seemed to be collapsing, it deftly marshaled the skills of a cadre of young, intelligent Islamic fundamentalists such as the Bahraini religious scholar Turki al Binali, who helped recruit many frustrated young people eager for a radical new source of hope. What looks to outsiders like nihilism is the opposite to many young Islamic State converts: They are genuinely thrilled to be taking part in a venture that aims to redraw the map and reverse the moral polarities of what they see as a fallen world.

The caliphate has emerged, again and again, as the key motivating factor for terrorists in Europe, including Anis Amri, the Tunisian suspected of having carried out last week’s truck attack in Berlin. Some European-born attackers, including some of those who struck in France this year, have cited their inability to reach Islamic State terrain in Syria as a source of deep frustration in their videotaped farewell statements, and a reason for striking on their home turf instead. The same goes for the Islamic State’s suicide bombers, whose numbers are an extraordinary testament to the group’s ideological power. The group’s primary

news source said in early December that Islamic State fighters had carried out 1,034 suicide attacks in 2016. That number is impossible to verify, but analysts agree that the total has been climbing for several years now. Even if that increase is largely because of the group’s defensive use of suicide bombers while under siege, the number of people willing — even eager — to sacrifice for the cause is staggering. When the political scientist Robert Paper wrote a book on suicide bombings in 2003, he counted a global total of 315, and that was over about 15 years. Yet the Islamic State’s dependence on the idea of the caliphate is also a risk. It was noteworthy that

the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, urged followers in a November audiotape message not to abandon Mosul. That seemed to cut against earlier statements from the group, which had hinted that the Islamic State could withdraw and regroup in the desert if necessary. Mr. Baghdadi’s warning suggested that he feared military defeat would drain the group’s global cachet, leaving Al Qaeda to inherit the jihadist mantle. “Once it loses its territory, ISIS will become another lost jihadist cause,� Mr. Haykel said. “Al Qaeda has the advantage of being an ideology that is not tied to a territory or an institution like the caliphate.�

U.S. Eye in the Sky Glares at ISIS as a Pivotal Battle Brews in Syria From Page A1

Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward Everyone ÂŽ

Iraq and Syria. The effort has destroyed hundreds of tanks, artillery pieces, military vehicles, command centers and fighting positions, and killed more than 50,000 fighters, according to American estimates. Since the air war began in late summer 2014,

Guided Tours Since 1952

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American and allied aircraft have conducted about 17,000 strikes in both countries. The Islamic State has lost about half of the territory it seized in Iraq and Syria in 2014. But as ISIS loses ground in its physical caliphate, or religious state, the threat of hundreds of foreign fighters returning home and of the expansion of its virtual caliphate through social media is certain to accelerate, American and European officials say. That raises fears of more terrorist attacks in cities outside the Middle East. For instance, the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for last week’s truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin even though the links between the group and the main suspect, Anis Amri, a 24year-old Tunisian, are not completely clear. After Mr. Amri’s death, the Islamic State released a video of him pledging allegiance to the group. President Obama has vowed to deal the Islamic State crippling blows in Mosul and Raqqa before he leaves office. This month, he ordered 200 more American Special Operations forces to Syria to help local fighters advancing on Raqqa, nearly doubling the Pentagon’s boots on the ground there. Commanders are uncertain, however, about the level of support President-elect Donald J. Trump will maintain for rebel groups in Syria combating the Islamic State. The military march on Raqqa is complicated by the predominant role of Kurdish militia members, who make up a majority of the 45,000 fighters bearing down on the city. They are the most effective American partner against the Islamic State in Syria, providing logistics, command and control, and fierce fighting prowess. But the Kurdish fighters are viewed by Turkey — a pivotal American ally — as a terrorist threat. These lingering diplomatic and military questions leave some congressional leaders voicing skepticism about a swift, decisive attack on the Islamic State capital. “It’s hard to see anything is imminent,� said Representative Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. With a prewar population of about 220,000, Raqqa is about one-tenth the size of Mosul, but commanders still face the same challenges of waging an air war while minimizing risks to civilians

SUZANNE JENKINS/U.S. AIR FORCE, VIA GETTY IMAGES

A Joint Stars surveillance plane refueling in 2004. Such planes help paint a picture of the Islamic State for American forces. in a congested city. There are other reasons to go slow. Some Islamic State headquarters buildings have been spared attack for now so the Americans can monitor their communications and movements of their personnel in and out to learn more about the enemy operations, General Harrigian said. Still, allied airstrikes have picked up as the Arab and Kurdish fighters have moved closer to the capital, and as commanders seek to pressure Mosul and Raqqa simultaneously. About 30 percent of the 1,300 strikes in and around Raqqa since the war began in 2014 have been conducted in the past three months. “The pressure in Raqqa is bearing fruit as ISIL leaders come out of hiding, which allows us to kill them,� Brett H. McGurk, Mr. Obama’s envoy to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, said this month. Tracking the enemy’s ground movements falls largely to the crew of the Joint Stars plane, a 1960s-era, reconfigured Boeing 707 jetliner packed with sensitive electronics that is part of an eclectic and unsung mix of odd-shaped surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft with names like Compass Call and Rivet Joint. These planes suck up some enemy communications, jam others and help paint a picture of the Islamic State on the ground for American fighters and bombers to attack. Bulging from the belly of the Joint Stars is a canoe-shaped, cloud-piercing radar that can see ground targets — and even some

low-flying planes and helicopters — as far as 250 miles away on either side of the nearly windowless fuselage. Aboard the plane, the crew of 19 Air Force and Army personnel — an unusual mix of active-duty and Georgia National Guard specialists — track clusters of dots on their screens that could represent groups of hostile fighters and their vehicles, friendly forces or just routine commercial traffic. Much depends on where they are and what time of day it is. From its high-flying, wide-area perch, the radar can track moving vehicles; low, slow-flying aircraft; and smaller potential targets such as people, said Lt. Col. William B. Hartman, 39, of Irvine, Calif., the Joint Stars squadron commander. The operators on board can change the filters on their systems to show different-size targets or their direction of travel in different colors, all of which is relayed back to operations centers in Baghdad and Erbil, in northern Iraq, he said. Flying from a base in the Persian Gulf, a typical Joint Stars mission over Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan can last about 11 or 12 hours. Crews pack snacks in their flight bags but also fire up the plane’s oven to prepare an inflight order of chicken wings. The Joint Stars is not equipped with cameras to identify specific images on the ground. When the crew members see something suspicious, they direct a Predator or Reaper drone to zoom in for a closer look. The Joint Stars is also valuable because a rotation of air-

craft and surveillance crews can monitor a particular area for days, weeks or months, watching Islamic State activity to understand what the military calls the enemy’s “pattern of life.� Islamic State fighters know from experience that they are being watched and often try to deceive the surveillance planes, hiding in schools or mosques or using camouflage. At one point, analysts said, ISIS even appeared to be trying to smuggle weapons strapped to the bellies of herds of sheep. “They’re extremely smart,� Master Sgt. Caylon Kimball, 31, an airborne intelligence technician from Anadarko, Okla., said of the militants. Several weeks ago, as the air campaign intensified against the Islamic State’s oil-production and distribution network, analysts noticed an intriguing development in the central Syrian desert, about 35 miles north of Palmyra. Comparing months-old radar data from Joint Stars and other surveillance imagery with newer versions, analysts discovered that the Islamic State was moving much of its oil tanker truck fleet to an obscure area of sandy gullies, about 20 miles by 20 miles in size. “They were trying to hide from us,� General Harrigian said. “They were adapting to what we were doing. They were going into the desert and just parking.� For several more weeks, analysts watched the clandestine desert truck stop grow, wanting to ensure it was the Islamic State trucking fleet. Confident in that assessment, General Harrigian ordered an attack plan, codenamed Olympus. In two waves of strikes — on Dec. 8 and 9 — about two dozen Air Force and Navy warplanes destroyed 188 of the trucks. Empty truck cabs were struck first to scare off drivers sleeping in their rigs, and General Harrigian said it appeared there were no civilian casualties. Besides wiping out a sizable portion of the Islamic State’s tanker truck fleet and depriving the group of over $2 million in oil sales, commanders said the strike was also meant to cripple morale. “There would be a larger strategic message we sent to them: Nice try. We found you,� General Harrigian said. “Keep trying to hide, we will hunt you down again.�

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Queen Misses Christmas Service Because of a ‘Heavy Cold’

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LONDON — For the first time in nearly 30 years, Queen Elizabeth II failed to attend a Christmas Day church service near her English country estate because of what Buckingham Palace described as a persistent cold. In a statement, Buckingham Palace said on Sunday that the 90year-old queen “continues to re-

By STEPHEN CASTLE

cover from a heavy cold and will stay indoors to assist with her recovery.� The queen, who had already been forced to change her travel plans for the holiday period because of the illness, planned to “participate in the royal family Christmas celebrations during the day,� according to the statement. The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, 95, were scheduled

to travel on Wednesday by train to their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, near England’s eastern coast. Their poor health pushed back the journey by a day, and they made the trip by helicopter. Prince Philip, who had also been ill last week, was well enough to attend the service. He was accompanied by members of the royal family, including Prince

Charles, the heir to the throne. The British monarch is particularly visible during the holidays, and Buckingham Palace said that the queen had attended church services at Sandringham on Christmas Day since 1988, when the royal family began celebrating the holiday there. Her annual Christmas Day speech, which was prerecorded, was broadcast as usual.

N

A11

MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MIKE BELLEME FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“This world’s dangerous right now, and I don’t think we are nearly where we need to be with border security,” said Jeff Miller, a city councilman in Hendersonville, N.C.

Terrorism Abroad Stokes Fears at Home Anxiety Pervades a North Carolina City Where Muslims Are Mostly Unknown By SABRINA TAVERNISE

HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. — Jeff Miller, a dry cleaner owner who serves on the City Council here, was driving his green truck late Monday afternoon when news of the Christmas market attack in Berlin came on the radio. “I thought, here we go again,” he said. “So sad.” But there was also something new. “This world’s dangerous right now, and I don’t think we are nearly where we need to be with border security,” he said. “I believe Donald Trump wants to do it right.” As Mr. Trump prepares to assume the presidency next month, one of the biggest issues he will face is immigration. His incendiary statements prompted some of the most enduring images of the campaign, with chants like “build the wall” and calls for de-

portations and bans on Muslims. Here in Henderson County, an upper-middle-class patch of western North Carolina where solid suburban homes stand next to hilly apple orchards, Mr. Trump’s tone did not appeal, but the underlying message hit home. Immigration looms large here: Hispanics now make up about 10 percent of the population. But they are a familiar part of the landscape. They are Christians. They have been a big part of the community for decades. Muslims, however, are none of those things. Most of what people know comes in the form of the daily drip of news into their iPads, and that does not leave a good impression. So the part of the immigration message that really resonates here is about Muslims from the Middle East. “It’s a little different than any time in history, when we are seeing this level of terror-

Greg Mathis, a Hendersonville pastor, is hopeful: “Securing our borders has been a long time coming, and Donald Trump was the first one in a long time to say it.” ism sweeping the world, and that has gotten people’s attention,” said Bill Campbell, pastor at Hendersonville Presbyterian Church. “Terrorism is an ideology, it’s not a religion, but the religion that tends to give birth to it most often these days is Islam. The threat

from that is very real, and we can’t just ignore it.” And while Mr. Trump has bounced around on the topic since Election Day — on Wednesday his spokesman indicated that Continued on Page A13

Wielding Claims of ‘Fake News,’ Conservatives Take Aim at Mainstream Media By JEREMY W. PETERS

WASHINGTON — The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.” Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.” Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have also taken up the call. As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!” Until now, that term had been widely understood to refer to fabricated news accounts that are meant to spread virally online. But conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself, incredulous about suggestions that that fake stories may have helped swing the election, have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda. In defining “fake news” so broadly and seeking to dilute its meaning, they are capitalizing on the declining credibility of all purveyors of information, one product of the country’s increasing political polarization. And conservatives, seeing an opening to undermine the mainstream media, a longtime foe, are more than happy to dig the hole deeper. “Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it’s gone too far,” said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, who has been critical of what he sees as excessive partisanship by pundits. “Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”

Journalists who work to separate fact from fiction see a dangerous conflation of stories that turn out to be wrong because of a legitimate misunderstanding with those whose clear intention is to deceive. A report, shared more than a million times on social media, that the pope had endorsed Mr. Trump was undeniably false. But was it “fake news” to report on data models that showed Hillary Clinton with overwhelming odds of winning the presidency? Are opinion articles fake if they cherry-pick facts to draw disputable conclusions? “Fake news was a term specifically about people who purposely fabricated stories for clicks and revenue,” said David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, the myth-busting website. “Now it includes bad reporting, slanted journalism and outright propaganda. And I think we’re doing a disservice to lump all those things together.” The right’s labeling of “fake news” evokes one of the most successful efforts by conservatives to reorient how Americans think about news media objectivity: the move by Fox News to brand its conservative-slanted coverage as “fair and balanced.” Traditionally, mainstream media outlets had thought of their own approach in those terms, viewing their coverage as strictly down the middle. Republicans often found that laughable. As with Fox’s ubiquitous promotion of its slogan, conservatives’ appropriation of the “fake news” label is an effort to further erode the mainstream media’s claim to be a reliable and accurate source. “What I think is so unsettling about the fake news cries now is that their audience has already sort of bought into this idea that journalism has no credibility or legitimacy,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a liberal group that polices the news media for bias. “Therefore, by applying that term to credible outlets, it becomes much more believable.” Conservative news media are now

awash in the “fake news” condemnations. When coverage of Mr. Trump’s choice for labor secretary, Andrew F. Puzder, highlighted his opposition to minimum wage increases, the writer and radio host Erick Erickson wrote that Mr. Puzder should have been getting more credit for pointing out that such increases lead to higher unemployment. “To say otherwise is to push fake news,” he wrote. (The effects actually have been found to vary from city to city.) Infowars, the website run by the conservative provocateur and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, labeled as “fake news” a CNN report that Ivanka Trump would move into the office in the White House normally reserved for the first lady.

SNOPES FACES NEW FACTS

A deal with Facebook is giving Snopes, the fact-checking website, a bigger role but also drawing more attacks. Page B1. Mr. Trump has used the term to deny news reports, as he did on Twitter recently after various outlets said he would stay on as the executive producer of “The New Celebrity Apprentice” after taking office in January. “Ridiculous & untrue — FAKE NEWS!” he wrote. (He will be credited as executive producer, a spokesman for the show’s creator, Mark Burnett, has said. But it is unclear what work, if any, he will do on the show.) Many conservatives are pushing back

JULIE SMITH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Rush Limbaugh in 2012. On his radio show recently, he accused the mainstream media of spreading fake news, saying, “They just make it up.”

at the outrage over fake news because they believe that liberals, unwilling to accept Mr. Trump’s victory, are attributing his triumph to nefarious external factors. “The left refuses to admit that the fundamental problem isn’t the Russians or Jim Comey or ‘fake news’ or the Electoral College,” said Laura Ingraham, the author and radio host. “‘Fake news’ is just another fake excuse for their failed agenda.” Others see a larger effort to slander the basic journalistic function of factchecking. Nonpartisan websites like Snopes and Factcheck.org have found themselves maligned when they have disproved stories that had been flattering to conservatives. When Snopes wrote about a State Farm insurance agent in Louisiana who had posted a sign outside his office that likened taxpayers who voted for President Obama to chickens supporting Colonel Sanders, Mr. Mikkelson, the site’s founder, was smeared as a partisan Democrat who had never bothered to reach out to the agent for comment. Neither is true. There are already efforts by highly partisan conservatives to claim that their fact-checking efforts are the same as those of independent outlets like Snopes, which employ research teams to dig into seemingly dubious claims. Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, has aired “fact-checking” segments on his program. Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist, has a web program, “Michelle Malkin Investigates,” in which she does her own investigative reporting. The market in these divided times is undeniably ripe. “We now live in this fragmented media world where you can block people you disagree with. You can only be exposed to stories that make you feel good about what you want to believe,” Mr. Ziegler, the radio host, said. “Unfortunately, the truth is unpopular a lot. And a good fairy tale beats a harsh truth every time.”

A12

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

N

Weather Report Va ancouver a

Winn nn eg nnipeg

Spokane

0s

30s

10s

Helena

Bismarck k

Eugen ene

L

30s s

20s 0

30s

Boise Minneapolis n s

Ren no n

Salt Lake City

Des Moine es

30s

30s

40s

Kansass Springfiel Sp ield eld d City St. Louis Lou

Topeka

Phoe hoe oenix

Ph Phi Philadelphia Wash Washington ash

Cha ha arleston esto eston e

Memphis

Little Ro Roc ockk

Birmingha m am a

Lubbo bbo bbock

Columb Colu bia Atlanta

70s

Dalla allas ass a

El Paso

High 57. A front will move east. Expect a shower or two in the morning and sunshine in the afternoon. It will be mainly clear at night.

Charlotte

60 60s

Ft. Worth

WEDNESDAY ...............Mostly sunny, cooler

Jackson n J Jacksonville

70s

60s

Baton o Rouge San Antonio S 80s 80 0s 0 Houston n

Honolulu nolulu olu ol ul

50s 0s Hilo 0s 60s 60 60s

70s

60s

Mo Mobile New Orleans

80s

80s s 0s

<0

70s s

80s

60s s

Mo onterrey o n

High pressure will move into the area, providing several hours of sunshine and light winds. It will be chillier than Tuesday, with increasing clouds at night.

O Orlando

Tampa a

Corpus Christi C

THURSDAY FRIDAY .............................Rain on Thursday

Miami

8 80s

Nassau Weather patterns shown as expected at noon today, Eastern time.

Fairbanks

TODAY’S HIGHS

10s

<0

20s

0s

10s

Anchor An Anchorage

30s

20s

H

Juneau eau

COLD

WARM

40s 0 0s

STATIONARY COMPLEX COLD

FRONTS

30s

40s

MOSTLY CLOUDY

SHOWERS T-STORMS

H

H L

A pattern of above-normal temperatures will span the nation's midsection Wednesday, most notably the snow-covered Northern Plains. Some rain will fall from the Ohio Valley to the lower Mississippi Valley with dry weather on the East and West Coasts.

Cities High/low temperatures for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday, Eastern time, and precipitation (in inches) for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday. Expected conditions for today and tomorrow.

C ....................... Clouds F ............................ Fog H .......................... Haze I............................... Ice PC........... Partly cloudy R ........................... Rain Sh ................... Showers

S ............................. Sun Sn ....................... Snow SS ......... Snow showers T .......... Thunderstorms Tr ........................ Trace W ....................... Windy –.............. Not available

N.Y.C. region New York City Bridgeport Caldwell Danbury Islip Newark Trenton White Plains

Yesterday 50/ 39 0 45/ 33 0 47/ 31 0 39/ 21 0 44/ 26 0 48/ 34 0 46/ 32 0 44/ 31 0

Today 45/ 44 Sh 45/ 43 Sh 43/ 42 Sh 40/ 39 Sh 47/ 44 Sh 45/ 44 Sh 46/ 44 Sh 44/ 41 Sh

Tomorrow 57/ 34 Sh 55/ 34 Sh 56/ 30 PC 53/ 27 R 54/ 31 PC 57/ 33 Sh 57/ 33 PC 54/ 31 Sh

United States Albany Albuquerque Anchorage Atlanta Atlantic City Austin Baltimore Baton Rouge Birmingham Boise Boston Buffalo Burlington Casper Charlotte Chattanooga Chicago Cincinnati Cleveland Colorado Springs Columbus Concord, N.H. Dallas-Ft. Worth Denver Des Moines Detroit El Paso Fargo Hartford Honolulu Houston Indianapolis Jackson Jacksonville Kansas City Key West Las Vegas Lexington

Yesterday 39/ 15 0 40/ 23 0.06 31/ 25 0.04 72/ 55 0 48/ 39 0 80/ 64 0.05 47/ 33 0 77/ 65 0 75/ 61 0 25/ 6 0 39/ 23 0 35/ 24 0 31/ 11 0.01 16/ 10 0.06 63/ 47 0 71/ 56 0 40/ 39 0.03 48/ 47 0.03 39/ 37 0 41/ 21 0 45/ 43 0 40/ 8 0 75/ 57 0.16 41/ 22 0.01 47/ 30 0.31 37/ 35 0 52/ 31 0.02 36/ 31 0.31 44/ 16 0 81/ 70 0.02 79/ 69 0.06 44/ 43 0.04 75/ 64 0 75/ 60 0 63/ 32 0.14 83/ 75 0.02 47/ 35 0 55/ 54 0.08

Today 37/ 34 I 41/ 24 S 29/ 22 Sn 62/ 56 R 51/ 48 C 76/ 58 T 48/ 45 Sh 79/ 63 PC 71/ 63 C 19/ 10 PC 38/ 36 PC 50/ 36 R 36/ 34 R 25/ 17 S 55/ 50 C 63/ 58 C 54/ 26 W 64/ 35 Sh 59/ 37 R 41/ 18 S 62/ 35 R 30/ 29 Sn 69/ 47 C 39/ 22 S 38/ 24 PC 56/ 31 R 54/ 32 S 29/ 7 Sn 37/ 36 I 81/ 72 W 80/ 66 C 63/ 32 R 78/ 63 PC 77/ 58 PC 45/ 24 S 82/ 75 PC 48/ 35 S 67/ 42 C

Tomorrow 46/ 29 PC 48/ 27 S 26/ 14 Sn 71/ 51 C 58/ 36 Sh 68/ 59 Sh 61/ 32 Sh 78/ 62 PC 68/ 48 C 29/ 17 Sn 52/ 31 Sh 37/ 27 SS 43/ 29 C 31/ 20 PC 69/ 46 C 63/ 38 Sh 35/ 25 PC 43/ 27 S 37/ 29 C 50/ 25 S 39/ 27 PC 46/ 27 PC 64/ 53 C 50/ 28 S 42/ 30 S 36/ 27 SS 60/ 40 PC 17/ 16 S 51/ 27 PC 81/ 70 S 76/ 65 PC 39/ 27 S 71/ 58 Sh 79/ 58 PC 47/ 31 S 82/ 75 S 51/ 38 S 48/ 28 PC

62 45 55 64 75 35 27 61 63 41 36 26 66 31 39 39 11 28 21 42 14 37 23 30 17 65 44 39 36 77 30 21 17 57 75 17 68 34 33 43 42 37 29 30

0.04 0 0.06 0 0 0.39 0.29 0.11 0.06 0 0.21 0.29 0.04 0 0 0 0.01 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.56 0.07 0.01 0 0 0.01 0 0.74 Tr 0.04 0.01 Tr 0 0 0 0.20 0 0 0.60 0

70/ 62/ 68/ 72/ 83/ 47/ 29/ 70/ 76/ 58/ 60/ 38/ 83/ 47/ 61/ 60/ 32/ 41/ 40/ 55/ 37/ 53/ 48/ 51/ 27/ 76/ 63/ 53/ 56/ 85/ 41/ 25/ 26/ 62/ 85/ 42/ 84/ 58/ 62/ 61/ 57/ 50/ 51/ 48/

60s

70s

80s

90s

100+

L

HIGH LOW PRESSURE

Highlight: National Outlook for Wednesday

L

50s

Little Rock Los Angeles Louisville Memphis Miami Milwaukee Mpls.-St. Paul Nashville New Orleans Norfolk Oklahoma City Omaha Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Pittsburgh Portland, Me. Portland, Ore. Providence Raleigh Reno Richmond Rochester Sacramento Salt Lake City San Antonio San Diego San Francisco San Jose San Juan Seattle Sioux Falls Spokane St. Louis St. Thomas Syracuse Tampa Toledo Tucson Tulsa Virginia Beach Washington Wichita Wilmington, Del.

68/ 56/ 57/ 72/ 84/ 38/ 36/ 72/ 74/ 45/ 68/ 53/ 83/ 47/ 55/ 43/ 36/ 43/ 42/ 57/ 36/ 50/ 36/ 50/ 28/ 78/ 59/ 52/ 54/ 84/ 39/ 42/ 27/ 60/ 84/ 35/ 84/ 36/ 54/ 70/ 49/ 48/ 65/ 45/

46 45 38 50 73 25 16 51 61 53 30 22 63 46 43 45 31 38 39 50 18 48 39 28 13 61 45 39 34 76 39 16 23 31 75 39 67 30 41 29 53 47 23 46

T PC Sh T PC PC Sn C PC C S S PC Sh S R Sn R PC C S C R S S T PC S S S R W PC PC S I PC R S S C C S Sh

55/ 69/ 47/ 55/ 84/ 30/ 23/ 52/ 73/ 67/ 56/ 44/ 83/ 58/ 68/ 47/ 45/ 48/ 55/ 70/ 47/ 66/ 39/ 54/ 31/ 71/ 69/ 55/ 59/ 85/ 46/ 34/ 35/ 47/ 85/ 40/ 82/ 36/ 71/ 55/ 66/ 63/ 51/ 59/

40 48 29 41 71 21 14 34 61 42 42 28 63 34 45 28 24 35 30 43 27 38 28 33 25 62 50 42 37 75 38 26 22 33 75 27 65 25 45 41 43 36 30 32

C S S C PC C S C PC Sh PC S PC Sh S PC PC R PC C PC C SS S PC C S S S S R S Sn S S SS S C S PC C Sh S Sh

Africa Algiers Cairo Cape Town Dakar Johannesburg Nairobi Tunis

Yesterday 65/ 43 0 63/ 49 0 84/ 56 0 84/ 68 0 64/ 53 0.35 82/ 56 0.05 64/ 53 0.03

Today 66/ 43 S 66/ 53 S 84/ 66 S 79/ 69 S 68/ 57 C 76/ 54 PC 65/ 51 PC

Tomorrow 65/ 45 PC 62/ 49 PC 80/ 65 PC 80/ 69 S 73/ 60 C 80/ 57 PC 65/ 52 PC

Asia/Pacific Baghdad Bangkok Beijing Damascus Hong Kong Jakarta Jerusalem Karachi Manila Mumbai

Yesterday 63/ 49 0.02 93/ 76 0 44/ 23 0.09 53/ 39 0 73/ 65 0 88/ 77 0.06 49/ 41 0.02 84/ 53 0 90/ 78 0.25 90/ 68 0

Today 61/ 44 PC 96/ 77 PC 34/ 16 C 52/ 39 PC 77/ 61 S 87/ 77 T 51/ 41 PC 84/ 58 S 83/ 77 R 90/ 70 PC

Tomorrow 59/ 45 PC 93/ 69 S 34/ 12 S 46/ 34 R 68/ 55 W 88/ 77 T 45/ 40 Sh 85/ 57 S 90/ 77 PC 91/ 71 PC

RAIN

50°

40°

Normal highs

TOMORROW .....................Morning showers

50s Raleig gh g h N Nashville

Albuquerqu rque

Tu Tucson

N Norfolk

Louisville

Wich ch chita

50s

Low 44. Spotty drizzle is expected this evening, with a few showers after midnight. A southerly wind will average 7 to 14 m.p.h.

Pitts tsburgh ts sbu

Richm chmond

60 60s

Santa a Fe F Oklahoma oma C City

60s

Cleveland

Chic hic o hicago

Record highs

60°

TONIGHT ........................A few showers late

New York N

Indianapolis i Den Denver De

40s 60s Lo 60s Los Angeles

Har Hartford a

Omaha

Colorado Springs Springs

Las Veg Vegas

Boss Boston

Albany

40s

20s

S Fran San an nc cisco co

San an Diego o

M Ma Manchester

Detroit e

Sioux o Falls alls

Cheye enne

30s

Por Portland Burlington n o on n

B Buffalo

Milwaukkee

Caspe pe per

Toronto o

40s

St. Paul S

High 45. An approaching front will cause periods of clouds and spotty drizzle. A southeast wind will average up to 8 miles per hour. Afternoon temperatures will be a little higher than usual for this time of year.

H Halifax

H

Montreal treal real

Otta Ott Ottawa

Fargo

Pierre

Fre re es sno s

20s

3 s 30s

H

TODAY ...............................Cloudy with mist

Quebec c

Billin lings lin

10s s 20s

5 s 50s

10s

20s

Regina

40s S 40 Seattle e Portlan and

Metropolitan Forecast

10s

10s

20s 0s

Meteorology by AccuWeather

FLURRIES

SNOW

A front will cause showers on Thursday, especially in the morning. The high will be 45. Expect intervals of clouds and sunshine on Friday with a high of 39.

30° Normal lows

20° W T F S S M T W T F TODAY 10°

0°

Actual High

ICE

Low

PRECIPITATION

National Forecast

Metropolitan Almanac

Expect snow in the Upper Midwest today. Gusty winds in the Dakotas will blow and drift snow left behind by the Christmas blizzard, creating subzero temperatures. Meanwhile, rain along a cold front will stretch from the eastern and central Great Lakes to East Texas. Expect a few thunderstorms over the latter region. Warm air will surge from the South to the Great Lakes. Cold air will be slower to leave the Northeast, allowing an icy mix to glaze the interior. It will be a cold and dry day across the Rockies. The Southwest will also be cool, with dense morning fog in California’s Central Valley. A new storm will move into the Northwest with rain and mountain snow.

In Central Park for the 16 hours ended at 4 p.m. yesterday. Temperature

New Delhi Riyadh Seoul Shanghai Singapore Sydney Taipei Tehran Tokyo

70/ 84/ 43/ 56/ 90/ 82/ 83/ 45/ 51/

0 0 0 0.06 0.30 0 0.03 0.79 0

72/ 84/ 41/ 55/ 86/ 85/ 83/ 52/ 55/

46 54 26 41 76 71 64 41 52

PC S R R T W S PC PC

72/ 80/ 33/ 44/ 84/ 83/ 66/ 52/ 62/

48 56 17 35 75 71 58 41 41

PC PC PC C T S Sh Sh R

Europe Amsterdam Athens Berlin Brussels Budapest Copenhagen Dublin Edinburgh Frankfurt Geneva Helsinki Istanbul Kiev Lisbon London Madrid Moscow Nice Oslo Paris Prague Rome St. Petersburg Stockholm Vienna Warsaw

Yesterday 53/ 47 0.05 59/ 41 0 49/ 40 0.30 52/ 45 0.04 41/ 30 0.10 49/ 38 0.12 57/ 44 0.26 56/ 43 0.33 49/ 45 0.09 48/ 37 0 37/ 33 0.04 45/ 36 0.20 34/ 28 0.11 60/ 44 0 57/ 47 0.01 54/ 35 0 30/ 25 0.14 52/ 46 0 44/ 33 0 53/ 42 0 43/ 38 0.20 59/ 39 0 38/ 35 0.03 39/ 32 0 47/ 36 0.18 39/ 34 0.13

Today 48/ 42 W 56/ 45 S 51/ 39 Sn 52/ 35 Sh 48/ 34 S 46/ 39 W 44/ 34 PC 44/ 40 PC 54/ 37 Sh 43/ 33 Sh 43/ 29 Sn 44/ 35 PC 35/ 33 C 60/ 41 PC 49/ 31 S 59/ 34 PC 32/ 30 Sn 62/ 48 S 40/ 32 PC 53/ 30 C 48/ 34 C 61/ 41 S 42/ 31 Sn 44/ 31 W 51/ 36 PC 48/ 34 Sh

Tomorrow 49/ 33 PC 59/ 46 S 46/ 39 Sh 46/ 32 S 43/ 33 PC 46/ 36 Sh 46/ 38 S 45/ 35 S 46/ 34 PC 40/ 30 S 33/ 27 C 46/ 36 PC 37/ 29 C 58/ 42 PC 45/ 31 S 61/ 35 PC 35/ 27 Sn 64/ 46 S 39/ 24 PC 45/ 30 S 41/ 37 C 61/ 38 PC 35/ 27 Sn 38/ 26 PC 42/ 37 W 43/ 29 Sn

North America Acapulco Bermuda Edmonton Guadalajara Havana Kingston Martinique Mexico City Monterrey Montreal Nassau Panama City Quebec City Santo Domingo Toronto Vancouver Winnipeg

Yesterday 90/ 72 0 71/ 66 0.03 6/ -6 0.01 80/ 47 0 86/ 66 0 91/ 75 0 82/ 75 0.04 74/ 46 0 81/ 59 0 33/ 18 0 83/ 73 0.03 90/ 73 0.04 31/ 13 0.01 89/ 71 0 36/ 27 0 33/ 24 0 18/ 6 0.02

Today 88/ 73 PC 67/ 62 PC 13/ 12 PC 79/ 46 PC 88/ 62 S 87/ 76 S 86/ 76 PC 73/ 47 PC 79/ 63 PC 31/ 28 Sn 83/ 72 PC 88/ 74 PC 18/ 16 Sn 88/ 70 S 49/ 31 R 38/ 37 Sn 20/ -4 Sn

Tomorrow 88/ 75 PC 69/ 66 PC 29/ 17 PC 81/ 49 S 85/ 63 S 88/ 74 S 86/ 74 S 72/ 50 PC 77/ 64 PC 38/ 21 SS 83/ 71 PC 89/ 74 PC 36/ 15 SS 87/ 70 S 34/ 27 SS 43/ 34 C 6/ 3 PC

South America Buenos Aires Caracas Lima Quito Recife Rio de Janeiro Santiago

Yesterday 75/ 64 0.85 85/ 77 0.25 80/ 67 0 70/ 52 0.26 86/ 77 0.07 91/ 78 0 77/ 51 0.02

Today 77/ 57 R 84/ 75 PC 78/ 66 PC 70/ 56 Sh 88/ 79 PC 90/ 78 S 66/ 48 PC

Tomorrow 80/ 59 S 86/ 75 PC 79/ 66 PC 72/ 55 Sh 88/ 80 C 95/ 80 S 88/ 58 S

Record lows

Low

Precipitation (in inches) Yesterday ............... 0.00 Record .................... 1.30

70°

60°

Record high 66° (2015)

50° 3 p.m.

Snow ......................... 0.0 Since Oct. 1 .............. 3.2

For the last 30 days Actual ..................... 5.40 Normal .................... 4.00 For the last 365 days Actual ................... 42.56 Normal .................. 49.94

50° Normal high 40°

40° 39° 7 a.m.

30°

SAT.

20°

Normal low 29°

Record low -1° (1980)

12 a.m.

6 a.m.

Avg. daily departure from normal this month .............. –0.4°

Humidity

High ........... 30.53 4 p.m. Low ............ 30.31 1 a.m.

High ............. 69% 7 a.m. Low.............. 44% 3 p.m.

An index of fuel consumption that tracks how far the day’s mean temperature fell below 65

10°

4 p.m.

LAST 30 DAYS

Air pressure

Heating Degree Days

YESTERDAY

0° 51 54 21 47 77 66 66 37 39

Forecast range High

12 4 p.m. p.m.

Avg. daily departure from normal this year ................ +2.2°

Reservoir levels (New York City water supply)

Yesterday ................................................................... 20 So far this month ...................................................... 670 So far this season (since July 1) ............................ 1357 Normal to date for the season ............................... 1494

Trends

Last

Temperature Average Below Above

Precipitation Average Below Above

10 days 30 days 90 days 365 days

Chart shows how recent temperature and precipitation trends compare with those of the last 30 years.

Yesterday ............... 63% Est. normal ............. 86%

Recreational Forecast Sun, Moon and Planets New

First Quarter

Mountain and Ocean Temperatures Full

Last Quarter Today’s forecast

Dec. 29 1:53 a.m. Sun

RISE SET NEXT R

Jupiter

R S

Saturn

R S

Jan. 5 7:19 a.m. 4:35 p.m. 7:19 a.m. 1:13 a.m. 12:31 p.m. 6:12 a.m. 3:37 p.m.

Jan. 12 6:34 a.m.

Jan. 19

Moon

R S R

Mars

R S

Venus

R S

4:40 a.m. 3:02 p.m. 5:35 a.m. 10:37 a.m. 9:31 p.m. 10:06 a.m. 8:19 p.m.

Boating From Montauk Point to Sandy Hook, N.J., out to 20 nautical miles, including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor. East wind at 8-16 knots. Waves will average a foot on New York Harbor, 1-2 feet on Long Island Sound and 2-4 feet on the ocean. Visibility reduced in spotty drizzle.

White 29/23 A little icy mix Green 33/22 A little icy mix Adirondacks 38/31 Some glaze

Catskills 34/32 A bit of ice in the a.m. Poconos 39/36 Drizzle, freezing early

50s

Southwest Pa. 55/42 Cloudy, rain and drizzle West Virginia 53/48 Cloudy and mild

High Tides Atlantic City ................... 5:21 a.m. .............. 5:36 p.m. Barnegat Inlet ................ 5:29 a.m. .............. 5:50 p.m. The Battery .................... 6:13 a.m. .............. 6:34 p.m. Beach Haven ................. 6:56 a.m. .............. 7:15 p.m. Bridgeport ..................... 9:06 a.m. .............. 9:36 p.m. City Island ...................... 9:45 a.m. ............ 10:14 p.m. Fire Island Lt. ................. 6:24 a.m. .............. 6:43 p.m. Montauk Point ................ 6:51 a.m. .............. 7:16 p.m. Northport ....................... 9:23 a.m. .............. 9:56 p.m. Port Washington ............ 9:49 a.m. ............ 10:23 p.m. Sandy Hook ................... 5:38 a.m. .............. 5:57 p.m. Shinnecock Inlet ............ 5:16 a.m. .............. 5:37 p.m. Stamford ........................ 9:09 a.m. .............. 9:39 p.m. Tarrytown ....................... 8:02 a.m. .............. 8:23 p.m. Willets Point ................... 9:42 a.m. ............ 10:13 p.m.

40s

Berkshires 35/29 Some glaze in the p.m.

Blue Ridge 53/48 Cloudy and mild

60s 70s

Color bands indicate water temperature.

An approaching front will bring clouds to Southern areas and a mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain to Northern areas. Afternoon temperatures will be in the 20s and 30s across New England and in the 50s in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Showers are expected tomorrow across the South.

THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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Terrorist Attacks Abroad Stoke Anxiety at Home From Page A11 suspending immigration from countries with a lot of terror attacks was still part of his plan — many moderate voters say they are hopeful about where he will eventually land. “I’m telling you, he’s going to surprise people, he’s going to make people mad on both sides,” said Greg Mathis, senior pastor at the Mud Creek Baptist Church in Hendersonville. “Sometimes he’s too blunt, maybe a little too raw. But securing our borders has been a long time coming, and Donald Trump was the first one in a long time to say it. I think that’s what registered with so many people in this country.” American Muslim organizations say that singling out Muslims amounts to racial profiling, and that Mr. Trump has deliberately stirred the pot, promoting theories about Muslims that simply are not true. They say that violence comes from ideological zealots, not from Islam. They say that the United States already does extremely vigorous vetting of immigrants and that some recent attacks that cited the Islamic State were carried out by Muslims who were born in the United States. “We’ve never said that people don’t have real fears about inter-

Cautious optimism about a new White House’s policies. national or domestic incidents and national security,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington. “But you want to take actions that are actually based on reality, not on wild conspiracy theories of Muslims about to overthrow the Constitution, or institute Shariah law.” Mr. Miller had some reservations voting for Mr. Trump, and said he was as surprised as anyone that Mr. Trump won. He didn’t like Mr. Trump’s attacks on Senator John McCain or his calls for mass deportations. Hispanics have long been part of life here, picking apples in the orchards, and Mr. Miller sees them as hard workers with strong family values. He employs several in his dry cleaning store. He strongly supports President Obama’s 2014 order shielding young undocumented immigrants. It helped a young family friend. “People are very welcoming here,” said Brother Roberto Perez, of the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. “At the local level, they go out of their way to help.” Hispanics are also churchgoers. They make up about half the congregation at Immaculate Conception. Pastor Mathis at Mud Creek has added a Spanish-language service on Sundays and had his book about Jesus translated into Spanish. “The thing about these immigrants — they settle down, they work hard, they are very familyoriented and they are Christians,” said Seth Smith, 37, a computer repairman in Hendersonville. “I don’t mind sharing my home as long as it is on fair terms with people who are working hard and keeping the same cultural values that makes this community this community.” Muslims are so scarce that few people here seem to know any. And the news kept happening: Paris, San Bernardino, Nice, Orlando. There was a disconnect, Pastor Campbell said. People wanted an open discussion about political Islam and the problems it poses for open societies, but felt they weren’t getting it.

“I can understand this administration not wanting to use words like ‘Islamic terrorism’ and wanting to soften things, but I also understand the angst when we are not having an open discussion,” he said. “That leaves it open for fearmongering.” This summer, when word got out that some members of a local church were talking about resettling Syrian refugees, many people objected. Mr. Miller was among them. The reluctance was not about lack of compassion. Local people, including his business, generously fund a well-equipped Boys and Girls Club. The Bounty of Bethlehem program draws hundreds of volunteers and donations for Christmas gifts and dinners for the needy every year. But worries about migrants from the Middle East run deep. “Let’s take care of our own before we expand to a group there’s so much uncertainty about,” said Mr. Miller, 62, a co-founder of a nonprofit for veterans. For example, there are many homeless veterans in the county who need care, he said. “Some people believe they can wrap their arms around anyone and make them their friend,” he said. “But they could stab you in the back.” Khalid Bashir, president of the Islamic Center of Asheville, in the nearby county of Buncombe, said Muslim Americans were no different from any other Americans in wanting to keep terrorists out of the United States. He estimated that there were 75 to 100 Muslim families in western North Carolina and that probably 20 of them lived in Henderson County. He knows one in which the mother is a nurse, the father a car dealer, and their daughter is in college. “Generally speaking, the stand for the Muslims is that nobody wants to have borders which are porous, including Muslim people,” Mr. Bashir said. “But making blanket statements about whole groups of people, whole religious groups, that’s what people are against.” Mr. Hooper said that many Americans had a distorted view of even the most basic facts about Muslims, one that often exaggerates their influence. He cited a recent study that found that on average Americans guess that Muslims are 17 percent of the population, when the real number is 1 or 2 percent. And unlike in some places in Europe, in the United States Muslims are well integrated into society. He said anti-Muslim incidents had spiked since the election. He got a call recently from a man who was disparaging Islam. When he asked if the man was threatening him, the man replied: “I don’t have to. My president will take care of you for me.” Many people interviewed in Henderson County said that it was wrong to target all Muslims and that making policy would be hard — more brain surgery than ditch digging. “We do have to be careful about this,” Pastor Campbell said. “This is complex. We don’t want to alienate people who come from the Middle East.” Jibril Hough, a Muslim activist in Charlotte, N.C., said some of the post-9/11 policies would probably be reinstated, but he was skeptical that Mr. Trump’s more radical propositions would happen. “I think it’s going to be tougher, but I don’t think it’s going to be as extreme as it’s being played right now,” he said. For Mr. Miller, the key will be whom Mr. Trump chooses for his team — and if he listens. Some of the appointments worry him. He wishes Mr. Trump would stop posting to Twitter. Still, he wants people to give him a chance. “I wish we could all set it aside right now and let the man see what he can do,” he said.

Dozens Shot in 2 Days in Chicago By KATIE ROGERS

At least 27 people were shot, seven fatally, in a 48-hour period in Chicago over Christmas weekend, according to the Chicago Police Department. It was the latest bloody chapter in a city besieged by gun violence. Homicides and shootings, already an all-too-common hazard in the city, have skyrocketed since last year, when the numbers were already high. The rise in violence is fueled in part by gangs, whose disagreements range from neighborhood turf wars to disputes over girlfriends. The conflicts often escalate quickly to gunfire. This weekend, one of the victims was an 18-year-old man who was shot multiple times in the neck and back while he was driving at 1:30 a.m. on Christmas Day in the Gage Park neighborhood, on the city’s Southwest Side. His death would become another entry in a fast-moving police log of murder investigations, many with no suspects in custody. Officer Jose Estrada, a spokesman with the Chicago Police De-

partment, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that the total number of homicides so far this year was 745, a 56 percent increase from 476 at the same time last year. This year was the first time in nearly two decades that more than 700 homicides had been recorded in the city, The Chicago Tribune reported this month. Officer Estrada said the total number of shooting victims so far stood at 4,252, up 47 percent from 2,884 at the same time in 2015. Data of the shootings over Christmas weekend logged by The Chicago Tribune reflected a relentless crime blotter: Nearly all of the people shot were men, the majority under 30. The brutal cold of a Chicago winter has not been as reliable a deterrent of violence as it has been in the past: 42 homicides have been recorded so far this month, compared with 33 during December last year, according to The Tribune’s data.

Remember the Neediest!

MIKE BELLEME FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Seth Smith, a computer repairman, does not mind immigrants who work hard and share his community’s “cultural values.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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The 45th President Blurred Business Lines

Trump Name Amplifies A Mom-and-Pop Empire From Page A1

Donald J. Trump with his son Donald Jr., left, and the Malaysian developer Tiah Joo Kim in 2013. Mr. Tiah said the elder Mr. Trump was warm and casual in a meeting.

ments and limited liability companies, the Trump Organization poses a raft of potential conflicts of interest for a president-elect who has long exerted such control over his company that, as he told The New York Times in a recent interview, he is the one who signs the checks. “I like to sign checks so I know what is going on,” he explained. Mr. Trump — owner of all but the smallest sliver of the privately held company — has said that, while the law does not require it, he is formulating plans to remove himself and his older daughter, Ivanka, from the company’s operations. (Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, is likely to have a role in the White House.) His sons Donald Jr. and Eric, along with other executives, will be in charge, the president-elect wrote on Twitter in mid-December, adding that “no

JONATHAN HAYWARD/THE CANADIAN PRESS

new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.” People involved in the planning have said that Mr. Trump intends to keep a stake in the business. But in recent weeks, amid rising pressure, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been intensely debating further measures. Among other things, the president-elect has agreed to shut down his personal foundation, has ended some international development deals and has reviewed a plan for an outside monitor to oversee the Trump Organization. Yet an examination of the company underscores the complex challenges of taking Mr. Trump out of Trump the organization. His company is a distinctly family business fortified with longtime loyalists that

operates less on standardized procedures and more on a culture of Trump. Mr. Trump may leave the details of contracts to his deputies, but his name — and influence — is stamped on every deal the company does. In an interview last spring with The Times, Mr. Trump explained that he approved new ventures based on his personal “feel.” And while in recent years his three oldest children have taken on more of a leadership role, Mr. Trump has the final say, sometimes weighing in on the most minute design details of planned hotels, golf courses or other properties the company owns or manages. His other top executives — many of them natives of Queens, where Mr. Trump grew up, or Brooklyn, where his father, Fred, expanded a housing empire many years ago — have secured power not necessarily through fancy pedigrees or impressive credentials, but through decades of devotion to their boss. Allen Weisselberg, the organization’s chief financial officer, started off as an accountant for Mr. Trump’s father. Matthew Calamari, the organization’s chief operating officer, was recruited in 1981 after Mr. Trump saw him eject some hecklers while working security at the United States Open tennis tournament. For some executives, there appears to be little division between their service to the company and their service to the Trumps. “We’re not a publicly traded company. At the end of the day, I work for the Trump family,” Alan Garten, the general counsel, explained in an interview with the legal industry publication Corporate Counsel shortly before the election. “That’s how I view my job. Whether it’s protecting their business interests or protecting their personal interests. I am here to assist them and represent them in any way they need.” When asked to elaborate in an interview last week with The Times, Mr. Garten said that in any job, “you want to be as helpful as you can,” but that “obviously the interests of the Trumps and the interests of the company are two distinct things.” The divisions between business and politics were often fuzzy during the presidential race: Mr. Garten became a “liaison” to Mr. Trump’s campaign; Michael Cohen, an executive vice president, tirelessly promoted his boss’s bid for the White House on television while battling negative media coverage; and Jason Greenblatt, the company’s chief legal officer, began serving as his adviser on Israel. On Friday, it was announced that Mr. Greenblatt would be joining Mr. Trump’s administration as a special representative for international negotiations. After the election, other lines continued to blur as the president-elect and his children met with foreign businessmen with

Donald J. Trump Chairman and president

The Trump Organization’s Top Executives … Said to be stepping down

connections to their global ventures and with foreign officials with potential influence over their business dealings. Some government-ethics lawyers have warned that unless Mr. Trump fully divests himself from the company and places someone independent of his family in charge, he risks entering the White House in violation of a constitutional clause that forbids him from taking payments or gifts from a foreign government entity. As Mr. Trump assumes the presidency, it is difficult to foresee him walling himself off from the company entirely, said Michael D’Antonio, the author of a critical biography, “The Truth About Trump.” “I don’t think that he could keep himself from inquiring about the performance of these businesses any more than he can keep himself from tweeting,” Mr. D’Antonio said. “It is just too vital to his identity. Profit is the way he has always measured himself. I don’t see how he can stop.”

Center of Power FAMILY

NON-FAMILY

Ivanka Trump Development and acquisition

Matthew Calamari Chief operating officer

Michael Cohen Special counsel

Alan Garten General counsel

Donald Trump Jr. Development and acquisition

Ronald Lieberman Management and development

George Sorial Counsel

Jeff Wagoner Hotel operations

Eric Trump Development and acquisition

Andrew Weiss Construction

Allen Weisselberg Chief financial officer

… And Its Globe-Spanning Businesses

MERCHANDISE

HOTELS

REAL ESTATE

Has included

At least

At least

∂

Neckwear

∂

Dress shirts

∂

Suits

∂

Eyewear

∂

Furniture

∂

Home accessories

∂

Cologne

∂

∂

8 domestic properties

∂

6 international properties

∂

28 domestic properties 9 international properties

Larry Glick Strategic development

GOLF At least

ENTERTAINMENT AND TELEVISION

Includes ∂

Restaurants

∂

Production company

∂

Modeling agency

Note: Properties include those owned, developed, managed or branded by the Trump Organization. Source: Trump Organization

∂

12 domestic properties

∂

5 international properties

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. Trump may have business interests around the world, but his power is concentrated at a single Midtown Manhattan address: 725 Fifth Avenue. With a gleaming exterior that shoots to the sky, a lobby decked with marble and a collection of highend tenants, Trump Tower is his primary residence as well as his company’s headquarters. To get to work, Mr. Trump steps onto the private elevator in his gilded three-story penthouse, presses 26 and waits a matter of seconds. When the doors open, he is at his office, surrounded by Mr. Garten, Mr. Weisselberg and other top executives. One floor down are the offices of Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump, who joined the company in the 2000s and are now his top deputies and advance guard. David Brecher, the chief executive of FM Home Loans, visited the Trump Organization about a decade ago to discuss a potential partnership and found the aesthetics telling. “Donald’s floor,” he said, recalling a swirl of gold trim and hues, “is very his style.” “The kids,” by contrast, “have a very cool floor. Sleek. Marble.” Photographs of Mr. Trump with the rich and powerful adorn his office walls, and his desk often overflows with papers, evidence of his refusal to communicate by email. When Mr. Trump wants to talk to someone, he calls out to his assistant, Rhona Graff, a Queens native whose office is right outside his door. She has been his gatekeeper for decades. Anyone seeking access to him over the phone has to go through Ms. Graff, sometimes with a secret code. Mr. Trump often boasts of the size of the Trump Organization. “It’s a big company,” he said in the interview last spring. A spokeswoman said the business employed “tens of thousands.” But industry experts estimate that no more than 4,000 people work for the Trump Organization worldwide. And executives say that the three floors that make up the headquarters appear to have no more than 150 employees. Kitty Bennett and Rachel Shorey contributed research.

It is a family business, as everyone involved is quick to explain. And the management structure is informal if not confusing, with deputies constantly buzzing in and out of the boss’s office. “We kind of run a little bit like a mom-andpop in that sense,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a 2011 deposition for a lawsuit involving a Florida development. “I guess there is an organizational chart, but in theory, there is not too many levels.” He added: “Could I make one? Yes. Is there one officially? Not that I’m aware of.” Indeed, the elder Mr. Trump has tended to collect executives and assign duties through personal preference. In 2004, Michelle Carlson was a young lawyer determined to move to California when a friend suggested that she meet with an acquaintance who could prove useful. She entered Mr. Trump’s office hoping to secure a recommendation she could use to find work with developers in Los Angeles, and she encountered a warm welcome. “I heard there was this nice Atlanta girl in the lobby,” she remembered Mr. Trump saying as he offered her a seat. Then came a series of direct questions: What were her responsibilities at her current job? How did she view her own strengths? In what areas did she want to grow? Forty-five minutes later, Mr. Trump was convinced: “I’m not going to give you any recommendations in L.A. I’m going to hire you,” Mr. Trump told Ms. Carlson, who went on to spend almost four years as his assistant general counsel, often working 18-hour days with a small team of lawyers while taking on other responsibilities in the real estate division. Andrew Weiss, a Romanian immigrant who grew up in Brooklyn, was hired straight out of graduate school in 1981, just as Mr. Trump was starting to make his mark. Thirty-five years later, having weathered many highs and lows with Mr. Trump, including the spectacular failure of his Atlantic City casinos, Mr. Weiss is still by his side, as executive vice president for development and construction. Mr. Calamari, who started out as a bodyguard, also saw his role expand as he remained committed to his boss. Five years ago, his son Matthew Calamari Jr. joined the Trump Organization as a security guard. Today, he is the director of surveillance. Brian Baudreau, the general manager of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, began as a driver for Mr. Trump. “My father knows how to find talent in people,” Eric Trump said, recalling how Mr. Baudreau used to chauffeur him to school. “He’s totally family,” he added. Devotion is rewarded. “To succeed in this company,” Mr. Garten said, “you have to be skilled, highly dedicated and highly loyal.” Some appear to be hired based on other calculations. For more than a decade, Ronald C. Lieberman oversaw the concession contracts for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, a post that required him to represent the interests of the city in a variety of deals with Mr. Trump. Then, in 2007, Mr. Lieberman began working for a new employer. In his job as executive vice president for management and development at the Trump Organiza-

THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

tion, he has helped Mr. Trump win contracts to operate the Central Park carousel and the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx, the very projects he handled on behalf of the city for years. Ivanka Trump is generally seen as the second-most powerful person at the Trump Organization, while the 11 other executive vice presidents are all men — and all white. There have been other senior female executives, like Cathy Hoffman Glosser, who oversaw the Trump Organization’s expansion into branding deals, part of its shift from building and buying real estate to selling the Trump name. (She left the company last year and did not respond to interview requests. Ms. Carlson said she left by choice to care for her baby, even though Mr. Trump made earnest attempts to keep her.) Mr. Garten said that outside the top executive ranks, “there’s greater diversity in terms of gender and ethnicity,” adding, “I don’t have the numbers in front of me.” Jill Martin, a vice president and assistant general counsel for litigation and employment, said in an interview last spring that diversity at the company was “less forced” than at the law firms where she previously worked. “With the firms, there was a lot of attention placed on gender and ethnicity and trying to find the balance,” she said. “With the Trump Organization, I just felt like those things really fall by the wayside. What’s important is someone’s individual drive and talent.” When Mr. Tiah was at Trump Tower to discuss the Vancouver partnership, he could not help noticing that female employees seemed to have something else in common. “You have to be attractive?” he remembers thinking. “Is that a requirement?”

Steeped in the Details It was the mid-2000s, and Phil Ruffin was in search of a partner to develop a combined hotel and condominium tower on the Las Vegas Strip. Mr. Ruffin, a casino tycoon, owned the land, but he needed an investor, a brand name to license and a team to manage the construction and operations of the property. Mr. Trump did not simply say yes to all three, Mr. Ruffin recalled. He threw himself into the details of the deal, pushing a bank to cut the interest rate on a loan by half, insisting that subcontractors lower their prices and requiring that everything about the 64story tower reflect his taste. “We’d tour, and he’d say, ‘This is wrong; this is right,’” Mr. Ruffin said. “The glass shower had to be etched glass because that’s the Trump way, more expensive. He didn’t want just a TV in the bathroom; it had to be in the mirror so you can watch when you’re shaving.” Mr. Trump, he said, remained actively involved when the financial crisis hit in 2008, threatening the financial viability of the Las Vegas venture, and the two men flew to Washington to meet with a tax lawyer. As they pulled up chairs in his office, the lawyer encouraged the men to cut their losses and declare bankruptcy. It would provide them with a handsome tax deduction. But Mr. Trump was adamant. “He said: ‘This is not Atlantic City; this is Las Vegas. I

JOSH HANER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

think it will recover,’” Mr. Ruffin said. Instead, he and Mr. Trump poured more money into the venture and continued to move forward. Mr. Trump’s children have taken on increasing responsibility in recent years; they often solicit new projects and are the primary liaisons with partners. Two years ago, Eric Trump became the Trump Organization’s main point of contact for the Las Vegas tower, Mr. Ruffin said. Ivanka Trump initiated the leasing of the old Old Post Office building in Washington, envisioning it as a new Trump hotel. But Mr. Trump has the final say on most deals, especially those involving his own money. He has signed the licensing agreements, the leases — and the big checks. And the tangle of limited liability companies used to structure all of his deals revolve around a single point of power: Mr. Trump. As one former executive described it, the company is the “hub of a wheel, and he’s in the middle.” The company adheres to few formal corporate guidelines or procedures. When determining whether and how to enter business partnerships, nothing is decided by established committee, or through written recommendation by the children, Donald Trump Jr. explained in the 2011 deposition in the Florida case. “Other companies can operate like bureaucrats” Mr. Tiah said. “They’re not like that.” Even so, the executives are known for playing tough. When seeking $470,000 in outstanding legal bills from the Trump Organization a decade ago, the lawyer Y. David Scharf accidentally included a single page of a separate legal bill to another client, the business magnate Carl C. Icahn.

How did Mr. Weisselberg, Mr. Trump’s chief financial officer, respond? “Mr. Weisselberg threatened to call Mr. Icahn and utilize this inadvertent clerical error in an effort to embarrass Mr. Scharf and my firm — unless my firm agreed to a 50 percent discount on the outstanding legal bills,” David A. Piedra, a partner in Mr. Scharf’s firm, Morrison Cohen, wrote in a 2007 letter to a lawyer representing Mr. Trump. “As I am sure you realize,” he wrote, “this threat, which smacks of extortion, is entirely inappropriate.” Mr. Scharf said in an interview that his firm had resolved the matter and bore no ill will toward Mr. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization or Mr. Trump. At the time of the election, Mr. Trump’s company was party to at least 75 lawsuits across the country, according to a nationwide tally by USA Today. Mr. Garten said that not all of the lawsuits were substantial, but acknowledged that “we’re extremely hands-on and meticulous in the legal aspects of the business.”

Formidable Loyalties As their boss advanced in the 2016 presidential race, Mr. Trump’s executives remained fierce and aggressive. When The Daily Beast was preparing to publish an article about Mr. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, alleging in a divorce deposition that he had raped her, Michael Cohen, one of the organization’s executive vice presidents, wrongly insisted it was impossible for a husband to rape his wife and made threats. He warned that if the reporter moved ahead with the article, “I’m going to mess your life up,” according to The Daily Beast’s account. It was just one of the many ways that Mr.

Cohen had cultivated the image of a pit bull, a reputation he said was well deserved. “Mr. Trump is more than just a boss to those of us who have been fortunate enough to be close to him, both professionally and personally,” he said in an interview. “He’s more like a patriarch, a mentor. These qualities make him very endearing to me, which is why I am so fiercely loyal to him and committed to protecting him at all costs.” He was not the only seemingly tireless proponent — and protector — of Mr. Trump’s political pursuits. Mr. Garten, the general counsel, defended his boss’s record and fought back against allegations that he had groped women and engaged in other sexual misconduct. At points it appeared as if he were threatening legal action on a daily basis against anyone who criticized Mr. Trump, including The Times and other news outlets. Last December, after Mr. Garten dangled the possibility of legal action against a “super PAC” promoting Jeb Bush and sent a cease-and-desist letter to an anti-tax group that ran $1 million in ads against Mr. Trump, supporters of Mr. Bush complained to the Federal Election Commission that the Trump Organization was illegally acting as an agent for the Trump campaign. “Trump and his agents have explicitly directed his corporate attorneys at the Organization to do the dirty work for the campaign,” a lawyer wrote in the complaint, which is pending. Six months later, Mr. Garten began to appear in the campaign’s financial reports. In the end, he was compensated by Mr. Trump for about $24,000 of legal work for the campaign and donated thousands more dollars’ worth of services as an in-kind contribution. Mr. Garten said he saw many of the attacks on Mr. Trump as an attack on the company. It was his job to fight back, he said.

‘A Real Family Affair’

Top, the exterior of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where Mr. Trump both lives and works. Center, Mr. Trump in his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. Above, Rhona Graff, the executive assistant to Mr. Trump. No one gets into his office without her say-so.

The president-elect’s deliberations over how to separate himself from his company coincided with one of its oldest and most celebrated traditions. Jill Cremer, a former vice president at the Trump Organization, fondly recalls company Christmas parties at the Plaza Hotel, the Pierre or the Rainbow Room. Mr. Trump would hand out prizes — airline tickets, luggage, cameras — and would pose with employees for photos. “The Christmas party was always the highlight,” Ms. Cremer said. “It was a real family affair.” This year, the celebration fell on Dec. 14, two nights after Mr. Trump said he would postpone announcing the details of his plan for the stewardship of the company. He was facing a flurry of activity, including making cabinet picks and navigating calls with foreign leaders, but he found the time to stop by the atrium of Trump Tower, where the party has been held in recent years. As hundreds of Trump Organization employees and guests nibbled on steak from Trump Grill and sipped wine from Trump Winery, Mr. Trump thanked the crowd for helping build the company that bears his name. “You could see the love in the room,” Eric Trump said.

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MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

KARSTEN MORAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

State Slow to Embrace Approach That Streamlines Building Projects A Process Shown to Save Time And Money Is Popular Elsewhere By WINNIE HU

The replacement of the Kosciuszko Bridge, a vital link between Brooklyn and Queens, with a new crossing has succeeded where many New York transportation projects have failed. It is on time and on budget. The first of two side-by-side, cable-stayed bridges will open in the spring, just three years after state transportation officials awarded $555 million to a project team. It was built using a contracting process that saves time and money by bundling together the design and construction phases of a project instead of carrying them out separately. This integrated approach — known as “design-build” versus “design-bid-build” — eliminates the need for two separate contracts and bidding processes, reduces the lag time after a design is completed but construction has yet to begin, and ensures closer coordination among project owners, architects, engineers and construction workers from the start. But design-build projects like the new Kosciuszko Bridge remain the exception in New York even as they have become widely used elsewhere. The State Legislature in Albany has authorized the use of the design-build process for only a few state agencies and authorities since 2011, despite efforts by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, to ex-

pand its use. “New York is a laggard in design-build,” said Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. “There’s really no justification; it’s widely used across the country. New York hurts itself by not having it available for use in New York City.” The stakes are huge for the city, which faces an ever-growing to-do list of capital projects to address its aging and overtaxed transportation and infrastructure system. Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner, said that if design-build were an option, her department could save as much as $330 million on a half-dozen of its biggest and most expensive road and bridge projects, including a $1.7 billion rehabilitation of a crucial 1.5-mile stretch of the BrooklynQueens Expressway. “We want to spend taxpayer dollars fixing bridges and roadways and not on change orders and procurement lawyers,” she said. Ms. Trottenberg and other supporters of design-build acknowledged that it might not be the right choice for every project, but said it should be an available option because of the potential savings in time and money. But some state legislators, state labor leaders, construction industry groups and others have raised concerns about expanding the use of design-build. These critics say it could lead to fewer public sector jobs as more design and engineering work is contracted out by government agencies as opposed to being done in-house, and could allow for a more subjective selection process as contracts are evaluated for the “best

SETH WENIG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

value” and not simply the lowest bid. “In that subjectivity a whole host of sins can be camouflaged, and you risk creating a system rife with favoritism and corruption,” said James Cahill, president of the New York State Building & Construction Trades Council, which represents more than 200,000 unionized construction workers. Despite such concerns, the design-build process has gained traction across the nation. Federal agencies, states and municipalities now use design-build on projects like new roads, bridges, schools and hospitals. In 2016, state transportation agencies reported more than 1,300 design-build projects, compared with 140 in 2002, according to research by the Design-Build Institute of America, a leading industry group. Lisa Washington, the institute’s executive director, said the concept of design-build dated Continued on Page A17

Top, the new Kosciuszko Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Queens, was built using designbuild, which bundles together the design and construction phases of a project. The most prominent example in New York of such a project is the replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge, above.

Spotting a Unique Guitar, Growing Suspicious and Stumbling Onto a Theft The system that prevents the employees of the Sam Ash Music store in Midtown from buying stolen guitars begins before the case is even opened. “First thing I say is, ‘What do you got there?’” said Ian Goldrich, a store manager. If the seller’s answer is something like, “It’s a 1953 Fender Telecaster with an CRIME Esquire neck,” then it is SCENE probably legitimate. But if the answer is “a guitar,” that’s something altogether different. A new seller who entered Sam Ash on Sept. 28 had a plausible explanation for not knowing much about the contents of the guitar case he carried that day and, later, other cases. “His father moved to North Carolina and left him the guitars,” said Jeremy Kolmin, another manager. The store bought his Gibson that day, and $4,300 worth of other instruments, mostly guitars, in the weeks that followed. “He’s a nice guy,” Mr. Kolmin recalled. The staff at Sam Ash knows a lot about guitars. So when that same seller entered in late November with an electric guitar, Mr. Kolmin did a double take. He was sure he had seen it before. Like many guitar enthusiasts, Mr. Kolmin visits the “gear pages” of musicians — links that display an artist’s favorite guitars. The seller was carrying a Heritage guitar — specifically, a Heritage Signature Skolnick, part of a limited series designed by a specific artist, Alex Skolnick. It was a unique instrument, and it made Mr. Kolmin

MICHAEL WILSON

CHRISTOPHER LEE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A stolen guitar belonging to Alex Skolnick, above, of the band Testament, was spotted by a manager at a music store. suspicious because he followed Mr. Skolnick and recognized it from his gear page. Then he flipped it over and saw the serial number, Z20001, and his suspi-

cions were all but confirmed. He asked something like, “Where did you get this again?” and the seller gave the same answer about his father, he recalled. The end digits, 001, indicated the

guitar was a series prototype, not one sold by the company. It would have belonged to the artist, Mr. Skolnick. Mr. Skolnick, 48, leads a jazz outfit, the Alex Skolnick Trio and, at this time

of year, has played holiday shows with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. But to a large and loud segment of his audience, Mr. Skolnick, with his long black hair and its telltale streak of white, is best known as lead guitarist of the thrash metal band Testament. The band gained fame in the late 1980s and was known in part for the melodic style Mr. Skolnick brought to his solos within a genre that favored raw intensity. He left in the 1990s, but the band has reunited over the years and continues to perform, as they will, with more than 60 other bands on a heavy metal cruise from Florida to Haiti in February, “70,000 Tons of Metal.” The store emailed Mr. Skolnick about the Heritage guitar. He lived in Brooklyn, but was in Berlin, wrapping up a tour with Testament. Months earlier, in May, he had placed a lot of equipment that was piling up at home — he estimates he owns 40 guitars, along with amplifiers and other gear — in a new CubeSmart storage facility near his apartment in Park Slope. The Heritage was among the stored guitars, and he had no idea it was not in the locker. “Indeed,” he wrote to Sam Ash in an email, “I might not have noticed for another year or so, as I’m on tour often and there are long gaps between my going through all the instruments I’m not using.” He promised to visit his locker upon his return that week. Before that hapContinued on Page A17

THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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A Dream of Soccer That Survived Life in a War Zone and Life on the Streets By EMILY PALMER

Idi Diallo started playing soccer when he was 5, living in a small Ivory Coast village, kicking a ball on his family farm through two rocks that served as the goal. Even as he played, he could see troops fighting in the distance and hear gunfire ringing out in the civil wars that raged through his childhood. He practiced every day, dreaming of playing in professional European soccer leagues. He had never seen a soccer game on television — played on pristine fields with roaring fans — but at 11, he left his family for Abidjan, the country’s largest city, to play for a local team for the next three years. He also joined the Ivory Coast national team and traveled to Ghana, where the team made the semifinals in a tournament of African nations. In 2010, he got a chance to play in Italy for the AC Milan Football Academy Camp, a youth program sponsored by the elite Italian football league. But when a relative in Milan was unable to house him, he decided to pursue his dream in the United States. Then 15, Mr. Diallo boarded a plane with a friend of his brother’s and headed to New York. They settled in the Bronx, but when his companion returned to Africa a month later, Mr. Diallo found himself alone on the streets. A practicing Muslim, Mr. Diallo found refuge at the Musa Mosque Islamic Center in the Bronx, where he often slept in the prayer hall. He also informally played soccer with the Fordham University team. “He’d have played me, but I didn’t have a diploma,” Mr. Diallo said of the coach, recalling an interaction on the field. “He said, ‘Where do you come from?’ And I said, ‘You don’t want to know.’” Then a friend at the university invited him to play in pickup games at Heritage Field, the site of the original Yankee Stadium. That is where Mr. Diallo met Fernando Rodriguez, a middle-age high school basketball coach battling advanced melanoma, who

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As a child in Ivory Coast, Idi Diallo dreamed of playing professional soccer. With help from an American coach, who sponsored Mr. Diallo for his green card, that dream may come true. watched the games. Mr. Rodriguez approached Mr. Diallo after a game to compliment his performance. Mr. Diallo spoke little English, but he recognized Mr. Rodriguez’s accent and responded in Spanish — the language he had chosen to learn at the soccer academy in Ivory Coast. “So from then, we started talking,” Mr. Diallo said with a smile. “It was a good moment. As time went by, he asked me about my

Striving for athletic success, with a mentor’s help. life. I don’t like talking about my problems; the past is in the past. But he’d take me to eat at a nearby cafeteria, and he’d ask small questions. He asked where I lived, and I said, ‘No house for me,’ and he invited me to stay with him.” A month after their initial meeting, Mr. Diallo accepted an invitation for a home-cooked dinner and saw Mr. Rodriguez’s spare

room. “There was no way I’d find something better than that,” he recalled thinking. Mr. Diallo, then 17, moved in and enrolled at Urban Assembly Media High School in Manhattan, starting as a 10th grader. He took classes to learn English and joined the soccer team, which won the championship in his first year. Mr. Rodriguez became Mr. Diallo’s legal guardian and started filling out paperwork to adopt him. But his health continued to decline, and a year after taking in Mr. Diallo, he was admitted to a hospital. This time, it was Mr. Diallo’s turn to take care of the man who had taken him in. He took warm meals to him and visited him often, updating him on his success at school. Mr. Rodriguez still managed to sponsor Mr. Diallo for his green card and help him apply for legal immigration status. Four months after Mr. Rodriguez died, Mr. Diallo learned that his immigration application had been approved. “When he passed away, it was hard,” Mr. Diallo said, shaking his head. “He’d become my father.” He played a game the day of Mr. Rodriguez’s funeral. And he continued classes. “I had to stay in school,” he said.

“I couldn’t give up on something he’d helped me work toward.” On a cold November morning, Mr. Diallo sat inside Create Young Adult Residences, a transitional housing program serving men 18 to 25, where he has lived since February 2015. Create is affiliated with Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, one of eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Mr. Diallo, now 20, recalls with pride the life he has lived after his mentor’s death. He graduated from high school in June and was accepted to both the College of Staten Island and LaGuardia Community College. It is a far different future from the one he imagined in Ivory Coast, where he spent few years getting a formal education; schools were often closed during the wars. He received a $2,000 scholarship from the National Association for Education and Homeless Children and Youth. The New York Public Library awarded him a laptop for academic excellence, and Catholic Charities used $350 from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund to pay for his schoolbooks. Financial aid will cover his academic costs for the

Spotting Unique Guitar, Manager Discovers Theft From Page A16 pened, on Dec. 1, the seller returned to Sam Ash with another Skolnick signature-series guitar, this one from the ESP Guitar Company. “We called the cops and said, ‘What are we supposed to do?’” said another manager, Bobby Colonna. Officers arrived and questioned the man briefly, but without a complaint from a victim, they could not arrest him, and he left. Still, Mr. Colonna urged the man to come back in a day, pretending he needed the Email: crimescene@nytimes.com Twitter: @mwilsonnyt

time to research the guitar’s worth. At the same time, Mr. Skolnick visited his locker. It did not appear to have been tampered with, and the contents of the unit looked untouched, but some guitars were indeed absent. He swore out a complaint. The managers at Sam Ash were sure that after the previous day’s police scrutiny, the man would not return. But return he did. Officers returned, too, and in front of the store staff, they were able to handcuff the seller, John Olds, 51, of Harlem. “My father passed away two years ago and left me the guitars,” he told officers, according to court docu-

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other a Merry Christmas and continued on their ways. Everyone in the car put money in their containers. Max Van Gilder Dear Diary: As a daily cyclist, I’ve learned to expect to encounter pedestrians at most intersections who are heedlessly crossing against the light and into traffic while glued to their smartphones. So nothing seemed out of the ordinary this past Sunday as I pedaled west on Ninth Street toward Avenue of the Americas and saw a lanky guy heading into the crosswalk without a thought about the light, the traffic or any other petty details. Except there was a twist: This jaywalker was immersed in a hardcover book. As a lover of the printed page, I didn’t know whether to yell or offer a highfive. Instead, I just rang my bell, and he jumped back, without ever taking his eyes off whatever he was reading. Gerry Khermouch Dear Diary: My 17-year-old grandson, Jacob, and his classmate were coming from Washington on a Saturday night. Because the boys had never been to New York City on their own before, Jacob’s mother wrote out detailed instructions: “Call Nana when your train gets to Penn Station. Walk two blocks to catch the F train. Get off at Bergen Street.” Their Amtrak train was due in at 6:45 p.m. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get Jacob’s call. Navigating Penn Station and the Herald Square crush to find the F at rush hour would need all the

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first two years at both schools. It will not cover his room and board, but he qualifies for an $800 rental subsidy from the city. In addition to working part time as a waiter, bringing in about $600 a month, he plays midfielder for Boca Juniors Academy-USA, affiliated with Argentina’s premier student soccer league. He travels to Long Island three days a week to practice, and has had tryouts with professional soccer clubs across the country, including the San Francisco Deltas and LA Galaxy II. Additional tryouts are scheduled for FC Miami City and Orlando City Soccer Club in January. He has also been invited for a return tryout in Los Angeles later in January but is unable to afford the plane fare. He laughed and shook his head, reflecting on the future, hopeful

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To delay may mean to forget.

yet unwilling to wish too much. “If God gets me on a team — whatever team — this year, and I do well ...,” he said, his words trailing off. “With agents watching those games, you never know.” He is waiting to choose a college until he hears back from professional soccer teams, and plans to start classes after tryouts conclude in February, studying business accounting or physical therapy. If he makes a team this year, he said, he plans to continue school in that city. Regardless of where the next few months take him, Mr. Diallo said, he will keep working to become a professional soccer player. “I could do without anything — live on the street — to play soccer,” he said. “And I’ve done that. I’ve been dreaming about this day since I was born.”

State Slow to Use Process That Streamlines Projects From Page A16

CHRISTOPHER LEE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jeremy Kolmin, a manager at a Sam Ash Music store, who recognized the unique Skolnick guitar that a man was trying to sell. ments. He added, “I can’t incriminate myself.” He is in jail awaiting trial on several counts of possession of stolen property. Mr. Skolnick got his guitars

back, including the Heritage No. 1, which is again being kept where it was before the move in May: in his crowded living room, in plain sight.

