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INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

Sanctity of Truth

Unused Embryos, Hard Choices

By TAMAR LEWIN

After years of infertility, Angel and Jeff Watts found an egg donor to help them have a baby. They fertilized her eggs with Mr. Watts’s sperm and got 10 good embryos. Four were transferred to Ms. Watts’s womb, resulting in two sets of twins — Alexander and Shelby, now 4 years old, and Angelina and Charles, not yet 2.

But that left six frozen embryos, and on medical advice, Ms. Watts, 45, had no plans for more children.

So in December she took to Facebook to try to find a nearby Tennessee family that wanted them.

“We have 6 good quality frozen six-day-old embryos to donate to an amazing family who wants a large family,” she posted. “We prefer someone who has been married several years in a steady loving relationship and strong Christian background, and who does not already have kids, but wants a boat load.”

In storage facilities across the United States, as many as a million frozen embryos are preserved in silver tanks of liquid nitrogen. Some are in storage for cancer patients trying to preserve their chance to have a family after chemotherapy destroys their fertility. But most are leftovers from the booming assisted reproduction industry.

And increasingly families, clinics and the courts are facing difficult choices on what to do with them — decisions that involve profound questions about the beginning of life, the definition of family and the technological advances that have

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 27

SHAWN POYNTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Up to one million embryos are stored in places like the National Embryo Donation Center in Knoxville, Tennessee.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOMAS MUNITA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jubair, 13, was left behind when his mother and three siblings fled their village in Myanmar for Malaysia.

Mother’s Anguished Decision Rohingya Often Pay a High Price to Flee Persecution in Myanmar

By CHRIS BUCKLEY and THOMAS FULLER

GELUGOR, Malaysia — Carrying one child in her arm, a second on her back and holding the hand of a third, Hasinah Izhar waded through a mangrove swamp into the Bay of Bengal, toward a fishing boat in the dusk.

Ms. Izhar, 33, had reached the muddy shore after sneaking around the fish ponds of western Myanmar, where she and about one million other members of the Rohingya minority are stateless, persecuted for their Muslim faith. She had signed up for passage to Malaysia. Her husband had made the journey two years earlier, after Buddhist mobs rampaged through villages, killing at least 200 people. He had warned her not to follow.

As she reached the skiff that would take them on the first leg of a weekslong journey, one fact weighed heaviest: She had left behind her oldest child, 13-year-old Jubair.

Since 2012, tens of thousands

INTELLIGENCE

WORLD TRENDS

A ‘third gender’ in Bangladesh.

Africa’s electricity trouble. PAGE 25

PAGE 24

A guard at the entrance of the Rohingya village of Thayet Oak, Myanmar. Residents need permission to leave. of Rohingya have fled Myanmar. The exodus exploded into a regional crisis in May after smugglers abandoned thousands of them at sea, with no country willing to take them in. Amid a global outcry, Malaysia and Indonesia eventually agreed to accept the migrants, temporarily. But lost in the diplomatic wrangling are the anguished choices faced by the families who leave.

Ms. Izhar knew it would cost as much as $2,000 just to bring her three youngest children to Malaysia. Taking Jubair could double the price, and she had only $500 from selling their hut in the village of Thayet Oak. She was married there at 18, and lost her first husband to a sudden illness. She relied on help from relatives to support her two gangly boys, Jubair and Junaid. A few years later,

MONEY & BUSINESS

Season of the Muslim shopper. PAGE 30

she married again and had another boy, Sufaid, and then a girl, Parmin.

It was while she was pregnant with Parmin that her husband fled to Malaysia.

Buddhist militants, incensed by rumors that Muslims had raped a Buddhist woman, had attacked villages across Rakhine State, the coastal region home to most of Myanmar’s Rohingya. Worried that he would be arrested like some of his friends, Ms. Izhar’s husband, Dil Muhammad Rahman, went into hiding. Then he disappeared entirely, not calling to tell her that he had gone to Malaysia until three months after he arrived.

Violence against the Rohingya flared again last year.

Ms. Izhar saw police officers strike a man in the head with clubs. Women living alone were especially vulnerable, and when night fell, she kept the house dark and hushed her children. By December, when

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 26

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

A tiny fish’s numbers are staggering. PAGE 32

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY INTELLIGENCE/TAHMIMA ANAM

Transgender Rights, Bangladesh Style On March 30, Labannya Hijra became a Bangladeshi hero. Witnessing the murder of the secular blogger Oyasiqur Rhaman by Islamist radicals in Dhaka, she grabbed at the fleeing assailants.

Her courageous intervention led to the arrest of two men, who later confessed to the killing.

The most striking part of the story, though, was that Labannya Hijra actually is a hijra, the South Asian term for biological males who identify as women.

(Hijras take the group’s name as part of their own.) So, as Labannya was lauded for her bravery, she also raised the question of whether members of this transgender community could be treated as active, equal citizens of Bangladesh.

Estimates of the number of hijras range from 10,000 to half a million (out of Bangladesh’s population of about 157 million).

In 2013, the government granted “third gender” status to hijras.

After Labannya’s heroic act, the government announced plans to recruit hijras as traffic police — a move widely welcomed. And recently the central bank has instructed financial institutions to spend a portion of their corporate social responsibility funds on the transgender community.

It appears that, like Caitlyn Tahmima Anam, a writer and anthropologist, is the author of the novel “A Golden Age” and a contributing opinion writer.

Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

In The Marshland of South Sudan Barefoot and shellshocked, the survivors trickle into a village here with stories of rape, castration and mass murder committed by a government that the United States helped install.

This civil war in South Sudan will be a top item on President Obama’s agenda during his visit to Africa this month, and I wish he could talk to these survivors.

Gatkuoth Kueah Yak tells me he watched from a distance as South Sudan government soldiers tied up his 15 children and put them in a grass hut. And then, he says, he watched as the soldiers torched the hut and burned his family alive.

Gatwech Them Manuar says he saw three young boys, ages 3 to 7, who had been castrated by government soldiers and left to bleed to death. He says he also saw two infants who were killed by soldiers bludgeoning them

Jenner, Labannya has become a symbol of our shifting attitudes to what we regard as normative in the realms of sexuality and identity.

In a number of South Asian countries, hijras are now referred to as members of a third gender. Over the past decade, Nepal, India and Pakistan, as well as Bangladesh, have all granted them legal status. In Bangladesh, this means they may identify their gender as “hijra” in national documents like passports and ID cards.

Their “thirdness” alludes simultaneously to the social exclusion hijras still face and to their ability to transcend the traditional binary confines of gender. In ethnographic terms, hijras exemplify the sometimes surprising cultural accommodations made by otherwise traditional societies in South Asia.

The concept of a third gender goes back at least as far as the third century A.D., with Hindu, Buddhist and Jain texts all including debates on sexuality and gender definitions. References to a third gender crop up sporadically throughout the historical record, until the 18th century, when colonial laws criminalized all sexual acts between men and cast relationships into a rigidly binary gendered form.

If this all sounds very progressive, thirdness must also be seen in the light of what it restricts, as well as what it permits. The hijra community is tightknit and hierarchical, with its own rules

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of kinship and power. When Labannya made her first public statement, she could only do so with the blessing of her mentor, Sapna Hijra — a figure who is somewhere between a symbolic parent and a spiritual leader in the hijra commune to which Labannya belongs.

It would be almost impossible for someone like Labannya to remain within her village of origin or with her biological family.

While the hijra can be “out” in Bangladeshi society, it is only within the confines of a segregated community that is largely defined by poverty, abuse and the sex trade.

Bangladesh’s government has also recently refused to repeal the laws, inherited from its colonial past, that criminalize homosexuality. (Similar laws still stand in India, too.) Apart from the fact that gay men and women who are not transgender are subject to these archaic laws,

this means that while hijras are allowed to be members of a third gender, it is illegal for them, too, to have relationships with other members of their sex.

In a progressive parallel universe, hijras could be seen as an authentic South Asian expression of the fluidity of sexuality and gender identity. In this ideal world, they would challenge not only our binary notions of sexuality but also many assumptions about our otherwise rigid-seeming society.

But the Bangladeshi hijra refuses to comfortably fit into this framework, because she is not just defined by her hijra status but by all the cultural, social, political and economic frameworks in which she has to live.

Most likely born a boy (though a small number of hijras may be biologically intersex), she will have chosen to identify as a woman. She will almost certainly be estranged from, her family. And

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Horrors of a War Worsen against a tree.

Nyakong Riek tells me that when government soldiers attacked her village, she ran with her 2-year-old son. “I was trying to pull him along,” she said. “But bullets were flying, and I couldn’t pull him fast enough. So I left him.” She says wistfully that she just hopes the boy died quickly.

These survivors are of Nuer ethnicity, and they say the South Sudan Army — disproportionately composed of the rival Dinka tribe — attacked them for that reason. Indeed, they say some Dinka soldiers mockingly cut the faces of Nuer women they raped to replicate the kind of decorative scarring used by Nuer men.

I interviewed survivors on a

INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY NANCY LEE Executive editor TOM BRADY Editor ALAN MATTINGLY Managing editor

ALLISON JOYCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hijras, biological males who identify as women, have been granted legal status in some South Asian countries.

Labannya Hijra sits for a portrait.

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grassy island, surrounded by rivers and marshland, where they had taken refuge (I reached the area by helicopter with a team from the United Nations World Food Program). The predations the Nuer describe happened in May in Unity State, and they say thousands of other survivors are stuck in the marshes, preyed upon by crocodiles while still trying to reach safety.

I shared the world’s exhilaration in 2011 as South Sudan celebrated independence from Sudan and became the world’s newest nation. But now it’s difficult not to feel despair.

South Sudan is rived by civil war and collapsing economically; it may be on a trajectory to a failed state with far-reaching consequences for the region. The country suffers worsening famine and mind-boggling corruption. It is led by a president, Salva Kiir, whom President George W. Bush and President Obama both tried to nurture. I’ve known Kiir for a decade, and he surely faced huge challenges — but he and other leaders have failed his

country.

South Sudan’s civil war erupted 18 months ago between Kiir’s army and the forces of the vice president, Riek Machar. Sudan has armed Machar, and all factions in the war have behaved brutally. The recent slaughter by government soldiers may be a response to horrific massacres by Machar’s forces a year ago.

The accounts of the displaced people I interviewed are supported by a United Nations report describing a “new brutality and intensity” to attacks in the area, citing nine separate instances in which government forces raped women or girls and then burned them alive in huts. A different United Nations assessment used satellite imagery to count some 250 structures burned in a single village, Ngop. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that its compound in Leer was looted and that 100,000 fled that county alone.

