Monday, june 29, 2015 binder1

INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

Sanctity of Truth

A Mission for the Poor, and the Planet For the Faithful, Social Justice and Concern for the Climate Are Intertwined

By JUSTIN GILLIS

For a young Christian named Ben Lowe, revelation came on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in Africa. A warming of the lake was reducing the catch of fish, the people were going hungry — and he had learned of scientific evidence that climate change was to blame. For the Reverend Brian Sauder, the moment came in a college classroom. Studying the fallout from environmental degradation, he learned of poor people who had to walk hours longer each day to gather firewood

from depleted forests.

For both men, Christian duties that their upbringing had led them to regard as separate — taking care of the earth and taking care of the poor — merged into a morally urgent problem.

“Why haven’t I ever made this connection before?” Mr. Sauder recalled asking himself.

It is a connection that many people of faith all over the world are starting to make. The sweeping pastoral letter recently issued by Pope Francis may prove to be a watershed, highlighting

the issues of social justice at the heart of the environmental crisis.

But the pope’s encyclical is, in a sense, simply an exclamation mark on a broad shift in thinking that has been underway for decades and extends far beyond the Roman Catholic Church.

Many faith traditions are awakening to the burden that climate change is placing on poor people, and finding justification for caring for the environment in their scripture. The pope’s call is likely to intensify this discussion, provoking what could be one of

the most important dialogues between science and religion since the days of Charles Darwin.

Environmental scientists who are themselves people of faith are in rising demand, valued as translators between two camps that have often seen the world in radically different ways. These scientists have known for a long time that the facts and data produced by their research colleagues would not be sufficient to rouse the public to act. For that to happen, the science had to be reframed in moral terms, they said.

“Science is like a compass,” said Nathaniel P. Hitt, a fisheries biologist who is active in a Presbyterian church in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. “It can tell us where north is, but it can’t tell us if we want to go north. That’s where our morality comes in.”

Dr. Hitt and the congregation to which he belongs recently put solar panels on the roof of their church and linked their home water heaters into a network that can help balance the grid

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 26

Helping Moms, Hurting Women IN CHILE, A law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time CLAIRE CAIN has led to a decline in MILLER full-time, stable jobs available to all women ANALYSIS — even those who are not mothers.

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and help make it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

They can end up discouraging employ-

ANNA PARINI

ers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits.

“For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women’s economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

Unlike many countries, the United States has few federal policies for working parents. One is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides workers at companies of a certain size with 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed but 8 percent less likely to get promotions

than they were before it became law, according to an unpublished new study by Mallika Thomas, who will be an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She attributed this partly to companies that don’t take a chance on investing in the careers of women who might leave. “The problem ends up being that all women, even those who do not anticipate having children or cutting back in hours, may be penalized,” she said.

The child-care law in Chile was intended to increase the percentage of women who work, which is below 50 percent,

among the lowest rates in Latin America.

It requires that companies with 20 or more female workers provide and pay for child care for women with children under 2, in a location nearby where the women can go to feed them.

It eases the transition back to work and helps children’s development, said María F. Prada, an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank and lead author of a new study on the effects of the law.

But it has also led to a decline in women’s starting salaries of between 9 percent

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 26

INTELLIGENCE

WORLD TRENDS

MONEY & BUSINESS

ARTS & DESIGN

Europe fails to confront refugee crisis. PAGE 24

Korean prostitute fights for her rights. PAGE 25

Siena’s new strategy to lure investors. PAGE 29

Upending conventions of black films. PAGE 34

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY A highly lethal contagious disease that has been detected in camels and humans in the Middle East is slowly spreading around the world and is causing havoc in South Korea. Known as the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, it has killed 35 percent of those it has infected.

There have been 1,333 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS in more than two dozen countries; at least 471 people have died.

Officials at the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have expressed confidence that the disease is not yet a global emergency. But a series of medical errors in South Korea shows what can happen to any country that

ED I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M ES

Coping With MERS lets its guard down. All of the South Korean MERS cases so far involved people who were infected in hospitals, either as patients and staff members or as visitors.

As of June 19, South Korea had 166 confirmed cases, with 24 deaths. Almost half of the cases were traced to the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, which is considered the top hospital in the country but which in this case bungled badly. Samsung doctors

had confirmed the country’s first MERS case on May 20 in a patient who had returned from the Middle East. But on May 27 they failed to identify a second MERS case and mistakenly diagnosed a 35-year-old man’s illness as pneumonia. He was kept in a crowded emergency room and hallway for three days, coughing up sputum teeming with the MERS virus while waiting for a bed to open up in a general ward upstairs.

More than 6,000 patients, staff members and visitors in South Korea have since been quarantined, at home or in institutions, to prevent further spread. But the hospital failed to identify many visitors who had been in the emergency room with the infected man and then left, potentially infecting many others in the community or in other hospitals.

On June 16, the World Health Organization’s emergency com-

mittee noted a decline in the incidence of new cases, which coincided with enhanced measures to trace, isolate and monitor contacts who might be infected. It called Korea’s outbreak “a wakeup call” for nations to be prepared for outbreaks of serious infectious diseases. But it stopped short of declaring an emergency.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the risk to the public “remains very low,” and it does not recommend that people change their travel plans because of MERS. But vigilant monitoring will be crucial. Hospital systems, the main culprits in spreading the disease in many countries, need to beef up their ability to identify and isolate cases and contacts.

INTELLIGENCE/SYLVIE KAUFFMANN

Europe’s Refugee Tragedy Awaits Solutions Paris On June 11, the bodies of 18 African migrants were found in the Sahara. According to Giuseppe Loprete, Niger’s chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration, they had died more than a week earlier — most likely from dehydration. Caught in a sandstorm between Arlit, in Niger, and Algeria, they lost their way, he said, and “the heat and lack of water did the rest.” A few days later, the remains of 30 more migrants were discovered in the desert.

This sad news didn’t reach the front pages in Europe: The Continent has been too busy trying to grasp the scale of the wave of migrants landing on its southern shores to pay attention to 48 unlucky Africans. Nobody here will see those bodies; no one will tell their stories. This particular tragedy will remain an African one.

The other tragedy, the drama of hundreds of thousands of people on the move, risking their lives on the Mediterranean, is now a European story. And as it unfolds before our eyes, we have no clear idea of what to do.

It’s not that we couldn’t see it coming. A year ago, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published some staggering statistics: At the end of 2013, the world counted 51.2 million displaced people — six million more than the year before.

Recently, the refugee agency said the number rose to 59.5 million in 2014. This is truly historic: Sylvie Kauffmann is the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde. Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

Not since the end of World War II have so many people been uprooted against their will.

Yet the 2013 figure went almost unnoticed. Millions of Syrians had already fled their country and taken refuge in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. The hardships of family life in refugee camps weren’t on our radar screens, and hardly on our TV screens. A number of refugees, from as far away as Afghanistan, did reach the European Union through Turkey to Greece and Bulgaria; so we built walls and sealed frontiers.

Then in the spring everything changed. Finding land borders locked, refugees had taken to the sea. Overwhelmed and frustrated by a lack of European solidarity, Italy had ended its Mediterranean rescue mission in December. Suddenly, the human tragedy was there for all Europeans to see: rickety boats capsizing every day; refugees drowning by the hundreds. So far this year, at least 1,868 people have died or disappeared in the Mediterranean, compared with 448 in the same period last year. Forced to do something, European Union members sent some ships to help with the crisis.

But then what? Those who reach dry land alive now face Act III of the tragedy — Act I being the first leg of the long journey from home, before they reach the sea. The Greek island of Lesbos and the Italian island of Lampedusa are swamped with migrants. The refugees want to go north, but nobody wants them.

With summer here, life on the run turns from chaotic to surreal, as well-fed European tourists flock to Mediterranean beaches.

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The Greek island of Lesbos and the Italian island of Lampedusa are swamped with migrants. A refugee from Afghanistan carried a baby on Lesbos.

The French police push migrants back to Italy; dozens of families sleep on the floor in the Ventimiglia rail station. In Nice, undocumented migrants are prevented from boarding trains to Paris. In the City of Light, police evacuate makeshift camps of African migrants, only to find them back, with newcomers, the next day.

Local people and relief groups feed them and clothe them, even though Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, demands that they be given “neither shelter nor medical care.” The town of Calais, last stop before the Channel, now has a “jungle”: a camp of about 3,000 migrants who in their desperation try to jump on trucks bound for Britain.

The Continent is now the premier destination for the world’s migrants. Last year, 626,000 people requested asylum in Europe, a 45 percent increase over 2013. (North America also registered a 42 percent increase but deals with far smaller numbers: 134,600 asylum seekers.) These figures go beyond the already high levels of legal and illegal immigration — an inflow of people that has spurred a populist and anti-immigrant backlash among voters across Europe.

Further confusing the picture,

posals amount to positive steps in the right direction, but most of its agenda remains focused on preventing people from coming to the European Union in the first place. This human wave cannot be stopped. The sheer nature of the conflicts raging in parts of SOEREN BIDSTRUP/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES Africa and in the Middle the difference between refugees East, along with the powerful defleeing war or persecution and mographic dynamics of Africa, economic migrants has blurred, means that migration will be a as the latter suffer grave human European feature for many years rights violations on their odysto come. This is an exceptional situation — in need of an excepseys, especially at the hands of traffickers in Libya. tional response.