METROPOLITAN DIARY EAR DIARY: It was a Saturday morning in early December. It was cold and gray and depressing. I was on the No. 1 train heading downtown from 168th Street, reading and minding my own business, as were the other 10 or so people in the car. The door at the north end of the car opened, and a blind man with a cane and a proffered container entered. Seconds later, the door at the car’s south end opened, and a blind woman with a cane and a similar container got on. Quietly and slowly, the two moved in opposite directions. Everyone was sitting at attention; no one said a word. What was going to happen when they met? They reached the middle of the car at about the same time and bumped into each other. Hands were extended. The woman touched the man’s face and said, “Is that you?” “I haven’t seen you in a long time,” he replied. “How are you?” They discussed aches and pains, talked about their children and grandchildren for a few minutes, hugged, wished each

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boys’ attention. They will be ringing my doorbell around 7:30, I told myself. But at 7:30, no Jacob; 7:50, no Jacob. I texted, “Where are you?” No reply. I reminded myself that there was no cell service underground. At 8:15, Jacob called. “Hi, Nana.” “Jacob!” “We’re at Spring Street,” he said. “On the E train. I had to get off to call you.” “Spring Street in SoHo? The E? It doesn’t come to Brooklyn. You need the F.” “We’ll find it.” He hung up before I could give directions. I texted: “Change at Canal to the A or C. At Jay StreetMetroTech, the F is across the platform.” Two more transfers! Sigh. It sounded so complicated. No word by 8:45. I stared at my phone. At 9, Jacob called. “We’re here!” Actually, they were five blocks away. They had overshot by one station. I went outside to wait. It felt as if the temperature had dropped 20 degrees in a few hours. They finally arrived. “Jacob!” I said, hugging him. He introduced me to Andrew. “Why didn’t you get off at Bergen?” “I was too busy reading your texts,” Jacob said. “We missed the stop.” Marcia Savin Dear Diary: Having boarded a crowded uptown subway train at Fulton

Street headed toward home, I stood in front of a 20-something man with the hope that in recognition of my white hair, he would offer me his seat. Nothing happened. He was immersed in his cellphone and earphones. I waved my hand in front of him to get his attention. “When I was your age,” I said, “I gave my seat to 87-year-old passengers.” He rose, gave me his seat and said, “When I am your age, I hope to be more subtle.” Bernard Bernstein Dear Diary: It was a December some years ago when I hopped into a taxi on the Upper East Side, headed for a meeting across town. I had a folder in my lap, filled with notes I needed to review before arriving — but, just my luck, a chatty driver. He peppered me with questions, about the weather, the holidays, the Rockefeller Center tree. I made every effort to answer briefly to discourage further conversation: “Yes, much too cold. Yes, busy wrapping. No, haven’t been to see it yet.” Finally, he took the hint, and we drove silently, me with my eyes fixed on my notes. When the cab stopped, I reorganized my folder and reached for my wallet. Then I looked up. The Rockefeller Center tree in all its splendor, right there. Quietly, together, we gazed. We smiled. “No charge for this part of the ride, lady,” he said. “I hadn’t seen it yet, either.” Ann Whipple Marr

back centuries to the master builders who produced masterpieces such as the Pantheon in Rome, the Parthenon in Athens or the Duomo in Florence, Italy. It was not until the 1800s, with the Industrial Revolution, that the increasing expertise of designers and engineers led to professional societies and a division of labor. For public works projects, separate design and construction phases soon became the standard. But beginning in the 1990s, concerns that the construction industry had become too segmented and lacked cooperation gave rise to a growing movement back to an integrated, “design-build” approach, Ms. Washington said. Today, 25 states have passed legislation authorizing the use of the design-build process by all agencies for all types of projects, while 17 other states allow it to be widely used, according to the institute. New York is one of eight states — along with Alabama, Delaware, Iowa, New Jersey, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where it remains a limited option. California transportation officials said the main benefit of the design-build process was that it allowed projects — including improving a highway interchange in San Bernardino County and rehabilitating the deck of a bridge in Sacramento — to be completed up to 30 months earlier than under traditional contracts. Similarly, the first big test of design-build for Georgia’s Transportation Department was the construction of a highway interchange that state leaders had promised would be ready for the opening of a nearby Kia Motors plant. Darryl D. VanMeter, who oversees design-build projects for the agency, said a project like that would typically take seven years. It was finished in just under two and a half years. In total, his agency has awarded $1.8 billion for 32 designbuild projects since 2006. All of them were on budget, and most either opened on time or were expected to, he said. Another benefit was that ideas were suggested by project teams that led to additional savings. “It opens the door for innovation,” Mr. VanMeter said. “But you open the door just enough to the areas you want them to be innovative about.” In New York, at the urging of the governor, the Legislature passed a law in 2011 authorizing five

agencies and authorities to use design-build: the Transportation Department; the Environmental Conservation Department; the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; the New York State Thruway Authority; and the New York State Bridge Authority. The most prominent example in New York of a design-build project is the Thruway Authority’s $3.9 billion replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge in Tarrytown, which state officials estimate will save at least $1.5 billion because of the streamlined process. The Transportation Department has also awarded contracts for an additional 26 design-build projects, including the Kosciuszko Bridge. Department officials estimated that, in total, they had shaved more than 45 years off those projects. The debate over design-build is expected to grow louder in the new year, as the authorization for the state agencies comes up for renewal. State Assembly leaders have already signaled concerns. “We will look at any proposal and review it, but we don’t support blanket design-build,” Michael Whyland, an Assembly spokesman, said. “Why? Because we want to make sure workers are protected and that taxpayer money is being spent responsibly.” The Civil Service Employees Association, an influential union representing nearly 200,000 public sector employees, and the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, have voiced similar concerns. But supporters of design-build are also lining up. John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, a government watchdog group, said that while he was usually skeptical of public-private partnerships, the cost savings of the design-build model were well established and the process was so widely used outside New York that “it’s archaic not to allow it.” Kathryn Wylde, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, which represents many of the city’s top business leaders, said one of the group’s legislative priorities would be getting use of the designbuild process renewed and expanded. “It’s the only way that government can deliver major projects on time and on budget,” she said. “The traditional way has proven to create massive delays and overruns that have not been in the interest of anyone. This is a step toward efficiency.”

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Overseas Entrepreneurs Set Up Shop at CUNY In New Visa Program By LIZ ROBBINS

Gabor Tankovics was checking off the boxes for his New York City tech start-up this past spring. Investors. Advisers. Users. But one box was still noticeably blank: Visa. “I really felt like, ‘O.K., I am at the stage where things are starting to work out,’” said Mr. Tankovics, 33, a native of Hungary. “At the same time, I might have to leave.” But then he heard about a new option, a program for international entrepreneurs created this year by New York City’s Economic Development Corporation with the City College of New York. By working at one of CUNY’s campuses, founders of start-up companies can obtain an 18-month United States visa to establish their businesses — with the aim of creating jobs and training aspiring innovators. In October, Mr. Tankovics became the first of two visa recipients out of 144 applicants for the program, the International Innovators Initiative, known as IN2NYC. “This was absolutely designed for me,” Mr. Tankovics said in an empty and echoing co-working space at LaGuardia Community College’s NYDesigns start-up stu-

The first in an effort to establish start-ups, and mentor students. dio. By next year, it will house Mr. Tankovics’s three-employee company, Dartboard, a web application to help manage student loans. The IN2NYC program selected Namisha Bahl, 26, of India, as its second participant. Ms. Bahl is a founder of Mogul, a website for women around the world that has 25 New York-based employees, she said, but is hoping to double in size by next year. Ms. Bahl, the company’s marketing director, will begin mentoring students at City College of New York’s Zahn Innovation Center, a start-up incubator promoting diversity in the tech world, next year. By March, she and Mr. Tankovics will be joined by as many as 20 more participants in the program, working at five schools in the CUNY system, according to IN2NYC officials. Ms. Bahl had been out of options. She had earned her master’s degree in integrated marketing from New York University in 2015 and twice applied for an H-1B visa. The visas, which go to skilled workers, are given out by lottery each year. The number of recipients is capped at 85,000, but more than three times as many people apply each year. And self-employed entrepreneurs are not eligible.

But in 2000, Congress allowed for exemptions to the cap, including people working at institutions of higher education or affiliated nonprofits. “It is an amazing and crucial opportunity,” Ms. Bahl said in an email. “I would not have been able to expand Mogul further without work authorization.” Or, as the program’s consulting lawyer, Peter F. Asaad, put it: “Without a program like this, she certainly would be out in the cold.” Because of guidelines set by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, IN2NYC applicants must be sponsored for the visa by their company’s board of directors, all of whom are American citizens or permanent residents. The board members have the power to determine how much the applicant earns and other terms of employment. The program does not just benefit the visa holder, its creators say. “It’s not just about one person, but it’s about the larger ripple effect,” said Maria Torres-Springer, the president of New York City’s development corporation. “Both in terms of job creation for that company, and what it also means for the students and faculty, the local schools with which they partner.” She added: “It’s an entire ecosystem.” Dartboard and Mogul both are geared toward millennials. Mr. Tankovics explained that his web application, available only by invitation now but planned for public testing in January, helps people pay their student loans faster, saving money on interest payments. Although he does not have any American student loans — he got a law degree and a master’s degree in business administration in Paris — when he came to New York for his master’s degree at Parsons School of Design, his friends in the United States all bemoaned their debt. A prototype of the app was the basis of his master’s thesis. He has not thought about how he would find a way to stay once his visa expires. “As a start-up founder, you do need to have a long-term vision, but at the same time you’re very into short-term fights. You’re struggling with every micro-decision,” Mr. Tankovics said. Next semester, he is planning to teach a course at LaGuardia tentatively called “Designing for Financial Empowerment.” He hopes to teach students how to create opportunities for those New Yorkers who may not be served by traditional financial outlets, like banks. His short-term goals are simple. “To have more users and a better service at the end of January and then hire new people,” Mr. Tankovics said. Then, looking around at the harshly lit space, he smiled. “And to move to an office with a window.”

KATHERINE TAYLOR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Gabor Tankovics received a temporary visa with help from IN2NYC, a program for international entrepreneurs.

Rapper Facing Criminal Charges Is Shot at Brooklyn Intersection By NIRAJ CHOKSHI

Troy Ave, the Brooklyn rapper charged with attempted murder after a May shooting at a concert at a Manhattan club, was shot twice on Sunday, the police said. The rapper, whose real name is Roland Collins, was driving a red Maserati around 4:20 p.m. in Brooklyn when an unidentified man approached the vehicle, which was stopped at an intersection at East 91st Street and Linden Boulevard. The gunman fired multiple rounds, the police said. Mr. Collins was struck twice, taking a gunshot wound to the arm and a graze wound to his head. He then crashed his vehicle into a parked car. Mr. Collins went to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, where he was hospitalized in fair condition. The police are investigating the shooting, though they said they had no description of the gunman. No arrests had been made as of Sunday night. In June, Mr. Collins pleaded not guilty to attempted second-degree murder and other counts in

connection with a May shooting at the Irving Plaza concert hall in Manhattan. In August, he sued the club and the concert promoter Live Nation, which oversees the Troy Ave in club, accusing it court in June. of lax security. The shooting occurred at a May 25 show that was to feature the rapper T.I. Before he was able to perform, however, shots were fired in a green room, killing Mr. Collins’s bodyguard Ronald McPhatter, 33, and wounding Mr. Collins and two other people. Security footage showed Mr. Collins firing one shot amid the scuffle. He had been scheduled to appear as a guest of T.I. that night and had entered through a V.I.P. entrance, according to the lawsuit.

Do not forget the Neediest!

DAVID GONZALEZ/THE NEW YORK TIMES

SIDE STREET

Kept in Line by an Angel When Envy Struck By DAVID GONZALEZ

Through the dim memories of a South Bronx childhood — as blurry as the steamed-up living room windows protected by chicken wire from the local knuckleheads and their barrage of rocks — thoughts of Christmastime in 1963 come slowly into focus. The smell of roast pork, the hard-as-nails spiced red and green candies, and the Christmas tree topped by an angel whose very presence spooked me — all of these seasonal recollections fade before one that to this day makes my heart race. Visiting the Fedco supermarket at Intervale and Fox. There, above the meat case crammed with pork chops, steaks and chicken, were toys arrayed on shelves tantalizingly close to our small outstretched arms. Big toys. The kind that made a 6-year-old lose himself with desire. There was the olive green tank that fired tan plastic shells with a whiff of talcum-powder smoke. The fire engine set with what seemed like a million pieces — most of which were lost within days. A secret agent kit, complete with a thin plastic trench coat that offered zero protection from the winter snow when I tried wearing it outside. These were real toys, not the flimsy cars and guns made in Japan

from stamped tin cans that still had Japanese lettering on the inside. And to my mind, none of this could compete with Fort Apache, which was my biggest Christmas wish in 1963. Inside a box whose illustration never matched the makeshift mess I would set up were the parts of a brown plastic fort to be peopled by soldiers on the inside and Apaches on the outside. Maybe it was an omen, since that very neighborhood a few years later would become known as Fort Apache thanks to the overworked and under siege 41st Precinct station house on Simpson Street. Between there and our apartment on Beck Street was an entire holiday universe. Sparkling Christmas garlands arched over Southern Boulevard, home to Wishna’s Toy Store and Kresge’s, where Mami worked at the lunch counter. Around the corner from our house was Santini’s bodega, where they sold on credit meat as tough as leather and crackers that sometimes had tiny squirming insects that had burrowed into the boxes. But Fedco was its own magical place. From after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, any visit there prompted wonder and hyperventilation. The excitement lingered when I was home, taking the box in which the grocer-

ies were delivered, turning it upside down as a table in front of the television and having my lunch as I watched cartoons of cats and mice trying to kill each other. But that was mere prelude. The minute a commercial came on, I went into Christmas list mode. Actually, I went into shouting mode whenever I spied a particularly cool toy. “Que Santa Clo me traiga Mister Machine!” I cried in perfect Spanglish. “May Santa Claus bring me Mister Machine!” And in case he didn’t hear me at first, I repeated it twice. It was this child’s Christmas in wails.

A difficult lesson during a Christmas in the South Bronx. Who needed a letter to Santa? I just shouted (which, I realized a few years later, had made it easy for Mami and Papi to know what I wanted). Sure enough, when the big day came, there under the tree would be the toy I had coveted at the supermarket. It would be enough to make me giddy. But not always. Late Christmas night in 1963, I learned my cousin Hector had

gotten a bike. Suddenly, Fort Apache didn’t seem so cool. Upset, I blurted out: “I hope he breaks his neck on that bike!” Mami and Papi were aghast. I knew I had crossed a line, and waited for punishment. Befitting our Catholic upbringing on this most holy of holidays, my parents made me apologize and ask for forgiveness, but not of Hector. No, absolution would come only from a higher power: the angel atop our Christmas tree. Reluctantly — and with more than a bit of fear of the stiffwinged angel looking down on me — I told the unblinking herald that I was sorry. Frankly, I do not know how sincere my apology was. What I did feel that day was terror that — as in movies about children seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary — the angel might react with a wink or a flap of wings. That childhood dread of being singled out by the almighty to witness a religious apparition lingers to this day, making me switch channels pronto when movies like “The Song of Bernadette” are shown on television. Apology done, I went back to playing with Fort Apache. Hector never broke his neck. My parents didn’t get me a bike until 1969. By then, Hector had a unicycle, but I had self-control. And my fear of otherworldly visions still keeps me in line.

THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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George Michael, 53, Pop Superstar Who Rose to Fame in Wham!, Dies By JON PARELES

George Michael, the creamyvoiced English songwriter who sold tens of millions of albums as a member of the duo Wham! and on his own, was found dead on Sunday at his home in Goring in Oxfordshire, England. He was 53. A police statement said: “Thames Valley Police were called to a property in Goring-onThames shortly before 2 p.m. Christmas Day. Sadly, a 53-yearold man was confirmed deceased at the scene. At this stage the death is being treated as unexplained but not suspicious.” Mr. Michael’s manager, Michael Lippman, told The Hollywood Reporter that Mr. Michael had died of heart failure “in bed, lying peacefully.” “It is with great sadness that we can confirm our beloved son, brother and friend George passed away peacefully at home over the Christmas period,” his publicist Connie Filippello said in a statement. “The family would ask that their privacy be respected at this difficult and emotional time. There will be no further comment at this stage.” Information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Michael was one of pop’s reigning stars in the 1980s and ’90s — first as a handsome, smiling teen-pop idol making lighthearted singles like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” with Wham!, then arriving as a grown-up pop sex symbol with his 1987 album “Faith.”

The superficiality and relentless promotion of ’80s pop stardom became troubling.

EBET ROBERTS

George Michael performing solo at Madison Square Garden in 1988. He later turned away from live shows. gay rights. During interviews in later years, he described himself as bisexual, and said that hiding his sexuality had made him feel “fraudulent.” He also described long struggles with depression. During the 2000s, Mr. Michael’s output slowed; his last studio album of new songs was “Patience” in 2004. In later years he put out individual songs as free downloads, encouraging listeners to contribute to charity. But in 2006, 25 years into his career, he could still headline stadiums worldwide. George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in East Finchley, London, on June 25, 1963, the son of a Greek Cypriot restaurateur and an English danc-

IAN DICKSON/REDFERNS

With Wham!, Mr. Michael made lighthearted pop singles like “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” But Mr. Michael grew increasingly uncomfortable with the superficiality and relentless promotion of 1980s-style pop stardom. He turned away from video clips and live shows; he set out to make more mature statements in his songs, though he never completely abandoned singing about love and desire. Mr. Michael wrote supple ballads, like “Careless Whisper” and “Father Figure,” as well as buoyant dance tracks like “Freedom ’90” and “I Want Your Sex.” For much of his career, including his best-selling albums “Faith” and “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” he was also his own producer and studio backup band. Much of his music drew on R&B, old and new, but his melodic gift extended across genres. He won a Grammy Award in 1988 for “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me),” a duet with Aretha Franklin, and “Faith” won the Grammy for album of the year. In Britain, he was showered with awards, and in 2004, Britain’s Radio Academy said he had been the most-played performer on British radio from 1984 to 2004. In 1998, Mr. Michael came out as gay after being arrested on charges of lewd conduct in a men’s room in Beverly Hills, Calif. He had long lent his name and music to support AIDS prevention and Niraj Chokshi contributed reporting.

er. In 1979, he and a schoolmate, Andrew Ridgeley, played together for the first time in a ska band called the Executive. That didn’t last, but they continued to make music together — nearly all of it composed and sung by Mr. Michael — and began releasing singles as Wham!, cultivating the image of carefree teenage rebels in songs like “Young Guns (Go for It!).” Their 1983 debut album, “Fantastic,” reached No. 1 in Britain; in the United States, their 1984 single “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” became ubiquitous on MTV and reached No. 1. In 1985, the duo became the first major Western pop group to perform in China as part of its world tour, and Mr. Michael appeared at the Live Aid charity concert, telecast worldwide, joining Elton John to sing Mr. John’s song “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” The worldwide 1984 hit “Careless Whisper,” credited in Britain to George Michael solo and to Wham! featuring George Michael in the United States, signaled a turn away from perky teenage fare. Mr. Michael’s status as a top British pop star was confirmed by his appearance on Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the 1984 all-star benefit single for Ethiopian famine relief. In 1986, Wham! dissolved, with a farewell show at Wembley Stadium. Mr. Michael had a No. 1 hit

with “I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me)” before releasing the album “Faith” in 1987. Its first single, “I Want Your Sex,” reached No. 2 in the United States, though it was seen as too risqué by some radio stations; Mr. Michael made an introduction to its video clip stating, “This song is not about casual sex.” “Faith,” which hinted at both gospel and rockabilly, reached No. 1, and the album included three more No. 1 hits: “Father Figure,” “Monkey” and “One More Try.” It has sold more than 10 million copies in the United States. But for his next album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” released in 1990, Mr. Michael set out to jettison his pop persona. “I’m not stupid enough to think I can deal with another 10 or 15 years of major exposure,” he told an interviewer at the time. “I think that’s the ultimate tragedy of fame, people who are simply out of control, who are lost. I’ve seen so many of them, and I don’t want to be another cliché.” The autobiographical “Freedom ’90” declared his independence from the pop machine; he wasn’t in its video clip, which had supermodels lip-syncing the lyrics. The album also included a No. 1 single, the ballad “Praying for Time,” and has sold two million copies in the United States, but after the blockbuster of “Faith” it was considered a commercial letdown. Mr. Michael entered a protracted legal battle with Sony Music over his contract, and was unable to release another album until 1996. Its title, “Older,” was an unmistakable signal that he was no longer directly courting the youth market; he was 32 years old. The album was an instant hit in England and Europe — it had six hit singles in England — though it was less popular in the United States. After his 1998 arrest, Mr. Michael released a greatest-hits album with two new songs; one, “Outside,” set its video clip in a men’s restroom. He made a 1999 album of cover songs, “Songs of the Last Century.” In the early 2000s, Mr. Michael released songs protesting the invasion of Iraq, including the 2002 “Shoot the Dog.” His last full studio album, “Patience,” was released in 2004, full of introspective ballads. Mr. Michael returned to performing; he joined Paul McCartney onstage during the 2005 Live 8 benefit concert. In 2006, he performed a world tour, paired with another collection of hits, “Twenty Five,” which included new duets with Mr. McCartney and Mary J. Blige. He continued to release individual songs sporadically, and in 2014, he released “Symphonica,” a collection of standards and his own songs recorded with an orchestra on a 2010-11 tour. During that tour, he collapsed with nearly fatal pneumonia and was hospitalized for five weeks; he wrote a single, “White Light,” about the experience. Mr. Michael had been planning an expanded reissue, due in 2017, of “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” paired with a documentary, “Freedom,” exploring his musical, personal and legal struggles. “I never minded being thought of as a pop star,” Mr. Michael told GQ in 2004. “People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music.”

ROBERT KOZLOFF/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Aretha Franklin joined Mr. Michael in 1988 in Auburn Hills, Mich., on his tour for his Grammywinning album “Faith.” Their duet on “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” was a No. 1 hit.

SAMUEL KUBANI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Mr. Michael onstage in Bratislava, Slovakia, on a 2007 European tour.

Deaths

Deaths

BLOCK–Henry. Left us peacefully two weeks after his 95th birthday bash. HAMERMAN–David J. Henry's great love of tennis Loving husband, father and was only surpassed by his grandfather, accomplished love for stained glass, his physician who re-imagined many friends, nieces and primary and geriatric care nephews, cousins and his wife over four decades at Monteof 69 years, Gilda Smithline fiore Hospital. He leaves beBlock. He served in the US hind wife Laura Lowy Army Air Corps in World War Hamerman; children, Alan, II. He received his MBA from Jean and Fred and their NYU. He played tennis from spouses; stepsons David and Brooklyn to the French RivieLloyd Lowy; and grandchildra receiving many trophies ren Alex, Evan, Andrew and and ranking #1 in Senior 55 Jacob Lowy, Elie, Cal and Tennis Eastern Division, plus Alice Hamerman and Emma national ranking. His many Allen. Shiva will be on Wedphilanthropies included the nesday, December 28th from Gilda and Henry Block School 6pm- 9pm at 32 Fraser Pl., of the Arts at the 92nd Street Hastings on Hudson, NY and Y, the Block-Kolker Center on Thursday, December 29th for Spiritual Arts at The Jewfrom 6pm-9pm at 333 Central ish Theological Seminary, Park West in New York City. Temple Emanu-El of Palm A memorial service will be Beach, Sutton Place Synaheld in January 2017. In lieu of gogue, and the Conservative flowers, please send donaSynagogue of the Hamptons. tions to the Arthritis FoundaServices will be held at tion or the Montefiore FounTemple Emanu-El of Palm dation. Beach on Monday, December 26 at 11:00am. Graveside farewell at Mt. Judah Cemetery in Queens, New York on Wednesday. We will all miss him madly . Love and kisses Henry. MacKENZIE–Warren G. BLOCK–Henry. The Jewish Theological Seminary mourns the loss of Henry Block, a dedicated philanthropist, artist in stained glass, and cherished friend. Henry and his wife, Gilda, generously underwrote the creation of The Block/Kolker Center for Spiritual Arts at JTS, an incubator for new forms of prayer and liturgy, which also honors their dear friend Kenneth Kolker (z l). Among their many honors, the Blocks received the JTS Community Service Award at Temple Emanu-El of Palm November 19, 1931 - DecemBeach. We extend our conber 17, 2016. Warren G. Macdolences to Gilda and the enKenzie passed away peacetire family. May they be comfully December 17, 2016, in St. forted among the mourners Louis, Missouri, shortly after of Zion and Jerusalem. celebrating his 85th birthday surrounded by family and BLOCK–Henry. loved ones. Warren was born The 92nd Street Y Board, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, the son staff and community mourn of John W.P. and Elizabeth A. the passing of Henry Block, MacKenzie. He graduated beloved husband of longtime from the Park School of Bufpatron and dedicated supporfalo, New York, in 1949, reter, Gilda Block. Our thoughts ceived his undergraduate deand prayers are with Gilda, gree from Yale University in the entire Block family as 1953, and then served in the well as their friends. Our U.S. Army in Korea as an arcommunity has been deeply tillery lieutenant. Returning blessed by the Blocks' geneto the United States, he rerosity and dedication. May ceived his juris doctorate they be comforted among from Columbia Law School in the mourners of Zion and Je1959. Warren married Phoebe rusalem. Ann Connor in 1956 and they Marc S. Lipschultz, President lived in New York City and Stuart J. Ellman, Chairman Darien, Connecticut, where Henry Timms, Exec. Director they raised five children who survive them: Phoebe MacKenzie Smith of St. Louis, BLOCK–Henry. Warren Gair MacKenzie, Jr. Sutton Place Synagogue of Washington D.C., James mourns the loss of our longConnor MacKenzie of St. Lotime member, Trustee and uis, Donald D. MacKenzie of Chai Pillar. A passionate sup- Denver, CO. and Scott A. porter of Jewish EngageMacKenzie of Cordoba, Arment through the arts, Henry gentina. Warren is also surand Gilda's support provides vived by his beloved brother, creative programming and John P. MacKenzie, of New outreach to many in our comYork City, and his sister Bonmunity. Our condolences to nie M. Grey of Chester, Conhis beloved wife, Gilda, and to necticut. Warren spent forthe extended family. May his mative years in Buffalo, NY, memory be a blessing. mentored particularly by M. Rachel Ain, Rabbi Adolphus Cheek, Jr., Head of Shari Pochapin, President Park School who provided life- altering guidance and love. Warren's older brother, DAVID–William H. Donald Bain MacKenzie of You were an original Little the U.S. Army Air Corps, was Rascal who grew up to bekilled in action on August 17, come a unique big rascal, and 1943, while flying a combat we all loved you for that, as mission over Europe. Warren well as for your wisdom, was an involved PTA parent warmth and consistently irbooster and longtime board reverent humor. Four genermember of Camps Owatonations of our family treasured na and Newfound in Harrison, your friendship and we shall Maine. He was a Sunday always miss you. School teacher and a life-long The Gordon Family Democrat. Warren gave time as a volunteer counselor at the Rahway, NJ prison, ELIAS–Charlotte. where he read the Bible to inHigh Ridge Country Club ackmates. Warren was a lifelong nowledges with sorrow the attorney, last passing the Bar passing of our esteemed in Florida in 1998. He started member, Charlotte Elias. We his career at Willkie Farr & extend our deepest symGallagher in New York City pathy to her beloved family. and proceeded to general Stuart Albrecht, President counsel responsibilities at Harvey Karofsky, Secretary Borden Inc., Baker Industries Inc. and Carl Fischer, Inc., where he held a senior manELIAS–Charlotte. It is with profound sadness to agement role at of one of the most prestigious publishers announce the passing of our of sheet music in the U.S. For beautiful mother, grandmothmany years, he served on the er and great-grandmother, board of the U.K.-based inCharlotte Elias. The most destrument maker and music voted mother to Gale Sitopublisher Boosey & Hawkes. mer (Ken), Shari Cherne Phoebe and Warren Mac(Mitchel), Sam Elias (Rosemary). GAGA to Colby Kenzie divorced in 1988 and Phoebe died in 2000. Warren Gualano (Mario), Harry Sitomarried Rose Schreibel in mer, Samara Slade (Mitchel), Chloe Cherne, Brant Cherne, 1989 and the couple lived in Rowayton, Connecticut, and Isaac and Caleb Elias. GreatLakeland, Florida. Rose pregrandmother to Gemma, Chase, Stella and Harlow. Her deceased him in 2007. Warren was a committed racquets beauty and class were only enthusiast who enjoyed playsurpassed by her devotion to ing tennis and paddle at the her family and her undying Tokeneke Club in Darien and love to her beloved husband, Iggy Elias. Her fight in life to at Echo Lake Club in Westfield, New Jersey. He infused overcome many illnesses his children with his passion were an indication of her for racquets, lifelong learnstrength. To all who were ing, the importance of camp, lucky enough to know her team spirit and helping othand be loved by her, her ers. Warren's eight grandsense of humor, her strength, children, siblings and friends elegance and her astounding mourn the passing of a humbeauty until the end, will ble, loving, selfless and never be forgotten. She thoughtful man who was a taught us that a smile, laughgreat father and role model. ter and being surrounded by family is the only solution for He was an optimist and a humanist who appreciated fine those things which we cannot music and the written word, a change. May you and Daddy gentle loving soul who will be and your beloved mother greatly missed. A private ceCele, now be reunited in lebration of Warren's life is heaven forever. We will planned. In lieu of flowers, forever miss you. Love you please send contributions to more... Services Tuesday, Planned Parenthood or the 1:30pm, Riverside Memorial charity of your choice. Chapel, NYC. ELIAS–Charlotte. Our heartfelt condolences to the loving family of Charlotte Elias. My best friend's beautiful mother. Charlotte you were a true beauty who touched my heart and soul deeply and forever. Your kindness, beauty and quirky sense of humor will remain in my heart and mind forever. Those special qualities live on forever in your daughters, son, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. You will be forever missed by those who knew you yet with us all in every summer breeze, twinkling star, the light of moon and especially in the magnificent smiles of my beautiful Gale, Colby, Harry and Harlow. With All Our Love, Lori Shabtai and Family

Deaths Block, Henry

McFadden, Josephine Perlman, Myra

David, William

Millington, John

Rothenberg, Nathan

Elias, Charlotte

Mumma, Richard

Sarnoff, Ellen

Hamerman, David

Murphy, Daniel

Mackenzie, Warren

Nadler, Miriam

MCFADDEN–Josephine N., MURPHY–Daniel Joseph, age 77. Peacefully died of died peacefully at his home in cancer in Hospice on DecemGulfstream, Florida on Deber 23, 2016. A resident of cember 21, 2016, after a couNew York City, a graduate of rageous three and a half year Chatham Hall, in Chatham, battle with pancreatic cancer. VA and Wheaton College in He was 83. Danny, as he was Norton, MA, her selfless deknown, had been retired for votion and advocacy for 34 years after a storied those in need was cultivated career on Wall Street. A pionby being a lifelong member eer in the block trading busiof Madison Avenue Presness, he built Shields and Co. byterian Church. There, she into a trading powerhouse. served as both Deacon and When Shields was sold, he beElder, a full-time volunteer came a Senior Partner at Opon the Pastoral Staff, and one penheimer and Co. where he of the church's Commissionfinished his career. He was a ers to the Presbytery of New great mentor and has left beYork City. She helped found hind a legacy of the many The Neighborhood Coalition careers he helped foster. In for Shelter in the early 1980s retirement, he loved spendas a response to homelessing time at his home in Sun ness in the city. Other organiValley, Idaho and avidly purzations she served and supsued his passions for golf, ported include Justice Works skiing, fishing, shooting and Community, advocating for travel. He had the personality just, humane and effective of a charming leprechaun criminal justice policies; with sparkling blue eyes and Bread for the World, a nation- an ever present ability to al Christian movement advomake those around him cating for the hungry; East laugh. He is survived by his Side Congregations for Housloving wife of over 35 years, ing Justice, an interfaith coaPK, his daughters Suzanne lition of more than 30 congreMurphy and Melinda Schild gations and community orgaand three granddaughters. nizations seeking safe and afHis daughter Marisa Wry prefordable housing for all New deceased him. In lieu of flowYorkers; and Health Advoers, the family requests that cates for Older People. Carmemorial contributions be negie East House, which she made to support the pancreawas instrumental in bringing tic cancer research of Dr. into existence, honored her Matthew Weiss M.D at Johns as a 2006 New York Treasure. Hopkins Medicine. Checks She was the Big Sis to Kath- should be made payable to erine (Kitty) M. Whitmore, Johns Hopkins University, reBarbara M. Sirna, Neil A. Mc- ferring Daniel J. Murphy, and Fadden, Lucy A. McFadden mailed to the attention of and John A. McFadden, and Bridget Cashen, Fund for was Aunt Josie to 10 nieces Johns Hopkins Medicine, 550 and nephews. A Memorial N. Broadway, Suite 722, BaltiService will be held at Madismore, Maryland 21205. on Avenue Presbyterian Church, Madison Avenue and NADLER–Miriam. Her loving sons and daugh73rd Street, on Saturday, ters-in-law, Jerrold (Joyce January 28, 2017 at 1pm in Miller), Richard (Janet), and the Sanctuary. The family Eric (Elisa Rivlin) announce requests that in lieu of flowwith great sadness the death ers, gifts in her honor be of their beloved mother, Mirmade to any of the organizations or schools she served so iam, known to all as Mickey. She was the loving wife of the faithfully. late Emanuel Max . A resident of Howard Beach, NY, she died peacefully on DeMILLINGTON–John cember 23, 2016, three weeks Anthony, passed away on Debefore her 97th birthday. She cember 16 at the age of 90. was adored by her grandBorn in the farm country of children and their spouses, Gwynedd Valley, PennsylvaLaura and Meir Cohen, Naonia to George and Elizabeth mi and Asher Cohen, Emily on October 8, John was the Rivlin-Nadler and Jonathan youngest of three brothers. Drover, Michael and Elyssa John grew up surrounded by Nadler and Max Rivlindogs, upland hunting, and a Nadler. She is also mourned passion for the outdoors. He and will be greatly missed by began a career in publishing, her seven beloved greatmoving through the ranks at Born and Time Inc. and, with his first grandchildren. raised in Brooklyn, NY, she wife, Didi Kelley, moved to was the daughter of the late Bangkok, Thailand to beIsidor and Bessie Schreiber. A come Managing Director of very shy and private woman, the Bangkok World newspashe was devoted to her famiper. Upon his return to the ly and her synagogue, the United States, John reHoward Beach Judaea Cenlaunched Atlas Magazine and ter. The funeral service will later oversaw membership take place Monday, Decemand business development at ber 26th, 11am, at the Plaza the Council on Foreign RelaJewish Community Chapel tions where he cultivated his passion for world affairs and on Amsterdam Avenue and political activism. A passion- West 91st St. Times and place of Shiva will be announced. ate democrat and liberal, John championed conserva- PERLMAN–Myra. tion, community and fair housing in his most beloved hometown of Washington Depot, Connecticut. We will remember our father for his love of nature, the numerous cars and motorcycles and, above all, his many, many, dearly loved dogs. He is survived by his wife Edwina, his five children: Hope, Juli, Hunter, Brooke and Steve; five stepchildren: Blade, Ned, Bayard, Tim and Elise; nine grandchildren and 13 stepgrandchildren. MUMMA–Richard M., Sr., a longtime resident of Larchmont and recently of Ridgefield, CT passed away on December 23, 2016 at home surrounded by his family. Born, May 22, 1930 in Gettysburg, PA to Richard and Elizabeth Mumma. Served in the U.S. Army during the Korean Conflict. Graduate of Columbia University spending most of his career with Compton/ Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising. Beloved Husband of Mary Ann Hayes Mumma. Survived by his six loving children and eleven grandchildren. Visiting Tuesday 2-4 and 7-9pm at John J. Fox Funeral Home in Larchmont. Mass Wednesday 10:00am at St. Augustine Church in Larchmont. Interment at Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye. In lieu of flowers, donations to Bronx Homeless Shelter and Services for the Needy.

Myra Shulamit Perlman was born in Brooklyn, NY on November 11, 1940. She passed away in North Bergen, NJ on December 26, 2015 as the Sabbath touched a full moon. She was the loving mother of Michael, Elizabeth and Daniel and grandmother of six. Myra was a nurse with a rebel spirit who lived by her own terms and to her own mantra - you are what you think you are. She will live on in all who knew her.

ROTHENBERG–Nathan. Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York records with deep sorrow the death of our devoted member, Nat Rothenberg. To his family and loved ones we express our profound sympathy. Beautiful memories of his life will endure forever. Services private. SARNOFF–Ellen Rosenthal. With heavy hearts, the Rosenthal and Sarnoff families mourn the passing of Ellen Sarnoff, age 85, on December 23, 2016, after an extended illness. A longtime local leader and philanthropist, Ellen chaired the Federation Board of South Palm Beach County from 2011 to 2014. She will be deeply missed. She is survived by her mother, Doris Rosenthal, sons Gary, Kenneth (Jeanette), and Douglas (Lori), grandchildren, Zachary, Alex, Ben, and Jared, brother, Peter (Beth) Rosenthal, and sister, Pat (Larry) Mann, and all those fortunate to have known this exceptional woman. She was preceded in death by her father, Edward Rosenthal, a former vice chairman of Warner Communications, now Time Warner Inc., and her sister, Carol Maslow. A private service will be held in New York. Memorial service in Boca Raton at a future date. Donations in Ellen's name can be made to the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County, 9901 Donna Klein Blvd., Boca Raton, Florida, 33428 or jewishboca.org/donate.

In Memoriam GLICKSMAN–Albert, Aly-Dearest husband, Happy Anniversary on the 24th, Merry Christmas on the 25th, and Happy Birthday on the 26th. Love Fran

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THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIALS/LETTERS MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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A Test for Trump on Social Security TO THE EDITOR: ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR., Publisher, Chairman Founded in 1851

A. G. SULZBERGER, Deputy Publisher

ADOLPH S. OCHS

ARTHUR HAYS SULZBERGER

ORVIL E. DRYFOOS

ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER

Publisher 1896-1935

Publisher 1935-1961

Publisher 1961-1963

Publisher 1963-1992

On Climate Change, Look to the States State governments will serve as an important bulwark against any attempt by President-elect Donald Trump to roll back the progress the United States has made in addressing climate change. And that’s good news for the planet. Over the last decade or so, most states have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by promoting energy efficiency and renewable fuels. These trends should continue as clean energy costs continue to decline and, in some parts of the country, fall below the cost of dirtier fuels like coal. The Brookings Institution reported this month that between 2000 and 2014, 33 states and the District of Columbia cut carbon emissions while expanding their economies. That list includes red states run by Republican legislatures, like Alaska, Georgia, Tennessee and West Virginia. It’s hard to know how Mr. Trump will change climate policy, but it is almost certain that he won’t advance it. He told The Times last month that he has an “open mind” about climate change, but has also called it a “hoax.” The people he has chosen to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Interior — the three agencies with the greatest influence on energy policy — have either denied or expressed skepticism that human activity is causing global warming, something that virtually all scientists agree on. And many people expect him to walk away from President Obama’s commitments under the Paris climate agreement and get rid of or weaken the E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan, which requires states to lower carbon emissions from the electricity sector. He and his appointees might also try to water down fuel economy regulations for cars and trucks, and cut clean energy tax incentives and research spending. States could blunt much of that damage. Even now, many states will be able to meet the Clean Power Plan’s targets by following through on planned investments and increasing energy efficiency, according to M. J. Bradley and Associates, a research and consulting firm. Some populous states have set targets that are even more ambitious and appear to be on track to meet them. California and New York plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Hawaii hopes to get all of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045. This month, Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, proposed new rules for power plants and vehicles to make sure the state achieves its goal of a 25 percent cut from 1990 levels by 2020. Emissions are already down by around 20 percent. Cheap natural gas, which has increasingly replaced coal as a fuel source, has had a lot to do with this progress, but so has the drop in the cost of wind and solar power — 41 percent in the case of land-based wind turbines and 64 percent for solar, between 2008 and 2015, according to the Energy Department. The cost of batteries has dropped by

almost three-fourths. In some states, including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska and parts of Texas, new wind turbines can generate electricity at a lower cost, without subsidies, than any other technology, according to a report published this month by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. Solar panels have not reached that point yet in the United States, but developers of big solar installations in countries like Chile, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates have signed contracts to sell electricity for much less than conventional fossil fuel plants charge, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. States are also beginning to put a price on carbon emissions to increase the cost of older fuels and encourage cleaner sources of energy, which Congress has refused to do. California has a cap and trade system in which electric utilities, fuel distributors and other businesses have to buy emission permits through auctions or from one another. New York and eight other Eastern states have a similar program for power plants. And this month, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington proposed a tax of $25 per metric ton on carbon emissions to increase education funding. Lawmakers, environmental groups and individuals who care about climate change ought to fight every effort to take the country backward on this issue. But it will be just as important for them to support states that are trying to advance the cause.