“The violence against children in South Sudan has reached a new level of brutality,” warned Anthony Lake, executive direc-

she is likely to be a prostitute or beggar. As a result, she is also likely to be involved with criminal gangs who control where and how she lives, whom she sleeps with and whether she will ever be able to have children.

In a broader sense, an acceptance of the hijra identity doesn’t preclude rigid notions of masculinity and femininity from dominating in Bangladesh. Men and women are still expected to fit into tightly defined gender categories that determine their access to a host of opportunities, from education to health care. And there is still a deeply embedded and rarely challenged culture of homophobia across the social spectrum.

It is important to bear all of this in mind when we think about Labannya and other members of the hijra community. We may celebrate her new status as a full-fledged citizen of Bangladesh, and we must hope that her visibility as the defender of Mr. Rhaman — and perhaps soon as an official member of the traffic police — will alter her status.

But it would be premature to pronounce the troubles of the hijras over.

Labannya might remind us again of America’s Ms. Jenner.

As we celebrate one exceptional individual, we must also press harder for the social and legal transformations that would grant broader rights for the whole panoply of sexual and gender identities: gay, hetero, trans, cis, “third” or otherwise.

tor of Unicef, alluding to the army’s assault. “Survivors report that boys have been castrated and left to bleed to death. … Girls as young as 8 have been gang raped and murdered. …Children have been tied together before their attackers slit their throats.”

On his Africa trip, Obama should work closely with Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia to impose sanctions on the families of recalcitrant leaders in all factions, so they pay a price until there is peace. The United States has donated $1.1 billion in aid to South Sudan since the civil war began, but what is most needed is tough, hands-on diplomacy to pressure all sides. Ethiopia has been trying to hammer out a peace, and it deserves more Western backing.

This is urgent, because the cycle of violence makes it ever more difficult to put South Sudan together again.

“I hate the Dinka now,” says Nyaluak Ngeach Tuak, whose 8-year-old son is missing.

Another woman, Nyabuol Rik Puol, says she wants counterattacks as vengeance against the soldiers who tried to rape her 11-year-old daughter and then killed her sister when she protested. “What happened to us,” she told me venomously, “should happen to the Dinka, too.”

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MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

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25

WORLD TRENDS

Pilot Stress Forces Cuts in Drone Flights

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and DAVE PHILIPPS

CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, Nevada — After a decade of waging long-distance war through their video screens, America’s drone operators are burning out, and the Air Force is being forced to cut back on the flights even as military and intelligence officials are demanding more of them over intensifying combat zones in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

The Air Force plans to trim the flights by the armed surveillance drones to 60 a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it deals with the first serious exodus of the crew members who helped usher in the era of war by remote control.

Air Force officials said that this year they would lose more drone pilots, who are worn down by the unique stresses of their work, than they can train.

Many operators feel “undermanned and overworked,” sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion, said Colonel James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force’s 432nd Wing, which runs

Hard decisions and long hours in a key military program.

Cluff, the Air Force commander.

Last year, Colonel Cluff said, top Pentagon officials thought that the Air Force could safely reduce the number of daily flights as military operations in Afghanistan wound down.

But, he said, “the world situation changed,” with the rapid emergence of the Islamic State.

Officials say that since August, Predator and Reaper drones have conducted 3,300 sorties and 875 missile and bomb strikes in Iraq against the Islamic State.

What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed.

While most of the pilots and camera operators feel comfortable killing insurgents who are threatening American troops, interviews with about 100 pilots and sensor operators for an internal study that has not yet been released, Colonel Cluff said, found that the fear of causing civilian casualties was another major cause of stress.

ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES A Defense DepartTrevor Tasin, a pilot who retired in ment study in 2013 2014, called drone work ‘‘brutal, 24 found that drone pilots had had mental hours a day, 365 days a year.’’ health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disthe drone operations from this desert outpost about 70 kilomeorder at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft deployed to ters northwest of Las Vegas.

Iraq or Afghanistan.

Drone missions increased Colonel Cluff said the stress tenfold in the past decade, on the operators belied a compushing the operators in an effort to meet the demand for plaint by some critics that flying streaming video of insurgent drones was like playing a video activities in Iraq, Afghanistan game or that pressing the misand other war zones, including sile fire button 11,270 kilometers Somalia, Libya and now Syria. from the battle made it psychoThe reduction could also crelogically easier for them to kill.

Trevor Tasin, who retired ate problems for the Central as a major in 2014 after flying Intelligence Agency, which has Predator drones and training used Air Force pilots to conduct new pilots, called the work drone missile attacks on ter“brutal, 24 hours a day, 365 rorism targets in Pakistan and days a year.”

Yemen, government officials Another former pilot, Bruce said. And the slowdown comes Black, was part of a team that just as military advances by the watched Abu Musab al-ZarqaIslamic State have placed a new premium on aerial surveillance. wi, the founder of Al Qaeda in The biggest problem is that a Iraq, for 600 hours before he significant number of the 1,200 was killed by a bomb. pilots are completing their obli“After something like that, you come home and have to gation to the Air Force and are make all the little choices about opting to leave. the kids’ clothes or if I parked in At the same time, a training the right place,” said Mr. Black, program is producing only who retired as a lieutenant colabout half of the new pilots that the service needs, said Colonel onel in 2013. “And after making life and death decisions all day, it doesn’t matter. It’s hard to Mark Mazzetti and Eric care.”

Schmitt contributed reporting.

JOAO SILVA/THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, NIC BOTHMA/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

Blackouts Stunt African Economies A woman in Cape Town had to run her restaurant by candlelight during a blackout.

Power lines over an informal settlement near Sebokeng, South Africa.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

JOHANNESBURG — In the darkened and chilly parking lot of a mall, a suburban family shared a snack on a Friday evening out. After finding their favorite restaurant closed because of a blackout, Buhle Ngwenya, with her two sons and two nephews, settled for meat pies from one of the few stores open in the mall.

“It’s like death, this load shedding,” Ms. Ngwenya, 45, said, referring to the blackouts imposed

by South Africa’s state utility to prevent a collapse of the national electricity grid.

Despite a decade of strong economic expansion, sub-Saharan Africa is still far behind in its ability to generate something fundamental to its future, electricity.

The World Bank estimates that blackouts alone cut the gross domestic products of sub-Saharan countries by 2.1 percent. The region’s electric generating capacity is less than South Korea’s, and a quarter of it is unproductive at any given moment because of the continent’s aging infrastructure.

The electricity shortages and blackouts have cast a harsh light on elected officials, causing rising anger among voters.

Experts say that the appointment of politically connected officials with little industry expertise at the South African state utility, Eskom, has led to mismanagement.

South Africa, which has the continent’s only nuclear energy plant, has around half of sub-Saharan Africa’s generating capacity, roughly 44 gigawatts. Still, the electricity cuts contributed to a recent drop in economic growth and a spike in unemployment to 26.4 percent, the worst level in a dozen years.

In Nigeria, the continent’s biggest economy, the electrical grid churns out so little electricity that the country mostly runs on private generators. When a fuel shortage struck this spring, a national crisis quickly followed, disrupting cellphone service, temporarily closing bank branches and grounding airplanes.

The demand for electricity in Africa has become a major international issue. China has taken the lead in financing many electricity projects across the conti-

nent. Companies from Asia, the United States and Europe are also supplying electricity to an increasing number of countries.

But it will take decades before sub-Saharan Africa enjoys universal access to electricity.

Nigeria’s leaders have promised a stable electricity supply since the end of military rule in 1999, spending about $20 billion and dismantling the National Electric Power Authority, better known as N.E.P.A. and widely derided as “Never Expect Power Always.”

Yet the country’s electricity generating capacity has remained virtually unchanged, about six gigawatts for a country

Voter discontent rises as electricity grids falter. of 170 million. The United States, with 320 million people, has a capacity of more than 1,000 gigawatts.

Most of the $20 billion spent to overhaul the electricity sector is believed to have gone into the pockets of corrupt officials, said Akpan H. Ekpo of the West African Institute for Financial and Economic Management in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. “In some middle-class parts of Lagos, people are lucky if they now get 30 minutes of power a day.”

In South Africa, in the last years of apartheid, electricity was reliable but reached only a

third of the nation’s households, few of them black. Under the African National Congress, whose leaders have governed ever since, 85 percent of households now have electricity, a remarkable accomplishment by any standard.

But energy experts say that these households, many of them low-income, consume little electricity. Instead, they said, the shortages result from frequent breakdowns at aging plants and, most critically, the delayed construction of two new facilities.

As far back as 1998, a government report warned that without new capacity, the country would face serious electricity shortages by 2007. A year later, in 2008, South Africa suffered its first rolling blackouts.

The blackouts have affected everyone, including giant gold mining companies, small businesses and individuals.

Dominating South Africa’s list of popular app downloads are ones that alert smartphone users to the impending start of a cutoff in their neighborhood or the risk of one as load shedding across the nation increases.

To Ms. Ngwenya, who was sharing meat pies with her family in the mall parking lot, load shedding was not only about electricity. She blamed the African National Congress, the party that liberated South Africa and has steered its course ever since.

“I always supported the A.N.C.,” Ms. Ngwenya said.

“However, when it comes to load shedding, I don’t know. It’s not normal coming to a mall and carrying a torch like this man here,” she said, pointing to another consumer shrouded in darkness.

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Sanctity of Truth

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

WORLD TRENDS

A Rohingya Mother’s Anguished Choice Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 word of ships waiting in the Bay of Bengal spread through the villages, she could not wait any longer.

Now, as she heaved her children into the boat, her mind was a jumble of relief, fear and regret.

Malaysia is a Muslim nation, and she believed she and her children would be safe there. Although she had not told her husband they were coming, she hoped he would welcome them and pay the smugglers. Most of all, though, she was tormented by the thought of Jubair.

When it was time to leave, he was with friends in another village. She gathered up the other

Leaving one child behind, to flee persecution. children and fled. Now, as the shoreline receded, she wished she had had a chance to explain her decision to Jubair.

After a few hours, the passengers were transferred to a motorboat, and later transferred to a ship. Ms. Izhar and her children huddled with a dozen women and their children on the deck. “I couldn’t sleep for six days and six nights,” she said. “One son was on my right side, one son was on my left side, and the small one was on my chest. We couldn’t move around.”

The small family had become so much cargo. Smugglers took around 58,000 people, mostly from Myanmar and Bangladesh,

on the journey last year through the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, according to the International Organization for Migration. They took 25,000 more people in the first three months of this year.