Faced with this rapidly exExperts know that solutions exist, but changing the political panding crisis, the European discourse on immigration reUnion has reacted as it often does: slowly, burdened by the quires courage and long-term lack of a common immigration vision, something not widely and asylum policy. shared in Western capitals these A few leaders in Brussels seem days. to have understood the scale of Perhaps European leaders can this movement of people and the recall a tragic precedent. In July challenges it poses to Europe’s 1938, President Franklin D. Rooidentity as well as to its ideals sevelt of the United States conof solidarity and shared human vened the Évian conference to values. In May, the European address the plight of hundreds of Commission belatedly came up thousands of German and Austriwith “A European Agenda on Mian Jews desperate for refuge afgration” that asked Union memter Hitler had expelled them. As Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the Unitbers to share 40,000 refugees among themselves according to ed Nations High Commissioner predetermined quotas. The idea for Human Rights, wrote in late of quotas was quickly rejected May: “The Évian conference was by several countries, including a catastrophe. ... The outcome of France and some Central Eurothe meeting was clear: Europe, North America and Australia pean nations. Instead, Brussels would not accept significant is now talking about a relocation numbers of these refugees. In the scheme based on the somewhat verbatim record, two words were more palatable notion of a “distriuttered repeatedly: ‘density’ and bution key” that sets out the cri‘saturation.’” teria under which member states May this catastrophe not be would absorb the migrants. repeated.

Some of the Commission’s pro-

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Sanctity of Truth

25

WORLD TRENDS

Chinese Suppliers Fuel the World’s Illicit Drug Trade

By DAN LEVIN

SHANGHAI — Ordering illegal drugs from China is as easy as typing on a keyboard. On guidechem.com, more than 150 Chinese companies sell alpha-PVP, also known as flakka, a dangerous stimulant that is illegal in the United States but not in China, and was blamed for 18 recent deaths in one Florida county.

Qinjiayuan sells air-conditioners, trampolines and a banned hallucinogen known as spice, which set off a spike in emergency room visits in America in April.

The stimulant mephedrone, sometimes sold as “bath salts,” is banned in China but for sale at the Nanjing Takanobu Chemical Company. “I can handle this for you legally or illegally,” a company salesman said by phone when asked about shipping the product overseas.

The open online drug market is the most blatant example of what Patrick Zuo, Mia Li and Chen Jiehao contributed research.

international law enforcement officials say is China’s reluctance to take action as it has emerged as a major player in the global supply chain for synthetic drugs.

While China says it has made thousands of arrests and “joined hands” with foreign law enforcement agencies, officials from several countries say Chinese authorities have shown little interest in combating what they see as the drug problems of other countries.

China’s chemical factories and drug traffickers have turned the nation into a leading producer and exporter of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, and the compounds used to manufacture them, according to international law enforcement agencies.

As governments around the world have stepped up regulation of these so-called precursor chemicals, the Mexican cartels have increasingly turned to Chinese chemical factories.

Clandestine Chinese labs man-

ufacture and export their own meth and other synthetic drugs around the world. The country’s chemical industry is weakly regulated, officials say, making it easy for criminal syndicates to divert chemicals with legitimate uses into the production of new and dangerous drugs.

The labs stay one step ahead of laws banning illicit synthetic drugs simply by tweaking a few molecules, creating new and not-yet-illegal drugs. Since 2008, the number of new psychoactive substances reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has soared to 541, far outpacing the 244 drugs controlled under global conventions. Often sold as “legal highs” and “research chemicals,” these drugs are designed specifically to exploit an outdated international legal framework.

Some countries have banned whole ranges of chemicals that mimic illegal drugs, but many nations do not. The European Union, with its open borders and

By CHOE SANG-HUN

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Sheikh al-Dosary, Ben Hubbard and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

disparate drug laws, provides ample opportunity for smuggling. “Drug traffickers take advantage of this,” said Soren Pedersen of the European police agency Europol. “As soon as a substance becomes illegal in Germany, they can just divert it to Denmark, Sweden or Austria.”

According to the Australian Crime Commission’s latest Illicit Drugs Report, released last month, China was the primary source of illicit amphetamine-type drugs detected at the Australian border in 2013 to 2014.

“China likes everyone to think they’re in control of everything,” said a United Nations official, who asked not to be identified.

Even when China does make

Prostitute Strikes Back At South Korea’s Laws

Saudi Prince Rises Swiftly RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Until about four months ago, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 29, was just another Saudi royal.

He grew up overshadowed by three older half brothers who were among the most accomplished princes in the kingdom — the first Arab astronaut; an Oxford-educated political scientist who was once a research fellow at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and founded an investment company; and a deputy oil minister.

But that was before their father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, 79, ascended to the throne. Now Prince Mohammed, the eldest son of the king’s third and most recent wife, is the rising star. He has swiftly accumulated more power than any prince has ever held, upending a longstanding system of distributing positions around the royal family to help preserve its unity, and he has used his growing influence to take a leading role in Saudi Arabia’s newly assertive stance in the region, including its military intervention in Yemen.

When King Salman installed Prince Mohammed as deputy crown prince, he passed over tens of older princes to put him second in line to the throne. He also put him in charge of the state oil monopoly, the public investment company, economic policy

Mexican cartels tap into China’s chemical industry.

an arrest, it may not accomplish much. For more than a decade, Zhang Lei, also known as Eric Chang, manufactured thousands of kilos of synthetic drugs for buyers in 57 countries, earning about $30 million from shipments to the United States alone, American officials say.

The Chinese police knew about Mr. Zhang for years, and finally arrested him in 2013. Last July, the United States Treasury Department froze the American assets of Mr. Zhang and his company and associates.

Yet the company remains open, and its English-language website promises three-day international delivery and full refunds if customs seizes any shipments.

Mr. Zhang’s mother, Wang Guoying, 65, denied that the company ever sold illegal drugs.

“What American buyers did with the chemicals they bought from my son can’t be blamed on him,” she said. “We’re a legitimate company. If we weren’t would we still be up and running?”

MANUEL BALCE CENETA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, with President Barack Obama and Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. and the ministry of defense.

The sweeping changes have thrust the young prince into power at a time when Saudi Arabia is locked in a series of conflicts. It is arming rebels in Syria, fighting in the United States-led air campaign over Iraq and leading an air assault in Yemen.

Some Western diplomats say they are worried about the growing influence of the prince, with one even calling him “rash” and “impulsive.” At least two other princes in the main line of the royal family made it clear that some older members of the clan have doubts as well.

King Salman, of course, has ultimate authority, and some diplomats who have met with both Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in recent months said the senior prince appeared avuncular toward his younger cousin.

Several said the crown prince appeared to be working hard to guide and train Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

After meeting with both princes at a summit meeting of gulf nations at Camp David last month, President Barack Obama said the younger Prince Mohammed “struck us as extremely knowledgeable, very smart.”

Prince Mohammed seemed to be planning for a future in gov-

ernment from an early age, said one family associate who knew him well. He never smoked, drank alcohol or stayed out late.

“He was always very concerned about his image,” the family associate said.

He became a constant presence at the side of his father, according to friends, relatives and associates.

Prince Mohammed has seldom, if ever given an interview, .

Associates say he likes water-skiing and other water sports on the Red Sea or during travels.

He is a fan of iPhones and other Apple products. And he developed an early and abiding love of Japan, which remains his favorite country, a close associate said. When Prince Mohammed first married several years ago, he took his wife on a two-month honeymoon to Japan and the Maldives. (He recently married a second wife, associates said.)

Many Saudis interviewed on the streets of Riyadh praised Prince Mohammed as representative of the nearly 70 percent of the population that is under 30.

But several said they worried about his rise. Abu Fahad, a businessman sipping coffee in a luxury hotel, said, “He has become Mr. Knows Everything. But he is 29 years old — what does he know?”

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jeong-mi, a 43-year-old prostitute in Seoul, says she knows about humiliation. She usually charges customers 20,000 to 30,000 won, or about $18 to $27 — roughly a third of what her younger competition gets.

When desperate, she has gone as low as 10,000 won. She has felt people sneering.

But what happened in July 2012 was too much to accept, she says. Three uniformed male police officers raided her room while she was with a customer. During such raids, the police typically collect a used condom or other evidence.

But that night, she says, the officers made her get dressed while they watched and took photographs, “giving me no time to keep the least dignity as a human.”

So she pushed back.

She challenged the 500,000 won fine from the police. With the help of an advocacy group, she also filed a lawsuit asking the Constitutional Court of South Korea to strike down a law that, besides criminalizing prostitution, calls on the state to root it out. In April, after two years of deliberation, the court held a public hearing, which lawyers said indicated the justices were nearing a decision.

“I want what I do to be recognized as a job, a legitimate way of making a living,” Ms. Kim said After 14 young prostitutes died in a fire in 2002, the South Korean government began an aggressive campaign against the sex trade. A statute called not merely for preventing prostitution, but for eradicating it.

Police crackdowns have since become more frequent. The

number of red-light districts in the country fell to 44 in 2013, from 69 in 2002, according to government figures, and the number of prostitutes fell to 5,100 from 9,100.

But prostitutes say those numbers failed to account for the many women selling sex at bars, on social networking services and through dating apps.

These represent a side of the sex industry that is expanding because of the crackdowns on red-light districts and leaves the women involved more vulnerable to abusive customers, pimps and others, critics say.