TO THE EDITOR:

ARIEL DAVIS

nance items similar to one used by Fannie Mae. They documented their findings with nearly 50,000 photographs. According to the suit, Fannie Mae’s stated goal is to maintain properties at a level that makes them ready for sale. But when comparing properties in different neighborhoods, the plaintiffs found glaring differences. Properties in white areas were more likely to be in good repair, cleared of trash and invasive weeds and with windows and doors securely closed. Fannie Mae-owned homes in majority-black areas had clearly been neglected, with debris strewn across the properties, weeds on the lawns and windows left wide open or boarded up. Foreclosed homes in minority areas had many more problems, as defined by the checklist, than homes in white areas. About a third of the foreclosed properties in minority areas had more than 10 problems, while only 7 percent of the foreclosed properties in white areas had that many. The suit argues that race was the driving factor in these differences, not crime levels, property values or other nonracial factors. For that reason, the plaintiffs contend, Fannie Mae was in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Fannie Mae disputes the allegations and says that its maintenance standards are designed to ensure that all of its properties are treated equally. This might be true. But the copious evidence in this lawsuit suggests that those standards are being applied unequally.

EDITORIAL NOTEBOOK

Where Teenagers Report the News LOS ANGELES To an outsider, a food cart in Boyle Heights might look like just another place to buy a churro or some corn on the cob. But for Jonathan ThunderbirdOlivares, street vendors are the center of a conflict between a community and its poorest members, one that touches on issues of land use, immigration and economic policy. And the best place to read about that conflict is The Boyle Heights Beat. The Beat (Pulso de Boyle Heights, in Spanish) is a bilingual newspaper written largely by teenagers from the Boyle Heights neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. In the coming years, the residents of Boyle Heights may be in greater need than ever of a publication that tells their stories. The paper was founded in 2011 by Michelle Levander, the director of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, and Pedro Rojas, former executive editor of the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, as a means of teaching young people about reporting. With financial support from the California Endowment and from private nonprofit sources, the website and the free quarterly print edition with a circulation of 33,000 is the only publication focused exclusively on Boyle Heights. The neighborhood, with about 99,000

TO THE EDITOR:

Republican plans to lower benefits fly in the face of economic reality. Social Security payments are not saved; they are spent on food, clothing, medical care, recreation and so on. Reduce that spending, and the economy suffers. Not to mention, of course, that people suffer. That does not seem to bother Republicans. Furthermore, there is no logical reason to limit the tax to pay for Social Security to incomes of $118,500 or $250,000. If everyone can draw on it, then everyone’s income, no matter how large, should be subject to the tax. This would eliminate any need to lower benefits or raise the retirement age. It would be very helpful if the media were more forceful in supporting the So-

cial Security program. I don’t hear much said about the benefits to children that Social Security provides if a parent dies. If people really focus on the fact that Social Security is not only an insurance program for the old but also for the young, perhaps there would be less opposition to paying the tax. If there is going to be another push by Republicans to water down Social Security, I hope that we can count on the media to resist it and to educate the public about its benefits. It is the bedrock of our safety net. MARGARET McGARRAHAN Berkeley, Calif. TO THE EDITOR:

One of the ideas for saving Social Security — the raising of the minimum age to 69 to “save” this American institution — is unrealistic in light of our American workers’ needs. Has no one espousing this approach considered the men and women who do the heavy lifting in our society? The garbage man’s daily lifting of heavy burdens, the carpenter who crawls on roof rafters, the stevedore, the commercial fisherman, those who are on their feet or doing other strenuous physical labor all day for years? These people, who start these jobs in their 20s, are many times burned out by their 50s. There are not enough jobs at a higher level for them to climb to a less demanding job, and so they join the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed. They haven’t been able in their menialpay jobs to create a retirement savings plan. Having contributed to Social Security, on what resources are they to live until they are 69? How are they to live on just that potentially reduced Social Security check when they do reach 69? A partial solution is indeed possible and pragmatic: Raise the level of wages subject to the Social Security tax; $118,500 is a small cutoff in this high-income country when so many are averaging above this old maximum. It is time for a change in Social Security: a thoughtful, empirically based answer to one of this society’s basic tenets, which is appropriate support for all its citizens. AL MAHAN Sarasota, Fla.

What Will Happen to Abortion in the New Era?

The Housing Crisis Lives On for Minorities The mortgage crisis that ravaged the economy eight years ago was especially damaging to African-American communities, where homeowners who qualified for affordable mortgages were often steered into high-priced loans that paid rich returns to mortgage brokers and lenders while leaving borrowers vulnerable to default. The ensuing glut of vacant homes drove down property values almost everywhere. But minority communities suffered disproportionately, widening the already considerable wealth gap between white and minority households. One big reason for these disparities, according to a federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of fair housing groups, was that companies like the mortgage giant Fannie Mae took better care of foreclosed homes in working- and middle-class white areas than of equivalent homes in black and Latino communities. The plaintiffs, led by the National Fair Housing Alliance, say they reported this problem as early as 2009 and that they filed suit against Fannie Mae only after it continued to neglect foreclosed properties it owned in African-American and Latino neighborhoods. The lawsuit relies on data the groups collected while investigating 2,300 foreclosed properties in 38 metropolitan areas between 2011 and 2015. The groups measured the conditions of the homes using a checklist of 35 mainte-

Re “Will Mr. Trump Cave on Social Security?” (“What’s at Stake” series, editorial, Dec. 18): I agree that we probably cannot count on the president-elect to protect Americans’ retirement security. But your suggestion that “modest” benefit cuts are needed to help preserve Social Security is off base. On the surface, it may seem fair to ask higher income earners to take a cut in benefits. But even “modest” benefit cuts are a slippery slope: today, higher income earners; tomorrow, middle-income working Americans who truly can’t afford benefit cuts. We can preserve Social Security without cutting anyone’s earned benefits or undermining public support for the program. As you point out, raising the income cap on payroll taxes would be a great start. A small increase in the FICA tax rate — only 1/20th of 1 percent over 20 years — would also add to Social Security’s long-term solvency. Instead of benefit cuts, benefit expansion should be at the top of the list for strengthening Social Security. The millions of Americans who depend on this cherished income security program deserve nothing less. MAX RICHTMAN Washington The writer is president and chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

people in an area of 6.5 square miles, is famous for its murals of religious and historical scenes. It’s an old neighborhood in transition, a working-class, predominantly Latino area facing gentrification as developers revamp historic buildings. Old and new meet in Mariachi Plaza, where kids skateboard and mariachi musicians wait to be hired for parties just a few steps from a slickly designed subway station and a large apartment complex under construction. Though many families have been in Boyle Heights for generations, a significant percentage of residents are undocumented immigrants, and anxieties about Donald Trump’s presidency run high. In a recent issue of The Beat, Jacqueline Ramírez, a 19-year-old student at Santa Monica College, interviewed an immigration lawyer about the future of the Obama administration program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows undocumented young people brought to the United States to stay temporarily and to get work permits. Ms. Ramírez, who has written for The Beat since high school, said this issue was important to many of her friends. An article on The Beat in The Columbia Journalism Review drew national

attention to its deep local coverage. Outsiders, including Mr. Trump, might learn something from it — like the fact that, as Ms. Ramírez said, undocumented students are “here to make a difference, not to destroy our country.” The Beat, like any traditional paper, aims to show readers how national issues — like immigration, worries about marijuana dispensaries and barriers to mental health care — play out on their streets. Big papers like The Los Angeles Times and La Opinión don’t have the resources to cover Boyle Heights fully, said Mr. Rojas. Besides, said Yazmin Nuñez, a founding member of The Beat, the young reporters know what their neighbors care about and how to make a story relevant to them — to “give it a heart and soul.” For Mr. Thunderbird-Olivares, that meant spending time with residents who oppose street vending, which is illegal in Los Angeles, as well as with street vendors, who need the work to survive. “It’s not a black-and-white issue,” a community organizer told him. The way people respond to street vending depends, like so much else, on the unique culture of their neighborhood. ANNA NORTH

Re “Emboldened by Trump’s Victory, Abortion Foes Vow ‘Onslaught’ ” (front page, Dec. 12): The increasing difficulties that women are likely to face in getting an abortion make clear that two things will inevitably rise in response: More women, denied access because of distance and cost of travel, lodging and so on, will try to self-abort, and many will be permanently injured as result; and there will be increased pressure for women to carry to term and give up their babies for adoption. The short-term reaction to such a loss is expected, but the long-term consequences for a mother to lose a child to adoption are nothing short of disastrous. Poor grief resolution for a great many women leads to lasting trauma that exhibits itself as a psychiatric diagnosis for depression, low self-esteem and self-punishment, difficulty in giving and receiving love, as well as a decreased likelihood of ever having another child. In other words, the trauma of losing one child to adoption deters a goodly percentage of women from ever having another. In large part, we — I am one of those women — do go on with our lives, but not without deep psychological consequences that affect our lives in myriad ways. Not only did I never have another child, I never see a child with a mother without immediately assessing to my own satisfaction whether the two are related by blood, or if an adoption was part of the story. No credible research finds that an abortion leads to such life-altering, encom-

passing and cataclysmic reactions. LORRAINE DUSKY Sag Harbor, N.Y. The writer is the author of “Hole in My Heart: A Memoir and Report From the Fault Lines of Adoption.” TO THE EDITOR:

Re “Abortion Is Found to Have Few Psychological Effects” (news article, Dec. 15): We weren’t surprised by a study that found that abortion has little effect on the mental health of women and indeed that barriers to abortion probably pose bigger emotional and psychological effects. But we were disappointed that news reports of the study did not note the disparate effect of barriers to abortion on minority women and immigrant and low-income women. A federal ban on taxpayer funding is among the many hurdles that many minority women and immigrant and low-income women must overcome to get a legal abortion. This study is further proof that such funding restrictions imperil women’s health in addition to violating women’s rights. Legal, accessible abortion improves and protects women’s mental and physical health. That alone is cause to repeal the federal Hyde Amendment and all other funding restrictions on abortion. SUNG YEON CHOIMORROW Interim Executive Director National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum Brooklyn

When Judges Impose Sentences: A Balancing Act Re “Unequal Sentences for Blacks and Whites” (editorial, Dec. 18): Racially motivated sentencing disparities are indefensible, and should be identified and corrected. But sentencing score sheets never tell the full story. An offender’s role in the offense, motive and general character; whether a defendant accepted responsibility and displayed remorse; the probability of recidivism, and victim input can’t be captured by equations. To consider these important variables, we rely on judges who know the circumstances of the crime and the offender. Criminal sentencing is difficult. Judges must consider various ends — incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and punishment — and impose a sentence that achieves some measure of them all. Sen-

tences must balance justice and mercy, with an eye toward public safety as well. The process is inherently imperfect. Under any conceivable sentencing scheme, some sentences will shock the conscience for leniency, others for severity. Similarly situated defendants will receive disparate sentences, and disparate defendants will receive similar sentences. These outcomes are unavoidable. Sentencing policy should provide a framework that minimizes errors, including unwarranted disparities. Judges should be free to make decisions after considering all relevant information, and communities are entitled to transparency and accountability for those decisions. GREG NEWBURN State Policy Director Families Against Mandatory Minimums Gainesville, Fla.

NEWS

EDITORIAL

DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor

JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor

JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor

JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

TO THE EDITOR:

TOM BODKIN, Creative Director

TERRY TANG, Deputy Editorial Page Editor

JANET ELDER, Deputy Managing Editor MATTHEW PURDY, Deputy Managing Editor KINSEY WILSON, Editor for Innovation and Strategy Executive V.P., Product and Technology REBECCA CORBETT, Assistant Editor STEVE DUENES, Assistant Editor IAN FISHER, Assistant Editor CLIFFORD LEVY, Assistant Editor ALEXANDRA MAC CALLUM, Assistant Editor MICHELE MC NALLY, Assistant Editor

BUSINESS MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer MICHAEL GOLDEN, Vice Chairman JAMES M. FOLLO, Chief Financial Officer KENNETH A. RICHIERI, General Counsel ROLAND A. CAPUTO, Executive V.P., Print Products MEREDITH KOPIT LEVIEN, Chief Revenue Officer ELLEN SHULTZ, Executive V.P., Talent and Inclusion WILLIAM T. BARDEEN, Senior Vice President TERRY L. HAYES, Senior Vice President R. ANTHONY BENTEN, Treasurer and Controller DIANE BRAYTON, Secretary

THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

Petrified Unity In Berlin

Despite the goose’s copious gifts, it has fallen out of favor. Today it’s hard to find goose meat. In New York City, select butcher shops take Christmas orders, but they’re pricey and increasingly uncommon. Finding a kosher goose is nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive. Two years ago I paid $250 for a nine-pound kosher goose that was specially raised, ritually slaughtered, then delivered by the farmer himself. The difficulty of the goose chase isn’t primarily that people’s tastes have changed, but that our food system has. Poultry farms made the transition from family operations to factories in the postwar period. Chickens, with the help of intensive breeding practices and the introduction of antibiotics, are now reared in large farms generally known as confinedanimal feeding operations. Geese are temperamental and aggressive, making them harder to confine. And since they prefer to

By Anna Sauerbrey

I

BERLIN

T has been almost a week since a truck plowed through a Christmas market in the heart of Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring dozens. In the following days, the city, the country — all of Europe — were gripped by the Continentwide manhunt for the suspect, Anis Amri, who was shot and killed by the Italian police on Friday. As I try to get ready for the holidays — to keep things normal — I find myself anxiously looking for signs of how my fellow Berliners are handling it all. When I wait at the train station, I wonder if the people next to me are scanning the platform. Are they afraid? And with a momentous national election next year, will that fear translate into political panic? I find no change — which is both a good and a bad thing. Certainly, sadness prevails in Berlin. At Breitscheidplatz, many have left flowers and candles. Some cry. “I just don’t get it,” said a man who lives nearby. “We have helped so many. Why do they attack us?” But there is also calm unity. “No matter where you’re coming from, we are one, and we are strong,” somebody wrote on a cardboard sign at the site of the attack. At least in Berlin, there are few demands for walls, or bans on Muslim immigrants. It wasn’t a given that calm would prevail. In Germany, 2016 started off with rage. On New Year’s Eve, gangs of young men harassed, abused and robbed hundreds of women at the main station in Cologne. Most of those the police arrested were North African migrants. Anti-immigrant sentiment surged; trust in the government, and in Chancellor Angela Merkel, plummeted. Attacks on shelters for asylum seekers rose. This rage is still there, of course. “Welcome, murderers, to Merkel’s multicultural slaughterhouse,” somebody wrote this week on the Facebook page of Beatrix von Storch, a prominent figure in the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Marcus Pretzell, the head of the party in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, wrote, just an hour after the attack, “These are Merkel’s dead.” But the rage seems contained. On Wednesday, the anti-immigrant Ein Prozent (One Percent) initiative demonstrated in front of the Chancellery. Several

After the Christmas market attack, Germany is polarized, but stable. high-ranking members of the Alternative for Germany participated, but only a few dozen protesters showed up. Police officers gated off a section in front of the building, enclosing the small and freezing crowd in the dark. The protesters were only a few miles from the mourners at Breitscheidplatz, but in a different world. Here we are, I thought, the angry and the sad, confined in their respective corners of the public sphere. German public sentiment is polarized, but stabilized. Contrary to what was feared, the terrorist attacks this summer in Ansbach and Würzburg have not significantly increased Alternative for Germany’s standing in national polls. My guess is that the Berlin attack will not change much, either. One reason for Germany’s fairly calm response is that we were prepared. New York, London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels — we all knew something similar would happen to us someday. We had time to watch, and learn. How to mourn, how to not overreact. Over the years, the Western world has developed a set of rituals in response: The lighting of candles, the pilgrimage to the sites of the attack, the defensive occupation of public spaces, the public oath by our representatives to not succumb to fear, the public profession to our liberal values. On Tuesday the Brandenburg Gate was bathed in lights the colors of the German flag. The posting of hashtags of solicitousness is the prayer of our secular times. Even the far-right expressions of wrath, the call for an eye for an eye, are part of the ritual. The populists’ exploitation of the anguish over terrorism has become part of the Western post-attack script. Of course, while rituals are comforting, they risk losing their meaning through repetition. We do not succumb to fear, but as we repeat it, we risk ending up holding the empty shells of former truths. The same is true for the political postattack ritual of promising harsher security measures. “It’s always the same after something happened,” said a man at the Chancellery protest. “They keep promising change and doing nothing.” He’s not exactly right: In recent years, Germany has introduced significant changes to its asylum laws, as well as to its security apparatus. But his sentiment is widely held on both the left and right. And the number of measures that could be imposed without changing the constitutional character of our country is narrowing. Which means: The frustration of those demanding a strong state response is bound to persist. For now, Germany remains in balance. But we end a crazy year huddled in the cold comfort of petrified division, united in helplessness. 0 Anna Sauerbrey is an editor on the opinion page of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and a contributing opinion writer.

It’s a culinary tradition that American Jews forgot. Bring it back.

JULIA ROTHMAN

A Goose for Hanukkah By Jeffrey Yoskowitz

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HRISTMAS dinner has it all: a well-balanced feast with a main dish — turkey, ham or goose — a range of sides, delicious desserts and eggnog to top it off. And Hanukkah? Jews typically enjoy latkes smothered in sour cream or applesauce (my preference), jelly doughnuts, chocolate coins and, consequently, eight days of pounding Tums. While I love these holiday specialties, they don’t constitute a coherent, let alone sensible, meal. For years I’ve suffered the gastric consequences of oddly paired fried foods and desserts without the anchor of a solid and celebrated main course. The story goes that eating such foods commemorates the unlikely military victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks in ancient times. Once they rededicated the Jewish temple, they found enough oil to light the temple lamp for one day, but somehow the oil lasted for eight. Hanuk-

Jeffrey Yoskowitz is the co-author of “The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods” and owner of the Gefilteria, a Brooklyn-based culinary venture that reimagines Ashkenazi cuisine.

kah celebrations are about the miracle of oil, and tasty things fried in it. For Jews like my ancestors from Central and Eastern Europe, the real factor that defined Hanukkah eating was less miraculous: the harsh winter season, when the earth yielded nothing. Jews in prewar Europe ate what was available and made pancakes from grated turnips, potatoes or milled grains. They’d fry them in schmaltz, rendered poultry fat, an essential component of Ashkenazi Jewish cooking. It didn’t end there, though. In the Old World there was a culinary tradition that has been all but forgotten among American Jews: a Hanukkah goose. When Hanukkah fell on the Sabbath, Jewish families of means would host a feast with roast goose, latkes fried in its schmaltz and most likely pickled vegetables. “The smell of smoking goose fat became the traditional scent” of Hanukkah, Michael Wex says in his book “Rhapsody in Schmaltz.” In fact, the waterfowl played a major role in Jewish cooking in prewar Europe. It was the preferred meat for those able to afford it. The French food writer Édouard de Pomiane wrote in 1929 that the goose was a “beneficent animal” for the Jews of Poland as it supplied so much to a household, from feathers for bedding to flesh for roasting to fats for rendering.

graze and can’t entirely subsist on grain, it is even harder to raise them at scale, meaning slimmer profit margins. For Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the United States, there was much to celebrate about eating in the mid-20th century. Foods were comparatively cheaper than in Europe and convenience took priority. Jewish cooks, mostly women at the time, began spending their days either in the work force or tending to matters of the home rather than rendering schmaltz. The introduction of inexpensive vegetable shortening and seed oils transformed Jewish kitchens and turned the goose into even more of a luxurious proposition once its fat, one of the primary reasons the animal was reared in the first place, was considered unnecessary. Jewish Americans also began to expect that someone else would raise and slaughter, then pluck and salt their poultry (to make it kosher) for them. Most kosher processing plants today aren’t equipped to handle geese, so the birds must be hand-plucked. “People used to eat a goose every Hanukkah when labor was cheap,” my friend Naftali Hanau of Grow and Behold, a pasture-raised kosher meat company, told me. “But those were European shtetl labor prices.” Since chicken is far cheaper to produce, it has become the goto bird in American Jewish kitchens. There’s a nice and simple way to honor the delectable tradition of the Hanukkah goose: Make it the centerpiece of at least one holiday meal. Try to find a goose from a small farm or your local butcher. If you can’t track one down or if it’s too expensive, use a pasture-raised duck or chicken and render its fat yourself. That’s right, make schmaltz. The past couple of years I’ve roasted a goose or duck with apples and onions. While the birds were in the oven, I fried up latkes in schmaltz, then served them to my guests with apple-pear sauce and probiotic sauerkraut — an Old World substitute for Tums. Hosting a goose-centric holiday meal may sound like an attempt to make Hanukkah more like Christmas, but it’s actually a distinctive Jewish tradition and a way to support small-scale farms that practice sustainable agriculture. By looking back to where our traditions come from, we can find relevant inspiration and meaning for today. Plus, there is no better way to celebrate the Hanukkah miracle than latkes fried in goose fat. 0

Women Are a National Security Issue By Valerie M. Hudson and Dara Kay Cohen

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HE Trump transition team asked the State Department last week to submit details of programs and jobs that focus on promoting gender equality. Maybe it’s for benign purposes — or better, a signal that the administration wants to make women’s empowerment a cornerstone of its foreign policy. But this seems unlikely, to put it mildly, given that such a commitment was absent from Donald J. Trump’s campaign, and alongside Mr. Trump’s vow to defund Planned Parenthood. Whatever the reason for their request, Mr. Trump and Rex W. Tillerson, his pick for secretary of state, should remember that women’s rights are tied directly to national security. The State Department’s gender equality programs are not just politically correct fluff — they deal with matters of life and death, like rape during war, genital cutting, forced marriage and access to education. The State Department provides essential funding to combat these problems. Nongovernmental organizations around the world that work with survivors of rape and sexual violence are supported by small grants from the State Department, for example. One program in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh trained 450 imams to extol the importance of girls’ education in their Friday sermons and, when officiating at marriages, to ask for the bride’s age and proof of her consent. The United States Agency for International Development helps girls purchase books and pay fees so they can finish grade school. This kind of work is important not just for the women and girls who directly benefit from them, but also for the security of their countries. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was Valerie M. Hudson is a professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Dara Kay Cohen is an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard.

not the first person to argue that national security is linked to women’s equality when she made it a cornerstone of American foreign policy. President George W. Bush identified “respect for women” as one of the “nonnegotiable demands of human dignity.” Even President Xi Jinping of China said in 2015 that “every step taken to promote women’s cause has been a giant step forward for the progress of human civilization.” This is not just hot air. Over a decade’s worth of research shows that women’s advancement is critical to stability and to reducing political violence. Countries where women are empowered are vastly

Working for gender equality is part of the fight on terrorism. more secure, whether the issue is food security, countering violent extremism or resolving disputes with other nations peacefully. Recruitment by terrorist groups is a prime example. A forthcoming paper by one of us, Professor Hudson, and Hilary Matfess, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses, has found that swiftly rising “bride prices” (money or goods given by the groom to the bride’s family) makes it easier for terrorists to recruit members. Bride prices typically act like a regressive tax on young men, and in some places, that burden has risen rapidly. In South Sudan, for example, a bride cost 12 cows a decade ago. But the going rate in recent years has been over 50 cows, 50 goats and $12,000. These marriage practices not only cast women as chattel, but also create widespread resentment among young men. Terrorist groups such as Boko Haram in West Africa and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan have found it easy to recruit in such a context, and in South Sudan, twothirds of men surveyed reported they

had to steal cattle to pay for brides, stoking ethnic conflict. A realist foreign policy would use this knowledge in efforts to reduce terrorist groups’ recruitment, perhaps also tracking bride price trajectories while encouraging a cap on prices and even changes in the practice, as Uganda has recently done. Furthermore, it is also vital to include women’s priorities in negotiations and transitions from conflict to peace. A study of the landmark United Nations resolution on women, peace and security found that peace agreements were significantly more durable when women took part in the negotiations. A realist foreign policy would take note of this. For example, to gain a lasting peace accord in Afghanistan, policy makers should make sure that both Afghan and American women are at the negotiating table in meaningful numbers. The strongest antidote to the instability caused by gender inequality is to attack the constellation of forces that cause women to suffer, such as child marriage and unequal property rights. Our foreign policy should ensure that women have not only a place at the table, but a real voice when major decisions are made. Even if the new administration is not poised to be as attentive to gender issues as previous ones, the United States still has obligations under international treaties, and also some of our own policies. The United States National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security requires the State and Defense Departments, along with the Agency for International Development, to meet benchmarks on efforts for women’s inclusion and empowerment. Consider what Ryan Crocker, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, said about the fate of Afghan women: “No one is going to be dumb enough to say, ‘Oh, forget the women; that’s not important.’ ” During the campaign, Mr. Trump called for a return to “foreign policy realism,” in which national security is the foremost concern, the stakes are zerosum and the most powerful states are the only ones that matter. To build such a foreign policy, women’s rights are an indispensable pillar. 0

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And The Trade War Came Donald Trump got within striking distance of the White House — or, more precisely, Comey-and-Putin range — thanks to overwhelming support from white working-class voters. These voters trusted his promise to bring back good manufacturing jobs while disbelieving his much more credible promise to take away their health care. They have a rude shock coming. But white workers aren’t alone in their gullibility: Corporate America is still in denial about the prospects for a global trade war, even though protectionism was a central theme of the Trump campaign. In fact, the only two causes about which Mr. Trump seems truly passionate are supposedly unfair trade deals and admiration for authoritarian regimes. It’s naïve to assume that he’ll let his signature policy issue slide. Let’s talk means, motive and consequences. You might imagine that a drastic change in U.S. trade policy would require congressional approval, and that Republicans — who claim to believe in free markets — would put on the brakes. But given G.O.P. spinelessness, that’s unlikely. In any case, the relevant legislation gives the occupant of the White House remarkable leeway should he choose to go protectionist. He can restrict imports if such imports “threaten to impair the national security”; he can impose tariffs “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits”; he can modify tariff rates when foreign governments engage in “unjustifiable” policies. Who determines whether such conditions apply? The executive himself. Now, these provisions weren’t intended to empower a president to reverse decades of U.S. trade policy, or engage in personal vendettas. You can guess, however, how much such niceties are likely to bother the incoming administration, which is already talking about using its powers. Which brings us to the question of motive. Why would a Trump administration impose restrictions on imports? One answer is those working-class voters, whose supposed champion is set to pursue a radically antiworker domestic agenda. There’s an obvious incentive for Mr. Trump to make a big show of doing something to fulfill campaign promises. And if this creates international conflict, that’s actually a plus when it comes to diverting attention from collapsing health care and so on. Beyond this, it’s clear that the incoming commander-in-chief really believes that international trade is a game in which nice guys finish last, and that America has been taken advantage of. Furthermore, he’s picking advisers who will confirm him in these beliefs. Oh, and don’t expect attempts by experts to point out the holes in this view — to point out, in particular, that the image of a predatory China, running huge surpluses by keeping its currency undervalued, is years out of date — to make any impression. Members of the Trump team believe that all criticism of their economic ideas reflects a conspiracy among think tanks that are out to undermine them. Because of course they do. So what will happen when the Trump tariffs come? There will be retaliation, big time. When it comes to trade, America is not that much of a superpower — China is also a huge player, and the European Union is bigger still. They will respond in kind, targeting vulnerable U.S. sectors like aircraft and agriculture. And retaliation isn’t the whole story;

Tariffs: A bad idea whose time has come. there’s also emulation. Once America decides that the rules don’t apply, world trade will become a free-for-all. Will this cause a global recession? Probably not — those risks are, I think, exaggerated. No, protectionism didn’t cause the Great Depression. What the coming trade war will do, however, is cause a lot of disruption. Today’s world economy is built around “value chains” that spread across borders: your car or your smartphone contain components manufactured in many countries, then assembled or modified in many more. A trade war would force a drastic shortening of those chains, and quite a few U.S. manufacturing operations would end up being big losers, just as happened when global trade surged in the past. An old joke tells of a motorist who runs over a pedestrian, then tries to fix the damage by backing up — and runs over the victim a second time. Well, the effects of the Trumpist trade war on U.S. workers will be a lot like that. Given these prospects, you might think that someone will persuade the incoming administration to rethink its commercial belligerence. That is, you might think that if you have paid no attention to the record and character of the protectionist in chief. Someone who won’t take briefings on national security because he’s “like, a smart person” and doesn’t need them isn’t likely to sit still for lessons on international economics. No, the best bet is that the trade war is coming. Buckle your seatbelts. 0

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

Comic Book’s Serious Goal

Holiday Price Index

Aid to Orlando Victims

9 Ladies Dancing: $7,552

“Love Is Love” is a 144-page anthology created in response to the Florida mass shooting. 2

Partridges are a bargain this year. Our annual look at the cost of the 12 days of Christmas. 3

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MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

Follow-Up Questions

STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The last briefing in the White House’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room before it underwent extensive renovations in 2006.

Lessons for News Media In a Disorienting Year Starting a weekly column about the nexus between media, technology, culture and politics in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign was like parachuting into a hail of machine-gun crossfire. Dense smoke was everywhere as the candidates and their supporters unloaded MEDIATOR on one another and, frequently, the news media, which more than occasionally was drawn into the fighting. The territory that was at stake was the realm of the true, and how all sides would define it in the hyperpartisan debate to come under a new president. With the campaign behind us and a new administration quickly taking shape, that territory remains very much in dispute. So the ammunition keeps flying, especially at the national news me-

JIM RUTENBERG

dia, which emerges from the election invigorated in its mission to report on plate-shifting news while rooting out the truth. And yet it has never been more besieged or, if the Gallup Organization had it right, distrusted. Sitting at my desk as I write this sentence on a Thursday night, our offices littered with empty champagne cups and cake crumbs on paper plates — the detritus of too many sayonara toasts to sage colleagues leaving with buyout packages — I’m trying to think my way to the big takeaway from the year American journalism just lived through that can help it in the downsized year ahead. This much is obvious, but it bears repeating before the year turns: If the news media is going to do its part in maintaining a fact-based national debate, it’s going to have to learn important lessons from 2016. Continued on Page 4

Changes Coming to Press Room: Who, Where, When and How By SYDNEY EMBER

With the naming of Sean Spicer as White House press secretary, Donald J. Trump has selected a Republican Party insider and communications veteran. But that doesn’t mean it will be business as usual for the press corps that covers the next administration. Mr. Trump’s unconventional, sometimes hostile, relationship with the news media and his penchant for communicating through unfiltered Twitter posts threaten to upend a decadesold Washington tradition that relies almost entirely on protocol. The result, reporters and editors say, could be a loss of transparency that would hinder the press’s role as a conduit for information to the people. But Mr. Trump’s advisers, and even some former White House press secretaries, say that some of the conventions of White House coverage are outdated and due for a face-lift.

In a radio interview this month, Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, suggested that traditions including the daily televised press briefings and seating assignments could change. “I think it’s time to revisit a lot of these things that have been done in the White House, and I can assure you that change is going to happen, even on things that might seem boring like this topic,” he told the radio host Hugh Hewitt. Mr. Spicer, in an interview with Fox News on Thursday night, said the new regime wanted to be “innovative, entrepreneurial” about its media operations. While he said he believed there would be daily briefings, Mr. Spicer suggested the format could change, perhaps by adding new elements, eliminating some television coverage Continued on Page 4

“I think it’s time to revisit a lot of these things that have been done in the White House.” REINCE PRIEBUS, the incoming White House chief of staff

Bigger Fact-Checking Role for Snopes Brings More Attacks By DAVID STREITFELD

SAN DIEGO — The last line of defense against the torrent of halftruths, untruths and outright fakery that make up so much of the modern internet is in a downscale strip mall near the beach. Snopes, the fact-checking website, does not have an office designed to impress, or even be noticed. A big sign outside still bears the name of the previous tenant, a maker of underwater headphones. Inside there’s nothing much — a bunch of improvised desks, a table tennis table, cartons of Popchips and cases of Dr Pepper. It looks like a dot-com on the way to nowhere. Appearances deceive. This is where the muddled masses come by the virtual millions to establish just what the heck is really going on in a world turned upside down. Did Donald J. Trump say on Twitter that he planned to arrest the “Saturday Night Live” star Alec Baldwin for sedition? Has Hillary Clinton quietly filed for divorce? Was Mr. Trump giving Kanye West a cabinet position? And was Alan Thicke, the star of “Growing Pains,” really dead? All untrue, except for the demise of Mr. Thicke, which was easily verifiable. “Rationality seems to have fallen out of vogue,” said Brooke Binkowski, Snopes’s managing editor. “People don’t know what to believe anymore. Everything is really strange right now.” That is certainly true at Snopes itself. For 20 years, the site was dedi-

ADVERTISING

Be Prepared For Trump Attacks, Brand Experts Say By ZACH SCHONBRUN

JOHN FRANCIS PETERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of the Snopes website, in its San Diego offices. Snopes was among a group of sites that recently reached a deal to work with Facebook in fact-checking questionable links. cated to urban legends, like the purported existence of alligators in New York City sewers, and other benign misinformation. But its range and readership increased significantly during a prolonged presidential election campaign in which the facts

became a partisan issue and reality itself seemed up for grabs. One way to chart Snopes’s increasing prominence is by measuring the rise in fake news about the site itself. If you believe the internet, the founder of Snopes, David Mik-

kelson, has a longer rap sheet than Al Capone. He was supposedly arrested for committing fraud and corruption and running a pit bull ring. In the wake of a deal that Snopes and Continued on Page 4

H&R Block’s new advertising campaign is one of the more ambitious in the company’s 62-year history. It hired the actor Jon Hamm for his first on-camera spokesman role, a significant coup. And the company ditched its “Refund Season” slogan in favor of a more aggressive pitch: “Get your taxes won.” The ads obviously target Intuit’s do-it-yourself Turbo Tax. More subtle is how much the campaign was really influenced by critical words from one heavy-hitting personality: Donald J. Trump. It was August 2015, still the early days of the presidential campaign, when Mr. Trump first mentioned that he hoped to “put H&R Block out of business” with his plan for a simplified tax code. Sixteen months later, the leading tax preparer is still feeling the effects. “We got kicked around a little bit last year,” Kathy Collins, chief marketing and strategy officer, said. “We realized this was the time to do this.” As the inauguration nears, Mr. Trump has shown no signs of curbing his willingness to criticize brands that draw his ire, as Boeing, Vanity Fair and Lockheed Martin have realized in recent weeks. The spontaneity of his denunciations — and the speed at which his words travel, particularly on Twitter — has created a sense of unease among marketing executives, who now must be prepared in case Mr. Trump’s insults fly in their direction. It is prompting some brands to pre-emptively draft informal contingency plans, and others, like H&R Block, to spend money shoring up their reputation. But one thing that industry analysts and crisis management experts seem to agree on: There is nothing in the handbook that instructs executives on how to handle an Continued on Page 2

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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THE WEEK AHEAD

Chasing 20,000 in 2016; Confidence Data Coming THE MARKETS

A 14.4 Percent Year-to-Date Gain for the Dow United States and European markets will be closed Monday for Christmas. Investors will need to wait until Tuesday to see if the Dow Jones industrial average reaches 20,000 for the first time — a nice, round, psychologically satisfying number that nevertheless represents only 30 companies and has been heavily affected by the performance of Goldman Sachs. At the close on Friday, the Dow achieved no zeros whatsoever, making it to 19,933.81. With that number, it tallied a year-to-date gain of 14.4 percent. Four more days remain for 2016 to claim the 20,000 milestone — otherwise, assuming it comes to pass, it will be officially credited to 2017. PHYLLIS KORKKI U.S. ECONOMY

December Consumer Confidence Report Is Coming

H&R Block’s new advertising campaign, with the actor Jon Hamm, has a more aggressive pitch: “Get your taxes won.” It was influenced by criticism from Donald J. Trump that he would put the company out of business with his plan for a simplified tax code. ADVERTISING

Prepare for Trump Attacks, Brand Experts Say From First Business Page overnight Twitter controversy created by the president-elect. “These are very much uncharted waters for companies,” Tim Calkins, professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said. “Rarely have we been quite so polarized, and rarely have we had a president who is so quick to call out an attack on perceived threats.” This puts companies — and the executives assigned to handle corporate imaging — in a delicate position. It is hardly advisable, Mr. Calkins said, for a company to challenge the authority of an incoming administration, whether on social media or in a formal ad campaign. But being conciliatory or supportive of a divisive figure like Mr. Trump can have negative consequences as well. Mr. Calkins said he thought companies were best served by staying as quiet as possible. But what if your company is criticized? Scott Farrell, an expert in crisis management and the president of Golin Corporate Communications, said there was no formulaic response. “The only thing that applies, no matter what the issue, is

speed,” Mr. Farrell said. “Slow kills companies fast in a Twitter conversation.” Some companies should even expect confrontation, he said, especially if they are in an industry that touches one of what Mr. Farrell calls Mr. Trump’s “hot zones,” such as trade, immigration, health care or defense. He is advising clients to thoroughly assess every coming public announcement against what it might trigger. “These guys should be wearing W.W.T.D. bracelets — What Would Trump Do?” Mr. Farrell said. “If you’re thinking of moving offshore, if you’re thinking of doing a layoff, if you’re thinking of even positive stuff, what would Trump do? Develop a playbook for those contingencies.” Andrew D. Gilman, who has consulted with companies like Johnson & Johnson, General Motors and Pepsi during crises, is telling brands to prepare for Mr. Trump as they would for a natural disaster — an event that is highly unpredictable but poses a big risk if it happens. One contingency is to line up a thirdparty spokesman who can help if the brand’s image is dinged. That is essentially what H&R Block did in signing Mr. Hamm, the “Mad Men” star, who has had

voice-over roles in ads for Mercedes-Benz and American Airlines but had yet to appear onscreen as a pitchman. He said in a telephone interview that he had been an H&R Block customer for years. “The fit between H&R Block and myself seemed copacetic and natural,” Mr. Hamm said. “And the tone of the creative was clever and outside the box for something as humdrum as taxes.” There is no mention of Mr. Trump in the first two 30-second ads featuring Mr. Hamm, and Bill Cobb, H&R Block’s chief executive, was hesitant to say Mr. Trump’s comments directly inspired the company’s new effort. But the message is that the tax code is complex. “We’ve been around for 62 years,” Mr. Cobb said. “The tax code was pretty simple in 1955. Yet people have always come here for help.” The forceful messaging is a sign of things to come from advertising agencies, said Allen Adamson, a brand strategy consultant. “From conversations I’ve had, there is a clear sense that in the next administration, companies will have to get their story out much more aggressively and

much more quickly than previously,” Mr. Adamson said. Vanity Fair’s swift response after Mr. Trump reacted to a negative review of a restaurant in one of his buildings by saying the magazine was “dead” could be an example for others to follow, Mr. Farrell said. Its message — including banner ads on its website calling itself “The Magazine Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Read” and asking for subscriptions — captured the magazine’s voice and identity. More than 40,000 people signed up for new subscriptions. “Vanity Fair played that perfectly,” Mr. Farrell said. “‘This was the magazine that Trump doesn’t want you to read.’ I think their response was consistent with the brand’s DNA.” And while Boeing’s shares took a hit after Mr. Trump posted on Twitter on Dec. 6 that he wanted to cancel the order for a new Air Force One, they began to rebound after the company had time to release statements. Still, marketing executives took it as a lesson: Be ready. “If you’re a C.M.O., you need to put another filter on your plans,” Mr. Gilman said. “Normally you’d never have to worry about a president singling out your company before. Now you do.”