After about a week at sea, Ms. Izhar’s family reached a much larger ship, where they joined hundreds of other migrants. She and the children were ordered down to a stinking, crowded hold three levels below the top deck. Soon after the passengers boarded, the smugglers demanded that they hand over the phone numbers of relatives who were expected to pay for the journey.

Ms. Izhar pulled her husband’s number from her tattered bundle. One of the crew told her husband that his wife was in Thailand. Ms. Izhar got on the phone and told him the smugglers were demanding about $2,100. “I don’t have the money to pay for you!” he shouted angrily, and demanded to know why she had left Jubair behind.

It is not uncommon for Rohingya women joining their husbands abroad to do so without telling them. If a woman told her husband, “most of the time the husband would not allow her to leave,” said Chris Lewa, a Rohingya rights advocate. The men fear that they will be saddled with more expenses.

Ms. Izhar and her children stayed in the hold for weeks while their fate was negotiated. The smugglers kept up the pressure.

One whipped Ms. Izhar with a piece of plastic tubing, and they called her husband repeatedly.

Haggling ensued. The smugglers’ price dropped to $1,700.

Over three weeks after the bargaining began, the money arrived, most of it from an uncle.

TOMAS MUNITA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jobs are scarce in Thayet Oak, a Rohingya village in Myanmar. Children fetching water.

Three days later, Ms. Izhar and her three children boarded a motorboat, and soon anchored off a beach in northern Malaysia. Ms. Izhar ended her voyage much as she had started it: trudging through the muddy edge of the sea as she waded ashore. “I felt happy,” she said. “I thought how much trouble our journey had been, and now it was nearly over.”

Back in Thayet Oak, everyone seems to know Jubair, the boy who was left behind. Six months after his mother left, he remained baffled as to why she did not take him along. “I think maybe she didn’t have enough money,” he said. “I don’t know exactly.”

Thayet Oak means mango orchard in Burmese, but the reality is less idyllic. Rohingya are denied citizenship by the government, and residents must seek permission before leaving. The village has no sanitation, postal service or electricity. In early May, a shrimp farmer, Salim

Ullah, noticed Jubair sitting in a shack that serves as the local grocery store.

“When I asked people, they said he has no father. His mother left already,” Mr. Ullah said. “I asked where does he stay? They said he just stays on the street.”

Mr. Ullah said he had taken Jubair into his home as a servant, giving him work fetching water for the equivalent of $9 a month.

Jubair has spoken to his mother six or seven times since her departure. “She said, ‘Son, don’t cry, don’t be sad, stay well,’ ” he said.

Two days after she landed in Malaysia, Ms. Izhar was driven to Penang Island, where her husband was working on a building site. Mr. Rahman beamed as he held Parmin for the first time.

At least 75,000 Rohingya live in Malaysia as registered refugees or unregistered migrants, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Rohingya groups say the

unregistered number is much higher. Life is safer, and there are more potential jobs. But under Malaysian law, neither refugees nor unregistered migrants can legally work. They receive no welfare, and most of the men struggle to pick up informal jobs as day laborers. Their children cannot attend government schools.

Nearly six months after her voyage, Ms. Izhar and her family share a house with 13 other people. Mr. Rahman can earn $8 to $16 for a day’s work, if he can get it. He has fallen three months behind on rent, and faces eviction.

There is also pressure to repay more than $1,000 he borrowed to pay the smugglers.

“We are illegal here, too,” Ms. Izhar said. “We belong to nowhere. On the ship, we thought we would have a peaceful and comfortable life in Malaysia.

Now after arriving in Malaysia we face more hardships.”

Normal, for Better or Worse Most of the gay-rights attention in recent weeks has been focused on victories for samesex marriage, in a popular vote in Ireland and a Supreme Court decision in LENS the United States. But there is movement on other fronts, too.

Even Exxon Mobil may be coming around.

The Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans, ranks companies on how they treat those employees.

In the most recent ranking, Exxon finished last. It has been there before. Exxon has been unpopular among gays since buying Mobil in 1999 and tossing out that company’s anti-discrimination policy.

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

But a day after the Supreme Court decision, 125 company employees marched in Houston’s gay-pride celebration behind an Exxon Mobil banner. Exxon gave its blessing. And earlier this year, it restored anti-discrimination protections for L.G.B.T. workers. Some observers see it as a business move.

“Like other major oil companies, Exxon is increasingly a technology company,” Steve Coll, the author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power,” told The Times. “They need to attract and retain the top scientific and engineering talent. They’ve been slow to recognize that it’s in their interest to move to a culture of inclusion.”

It’s not just oil companies.

Inclusion is having its day even in comic books, where gay characters and themes have been showing up more frequently.

“Our main directive is to make these characters as modern and reflective of the real world,” Jim Lee, a co-publisher of DC Comics, told The Times. Or as

real-world as you can be while using superhuman skills to fight off the bad guys. DC’s recently revamped lineup includes a series for the superhero Midnighter, for whom being gay is just part of the package, along with his mask and his power to heal from injury rapidly. Typical superhero stuff.

Typical is what readers want, according to Phil Jimenez, an artist who has worked on Wonder Woman and other comics.

They don’t want to see the stereotypical effeminate gay man, he told The Times.

“As long as the dude is dude enough, then he’s acceptable,” he said.

The same goes for the nondudes. Shannon Watters, an editor at Boom! Studios, is the creator of the series Lumberjanes, about five girls at summer camp.

“We wanted to have queer characters but not oversexualize them,” Ms. Watters said.

“The normalization of queer young people was important.”

Normal is not without cost, as

MICHAEL STRAVATO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Employees marched under the Exxon name at a gay pride celebration in Houston recently. some gay-rights advocates are learning. The Times called the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage “a crowning achievement but also a confounding challenge to a group that has often prided itself on being different.”

Prejudice has by no means disappeared, and the door remains open to discrimination in employment, housing and other areas of American life. But as

progress comes, many rallying points of gay life, like the gay bar, are fading. That has left some people looking back wistfully.

“People are missing a sense of community, a sense of sharing,” said Eric Marcus, the author of “Making Gay History.” “There is something wonderful about being part of an oppressed community.”

ALAN MATTINGLY

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

Sanctity of Truth

27

WORLD TRENDS

Embryos in Storage, Hard Choices Ahead Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 opened new reproductive possibilities.

Since the first American “test tube” baby was born in 1981, in vitro fertilization, at a cost of $12,000 or more per cycle, has grown to account for more than 1.5 percent of American births.

The embryos with the greatest chance of developing into a healthy baby are used first, and the excess are frozen; a 2002 survey found about 400,000 frozen embryos, and another in 2011 estimated 612,000. Now, many reproductive endocrinologists say, the total may be about a million frozen embryos in the United States.

Couples are generally glad to have leftover embryos, backups in case a pregnancy does not result from the first tries.

“But if I ask what they’ll do with them, they often have a Scarlett O’Hara response: I’ll think about that tomorrow,” said Dr. Mark V. Sauer of the Center for Women’s Reproductive Care at Columbia University in New York. “Couples don’t always agree about the moral and legal status of the embryo, where life begins, and how religion enters into it, and a lot of them end up kicking the can down the road.”

Many embryos sit in stor-

More couples are willing to help other families grow. age indefinitely, researchers say, at a cost of $300 to $1,200 a year. Some people stop paying the storage fees and leave it to the facility to figure out what to do. But most people grapple among these choices: using them to have more babies; thawing and disposing of them; donating them for research; or, like the Wattses, giving them to another family.

“People might start out thinking they would donate them to research, or give their extras to someone else with need,” Dr. Sauer said. “But once they have a baby, they change their minds, thinking it would be too weird to have another child out there, just like their son or daughter.”

Some cases have landed in court. So far, there has been little consistency in rulings. In Illinois, the courts have said it should be a matter of contract.

But judges in Massachusetts have said such contracts are not enforceable. Other courts have called for balancing the interests, and considering whether one party has no other option for having a baby, while others still have required mutual consent by the man and the woman when the embryos are to be used. Most courts have sided with the party who does not want the embryos used.

Then there is the religious dimension. In vitro fertilization and embryo-freezing are frowned on by the Roman Catholic Church. Most evangelicals accept in vitro, but believe frozen embryos have the right to full lives.

The government is of little help. While some countries have strict rules about assisted reproduction, limiting how long embryos may be frozen or how many may be transferred at once, the field remains largely unregulated in the United States.

But the demand keeps rising, and, to meet it, Dr. Ernest Zeringue’s IVF clinic in Davis, California, has a program he calls California Conceptions that goes beyond embryo donation to embryo creation. The clinic buys eggs and sperm from donors whose profiles have broad appeal — tall, thin and well educated — then combines them to make embryos that are sold to three or four families. The donors and the would-be parents know the embryos will be used by multiple families. For $12,500, patients get three tries, from a different batch of embryos each time each — and a money-back guarantee for those who do not achieve a 12-week pregnancy each time.

Some doctors and lawyers questioned whether it was ethical for a company to create embryos it would own until they were implanted. Others were troubled by the whiff of eugenics. But Adrienne, a San Diego woman who asked that her last name not be used, praised the program. She became pregnant with twins after the first embryo transfer.

“We’d been through IVF, which was draining and upsetting and stressful, so when we heard about California Conceptions, the three tries and money-back guarantee, it was very reassuring,” she said.

But the number of couples willing to simply give their excess embryos to another family are increasing. Donated embryos were used in 1,084 transfers in 2013, up from 596 in 2009.

“I love it, since it provides a family to someone who’s run out of money to proceed any other way, and it uses embryos that would otherwise sit in cryopreservation indefinitely,” said Elizabeth Falker, a New York lawyer.

Two weeks after Ms. Watts posted on Facebook, she found Rayn and Richard Galloway.

“We talked, we Skyped, we exchanged hundreds of messages, and when they called to say they wanted to go ahead, I was so relieved I cried,” Ms. Watts said.

Like the Wattses, the Galloways had had years of infertility treatment. On May 12, they headed to Knoxville to have three embryos transferred to Ms. Galloway’s womb.

Only two of the three made it successfully through the thaw, but finally, Ms. Galloway was on the path to motherhood.

Simona Halep has been threatened by a fan, Jesper Andreassen, below eating jalapeños in a video.

THOMAS KIENZLE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Fear Joins Women’s Tennis Circuit

By BEN ROTHENBERG

Jesper Andreassen held up a plate of 10 jalapeños for the camera, then stuffed them into his mouth, one by one, proudly tossing each stem over his shoulder as he finished. He paused several times to curse, laugh, cough or shout, sounds that devolved into a series of pained growls as he neared the end. Once the last pepper had been consumed, Mr. Andreassen, a middle-aged Dane, thanked the viewer for watching.