“These are women struggling to make a living despite a social stigma. Should we drive them to death by branding them again as criminals?” asked Park Kyung-shin, a professor of law at Korea University in Seoul. He was referring to the November death of a 24-year-old single mother who jumped out of a sixth-floor motel room to escape a police raid.

Ms. Kim goes to work in the capital’s Cheongryangri redlight district, a lattice of alleys lined with “glass rooms” where young women in miniskirts and high heels can be observed sitting on stools under neon lights.

Ms. Kim, a high-school dropout who drifted from one menial job to another and now lives in a motel room, vows to continue as a prostitute for as long as she can. She notes that a police station overlooks one entrance to her red-light zone, and that officers patrol but never close it.

“They come and selectively catch a few unfortunate women at a time and collect fines like taxes,” Ms. Kim said. “The state is no different than a pimp.”

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Sanctity of Truth

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

WORLD TRENDS

Religions Awakening To Climate Challenge Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 fluctuations from renewable power, and they are avidly studying other ways to tackle the emissions causing global warming.

Hundreds of other churches, mosques and synagogues in America have put up solar panels in recent years or retrofitted their buildings to cut energy use.

With the cost of renewable energy falling, that number could soon be in the thousands.

Politicians who try to reduce incentives for renewable power can find themselves contending with upset preachers. A pastor in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Brian Flory, recently helped stall such a bill in his state, citing the right of churches to “generate electricity from God’s free sunshine.”

Men like Mr. Lowe and Mr. Sauder have dedicated their lives to helping other people of faith grasp the connection between climate change and the harm being done to the poor.

Mr. Sauder, ordained in the Mennonite denomination, is the executive director of Faith in Place, an interfaith group in Illinois that helps houses of worship cut emissions. Similar groups have sprouted across the United States under the banner of a national organization called Interfaith Power and Light.

Mr. Lowe traveled as a college student, nearly a decade ago, to Lake Tanganyika, where he studied with an environmental scientist named Catherine O’Reilly.

Dr. O’Reilly had documented

that rising temperatures in the lake were depleting the surface waters of nutrients. That, in turn, was damaging fish populations that historically helped feed millions of people. “I realized that climate change was already having impacts, and not just on God’s creation, but on many of my brothers and sisters around the world,” Mr. Lowe said.

The situation has grown only worse since, with overfishing being a possible factor, said Dr. O’Reilly, now at Illinois State University. She visited the lake last year, and “the price of a small pile of fish has gone up 10 times, which is huge for people who are living day to day,” she said.

After college, Mr. Lowe helped found, and is now the spokesman for, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, an organization that has allied with other faith and environmental groups to push for change. Despite shifting public opinion, Mr. Lowe and others who employ the slogan “creation care” are still viewed with suspicion by many fellow evangelicals.

Polls suggest that evangelicals are the American religious group least likely to believe that global warming is real or caused by humans. Many of them are politically conservative and are influenced by groups that question established climate science and defend the rising use of fossil fuels.

Among Christians and Jews, theological discussion sometimes centers on exactly what God meant in the first chapter

KALEB NYQUIST/YOUNG EVANGELICALS FOR CLIMATE ACTION; LEFT, AARON P. BERNSTEIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A prayer circle of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action. Top left, Brian Flory, an Indiana pastor, helped stall a state bill to reduce incentives for clean energy. of Genesis when he granted human beings “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing.”

Does this passage — in Christian theology, it is called the dominion mandate — mean that people can do no ecological wrong? Some conservative

Trying to end a perception that fossil fuels lift the poor. politicians do seem to interpret the verse, and related ones, as a promise that God would not let humans wreck their only home.

“My point is, God’s still up there,” Senator James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who is one of the leading climate-science doubters in Congress, said on a Christian radio program in 2012. “The arrogance of people

to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what he is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.”

In his encyclical, Francis disputed this view, declaring not only that humans are altering the climate but that the dominion mandate encompasses a duty to care for creation.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who is an evangelical Christian, lines up with the pope on the issue. If God granted humanity free will, she sometimes asks audiences, why would that not include the capacity to harm the planet?

Religious conservatives who oppose environmentalism point out that economic success has historically been closely linked to the use of fossil fuels. “The policies meant to mitigate global warming would oppress the poor by depriving them of the energy without which they cannot rise out of poverty,” E. Calvin Beisner, a leader of an American group called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, declared this year in Rome

at a symposium held to pre-emptively counter Francis’ message.

Liberal groups often dismiss that view as tendentious, yet it is precisely the fear that preoccupies countries like India that have refused to commit to serious emissions limits.

The stated goal of the environmental movement is to break the link between fossil fuels and economic success.

Perhaps the biggest question now is whether rising concern about the environment among religious groups will translate into stronger political demands that governments find ways to reduce the cost of low-carbon energy supplies, improve their reliability and speed their deployment.

This month, more than 350 American rabbis issued a letter of their own, declaring that the time for action was at hand.

It declared: “The hope is that over and over in our history, when our country faced the need for profound change, it has been our communities of moral commitment, religious covenant and spiritual search that have arisen to meet the need.”

Job Laws Intended to Help Moms Can End Up Hurting Their Careers Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 and 20 percent. Researchers compared pay at the same companies before and after they were big enough to be forced to comply with the law.

“That was thought to be a provision to help them participate in the labor force and achieve more work-family balance, and it’s doing the opposite,” said Ms. Prada, whose study was published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than 7 the right to ask for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.

Over the next decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study by Daniel Fernández-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid, and Núria Rodríguez-Planas, an economist at City University of New York, Queens College. The probability of women of childbearing age not being employed climbed 20 percent. Another result: Women were more likely to be in less stable, short-term contract jobs, which are not required to provide such benefits.

“One of the unintended consequences of the law has been to

push women into the lower segment of the labor market with bad-quality, unprotected jobs where their rights cannot be enforced,” Mr. Fernández-Kranz said.

These findings are consistent with previous research by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, economists at Cornell. In a study of 22 countries, they found that generous family-friendly policies like long maternity leaves and part-time work protections in Europe made it possible for more women to work — but that they were more likely to be in dead-end jobs and less likely to be managers.

There is no simple way to prevent family-friendly policies from backfiring, researchers say.

Family-friendly employee policies sometimes backfire.

One idea is to make sure that employers do not have to finance them. As in Chile, they will often pass the burden to employees.

The three American states — California, New Jersey and Rhode Island — that offer paid family leave finance it through employee payroll taxes, for example.

Another suggestion is to make sure policies are generous but not too generous. Some say

that more than three months of maternity leave is helpful, but that more than nine months begins to hurt women’s career prospects.

Perhaps the most successful way to devise policies that help working families but avoid unintended consequences, people who study the issue say, is to make them gender neutral. In places like Sweden and Quebec, for instance, parental leave policies encourage both men and women to take time off for a new baby.

“It has to become something that humans do,” said Ms. Glynn, from the Center for American Progress, “as opposed to something that women do.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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WORLD TRENDS

A Steady Approach To Life Life can be one big balancing act: How can we strive for more but also be happy with what we have? How do we work to reach our full potential without LENS stressing out? It is important to find that middle ground, because when things are out of balance, body and mind can fall apart.

A momentary lapse of balance can lead to falling down, and you might not be aware of your own limits. One quick test is to stand on one leg for 30 seconds — and then close your eyes and try it again, a balance test that the runner Alex Hutchinson wrote about in The Times. He put himself to a series of such tests a few years ago while researching an article about high-altitude hiking. Despite his strength and endurance fitness, he found he was “as unsteady as

Testing one’s focus, as a Himalayan hiker or an investor.

newer range of inventions to nudge us in the right direction, monitoring eating speeds and relaxation time.

There is a danger that such devices that do the work for you are a form of “dumbing-down,” Natasha Dow Schüll, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Times.

But they can also — with a nudge from a mindful awareness — give insight into a person’s behavior and help her meet certain personal goals.

“It’s like you are a detective of the self and you have discerned these patterns,” Ms. Schüll said.

A favorite of hers is Muse, a headband that monitors brain waves and plays different sounds based on whether a person is distracted or calm.

By hearing the sounds and being more aware of the brain’s state of being, she said, “you do learn to calm your mind.”

Such a cool head can also have financial benefits for investors. The trick, as Jeff Sommer wrote in The Times, is to think of the long term rather than living in the moment.

“When investors think short-term CHRISTOPHER GREGORY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES and try to time Physical fitness should be centered the market, they more on balance than on muscle haven’t done very strength, one athlete believes. well,” said Louis S. Harvey, the president of a Bosa Himalayan hiker with mounton research firm that tracks the outcomes of investors in tain sickness.” mutual funds. This is partly The problem, he wrote, is because people buy and sell that fitness too often focuses frequently based on headlines on muscle strength, aerobic in the news, and do not take endurance and flexibility as into account the transaction elements to be achieved sepcosts involved. arately rather than viewing A $10,000 investment in them as a holistic, interconthe S.&P. 500 index would nected state of being. One grow to $65,464 over 20 years, way to tie them together, he compared with only $27,510 suggested, is to keep the mind for the average stock mutual active in the process. fund investors, Mr. Sommer Whether doing coordination reported. After 40 years, with exercises like obstacle courscompounding, the nest egg es or partaking in activities would grow to about $428,550, like dancing or tennis with compared with only $75,680 a partner, “it is novelty and for mutual fund investors, a unpredictability, rather than $352,870 difference. repetition, that are essential to “It’s not just about buying keep your brain engaged,” Mr. hot mutual funds,” John RekHutchinson wrote.