The Conference Board will release its December consumer confidence report on Tuesday. After a slump in October, the index achieved pre-recession levels in November, with survey respondents expressing optimism about the economy. Last month, the percentage who said they thought that business conditions were “good” rose to 29.2 percent, from 26.5 percent in October. This month’s report will include the effects of the presidential election, as most consumers last month were surveyed before Nov. 8. ZACH WICHTER JAPAN

Insight on Bank of Japan’s Response to Interest Rates The Bank of Japan on Thursday will release minutes from its meeting last week that should shed light on how the country’s central bank is handling the prospect of rising interest rates. Given statements from the Federal Reserve and the proposed plans of President-elect Donald J. Trump to increase infrastructure spending, interest rates in the United States are almost certain to rise. That will put pressure on the Bank of Japan to relax its support for low and even negative interest rates — a key part of the country’s efforts to jolt its economy out of its doldrums. CARLOS TEJADA

MICHAEL KAPPELER/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Chancellor Angela Merkel will deliver a New Year’s speech. GERMANY

Merkel Faces Tough Sell on Migrants in Annual Address On Saturday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany will deliver her traditional New Year’s speech. Once regarded as a somewhat tedious ritual, the event has taken on more significance because of the rise of the right in the past two years and an influx of migrants. In her last New Year’s address, Ms. Merkel argued that refugees were good for the economy. But that may be a harder sell this year, as she faces criticism that her refugee policy has allowed terrorists to enter Germany undetected. JACK EWING

Treasury Auctions for Week of Dec. 26 The Treasury’s schedule of financing this week includes an auction of four-week bills on Tuesday. At the close of the New York cash market on Friday, the rate on the outstanding three-month bill was 0.51 percent. The rate on the six-month issue was 0.65 percent, and the rate on the four-week issue was 0.41 percent.

The following tax-exempt fixedincome issues, valued at $50 million or more, are scheduled for pricing this week: TUESDAY Florida Board of Education, $140.4 million of general obligation unlimited tax refinancing bonds. Competitive. Florida Department of Transportation Turnpike Enterprise, $137.3 million of revenue bonds. Competitive. ONE DAY DURING THE WEEK None scheduled.

Everything you need to know for your business day is in Business Day. The New York Times

One contribution, left, was inspired by Harry Potter. Another story, right, discusses the danger of guns.

Celebrities Honor Orlando Victims in Comic Book By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES

The comic book author and screenwriter Marc Andreyko felt unfathomable horror when he heard the news of the June 12 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Feeling compelled to help, he posted on Facebook a suggestion to create a comic book that would benefit the victims. The result is “Love Is Love,” a 144-page anthology filled with original work by contributors both familiar and unexpected. The book, which will be available Wednesday, includes pages from the documentarian Morgan Spurlock, the actor Matt Bomer, the comedians Patton Oswalt and Taran Killam, and other entertainers. “I went through my Rolodex — to use a word for something that doesn’t even exist anymore — and looked for people who I’m friends with and had name value,” Mr. Andreyko said. “I want this book to

be in as many hands as possible.” Proceeds from the book, which will cost $9.99 and be available in comic stores and for download online (with additional pages), will benefit Equality Florida, which has set up a fund for the victims of the Pulse shooting and their families. Mr. Andreyko, 46, said the inspiration for the book could be traced to his childhood. He fondly recalled the musical acts that came together for benefit concerts such as Band Aid and Live Aid and the song “We Are the World.” He noted that the format of the book — no story is over two pages long — had been chosen to help lure contributors who had tight schedules. But Mr. Andreyko found the biggest motivator was the act of expression. “It was therapeutic,’’ he said. “By doing the art, it was purging for us.” The offerings are diverse:

There are stories that directly address the victims, some pinups, wistful ruminations and more. Brian Michael Bendis, one of Marvel’s most prolific writers, teamed up with his oldest daughter, Olivia, to capture a glimmer of a moment from the shooting at Pulse. They came up with a dialogue-free spread of revelrous dancers and a lone person in shadow looking upon them. “The idea that someone could stand in the middle of that club full of joy and fun and be drowning in madness was something we couldn’t get past,” Mr. Bendis said. Michael Avon Oeming drew the artwork, and Taki Soma colored it. Mr. Spurlock, who is working on a documentary about superheroes for the History Channel, wrote a one-page story, with art by Kieron Dwyer, in support of the nation’s dedicated police officers. Mr. Spurlock said officers were sometimes tarnished as a group because of the actions of a few.

“These guys still have to show up and do their jobs,” he said. One of the most unusual contributions comes by way of J. K. Rowling, who allowed the use of a quote from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” It serves as a caption to an image of Harry and his friends drawn by Jim Lee, a copublisher of DC Comics. The pairing seemed only natural, Mr. Andreyko said. “If we get the biggest-selling author on the planet, we need the biggest artist,” Mr. Andreyko said. Mark Chiarello, a senior vice president of art and design at DC, added a watercolor rainbow flag to the drawing. The quote is by Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Harry’s school, who Ms. Rowling has said is gay, and drives home the point of the anthology: “Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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Why the Computing Cloud Will Keep Growing and Growing By QUENTIN HARDY

SAN FRANCISCO — Jeff Bezos of Amazon, along with a couple of his rivals, may eventually control much of the $1 trillion global market for business computers and software. That is because Amazon Web Services, his big-business computing division, is starting to affect more than just the world of computer servers, data storage and networking at the core of computing. Increasingly, it is also entangled with mobile phones, sensors and all sorts of other devices in the so-called Internet of Things. It’s the same story at Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the other two big cloud companies. Start-ups and giant corporations rent the core resources, along with related software, instead of owning and running their own machines. What’s next? As innovations like artificial intelligence and connected devices become popular, customers are putting cloud components in mobile comput-

ing, home games and email marketing campaigns. In other words, the big clouds aim to be everywhere. “When has Amazon ever thought about anything other than world domination?” said Lydia Leong, who follows cloud computing at Gartner. Not content to be in big centralized data centers, she said, “they want to be at the edges, whether that is a customer’s own computers or the Internet of Things.” This aim for domination was clear at Amazon’s big customer conference, called Re:Invent, which was held in Las Vegas this month. About 32,000 people went to the fourth annual event. In one talk at the conference, an Amazon Web Services executive showed off the company’s 8,700-mile undersea cable, part of an A.W.S. global network that each day adds computing power equal to that inside a Fortune 500 corporation, and spoke about this expansion. He talked about crushing the costs of servers and networking, most likely sad news

for old tech giants that make those things, like Dell and Cisco. In a nice bit of showmanship during the main keynote, Andy Jassy, the head of A.W.S., appeared onstage with an 18-wheel truck carrying a device that could suck 100 petabytes of data out of a customer’s computers and put it in the Amazon cloud. That is equal to two billion filing cabinets of paper, which a surprising number of companies now possess in digital form, thanks to things like video and sensors. Put that together with some software Mr. Jassy talked about that would be on chips made by Intel but capable of gaining access to the A.W.S. cloud, and you get the picture: There isn’t a part of computing Amazon doesn’t want to touch. It is easy to see why this matters to Amazon. In the third quarter, A.W.S. had revenue of $13 billion a year, growing at 55 percent annually. A.W.S. was 10 percent of Amazon’s revenue, but more than 100 percent of the

company’s operating income. Amazon’s international retail business lost money, and United States retail sales are nowhere near as profitable. Amazon says it is hardly moving away from a core business of providing large-scale computing, but rather finding more ways to sell stuff related to it by moving to edge devices. “We see it less as a move from one to the other, and more of an extension,” an Amazon spokeswoman, Mary Camarata, wrote in an email Saturday. “We have an enormous number of customers excited about leveraging the capabilities.” But Amazon is not alone in this business, and the competition is getting more intense. A.W.S. now has 81 services, including ways to work on home video games. Microsoft’s 67 services include Internet of Things “hubs” and email marketing campaigns. Google has 53, including ways to deploy mobile software globally and steer performance with data analysis. Comparisons of serv-

ing the way devices on the edge act.” There are profound consequences from the scale and ambition of this trend. Given their size, wealth and technical expertise, the big cloud companies are likely to build cheaper designs and demand lower prices for everything in computing. Who is to say they don’t affect the devices themselves? That is starting to dawn on the rest of the industry. On the first day of Re:Invent, Mr. Jassy had a private lunch with about 10 venture capitalists. It is an annual affair, where he indicates where A.W.S. is going, and they figure out how to make money from it. “He wasn’t explicit, but if you were hoping to invest in storage, computing — anything below applications — you are hosed,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a partner at Battery Ventures, who attended the lunch. “Andy is smart and approachable, but reading between the lines, I’m not sure this is good for the V.C. ecosystem.”

ices are difficult, as one company’s service may encompass two or three offered by another. Machine learning — a method for computers to gain knowledge without being programmed with that information — is front and center for Alphabet’s Google, said Urs Hölzle, the head of technical infrastructure at Google Compute. Google has recently shown off its own global network of submarine cables, along with local devices like cloud-connected office whiteboards. Over the next year, Mr. Hölzle said, Google will open about one new Compute facility a month. Building out across the globe, with sometimes $1 billion or more in a facility, is critical in some cases to meet local data regulations. Equally, the big cloud companies all want to be as close to customers and their devices as possible. “Global proximity is a huge advantage,” said Corey Sanders, the director of program management at Azure. “This is a way to transform your business, includ-

ANDREA MOHIN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

According to this year’s Christmas price index, calculated by PNC, giving your true love nine ladies dancing, like the members of the New York City Ballet above, would cost $7,552.

What ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ Gifts Cost in 2016 the same price, $5,508, as in 2015. But compensation for their work has increased nearly continuously since 1984, when their performance ran about $1,600.

By ELIZABETH OLSON

As far as the economy goes, the literal meaning of holiday songs is hardly a typical indicator of consumer sentiment. Yet, there are hidden economic lessons, if you delve into the costs of goods and services. It is with this spirit (and some creative back-of-the-envelope calculations) that we again turned our thoughts of fancy to “The 12 Days of Christmas.” For those who were willing to give their true love extravagant memories for the days running from Christmas Day until Epiphany, this was the bill. All told, the whimsical splurge ran a little less than 1 percent more than last year, largely because of slow economic growth. That works out to a grand total of just $34,363.49. The Christmas price index closely mirrors the government’s Consumer Price Index, which tracks the prices of more pedestrian goods and services such as housing and transportation. The C.P.I. rose 1.7 percent over the 12month period ending in November. The good news is that prices for goods remained static in the last year, according to the PNC index. But entertainers — including those 11 pipers piping and 12 drummers drumming — enjoyed a bit of a boost in their paychecks, reflecting this year’s increase in average hourly earnings. But this year’s deal may be better than next year’s, said Thomas P. Melcher, chief investment officer for the PNC Asset Management Group, a division of PNC, because interest rates are likely to increase, leading to higher consumer borrowing rates. As the economy continues to expand,” Mr. Melcher noted, “it is

11 PIPERS PIPING: $2,708 The cost

to have 11 of these lively wind-instrument players rose for the first time since 2013. It is up 2.8 percent from their previous level of $2,635, according to a Philadelphia union for musicians. Their pay began to get a boost in the early 2000s and has risen steadily since then.

12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING: $2,934 To have the dozen drum-

LEFT, BRYAN THOMAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; RIGHT, SHAH MARAI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Bagpipe players in Queens, left, and jewelry at a shop in Kabul, Afghanistan. Hiring 11 pipers piping this year would cost $2,708, a 2.8 percent increase from their previous rate, while the price of five golden rings has held steady at $750. likely the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates this month or early next year. That will affect the Christmas index but not necessarily by much.” This year, there were wide fluctuations in the price of some products, based on the data that PNC gathered from retailers, hatcheries and dance companies. A PARTRIDGE IN A PEAR TREE:

$210 The true bargain in the gift package, the partridge price fell 20 percent, to $20, as a result of a larger supply of the game birds. Last year, the price soared because the partridge became a popular dish among foodies, but supply apparently met demand. Adding in the pear tree, which cost $190 — the same price as last year, according to Cinnaminson Nurseries in New Jersey — the grand total for the set is $210, or 2.3 percent less than last year. TWO TURTLE DOVES: $375 The

costs of two turtle doves, sometimes considered a symbol of true love, are adding up this year. The brace of lovebirds cost $375, or 29.3 percent more than last year, because of a shortage of birds. According to PNC, a turtle dove lays eggs, called clutches, only two or three times a year, and each clutch has only two eggs. THREE FRENCH HENS: $181.50 The brood of imported hens, sometimes called faverolles because the breed was developed in the 1860s near the French villages of Houdan and Faverolles, came in at $181.50, the same price as 2015. FOUR CALLING BIRDS: $599.96

Once called colly birds — an ancient term for blackbirds — they are ringing up at $599.96, the same as last year. Prices for these, and other birds, can swing from year to year. FIVE GOLDEN RINGS: $750 The price of gold rings held steady for

the fourth year in a row. Even though gold commodity prices dipped earlier this year, they later evened out. (According to some, the reference to five golden rings in the classic carol might have actually been to five ring-necked pheasants — which would be more in keeping with the lineup of birds in the song.) SIX GEESE A-LAYING: $360 The gaggle of geese remained at $360, holding steady from last year. Prices of the birds, sometimes associated with Christmas dinner, have varied, according to information PNC gathered from a waterfowl farm. SEVEN SWANS A-SWIMMING: $13,125 The cost for swans has

historically been volatile. This year, the wedge of elegant birds had an impressive $13,125 price tag — or $1,875 each — the same as last year. But the price on their

heads can be so variable that it skews the index’s outcome in some years. EIGHT MAIDS A-MILKING: $58

With no increase in the federal minimum wage — it’s been the same since 2009 — the eight maids received the same basic compensation as last year. Three decades ago, the maids earned an even more meager $26 for such toil over the holidays (not adjusting for inflation). NINE LADIES DANCING: $7,552 As with the farm workers, the price tag for nine ladies dancing was static this year. The group (priced at a rate for professional modern or ballet dancers) was paid $7,552 this year, the same as 2015. Sorry, ballerinas — no raise in 2016. 10 LORDS A-LEAPING: $5,508 Male entertainers did not fare any better than their female counterparts this year. They were consigned to performing their athletic feats for

mers at your true love’s doorstep will cost some 2.8 percent more than last year. Compensation for the dozen drummers will be $2,934, their first raise in several years. No calculations were factored in to compensate the neighbors for noise complaints.

Ship, or Buy Local? For Christmas shopping this year, it was significantly less expensive to gather your gifts in person rather than order them online. Assembling the parades of fanciful fowl and the troupes of entertainers from the comfort of home will have cost the giver $10,239 more this year — bringing the grand total to a hefty $44,602. The overall price tag would soar, however, if the sender of the gifts believed that the song required that the presents had to be added each time the verse is sung. The cost of all the items repeated in the song’s verses means buying 364 gifts, and would have put the giver out of pocket an eye-popping $156,507.

Remember the Neediest!

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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Bigger Fact-Checking Role for Snopes Brings More Spurious Web Attacks From First Business Page others made this month to start fact-checking for Facebook, new slurs and allegations poured forth. The underlying message of these spurious attacks is that the movement to fact-check the internet is a left-wing conspiracy whose real goal is to censor the right, and therefore must be resisted at all costs. “Smearing people just because you don’t like what they’re saying often works to shut them up,” Ms. Binkowski, 39, said. “But at Snopes you learn to grow a thick skin. I will always push back. At least until someone shows up at my workplace and kills me.” Mr. Mikkelson, a former computer programmer, met his first wife, Barbara, in a folklore discussion group on the internet. They called their website Snopes in tribute to the venal family in William Faulkner’s novels. Their first group of posts, back in 1995, tackled questions about Disneyland, such as whether there really was a secret restaurant at the park. (There was.) It

was a time when the nascent web was seen as a force that would deliver enlightenment and truth to all. Starting about two years ago, Snopes made an effort to professionalize itself. It added a dozen staff members just in time to become the go-to debunking site for an election full of venom. The number of unique users jumped 42 percent over 2015, peaking at nearly 2.5 million the day after the election. Just about everyone at Snopes thought things would calm down after the votes were in. “The fake news wasn’t from Trump so much. It was from people who hated Hillary Clinton,” Ms. Binkowski said. “Once the election was over we figured it would go away.” She scheduled a vacation, and thought she would spend more time writing about such things as how no one has a water bed anymore. Mr. Mikkelson, 56, went on a lengthy honeymoon in Japan and China. But the role of fake news and misinformation in Mr. Trump’s surprise win quickly reached a fever pitch, prompting questions

about the extent to which Facebook, where many of these bogus stories were shared, had influenced the election. Reluctantly, the social media giant was forced to act. The plan is for Facebook to send questionable links to a coalition of fact-checking sites, including Snopes. If the links are found to be dubious, Facebook will alert users by marking stories with a “disputed” designation. Mr. Mikkelson, speaking from Washington State, declined to claim this new initiative was a potential turning point in the quest for truth on the internet, or even in the history of Snopes. “I said, ‘O.K., we’ll give it a try,’” he said. “It doesn’t really involve us doing anything we wouldn’t already be doing.” As for Facebook, he thinks it had to do something but had few good options. Blocking content outright, for instance, would be a public relations minefield. Even when he is in this country, Mr. Mikkelson is a bit elusive. His voice mail box is full, but he is in no hurry to clear it out. In the wake of a contentious divorce from Bar-

bara, he now owns half of Snopes. The other half is owned by the principals of Proper Media, a digital media firm. All of Snopes’s revenue — Mr. Mikkelson says he doesn’t know what it is — come from ads. Facebook is not paying for its services. Nor is the billionaire George Soros funding the site, although that is sometimes asserted in antiSnopes stories. Mr. Mikkelson seems more amused than outraged by the spectacle that is the internet, even when it takes aim at him. “We don’t have any inflated sense of self-importance at Snopes,” he said. “People are always telling us, ‘You’re deviating from your mission.’ My response is: ‘We don’t have a mission. We just do what we do.’” But he conceded that something had gone wrong with the early utopian dreams for the internet. “Making everyone equal as an information source doesn’t work very well in practice,” he said. Then he laughed, something he does frequently. Ms. Binkowski, a former radio reporter who still freelances

about border issues, thinks there is a mission. “Not to be ideological or Pollyannaish, but you have to believe this work makes a difference,” she said. “Otherwise you’d just go back to bed and drink.” Although there are other benefits to working at Snopes: “I really like telling people they’re wrong. ” The Snopes writers generally take a long-term perspective on fake news. The practice itself they see as ancient. The difference now is that the stories circulate faster and people can make money spreading them, which gives its purveyors a whole new motivation. There is also a cultural shift, said Kim LaCapria, who lives on Long Island and writes many of the Snopes political posts. “It used to be that if you got too far from the mainstream, you were shunned for being a little nutty,” she said. “Now there is so much nutty going around that it’s socially acceptable to embrace wild accusations. No one is embarrassed by anything anymore.” The remedy, she and Ms. Binkowski feel, is more traditional

journalism. “People aren’t necessarily getting the media literacy they need, so they’re just kind of panicking,” Ms. LaCapria said. Mr. Thicke’s death underlined this. In addition to those asking direct questions, thousands of users searched Snopes for confirmation of the actor’s demise. “People think the death of a 69year-old from a heart attack must be a hoax. That is how muddy the waters are now,” Ms. LaCapria said. “They are afraid, even with such an easily verifiable thing, to trust anyone.” But there are also those who trust too much, and they are a much larger group. The bios at the end of posts on Snopes are often whimsical, so Ms. LaCapria wrote that she got her job “due to an executive order unilaterally passed by President Obama during a secret, late-night session.” A joke — but her own mother took it at face value. “You’ve known me for 36 years. Of course it’s not true!” Ms. LaCapria told her. “It’s very easy for us to be tricked, all of us.”

Lessons From 2016 for News Coverage, as the Ground Shifts From First Business Page But the lessons need to be drawn not only from what it did wrong but also from what it did right. What the mainstream media did wrong is well established. It generally failed to appreciate the power of the anger that ultimately decided the presidency. And that was in large part because it was overly hooked on polling that indicated a Hillary Clinton glide path, overly reliant on longtime sources who believed the rules of politics were immutable and too disconnected from too many workaday Americans. It repeatedly underestimated Donald Trump, not to mention Bernie Sanders. And there could have been a lot more reporting on both candidates’ policy plans, or lack thereof. What it did right has been less appreciated than it deserves. Faced with a precedent-shattering candidate who made false assertions at a rate none had seen before — one considerably higher than that of his opponent — reporters became more assertive in calling out falsehoods. They reported on the apparent affinity between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the paid speaking appearance his national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, made for Mr. Putin’s staterun television network Russia Today. They dug into the interests of the Clinton Foundation’s foreign donors. They reported out Mrs. Clinton’s connections to Goldman Sachs and her paid speaking tour through corporate America despite her refusal to release transcripts from those speeches. They exposed the questionable

practices of Mr. Trump’s charitable organization and reported on his taxes even as he refused to release them — a break with decades of tradition. And, no, they did not “ignore” Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, the existence of which this newspaper was the first to report (more on that in a minute). Of course, what the mainstream news media did right and what it did wrong were inexorably joined. So when Mr. Trump would, say, insult Senator John McCain for being captured while fighting for his country in Vietnam, or declare that he could grab women by their genitals uninvited, reporters covered those moments for what they were: jarring exhibitions of decidedly unpresidential behavior as it has been defined through history. Then they would look at polls and the political prognostication sites showing Mrs. Clinton as the overwhelming favorite, and see affirmation that the old rules were holding. But, as the New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin told me on Thursday afternoon, “People don’t all see things in the same way.” Too often, Mr. Goodwin said, he found that mainstream press coverage treated Mr. Trump’s more outlandish actions as disqualifying when in the end they clearly weren’t — at least for the voters in the states that decided the Electoral College outcome and thus the presidency. “The 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump clearly didn’t see things the same way as the reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post and other similar news

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

President-elect Donald J. Trump after meeting with families and speaking to reporters this month in the aftermath of an attack by a student at Ohio State University.

organizations did,” he said. Mr. Goodwin is a Trump supporter who identifies himself as a conservative Democrat. He has been highly critical of news coverage of Mr. Trump, especially that of this newspaper — and of a column by yours truly in August about journalism’s role in the Trump era — which he viewed as woefully unfair. We agreed to disagree on that score. But he’s in plentiful company among Mr. Trump’s voters, who, along with Mr. Trump, have promoted the election result as a castigation of all the mainstream news coverage of the campaign. Of course, where one stands on press bias so often depends on where one sits politically. Talk

with a Clinton aide and you’ll inevitably hear that unfair news coverage was a big reason for her loss. “Her coverage was out of context and disproportionately negative,” Jennifer Palmieri, the senior Clinton strategist, told me. “The email coverage was the original sin,” she said, arguing that the reporting on the private server was so “completely out of proportion” that it unfairly became something nefarious in the minds of voters who initially didn’t see it as a big deal. In her view, the news media should have made it clear that Mr. Trump’s failings were different — and far worse — from any of Mrs. Clinton’s, which presum-

ably would have contributed to a different outcome. As I wrote in my very first Mediator column in March, it is not the mainstream, non-opinion news media’s job to determine outcomes. That’s up to the voters. Nor should the news media measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is political journalism’s job to be true to the facts in a way that helps voters envision what the candidates will be like in the nation’s highest office. And judging by the past couple of weeks, the coverage seems to have succeeded in that regard. If you read or viewed reports about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia and his compliments of Mr.

Putin, then his choice of Rex Tillerson for secretary of state — a man whom Mr. Putin considers a friend of Russia — should not have been a surprise. If you read the coverage questioning whether Mr. Trump would upend the United States’ approach to nuclear weapons, his suggestions last week that he might reverse decades of United States nuclear weapons policy did not come out of left field. I could go on. When you get down to it, the takeaway from the year is pretty basic. It struck me as I was speaking with Ms. Palmieri, who harked back to how President Obama’s nominee to lead the Health and Human Services Department eight years ago, Tom Daschle, withdrew his name after news broke that he had failed to pay taxes on his use of a chauffeur and car service. “Imagine a Trump nominee dropping out because they didn’t pay taxes on their car and driver,” she said. If there’s anything that Mr. Trump proved this past year, it’s that something that led to a certain eventuality yesterday won’t necessarily do so tomorrow. Maybe a piece of scandalous news will sink a Trump nominee; maybe it won’t. That means that even as the news media reports the heck out of the story — as it must — it needs to avoid getting ahead of it; let the facts lead, and let them do it at their own pace, not that of Twitter. Every incorrect leap only helps those who are so aggressively seeking to undermine journalism for their own political ends. It’s also just bad journalism. So, 2017, here we come. Until then, peace.

Changes Coming to White House Press Room: Who, Where, When and How From First Business Page and bringing “more people into the process.” All this has stirred concern among journalists who say seemingly small changes to the system could lead to the diminishing of other traditions. “Beginning to suggest the daily briefings shouldn’t happen every day in the format that they are, I think, begins to establish a slippery slope,” said Scott Wilson, the national editor for The Washington Post, who was a White House correspondent during the Obama presidency. “There is value in having a formal setting where the administration’s position is stated and can be referred to and can be archived.” Since his election, Mr. Trump has shown few reservations about ignoring the norms of presidential media coverage. He has defied convention by refusing to allow journalists to travel with him on his plane — including on his flight to the White House for his first meeting with President Obama. In a highly publicized incident last month, he left Trump Tower for dinner with his family without telling the reporters assigned to cover his whereabouts, sending the reporters scrambling for information. And while Mr. Trump has granted some interviews, including with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, he also has not held a news conference since late July, preferring instead to use Twitter as his megaphone. The protocols that underpin the relationship between the news media and the president might seem arcane to many Americans. But press advocates say these traditions, even in the age of Twitter,

ensure fundamental tenets of democracy: historical record and access to information. “The American people deserve to have someone stand up and be accountable for the work of the president and the White House every day,” said Mike McCurry, who served as press secretary for President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. “I think any White House needs to explain its position and reasoning in more than 140 characters.” Many journalists also said that the new administration should retain the so-called protective pool — a group of journalists that travels with the president whenever he goes outside the White House, and through which he can communicate with the public during an emergency or crisis. “We’re not asking to be at his dinner table with him,” said Jeff Mason, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which coordinates the pool. “We just want to be nearby in case something happens.” Veteran journalists point to the presence of a pool reporter with President George W. Bush on Sept. 11, 2001, as an example of providing a witness to history in a matter of urgent national interest. The pool’s presence ensures timely reporting on the president’s activities and essentially “protects” the ability to deliver coverage should something unexpected occur. But there is acknowledgment on both sides of the lectern that some re-examination of the system is warranted, especially as news organizations, which must pay their way to follow the president, are increasingly hamstrung by budget constraints.

PAUL MORSE/THE WHITE HOUSE

President George W. Bush speaking with his advisers at the White House on Sept. 11, 2001, before delivering a national address about the terrorist attacks that day. “The question really should be, why do you need a protective pool when everybody has cellphones?” said Marlin Fitzwater, who was the press secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. “When you have a president who can operate a tweet and reach 28 million people from the driveway of any building in America, you don’t really need 14 people sitting there and watching him all night long.” (Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, has about 18 million followers.) Mr. Mason said that, since the election, the correspondents’ association and Mr. Trump’s team

had “made a lot of progress in forming a protective pool” and that he was confident Mr. Trump would allow reporters to accompany him on Air Force One once he became president. Mr. Trump’s team has floated the possibility of other changes as well. In his radio interview, Mr. Priebus hinted that the Trump administration might assume control of the seating assignments in the briefing room. The correspondents’ association has decided seating assignments since 1981, in large part because administrations of both parties did not want even the appearance of favoritism in determining press ac-

cess. Mr. Priebus’s remarks prompted concern that the new administration would try to usurp some of the association’s control. Still, many said some kind of seating reform was appropriate. Mr. McCurry and Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary under George W. Bush, said they had discussed a setup that would allow a revolving group of journalists into the briefing room rather than reserving seats only for the existing White House press corps. Foreign journalists could attend on Wednesdays, for example, while alternative online media outlets such as Breitbart News

and Think Progress could rotate in on Thursdays. Breitbart — the hard-right website whose former chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, was named Mr. Trump’s chief strategist — is already part of Mr. Trump’s transition pool. The organization’s presence has raised some eyebrows, particularly in liberal media circles, because of its connection to Mr. Bannon. But members of the pools said they did not see it as an issue and pointed out that other partisan news outlets, like the leftleaning Huffington Post, were part of the pool. Some former press secretaries suggested that Mr. Trump’s administration should rethink the tradition of broadcasting press briefings on live television, which many say has led to posturing and performance. Mr. McCurry, who introduced the tradition, said the live format had turned the daily briefings “into an alternative to the daytime soap operas.” “It was not a mistake to allow broadcast media to record the daily press briefing, but I should have put some restrictions and rules on it,” he said. One idea, he said, would be to embargo the briefings until their conclusion so they might be more informative for reporters and less like a theatrical show. Mr. Fleischer also recommended taking the briefings off live television. But given Mr. Trump’s propensity for showmanship, the live broadcasts may be the tradition least likely to change. “There’s a piece of me that thinks what Trump wants to do more than anything else,” Mr. Fleischer said, “is make the briefing a red-hot TV show.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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‘I watched many patients who were not able to get that assistance.’ Elaine Brecher, a former social worker, referring to American Kidney Fund aid needed for dialysis.

JENNIFER S. ALTMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Kidney Fund Seen Insisting on Donations, Contrary to Deal From Page A1 ance,” said Elaine Brecher, a former social worker at a small clinic in rural Arkansas. After an application for one patient was declined, she said, she did not apply for others, because a colleague believed that only clinics that donated could refer patients. Ms. Brecher now works at a clinic owned by Fresenius, one of the two largest dialysis companies along with DaVita. Together, the two companies provide nearly 80 percent of the charity’s funding. She said her current patients benefited from the Kidney Fund, whose assistance can amount to thousands of dollars in financial aid a year. “If our patients didn’t get that assistance, they would be owing great big huge bills to hospitals and doctors,” she said. The financial help is available to patients with kidney failure, known as end-stage renal disease, many of whom are unable to work. The money covers the insurance premiums for many types of coverage, including Medicare and employer and individual private plans. The Kidney Fund’s payments are part of an unusual deal it made with the government and the dialysis industry 20 years ago. The arrangement allows the dialysis companies to avoid violating anti-kickback laws. It allows dialysis clinics to donate to the Kidney Fund, treat patients whose insurance premiums are paid by the charity and then collect money from the insurers for those patients’ treatments — essentially guaranteeing a steady stream of paying customers for the companies. But the agreement also has a caveat: It requires that all patient applications be treated equally, regardless of whether their clinic donates. In an interview this month, LaVarne A. Burton, the Kidney Fund’s chief executive, said that the charity treated all patients equally, and that the fund had never denied anyone assistance if they qualified financially. “It is simply not true that we require any provider to contribute to the program,” she said. “Never have, and never will.” She acknowledged, though, that the charity pushed clinics hard to donate, particularly if they applied on behalf of patients. “We believe there is a moral obligation for providers to contribute to the organization,” she said. Ms. Burton said the concerns raised by social workers like Ms. Brecher and others arose because many in the industry misunderstood how the charity worked. The charity recently updated its guidelines, she said, to provide more clarity. An examination of public documents, as well as interviews with more than a dozen social workers, employees of dialysis clinics, insurance officials and regulators, and a former executive at the charity, put the actions in a different light. Many of the clinic workers, from about a half-dozen states, were called randomly, to limit any chance of coordinated talking points. For years, The Times found, the Kidney Fund’s preference for patients at the biggest clinics has been an open secret among many social workers, who said that as a result they had stopped applying for assistance entirely. The findings also add to a list of concerns about the group’s relationship with the dialysis industry. This year, for example, the fund faced questions about whether it was helping dialysis companies game the Affordable Care Act. In some cases, insurers and government officials have argued, the dialysis clinics used the charity’s assistance program to push people who were eligible for Medicaid, government health insurance for the poor, into private health coverage available under the new law. The private plans pay the clinics much more than Medicaid — up to four times as much, adding up to an additional $200,000 per patient per year — for the same dialysis treatment. In recent months, the federal govern-

MIKE COPPOLA/GETTY IMAGES, FOR AMERICAN KIDNEY FUND, ABOVE AND BOTTOM

ment has raised concerns about how patients are steered into private plans. UnitedHealthcare sued one company, American Renal Associates, over the practice, claiming it was harming patients by converting them to less generous coverage. American Renal, which declined to comment for this article, has denied the claims and is fighting the suit. The suit against American Renal also says the Kidney Fund directed some donations directly back to patients at American Renal. As part of an investigation by Medicare, social workers and insurers have made similar accusations against the Kidney Fund. Ms. Burton denied those accusations and attributed the recent scrutiny of the insurance assistance program to insurers that want to avoid covering the often costly medical bills of people who need dialysis. “The insurance industry has let us have it full force,” she said.

A Costly Treatment Dialysis filters toxins from the blood when a patient’s kidneys no longer work. The process is lifesaving, but also onerous, often requiring that patients be tethered to a machine for hours at a time, three times a week. Patients on dialysis often cannot hold full-time jobs, studies have shown, and those receiving the treatment are disproportionately poor. The poorest people with kidney disease qualify for Medicaid, which covers all of their costs. But Medicare covers most of the 500,000 or so Americans who need the treatment, regardless of their age, under a government program that has existed since the 1970s and that costs the federal government more than $30 billion a year. Even with help, people covered by Medicare are left with significant out-of-pocket costs. Most must pay a monthly premium of about $120, as well as a portion of their medical expenses, which can add up to several thousand dollars a year. Until the late 1990s, the dialysis companies routinely paid these expenses. But a federal law outlawed that practice, out of concern that covering a patient’s bills might dissuade that patient from switching to another clinic that might provide better care. That was when the American Kidney Fund stepped in. In 1995, the charity was relatively small, with a $5 million annual budget and contributions from the dialysis industry that accounted for less than 10 per-

cent of its donations. The Kidney Fund and the biggest dialysis clinics presented the government with a proposal that would allow the companies to indirectly pay insurance premiums for patients. The deal, reached with the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services in 1997, has had a profound effect on the charity. In 2015, the Kidney Fund reported revenue of $264 million, making it one of the country’s 100 largest nonprofits. The dialysis industry has also flourished. DaVita and Fresenius in particular have grown quickly, buying smaller chains, consolidating their market share and locking in profits. The Kidney Fund says it got 78 percent of its revenue in 2015 from two companies, which insurers, state regulators and others identified as DaVita and Fresenius. “There’s a long history of recognition of the unique needs of that patient population,” said Philipp Stephanus, a senior vice president at DaVita who handles patient support and insurance issues. The Kidney Fund, DaVita and Fresenius said the federal agreement prohibited them from disclosing what percentage of applications the fund approved from those companies’ clinics, or how much the charity paid in insurance aid for patients at those clinics. But the 1997 deal tried to prevent any preferential treatment, no matter how big the companies became. Kevin McAnaney, a former government lawyer who helped draft the original agreement, said fairness to patients was at the heart of the deal. Everyone understood that “they were covering free riders who weren’t contributing anything,” said Mr. McAnaney, a lawyer in private practice who previously worked at the Office of Inspector General. But if the rules are not followed, the Office of Inspector General has the right to end the agreement, which would profoundly change the relationship of the industry and the charity. “If all the conditions are not met, the opinion is without force and effect,” said Donald White, a spokesman for the agency. In keeping with the agency’s policy, he would not confirm or deny whether the agency was investigating the group.

Patients Turned Away Tracey Dickey works as a social worker for a nonprofit dialysis clinic in rural Mis-

A DaVita dialysis center in Paterson, N.J., top, before its opening in 2014. DaVita is one of two large dialysis companies that provide most of the funding for the American Kidney Fund, which held an event, above, in 2011 to raise awareness about kidney disease. The charity’s chief executive, LaVarne A. Burton, below, says that it treats all patients equally and that it has never denied assistance to a person who qualifies financially.

souri with no connection to a big dialysis company, and many of her patients struggle to pay their medical bills, she said. They are exactly the kind of people the Kidney Fund says it is there to help. In November 2014, Ms. Dickey emailed an executive at the fund. She said she had heard that only clinics that donated to it could apply for financial aid for patients. Her clinic had not donated, she said — but she still had a patient in need. “I need to know the facts before I tell her there isn’t premium assistance,” Ms. Dickey wrote in an email to the fund. She provided a copy of the email to The Times. An executive at the fund wrote back the same day. He was noncommittal, but attached a set of guidelines that he asked her to review. “If your company cannot make fair and equitable contributions,” the guidelines read, “we respectfully request that your organization not refer patients.” And so she didn’t. The patient, Ms. Dickey said, continues to struggle financially. This summer, after Ms. Dickey and other social workers shared their experiences in an industry discussion group, the Kidney Fund invited them to contact the charity about their concerns. When she followed up, the charity told Ms. Dickey that she would need some computer training to enroll in the program. She has not pursued it, she said. Ms. Burton said that Ms. Dickey had apparently misunderstood the exchange with the Kidney Fund employee and that had she applied, her patient would have been approved, assuming the person qualified financially. But Ms. Brecher and several workers at other nonprofit or independent clinics told similar stories. An administrator at an independent clinic in a Midwestern city said he had helped a handful of patients maintain their coverage through the fund after they transferred to his clinic from a large chain. He declined to be identified because, he said, he did not want to anger DaVita and Fresenius, who sometimes send him patients. Each time, he said, the charity’s workers later demanded that the clinic make a donation that at a minimum covered the amount it had paid for the patient’s premium. If he did not pay, he said he had been told, the patient risked losing the financial help from the charity for his insurance. The administrator said he had refused to donate to the charity. The Kidney Fund continued to help pay for the patients’ insurance, he said, but the aggressive approach angered him. Ms. Burton said the charity never declined a patient because a clinic did not donate. But she said the Kidney Fund did not hesitate to ask clinics for donations. “We are a charitable organization,” she said. “We fund-raise for everything that we do.” She said nearly 40 percent of the 213 dialysis companies whose clinics had successfully helped patients apply to the fund had never donated. She would not say, though, what percentage of the 80,000 patients the fund helps annually comes from clinics that do not donate, or how many of those patients come from the biggest companies, which donate most of their revenue. Still, some social workers say the assumption at many clinics where they work is that the aid decisions are not always based on financial need. Jennifer Bruns, now a social worker at the St. John Transplant Specialty Center in Detroit, worked for years in dialysis clinics and said she had many clients who received assistance from the American Kidney Fund. She said sometimes patients would tell her that their insurance premiums — which the Kidney Fund had agreed to pay — had not been paid that month. Ms. Bruns called the fund to find out why, she said in an interview, “and they would say, ‘Well you haven’t made your contribution this month.’”