The clip, which he posted to Facebook in August, had one person as its target audience: Simona Halep, a Romanian tennis player who has been given the nickname Halepeño.

For months, Mr. Andreassen had tried to prove his devotion to her online, addressing her in a barrage of flattering posts on Twitter. But in April, after seeing a rumor that she was planning to marry, he changed his tone.

He became threatening and demeaning, telling Ms. Halep that she would die or never walk again for mistreating him.

Ranked number 3 in the world, she was playing at a tournament in Stuttgart, Germany, when the threats surfaced, and security officials there were immediately briefed. They surrounded her practice session and searched the stands for suspicious items.

Twenty-two years after Monica Seles, the top-ranked women’s player at the time, was stabbed in the back by a Steffi Graf fan during a changeover at a tournament in Hamburg, Germany, many female tennis players say personal security remains an unsettling aspect of life on the professional tour.

Officials with the Women’s Tennis Association, the worldwide governing body, say they continue to make the security of tour players their number 1 concern.

But at the same time, social media has brought players and fans closer than ever, and at times that proximity can be frightening.

Ms. Halep entered Stuttgart with a 24-3 record, but has since lost five of 11 matches, including defeats in the second round of the French Open and in the first round of Wimbledon. After that

Social media can put sports stars in more peril. loss, to 106th-ranked Jana Cepelova, Halep attributed her recent struggles to several factors, but did not reject the notion that stress caused by Mr. Andreassen could have contributed to her slump.“Yeah, can be,” she said. “I didn’t think about this.”

John Tobias, an agent for several prominent players, including Caroline Wozniacki, said safety concerns were greater for the female players he represented than for his male clients.

He said he did not give out the home addresses of his female clients, even to sponsors. When new products come in, they are delivered to the agency’s office and then sent to the player by courier.

“We do little things like that, just if there’s some guy who happened to work in shipping at Babolat,” he said, referring to Ms. Wozniacki’s racket sponsor.

Ms. Wozniacki, ranked number 5 in the world, has posted a photo on Twitter of one of the new Adidas shoes she had received.

On the inside was a handwritten note from a man named Andy, who asked her to call him and included a heart drawing and his phone number.

“Very creative,” she wrote.

Although Ms. Wozniacki said she took precautions, she ac-

knowledged a sense of helplessness in a global sport that allows the public close access to its stars nearly every week.

“With social media and with the tournaments being where they are, if someone really wants to find you and really wants to do something, you can’t do anything about it,” she said.

Pam Shriver, who was president of the WTA when Ms. Seles was attacked, said that day was a seminal moment for women’s tennis. “The world totally changed after that,” she said.

Some changes were visible.

Players’ chairs were placed farther from the stands, and during changeovers security personnel began standing on the court, facing the crowd. But other changes came in safety seminars given by the tour to its shaken players.

“There were things like, never, ever, in a public setting, say what hotel you’re staying at,” Ms. Shriver said. “Never say to a friend across the lobby what room number you’re in.”

“When you go down to work out at the hotel health club, and they ask you what room number you’re in, don’t ever write it down. When you’re a young athlete, you might not consider that.

But post-Seles, you did.”

Ms. Seles did not return to the sport for more than two years after she was attacked. She never regained her dominance.

Heather Watson, who receives publicity outpacing her number 59 ranking as the top woman in Britain, said she had come to accept the online abuse.

“Oh, I’ve had death threats,” she said. “I’ve had people threatening to kill me and kill my family, wishing that I get cancer and die a slow, painful death. Horrible words I couldn’t even think up in my head, to be that mean.”

However, the most persistent concerns for female players are about their time off the court.

In May 2011, a fan repeatedly pursued Serena Williams, the American tennis star, in public places, including at a radio station and her dressing room at the Home Shopping Network in Tampa, Florida. He was arrested outside her gated community.

“It’s scary,” she said. “Very scary.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

WORLD TRENDS

Heathrow Expansion Stalls In Britain

By STEVEN ERLANGER

LONDON — About 70 years have passed since greater London got a new airport runway, seven decades of economic growth and stupendous wealth that have transformed the city into a global capital to rival New York and Paris.

But every time there is fog or snow or heavy rain or even a blown tire on an aircraft, there is enormous disruption at Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, running now at 98 percent of capacity. Delays are common at the best of times, passengers miss important connecting flights, and even Gatwick Airport, which relies on short-haul and charter flights, is near capacity.

Yet decades after it became obvious that southeast England needed at least one more runway to allow London and the British economy to keep growing, the majority Conservative government says it remains unwilling to make a politically divisive decision on the matter for at least six more months.

But after three years and at a cost of more than $30 million, an independent commission announced recently that it unanimously favored building a third runway at Heathrow for economic and strategic reasons. Its choice was supported by the business lobby, the Confederation of British Industry and, subject to environmental considerations, the opposition Labour Party.

Prime Minister David Cameron campaigned in 2009 on a promise not to expand Heathrow, with “no ifs or buts,” as he said then. And prominent Conservative politicians, like London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, oppose expansion.

Many residents around Heathrow, despite being dependent on the airport for their jobs, have campaigned against expansion.

The Heathrow choice would add $230 billion in economic growth over 60 years and 70,000 jobs by 2050 and would provide better connections to the world for Britons, including those living outside London, the Airports Commission said.

The new runway would allow Heathrow to double its passenger capacity by 2050 and increase takeoffs and landings to 740,000 from about 480,000 now.

The added capacity would also bring down the cost of flying for passengers.

But the commission said a new runway should meet more stringent noise and environmental standards.

Howard Davies, the economist who led the commission, told the BBC that Britain’s international reputation, and that of its government, were at stake.

“Is London prepared to make the decisions it needs to remain a global city?” Mr. Davies asked.

“I think ministers will realize a decision is needed.”

Plan to Expel Haitians Tests Close Ties Haitians who entered the Dominican Republic to work for the day returned via the river after a border gate was closed.

By AZAM AHMED and SANDRA E. GARCIA

SA BA NETA , Dominica n Republic — For decades, the people of Barrio Cementerio, a neighborhood divided evenly between Dominicans and Haitians, have coexisted peacefully.

Proximity smothered prejudice.

That is changing. A government plan that could deport thousands of people of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic has started to tear at the unity that once bound this place.

A bitter landlord stopped renting to a Haitian tenant. The head of the local Red Cross says the deportations are long overdue, while a gang leader promises to hide his Haitian friends from the authorities. A Dominican husband fears losing his wife and their children, who have no papers. A police officer agonizes over the prospect of having to deport his best friend.

“I have no choice,” said John Tapia Thomas, the police officer.

“It saddens me to think about being ordered to detain someone I really care about.”

Like much of the country, Barrio Cementerio on this issue is a patchwork of sympathy, prejudice and resentment born of crowded schools, competition for jobs and a stressed health care system.

But the Dominican Republic is hardly alone in dealing with migrants. The surge in migration from conflict and hardship has rattled nations the world over.

With his efforts to register migrants and expel those in the country illegally, President Joanna Berendt contributed reporting from Warsaw, Poland.

MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Danilo Medina, who is running for re-election next year, has been playing on the frustrations many Dominicans feel toward their poorer neighbors on the island of Hispaniola. So far, with the world watching, the Dominican government has not carried out the mass expulsions many Haitians fear. Still, the threat of being seized has led more than 31,000 Haitians to leave, according to government figures, opting to cart their belongings across the border rather than risk losing everything in a sudden deportation.

The departures may not have been entirely voluntary. “People returning are telling me that the police are working with street gangs to force out immigrants in the big cities,” said one Haitian border guard. “Strangers are going door to door late at night and threatening to burn

people’s houses down.”

In the border town of Dajabón, trucks loaded with furniture and mattresses trundled through crowds passing over Friendship Bridge, which stretches across a river where in 1937 a Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ordered the massacre of more than 10,000 Haitians. Twice a week, thousands of Haitian merchants are allowed to cross over to buy and sell everything from used clothes to crockery.

A Dominican shop owner, Juan Liriano, says he pays Haitian workers about $3.50 a day, and food. He must pay Dominicans nearly $11. But he says people must follow the immigration law. “If I went to America without papers, I would be deported,” he said. “What’s the difference?”

Joseph Vilno, one of his Haitian workers, has a wife and four

children back home. He paid a smuggler $65 to ferry him over the border, a small fortune for him. He wonders if he will be deported, and if he can sneak back again. “There is nothing for me in Haiti,” Mr. Vilno said.

In Barrio Cementerio, a neighborhood in the small town of Sabaneta, some stand behind their Haitian friends. Others say it is time for them to leave.

“If I’m living in this or any country as an immigrant, then I should get a job and work to make enough money to legalize myself,” said Francisco Peguero of the local Red Cross.

Fibian, a young Dominican gang leader, refused to yield. “If the police sends a patrol to my neighborhood looking for my friends, I am going to hide them in my house,” he said. “I don’t understand why you would even ask me that.”

Russia Sees Peril In Muslim Converts

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

ERZURUM, Turkey — As a teenager in St. Petersburg, Maksim Baidak hung out with neo-Nazis and right-wing nationalists, but the Russian security services mostly left him alone.

It was not until he found God as a convert to Islam and leader of a group of ethnic Russian Muslims that he came under near-constant surveillance and was often forced into cars at gunpoint by security agents.

Then, one morning in 2013, masked commandos from a special counterextremism unit arrested him. For two days, he was interrogated, at times with a black hood over his head.

“I was arrested like a terrorist,” said Mr. Baidak, 28, who now lives in northeast Turkey.

Russia has long lived in fear of a jihadist uprising within its own borders, particularly in the Caucasus, where it fought two wars to suppress Muslim separatists.

For President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, Slavic, ethnic Russian converts to Islam like Mr. Baidak pose an especially sub-

versive threat by challenging the Orthodox Christian national identity Mr. Putin has used to unite the country. The government also worries that ethnic Russian Muslims will link up with other anti-Kremlin forces, including nationalists, pro-democracy groups and gay rights organizations.

“I worked with the L.G.B.T. society; it’s unbelievable for Muslims, yeah?” Mr. Baidak said, describing a group, Islamic Civil Charter, now banned in Russia.

“If they are agents of freedom and we fight for freedom also, we fight for our common values.

Let’s fight together.”

Russia’s security services were not about to let that happen. A crackdown began, leading to widespread arrests not just in the predominantly Muslim Caucasus but throughout European Russia and as far north as Novy Urengoi.