Another way to keep yourenthaler of Morningstar, an investment research and manself in balance is by using devices and applications that agement firm, told The Times. monitor your body’s activity, “It’s important not to chase whether it’s the steps you’ve hot asset classes, either. Longtaken in a day, calories eaten term and steady, both of them, or hours slept. There is even a are important.”

Finding a balance can pay off in more ways than one.

For comments, write to TESS FELDER nytweekly@nytimes.com.

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, APPLE

Americans’ willingness to experiment lies behind the astonishing success of technological pioneers like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in 2005, and Steve Jobs, below, at Apple in 1977.

Innovation Held Back in Europe

By JAMES B. STEWART

Antitrust fervor in Europe seems to have hit fever pitch.

Apple, Google and Facebook are all subjects of investigation, and Amazon is now the focus of at least three separate inquiries.

Europe’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager, contends it’s just coincidence that so many of her targets are American tech companies: “This just reflects that there are many strong companies in the U.S. that influence the digital market elsewhere,” she said.

But even if true, why would that be? Why hasn’t Europe fostered the kind of innovation that has spawned hugely successful technology companies?

In the United States, three of the top 10 companies by market capitalization are technology companies founded in the last half-century: Apple, Microsoft and Google. In Europe, there are none among the top 10.

Yet if any region of the world could compete successfully with the United States in technology, it would be Europe. The European Union has venerable universities, a well-educated work force, affluent and technically skilled consumers and large pools of investment capital.

Europe has a long history of inventions, including the printing press, the optical lenses used in microscopes and telescopes and the steam engine.

But recently? Not so much.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed in Europe. The European Union has unveiled its “Digital Single Market” strategy to foster European entrepreneurship and ease barriers to innovation. European countries have tried to replicate the critical mass of a Silicon Valley with technology centers like Oxford Science Park in Britain, “Silicon Allee” in Berlin and Isar Valley in Munich, and “Silicon Docks” in Dublin.

There are institutional and structural barriers to innovation in Europe, like smaller pools of venture capital and rigid employment laws that restrict growth.

Jacob Kirkegaard, a Danish economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for Inter-

The freedom to fail liberates U.S. entrepreneurs. national Economics, and Petra Moser, a German-born assistant professor of economics at Stanford University in California, said the major barriers were cultural.

Often overlooked in the success of American start-ups is the even greater number of failures.

“Fail fast, fail often” is a Silicon Valley mantra, and the freedom to innovate is inextricably linked to the freedom to fail. In Europe, failure carries a much greater stigma than it does in the United States. Bankruptcy codes are far more punitive, in contrast to the United States, where bankruptcy is simply a rite of passage for many successful entrepreneurs.

Professor Moser recalled that a businessman who declared bankruptcy in her hometown in Germany committed suicide.

“In Europe, failure is regarded as a personal tragedy,” she said.

“Here it’s something of a badge of honor. An environment like that doesn’t encourage as much risk-taking and entrepreneurship.”

There is also little or no stigma in Silicon Valley to being fired; Steve Jobs himself was forced out of Apple. “American companies allow their employees to leave and try something else,”

Professor Moser said. “Then, if it works, great, the mother company acquires the start-up. If it doesn’t, they hire them back. It’s a great system. It allows people to experiment and try things.

In Germany, you can’t do that.

People would hold it against you.

They’d see it as disloyal.”

Europeans are also much less receptive to the kind of truly disruptive innovation represented by a Google or a Facebook, Mr. Kirkegaard said.

He cited the example of Uber, the ride-hailing service that has been greeted with hostility in Europe, and its reception says a lot about the power of incumbent taxi operators.

“But it goes deeper than that,” Mr. Kirkegaard said. “New Yorkers don’t get all nostalgic about yellow cabs. In London, the black cab is seen as something that makes London what it is. People like it that way. Americans tend to act in a more rational and less emotional way about the goods and services they consume, because it’s not tied up with their national and regional identities.”

One of Europe’s greatest innovations was the forerunner of the modern university: Bologna, founded in 1088. But as centers of research and innovation, Europe’s universities long ago ceded leadership to those in the United States.

With its emphasis on early testing and sorting, the educational system in Europe tends to be very rigid. “If you don’t do well at age 18, you’re out,” Professor Moser said. “That cuts out a lot of people who could do better but never get the chance. The person who does best at a test of rote memorization at age 17 may not be innovative at 23.”

She added that many of Europe’s most enterprising students go to the United States to study and end up staying.

None of this will be easy to change, even assuming Europeans want change. “In Europe, stability is prized,” Professor Moser said. “Inequality is much less tolerated. There’s a culture of sharing. People aren’t so cutthroat. Money isn’t the only thing that matters.”

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WORLD TRENDS

ISIS Is Entrenching Itself in Its Territories’ Fabric

By BEN HUBBARD

ERBIL, Iraq — In northern Syria, the jihadists of the Islamic State have fixed power lines and dug sewage systems. In Raqqa, they search markets for expired food. In Deir al-Zour, they have imposed taxes on farmers and shopkeepers and fined men for wearing short beards.

A year after the Islamic State seized Mosul, the jihadist group continues to stitch itself deeper into the fabric of the communities it controls. In areas with shattered ties to national governments, the jihadists have worked to fill the void, according to interviews with residents from areas in Syria and Iraq ruled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The group is offering reliable, if harsh, security; providing jobs; and projecting a sense of order in a region overwhelmed by conflict.

“As a way of life, people got used to it,” said a laborer from Raqqa. If you followed the rules, the jihadists left you alone, he said.

“It is not our life, all the violence and fighting and death,” he Hwaida Saad, Karam Shoumali and Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting.

said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But they got rid of the tyranny of the Arab rulers.”

In the process, the Islamic State’s administration has banned dynamite fishing and Apple products, pressured teachers to work in its schools and offered rewards for killing Jordanian fighter pilots, according to jihadist documents compiled by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

The Islamic State’s territory stretches from the outskirts of Aleppo in Syria into central Iraq, where it shares a volatile border with the Kurds in the north and approaches Baghdad in the south. Much of the area is sparsely populated desert, but the group has millions of people under its charge.

The Islamic State differs from jihadist groups like Al Qaeda in its drive to establish a Sunni Muslim state governed by an extreme version of Islam. Its method of seizing territory seeks to lay the groundwork for this by prompting a “geographic cleansing,” according to Hassan Abu Hanieh, a Jordanian expert on Islamist groups. Enemies flee or are killed. What remains are mostly Sunni Arabs who try to

NOUR FOURAT/REUTERS

The Islamic State provides services and order usually lacking during war. Men disposed of confiscated products in Raqqa. continue their lives.

The Islamic State works to coopt them by providing services lacking in wartime, Mr. Abu Hanieh said. “People may not be with the organization’s ideology, but the group has been able to give some stability, punish thieves and put in place a legal system,” he said.

Many residents have become dependent on the Islamic State’s services, Mr. Tamimi said. “The end effect of this is that the Islam-

ic State entrenches itself and becomes very difficult to get rid of,” he said. “Are you going to bomb the schools in the towns they run and deny the people access to any education whatsoever?”

To enhance their staying power, the jihadists have focused on children, revamping curriculums and indoctrinating teachers. Islamic State propaganda videos often show children planting bombs to kill Iraqi security forces, cheering for Islamic State con-

voys and watching executions.

“The biggest threat we have is that the children have a new curriculum that is very extremist,” said a Kurdish security official.

“This is a ticking time bomb for the future.”

Residents of Islamic State areas did not describe easy lives, but some wanted the jihadists to stay, reflecting the deep political failures in their countries. Many now living under the Islamic State in Syria suffered under both President Bashar al-Assad and the rebels who chased out his forces, leaving them with no alternative to the jihadists. And many Sunnis in Iraq trust the Islamic State more than the Shiite-led government in Baghdad and the militias it has used to fight the jihadists.

“Now there is more security and freedom, no arrests, no harassment, no concrete barriers and no checkpoints where we used to spend hours to get into the city,” said Mohamed al-Dulaimi of Falluja, Iraq.

“What will happen if the militias enter Falluja?” he asked.

“We will take our guns and fight them, not because we are ISIS, but because the militias will kill us all.”

Doping Charges Hit Russian Walkers

Elena Lashmanova, second from right, served a ban for doping.

Far left, Viktor Chegin, the Russian coach.

By CHARLY WILDER

SARANSK, Russia — Racewalking is the peculiar track and field event that elicits snickers every four years when its athletes are seen wiggling toward the finish line in the Summer Olympics.

The palatial glass-and-steel Olympic Training Center of the Republic of Mordovia, where athletes work out on a 3.2-kilometer wooded path, is one of the largest, most important facilities in the world devoted to the sport.

The high-tech, live-in center has churned out champions for the past decade and led Russia to dominate the sport on the world stage.

At the helm of the Russian race walking program is Viktor Chegin, whose name adorns the facade of the center here in Saransk, about 650 kilometers east of Moscow. Responsible for coaching the three Russian athletes who swept the 2009 world championships, as well as multiple Olympic medal winners and world-record holders in the years since, Mr. Chegin is a hero here.