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3 ARTS, BRIEFLY

5 BOOKS

A backstage competition at ‘Hamilton.’

Stories full of exquisite depth and shallow fun.

2 MUSIC

Mavis Staples honored. BY JOE COSCARELLI

NEWS

BY CARMELA CIURARU

MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

CRITICISM

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‘The Mikado’ Returns, And So Do Questions A staging of this operetta, set in an imaginary Japan, hopes to please while not offending. By MICHAEL COOPER

One of the most passionately debated stage works of our time is a 131-year-old operetta. Is Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduringly popular “The Mikado” a droll satire of Victorian England? A racist caricature of Japan? Some amalgam of the two? Recent revivals have ended up in the cross hairs of these questions, sparking protests across the nation, along with earnest wondering about how — and even if — this 1885 piece should be staged in the 21st century. When an outcry arose last year over a planned revival of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players’ old production — which had featured a mostly white cast in yellowface makeup, and employed some ugly stereotypes to evoke the imaginary Japanese town of Titipu — the company initially responded by saying that it would scrap the makeup. Then, realizing that the complications were more than skin deep, it decided to scrap the entire staging and take a year to rethink its approach, diversify its cast and create a new show. The result will open on Wednesday at Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in Manhattan. Finding the right balance is not easy: Some of the most severe critics of “The Mikado” find it too inherently offensive to be performed, while some ardent fans view any changes as bows to excessive political correctness. Shortly after the New York company announced it was replacing last CONTINUED ON PAGE C4

Donald Judd, Unexpected Philosopher A grace note for the artist’s career gathers more than 800 pages of his prolific writing.

JASU HU

Waiting. Thinking. Feeling. Unpacking and celebrating what it means to be black within the African-American Museum.

By RANDY KENNEDY

I’M GOING TO LEVEL with you. Getting inside

The sculptor Donald Judd, one of the most important artists of the mid20th century, declared that he took up writing in the early 1960s purely as a “mercenary,” to earn money as a critic in his spare time. The statement was about as sincere as the oftcited one of the novelist John Cheever — that literature is not a competitive sport. Both men might have wanted, or needed, to believe their pronouncements, but they knew they weren’t exactly true. For Judd, who died in 1994, the overwhelming confirmation has arrived in the form of a new collection of his writings, the first to cover the entire prolific sweep of his output, much of it never before collected or published, a dense volume that one critic has described as resembling a “brick and a bible.” At more than 800 pages of essays, reviews and uncompromising observations about art, history and subjects as particular as Dallas (“very disagreeable”) and psychology (“the astrology of the mind”), the book, “Donald Judd Writings,” is aimed at adding Judd’s singularly contrarian voice

the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is hard. “Advanced timed passes for April 2017 Available on January 4th,” the website laughs. So with all due respect to the buckets of cash raised to fix Dorothy’s ruby shoes, the opening of the Blacksonian is the museum event of the year — probably the century. (Yes, “the Blacksonian,” because no one is going say that whole name; and no one’s going to say “NMAAHC,” either, because no one wants to hear “God bless you” every time somebody says it.) The wait to create a national museum of black history and culture was decades long. And the result amounts to a major bureaucratic, academic and emotional achievement. Now everybody wants in. So some of us have to wait. I got in on a chilly autumn Sunday, after a stranger, who had more passes than she needed, gave an extra one to me. There aren’t many places where gluttony becomes largess, but it does at the Blacksonian. While you’re standing there, hoping a look of pity turns into a pass, there’s plenty of

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time to roll your eyes at the faint fragrance of barbecued meat from the food truck parked along Constitution Avenue, or to ask someone to hold your spot in line while you consult with the man selling sweet-potato pies nearby. There’s also plenty of time to admire the edifice you’re waiting to enter: three tiered trapezoidal stacks of bronze-tinted gating that sheaths a giant glass box. I had assumed that the gating was iron or actual bronze. Nope. Aluminum. Aluminum siding. But it’s the most vivid, most alive, aluminum siding you’re ever going to see. Obviously, we’re talking about architecture not black hair, but the edges lay perfectly. Designed just a little differently, the gating might have read as defensive, as a meticulous: “Keep out.” But the panels are too porous for combat. They extend cautious warmth, instead: “Take care.” The trapezoids, we’ve been told, evoke a Yoruba crown, imputing a sense of majesty. You can see that, especially in the museum’s silhouetted logo. Yet viewed from the minor distance of 14th Street and Constitution, with the Washington Monument playing the role of antenna, it’s a fortress. But — unlike, say, the pink marble of its neighbor the

National Gallery of Art, or the weatheredlooking, curvilinear limestone of the National Museum of the American Indian — the Blacksonian is brown. In the course of a day, depending on the weather and the light, that aluminum skin turns every shade of that color. In the sunlight, it’s golden, sepia in the shade, redbone when it’s overcast. At dusk, it’s mahogany and deep chestnut after a cloud gobbles up the sun. The building can be all of these browns without ever getting to black, as if it knows that no black person is actually, phenotypically black. So the building, a mighty, physical construct, memorializes a figurative one. “Black” is the concept that gets unpacked, rebuilt and celebrated within the museum. Inside, there’s more waiting to be done — for the very good restaurant, for the ladies’ room, for entry to the museum’s deep lower levels. Building waiting into the experience feels right for a place that tells the story of a people who’ve had to wait for everything else. The anticipation for the subterranean history galleries already feels mythic. You might know, for instance, that the museum’s narrative history starts underground, and gradually brings you up — into the present, into the ample light that pours through the great glass enclosure. But that doesn’t acCONTINUED ON PAGE C7

Lincoln’s no hero at ‘the Blacksonian.’ He’s a man with a nagging mandate from Douglass to do the right thing.

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‘Look at Me Now — I Got My Ribbons’ The gospel and R&B singer returned to the White House with a Kennedy Center Honor. By JOE COSCARELLI

Mavis Staples, the 77-year-old gospel and R&B singer, knows the White House well, having attended numerous cultural events there during the Obama administration. But this last one, a reception for the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, was extra special. Ms. Staples, whose music career began as a child at the dawn of the civil rights movement with her family band, the Staple Singers, was recognized this month for her lifetime achievement at the 39th annual Kennedy Center Honors event. “That was the most beautiful thing that could’ve happened for me,” Ms. Staples said in an interview upon returning home to the South Side of Chicago. “I’m just thankful that the Lord has kept me this long where I could receive it.” The ceremony — which also honored Al Pacino, James Taylor, the Eagles and the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich — will be broadcast Tuesday on CBS at 9 p.m. In a lively chat, Ms. Staples, still glowing, discussed some behind-the-scenes moments from her big weekend in Washington. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Let’s start at the bottom: What was the worst part? The worst part was my feet. It was just those high-heeled shoes. I took them off, too. My tour manager, he knew that might happen, so he had my flat shoes. My feet were thanking me. My feet felt like they had been honored. You’ve been to the White House a few times during the Obama presidency, is that correct? I sure have. I’ve been there at least four times. I had been at the White House with the Clintons, too. I’m old school! What did President Obama say to you this time around? When I walked in, he said, “Mavis, here you are again!” I said, “I’m back, but look at me now — I got my ribbons.” He put his arm around me and we took our picture. I had seven guys with me [including her frequent collaborator Jeff Tweedy of Wilco]. All of them were tall. Michelle said, “Oh, Mavis, this is how you roll, huh?” I said, “This is how I roll, Michelle.” They be rushing you, so we couldn’t have a whole long conversation, but then I sat next to him and Michelle in the balcony, and he said, “Mavis, you’re looking good.” I was almost crying again. I’ve just been so happy.

AL DRAGO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mavis Staples, the 77-year-old gospel and R&B singer, at a reception honoring the 2016 Kennedy Center Honors in the East Room of the White House. “I’m just bubbling,” she said of receiving the honor and notice from President Obama.

A whole lot of stuff don’t excite me no more, as old as I am, but I’m just bubbling. There’s a photo of you fist-bumping James Taylor. What was going on in there? Oh yeah, we did! I believe it was after Garth Brooks sang [Mr. Taylor’s] song. I felt so good about it that I gave him a bump. He almost didn’t know what my fist was there for, but he finally hit it. It reminded me of when you first saw Obama and Michelle do that. They did the fist bump. We black people, we’ve been doing it for years. But when they did it, the world knew about it. Word is you and Al Pacino did a little singing together. Al Pacino, he said something about, “We gotta do something!” I started singing — “We gotta do it again, we gotta do it again” — and he started dancing. I said, [singing] “Let’s do it in the morning!” He said, “Oh, no, no, Mavis, I don’t do it in the morning.” I said, “You got to — that’s the song!” He is so comical.

How do you think the appreciation of culture and music will change under a Trump administration? You know, I’ve thought about that. We tried to figure out who would go, who would be the artists. I think it would probably be country artists. I haven’t seen any of the big-time country artists sing for Mr. Trump, but it would probably be in the country family.

Have you spoken to your old friend Bob Dylan about his big award this year, the Nobel Prize for Literature? You know what, just like they couldn’t find him, I can’t find him either! He’s a hard guy to get a hold of. We’re good together when we’re together, but when we split up, it’s over. [Laughs]

Your music has always been a soundtrack for social change and racial progress. When you see the state of the country these days, are you disheartened? I am really disheartened. I’m about to relive the ’60s. I’ve seen some of it already. I can turn on the news and I can swear I’m back in the ’60s. The way things are going, every day it’s something. I feel like all of this is happening because of the way Mr. Trump is. He’s bringing it on. I’m going to have to start writing songs again. I’m so sorry that we, as black people, don’t have a leader like Dr. Martin Luther King — someone to take

What would your father, Mr. Pops Staples, say about this award? My father is the first thought in my mind when something like this comes to me. Oh, Lord, Pops — you did it again, Daddy. He’s the cause of it all. He started it. I can just see my father up in heaven, he’s walking around, talking to the angels and the elders and he’s got this gleam in his eye and a big smile on his face: “My daughter, let me tell you all something, my baby daughter, Mavis, that Kennedy Center is honoring her tonight!” He’s so happy. I just wish to God he was here.

charge. We have to do it through our songs and our actions. And try to stay nonviolent.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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can single, “Please Please Me,” was pressed there. Moreover, during an era of deep racial hostility in the South, the plant’s second-floor “Motown Suite” once provided a respite for African-American music executives and performers who were denied hotel rooms. Acknowledging fears that the plant on Chestnut Street would be repurposed or torn down, United made clear on social media in recent days that the company is committed to preserving the location in a way that honors its “important place in musical history.”

YOUR DAILY ARTS FIX

NOCHE FLAMENCA This lively troupe and its star, Soledad Barrio, return for a winter season of flamenco. 8 p.m. at West Park Presbyterian Church. 212-352-3101, nocheflamenca .com

A Holiday Gift for Fans From Run the Jewels

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Holidays With ‘Hamilton’ From left, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cate Blanchett and Josh Groban, judging a door-decorating contest backstage at “Hamilton.” The winner: A photo-booth-theme door designed by members of the show’s men’s ensemble.

series, will be moderated by Chris Kapp and directed by Michael Gamily, with educational outreach by Arthur Adair. Admission is free with a suggested donation, and advance reservations are required. (lamama.org)

Vinyl Record Maker Said to Be Expanding The alt-weekly The Nashville Scene first reported last week

CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARDS NOMINEE BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

“SCRUPULOUS, COMPASSIONATE AND SURPRISING.”

that the United Record Pressing plant, a mainstay of vinyl production since 1949, would be expanding its operations to a new 142,000-square-foot facility in South Nashville. In a later article by Billboard, United said that the new facility, estimated to be the size of “two football fields,” would double the plant’s production capacity, and that the expansion would help the country’s largest vinyl manufacturer keep pace with strong market demand. According to a 2015

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report from Nashville Public Radio, United produces up to 40,000 records a day, and United’s head of marketing is quoted in the piece as saying the plant accounts for 30 to 40 percent of all vinyl records available in stores. Tucked away in the quiet neighborhood of WedgewoodHouston, United Record Pressing has made records by the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Michael Jackson, John Coltrane, Taylor Swift and the Beatles, whose first Ameri-

“THE BEST PICTURE OF THE YEAR”

-A.O. Scott, THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Late on Christmas Eve, the hiphop duo Run the Jewels, featuring Killer Mike and El-P, surprised fans by releasing their much-anticipated third album, “RTJ3,” three weeks early, and for free. The collection, announced during the coda of an ad hoc “Portlandia” skit on the group’s YouTube page, features collaborations with the jazz composer and saxophonist Kamasi Washington; the rappers Danny Brown and Trina; the producer Boots; and Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine. It comes two years after the album “RTJ2,” which was praised for its cleareyed take on racial hostility in America. “RTJ3” is available as a download and on streaming services, and physical copies will be available on Jan. 13.

SANDRA BERNHARD Joe’s Pub closes 2016 with a new cabaret show from Ms. Bernhard, a treasure of downtown culture. 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. 212-539-8778, joespub.com

Remember the Neediest!

COMPILED BY RYAN BURLESON

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BEST PICTURE N O M I NAT I O N S

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“Hair,” the musical that voiced a generation’s antiwar passions, will celebrate its 50th anniversary at La MaMa on Jan. 21 with a night of storytelling and performances by original and revival cast members. Those confirmed from the 1968 cast include Natalie Mosco; Allan Nicholls; the Rev. Marjorie Lipari; and Dale Soules, who now plays Frieda Berlin on “Orange Is the New Black.” They will be joined by, among others, André De Shields, who counts his appearance in a 1971 Chicago production as the official start of his career. The “Hair” event will feature personal stories from the creators Galt MacDermot and James Rado, who will be celebrating his 85th birthday. And a demo of the song “Hair,” performed by Mr. Rado, Mr. MacDermot and their collaborator, Gerome Ragni, who died in 1991, will be played publicly for the first time. Attendees will also hear live performances of “Aquarius,” “Donna,” “Frank Mills” and “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sun Shine In),” and they’ll view rarely seen photos from the private collection of the “Hair” producer Michael Butler. Mr. Butler; an original cast member, Walter Michael Harris; and Antwayn Hopper, who performed in the 2009 Broadway revival of the show, will make appearances via video. “Hair” first appeared in October 1967, at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, before migrating to Broadway. The anniversary event, presented as part of La MaMa’s Coffeehouse Chronicles

DRAMA

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Victoria

Read it before you watch VICTORIA , the upcoming MASTERPIECE presentation on PBS.

“IRRESISTIBLE.” —PEOPLE

DA ISYG OODW IN NOV ELS . COM

JULIETA

CASEY AFFLECK G O T H A M AWA R D

as of 12/21/16

(Subtitled) 12:15, 12:30, 2:45, 4:15, 5:00, 6:25, 7:10, 8:35, 9:20

A MONSTER CALLS •Q

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out, as the tide 4 Permit 7 Reply to a captain 10 Brewpub offering, for short 13 Org. that targets traffickers 14 Raised, as a building 16 Partner of neither 17 Mountain on which you might yodel 18 Stockpiling, in a way, as feed 19 Letters in a personals ad 20 Gymnastics floor cover 21 Directive for additional information 22 Cartoon pic 23 Get out of bed 25 TV warrior princess 26 Race loser in an Aesop fable 27 Reflective sorts 29 Fur wraps 31 This: Sp. 32 It’s usually behind a viola in an orchestra

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Flexible Flyers, e.g. Present time in England? … or a hint to each set of shaded squares Lispers’ banes Scrubbed, as a NASA mission Be ___ equal footing Bear witness (to) Soviet premier Khrushchev Caviars Try, as a case Track events Lobster ___ diavolo (Italian dish) Hit pay dirt “You ___!” (“Absolutely!”) On the ___ (fleeing) Literary critic Broyard Actress Thurman Get older Bruno Mars or Freddie Mercury Some PCs The “p” in m.p.g. Ram’s mate Stockholm’s home: Abbr. U.S.P.S. assignment: Abbr.

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24 whose currency, RUBLES, 26 is almost an anagram of its 46 name 28 47 3 St. John the ___ 71 30 4 ___ Antilles 5 Pennsylvania city 33 or the lake it’s 49 on PREVIOUS PUZZLE 34 6 Bygone point51 to-point M A L W A R E 54 35 communication E H A R M O N Y 7 Suffix with valid S E X Y B A C K 55 8 Gossipy sorts O S A L I M O N 38 9 Border V E D A Y E D O 56 39 I S O N C R E W 10 Proportional to the surroundings 40 59 D F I C A M A R B L E 11 Motorized 41 60 P J U R Y B O X 12 Like the Venus de Milo L D E S T Q V C A H E E D S E L Y A R D C A R A Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles, O R I N C U B I nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year). U M V I A C O M Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay. T A A B B E Y Crosswords for young solvers: nytimes.com/studentcrosswords. 2 Country

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SUNDANCE

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Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. For solving tips and more KenKen puzzles: www.nytimes.com/kenken. For feedback: nytimes@kenken.com KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. Copyright © 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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JULIETA CERVANTES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players rehearsing “The Mikado,� opening Wednesday at Kaye Playhouse.

‘The Mikado’ Balancing Act CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

year’s “Mikado� with “The Pirates of Penzance,� David Wannen, its executive director, received a letter from a self-described pirate who complained that he was offended that the troupe did not plan to cast real pirates. David Auxier, the director of the new “Mikado� production, recalled that “Sometimes the conversation got to be: ‘You’re never going to please everybody, so why try?’� He added: “I said, ‘We’re starting from the understanding that we’re never going to please everybody. But we’re still going to try.’� As the use of yellowface — which can refer not only to makeup, but to broader attempts at racial impersonation or caricature — has drawn protests at “Mikado�

NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

From foreground left, Rebecca O’Sullivan, Sarah Smith and Amy Maude Helfer in a 2010 production of “The Mikado� at Symphony Space.

A cast in yellowface may have seemed funny in 1885. A new staging is more mindful.

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revivals from Seattle to New York, companies presenting it have responded with a variety of approaches. A topsy-turvy 2013 staging by Skylark Opera and Mu Performing Arts in St. Paul inverted the libretto, setting the piece in England and casting Asian-American actors in key roles. This year, the Lamplighters Music Theater in San Francisco decided not to set its new production in Japan after local Asian-American performers threatened protests. Instead it moved the action to Renaissance Italy and changed the opening line from “If you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Japan� to “If you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Milan.� A production by the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players this fall was set in a

QUINTO OTT

The operetta’s costume renderings for Three Little Maids, above, and Ko-Ko, right, by Quinto Ott.

1960s Oriental-theme hotel in Las Vegas to, as the organizers put it, “recontextualize the origins of the show in Japonisme and commodity racism.� It still drew protests. In New York, emotions have run high on all sides. A Save the Mikado NYC Facebook page sprang up, calling for the operetta “to be performed exactly as conceived by Gilbert and Sullivan, with only a very small number of minor alterations that have been standard for over half a century.� Another Facebook group, Artists Against The Mikado, was “dedicated to the controversial idea that minstrel shows where white people dress up as fake Japanese is a little out of date.� The old “Mikado� production had used yellowface, and the troupe had invented a minor role, played by a child, that was credited as a “coolie,� which company officials said they had not realized was a slur. A 2004 version of the staging included “a man with a Fu Manchu mustache and impossibly long fingernails,� Josephine Lee, a professor of English and Asian-American Studies at the University of Minnesota, writes in her influential 2010 book, “The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado,’� which traces the work’s long, complex racial history. In an interview, Ms. Lee questioned the commonly heard defense that “The Mikado� should not be considered racist because it is meant in fun. “There are lots of instances in blackface minstrelsy that are lighthearted and funny — and also offensive,� she said. Before mounting their new “Mikado,� the New Yorkers sought advice, listened to critics and sent out casting calls that stressed a desire for diversity. At a forum held in November at the Kaye Playhouse, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia who has performed in Gilbert and Sullivan works, noted that many of the most offensive elements of recent productions were invented by stage directors. “You don’t need to do a lot of violence to the work to not tape actor’s eyes back to make their eyes

QUINTO OTT

look ‘slanty,’� he said, recalling productions he had appeared in that did just that. So the New York company set about trying to strip away those elements. Like Mike Leigh’s 1999 film “Topsy-Turvy,� which told the story of Gilbert and Sullivan as they created “The Mikado,� the new production will firmly establish the operetta as a work of the Victorian imagination. A new prologue features the composer and librettist planning their next opera and admiring some Japanese objects. When a sword falls, knocking Gilbert unconscious, he dreams “The Mikado� proper, set in an imaginary Japan as conceived by a 19th-century Englishman. The production will emphasize the work’s satire of Victorian mores, and do away with racially charged performance tics and excessive bowing and shuffling in its choreography. While the ensemble would never be mistaken for, say, the multicultural cast of “Hamilton,� it is the troupe’s most diverse yet. Erin Quill, an Asian-American actress, wrote about the controversy last year on her lively blog, The Fairy Princess Diaries. Ms. Quill, who spoke at the company’s forum in November, said in an interview that she was “cautiously optimistic� about the new production. “Am I glad this conversation is happening?� she asked. “Absolutely. Do I wish this conversation had been 20 years ago? Of course.�

Do not forget the Neediest!

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

CARMELA CIURARU

THE GARDENS OF CONSOLATION

By Parisa Reza, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. 260 pages. Europa Editions. $16. . ...................................................................

This exquisite, deceptively quiet novel opens with a 12-year-old Iranian girl and her donkey, trekking down a desolate desert road. The girl, Talla, is already married; her shepherd husband, Sardar, walks beside her. She finds comfort in her belief that “no one but God and her husband would have authority over her.” The year is 1920. Talla, who like her husband is illiterate, has never left her home village and has no idea that World War I has ended, yet “her reclusive life felt enormous to her.” Talla settles with Sardar outside of Tehran and learns by way of gossiping locals about her country’s chaotic politics, including the transformative rise of Reza Khan. When Khan becomes the king, Reza Shah, he begins “flouting Iranian tradition, and the changes would prove devastating.” Some of the novel’s passages seem uncannily relevant to the current divide over immigration in America — with mention of “people who spoke languages no one understood, who came from everywhere and nowhere. New arrivals were always viewed with suspicion.” The novel traces the couple’s lives over decades, as they struggle to start a family and find stability amid political tumult. Amid the cacophony of voices competing for dominance (and oil) in their country, Talla’s politically engaged son, Bahram — handsome, educated, a star athlete — navigates dangerous paths of activism and resistance “with a strange mix of narcissism and patriotism.” Slowly, the narrative evolves from an intimate chronicle of Talla and Sardar’s provincial lives into a sweeping tour through early-20th-century Iran.

FREEBIRD

By Jon Raymond. 322 pages. Graywolf Press. $26. . ..................................................................

The Lynyrd Skynyrd classic for which this uneven novel is named figures into the final scene — aptly, a road trip. The song provides liberation, though not for the character most in need of release: Anne Singer, a 45-year-old single mother in Los Angeles, frustrated by her deadend job in a municipal sustainability office. Suffering from burnout and “generalized hate,” she’s vulnerable to the brash businessman who approaches her with a convoluted plan to monetize the city’s wastewater supply. She is also coping with care for her octogenarian, Holocaust-survivor father, and a strained relationship with her feckless teenage son. Her brother, Ben, an ex-Navy SEAL, returns home with PTSD and a murder plot directed at a former employer. The novel toggles discordantly between dysfunctional family drama and crime thriller. Despite hints of weighty themes, none are explored with much depth. Nor is the narrative served by the author’s prose, alternately lyrical and breezy. Still, Anne offers plenty of memorable moments. Her earnest, altruistic impulses coexist with a deep misanthropy she can’t quite suppress. Spotting a crucifix around someone’s neck, she admits her loathing for “these stupid, sanctimonious ornaments of someone’s private belief. What did God care if you advertised your creed?”

. ...................................................................

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This debut novel might be described as “The Devil Wears Prada” meets “Primates of Park Avenue.” A behind-the-scenes glimpse into the daunting admissions process at an elite Manhattan private school, “Small Admissions” offers a tantalizing if shallow premise. Kate Pearson, 25, lands a job at the fictional Hudson Day School after a comically terrible interview. She dislikes children, curses with abandon and is inconsolable after a breakup with her French boyfriend. Alongside subplots involving Kate’s controlling sister, Angela, and two college friends, the story follows Kate’s work tribulations and renewed attempts at dating. Although Ms. Poeppel once worked in private school admissions, she delivers few startling insights. The rich parents are as entitled and demanding as you might expect. They try to bribe their way into a top-choice school or threaten litigation; they’re a bit crazy and trapped in unhappy marriages; they panic over their children’s test scores and essays. “Getting into private school in Manhattan is like getting into Harvard,” one desperate woman says, reminding her husband, “We have to appear stable.” The clichés extend to a promising Latina applicant, the violin-playing and “unusually empathetic” Claudia Gutierrez, whose mother works two jobs and whose father died of cancer. Nuance is largely absent as the novel goes for frothy fun and hits predictably heartwarming notes. Take it for what it is; you’ll be entertained.

GEORGE ETHEREDGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Rainer and Flavin Judd, Donald Judd’s children, who oversee his legacy and who have ensured that his writings reach a wider audience.

Donald Judd, Philosopher CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

not just to the list of great artist-writers but also to the canon of American literature. Widely known, and sometimes reviled, for his critical writing about the art of the 1960s, Judd could be as damningly final in his judgments as he was rigorously clear in his descriptions of work. A piece by Anselm Kiefer, he once wrote, was “one of the worst paintings I’ve ever seen in all respects.” The task of shepherding his many words into print was not simple. Judd — who will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in the next few years that will explore his role as a pioneer of Minimalism, a term he derided as woefully simplistic — did not type, for one thing. Throughout his life, he was known for the yellow legal pads always within his reach, a body of longhand writing that came, along with other manuscripts, to fill 30 boxes. Over a period of months, his son, Flavin, who was 25 when his father died and now

A sculptor, and critic, with strong opinions on Western culture and more.

By Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull with Nikolai Formozov. 140 pages. New York Review Books Classics. $14.95.

By Amy Poeppel. 358 pages. Aria Books. $26.

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NEWLY RELEASED

THE RETURN OF MUNCHAUSEN

SMALL ADMISSIONS

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In recent years, New York Review Books has been reissuing works by this neglected Russian master, who was not published in his lifetime. (He died at 63 in 1950.) In this witty, whimsical novella, the much-mythologized 18th-century German baron, Hieronymus von Munchausen, is imaginatively conjured. Familiar elements remain, including the baron’s famously upturned pigtail, which once supposedly pulled him and his horse from a swamp. And of course, Munchausen is a raconteur extraordinaire, filled with tall tales and very much full of himself. His greatest pleasure is the sound of his own voice, and his perorations rouse audiences to standing ovations and the kind of ardor summoned at a Justin Bieber concert. (The baron’s devoted followers are known as Munchauseniads.) Mr. Krzhizhanovsky’s plot, such as it is, takes Munchausen through 1920s Berlin, London and Moscow as a freewheeling diplomat-secret agent — though he spends most of his time philosophizing, smoking his pipe and reeling off postprandial aphorisms. (Of horses and voters, he says, “if you do not put blinkers on them, they will throw you into the nearest ditch.”) Munchausen’s trusted confidant, the poet Ernst Unding — whose name translates as “Earnest Nonsense” — gently challenges the details of his friend’s long-winded stories and departures from “the trammels of truth.” Munchausen can’t help himself. His perceptions do not extend much beyond “the radius of his fedora,” and his delight in bending reality as he pleases seems almost childlike, and utterly charming.

oversees his legacy along with his sister, Rainer Judd, became in a sense his father’s translator, deciphering Judd’s serpentine handwriting, reading some of it for the first time. In the process, he said, he felt as if he had been able to spend time once again in the presence of Judd, a famously domineering man, though one who had a close relationship with his two children after his divorce from their mother, the dancer Julie Finch. “Rainer and I were the only people who could argue with him,” said Mr. Judd, now 48, in a recent interview at 101 Spring Street, the cast-iron SoHo building that Judd bought in the late 1960s and which has been preserved as a museum. “We could talk with him in a way that employees and girlfriends really couldn’t.” Of the time spent putting the book together, he said: “It was beautiful. It’s about as close as you can get to someone again when you’re with what they wrote.” Judd lived with his children between New York and Marfa, Tex., the small high-desert town where he established permanent installations of his work, in part to get as far away from the art establishment as possible. His considerable reputation as a writer rested mostly on a collection that came to be called “the yellow book,” for its cover, but it contained writing only up to 1975 and became hard to find. His son, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michèle, a psychoanalyst, and their three children, said his father never spoke about what he wanted done with the mass of unpublished notes. But Mr. Judd said he had always been on the side of publishing, as Max Brod was in ignoring his friend Franz Kafka’s request to burn his papers. “Basically, after you die,” Mr. Judd said, “it’s not yours anymore.” The book, which Mr. Judd edited with Caitlin Murray, archivist for the Judd Foundation, shows Judd much more fully than ever before in all his ranges — philosophical, furious, dryly funny and oracular. It also shows him as a deeply read student of history who tended to believe Western culture hadn’t yet emerged from the Middle Ages and that, more than people cared to acknowledge, violence, oppression and ignorance continued to be societal defaults. “Even a year ago, some of that seemed paranoid and a little far-fetched,” Mr. Judd said. “But now, you know, really not at all.” (In February of 1991, during the gulf war, Judd wrote: “The circumlocutions of liberalism went so far as to become the statements of fascism. Both met.” A year earlier, about the citizens of modern societies, he observed: “ . . . you are free, indigenous and important, but for your protection your life is completely monitored.”) David Raskin, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of a 2010 monograph about Judd’s work, said he saw Judd, who studied philosophy at Columbia University, as an heir of American thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, whose essay “How to Make Our Ideas

JAMIE DEARING/COURTESY JUDD FOUNDATION

The sculptor Donald Judd in 1982 at La Mansana de Chinati, a.k.a. the Block, in Marfa, Tex., where he established permanent installations of his work. Left, some of his writing concerning James Brooks’s “Ainlee” (1957). Judd didn’t type and was known for always having yellow legal pads to fill, longhand.

JUDD FOUNDATION ARCHIVES

Clear” was a founding document of pragmatism. “Judd wrote to figure out what he believed in,” Mr. Raskin said, adding, “He really paved the way for later artists who wanted to get their ideas out through writing.” Mr. Judd, an open, funny, friendly man with something of his father’s look, though leaner and without Judd’s ever-present beard, said he hoped the book, published by the Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, would deepen understanding about Judd beyond clichéd views of his boxy, industrially canted work as cold and reductive. “This is more than just an artist writing about his work,” he said. “It’s an artist writing about how you should think about how you live.” Rainer Judd, a president of the Judd

Foundation along with her brother, added in an interview: “I guess I feel a little bit bad that readers don’t get Don along with these writings, because the guy had such a sparkle, like a twinkle in his eye, and it so balanced out the fervor and aggression that could be in his language.” (Rainer was named for the dancer Yvonne Rainer and Flavin for the artist Dan Flavin, friends of their parents.) Mr. Judd, who also studied philosophy and was interested in filmmaking and architecture, said that before his father’s death, he had felt that he would probably spend a good deal of his adult life working for his father in some form or fashion. “So I guess, in a weird way, what would have happened, happened in the end anyway,” he said. “Just without him around.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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Kevin Can Wait Man With a Plan Kevin Can Wait Man With a Plan Scorpion “Fish Filet.” Sylvester’s “Kevin and Don- “Two Tickets to “Kevin’s Good “The Puppet The- life is threatened. (14) na’s Book Club.” Paradise.” (PG) Story.” (PG) ater.” (PG) Hairspray Live! Tracy Turnblad fights segregation. (PG)

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The Karate Kid (1984). Ralph Macchio. (PG) (6:10) The Karate Kid Part II (1986). Pat Morita. (PG) (8:18) The Karate Kid Part III (1989). Ralph Macchio, Pat Morita. (PG) (10:13) Johnson Fam. The Staircase The Staircase “A Weak Case?” The The Staircase “The Prosecution’s The Staircase “The Blowpoke Re- The Staircase “The Verdict.” (14) The Staircase “Last Chance - Re(14) (6:15) prosecution presents its case. (7:20) Revenge.” (14) (8:25) turns.” (14) (10:35) opening the Case.” (14) (11:40) . Indiana Jones and the Last Insidious (2010). Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne. New house comes with ghosts. “Saw” team Doom (2005). The Rock, Karl Urban. Soldiers battle mutants on Mars. Crusade (1989). (PG-13) (5) goes straight with mixed results. (PG-13) Claustrophobic mess based on video game. (R) Wrecked “Cop The Detour “The The Detour “The The Detour “The The Detour (MA) The Detour “The The Detour “The The Detour “The The Detour “The The Detour “The Search Party Tricks.” (MA) Pilot.” (MA) Hotel.” (MA) (7:57) Tank.” (MA) (8:24) (8:51) B & B.” (9:18) Road.” (10:12) Drop.” (10:39) Track.” (11:06) Beach.” (11:33) (MA) . The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959). Harry Belafonte, Mel Charro! (1969). Serious western set The Omega Man (1971). Good sci-fi, best in middle third when germOn the Beach in old Mexico. Colorful, at least. (6:15) warfare survivor finds he’s not alone. Good Chuck and Ros. (GP) Ferrer. (1959). My 600-Lb. Life “Angel’s Story.” My 600-Lb. Life “Laura’s Story.” My 600-Lb. Life “Lupe’s Story.” Lupe makes a potential lifesaving move. My 600-Lb. Life “Angel’s Story.” My 600-Lb. Life Pacific Rim (2013). Charlie Hunnam, Man of Steel (2013). Henry Cavill, Amy Adams. The origins of Superman. Sometimes po- Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013). Logan Lerman. Percy must find Diego Klattenhoff. (PG-13) (5:15) etic, sometimes crude. (PG-13) Golden Fleece to save Camp Half-Blood. Sufficiently diverting. (PG) (10:45) Bizarre Foods With Zimmern Delicious Delicious Ice Hotels. Not Impossible (N) (G) Booze Traveler “On the Rocks.” (N) Delicious Delicious Ice Hotels- Im.

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(2000) on Sundance Now. Ed Harris summons the spirit of the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, standing over an enormous canvas and dripping paint in graceful swooping gestures as the camera dances around him. He also seethes like the alcoholic that Pollock was — upending dinner tables, raging at his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and ultimately crashing his car, which killed him. The movie, which Mr. Harris also directed, reminds us that great art is “about discovering and communicating messy truths that spill all over the place,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times.

POLLOCK

12:00

. Mommie Dearest (1981). Joan Crawford’s child-rear-

liams, Sally Field. (PG) (5) makes a sitcom shine. (PG) The Sandlot (1993). Tom Guiry, Mike Vitar. (PG)

M.L.B. Network Countdown The greatest plays from 2016.

(1961) on Amazon, Fandor and iTunes. After a young woman (Lea Massari) disappears during a yachting trip off the coast of Italy, her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Monica Vitti) set off in search of her. But soon it’s clear they’re attracted to each other. Michelangelo Antonioni’s mystery, which arrived from Europe to great fanfare, is a classic now. But at the time, Bosley Crowther of The Times said that watching this “weird adventure” is “like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have got lost.”

L’AVVENTURA

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. Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Robin Wil- . Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). Robin Williams, Sally Field. Caring dad becomes nanny in disguise. Brilliant Robin

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on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. Marianne (Tilda Swinton), a rock star recuperating from throat surgery, and her lover, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), find their reverie on a volcanic island interrupted when her former beau Harry (Ralph Fiennes), and his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), unexpectedly roar in. Harry is on a desperate mission, and soon Marianne and Paul’s bliss has been rather violently commandeered by wandering glances and furtive caresses. The Italian director Luca Guadagnino has loosely adapted Jacques Deray’s 1969 New Wave thriller “La Piscine,” adding magnificent digs and a soundtrack throbbing with the Rolling Stones, Harry Nilsson, Verdi and 1970s Brazilian classics. A BIGGER SPLASH (2016)

The Last Song (2010). Beach-side soap opera, Nicholas Sparks-style. If only it were the last. The Last Song (2010). (PG)

King of the Hill King of the Hill Shark Tank Savory cake balls; gourmet pickles. (PG) Anderson Cooper 360 (N) (PG)

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Hook (1991). Dustin Hoffman. Spielberg’s “Peter Pan” spinoff, more about family than fantasy. Clamorous, cluttered, exuberant. (PG) Jumanji (1995). Robin Williams. (PG) Set It Off (1996). Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah. Four inner-city women rob bank. Messy but impassioned. (R) Centric Live: Bell Biv Devoe Bell Lift Every Voice Biv Devoe celebrates. (PG) (G) (12:10) Bloomberg Businessweek (N) (G) Bloomberg Best: Asia 2016 Charlie Rose (G) Best of Bloomberg Markets Best of Bloom. Vanderpump Rules “The Sociopath Vanderpump Rules “No Show.” Lala Timber Creek Lodge “Resting Chef Watch What Vanderpump Rules “No Show.” Test.” (14) dreads Ariana’s birthday trip. (N) Face.” (N) (14) Happens Live Lala dreads Ariana’s birthday trip. College Football From Nov. 7, 1998. College Football From Oct. 4, 2014.

Cleveland Show Bob’s Burgers American Dad American Dad Shark Tank Seth MacFarlane sup- Shark Tank A towel that allows for ports an invention. (PG) public changing. (PG) The Legacy of Barack Obama The presidency of Barack Obama, a legacy which may be among the most consequential in history. Futurama “Juras- South Park “The South Park But- South Park (14) South Park “The South Park (MA) South Park sic Bark.” (7:27) Magic Bush.” (14) ters’ virtual reality. Cissy.” (14) “Goobacks.” (MA) Best Thing Ate Best Thing Ate Best Thing Ate Best Thing Ate Best Thing Ate Fact or Fict Fact or Fict

Futurama (PG) (6:54) Best Thing Ate

COM

8:30

Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton.