The pressure by the security services has set off a wave of refugees seeking safety and religious freedom, especially in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Muslim leaders

SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ethnic Russian converts to Islam challenge Russia’s Orthodox Christian identity. A mosque in Stavropol, Russia. and human rights advocates say that Russia’s often brutal approach has also added to the appeal of the Islamic State, with the Russian authorities saying recently that hundreds of Russian Muslims have gone to Syria.

For moderate converts who have fled Russia, one obstacle to obtaining political asylum, or even more basic social service help, has been a lack of awareness among some officials that Slavic Muslims even exist.

Many converts are adherents to the Salafist movement of Sunni Islam, which is often linked with extremism, if unfairly so, because it espouses more or-

thodox religious practices. Estimates of Russia’s Muslim population range from 16 million to 20 million.

Grigory A. Mavrov, 35, who converted to Islam, now lives with his wife in Istanbul. He helped found two Muslim groups now banned in Russia and has been arrested three times. Last year, Mr. Mavrov was arrested in Turkey at the request of Russia and ordered deported. He hopes to receive political asylum in Turkey or elsewhere.

“They don’t want independent structures, independent organizations in Russia,” Mr. Mavrov said. “They are afraid of them.”

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

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MONEY & BUSINESS

A Pocket of Strength In Russia’s Economy

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

CHEREPOVETS, Russia — Burly steel workers in this gritty industrial town have their choice of free services at the company spa in a leafy park down the road from the factory.

Thirty masseuses treat aching backs and sore muscles. The spa menu at Rudnik, or the Spring, also includes hot mineral baths, mud wraps, acupuncture and a sauna — all served with organic, stress-reducing teas.

Life is good for workers at the steel company, Severstal.

Along with the spa perks, Severstal covers the cost of vacations to Sochi on the Black Sea. A company dental office offers two free fillings annually. Workers also got 8 percent pay raises this

Steel and other industries benefit from a weak ruble. year, along with bonuses.

“A crisis has supposedly occurred,” said Andrei G. Meledin, who works on a production line.

“But we don’t feel it here.”

As the rest of Russia retrenches in the face of recession, steel companies like Severstal are booming. In the first quarter, Severstal swung to a $343 million profit, after reporting a loss in the same period a year ago.

Falling oil prices, rising geopolitical tensions and Western sanctions have caused broad turmoil on the Russian economy.

The World Bank estimates that the economy will shrink by 2.7 percent this year.

But those same conditions have proven extraordinarily favorable to a certain class of Russian commodity companies, par-

ticularly in the steel and chemicals industries.

Such companies, which have not been ensnared by sanctions, are benefiting from a weak ruble.

These companies have significant costs for raw materials and labor, all of which are denominated in rubles. Their goods, though, are sold on the global markets, where prices are generally set in dollars.

While the ruble has recovered somewhat in recent months, it still remains about 39 percent off its high of last year. And the central bank is intentionally trying to keep a lid on the ruble’s value, boding well for the companies’ profits.

Russia smelts about 75 million tons of low-cost steel a year, of which 30 million tons are exported. And as an unexpected pocket of strength in the Russian economy, steel is helping the country weather the onslaught of Western sanctions and bringing runaway gains for investors who got in this winter.

Shares in Mechel, a Russian steel and coal company, are up more than 180 percent since the start of the year, making it one of the best-performing stocks in the world.

Share prices for a dozen or so other steel and nonpetroleum commodity exporting companies also shot up this year, leading an overall rise in the Morgan Stanley index of Russian stocks of 19 percent.

“We have it all” in the Russian steel industry, Vladimir V. Zaluzhsky, the head of investor relations at Severstal, said of the benefits of a weak currency and still relatively strong global prices of steel.

The success of steel reflects the scattershot effect of sanctions on the economy. Certain industries are shrugging off the restrictions, as others teeter.

Strangely, sanctions hit hard

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from top, Nikolai G. Vaulin, a steel worker, bathes in mineral waters at a spa nearby for mill employees; galvanized steel at the Severstal plant; a blast furnace. in communities with a history of opposing President Vladimir V. Putin politically, such as the urban middle class in Moscow, which is reeling from inflation.

The restrictions missed core supporters of Mr. Putin in some industrial and mining towns, while strikes and economic protests have broken out in others.

The industry dynamics, though, have shifted. As China’s growth has slipped modestly, the ripples have been felt in the

industry.

Over the first quarter this year, global prices for a main type of steel Severstal forges, hot rolled steel, fell to $320 a ton from about $400 a ton, or by about 20 percent.

But the costs for Severstal and other Russian companies have fallen further, along with the ruble.

To concentrate on Russian operations as conditions improved for the country’s steel players, Severstal sold a plant last sum-

mer that it had acquired a decade earlier in Michigan. The company is in the midst of investing tens of millions of dollars refurbishing blast furnaces in Russia.

Factory employees here said they had not felt the bite of sanctions as many Russians had.

“We make steel, and we make a lot of it,” said Nikolai G. Vaulin, a steel mill worker, as he soaked at the spa. “So we make a lot of money. And some of it ends up here.”

He added, “Boy this feels good.”

With Start-Up, Google Has Bold Ambitions to Improve City Living

By STEVE LOHR

Google’s ambitions and investments have increasingly broadened beyond its digital origins in Internet search and online advertising into the arena of physical objects: self-driving cars, Internet-connected eyeglasses, smart thermostats and a biotech venture to develop life-extending treatments.

Now Google is getting into the ultimate manifestation of the messy real world: cities.

The Silicon Valley giant is starting and funding an independent company dedicated to coming up with new technologies to improve urban life. The start-up, Sidewalk Labs, will be headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P. Mr. Doctoroff jointly conceived the idea for the company, which

Sidewalk Labs is led

by Daniel L. Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York City.

NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

will be based in New York, with a team at Google, led by its chief executive, Larry Page.

The founders describe Sidewalk Labs as an “urban innovation company” that will pursue technologies to cut pollution, curb energy use, streamline transportation and reduce the cost of city living. To achieve that goal, Mr. Doctoroff said Sidewalk Labs planned to build technology itself, buy it

and invest in partnerships.

The timing for Sidewalk Labs is right, Mr. Doctoroff said, because “we’re on the verge of a historic moment for cities,” when technologies are rapidly maturing to help address needs like the environment, health and affordable housing. The arsenal of fast-developing technologies, he said, includes sensors, smartphones, and the resulting explosion of digital data combined with clever software to

help residents and municipal governments make better decisions.

Major technology companies, like IBM and Cisco, already have large businesses that apply information technology to improving the efficiency of cities. IBM has used its researchers and technical prowess in projects like traffic management in Stockholm and microlevel weather forecasting to predict the location of life-threatening mudslides in Rio de Janeiro.

Sidewalk Labs, Mr. Doctoroff said, planned to work in “the huge space between civic hackers and traditional big technology companies.”

While big technology companies take a “top-down approach and seek to embed themselves in a city’s infrastructure,” he said, Sidewalk Labs would develop “technology platforms that people can plug into” for things like managing energy use or altering

Seeking to cut pollution, energy use and living costs. commuting habits.

There is already an emerging academic focus on applying modern digital technology to cities’ physical systems. Leading examples include New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and the University of Chicago’s Urban Center for Computation and Data.

“It’s great to see an ambitious private sector initiative like this recognize that cities are important,” said Steven E. Koonin, director of the N.Y.U. urban science center. “And there are technology opportunities, but they are complicated.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

MONEY & BUSINESS

Jet Fuel Made of Waste and Fats Spews Less Carbon

By JAD MOUAWAD and DIANE CARDWELL

Sometime this summer, a United Airlines flight will take off from Los Angeles International Airport bound for San Francisco using fuel generated from farm waste and oils derived from animal fats.

For passengers, little will be different — the engines will still roar, the seats in economy will still be cramped — but for the airlines and the biofuels industry, the flight will represent a milestone: the first time a domestic airline operates passenger flights using an alternative jet fuel.

For years, biofuels have been seen as an important part of the solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And airlines have been seen as a promising customer in a biofuels industry that has struggled to reach its goals.

United says it plans to invest $30 million in one of the largest producers of aviation biofuels, Fulcrum BioEnergy, the biggest investment in alternative fuels so far by a domestic airline. (Cathay Pacific, based in Hong Kong, last year announced a smaller investment in Fulcrum.)

The quantities United is planning to buy from Fulcrum constitute a small drop in its fuel consumption. Last year, United’s fleet consumed 14.8 billion liters of fuel, at a cost of $11.6 billion.

But airlines are increasingly under pressure to reduce carbon emissions. The Obama administration proposed last month that new limits on aviation emissions be developed, and the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, is expected to complete its own

Fulcrum expects to open its Nevada biofuels refinery in 2017.

Pressured to cut emissions, airlines turn to biofuels. negotiations on limiting carbon pollution by February 2016.

“There is a significant role for biofuels within the aviation sector, specifically for reducing carbon emissions,” said Debbie Hammel, a resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who focuses on biofuel.

Airlines say they have reason to adapt, not only to reduce pollution but also to lower what is usually their biggest cost: jet fuel.

Fulcrum, based in California, has developed a technology

joined with Solena Fuels to build a biofuel refinery near London’s Heathrow Airport, which will be completed by 2017.

United’s deal is the airline’s second major push toward alternative fuels.

In 2013, the airline agreed to buy about 57 million liters of biofuels over three years from a C a l i for n i a -­ba s e d FULCRUM BIOENERGY producer called AltAir Fuels, which makes biofuels out of nonedible that turns household trash into natural oils and agricultural sustainable aviation fuel, a kind waste. that can be blended directly with United expects that the first traditional jet fuels. It is buildroughly 19 million liters from ing a biofuel refinery in Nevada AltAir will be delivered this sumto open in 2017, and has plans for five more plants. Fulcrum said its mer at its Los Angeles airport technology can cut an airline’s hub to help power the flights to carbon emissions by 80 percent San Francisco. compared with traditional jet For the first two weeks, four to fuel. five flights a day will carry a fuel United’s deal with Fulcrum is mixture that is 30 percent biofuone of many that airlines have el and 70 percent traditional jet made in recent years. fuel; after that, the fuel will be Alaska Airlines aims to use blended into the overall supply, biofuels at least at one of its airUnited said.

“The AltAir project serves as ports by 2020. Southwest Airlines a catalyst intended to pave the announced last year it would way for the industry,” said Angepurchase about 11 million liters a year of jet fuel made from wood la Foster-Rice, United’s managresidues from Red Rock Biofuels. ing director for environmental The first blend of this new fuel affairs and sustainability. product, however, won’t be availBy burning biofuel products like farm waste that have already able until 2016. absorbed carbon during their Last year, British Airways

For Ramadan, Courting Free-Spending Muslims

The “Ramadan Edit” from Net-a-Porter, which heralded Ramadan with a selection of garments and accessories.