But now Mr. Chegin and the racewalking center in Saransk are in the middle of one of the biggest doping scandals in the history of track and field. As far back as 2008, Mr. Chegin faced accusations of doping when five of his athletes tested positive for banned substances on the eve of the Beijing Olympics. To date, 26 Russian racewalkers have been barred from the sport for doping violations, at least 20 of them trained by Mr. Chegin.

Several of Mr. Chegin’s ath-

OLEG NIKISHIN/GETTY IMAGES; LEFT, OKSANA YUSHKO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

letes are serving lifetime bans for use of EPO, a blood-doping agent that improves oxygen delivery to the muscles but also increases the likelihood of thrombosis and stroke. Many have had medals rescinded.

Yet for years, even as his walkers were caught again and again, Mr. Chegin emerged largely unscathed, and the center in Mordovia continued to receive hundreds of millions of rubles in federal and state funding. Last year, the Russian government allocated an additional 375 million rubles (about $7 million currently) to the center, part of the city’s preparation to host a site in soccer’s 2018 World Cup. Even after July 2014, when Mr. Chegin was officially fired from Russia’s national team after five new doping violations finally led to an investigation by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, or

Rusada, he has continued to train athletes in Saransk.

It was not until the beginning of this year that track and field’s world governing body, the I.A.A.F., together with Russia’s antidoping agency and the World Anti-Doping Agency, investigated Mr. Chegin, prompted largely by an online campaign run by a group of racewalkers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

No matter — Mr. Chegin continues to draw broad support at home. A poll in January by the leading Russian web portal Mail. ru showed that 72 percent of respondents thought the doping scandal was, entirely or in part, a Western conspiracy against Russia.

He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Over the past decade, resentment has grown among other national teams as more and more

Russian racewalkers were caught doping but continued to dominate international competitions.

“The last couple years, I started getting really angry, knowing I’m racing against doped-up athletes,” said Jared Tallent, an Australian racewalking champion who has repeatedly finished second or third at world championships behind Russian walkers who were coached by Mr. Chegin and later barred for doping.

“He’s cheating, and it’s bad for the sport.”

Last December, Elena Lashmanova, a Russian walker who had been banned for two years over doping charges, apparently took part in an official race at the Saransk training center. That, together with six new doping violations this year alone, might have finally tipped the scales against Mr. Chegin. The I.A.A.F., WADA and Rusada are conducting mul-

tiple investigations against him and the Olympic Training Center in Saransk, all of them set to conclude by the end of the year. Both the I.A.A.F. and WADA were already engaged in a major investigation into Russian athletics after a documentary by the German broadcaster ARD alleged that systemic doping and cover-ups were widespread in the country.

Igor Zagorsky, the Rusada director, denies the claims made in the documentary.

Brent Vallance, a former racewalker and coach for Australia’s national team, said: “I personally don’t hold anything against the individual athletes, because I believe they don’t know they’re doing it. I honestly believe they’re just following blindly what they’re told to do. It’s almost worship status that Viktor Chegin gets there, so when you’re told to do something, you just do it.“

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

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MONEY & BUSINESS

Investors Again Willing To Put Money in Brazil

By DAN HORCH

GIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Banca Monte dei Paschi survived plagues and wars, but financial hubris felled it.

Seeking a Renaissance in Siena

By JACK EWING and GAIA PIANIGIANI

SIENA, Italy — Operators of an ambulance service had to find new sources of funds. A biotech company filed for bankruptcy. The local professional soccer team slipped into the minor leagues after it could not pay top salaries. As for the Palio, Siena’s famed bareback horse race, clans must pay for their own costumes.

Siena, a city in central Tuscany, is scrambling to fill the financial hole caused by the near collapse of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank.

The foundation that owned the bank financed a broad range of social services and cultural events, showering 150 million euros a year, about $170 million, on Siena and the surrounding region. The bank was the city’s largest private sector employer.

Now, Siena is trying to attract outside investments and show that it can create jobs.

Since its founding in 1472, Monte dei Paschi and its wealth have been at the center of life in Siena.

The bank survived plagues, panics and wars. Its headquarters are still located inside a medieval fortress. But modern financial hubris felled the centuries-old bank. In 2008, Monte dei Paschi acquired a rival to become Italy’s third-largest bank. The €9 billion price tag was considered too high, even at the time, and bank management engaged in a series of derivatives transactions that later produced huge losses.

In mid-June, Monte dei Paschi completed a sale of shares valued at €3 billion and replenished its capital. But the bank is gasping under a pile of bad loans and has effectively put itself up for sale, which could mean moving its headquarters. Fabrizio Viola, the bank’s chief executive, said that Monte dei Paschi will continue to support Siena as a bank, though not as a benefactor.

Some of the changes have been small. The Misericordia di Siena, which provides the ambu-

lance service, is making up the lost funds by renting out real estate and collecting more money from members and other private sources. “Had we survived only with the foundation’s money, we’d have gone belly up,” said Mario Marzucchi, president of the Misericordia.

“There was too much money.

Everything was easy,” said Marcello Clarich, the president of the Monte dei Paschi Foundation.

“Now we are going back to normality.” With a lwell-preserved medieval center, Siena is crowded with tourists in the summer but is often underbooked the rest of the year.

Work has long been underway to improve the highway that connects Siena with Florence, and officials have staged events to attract sports tourists, boosting tourism by an estimated 10 per-

As easy money dries up, a Tuscan city tries new strategies. cent last year. But tourism will not replace the high-paying jobs Monte dei Paschi once provided.

To fill that gap, officials are trying to turn the surrounding province of Tuscany into an international center for drug research. The British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline has a large operation in Siena. The effort suffered a blow when Siena Biotech filed for bankruptcy in April. Despite spending 14 years and €160 million seeking treatments for Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases, the company never produced any marketable therapies. The failure of Siena Biotech, which depended entirely on the Monte dei Paschi Foundation, is seen as a cautionary tale.

Now officials are trying a new strategy. Toscana Life Sciences is serving as an incubator for 16

start-ups developing new technologies and related services. It is trying to mold the small pharmaceutical companies scattered around the region into a cluster that can feed off each other and take better advantage of the proximity of GlaxoSmithKline as well as Eli Lilly, which has a drugmaking plant outside Florence. The organization is supporting research into the therapeutic qualities of ingredients found in local products like olive oil and red wine, among other activities. It is also working with local universities.

But the effort also requires a government rethink. Investors won’t come to Tuscany “just because it’s more beautiful and has better wine,” said Andrea Paolini, director general of Toscana Life Sciences.

Entrepreneurs here, as with much of Italy, face a mountain of bureaucracy. So officials are trying to simplify things.

“This is critical for companies,” said Luigi Marroni, the regional minister of health.

“If it takes six months to get an approval in Tuscany and two months in New Jersey, they’ll go to New Jersey.”

In January, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a nonprofit health care provider, decided to open a center to diagnose liver and digestive ailments in Chianciano Terme, a town near Siena known for its healing waters. Officials in Siena helped accelerate the approval process, and the center opened in June.

“Our impression is that the local government is really pushing hard,” said Bruno Gridelli of U.P.M.C. International. “They understand that if they want to improve the economy, particularly after the problems of Monte dei Paschi, they need to attract investment.”

Officials are working on centralizing procedures like building permits. Bruno Valentini, Siena’s mayor, said, “The only way to save the city is to renew it.”

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Six months ago, stocks and bonds in Brazilian companies were practically left for dead. Brazil was sinking deeper into a recession. Its currency, the real, was reeling. And the country’s largest company, the government-controlled energy giant Petrobras, was embroiled in a corruption scandal that drew in politicians and weakened the government of President Dilma Rousseff.

Although Brazil is still recovering from its economic malaise, the nation’s major companies are attracting investors again. In recent months, President Rousseff has taken steps to cut the budget deficit. And Petrobras sold $2.5 billion in bonds with a 100-year maturity.

Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest economy, still faces hurdles. Investors have lost billions in companies under investigation in possible securities law violations. The real has dropped nearly 40 percent against the dollar in the last year, adding to losses for foreign investors. Inflation is still more than 8 percent.

And should the government’s progress in stabilizing the national debt falter, fears of a ratings downgrade could again send the currency plunging.

But, cautiously, some companies are tapping the public markets. Once new management took over in February, Petrobras — the world’s most indebted energy company, with about $130 billion in debt — moved quickly to build cash reserves.

In the last two months, it raised more than $11 billion from the China Development Bank, the Standard Chartered Bank and three Brazilian banks.

In early May, the Brazilian subsidiary of the Spanish telecom giant Telefónica issued new shares and raised $1.4 billion to help finance its acquisition of Vivendi’s Brazilian telecom unit.

In other signs of a turnaround, a local insurance brokerage firm, Par Corretora, just held an initial public offering,

the first Brazilian company to do so in almost eight months.

It raised a modest $190 million, but that exceeded the high end of its target range, as a surge in demand led it to raise its share price.

“The success of recent offerings shows that there is a demand for quality names,” said Jean-Marc Etlin, chief executive of the Brazilian investment bank Itaú BBA. More transactions are considered likely. The reinsurance company IRB-Brasil is expected to file for an initial public offering, seeking to raise $1.3 billion.

Another large bank, Caixa Econômica Federal, said in April that it was looking to hire investment banks to spin off its insurance division this year in an I.P.O. that could raise $3 billion.