Leah Remini: Scientology and the Leah Remini: Scientology and the Leah Remini: Scientology and the Intervention (N) The First 48 (14) The First 48 “Unnecessary Rough- Leah Remini: Aftermath “Fair Game.” (14) Aftermath “The Bridge.” (14) Aftermath “A Leader Emerges.” (14) (14) (10:12) (10:44) ness; Rules of the Game.” (11:01) Scientology World War II in Color (PG) World War II in Color (PG) Against the Odds (PG) Against the Odds (PG) World War II in Color (PG) Against-Odds Breaking Bad Breaking Bad “Seven Thirty-Sev- Breaking Bad “Grilled.” Walt and Breaking Bad “Bit by a Dead Bee.” Breaking Bad “Down.” Walt tries to Breaking Bad “Breakage.” (14) (14) (6:24) en.” (PG) (7:28) Jesse are trapped with Tuco. (8:32) (PG) (9:36) reconnect with his family. (PG) (10:40) (11:44) River Monsters (PG) River Monsters: Legendary Locations “Deadliest Amazon Encounters.” (N) (PG) River Monsters: Legendary Locations (PG)

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The Virgin Suicides (2000). Kirsten . The Last Days of Disco (1998). Chloe Sevigny. Young people freThe Descent (2005). Shauna Macdonald. Six spelunk- Rocky Balboa (2006). Sylvester Dunst. (R) (6:15) quent hot New York club in 80’s. Witty, via Whit Stillman. (R) ers encounter hungry underground predators. (R) Stallone, Burt Young. (PG) (11:40) Pete Holmes: Faces and Sounds Straight Outta The Divergent Hidden Figures: O Every Brilliant Thing An adaptation Joy (2015). Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro. Single mother builds business dynasty. Lawrence’s Joy is a joy. (PG-13) (9:05) (MA) (11:15) Compton (12:15) Series: Allegiant HBO First Look of the off-Broadway show. (N) (PG) Game of Thrones “The Pointy Game of Thrones “Baelor.” Ned Game of Thrones “Fire and Blood.” Sisters (2015). Amy Poehler, Tina Fey. Adult sisters throw one last party Patria O Muerte: End.” Robb rallies his father’s allies. makes a decision. (MA) A new king rises in the north. (MA) at childhood home. A little less funny than you’d like. (R) Cuba . Panic Room (2002). Jodie Foster, Forest Whitaker. Woman and daughter Phone Booth (2002). Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland. Traders (2015). Killian Scott. Market Run All Night (2015). Liam Neeson, Ed Harris. (R) (6:05) play cat-and-mouse with armed intruders. Above-average thriller. (R) (8:05) (R) trades in fights to the death. (11:25) . The Gift (2015). Jason Bateman, Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the The Hateful Eight (2015). Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell. Bounty hunter and others meet at frontier outpost. Rebecca Hall. (R) (6) Wall “Off the Wall.” (14) Lesser Tarantino. (R) (9:35) Cold Souls (2009). Casino Royale (2006). Daniel Craig, Eva Green. James Bond plays poker with a guy who The Affair Alison spends a day with Shaquille O’Neal Presents: All Star Comedy Jam (PG-13) (5:45) finances terrorists. Sensational stunt work with a core seriousness. (PG-13) Noah. (MA) Live From Sin City Comics perform in Las Vegas. (MA) Risen (2016). Wild Hogs (2007). Four friends embark on a motorSweet Home Alabama (2002). Josh Lucas. Southern-born New York fashion The Object of My Affection (1998). Jennifer Aniston, (PG-13) (5:30) cycle trip. One long “I’m not gay!” joke. (PG-13) (7:20) designer torn between two men. Radiant Reese has a ball, of fluff. (PG-13) Paul Rudd. (R) (10:50) I Know What Thirteen Days (2000). Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood. Costner as Kennedy’s right-hand Texas Rising Valkyrie (2008). Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh. Plot to assassinate HitYou Did Last man in the Cuban missile crisis. By-the-numbers countdown. (PG-13) (Part 6 of 10) (14) ler. Slick, facile entertainment. (PG-13) (10:45) The D Train (2015). Jack Black, Sleeping With Other People (2015). Sex addicts vow not The Architect (2016). Parker Posey, James Frain. Couple hire uncom- Six Days, Seven Nights (1998). James Marsden. (R) (6:15) to sleep with each other. Rom-com without the rom. (R) promising architect. (9:45) Harrison Ford, Anne Heche. (PG-13)

7:00

Make waves in the Mediterranean with “A Bigger Splash” and “L’Avventura.” Paint a canvas with Jackson Pollock and J. M. W. Turner. Then count life’s blessings.

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(2014) 2 p.m. on Starz Cinema. Timothy Spall plays J. M. W. Turner (17751851), whom John Ruskin called “the greatest painter of all time.” It’s “a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times. MR. TURNER

EVERY BRILLIANT THING 8 p.m. on HBO. A boy tries to cure his suicidal mother’s depression by making a list of the best things in the world, which he compiles from the age of 7 through his marriage. Then life deals a bitter blow and suddenly it’s the son who needs the list. The British comedian Jonny Donahoe performed this one-man show, written by Duncan Macmillan, at the Barrow Street Theater. Writing in The Times, Ben Brantley said it is “pretty much guaranteed to keep your eyes brimming.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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WESLEY MORRIS 2016: A MEMORY TO KEEP

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Waiting. Reading. Connecting. Feeling. CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1

count for the emotional toll of all the waiting and reading and thinking and connecting and feeling to come. It doesn’t account for the experience of standing in the immense concourse and seeing the faces of the hundreds of people waiting with you, the endless hues of skin. This standing around is simultaneously boring and one of the happiest, most poignant things I’ve ever done with monotony. Here we all are, imported as Africans, standing around as African-Americans, checking our phones, laughing, talking, taking group selfies, waiting with white people from this country and from Europe, with all kinds of Latinos, all kinds of Asians, all kinds of Arabs, to interact with a version of a story of what America truly is. During that wait for the underground galleries, natural impatience threatens to upstage the human majesty of it all. You don’t know why it’s taking so long to get there. Once you reach the entrance, you see. You’re waiting for an elevator. The Blacksonian has one pivotal conceit, one metaphorical device that you need to embrace despite its hokiness, despite its comical proximity to a set of stairs, and it’s the elevator. The elevator is an enormous glass box that comfortably fits about 30 people. The operator welcomes you to a time machine that’s going to carry you from the 21st century to the 15th. It was a device I knew I’d bought into when the operator asked whether we were ready, and I honestly couldn’t say that I was. Despite waiting all morning for this — despite waiting all my life, really — I was overcome with stress. Suddenly, I was unready to see any of the 37,000 procured, purchased and donated objects, even as the box began its descent and landed its cargo at the year 1400. The stress never left. And it probably shouldn’t have. That’s history. It’s heavy. You just bear the weight as you set forth to graze thousands of chronologically arranged facts, names, photographs, things, explanatory guides, problems. The museum doesn’t tell you how proceed. You’re not doing it wrong, even though a school of museum criticism — and to be fair, some museumgoers — expect hand-holding. Maybe the Blacksonian doesn’t instruct you on where next to graze. But you’re always oriented. And it’s the orientation that gets to you. Until the installation on slaves’ role in the Revolutionary War, for instance, the ceilings in the galleries are low (Kobe Bryant and LeBron James are among the museum’s big-league donors, and I wish their heads luck). With a crowd, the walkways narrow; the lighting is almost notional, polite, correspondent with one solemn detail after the next. You can see more than well enough to understand that enslaved labor was foundational for the colonies. You can hear that anyone speaking is doing so almost reluctantly. You feel simultaneously overheated and spiritually chilled. In these early galleries, you’re always in someone’s way. There’s always some image you’re not seeing, some wall text you practically have to kiss in order to read. It’s strange: Here we are, climbing past one another, inspecting the historical molecules that make us us. Objects, stories, illustrations, faces, ideas and legislation will magnetize you to them, will imprint themselves upon you. That happened to me almost immediately, with the registry-like wall of slave ships. It carries the names of vessels and their countries of commercial origin (always Europe, often Portugal). It specifies the date of disembarkation and tallies the number of passengers versus the number of survivors. The wall appears to be a single structure, full of information that you have to both crouch and get on the tips of your toes to make out. Then you realize that it runs the length of much of one side of the

Top, “The Paradox of Liberty,” part of the “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition, which includes Thomas Jefferson and stacks of bricks painted with the names of some of his slaves. Above, from left, a statue of John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Peter Norman at the 1968 Olympics. Bottom row, from left, bricks painted with the names of slaves; an auction block used in Maryland in 1880; and an article about the murder of Emmett Till.

gallery, and that the decorative presentation has fooled then floored you. It’s such a horrifyingly casual display that it becomes grimly amusing before it turns devastating. The awkward presentation feels morally apt. The Atlantic Ocean was once a sloshing highway to transport slaves. The work you do to see that wall is emblematic of the work to be done by visitors all over the historical galleries. You reach the end of Reconstruction on the lowest level and have to climb a ramp to get to the civil rights era. That doesn’t feel accidental. It’s effort that seems meant as a terribly loaded abridgment of the work black people have always done in this country. Progress is a StairMaster. The Blacksonian reveals a wicked, poetic sense of humor about this history. You exit that long, tight, airless gallery into a huge open space with virtually no ceiling, and you realize you weren’t breathing. And then you catch your breath only to look up and see, on a platform, a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Arrayed behind him are rows and rows of bricks painted with the names of some of his slaves — Hercules and Jupiter and lots of Sallys. Surrounding him are equally proportioned statues of Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker, Phyllis Wheatley and the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louver-

ture — black people the museum argues are equally important. They loom near Jefferson. They haunt him. Abraham Lincoln, too, is morally conjoined here, on the abolition of slavery. He is as bound to Frederick Douglass, as Tony Curtis is chained to Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones.” Lincoln’s not a hero at the Blacksonian. He’s a man with a nagging mandate from Douglass to do the right thing. He’s another brick in the wall. The time machine transports you to other places — to an old slave cabin, a heartbreakingly perfunctory bill of sale for a black girl, the coffin of young, murdered Emmett Till, to photograph after photograph of slaves who radiate a kind of melancholic neutrality. Encountering so many long faces makes you aware of the length of yours. They also dare you to wonder: Who, among these ancestors, was the first to have the audacity to be pictured with a smile? The wonder keeps growing. How did this country ever evolve from a wall listing the amount paid for so many black people to the wall on the great ground floor featuring the many black people who helped pay to build the museum that would display either wall? How did we get from the funereal assessment of American history below ground to the vibrant galleries on the upper floors that salute black hair, black comedy, black ath-

letes, black scientists, black travel, black art, black body language, Chuck Berry’s Cadillac? (That’s not quite the story down the Mall, at the Museum of the American Indian, and I carried that heaviness around with me, too.) The Blacksonian takes astonishing care to correct a crucial misrepresentation of slavery. I, at least, am guilty of necessarily focusing on the very real degradation of the work and not on the dignity and ingenuity of the workers. Over and over, the word “skill” appears in the display texts to describe the innovation slaves made to streamline agriculture and industry. Though the labor was evilly got and cruelly maintained, the laborers were innovators, creators and artisans. We call this place a museum, but to behold its impregnability, to feel centuries of pain and pride, to receive the story of how black people helped forge this nation (first by whip then by will), to find, at the twilight of one historic presidency and the dawn of what promises to be a very different one, that the forging must (must) continue — to see that metal gating reaching up, up, up — is to sense that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture really should have an additional name, one worthy of all that forging and hammering and ironing out. It should also be called the Blacksmith.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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4-5 PHOTO ESSAY

Irving, James and the Cavs thwart the Warriors again.

A look back at images of the year’s remarkable victories and notable losses.

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The Celtics beat the Knicks and highlight their flaws.

SCORES

ANALYSIS

COMMENTARY

MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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A Season To Rebuild? Not Necessary At UConn Brian Stewart told people so. For four historically triumphant years, he contended that the Connecticut women’s basketball team was greater than the sum of Coach Geno Auriemma’s prize recruits, a conga line of achievers that included Stewart’s daughter, a once-in-a-generation ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL talent by the name of Breanna. Daddy Stewart — a recreational gym rat in his spare time from his job as a technician at a Syracuse hospital and a motivational conspirator in his daughter’s career — could foresee the Connecticut beat downs happening this season despite the exodus last spring of the players who would become the first three chosen in the W.N.B.A. draft. He could even imagine that the Huskies, supposedly rebuilding after four consecutive national championships, would be where they are: 11-0, riding an 86-game winning streak, four victories shy of the N.C.A.A. record — women’s and men’s — that Connecticut established in 2010. Well, he could almost imagine it. “I probably would have thought they would already have lost one here or there,” Stewart said in a telephone interview. “They’ve had, you know, a pretty tough schedule.” Among the 11 victims are Florida State, Baylor, Notre Dame and Ohio State. All still ranked No. 12 or higher in last week’s poll. Next up: a visit on Thursday night to unbeaten Maryland, ranked No.3 in the USA Today coaches poll, and probably the last serious obstruction between the Huskies and the shattering of their own record. “To do what they’re doing is a testament to the M.O. of the team and the program,” Stewart said. Which is, in his informed opinion? “I personally know that Breanna was no princess there — just the opposite,” he said. “So I’d say: ‘Check your ego at the door. It’s not about you.’” This season, unavoidably, is about Auriemma, about putting to rest the notion that his record 11 career Division I titles (again, for men’s and women’s basketball) have primarily been about charismatically pitching to recruits and their parents. It has also become, at least thus far, a thumbs-down rejoinder to the women’s sports degraders, forever skeptical or outright dismissive of Connecticut’s dominance, based on the false presumption that the Huskies seldom had worthy competition. What the critics have failed to grasp, Stewart said, is that the success is as much about how Connecticut recruits as it is about whom. “They go after more than basketball talent at UConn,” Stewart said. “They recruit personalities driven to win.” After no lost games since November 2014, and after the graduations of Stewart, Moriah Jefferson and Morgan Tuck — the aforementioned top Continued on Page D2

HARVEY ARATON

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILL VRAGOVIC FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Thomas Fletcher, the top-ranked long snapper in the country, is the second long snapper to receive a full scholarship from Alabama out of high school.

An Upside-Down Priority Long snappers may be on the field for just a few plays. But at schools like Alabama, no detail is too small. By SAM BORDEN

BRADENTON, Fla. — Alabama football is relentless. The Crimson Tide have won 16 national championships, including four in the last seven years. They have made the most bowl appearances in big-time college football with 64. They have won 30 conference titles. They have had 11 undefeated seasons and will continue their push toward a 12th if they can beat Washington in a College Football Playoff semifinal game on Saturday. So what is Alabama’s secret? Some say it’s the defense. Others point to the offense or the toughness or the competitiveness of the Southeastern Confer-

Fletcher lifting weights this month at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. ence or the atmosphere at overflowing Bryant-Denny Stadium. There is one person, however, who takes a more unorthodox view, at least as it pertains to the Tide’s most recent successes. “It’s the long snapper,” said

Lions’ Quarterback Is Flying Under Radar, With Panache By DAVID WALDSTEIN

ORLIN WAGNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Crystal Dangerfield, who was the nation’s top point guard prospect, is now a freshman at Connecticut.

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — Early in 2009, just before the N.F.L. draft in which the Detroit Lions owned the first pick, Troy Aikman and Matthew Stafford had dinner together in Arizona, where Stafford was training. Aikman, the Hall of Fame quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and now a broadcaster for Fox, lives in Highland Park, Tex., an area of Dallas close to where Stafford grew up and played sports alongside his childhood friend Clayton Kershaw, who is now a star pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Aikman said he had never seen Stafford play in high school, but they met a few years later when, while eating at the same Dallas restaurant, Stafford walked over to Aikman’s table and introduced himself as the quarterback for the University of Georgia and an N.F.L. hopeful.

They became friendly, and by the spring of 2009, Stafford was projected as the No. 1 draft pick, as Aikman had been 20 years earlier. As they ate together before the draft, Aikman asked Stafford straight up: Do you really want to go to the Lions? After all, Detroit had not won a playoff game since 1991 (and still has not) or a championship since 1957, when Bobby Layne, who lived on the same street as Stafford in Dallas and played for the same high school, was Detroit’s darling quarterback. So just between friends, was he really O.K. with becoming a Lion? “He said, ‘Absolutely,’” Aikman said in a telephone interview last week. “He said: ‘I want to go to Detroit, and I want to be part of building something. I want to leave my mark on this franchise.’ “Nothing against Detroit,” Aikman Continued on Page D7

Chris Rubio, who then quickly acknowledged that, yes, he was speaking about players whose only job is to snap the ball on punts or kicking plays and that, yes, as the leading guru for long snappers in the country, he might be a little

bit biased. “Just think about it, though,” Rubio continued. “Seriously. Is it really that crazy?” Maybe only a little. Consider this: Whatever Alabama does in the playoffs this season, it almost surely will be the early favorite to win next season’s title in part because it has, as it does nearly every year, attracted the top-rated recruiting class in the country. Of Alabama’s 24 current committed recruits for 2017, almost half are rated in the top five at their position by top scouting services. Five of them are ranked No. 1, including a tall, lanky kid from Washington State named Thomas Fletcher, who just graduated from the famed IMG Academy here and is — wait for it — a long snapper. Fletcher will become the second long snapper in Alabama history to be awarded a full scholarship out of high school. The first, Cole Mazza, who will graduate this year, was also the No. 1rated snapper when Coach Nick Saban Continued on Page D8

‘You can’t be afraid to fail. That’s a big part of it.’ MATTHEW STAFFORD

RICK OSENTOSKI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Quarterback Matthew Stafford has led the Lions to the top of the N.F.C. North with eight comeback wins.

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Despite Stars’ Exodus, No Need for Rebuilding at UConn From First Sports Page three draft picks — many had this season pegged as comeuppance for Connecticut, and even Auriemma called it, in advance, “a great unknown.” Before we go further, we must put comeuppance into proper UConn context. Four rotation players did return, including Katie Lou Samuelson, the country’s highest-rated 2015 recruit; a solid veteran in Kia Nurse; and two skilled forwards in Napheesa Collier and Gabby Williams. The team also gained the nation’s top point guard prospect, the freshman Crystal Dangerfield. Conversely, Auriemma had no preseason All-Americans, no front-line size which with to make the rim area a no-trespass zone and a bench that typically goes no deeper than two players. And his primary competitors, believed to be Baylor and Duke, were returning their most formidable players. A betting person might have heeded the hopeful prophecy of Louisville Coach Jeff Walz, who while paying homage to Auriemma said last spring: “Things eventually change. Next year, they lose three great players and might lose in the Elite Eight, as if that would be horrible.” And that could certainly happen, because this Connecticut team is not universally feared in the way last season’s Huskies were. In its opener at Florida State, Connecticut was one converted jumper from losing at the buzzer. The victory over Baylor required a breakout performance from the still froshlike, erratic Dangerfield. If the winning streak ends at Maryland, no one will be shocked. Or devastated, in Auriemma’s stated case.

Coach Geno Auriemma watching his Huskies improve to 11-0 with a win at Nebraska.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NATI HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gabby Williams, one of Connecticut’s four returning rotation players, grabbing a rebound last week in Lincoln, Neb. “What’s the difference if we win 90 or 91 or 92? Who cares?” he said after a 43-point annihilation of Nebraska last week. “We already won 90.” This, of course, was the coach playing it coy, having it both ways. Auriemma fully comprehends what another unbeaten season — or fifth consecutive championship — would mean for his already unmatched legacy.

Running the table would also raise the possibility of the patently ridiculous — given the return next season of Auriemma’s current core roster; the much-anticipated addition of Azura Stevens, a 6-foot-6 transfer from Duke; and the arrival of another heralded recruiting class. But why speculate about the future when the present is so

unfamiliarly gratifying? When Auriemma is, for now, still No. 1 and people, for once, are asking how. The answers, in part, invariably point to him, and his M.O. The Huskies hustle: “I watch the games, and you can see it plain as day — they’re running hard down the court when the other team is jogging,” Brian Stewart said.

They pass: “They move the ball better than any team in the country,” Jeff Mittie, the coach of Kansas State, said this month after the Huskies handed his team its first loss. Intimidation: When DePaul visited Storrs on Dec. 1, the Blue Demons were ranked No. 15 — and trailed after one quarter, 37-6. Growth: “Not everyone can be

in that leading role,” Auriemma said of his returnees before the season. “But some can’t wait to start doing bigger parts. I think the four — Kia and Katie Lou, Gabby and Napheesa — they want bigger roles, but it’s going to be a learning process.” They would appear to be acing a Berlitz course in basketball leadership, but certainly realize they have done nothing yet except to reinstall a burden of championship expectation that they as players — along with their parents — will eventually feel. Not Brian Stewart, who has been there, done that. These days, he keeps long-distance tabs on Breanna, who is playing professionally in China after her rookie W.N.B.A. season in Seattle, but he still routinely tunes in to watch the Huskies, as he did for the previous four seasons. He is still confident of victory, just much calmer. “I enjoy the games much more now,” he said.

MIKE STOBE/GETTY IMAGES

The Knicks’ Joakim Noah (13) pursuing a loose ball against the Celtics on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. A bounce pass by Noah helped the Knicks tie the score late, but Boston hung on.

Facing Another Measuring Stick, the Knicks Come Out on the Short End By MIKE VORKUNOV

With 1 minute 6 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter of their Christmas Day matinee, the Knicks and the Celtics were back where they had started, tied again after nearly 47 CELTICS 119 minutes of a game that KNICKS 114 tipped off shortly after noon and, perhaps because of the early start, at times seemed a little drowsy. And yet here was Madison Square Garden suddenly thundering and frothing, the Knicks having caught up when the game had seemed pretty much over. But two possessions followed, one by each team, that put Boston back in front for good, quieted the Garden and demonstrated the ongoing gap between these two rivals — one growing into a conference

contender and the other on the upswing but still trying to figure out how to beat teams that are not N.B.A. weaklings. What the two possessions also showed is that while the Knicks have star power, the Celtics seem to have a better grasp of on-court patience and precision. In that final minute of the game, it made all the difference. The first of the two crucial possessions came with the score tied at 112-112 and Boston with the ball. The Celtics whipped the ball around and nearly ran the Knicks’ defense ragged until Marcus Smart, with the sixth pass of the possession, hit an open 3-pointer to put the Celtics ahead. When the Knicks came down the court, there was little of the cohesiveness that Boston had just displayed. Instead, the Knicks’ possession ended clumsily, with

Carmelo Anthony dribbling along the sideline and looking trapped until Boston’s Avery Bradley dislodged the ball and sent it rolling to his teammate Jae Crowder under the basket with 18 seconds left. Crowder grabbed the ball, was fouled and hit two free throws, and soon enough the game ended in a 119-114 victory for the Celtics. The result left with the Knicks with a 16-14 record, which is not bad given the miseries of recent seasons. Still, they knew they had come up short in a game that served as another measuring stick of how much progress they are actually making in Phil Jackson’s third season as the team president. The answer would seem to be some, but not enough. The Knicks are just 3-10 this year against teams with records of .500 or better and will have to improve in

that regard for anyone to take them seriously. “That’s the jump we’ve got to make,” the Knicks’ Courtney Lee said afterward. What particularly seemed to hurt the Knicks on Sunday was a lack of ball movement. They were credited with just 11 assists on their 41 field goals, fewer than half of the 25 assists that the Celtics compiled in sending 45 shots through the net. And the Celtics, led by their undersized, hard-todefend point guard, Isaiah Thomas, seemed to have the Knicks’ defense scrambling for much of the afternoon, a difficult situation for any team, let alone one with the sixth-worst ranking in the league. Often enough, the Knicks have found ways to win this season with high-scoring efforts by Anthony, or Kristaps Porzingis, or even Derrick Rose. But they did

not have enough answers on Sunday, and Anthony, in particular, had an uneven game, leading the team with 29 points in 39 minutes but missing 15 of 24 shots and making that costly turnover in the final minute. The Knicks maintained after the game that their offense against the Celtics had not been too isolation-heavy, even though their coach, Jeff Hornacek, seemed to differ, saying the ball movement had not been good. “I think that’s just the type of basketball we play,” said Porzingis, who scored 22 points and had 12 rebounds. “We’re not the team that gives the most assists. A lot of it is ‘iso’ for guys and guys making one-on-one plays for themselves and for others. I’m not really worried about that too much. Obviously, there are situations where we can make that ex-

tra pass.” He added, “But that wasn’t why we lost.” Perhaps not, and yet it was noteworthy that it was one of the Knicks’ best plays of the day — an assertive bounce pass from Joakim Noah to a cutting Anthony — that allowed the Knicks to tie the score with a minute to go. But then came the 3-pointer by Smart that was followed by a play in which Anthony, without a clear opening to shoot, might have chosen to pass the ball but did not, and instead lost it. “This is a team that executes very well,” Noah said afterward in praise of the Celtics, who, with an 18-13 record, are now a game and a half ahead of the Knicks in the Atlantic Division. “And we have to look at that team and say, ‘What can we do better as a team?’ I think we will.”

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BRIAN SPURLOCK/USA TODAY SPORTS, VIA REUTERS

Cavaliers guard Kyrie Irving (2) between the Warriors’ Draymond Green and Stephen Curry in Sunday’s rematch of the N.B.A. finals. With 3.4 seconds left, Irving would deliver the game winner.

Without Any Title at Stake, Cavaliers Relive Their Memorable Rally CLEVELAND (AP) — With another clutch shot, Kyrie Irving took the Warriors on a trip down memory lane. Irving dropped a short turnaround jumper over Klay CAVALIERS 109 Thompson with 3.4 seconds left on SunWARRIORS 108 day as the Cleveland Cavaliers rallied just the way they did in June’s N.B.A. finals to defeat the Golden State Warriors, 109-108, in a marquee matchup that more than lived up to the hype. Down by 14 early in the fourth quarter, the Cavs chipped away and then put the ball in the hands of Irving, whose stepback 3-pointer over Stephen Curry on June 19 helped seal Game 7 of the finals and gave Cleveland its first major pro sports championship since 1964. This time, Irving went deep into the

lane before spinning and making his shot over Thompson, one of the league’s best defenders. “The kid is special,” LeBron James said of Irving. “It was never in doubt.” Irving earlier drained a 3 from the wing that looked a lot like the one he made on June 19, but his bucket over Thompson was more difficult. “That’s a really hard shot,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said. “I thought Klay played tremendous defense. You don’t do anything different.” Golden State had one last chance, but Kevin Durant, who led all scorers with 36 points in his first game in the league’s hottest rivalry, lost his balance coming off a screen and could not get off a shot as time expired. “I was trying to make a move,” said Durant, who thought he had been fouled

by Richard Jefferson. “I didn’t fall on my own.” James scored 31 points with a seasonhigh 13 rebounds, Irving added 25 points and Kevin Love scored 20 points for the Cavaliers, who faced a three-games-toone deficit in last season’s finals before stunning a Warriors team that had won 73 games during the regular season. Thompson added 24 points for the Warriors, who had won seven straight. Draymond Green scored 16 points and Curry 15. The biggest present for basketball fans this holiday season was filled with drama, intensity and more than a few moments that served as reminders of last season’s brilliant finals. “It lived up to what everyone wanted it to,” James said. Jefferson ignited a 14-3 run by the Cav-

aliers in the fourth quarter with a dunk over Thompson. After the play, Jefferson, who had missed his first eight shots, was called for a technical for winking at Durant. On the game’s final play, it was Jefferson’s defense that helped stop Durant. “We all think we’re fouled on every play in every single game,” Jefferson said. “That’s why I say I know the referees have a very hard job. I switched to his body. He looked like he lost his balance. He was trying to regain his balance, and as soon as I saw him start to stumble, I ran off.” The teams will meet again Jan. 16 and then not again unless both make it back to the N.B.A. finals, which would be the first time in league history that the same teams played for the title in three consecutive seasons.

To remind their guests of what happened in June, the Cavaliers propped open a door near Golden State’s locker room to display a large photo of James’s game-changing block of Andre Iguodala in Game 7. The picture had been doctored with a championship ring taped over James’s left index finger. If there was any doubt this game meant more than the other 81 to both teams and their fan bases, Green took care of that in the opening minutes. After being called for his second personal foul, Green stormed off the floor, cursing with every step on his way to the bench. After Green, whose suspension from Game 5 of the finals helped swing the series to Cleveland, was given a technical, several of his teammates came over to calm him down before things got worse.

A Promise Is Kept, and a Legacy Is Secured LeBron James was present at two Game 7 thrillers in 2016 but played in only one of them. It was on the night of June 19 at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., where James and the Cleveland Cavaliers faced the Golden State Warriors in Game 7 of the N.B.A. finals. Before bringing the trophy home to Ohio — YEAR as promised — James IN REVIEW and his teammates had to find a way to win on the road, just as they had in the first three rounds of the playoffs. History was against them. No team had rallied from a three-games-to-one deficit in the finals to win the N.B.A. title. And the Cavaliers, founded in 1970, had never won the title, not even when James — the greatest basketball talent of his generation — first led them to the finals against the San Antonio Spurs in 2007, when he could jump a little higher, recover a little faster and dominate with more margin for error. But this time James, at 31, was part star, part missionary, and what elevated this into the game of the year from an international perspective was James’s drawing power and his throwback sense of community. There was a glut of transcendent games in 2016: Portugal’s first major soccer title at the European Championship, secured in extra time in France; Brazil’s cathartic grudge match in Rio with Germany that secured its first men’s soccer gold medal; the Cubs’ curse-terminating victory in the Game 7 that James would attend as a spectator just four and a half months after the N.B.A. finals while wearing a T-shirt that read, “Cleveland or Nowhere.” But in a thoroughly mercantile, increasingly globalized sports world, players are still the sum of their actions, and James — who returned to Cleveland from Miami in 2014 — was honoring not only his roots with his old-school loyalty and hunger-pang hustle, but others’ roots, too. “Look, the city of Cleveland needed this,” said Tony Godsick, the Clevelandbased agent who has long represented

LeBron James changes Cleveland’s course, both on and off the court.

CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

EZRA SHAW/GETTY IMAGES

By finally bringing a championship to the Cavaliers, LeBron James demonstrated that there is still loyalty in a sports world dominated by dollar signs. Roger Federer. “It’s been the butt of so many jokes for so long, all unnecessary, to be honest. A lot of the things people make fun of were years ago. But LeBron was able — and he was not alone with that great supporting cast — to find a way to change the direction of the series and probably a lot more. “Harvard Business School can do a study in a few years and really delve into the economic and psychological impact of that win, what it did to a city and a region.”

The Cavs’ Game 7 was a fine spectacle even without the back story — 20 lead changes in total; players succumbing or rising to the big occasion. Cleveland led by 1 when the first quarter ended; the Warriors led by 7 at halftime when the Cavaliers’ coach, Tyronn Lue, made it clear in front of his team that James needed to be a bigger presence. James was not amused, not after having scored 41 points in Game 5 and 41 more in Game 6. Not after all the

team-building and load-carrying he had embraced throughout the season and the series. “I didn’t really think he was playing that bad,” Lue later told Sports Illustrated. “But I used to work for Doc Rivers in Boston, and he told me, ‘I never want to go into a Game 7 when the best player is on the other team.’ We had the best player. We needed him to be his best.” But what was so telling about how much this particular Game 7 meant was

that none of the main men were truly at their best down the stretch. Even James forced and missed too many shots in the fourth quarter, but with the scored tied at 89-89 with four and a half minutes to play, Golden State went even colder. The Warriors — the offensive juggernaut that dominated the regular season with a record 73 victories — failed to score so much as a point the rest of the way. That was a reflection of Stephen Curry’s dip in form and confidence in the playoffs; a testimony to the nerves that a Game 7 can jangle. But it was also a tribute to the Cavaliers’ defense and above all to what James did with 1 minute 51 seconds to go. With the Warriors on a fast break and Andre Iguodala heading for what looked like a routine layup, James altered that reality by swooping in from behind, touching the ball an instant before it hit the backboard — an instant before he would have been called for goaltending. “The Block” will not soon be forgotten, and the other play of the game soon followed when Kyrie Irving broke the tie for good with a 3-pointer over Curry with 55 seconds left. On Cleveland’s next possession, James was fouled on an attempted dunk and fell hard, wincing and clutching his right wrist on his shooting hand as he writhed on the floor. It looked bad — bad enough to make you wonder whether James had now given all he had to give to this phenomenal series and phenomenal game. But that was selling him and the moment short, and he was soon back on his feet and back at the free-throw line, where he went 1 for 2 to give the Cavaliers, and his city, the 4-point cushion they needed.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

Medals and Mortals The end of a curse. The restoration of a king. The death of the Greatest. On court and field, 2016 was a year for long-awaited wins. The Chicago Cubs’ World Series triumph ended a 108-year run of futility that had turned the club into a cliché, and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ comeback in the N.B.A. finals gave that city its first major sports title in 52 years. Each of those championships came in a Game 7, with the winner overcoming a deficit of three games to one. To deliver on the title promise that LeBron James had made a year earlier upon his return from Miami to Cleveland, the Cavaliers rallied against the Golden State Warriors, who had the best regular-season record in N.B.A. history. King James’s chase-down block of a layup attempt by Andre Iguodala late in Game 7 was the crucial moment of the series, and a resonant warning about foregone conclusions.

The Cubs, who sprinted out of the gate to the best record in the regular season, needed to win the final two games of the World Series in Cleveland to vanquish the Indians, who had gone 68 years without a championship. A rain delay and extra innings in Game 7 drew out the delightfully excruciating suspense. The losses of 2016 were no less remarkable. Arnold Palmer, a force of personality so great he engaged his own Army, died at 87. Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey, the author of a career spanning decades whose sport subsumed his surname, died at 88. And the loss that hit perhaps hardest of all, with the same thunder he had carried in his hands: Muhammad Ali, the butterfly and the bee, singular in his duality, died at 74, long after his voice had fallen silent. He was the fighter who would not fight, the silver-tongued showman who became the social conscience of a country at war with itself. RANDY PENNELL

Above, Simone Biles of the United States, the all-around Olympic gymnastics champion. Below, LeBron James blocking a layup as the Cleveland Cavaliers became the N.B.A. champions. Bottom, Cubs fans at a downtown rally after their team ended a 108-year wait for a World Series title. Right, Neymar, the Brazilian soccer star, after his national team’s Olympic victory on home soil in Rio de Janeiro.

ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

N

From left: Simone Manuel with her United States teammate Abbey Weitzeil after the 100-meter freestyle at the Rio Games, where Manuel became the first black woman to claim gold in an Olympic swimming event; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, center, and teammates kneeling for the national anthem in protest of police treatment of minorities; and Serena Williams at Wimbledon, where she won a record-tying 22nd Grand Slam title. FROM LEFT: CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES; THEARON W. HENDERSON/GETTY IMAGES; BEN CURTIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

BARTON SILVERMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

ERNIE SISTO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Above, Michael Phelps after winning the 200-meter butterfly in Rio, where his record total of gold medals grew to 23. At right, from top, some of the giants who died in 2016: Muhammad Ali, pictured in 1980; Arnold Palmer, in 1958; Gordie Howe, in 1956.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

ASSOCIATED PRESS

D5

D6

0

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

N

S C O R E B OA R D PRO BASKETBALL

PRO HOCKEY

N.B.A. STANDINGS EASTERN CONFERENCE Atlantic

W

Toronto

N.F.L. STANDINGS

EASTERN CONFERENCE

AMERICAN CONFERENCE

Pct

GB

Atlantic

W

L OT Pts GF GA

East

21

8 .724

—

Montreal

21

9 4 46 104

76

y-N. England 13 2 0 .867 406 236

Boston

18

13 .581

4

Ottawa

20 11 3 43

88

89

Miami

Knicks

16

14 .533

5{

Boston

18 14 4 40

85

87

Buffalo

7 8 0 .467 389 348

7

22 .241

14

Tampa

17 15 3 37 100

98

Jets

4 11 0 .267 245 399

Nets

7

22 .241

Southeast

W

Philadelphia

L

PRO FOOTBALL

N.H.L. STANDINGS

L

14

Florida

15 14 6 36

85

97

South

GB

Toronto

14 12 7 35

97

95

y-Houston

9 6 0 .600 262 304

Stottlemyre’s Health Is Said to Be Improving The health of the former Yankees pitcher Mel Stottlemyre was said to be improving Sunday. “Please know that the greatest warrior I have ever known is doing a lot better,” Stottlemyre’s son Todd wrote on his Facebook page. Stottlemyre, 75, was found to have multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer, in 2000. The younger Stottlemyre had said Friday that his father was fighting for his life in a hospital. “He is recovering at God speed and he is looking forward to getting out of the hospital,” Todd Stottlemyre wrote. Stottlemyre pitched for the Yankees from 1964 to 1974, winning 20 or more games in 1965, 1968 and 1969. He was a five-time All-Star and had a career record of 164-139 with a 2.97 E.R.A. in 360 games. After he retired, Stottlemyre served as a pitching coach for the Mets and the Yankees. CUBS’ SERIES WIN VOTED TOP STORY The Cubs’ first World Series title since 1908 was the runaway winner for The Associated Press’s top sports story of 2016, collecting 48 of 59 firstplace votes and 549 points in balloting by A.P. members and editors. The death of Muhammad Ali after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease was second with 427 points, and LeBron James leading the Cleveland Cavaliers to the franchise’s first N.B.A. title took third with 425 points. PRO BASK ETBA LL

Spurs Hang On to Defeat the Bulls LaMarcus Aldridge had a season-high 33 points and the host San Antonio Spurs held on to beat the Chicago Bulls, 119-100, on Sunday after nearly blowing a hot start. Kawhi Leonard added 25 points, 10 rebounds and 4 assists. Tony Parker had 13 points and 8 assists. Chicago rallied from a 20-point deficit to lead by 3 points midway through the third quarter but could not sustain the push, taking its third straight loss. Dwyane Wade led the Bulls with 24 points, including 10 in the final quarter. WESTBROOK LEADS THUNDER OVER TIMBERWOLVES Russell Westbrook had 31 points and 15 assists as the Oklahoma City Thunder defeated the visiting Minnesota Timberwolves, 112-100. Westbrook had 10 assists in the second half, but fell short of becoming the first Thunder player to score at least 40 points in four straight games. Karl-Anthony Towns led Minnesota with 26 points. PRO FO OTBAL L

Texans Pin Playoff Hopes on Savage Houston quarterback Tom Savage was not great in his first career start in place of Brock Osweiler. But Savage did not make any major mistakes during the Texans’ 12-10 win over the Cincinnati Bengals on Saturday night, allowing Houston to clinch a second straight A.F.C. South title. Savage and the Texans know he will need to improve in the postseason. “I think we can build, and obviously I think it’s a good thing that we protected the ball — not put the defense in a tough situation,” Savage said. Savage threw for 260 yards last week to help Houston All news by The Associated Press unless noted.

rally for a 21-20 win over the Jacksonville Jaguars in his first regular-season action since 2014. Osweiler was benched that game after throwing interceptions on consecutive possessions in the second quarter. Coach Bill O’Brien left Osweiler on the bench and stuck with Savage, and early on against the Bengals it looked like a mistake. Savage, in his third season, completed two passes for 13 yards in the first half, and the Texans trailed by 3-0 at halftime. He was much better in the second half, and he finished with 176 passing yards to help Houston win. He completed 18 of 29 passes and has not turned over the ball. Osweiler threw more interceptions (16) than touchdown passes (14) in his 14 starts. “We went to no-huddle, and he was able to get rid of the ball a little bit quicker,” O’Brien said. “The no-huddle helped our pace, our rhythm, and it was just a good job by the offensive staff of getting him into a rhythm.” Though the Texans have already secured the division title, next week at Tennessee will be important for Savage to get more experience before the playoffs begin. They are looking for more this year after an embarrassing 30-0 home loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the first round last January. “The goal is to win it all, but this is the first step,” the owner, Bob McNair, said. The Texans are looking to pick up that elusive 10th win after going 9-7 in each of O’Brien’s first two seasons. The Titans will be without quarterback Marcus Mariota after he broke his leg in a loss to the Jaguars on Saturday that helped Houston secure its playoff berth. The Bears’ 41-21 loss to Washington on Saturday was as ugly as any this season, and it guaranteed the Bears (3-12) will at best match their worst record in 14 years. The loss also left open the possibility that Chicago will equal its lowest win total in a nonstrike year in more than four decades. BEARS ARE WOEFUL

SOC C E R

Chelsea Will Seek Its 12th Win in a Row In one sense, normalcy has returned to the Premier League after the craziness of Leicester’s improbable surge to the title last season. The top six on Christmas Day were the teams that many predicted would challenge for the title: Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Tottenham and Manchester United. There is nothing normal about Chelsea’s current form, however. After 11 straight wins, Chelsea leads the league by 6 points over Liverpool. Only once — Arsenal in 2001, with 13 straight wins — has a top-tier club had a longer winning streak in one season since World War II. With a stingy defense (two goals conceded in the last 11 games), a dynamic midfield marshaled by N’Golo Kante and a forward line led by the league’s top scorer, Diego Costa, there are no apparent weaknesses in Chelsea’s lineup. It is hard to see how Chelsea can be stopped. Costa, who last season appeared more interested in picking fights than scoring goals, has been consistent this season, with 13 goals and 5 assists. Chelsea has three tough away games left — at Spurs, Liverpool and United — and is proving adept at eking out 1-0 wins. Four of its last six games have finished with that score line, including the last three. One thing seems certain: There will be no miracle sequel for Leicester, which is languishing in 15th place.