By RUTH LA FERLA

On his Armani/Dolci website and in his sweets emporiums across the Middle East, Giorgio Armani is offering a box of chocolates, date-and-honey-filled pralines sans alcohol.

But his gesture has nothing on that of Monique Lhuillier, who is selling a selection of caftans on the upscale Moda Operandi site, including a version in virginal white embroidered with cascades of field flowers.

Nor can it compete with Tommy Hilfiger, whose 11-piece capsule collection, available at Hilfiger stores in the Middle East, incorporates temptations like a cowl-neck black satin evening dress and a long-sleeve teal gown slit, a bit indecorously, from instep to knee.

Mr. Hilfiger is among the latest in a handful of designers and merchants seeking to capitalize on Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic lunar calendar. (It ends this year on July 17.) A time of fasting and contemplation alternating in the evenings with festive gatherings of family and

Extravagance that would look familiar at Christmastime. friends, it has emerged in recent years as a month of extravagant spending that is rivaled, some say, only by Christmas.

As far back as 2012, Euromonitor International, a market research firm in London, took note.

“Like Christmas, a religious context serves as a reason for families and friends to come together,” Ilse Thomele, an analyst, observed, predicting, “a typical ‘Ramadan consumer’ is likely to emerge in the same way as the Christmas shopper as a global phenomenon.”

That notion was not lost on Net-a-Porter, which heralded the month with the online announcement of a “Ramadan Edit,” featuring two fair-haired models glamorously posed in flowing garments against a backdrop of

lifetime, jet engines avoid introducing into the atmosphere new carbon from a fossil fuel that has been locked away, underground, for millions of years, Ms. Foster-Rice said.

And the airlines seem to have little choice. For example, airlines, unlike automakers, cannot turn to other options like electrification, said Ms. Hammel of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is why it is important, she added, that the fuels be sustainably produced.

But despite the airlines’ interest, there are still hurdles to the large-scale development of biofuels — most notably reasonable cost and reliable supplies.

“It remains quite difficult to get biofuels for aviation that is cost-effective, and to make sure the fuels will be available,” Ms. Foster-­R ice said.

E. James Macias, Fulcrum’s chief executive, said Fulcrum could produce its biofuel for “a lot less than” about 26 cents per liter. (United bought its jet fuel for about 55 cents per liter, on average, in the first quarter, and said its deal with Fulcrum was competitive with the price of traditional jet fuel.)

By 2050, the airline industry hopes to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to half of their 2005 levels, according to the International Air Transport Association.

But getting there will not be easy.

“That is why it is important to actually invest and be willing to take on some of the risk,” Ms. Foster-Rice said, “and encourage the companies to really focus on jet fuel at a cost-competitive price.”

parched earth.

The gambit was a bold one.

“It’s the first time we’re talking to Ramadan so directly,” said Holly Russell, the senior readyto-wear buyer for Net-a-Porter.

Such appeals to a deep-pocketed segment of the Muslim community have rarely been more pointed or direct.

Others have been more tentative. Even houses like Hilfiger and DKNY, which is offering, for the second year, a special Ramadan collection, have scarcely dipped a toe in the water, their

capsule lines sold strictly in the Middle East.

According to a study released last year by the American Muslim Consumer Consortium, there are two billion Muslims worldwide. Sabiha Ansari, a consortium founder, puts Muslim spending power in the United States alone at $100 billion.

She hopes retailers will recognize Muslims as an economic force.

In London, where the annual influx of Middle Eastern shoppers has been termed the Rama-

dan rush, “Ramadan has long been every big store’s unspoken secret,” said Ed Burstell, the managing director of Liberty of London.

Many Muslim women are ready to part with sums ranging from $300 to several thousand dollars in a single online or store visit, temporarily setting aside their abayas and burqas for ornately embroidered caftans, colorful gowns, loosefitting dusters and all manner of gilt-edged refinements to wear in the evening and through Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festivities to observe Ramadan’s end.

Neiman Marcus stores have yet to court the Muslim shoppers deliberately, but during a promotional calendar meeting at the headquarters, “Ramadan came up as an opportunity we need to understand better,” said Ginger Reeder, a spokeswoman for the company.

Was Ramadan a time for gift-giving, one that includes but is by no means limited to fashion?

“We need to dig deeper to find out what the opportunities are,” Ms. Reeder said.

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

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Sanctity of Truth

31

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Cuddly Classroom Help For Children With Autism

By JAN HOFFMAN

Guinea pigs do not judge. They do not bully. They are amiable, social and very touchable.

When playing with guinea pigs at school, children with autism spectrum disorders are more eager to attend, display more interactive social behavior and become less anxious, according to a series of studies, the most recent of which was just published in Developmental Psychobiology.

In previous studies, researchers in Australia captured these results by surveying parents and teachers or asking independent observers to analyze videotapes of the children playing. In the new report, however, the researchers analyzed physiological data pointing to the animals’ calming effect on the children.

The children played with two

An animal that instills the idea ‘he loves me.’ guinea pigs in groups of three — one child who was on the spectrum and two typically developing peers. All 99 children in the study, ages 5 to 12, wore wrist bands that monitored their arousal levels.

The first time that typically developing children played with the guinea pigs, they reported feeling happy and registered higher levels of arousal. The researchers speculate the children were excited by the novelty of the animals.

Children with autism spectrum disorders also reported feeling elated, but the wrist band measurements suggested their arousal levels had declined. The animals seem to have lowered the children’s stress, the researchers concluded.

Geraldine Dawson, the director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development in North

Carolina, described the work as “very promising.”

She said autism is associated with high levels of arousal and anxiety that interfere with social interaction. She said this modest intervention could readily be adapted by teachers coping with a scarcity of resources.

“We don’t know what the mechanisms are,” Dr. Dawson said. “Maybe it’s easier to interact with others when you have a third object, rather than face-toface interaction.”

Yet when children on the autism spectrum played with toys in the presence of the other two children, their levels remained elevated. “They found something about the animal itself that was helpful,” Dr. Dawson said.

The activities with guinea pigs were unscripted. The children could feed, pet, groom and draw the animals.

After eight weeks, many children, both typical and on the spectrum, described the guinea pig as “my best friend,” said Marguerite E. O’Haire, the lead researcher in Australia, who is now at Purdue University in Indiana.

“If you ask the children what the guinea pig is thinking,” Dr. O’Haire said, “a common answer would be, ‘That he loves me.’ ” Children with autism, who have difficulty interacting socially, are vulnerable to being teased and excluded by mainstream peers. But after 16 sessions with guinea pigs, parents would tell Dr. O’Haire, “ ‘Now my child feels like she has friends she can sit with at school.’ ” She said the animals may function as “social buffers” for these children, for whom social engagement is bewildering and taxing.

Hal Herzog, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, commended this study’s rigor. “They didn’t overextend their claims,” said Dr. Herzog, noting that the researchers were careful not to describe play with guinea pigs as a type of therapy.

Deborah Fein, an autism expert at the University of Connecticut, said, “There really is no downside to this intervention.”

BILLY H.C. KWOK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Huso Yi of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Center for Bioethics said of gene modification work, ‘‘The consensus among the scientific community is, ‘not for now.’ ’’

Ethics Divide China and the West

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

BEIJING — China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually to become a leader in biomedical research, building scores of laboratories and training thousands of scientists.

But some experts worry ethical boundaries are being crossed.

Scientists around the world were shocked in April when a team led by Huang Junjiu, 34, at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, published the results of an experiment in editing the genes of human embryos.

The technology, called Crispr-Cas9, may one day be used to eradicate inheritable illnesses.

But in theory, it also could be used to change such traits as eye color or intelligence.

The Chinese tried to modify a gene that causes a blood disorder called beta-thalassemia.

The experiment failed in 85 embryos.

Scientists in the West generally object to this sort of research on the grounds that it amounts to genetic engineering of humans.

“The consensus among the scientific community is, ‘not for now,’ ” said Huso Yi, the director of research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Center for Bioethics.

Chinese scientists seem in no mood to wait.

“I don’t think China wants to take a moratorium,” Mr. Yi said.

“People are saying they can’t stop the train of mainland Chinese genetics because it’s going too fast.”

Training in ethics for Chinese scientists was introduced, under pressure from the West, only a dozen years ago.

“The ‘red line’ in the West and in China are not too similar,” said Deng Rui, a medical ethicist at Shanxi Medical University. “Confucian thinking says that someone becomes a person after they are born,” he

DR. MARGUERITE E. O’HAIRE

A study has found that guinea pigs can have a calming effect on children with autism, who are vulnerable to being teased.

Vanessa Piao contributed research.

Beijing tests limits as it pushes to take the lead in genetics.

GILLES SABRIE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Rao Yi at Peking University, with samples of genetically modified fruit flies. added. “That is different from the United States or other countries with a Christian influence, where because of religion they may feel research on embryos is not O.K.” The state does set limits, Ms. Deng said: “Our ‘red line’ here is that you can only experiment on embryos that are younger than 14 days old.”

Chinese scientists adhere to globally accepted ethical and scientific norms, said Zhai Xiaomei, a member of the country’s National Medical Ethical Committee. But many scientists experience pressure not to do so, she acknowledged.

“Inside China, there are people who are opposed to international standards, citing cultural differences,” Ms. Zhai said.

“This force is actually quite powerful sometimes.

“For example, they say we should use our homegrown Confucian thoughts to solve problems, as those international standards are from the West while we have our Eastern culture. But we absolutely disagree with this point of view.”

In the case of Dr. Huang’s experiment, the national committee decided that it was ethically

acceptable because it “was not for reproductive purposes,” Ms. Zhai said.

“They chose to use embryos that would soon be destroyed.

So far, we have been regarding it as a very fundamental research, instead of interventions in or editing of germ cells,” Ms. Zhai said.

But she struck a warning note: “If you want to edit genes in germ cells with the intention of using this right away, it’s absolutely not O.K., because the technology has yet to become mature.”

Disturbed by the recent study, Rao Yi, a professor of biology and director of the four-year-old Center of Life Sciences at Peking University, run jointly with Tsinghua University, warned that scientific research in China urgently needed more effective ethical oversight.

“The more technology we have, the more dangerous we are to ourselves and entire humankind,” Dr. Rao said.

Chinese scientists are generally poorly paid, he said, but may receive a bonus of up to $32,000 per article from the state for publishing in international scientific journals, providing financial incentives for pushing the boundaries.

“Do first, talk later” is the attitude of many, Dr. Rao and two colleagues wrote recently on iScientist, an online community for Chinese researchers.