The government has an interest in helping to elevate the

A country slowly recovering from its economic malaise. capital markets. IRB and Caixa Econômica Federal’s insurance division are partly owned by the government, which is eager to raise money to close a gaping budget deficit. Brazil’s deficit is 7.5 percent of its gross domestic product; in contrast, the deficit of crisis-ridden Greece was 3.5 percent last year.

“The government, given its need for money, will probably be aggressive about opening capital in the companies it owns,” said Eliana Chimenti, an analyst.

Some $4 billion is expected to come from selling offshore petroleum reserves.

“Uncertainties have lifted enough that investors can see opportunities,” said Renato Ejnisman, head of Banco Bradesco BBI. “There are good names available at good prices.”

YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Brazil is eager to close its budget deficit, which is still 7.5 percent of its gross domestic product. A protester in April.

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MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

MONEY & BUSINESS

Easier, Cheaper Ways To Send Cash Abroad

In Johannesburg last month, a protest against France and Engie, a French company, to stop supporting coal there.

Below, a power plant in Ohio.

By MARK SCOTT

LONDON — When Stellah Vardling in Kampala, Uganda, was getting ready for her birthday party, she texted her sister in Sweden, who quickly sent money directly to her smartphone.

“All it takes is a few minutes,” said Ms. Vardling, who receives a couple of remittances each month on her phone from her extended family in Sweden to pay for food, clothes and other basic necessities. “By the time I ask for the money, there’s always something urgent that needs to be bought.”

Ms. Vardling’s experiences are part of a growing shift in how people send money to each other around the world. While companies like Western Union have offered international money transfers for decades, tech start-ups and traditional telecom companies are reducing the barriers to, and costs of, sending cash overseas.

“International remittances is the fastest-growing mobile money product,” said Seema Desai, head of mobile money at the GS-

Tech start-ups are changing the global remittance market.

Vodafone, the European telecom giant — as the most practical way to pay for goods and send money to friends and family.

Ismail Ahmed, a former remittance expert at the United Nations, started WorldRemit, a London-based financial company in 2010. WorldRemit allows people to send money digitally from more than 50 countries and receive it in over 115 countries.

Mr. Ahmed has secured more than $140 million in funding, for a valuation of about $500 million.

“We want people to send money like they send text messages,” he said. “From the beginning, I wanted to make sending and receiving money as digital as possible.”

Most online transfer companies require individuals to send money from bank accounts that are already highly regulated. Cellphone operators also collect large amounts of data on their users who rely on these services.

And as all transactions are processed digitally, there is an audit trail detailing exactly where, and to whom, the money is sent.

Mr. Ahmed said the company’s customers — hundreds of thousands of people now SVEN TORFINN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES send money through its M-Pesa, a Kenyan cellphone-based digital platform each month — are quickly money transfer service, has become forgoing cash transfers popular in the developing world. for mobile money.

When the business first began offering its services, MA, a telecom trade organizarecipients had to pick up the cash. tion in London. “It’s disrupting Now, those transactions reprethe traditional players like Western Union.” sent just a third of the remittancThe global remittance market es on WorldRemit’s platform. will be valued at almost $600 bilIn many countries, like Zimbalion this year, according to the bwe and the Philippines, about World Bank. New technology has three-quarters of people now helped cut the price of sending receive remittances as mobile traditional remittances in half, to money directly on their phones. an average of $4 for sending $100, “At the end of last year, 20 according to the GSMA. percent of all global mobile Individuals log into online sermoney transfers came through WorldRemit,” Mr. Ahmed said. vices either through a computer “It’s our fastest-growing area.” or, increasingly, a smartphone, Telecom operators are introand enter their bank details. To send the money, the user has onducing their own international remittance programs. In East ly to type in the recipient’s cellAfrica, the local carrier MTN phone number, enter a password and Vodafone recently agreed to and confirm the transaction, allow their customers to transfer which usually takes less than a money through cellphones. few hours, compared with several Orange, the French telecom days for a traditional remittance. giant, also offers international The recipient receives a text mesmobile money transfers across sage when the money is available several West African countries, for pickup or has been credited to and plans to extend the service to a mobile money account.

France, home to a large diaspora These sort of mobile payments of immigrants, by early next year. have not caught on in many West“We’re addressing a basic ern countries. But mobile money need,” said Laurent Paillassot, is now a fixture across large who oversees Orange’s mobile parts of the developing world. banking services in Paris. “The With limited access to traditional ability to make an instantaneous bank accounts, people have often money transfer is what people turned to services like M-Pesa want.”

— a mobile money offering from

GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES; BELOW, GREG SAILOR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEWS ANALYSIS

Fossil Fuels Remain Resilient

By DAVID GELLES

Norway this month became an unlikely leader in a growing social movement: persuading investors to sell their stock in fossil fuel companies.

In Norway’s case, its $890 billion pension fund — the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world — will begin divesting itself of its stakes in coal companies. The move offered a powerful endorsement of a tactic its backers say has the potential to reduce carbon consumption.

The fossil fuel divestment movement, begun on the campus of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 2011, has gathered force in only four years.

AXA, the French insurance group, said it would sell $560 million in coal investments.

The Rockefeller family said its philanthropic arm would sell fossil fuel investments. And the endowments of several universities have purged coal company stocks.

“There’s been a tipping point in the last six months,” said Ben Caldecott of Oxford University.

Coal prices are falling. The Dow Jones coal index is down 86 percent since 2011. In a recent securities filing, Peabody Energy, one of the country’s biggest coal producers, listed the divestment campaign as a risk factor that threatened its share price.

The logic of the campaign is that diminishing support from the markets will create financial hardship and ultimately lead fossil fuel producers to change. But there is an open secret: For all its focus on stock holdings, the true impact of divestment campaigns has nothing to do with a company’s investor base, share price or creditworthiness. It lies in the shame it causes.

In 2013, Mr. Caldecott and others at Oxford examined previous divestment movements — like those against apartheid in South Africa and tobacco companies. The study concluded that even if every public pension fund and university endowment sold its fossil fuel stock, the effect would be negligible.

That’s largely because most energy company stock is held by big institutional investors like BlackRock and Fidelity, whose managers are unlikely to use their portfolios to advance moral or social agendas.

“Divestment in itself is neither here nor there,” said Atif Ansar, an author of the study and a professor at Saïd Business School at Oxford. “On its own, it’s not going to generate any real impact.”

In the case of coal, the stocks are down because shale mining and cheap natural gas have re-

Big investors want big returns, not emission reductions. duced demand for coal.

But that does not mean divestment campaigns have no consequences. Again, there’s the shame factor.

Critics, though, argue that damaging the reputations of coal and oil companies does nothing to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

“I’m very supportive of aggressive climate policies,” said Robert Stavins of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “But the message from the divestment movement is fundamentally misguided.”

He contends that the problem is an economy that re-

mains dependent on fossil fuel production and consumption.

While clean energy production is growing, Western economies would grind to a halt tomorrow without fossil fuels.

And the divestment movement has focused on Western companies, while India and China have continued to mine and burn huge amounts of coal. Norway, now a leader in the movement, amassed its gargantuan sovereign fund by drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. “Divestment comes at the expense of meaningful action,” said Frank Wolak of Stanford University in California. “It will do nothing to reduce global greenhouse emissions. It will not prevent these companies from raising capital.”

A more effective use of activists’ energy, Mr. Wolak and Mr. Stavins said, would be to work on putting a price on carbon emissions through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system.

“What we need to do is focus on actions that will make a real difference,” Mr. Stavins said, “as opposed to actions that may feel or look good, but have very little real world impact.”

Divestment campaigners are more than happy to provoke companies like Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy.

But Bill McKibben of the divestment group 350.org said, “Left to their own devices, a sense of concern is inadequate to move the fossil fuel industry to action.”

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

31

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Naomi Oreskes, Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate “One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it?”

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard, is one of the biggest names in climate science. But she did not earn her recognition as a climatologist. She earned it by applying the tools of historical scholarship to defend the field against ideologically driven attacks.

Formally, she is a historian of science. Informally, she has become a boxer, throwing herself into a messy public arena that many career-minded climate scientists try to avoid. She helps raise money to defend researchers targeted for criticism by climate change denialists. She has become a heroine to activist college students, supporting their demand that universities and other institutions divest from fossil fuels. Climatologists, though often reluctant themselves to get into fights, have showered her with praise for being willing to do it.

“Her courage and persistence in communicating climate science to the wider public have made her a living legend among her colleagues,” two climate researchers, Benjamin D. Santer and John Abraham, wrote in a prize-nomination letter in 2011.

Dr. Oreskes’s core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people. In a 2010 book, Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and this spring the book became a documentary film, by Robert Kenner.

Dr. Oreskes has been vilified on conservative websites, and gets hate mail. Complaints about

NAOMI ORESKES

Historian of science

KAYANA SZYMCZAK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

her research were filed at her previous employer, the University of California, San Diego, though never upheld. One of the men she has targeted in her writing, the physicist S. Fred Singer, said that she was protected at that institution by “a mostly feminist mafia.”

Born in 1958, Dr. Oreskes grew up in Manhattan. She started at Brown University, but finished her undergraduate geology degree at the Royal School of Mines in London. After graduating with high honors, she won a job in 1981 as a young field geologist for Western Mining, an Australian company. After three years she decided to return to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree at Stanford University.