PF PA

17

13 .567

—

Detroit

15 15 4 34

83

96

Tennessee

8 7 0 .533 357 361

15

15 .500

2

Buffalo

12 13 8 32

71

91

Indianapolis

7 8 0 .467 387 372

Washington

13

16 .448

3{

Orlando

14

18 .438

4

Miami

10

21 .323

7{

Pct

GB

Cleveland

23

W

6 .793

—

Milwaukee

14

14 .500

8{

Indiana

15

16 .484

9

Chicago

14

16 .467

9{

Detroit

14

18 .438 10{

Southwest

W

San Antonio Houston Memphis

L

Metropolitan W

L OT Pts GF GA

Columbus

23

5 4 50 110

Pittsburgh

22

8 5 49 121 100

Rangers

23 12 1 47 119

89

Wash.

20

69

Phila.

20 12 4 44 110 108

8 4 44

87

65

Carolina

15 11 7 37

88

Devils

13 14 7 33

80 102

90

Islanders

13 14 6 32

90 102

L

Pct

GB

25

6 .806

—

22

9 .710

3

20

12 .625

5{

Central

W

L OT Pts GF GA

Chicago

22

9 5 49 102

86

Minnesota

21

8 4 46 102

66

18 12 5 41

98 103

Jacksonville

3 12 0 .200 298 376

North

W L T Pct

y-Pittsburgh

10 5 0 .667 372 303

Baltimore

PF PA

8 7 0 .533 333 294

Cincinnati

5 9 1 .367 298 305

Cleveland

1 14 0 .067 240 425

West

W L T Pct

x-Oakland

12 3 0 .800 410 361

PF PA

x-Kansas City 11 4 0 .733 353 284 Denver

8 7 0 .533 309 291

San Diego

5 10 0 .333 383 386

NATIONAL CONFERENCE East

W L T Pct

y-Dallas

12 2 0 .857 366 258

PF PA

x-Giants

10 5 0 .667 291 274

11

21 .344 14{

St. Louis

Dallas

9

21 .300 15{

Nashville

15 13 5 35

94

Northwest

W

Dallas

14 14 7 35

89 106

Phila.

Winnipeg

16 17 3 35

95 105

South

W L T Pct

Colorado

12 20 1 25

67 106

y-Atlanta

10 5 0 .667 502 374

New Orleans

BASEBAL L

W L T Pct

Atlanta

WESTERN CONFERENCE

at the start of the 107th Copa Nadal race on Sunday in Barcelona, Spain.

10 5 0 .667 349 345

Pct

WESTERN CONFERENCE

A CHRISTMAS SWIM Swimmers

PF PA

Charlotte

Central

JOSEP LAGO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

W L T Pct

L

Pct

GB

Oklahoma City

19

12 .613

—

Utah

18

13 .581

1

94

8 6 1 .567 386 364 6 9 0 .400 340 318 PF PA

Portland

13

19 .406

6{

Pacific

W

Tampa Bay

8 7 0 .533 337 353

Denver

12

18 .400

6{

San Jose

21 12 1 43

87

75

New Orleans

7 8 0 .467 437 416

Minnesota

9

21 .300

9{

Edmonton

18 12 6 42 105

97

Carolina

Pacific

W

Golden State

27

L OT Pts GF GA

Washington

6 9 0 .400 353 385

Pct

GB

Anaheim

17 12 6 40

96

99

North

5 .844

—

L.A.

17 13 4 38

87

84

Detroit

9 5 0 .643 301 285

L

W L T Pct

PF PA

L.A. Clippers

22

9 .710

4{

Calgary

18 16 2 38

94 103

Green Bay

9 6 0 .600 401 364

Sacramento

13

17 .433

13

Vancou.

14 18 3 31

86 109

Minnesota

7 8 0 .467 289 297

L.A. Lakers

11

22 .333 16{

Arizona

11 18 5 27

75 108

Chicago

21 .300

NOTE: Two points for a win, one point for overtime loss.

Phoenix

9

17

SUNDAY Boston 119, Knicks 114 Cleveland 109, Golden State 108 San Antonio 119, Chicago 100 Oklahoma City 112, Minnesota 100 L.A. Clippers at L.A. Lakers

MONDAY Charlotte at Nets, 7:30 Memphis at Orlando, 7 Milwaukee at Washington, 7 Cleveland at Detroit, 7:30 Atlanta at Minnesota, 8 Dallas at New Orleans, 8 Indiana at Chicago, 8 Phoenix at Houston, 8 Toronto at Portland, 10 Denver at L.A. Clippers, 10:30 Philadelphia at Sacramento, 10:30

TUESDAY

Knicks at Atlanta, 7:30 Charlotte at Orlando, 7 Indiana at Washington, 7 Milwaukee at Detroit, 7:30 Nets at Chicago, 8 L.A. Clippers at New Orleans, 8 Phoenix at San Antonio, 8:30 Minnesota at Denver, 9 Sacramento at Portland, 10 Toronto at Golden State, 10:30

CELTICS 119, KNICKS 114 A PTS 1 16 3 9 5 15 2 11 4 27 7 15 2 16 0 2 1 8 0 0 25 119

Percentages: FG .484, FT .750. 3-Point Goals: 14-36, .389 (Crowder 3-6, I.Thomas 3-13, Green 2-3, Olynyk 2-3, Smart 2-4, Bradley 1-1, Horford 1-3, Jerebko 0-3). Team Rebounds: 7. Team Turnovers: 6 (11 PTS). Blocked Shots: 3 (Horford 2, Green). Turnovers: 6 (I.Thomas 2, Bradley, Crowder, Olynyk, Smart). Steals: 10 (Bradley 3, Horford 3, Green, Jerebko, Johnson, Smart). Technical Fouls: Horford, 7:21 third. FT Reb FG KNICKS Min M-A M-A O-T A PTS Anthony 38 9-24 9-9 2-7 2 29 Porzingis 37 9-16 2-2 3-12 1 22 Noah 27 3-4 2-3 5-12 2 8 Lee 34 4-9 1-2 1-3 0 11 Rose 37 10-19 5-6 3-5 3 25 Jennings 15 0-2 0-0 0-2 2 0 Holiday 13 1-3 4-4 0-1 0 7 O’Quinn 13 3-4 0-0 1-4 0 6 L.Thomas 9 1-3 1-1 2-2 1 3 Kuzminskas 8 1-3 0-0 1-1 0 3 Hrnngmz 3 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 Totals 240 41-87 24-27 18-49 11 114 Percentages: FG .471, FT .889. 3-Point Goals: 8-23, .348 (Porzingis 2-4, Lee 2-6, Anthony 2-7, Holiday 1-2, Kuzminskas 1-2, Jennings 0-1, L.Thomas 0-1). Team Rebounds: 7. Team Turnovers: 17 (19 PTS). Blocked Shots: 6 (Porzingis 4, Anthony, Lee). Turnovers: 17 (Porzingis 5, O’Quinn 4, Rose 3, Anthony 2, Holiday 2, Jennings). Steals: 5 (Jennings 2, Porzingis 2, Anthony). Technical Fouls: Lee, 00:27 second; Anthony, 7:21 third; O’Quinn, 8:15 fourth. Boston . . . . . . . 22 Knicks. . . . . . . . 28

34 20

32 31—119 34 32—114

A—19,812 (19,812). T—2:28. Officials— Marat Kogut, Kane Fitzgerald, Zach Zarba

COLLEGE BASKETBALL MEN'S SCORES MIDWEST Illinois St. 68 . . . FAR WEST Hawaii 60 . . . . . San Diego St. 62 Utah 74 . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . Tulsa 56 . . . . Southern Miss. 46 . . . . San Francisco 48 . . Stephen F. Austin 66

SOCCER ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE Team GP Chelsea . . . . . 17 Liverpool . . . . . 17 Manchester City 17 Arsenal . . . . . . 17 Tottenham. . . . 17 Man. United . . 17 Southampton . . 17 West Bromwich 17 Everton. . . . . . 17 Bournemouth . . 17 Stoke . . . . . . . 17 Watford . . . . . 17 West Ham . . . . 17 Middlesbrough . 17 Leicester. . . . . 17 Burnley . . . . . . 17 Crystal Palace . 17 Sunderland . . . 17 Swansea. . . . . 17 Hull . . . . . . . . 17

W D L GF GA Pts 14 1 2 35 11 43 11 4 2 41 20 37 11 3 3 36 20 36 10 4 3 38 19 34 9 6 2 29 12 33 8 6 3 24 17 30 6 6 5 17 16 24 6 5 6 23 21 23 6 5 6 21 21 23 6 3 8 23 28 21 5 6 6 19 24 21 6 3 8 21 29 21 5 4 8 19 31 19 4 6 7 16 19 18 4 5 8 23 29 17 5 2 10 16 28 17 4 3 10 28 32 15 4 2 11 15 28 14 3 3 11 20 37 12 3 3 11 14 36 12

Monday's Games Watford vs. Crystal Palace Arsenal vs. West Bromwich Burnley vs. Middlesbrough Chelsea vs. Bournemouth Leicester vs. Everton Manchester United vs. Sunderland Swansea vs. West Ham Hull vs. Manchester City Tuesday's Game Stoke vs. Liverpool

Ottawa at Rangers, 7 Washington at Islanders, 7 Pittsburgh at Devils, 7 Boston at Columbus, 7 Buffalo at Detroit, 7:30 Minnesota at Nashville, 8 Winnipeg at Chicago, 8:30 Dallas at Arizona, 9 Calgary at Colorado, 9 San Jose at Anaheim, 10

Arizona

6 8 1 .433 374 356

Los Angeles

4 11 0 .267 218 350

San Fran.

2 13 0 .133 286 455

y-clinched division

SATURDAY

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

GP .29 .29 .34 .36 .33 .34 .35 .36 .32 .32 .36 .24 .29 .31 .32

G 24 19 19 19 16 16 16 16 15 15 15 14 14 14 14

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

GP .36 .35 .32 .34 .36 .36 .32 .35 .35 .36 .35 .35 .34 .36 .36

A 29 25 24 24 24 24 23 23 23 23 22 22 21 21 21

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

GP PP .29 9 .36 8 .36 8 .32 7 .33 7 .34 7 .35 7 .35 7 .36 7 .29 6 .30 6 .31 6 .32 6 .33 6 .34 6

Assists

Power Play Goals Sidney Crosby Pittsburgh . . . . Leon Draisaitl Edmonton . . . . . Wayne Simmonds Philadelphia . Cam Atkinson Columbus . . . . . Matt Moulson Buffalo . . . . . . . Shea Weber Montreal . . . . . . . Ryan Kesler Anaheim . . . . . . . Tyler Seguin Dallas . . . . . . . . Patrik Laine Winnipeg . . . . . . . Patric Hornqvist Pittsburgh . . . Mike Hoffman Ottawa . . . . . . . Sam Gagner Columbus . . . . . . Alex Ovechkin Washington. . . . Brayden Schenn Philadelphia . . Jeff Carter Los Angeles . . . . .

9 5 1 .633 329 269

Philadelphia 24, Giants 19

Carolina at Pittsburgh, 7 Toronto at Florida, 7 Montreal at Tampa Bay, 7:30 Philadelphia at St. Louis, 8 Los Angeles at Vancouver, 10

Connor McDavid Edmonton . . . Evgeni Malkin Pittsburgh . . . . . Ryan Getzlaf Anaheim . . . . . . Erik Karlsson Ottawa . . . . . . . Patrick Kane Chicago . . . . . . . Jakub Voracek Philadelphia . . . Alexander Wennberg Columbus Victor Hedman Tampa Bay . . . Phil Kessel Pittsburgh . . . . . . . Duncan Keith Chicago . . . . . . Tyler Seguin Dallas . . . . . . . . Vladimir Tarasenko St. Louis . . Joe Thornton San Jose . . . . . . Claude Giroux Philadelphia . . . Artemi Panarin Chicago. . . . . .

PF PA

y-Seattle

THURSDAY

WEDNESDAY

Sidney Crosby Pittsburgh . . . . David Pastrnak Boston . . . . . . Jeff Carter Los Angeles . . . . . Patrik Laine Winnipeg . . . . . . . Auston Matthews Toronto . . . . Marian Hossa Chicago . . . . . . Vladimir Tarasenko St. Louis . . Wayne Simmonds Philadelphia . Cam Atkinson Columbus . . . . . Alex Ovechkin Washington. . . . Artemi Panarin Chicago. . . . . . Rickard Rakell Anaheim. . . . . . James Neal Nashville . . . . . . . Sam Gagner Columbus . . . . . . Artem Anisimov Chicago . . . . .

W L T Pct

x-clinched playoff spot

THROUGH DECEMBER 25 Goal Scoring

WEDNESDAY

FG FT Reb BOSTON Min M-A M-A O-T Crowder 33 5-9 3-4 1-6 Johnson 24 3-6 3-4 4-5 Horford 34 7-13 0-0 3-7 Bradley 32 5-12 0-0 0-6 I.Thomas 32 9-23 6-8 0-3 Smart 28 5-9 3-4 1-2 Olynyk 23 7-9 0-0 0-2 Jerebko 12 1-5 0-0 1-2 Green 11 3-6 0-0 2-4 Brown 6 0-1 0-0 0-2 Totals 240 45-93 15-20 12-39

TUESDAY

N.H.L. LEADERS

Memphis at Boston, 7:30 Oklahoma City at Miami, 7:30 Houston at Dallas, 8:30 Utah at L.A. Lakers, 10:30

3 12 0 .200 269 361

West

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

New England 41, Jets 3 Jacksonville 38, Tennessee 17 Washington 41, Chicago 21 Green Bay 38, Minnesota 25 Cleveland 20, San Diego 17 Atlanta 33, Carolina 16 Miami 34, Buffalo 31, OT Oakland 33, Indianapolis 25 New Orleans 31, Tampa Bay 24 San Francisco 22, Los Angeles 21 Arizona 34, Seattle 31 Houston 12, Cincinnati 10

SUNDAY Pittsburgh 31, Baltimore 27 Kansas City 33, Denver 10

MONDAY Detroit at Dallas, 8:30

A.F.C. LEADERS Week 16 Quarterbacks . . . . .

. . . . .

Att 540 535 559 505 579

Com Yds 327 4117 346 3980 356 3933 322 3919 374 3788

TD 31 17 28 29 19

Int 19 8 6 12 13

D. Murray, TEN McCoy, BUF . . Ajayi, MIA . . . . Bell, PIT . . . . . Blount, NE. . . .

. . . . .

Att 282 229 244 241 285

Yds 1266 1257 1213 1146 1110

Avg 4.5 5.5 5.0 4.8 3.9

LG 75t 75t 62t 44 44

TD 9 13 8 6 17

Hilton, IND. . . . . A. Brown, PIT . . A. Cooper, OAK . Landry, MIA . . . . D. Thomas, DEN

No . 85 . 96 . 78 . 85 . 83

Yds 1353 1188 1110 1060 1016

Avg 15.9 12.4 14.2 12.5 12.2

LG 63t 51 64t 71 55t

TD 6 11 4 3 5

Att 623 571 498 571 559

Com Yds 442 4858 384 4630 346 4613 374 4128 344 3978

TD 35 24 34 36 23

Int 14 10 7 7 13

Att 310 288 229 217 215

Yds 1551 1233 1178 988 983

Avg 5.0 4.3 5.1 4.6 4.6

LG 60t 58t 69 47 48

TD 13 16 6 6 10

No . 96 . 76 . 91 . 91 . 75

Yds 1323 1313 1256 1191 1154

Avg 13.8 17.3 13.8 13.1 15.4

LG 75t 75t 45t 60 98t

TD 10 5 11 14 8

Rivers, SD . . Dalton, CIN . Carr, OAK . . Luck, IND . . Flacco, BAL .

. . . . .

Rushers

Receivers

N.F.C. LEADERS Week 16 Quarterbacks Brees, NOR . . . . Cousins, WAS . . M. Ryan, ATL . . . A. Rodgers, GBY Palmer, ARI . . . . Rushers E. Elliott, DAL . . Da. Johnson, ARI Howard, CHI . . . C. Hyde, SNF . . D. Freeman, ATL

BOWL SCHEDULE

Receivers

All Times EST MONDAY, DEC. 26 St. Petersburg (Fla.) Bowl Mississippi State (5-7) vs. Miami (Ohio) (66), 11 a.m. (ESPN) Quick Lane Bowl Detroit Boston College (6-6) vs. Maryland (6-6), 2:30 p.m. (ESPN2) Independence Bowl Shreveport, La. NC State (6-6) vs. Vanderbilt (6-6), 5 p.m. (ESPN2)

Beckham, NYG . J. Jones, ATL. . . Mi. Evans, TAM . Jo. Nelson, GBY . Cooks, NOR . . .

TUESDAY, DEC. 27 Heart of Dallas Bowl Army (7-5) vs. North Texas (5-7), Noon (ESPN) Military Bowl Annapolis, Md. Wake Forest (6-6) vs. Temple (10-3), 3:30 p.m. (ESPN) Holiday Bowl San Diego Minnesota (8-4) vs. Washington State (8-4), 7 p.m. (ESPN) Cactus Bowl Phoenix Boise State (10-2) vs. Baylor (6-6), 10:15 p.m. (ESPN) WEDNESDAY, DEC. 28 Pinstripe Bowl Bronx, N.Y. Northwestern (6-6) vs. Pittsburgh (8-4), 2 p.m. (ESPN) Russell Athletic Bowl Orlando, Fla. Miami (8-4) vs. West Virginia (10-2), 5:30 p.m. (ESPN) Foster Farms Bowl Santa Clara, Calif. Indiana (6-6) vs. Utah (8-4), 8:30 p.m. (FOX) Texas Bowl Houston Kansas State (8-4) vs. Texas A&M (8-4), 9 p.m. (ESPN) THURSDAY, DEC. 29 Birmingham (Ala.) Bowl South Florida (10-2) vs. South Carolina (66), 2 p.m. (ESPN) Belk Bowl Charlotte, N.C. Virginia Tech (9-4) vs. Arkansas (7-5), 5:30 p.m. (ESPN) Alamo Bowl San Antonio Oklahoma State (9-3) vs. Colorado (10-3), 9 p.m. (ESPN) FRIDAY, DEC. 30 Liberty Bowl Memphis, Tenn. Georgia (7-5) vs. TCU (6-6), Noon (ESPN) Sun Bowl El Paso, Texas North Carolina (8-4) vs. Stanford (9-3), 2 p.m. (CBS) Music City Bowl Nashville, Tenn. Tennessee (8-4) vs. Nebraska (9-3), 3:30 p.m. (ESPN) Arizona Bowl Tucson, Ariz. Air Force (9-3) vs. South Alabama (6-6), 5:30 p.m. (ASN)

N.F.L. CALENDAR Jan. 7-8 — Wild-card playoff games. Jan. 14-15 — Division playoff games. Jan. 21-22 — Conference championships. Jan. 29 — Pro Bowl, Orlando, Fla. Feb. 5 — Super Bowl, Houston. FRIDAY, DEC. 30 Orange Bowl Miami Gardens, Fla. Florida State (9-3) vs. Michigan (10-2), 8 p.m. (ESPN) SATURDAY, DEC. 31 Citrus Bowl Orlando, Fla. LSU (7-4) vs. Louisville (9-3), 11 a.m. (ABC) TaxSlayer Bowl Jacksonville, Fla. Kentucky (7-5) vs. Georgia Tech (8-4), 11 a.m. (ESPN) CFP Semifinals Peach Bowl Atlanta Alabama (13-0) vs. Washington (12-1), 3 p.m. (ESPN) Fiesta Bowl Glendale, Ariz. Clemson (12-1) vs. Ohio State (11-1), 7 p.m. (ESPN) MONDAY, JAN. 2 Outback Bowl Tampa, Fla. Florida (8-4) vs. Iowa (8-4), 1 p.m. (ABC) Cotton Bowl Arlington, Texas Western Michigan (13-0) vs. Wisconsin (103), 1 p.m. (ESPN) Rose Bowl Pasadena, Calif. Penn State (11-2) vs. Southern Cal (9-3), 5 p.m. (ESPN) Sugar Bowl New Orleans Oklahoma (10-2) vs. Auburn (8-4), 8:30 p.m. (ESPN) MONDAY, JAN. 9 College Football Championship Tampa, Fla. Semifinal winners, 8:30 p.m. (ESPN) SATURDAY, JAN. 21 East-West Shrine Classic ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. West vs. East, 3 p.m. (NFL) NFLPA Collegiate Bowl CARSON, Calif. National vs. American, 4 p.m. SATURDAY, JAN. 28 Senior Bowl MOBILE, Ala. South vs. North, 2:30 p.m. (NFL)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016

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P R O F O O T B A L L N. F. L . W E E K 16

With an Outstretched Hand, the Steelers Seize the A.F.C. North Title PITTSBURGH (AP) — With the clock ticking and a season filled with promise evaporating, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger took STEELERS 31 the snap, turned to his RAVENS 27 left and put the A.F.C. North title in the hands of Antonio Brown. Brown, the Steelers’ star wide receiver, caught the ball at the Baltimore 1-yard line and waited for the hit he knew was coming. When it arrived from Ravens safety Eric Weddle and linebacker C. J. Mosley, Brown ducked his head and stretched the ball across the goal line for a division-clinching touchdown that embodied his team’s considerable resilience. After reeling in November — and reeling even early in the fourth quarter at home on Sunday against an archrival that has more than had their number in recent years — the Steelers found a way to reach the playoffs anyway and eliminate the Ravens from postseason contention. Brown’s lunging 4-yard score with nine seconds left lifted Pittsburgh to a gripping 31-27 victory and a second division title in three years, delivering just as Brown said Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell had predicted. “Over there by the heaters before the final drive, he said, ‘A. B., you got to go down there and get the game winner,’” Brown said. It was a play that Brown’s teammates have seen many times, just never with so much on the line. “That’s A. B.,” said receiver Demarcus Ayers, who drew a passinterference penalty to help set up Brown's score. “He does it so much in practice, it doesn’t ‘wow’ you in a game. In this particular moment it’s like, ‘He’s done it again.’” Brown finished with 10 receptions for 96 yards to join the Hall of Fame receiver Marvin Harrison as the only players with four straight 100-catch seasons. Roethlisberger shook off two third-quarter interceptions to finish with 279 yards passing and three touchdowns. Bell ran for 122 yards and a score and hauled in another on an ad-libbed play by Roethlisberger as Pittsburgh rallied from a 10point deficit to win its sixth straight game. The Steelers (10-5) will host a game during wild-card weekend on either Jan. 7 or 8, heady territory given that they were 4-5 after

FRED VUICH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pittsburgh’s Antonio Brown (84) reached over the goal line for the game-winning touchdown with nine seconds left as the Steelers rallied from a 10-point deficit. a loss to Dallas on Nov. 13. “I think today showed some resolve,” Roethlisberger said. “I think we showed some fight, no quit.” The Ravens (8-7) took the lead on Kyle Juszczyk’s 10-yard burst up the middle with 1 minute 18 seconds left. But Roethlisberger calmly took 10 plays to lead the Steelers 75 yards, the last 4 on a play that could live on in team history — depending on how far

Pittsburgh’s momentum can carry it. Joe Flacco passed for 262 yards, including a pretty 18-yard pass to Steve Smith Sr. that put Baltimore up by 14-7 early in the third quarter. Smith ended up with seven receptions for 79 yards, but the Ravens crumbled late. Their defense put up little resistance as Roethlisberger calmly put his team in position to return to the playoffs. Ravens linebacker Terrell

Suggs said his unit had entered the game intending to keep the Steelers’ three stars — Roethlisberger, Brown and Bell — from putting their stamp on the game. They did it anyway. “They’re a good team,” Suggs said. “They’re well deserving. They won the division; we’ll applaud them. But we’ll be back.” The Steelers’ playoff hopes seemed to be disappearing in the third quarter. Roethlisberger

twice threw interceptions deep in Pittsburgh territory — both on poorly thrown balls to well-covered targets — that helped the Ravens take control of the game, albeit briefly. “It’s pretty special the way we won it,” Roethlisberger said. “Especially after feeling the way I felt at a certain point in that game and feeling like you let guys down and you blew it.” Instead, it is the Ravens who

Lions’ Quarterback Is Flying Under the Radar, With Panache

Lions (9-5) At Cowboys (12-2) 8:30 p.m., ESPN Line: Cowboys by 7 The Lions can do this the hard way, or they can do this the hard way. Detroit can clinch a playoff spot by winning this game, but that will require beating a Cowboys team that is 12-0 against every opponent not named the Giants. Or the Lions can clinch a playoff spot and the N.F.C. North title in their regular-season finale, but that will require beating a Packers team that has won five straight. The Cowboys have already clinched home-field advantage in the N.F.C. playoffs. All they stand to lose is their best players to injury, so they will want to be careful out there.

From First Sports Page continued, “but I don’t know how many quarterbacks would have said that. I always remembered it.” After nearly eight prolific and compelling years in Detroit, Stafford has established himself as one of the toughest, most entertaining players in football, passing for more yards than all but three other quarterbacks in their first eight seasons. Only Peyton Manning, Matt Ryan and Dan Marino had more. Stafford is also in sixth place for the most games with at least three touchdown passes in his first eight seasons. Stafford has 27, trailing only Marino, Manning, Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady, a quarterbacking pantheon in the modern passing era. This season, with virtually no running game for support, Stafford has led the Lions to the top of the N.F.C. North, a halfgame ahead of the Green Bay Packers. On Monday night, the Lions (9-5) will play the Cowboys (12-2) in Arlington, Tex., not far from Stafford’s family home, with a chance to win a playoff spot for only the third time in Stafford’s career. Dallas was the opponent in two of Stafford’s more memorable comeback wins, including one in 2013 in which he faked a spike with 12 seconds left and, without notifying anyone on his team, dived into the teeth of the Dallas defense for the winning touchdown. Thrilling drives like that one have become Stafford’s signature skill. He has 28 fourth-quarter comeback wins in his career and eight already this year, a record for an N.F.L. season since the league’s merger with the American Football League in 1970. Certainly, it would be preferable, and much less stressful, to lead every game by 21 points. But in those nerve-jangling final minutes when improvisation, poise and toughness are required, Stafford can be at his best. “I definitely want the ball in my hand,” he said at his locker after a workout last week. “I want the opportunity to help my team win. Luckily, we’ve been able to do it eight times this year.” If the Lions trail as the clock is draining, Stafford will extemporize long pass plays out of desperate scrambles, dive for critical yardage on fourth down, absorb punishing hits and play through an array of injuries, both serious

will spend a long off-season wondering how their mastery over the Steelers — and a potential postseason berth — dissolved in the final 12 minutes. Baltimore will miss the playoffs for the third time in four seasons. “With everything you work for and you don’t reach your goal, so it’s, it’s just somber,” Weddle said. “It’s down. “Give them credit. Ben got it rolling.”

PICK: LIONS

BRAD PENNER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Detroit quarterback Matthew Stafford (9) “throws his body around for us and fights for every yard,” wide receiver Golden Tate said. and minor. “He’s the ultimate competitor,” Lions wide receiver Golden Tate said. “He throws his body around for us and fights for every yard. I love to see it, but I hope and pray every time that he’s going to get

A fierce competitor becomes a prolific and dynamic force. back up. In those late-game situations, he kind of carries the team on his back.” Of Stafford’s 28 fourth-quarter winning drives, 18 have come after the two-minute warning, and his eight game-winning touchdown passes in the final two minutes are

the most by any quarterback since the merger, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The string of comeback wins this year began in Week 1 in Indianapolis after the Colts seized a 1point lead with 37 seconds left in the game. Stafford drove his team 50 yards in 29 seconds, with three straight quick-strike passes that set up a Matt Prater field goal. “You can’t be afraid to fail,” Stafford said. “That’s a big part of it.” Under the offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter, Stafford has become a more accurate passer — completing 66.3 percent of his passes this year and 67.2 percent last year. Before that two-year span, his career average was 59.6 percent. This season, Stafford has thrown 22 touchdown passes and eight interceptions, one of which came Dec. 18, late in the Lions’ 17-6 loss to the Giants — one of the rare occasions when Stafford could not

engineer a comeback. A few days later, he was snubbed by Pro Bowl voters for the seventh time in eight seasons. When someone suggested to Stafford that the Pro Bowl ballot is largely a popularity contest, he joked: “Am I unlikable? Is that the problem?” The problem could be that the things that make Stafford excel in late-game situations — his ability to escape trouble and throw crisp, accurate spirals on the run, his ruggedness and his leadership — are not easily quantifiable. “I do think that he’s a unique guy,” Lions Coach Jim Caldwell said. “He’s extremely tough, and I think that has a trickle-down effect on our team. He’s got poise. He’s got focus. They believe in him.” Because of Stafford’s ability to extricate wins from impending losses, the Lions are in the opposite position heading into their fi-

nal two games — hoping that Green Bay, now 9-6 after winning its past five games, does not come from behind on them with a victory in their Week 17 divisional showdown in Detroit. But for all of Stafford’s accomplishments, two glaring voids have prevented him from joining Layne, his fellow Highland Park alumnus, in Lions lore. While Layne won three league championships in Detroit, Stafford is 0-2 in the playoffs and has never won a division title. “He is a terrific talent and a great competitor,” Aikman said. “But when people talk about the best quarterbacks out there, they talk about Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady. Matt’s name doesn’t really come off the tongue. The reason, in my opinion, is that you’ve got to do it in January. Until you win in January, then you are never going to be thought of as a great one.”

DAVID WHITE

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Chiefs Eliminate the Staggering Broncos From Playoff Contention KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — With their postseason spot secured, the Kansas City Chiefs turned to Travis Kelce and Tyreek Hill to roll past CHIEFS 33 the Denver Broncos, 33-10, BRONCOS 10 on Sunday night and keep their A.F.C. West title hopes alive. Kelce had 11 catches for 160 yards and a touchdown, and Hill took a handoff 70 yards for another score as the Chiefs beat the Broncos for the third straight time and eliminated Denver, the Super Bowl champion, from postseason contention. Kansas City punctuated the win when the 346-pound defensive tackle Dontari Poe, who had lined up at quarterback, threw a jump pass to Demetrius Harris with under two minutes left. The Chiefs had already been assured of a wild-card berth when Pittsburgh beat Baltimore earlier in the day. But a win next weekend in San Diego, coupled with a loss by Oakland in Denver, would give the Chiefs their first division title since 2010, not to mention a firstround bye and a home playoff game. Meanwhile, the Broncos trudged through another inept offensive performance. Trevor Siemian completed 17 of 43 passes for 183 yards and threw a game-ending interception, and the only touchdown drive he led came after a pick had given him the ball at the Kansas City 6. Justin Forsett scored two plays later. The lackluster performance came a week after a dismal showing in a 16-3 loss to New England led to a locker-room shouting match between the Broncos’ offense and defense. The team played down any kind of disharmony this week, but its performance on a sloppy, soggy night at Arrowhead Stadium only seemed to underscore the rift during a most frustrating season. Kansas City took control of the prime-time matchup from the opening bell. Alex Smith capped a 77-yard touchdown march with a 10-yard keeper in the first quarter, and Hill outran the banged-up Broncos a few minutes later to give the Chiefs a 14-0 lead.

REED HOFFMANN/GETTY IMAGES

Quarterback Alex Smith, right, after scoring the Chiefs’ first touchdown on a 10-yard keeper. Kansas City scored two more touchdowns in the first quarter. It was the fourth touchdown Hill had scored against the Broncos this season. Forsett’s touchdown gave the Broncos fleeting hope, but that hope was dashed moments later. Kelce took a screen pass and followed perfectly executed blocking

for an 80-yard touchdown and a 21-7 lead. The Chiefs’ defense took care of the rest to make it a festive night for their fans. The biggest hit of the night came when a security guard tackled a fan who had run onto the

field. Of course, the tackle occurred after the fan had run about 90 yards untouched, so in that respect the security force was not a whole lot better than the Broncos’ first-half defense. Broncos cornerback Kayvon Webster was taken from the field

on a cart after being hit high by Chiefs linebacker Terrance Smith while covering a touchback in the second quarter. Webster’s head was snapped back by the block, and he was being evaluated for a concussion. He did not return. Broncos defensive end Derek

Wolfe left in the first half with a neck injury and did not return. Denver was already without leading tackler T. J. Ward and tight ends Virgil Green and A. J. Derby because of concussions and linebacker Brandon Marshall because of a hamstring injury.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL

A Secret to Alabama’s Success? No Detail’s Too Small From First Sports Page offered him an Alabama scholarship in 2012. Put another way: Alabama’s focus on the littlest details of the game even stretches to the point that, in addition to craving the highest-rated recruits at quarterback, linebacker and running back, Saban has to have the best at a position that might be on the field for only seven or eight plays a game. If that sounds a little Beli-

chickian, that’s because it is. Saban, after all, worked under Bill Belichick, the famously fastidious N.F.L. coach, from 1991 to 1994, and just last year, Belichick stunned much of the N.F.L. when he selected a long snapper with the New England Patriots’ fifth-round draft pick. (It was just the fourth time that an N.F.L. team had drafted a long snapper, and the player, Joe Cardona, has appeared in every game for the Patriots since his arrival.) The theory, championed by

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Belichick and embraced by his disciples (including Saban), is simple: Leave nothing, ever, to chance. And so in an era when strength coaches are sometimes paid as much as head coaches and college recruiting occasionally extends to children who have not yet started high school, it should probably not be a surprise that the old way of finding a long snapper — dig up a walk-on or teach a fourth-stringer how to do it — has been replaced. “You’re basically buying a reliable car,� said Rubio, a former long snapper at U.C.L.A. who now puts on dozens of snapping camps and publishes on his website what is generally accepted as the most reliable rankings of snapping prospects. “It isn’t fast. It isn’t flashy. But it will always start.� Always, of course, is the key point, and that is why evaluators like Rubio combine a snapper’s physical traits — “you generally want long arms and a big butt,� he said — with his mental durability. “Ideally,� Fletcher said in a recent interview, “I’ll go to Tuscaloosa and no one will notice me for four years. If that happens, it means I’ve done my job.� That has always been the goal for the snapping position, as the reality of the fourth-down role is stark: While occasionally a wayward snap turns out well, most of the time it ends up as a total disaster. Understandably then, long snappers are often overwhelmingly self-critical — “I get really upset if I even forget to use a turn signal one time,� Fletcher said — if not outright perfectionists. That mentality usually dovetails nicely with the life perspective of most football coaches, though it was not until recently that the recruiting of long snappers became so prevalent. Rubio said a snapper from Southern California, Christian Yount, was the player who raised awareness of such recruiting when he accepted a scholarship from U.C.L.A. in 2005. Specific numbers are difficult to quantify — not every college is looking to sign a snapper every

Luring top recruits, for even the littlest positions.

JOHN BAZEMORE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Alabama Coach Nick Saban this month. His theory is simple: Leave nothing to chance. He seeks out the best at a position that might be on the field for only seven or eight plays a game. year, and a handful of Division I programs still look to use walkons in the role — but dozens of teams, including Notre Dame and Michigan, have given scholarships to long snappers in recent seasons. Over the past decade, Rubio estimated, more than 250 players who came through his camps have earned scholarships. When Alabama called Rubio looking for Mazza’s replacement, he did not hesitate to highlight Fletcher as the logical successor. The son of a former N.F.L. long snapper, Fletcher knows as well as anyone that the position involves more than the ability to snap a ball into a garbage can from the upper deck of the stadium. Fletcher switched from tight end and linebacker to full-time snapper in the fall of 2014. He credits Rubio with coaching him up to the level of consistency that earned Saban’s attention. “It’s an A or an F kind of job, pass or fail,� said Ryan Longwell, the former N.F.L. kicker, who is now a special teams coach at IMG, “and Fletch is one of the best I’ve seen.� Snapping the ball through one’s legs, over and over, to send it up to 15 yards in around 0.75 seconds is

only part of the skill set. Alabama is one of a few colleges that run a so-called pro-style punt coverage, in which the snapper has to immediately move backward and block — as opposed to snap and sprint down the field toward the returner. That makes it even more critical for Saban that he identify a

trained prospect. To that end, Fletcher has been working to add a bit of size to his frame to help with the blocking, and he plans to enroll early in Tuscaloosa. He won’t be at Alabama’s semifinal game because he’ll be preparing for a high school all-star game, but if the Crimson Tide reach the national championship game on Jan. 9, he is hoping he will be in Tampa, Fla., to see his new team try to extend its dynasty. For a kid whose primary job during a play is to simply avoid ruining it before it even gets started, the entire experience is fairly amazing. “When I first started doing this, I had no idea these kinds of opportunities were even possible,� Fletcher said. He smiled. “But all I know now is that I’m really, really glad they are.�

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