More unpleasant scientific surprises are looming, several scientists said.

“Right now, human gene editing is the main thing,” Mr. Yi said. Geneticists in China “don’t want to be guided by Western people.”

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Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

A Sea-Cloaked Mystery With Trillions of Tiny Clues

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Habitats on land — rain forests, steppes, woodlands, deserts, alpine meadows, all well explored over the centuries — make up less than 1 percent of the planet’s biosphere. Why so little? The band of life is narrow. Fertile soil goes down only about a meter, and even the tallest trees stretch up only about 90 meters.

Water, however, is a different story. It covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface and goes down kilometers. Scientists put the ocean’s share of the biosphere at more than 99 percent.

Fishermen know its surface waters and explorers its depths. But in general, compared with land, the ocean is unfamiliar.

Which helps explain why scientists have only recently come to realize that the bristlemouth, a fish of the middle depths that glows in the dark and can open its mouth extraordinarily wide, baring needlelike fangs, is the most numerous vertebrate on the earth.

“They’re everywhere,” Bruce H. Robison, a senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, said of the bony little fish.

“Everybody agrees. It’s the most abundant on the planet.”

By human standards, the brute is tiny, smaller than a finger. But this strange fish makes up for its diminutive size with staggering numbers, as well as a behavioral trick or two.

It starts life as a male and, in some cases, switches to a female.

Scientists call it protandrous, a male-first hermaphrodite.

John C. Avise, the author of “Hermaphroditism,” said the adult male bristlemouth tended to be smaller than the female and had a better developed sense of

William Beebe, left, was the first scientist to view bristlemouths in their habitat.

He rode in a bathysphere designed by Otis Barton.

WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY

MARCOS CHIN

smell, apparently to find mates in the darkness.

“They occupy an environment that’s hard to access,” Dr. Avise said of the fish, so there is “precious little information” about their behavior.

Though the portrait of the bristlemouth is incomplete, scientists know enough to assert that it far outstrips all other contenders for the title of most common vertebrate on the planet. Ichthyologists put the likely figure for bristlemouths at hundreds of trillions

— and perhaps quadrillions, or thousands of trillions.

The bristlemouths are a rapacious family of fishes that include the wildly successful genus Cyclothone — Greek for “circular,” in apparent reference to the creature’s gaping mouth.

They are also known as roundmouths.

The genus has 13 species. The distinguishing features are subtle differences in the fins and luminous organs. All members wield bristlelike teeth. They are

2.5 to 7.5 centimeters in length, tan to black in color, and at times display ghostly translucence.

The first hints of the fish’s ubiquity came during the voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger, a British ship that sailed the globe from 1872 to 1876 and helped lay the foundations of oceanography. It lowered nets at dozens of sites and hauled up the creatures from as deep as five kilometers.

The first scientist to view the animals in their dark habitat was William Beebe. In the early 1930s, Mr. Beebe, a senior explorer of what is now the Wildlife Conservation Society, plunged into the depths off Bermuda in a spherical submersible, gazed through its porthole — and saw aliens.

“Numberless little creatures” raced through his light beam, he wrote in his 1934 book, “Half Mile Down.” They turned out to be bristlemouths. A color plate in the book shows a group with jaws wide open while chasing a school of copepods, tiny crustaceans with long antennas.

Textbooks from the 1970s to the 1990s said little about Cyclothone. Then came a new wave of

research, centering on trawls of the deep ocean with a new generation of nets. No matter how far the nets plunged, up came vast numbers of bristlemouths.

Dr. Robison said bristlemouths have very small eyes that in the dim habitat seemed to play little or no role in finding prey. Instead, the fish apparently relies on sense organs that can detect movement and vibration in the surrounding water.

And the rows of glowing dots on the bristlemouth’s abdomen?

Dr. Robison said they appeared to be camouflage that helped the creature hide from predators by matching the surrounding light.

It has taken roughly a century and a half, but science has finally come to know the bristlemouth.

But if the tortuous route to identifying the dominant fish is any indication, it will take longer still to learn about the uncommon forms of life that roam the depths.

“We keep seeing lots of different critters we haven’t seen before,” Dr. Robison said of voyages in the Monterey Canyon, a deep gorge in California’s coastal seabed. “The deeper you go, the stranger things get.”

Advancing Capabilities of Fiber Optics

By JOHN MARKOFF

Researchers have announced an advance that could double the capacity of fiber-optic circuits, potentially opening the way for networks to carry more data over long distances while significantly reducing their cost.

Writing in the journal Science in June, electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego, proposed a way to extend the range that beams of laser light in fiber-optic glass wires can travel and, in theory, achieve that large improvement.

One way to understand the challenge of sending data through fiber-optic circuits is to imagine a person shouting to someone else down a long corridor. As the listener moves farther away, the words become fainter and more difficult to discern as they echo off the walls.

A similar challenge confronts the designers of networks that carry data. Beams of laser light packed densely in fiber-optic glass wires need to be both amplified and recreated at regular intervals to send them thousands of kilometers.

The process of converting the

Sending stronger signals at a much lower cost. optical ones from light to electricity and then back again is a significant part of the cost of these networks. The process also limits how much data they can carry.

In its report, the group described a way to “predistort” the data that is transmitted via laser beams so that it can be deciphered easily over great distances.

This is done by creating, in effect, guardrails for the light beams with a device known as a frequency comb — using very precise and evenly spaced signals — to encode the information before it is transmitted.

That has the effect of embedding a digital watermark in the original data, making it possible to transmit data accurately over much longer distances and dispense with the need to perform optical-to-electronic conversions

at relatively short intervals.

The researchers said they had set a transmission record for a fiber-optic message, sending it more than 12,000 kilometers in a laboratory experiment without having to regenerate the signal.

That experiment is not discussed in the just-published paper.

The research, which has been supported in part by Google and Sumitomo Electric Industries, a maker of fiber-optic cables, is a step closer to the vision of an “all-optical network,” according to Nikola Alic, one of the authors of the paper.

Such a network would be significantly less expensive and could carry more data. So far, the researchers have been able to increase the power of the lasers twentyfold to achieve transmissions over far greater distances, he said. Until now, increasing the power of the laser signal in current fiber-optic networks has been analogous to moving in quicksand — the more you increase the power, the greater the challenge of interference and distortion.

Bart Stuck, a former Bell Laboratories scientist who conducted

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO, PHOTONICS SYSTEMS GROUP

A frequency comb helps decipher data that is transmitted via laser beams over great distances, engineers found. research in signal processing, said of the new paper, “This is great engineering.” Similar ideas were used in an earlier era of communications, he noted. Although the concept was used in the world of analog voice communications, the U.C. San Diego researchers have pushed the ideas into the optical communications world. “Their contribution is doing this at gigabits per second,” Mr. Stuck said.

But some optical scientists were skeptical about the prospects for the new approach.

“This is very interesting research, but there will be challenges applying this approach in the real world,” said Alan Huang,

a former researcher at Bell.

The growth of the Internet, driven largely by the exploding consumption of digital video, is continuing to expand at a significant rate.

In May, Cisco reported that annual transmitted global Internet data would pass a threshold of one zettabyte, or the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs, by the end of 2016.

By comparison, all of the information stored on the World Wide Web in 2013 was estimated to be four zettabytes. The amount transmitted annually — to be sent across networks, not just stored — is expected to reach two zettabytes a year by 2019.

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

33

T H E W AY W E E AT

Real Korean Flavor For a YouTube Table

By JULIA MOSKIN

JENN ACKERMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sameh Wadi, the chef at Saffron in Minnesota, sharing a meal with family and friends.

Appetizing Meals to Break the Fast Dates with cream and chopped pistachios and, right, roast chicken with couscous, dates and buttered almonds.

By JULIA MOSKIN

When the chef Sameh Wadi was growing up — first in Kuwait, then in Jordan, and finally in Minnesota — one of the few constants in his life was his mother’s cooking, especially the datefilled ring cookies called ka’ak that she made by hand and stockpiled during Ramadan.

Children do not fast during Ramadan, but adults like Mr. Wadi’s mother, Shahira, do not eat during daylight for the month. Traditionally, women spend much of their time cooking for the iftar, or fast-breaking meal, that is eaten every night after sunset.

“No question, those are my favorite things in the world to eat,” Mr. Wadi said. “I never realized as a kid how cruel it was to steal them, because even though she was fasting, she would still have to make more.”

During Ramadan, the farflung Muslim communities of the world are unified by one food: the date, one of the earliest cultivated crops and an ancient icon of the Middle East, where the thick-trunked date palm is a symbol of hospitality, rest and peace.

In the hadith, a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, it is recorded that he always broke the fast with dates and water, so many Muslims are careful to follow, whether the fruit is called balah (Arabic), khajoor (Urdu), hurmah (Turkish) or buah kurma (Indonesian).

In modern communities, restaurants offer iftar specials and buffets, and all-night food markets pop up to feed the hungry throngs. Dates are always available, out of respect for tradition and because they provide a quick boost of energy for the eating to come.

“An iftar without dates would feel very strange to all the Muslims I know,” said Yvonne Maffei, who writes a popular cooking and nutrition blog, My Halal Kitchen, from her home north of Chicago.

“It would be like Thanksgiving without a turkey: The table doesn’t look right without it.”

NATHAN WEBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; RIGHT, RIKKI SNYDER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Ramadan began on June 17 this year. (Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, not solar, Ramadan takes place at different times during the Western year.)

The two large meals of the night hours, the predawn suhoor and the sundown iftar, are opportunities for home cooks to come up with ever more alluring, filling and nourishing dishes.

“It sounds strange that Ramadan is a time for even thinking more about food,” said Razia Parvez, a homemaker in New Jersey, who was born in Paki-

During Ramadan, the date unifies the world’s Muslims. stan. “But cooking helps me get through the fast, because I can smell everything and imagine the tastes that I will be serving my family later.”

Muslims observing the fast try to eat extra dairy and protein at both meals to help stave off hunger the following day.

Iftar invariably includes a bowl of dates, and sometimes more elaborate desserts, like pitted dates stuffed with nuts or labne (thick yogurt); ma’moul and ka’ak, round cookies filled with dates; and date paste rolled in-

to cylinders or balls and coated with coconut.

The most elaborate desserts are saved for Eid al-Fitr, a great feast on the first night of the month that follows Ramadan, which this year falls on July 17.

Shirin Farhat, an Iranian-American student in Los Angeles, said that her mother’s ranginak, a traditional Persian cake of dates cooked with cinnamon and cardamom and layered with walnuts, is the dish she looks forward to all year long. “I just take a bite of a date to break the fast,” she said. “I save my appetite for ranginak.”