But she felt a growing desire to plunge into more fundamental questions about the nature and

history of science. She established her career as a historian with a book-length study examining the role of dissent in the scientific method. As she put it a few months ago to an audience at Indiana University, she wanted to wrestle with this question: “How do you distinguish a maverick from a crank?”

Her subject was Alfred Wegener, the German scientist who proposed in 1912 that continents drifted around the earth.

Initially rejected, his idea was revived decades after his death to become the theory of plate tectonics.

Dr. Oreskes started wondering about climate science. At the time, the widespread public impression was that scientists were still divided over whether humans were primarily responsible for the warming of the plan-

et. But how sharp was the split, she wondered? She decided to do something no climate scientist had thought to do: count the published scientific papers. Pulling 928 of them, she was startled to find that not one dissented from the basic findings that warming was underway and human activity was the main reason.

She published that finding in a short paper in the journal Science in 2004, and the reaction was electric. Advocates of climate action seized on it as proof of a level of scientific consensus that most had not fully perceived. Just as suddenly, Dr. Oreskes found herself under political attack.

Some of the voices criticizing her were barely known to her at the time, Dr. Oreskes said. She had connected by then with Dr. Conway. It did not take them long to document that this group,

Rise in Retractions Draws Scrutiny to Science Papers

By BENEDICT CAREY

After two graduate students raised questions in mid-May about a study in the journal Science on how political canvassing affects opinions of same-sex marriage, editors began to investigate. Science soon pulled the paper, by Michael LaCour of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald Green of Columbia University, because of concerns about Mr. LaCour’s data.

The case has played out against an increase in retractions that has alarmed many journal editors and authors.

Scientists in fields as diverse as neurobiology, anesthesia and economics are debating how to reduce misconduct.

The blog Retraction Watch, the first news media outlet to report that the study had been challenged, has charted a 20 percent to 25 percent increase in retractions across some 10,000 medical

and science journals in the past five years: 500 to 600 a year today from 400 in 2010. (The number in 2001 was 40, according to previous research.)

The primary causes are far from clear. More papers are being published in more journals.

New tools for detecting misconduct, like plagiarism-sifting software, have become widely available. The pressure to publish attention-grabbing findings is also stronger than ever — and so is the ability to “borrow” and digitally massage data.

Retraction Watch’s records suggest that about a third of retractions are because of errors, like tainted samples or mistakes in statistics, and about twothirds are because of misconduct, or suspicions of misconduct, such as image manipulation.

The second leading cause is plagiarizing text, followed by republishing — presenting the same results in two or more journals.

Dr. Ivan Oransky helps edit the Retraction Watch.

The blog found that retractions had risen 20 percent to 25 percent in five years.

CHRISTIAN HANSEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Uncovering tainted samples, fake data and plagiarized text.

Faked data is also a factor. No one knows the rate of fraud with any certainty. In a 2011 survey of more than 2,000 psychologists, about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data. Other studies have estimated a rate of about 2 percent.

Yet one offender can do a lot of damage. The Dutch social

psychologist Diederik Stapel published dozens of studies in major journals for nearly a decade based on faked data, investigators at the universities where he had worked concluded in 2011.

Suspicions were first raised by two of his graduate students.

“If I’m a scientist and I fabricate data and put that online, others are going to assume this is accurate data,” said John Budd, a professor at the University of Missouri and an author of one of the first exhaustive analyses of retractions, in 1999.

“There’s no way to know” without inside information.

which included prominent Cold War scientists, had been attacking environmental research for decades, challenging the science of the ozone layer, even the finding that breathing secondhand tobacco smoke was harmful.

Trying to undermine climate science was simply the latest project.

Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway came to believe that the attacks were patterned on the strategy employed by the tobacco industry when evidence of health risks first emerged. Documents showed that the industry had paid certain scientists to contrive dubious research and had cherry-picked evidence to present a misleading picture. The tobacco industry had used these tactics in defense of profits. But Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway wrote that the so-called merchants of doubt had adopted them for a deep ideological reason: contempt for government regulation.

“One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it?” Dr. Oreskes said. “It’s like wine. If the science about climate change were only a few years old, I’d be a skeptic, too.”

People pushing climate denial remain unpersuaded, regularly issuing attacks on Dr. Oreskes.

“Most people would think it’s a bad thing to be a lightning rod, and I cannot say I enjoy it,” she said. “But remember, the whole purpose of a lightning rod is to keep people safe.”

One of Retraction Watch’s most effective allies has been Dr. Steven Shafer, the current editor of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, whose aggressiveness in re-examining published papers has led to scores of retractions.

The field of anesthesia is a leader in retractions, largely because of Dr. Shafer’s efforts.

Other cases emerge from issues raised at post-publication sites, where scientists dig into papers, sometimes anonymously. David Broockman, one of the two who challenged the LaCour-Green paper, had first made public some of his suspicions on a message board called poliscirumors.com.

What these various tipsters, anonymous post-reviewers and whistle-blowers have in common is a nose for data that looks too good to be true, he said.

“Until recently it was unusual for us to report on studies that were not yet retracted,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, an editor of Retraction Watch.

But new technology and a push for transparency from younger scientists have changed that, he said. “We have more tips than we can handle.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Real Concerns Arise About Virtual Reality

By NICK WINGFIELD

The ability of virtual reality to transport people to locales both exotic and ordinary is well known. Yet how the medium will fit into people’s online and offline lives is a new frontier. The best known of a new league of virtual reality headsets, HTC’s Vive by Valve, will start going on sale by the end of the year.

That makes the thousands of developers and early adopters effectively lab rats for these devices. They’re the ones figuring out how to navigate their real-life surroundings when their vision of the real world is shut out.

On a recent night, a dozen people strapped on virtual reality headsets, logged on to the Internet and sat down to watch a movie. The sounds from the virtual movie theater was so accurate that munching potato chips can be problematic. “When all of a sudden 10 avatars turn around and look at you, you know you should be quiet,” said Eric Romo of AltspaceVR, a Silicon Valley start-up that organizes the virtual movie gatherings.

Etiquette around social forms of virtual reality is taking shape as proponents say the promise of the technology has caught up to the hype. Facebook paid $2

With headsets, it’s a challenge to navigate the real world.

There are headsets already on the market that cradle smartphones in front of peoples’ eyes, using lenses and the screens on the devices to create 3-D images.

They have no dangling wires, so users are free to tune out in virtual space while sitting in a restaurant or park. And this year, the Australian airline Qantas started testing mobile virtual reality headsets, made by Samsung, in some airport lounges and firstclass cabins on some flights.

But wearing a virtual reality headset in public could make someone a target for derision and, more seriously, theft. Patrick O’Luanaigh, the chief executive of nDreams, a British developer of virtual reality software, put on a mobile headset earlier this year on a train ride from Reading to Bristol. He turned on an nDreams app called Perfect Beach that simulated the experience of being at the beach.

“You forget where you are other than the vibrations and bouncing,” said Mr. O’Luanaigh, who did not forget to secure his bag between his actual feet.

The protocol for interrupting someone’s virtual reality session isn’t clear, either.

“When you’re in a room with somebody and you have a mobile device in front of you, they think they have your presence,” said Mark Bolas, an associRAMIN TALAIE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ate professor of interVirtual reality headsets are active media at of the University of Southern becoming more common. The California. “In a virtual Oculus Rift at a recent event. environment, they know they don’t have your billion for Oculus VR, a start-up presence. You almost want to that recently showed the final deleave that person alone.”

A trickier challenge could be sign of the virtual reality headset policing virtual reality games that it plans to begin selling next that are social in nature. year. And Sony is getting its own Developers are buzzing over headset ready for PlayStation 4. the possibilities of immersive One question about virtual revirtual worlds in which people ality is what will happen to peoconnect with each other. The pople in the real world when they are transfixed by virtual space. tential for harassment, though, All of the screens in consumers’ which is bad enough in convenlives — whether on televisions, tional online video games, and smartphones and computers — other forms of abuse — especially can be absorbing. They do not, in online settings that permit anhowever, completely occlude onymity — is very real for virtual what’s happening around somereality.

When players in a virtual realone the way virtual reality headsets do. ity game are inhabiting the perPeople immersed in a virtual spective of an avatar, other playreality game can easily lose track ers who get too close to them can of where furniture, windows and feel like they are inappropriately humans are around them. At violating their personal space.

Valve, developers plan to mini“It creates these lifelike experimize unwanted collisions with a ences in a space pretty abstractfeature that it calls a “chaperone” ed from the real world,” said Matt system. The technology maps the McIlwain, managing director of terrain of a room and when someMadrona Venture Group, a venone wearing a headset gets close ture capital firm in Seattle that is to an object, a wireframe model pursuing virtual reality investof the room materializes in the ments. “That has the opportunity virtual space in front of their to amplify both the positives and eyes. negatives of human nature.”

LEFT, JURAJ LIPTÁK/LDA SACHSEN-ANHALT; PAVEL KUZNETSOV AND NATALIA SHISHLINA, BELOW

DNA extracted from bones found near Samara, Russia, below and right; near SaxonyAnhalt, Germany, left; and elsewhere point to three sources of today’s Europeans.

Tracing Roots of Europe With DNA

By CARL ZIMMER

For centuries, archaeologists have reconstructed the early history of Europe by digging up ancient settlements and examining the items that their inhabitants has left behind.