There are three basic types of dates: soft (including barhi, halawi, khadrawi and medjool), semi-dry (like the deglet noor and zahidi), and dry (like thoori), but thousands of variations are available around the world.

Their flavors range from rich molasses to light butterscotch to honey, sometimes accented with the headiness of cognac, the succulence of prunes and the burnt-sugar edge of caramel.

During Ramadan, many Muslim-Americans make a point of seeking out dates from their ancestors’ home countries. Purple-black ajwa dates from Medina in Saudi Arabia are considered the finest of all.

Mr. Wadi got his hands on some recently.

“I just sat down and ate them all,” he said. “Cooking an ajwa would be like deep-frying a black truffle.”

During the years that she was addicted to online gaming, life for Emily Kim began when she got home from work at 6 p.m.

“I would shower quick, and eat something, no matter what, so I could start playing my game,” said Ms. Kim, a.k.a. the YouTube Korean-cooking star Maangchi. “And I wouldn’t stop till 3 a.m.”

In 2003, divorced and with her two grown children out of the house, Ms. Kim ventured into the online role-playing battle game City of Heroes and couldn’t pull herself away. Maangchi, pronounced MAHNG-chee and meaning “hammer” in Korean, was the name of her online avatar, who specialized in destruction, wielding a huge scimitar and wearing a tiny miniskirt.

In 2007, her children persuaded her to try a more nourishing form of Internet expression: cooking videos. “I had no idea if anyone would watch me,” she said, “but the Korean recipes I saw in English were full of mistakes, and I wanted to show the real way we do things.”

Now, Ms. Kim has more than 650,000 YouTube subscribers.

At age 58, she has just published a cookbook, “Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking,” one of the few comprehensive books on Korean cooking written for Americans, but without major adjustments to make the food more accessible.

From watching her videos, it is hard to envision Ms. Kim as a reclusive gamer. In extravagant eye makeup and bright pink lipstick, she cooks huge batches of bibimbap, bulgogi and KFC, sweet-sticky-spicy Korean fried chicken. She demonstrates the endless variations of kimchi and schools her viewers in the pronunciation of dishes like soegogi-muguk (SAY-go-gee mooGUHK), beef and radish soup.

Although she presents herself as lighthearted, Ms. Kim is first and foremost a teacher, and a strict one at that. “I have to do everything correctly,” she said. “Otherwise I will hear about it from the Koreans.”

This is a phrase she often

ONLINE: AUTHENTIC FOOD

Emily Kim demonstrates how to make Korean barbecue: nytimes.com Search Maangchi

repeated to the editors of her cookbook when they quailed at including recipes for fermented sardines, jellyfish salad and kelp stock. This, Ms. Kim believes, is the problem with virtually every Korean restaurant in the United States: The food is sweeter, saltier, less spicy, less fishy and less rich with umami than it should be.

Ms. Kim was raised in Yeosu, near the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, where her family was in the seafood business.

She learned from her mother, aunts and grandmothers how to not only cook but also pickle, smoke, dry and ferment.

Ms. Kim first came to the United States in 1992 with her husband, who emigrated to take a teaching job in Missouri.

In the Midwest, she would lead fellow expatriates on expeditions in search of Japanese or Chinese restaurants.

Now, she lives and shoots her videos in a compact apartment perched above Times Square.

She shares the apartment with David Seguin, a web developer at The New York Times, whom she married in 2009. There, she practices the slow and ancient art of fermenting, making gochujang (chile paste) and doenjang (soybean paste), an umami-rich flavor element pervasive in Korean cooking.

The recipe calls for an electric blanket, about four liters of salt and hay; it takes almost a year to complete.

Traditionally, even a basic family dinner consists of eight to 10 different dishes: soup or stew, rice, kimchi, often a stirfry of protein and vegetables, and at least three side dishes like spicy cucumber salad or steamed eggplant.

“There is nothing Koreans love more than sitting around a table where every inch is covered with food,” Ms. Kim said.

“And if there is a grill in the middle of it, that is even better.”

MORGAN LONE YEAGER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Emily Kim has more than 650,000 YouTube fans.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JULY 13, 2015

ARTS & DESIGN

From Work Fields To Poet Laureate The poet laureate of the United States tends to be busy, Howard Nemerov once said, because he or she spends so much time explaining what the job entails.

With Juan Felipe Herrera as America’s new laureate, you ESSAY wish the job still entailed writing ceremonial verse, commissioned in bygone days for events like the openings of bridges or the deaths of fine old soldiers. Mr. Herrera is a poet you’d like to hear declaim from the National Mall in Washington.

In part this is because he is an unusual laureate, the son of California migrant workers, a man who understands people who are drained from the day’s labors.

Mostly, though, you’d like to hear him at the National Mall because his work is built

DWIGHT GARNER

Verse that speaks to the struggles of the workers. to be spoken aloud. His best poems are polyrhythmic and streaked with wit.

Witness Mr. Herrera’s long poem, “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (Remix),” for example. In it, he flies a freak flag, in a manner that resembles a blend of two 1960s activists, Oscar Zeta Acosta and Allen Ginsberg, on behalf of his determined politics.

Among those reasons Mexicanos can’t cross: “Because it’s better to be rootless, unconscious & rapeable”; “Because the pesticides on our skin are still glowing”; “Because pan dulce feels sexual, especially conchas & the elotes”; “Because we’ll build a sweat lodge in front of Bank of America”; “Because we’re locked into Magical Realism”; and “Because Freddy Fender wasn’t Baldemar Huerta’s real name.”

Mr. Herrera, 66, who came of

age as a poet amid the Chicano cultural movement in Southern California in the late 1960s and early ’70s, remains close to the soil in many of his most vivid poems. “Blood Gang Call,” from 1999, includes these lines: Calling all orange & lemon carriers, come down the ladder to this hole Calling all chile pepper sack humpers, you, yes, you the ones with a crucifix The poem ends: Calling all tomato pickers, the old ones, wearing frayed radiator masks.

Mr. Herrera’s best work is collected in two volumes, “Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems” and “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007.”

Mr. Herrera’s charms are impossible to deny. When he is on, he is really in touch with his audience and in touch with democratic gifts. His senses are open toward the world and his bearing on the page is noble and entrancingly weird.

In a 2004 poem, “Don’t Worry, Baby,” he seems to have occult gifts, writing, “I worry about Bill Cosby’s karma.”

Here are some other things, according to this poem, that keep him up at night: “I worry about monolingual emergency signs”; “I worry about people who use the word folk”; “I worry about Stephen King’s supply of vitamin D”; “I worry about kindergarten teachers whose clothes match”; “I worry about oyster bars going straight”; and, finally, “I worry about people who say, ‘Don’t worry, baby.’ ” That poem appeared in the collection “Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler,” reminding you that he has a gift for titles.

Here’s a welcome to Mr. Herrera. We may come to lean on him. As he puts it in one of his poems, I want to write of love in the face of disaster.

GARY KAZANJIAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Juan Felipe Herrera, 66, is the son of migrant workers in California. He writes verse meant to be spoken aloud.

GETTY IMAGES

Nina Simone, pictured in about 1968, remains relevant to music and political activism.

Nina Simone at a Posthumous Peak

By SALAMISHAH TILLET

The feminist writer Germaine Greer once declared: “Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real.”

This year, Nina Simone is striking posthumous gold as the inspiration for three films and a star-studded tribute album, and she was name-dropped in John Legend’s Oscar acceptance speech for best song. This flurry comes after a decade-long resurgence: two biographies, a poetry collection, several plays, and the sampling of her signature haunting contralto by hip-hop performers including Jay Z, the Roots and, most relentlessly, Kanye West. Though it was hip-hop, Simone once said, that “ruined music, as far as I am concerned.”

Fifty years after her prominence, Nina Simone is now reaching her peak.

The documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” directed

by Liz Garbus (“The Farm: Angola, USA”) and now on Netflix, opens by exploring Simone’s unorthodox blend of dusky, deep voice, classical music, gospel and jazz piano techniques, and civil rights and black-power musical activism.

Not only did she compose the movement staple “Mississippi Goddam,” but she broadened the parameters of the great American pop artist. “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” Simone asks in the film.

And in “What Happened,” Simone emerges as a singer whose unflinching pursuit of musical and political freedom establishes her appeal today.

While Simone’s lyrical indictment of racial segregation connects her to the contemporary moment, those closest to her felt

more comfortable telling her story after her death in 2003.

As Ms. Garbus said, “The answer for her return is also because of the estate, and people being ready to relinquish some control of her story.” Simone’s daughter, the singer and actress Lisa Simone Kelly, shared diaries, letters, and audio and video footage with Ms. Garbus.

Over the last decade, a steady stream of reissued albums and previously unheard interviews and songs, as well as unseen concert footage, have flooded the market. But there has been a dizzying array of lawsuits over the rights to her master recordings in the last 25 years.

The most high-profile con-

A singer’s pursuit of freedoms adds to her appeal today. troversy about Simone’s legacy, however, involves Cynthia Mort’s biopic, “Nina,” due later this year. Starring Zoe Saldana in the title role, the film was beleaguered by public criticism over the casting, an antagonism further fueled by leaked photos of Ms. Saldana with darkened skin and a nose prosthetic.

Born Eunice Waymon in 1933, Simone grew up in segregated North Carolina. At 3, she was playing gospel hymns for the church choir on piano; by 8, her mother’s white employer offered to pay for her classical music lessons. Simone trained at Juilliard in New York for a year, then was denied admission to the Curtis

Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She renamed herself Nina Simone and performed in Atlantic City nightclubs, adopting jazz standards in her repertoire.

She would have her only Top 40 hit with “I Loves You, Porgy” in 1959. To further her music career, Simone moved back to New York, where she befriended the activist-writers Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. Simone composed “Mississippi Goddam” in 1964 in response to the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four African-American girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, a year earlier.

Though she was bisexual, her longest romance was her 11-year turbulent marriage to Andy Stroud, a former police officer. She suffered from “mood swings” that 20 years later were diagnosed as a bipolar disorder.

In the interim, Simone left her marriage and country, becoming an expatriate in Liberia, Switzerland, then France, where she died.

Simone’s androgynous voice, genre-breaking musicianship and political consciousness are a huge draw for today’s gay, lesbian, black and female artists who want to be taken seriously for their talent, their activism or both.

“Nina has never stopped being relevant because her activism was so right on, unique, strong, said with such passion and directness,” Ms. Garbus said. “But why has she come back now?” she asked, answering her own question by pointing to how little has changed, citing the protests over the police killings of unarmed African-Americans.