More recently, researchers have been scrutinizing something even more revealing than pots, chariots and swords: DNA. In the journal Nature this month, two teams of scientists — one based at the University of Copenhagen and one based at Harvard University — presented the largest studies to date of ancient European DNA, extracted from 170 skeletons found in countries from Spain to Russia. Both studies indicate that today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe at different stages of history.

The first were hunter-gatherers who arrived some 45,000 years ago. Then came farmers from the Middle East about 8,000 years ago.

Finally, a group of nomadic shepherds from western Russia called the Yamnaya arrived about 4,500 years ago. The authors of the new studies also suggest that the Yamnaya language may have given rise to many of the languages spoken in Europe today.

Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Dublin who was not involved in either study, said that the new studies were “a major game-changer.

To me, it marks a new phase in ancient DNA research.”

The two teams worked independently, studying different skeletons and using different methods to analyze their DNA. The Harvard team collected DNA from 69 human remains dating back 8,000 years and cataloged the genetic variations at almost 400,000 points. The Copenhagen team collected DNA from 101 skeletons dating back about 3,400 years and sequenced the entire genomes.

Both teams also compared the newly sequenced DNA to genes retrieved from other ancient Europeans and Asians, and to living humans.

Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations. Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe from Turkey at the time. But the new evidence shows that it

wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.

The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.

“It’s an amazing cultural process,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. “You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians.

And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.”

From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA

Ancient skeletons’ genes point to three key migrations. began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.

About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived, one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.

The closest match to this new DNA, both teams of scientists found, comes from skeletons found in Yamnaya graves in western Russia and Ukraine.

Archaeologists have long been fascinated by the Yamnaya, who left behind artifacts on the steppes of western Russia and Ukraine dating from 5,300 to 4,600 years ago. The Yamnaya used horses to manage huge herds of sheep, and followed their livestock across the steppes with wagons full of food and water.

It was an immensely successful way of life, allowing the Yamnaya to build huge funeral mounds for their dead, which they filled with jewelry, weapons and even entire chariots.

David W. Anthony, an archaeologist at Hartwick College and an author of the Harvard study, said it was likely that the expansion of Yamnaya into Europe was relatively peaceful.

Dr. Anthony said he thought the most likely scenario was that the Yamnaya “entered into some kind of stable opposition” with the resident Europeans that lasted for a few centuries.

But then, gradually, the barriers between the cultures eroded.

“It wasn’t Attila the Hun coming in and killing everybody,” he said.

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

33

H E A LT H & F I T N E S S

A Class of Drugs Shows Promise Against Cancer

By ANDREW POLLACK

A new drug that unleashes the body’s immune system to attack tumors can prolong the lives of people with the most common form of lung cancer, doctors reported, the latest example of the significant results being achieved by this new class of medicines.

In a separate study, researchers said they had found that a particular genetic signature in the tumor can help predict which patients could benefit from the immune-boosting drugs. The finding could potentially extend use of these drugs to tumors that have seemed almost impervious to the new drugs. “If you have the signature, you should treat with these checkpoint inhibitors,” said Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr., an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and the senior author of the study on the genetic marker, referring to the new drugs.

Both studies were published online in May by the New En-

gland Journal of Medicine.

The checkpoint inhibitors work by releasing molecular brakes, or checkpoints, that prevent the body’s immune system from attacking tumors. The products on the market so far are Keytruda, which is made by Merck, and Opdivo and Yervoy from Bristol-Myers Squibb. All three are approved in the United States to treat melanoma, a deadly skin cancer. Opdivo was also approved in March to treat the so-called squamous-cell form of non-small cell lung cancer, which accounts for about one-quarter of the cases of lung cancer.

The new study shows that Opdivo also prolongs survival for patients with nonsquamous cell lung cancer, which accounts for most of the rest of the cases. Patients who received Opdivo lived a median of 12.2 months compared with 9.4 months for those treated with the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. Moreover, Opdivo, also known as nivolumab, had

far fewer serious side effects.

Patients whose tumors produced a protein called PD-L1, which looks to be another predictor of success for certain checkpoint inhibitors, fared even better. Among just those patients, median survival was 17.2 months in the group receiving Opdivo and nine months for docetaxel.

Other studies have found that Opdivo significantly shrank tumors in 19 percent of patients with advanced liver cancer and Keytruda in 25 percent of patients with head and neck cancer. (Keytruda and Opdivo cost $150,000 a year.) Still other studies have shown the checkpoint inhibitors can help some patients with kidney, bladder, stomach and other forms of cancer. But there have been few signs of effectiveness with colorectal, prostate or pancreatic cancers.

Why do the drugs work so well for some cancers and barely at all for others? One thought is that lung cancer and melanoma are

difficulty perceiving their child’s weight is because of the “new normal”: Throughout the developed world and even in some developing countries, children are generally becoming heavier.

But in an interview, Dr. Katz also cited parents for “willful, genuine denial.” Once a parent acknowledges the child has a problem, he said, “You have to deal with it.”

Other experts counter that the problem can be complicated and subtle, the result of family dynamics. Perhaps there are slender siblings, and the parents cannot figure out a diet that fits all.

It is “natural for a parent to want to think optimistically about their child,” Dr. Thomas N. Robinson, a professor of pediatrics and director of the Center for Healthy Weight at Stanford University in California, wrote in an email. “When they take their loose fitting shirts and pants off in the exam room, you see just how a tremendous amount of body fat can be hidden,” he said.

It is only now, as Bonnie Ryan of Bridgeport, Connecticut, looks at old photographs of her grandson, 12, that she sees how the weight accumulated over the years. At 7, he was “chunky,” she remembers thinking. And at 8, chunkier still. But his father grew to 1.93 meters and 100 kilos. She

hoped her grandson would stretch out, too.

Shortly after her grandson’s checkup at 11, she and her son met with the pediatrician.

Her grandson, the doctor said, was 1.54 meters, 91 kilos and had pre-diabetes.

She has enrolled the boy in Bright Bodies, a healthy lifestyle program in New Haven, sponsored by Yale.

When parents believe their chilGISELLE POTTER dren are active, they are more likely to consider their child’s weight to be normal, studies have shown. But parents often overestimate their children’s activity. A 2011 study in Pediatrics found that parents preferred that physicians use terms like “weight problem” and “unhealthy weight,” rather than “fat” and “obese.”

Research shows that some low-income mothers distrust growth and weight charts.

Of course, a body mass index score or a number on a scale is one factor among many that indicate a child’s overall health.

“But weight is the canary in the coal mine of chronic disease,” Dr. Katz said. He and others said that a first step in helping parents help their children was to set aside the shame that might be their biggest impediment. “It has to be about love,” Dr. Katz said.

“Families have to approach this together.”

Indeed, children may be more aware than their parents that they are overweight.

The other night at Bright Bodies, Ms. Savoye facilitated a discussion in a weight-management group for teenagers. One girl, 15, had lost 14 kilos and had about 18 more to go.

“I wish my parents had done something about my weight earlier,” the girl said.

Childhood Obesity Fed

By Parents In Denial

By JAN HOFFMAN

Not only was the 16-year-old boy 27 kilos overweight, but a blood test showed he might have fatty liver disease. At last, his mother took him to a weight management clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. But she did not at all like the dietitian’s advice.

“I can’t believe you’re telling me I can’t buy Chips Ahoy! cookies,” said the mother.

This was hardly the first time that Mary Savoye, the exasperated dietitian, had counseled parents who seem unable to acknowledge the harsh truth about their child’s weight. “Often they don’t want to accept it because change means a lot of work for everyone, including themselves,” she said.

In a recent study in Childhood Obesity, more than three-quarters of parents of pre-school-age obese sons and nearly 70 percent of parents of obese daughters described their children as “about the right weight.”

The researchers also compared these 2012 survey results with those from a similar survey in 1994. Not only were the children in the recent survey significantly heavier, but the likelihood that parents could identify their child’s weight accurately had declined about 30 percent.

Dr. David L. Katz, the director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, has coined a word for the problem: “oblivobesity.” “Parents cannot ignore the threat of obesity to our children and still hope to fix it,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the new study.

One reason parents may have

Scientists zero in on the most effective way to fight tumors. often caused by things that damage DNA — tobacco smoke and ultraviolet radiation. They thus “have tons of mutations, hundreds of mutations per tumor,” said Dr. Diaz, more than most other tumors. That might make it easier for the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as something to be destroyed.

But some cancers have even more mutations — those with a genetic defect known as mismatch repair deficiency. This deficiency prevents the repair of changes in DNA that can arise as cells divide, allowing mutations to accumulate. The deficiency is found in Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that puts

people at a high risk of developing cancer. The mismatch repair deficiency is also found in about 10 percent of colorectal cancers that are not inherited, and probably in a few percent of many other cancers, including prostate and pancreatic, Dr. Diaz said.

One of the patients in the study, Stefanie Joho, has Lynch syndrome. Her mother had colon cancer at age 44. Ms. Joho was diagnosed with colorectal cancer shortly after graduating from New York University. Two surgeries and two different types of chemotherapy failed to stop the disease. Out of options and in terrible pain despite taking high doses of a narcotic, Ms. Joho returned to her parents’ home outside Philadelphia, where she was mostly bedridden.

But after she began receiving Keytruda in August, her tumor started shrinking. She threw away her narcotics. “I haven’t felt this well in four years,” said Ms. Joho, who is now 25.

Measuring the Rise Of Doughy Dad Bods

By JOSH BARRO and JUSTIN WOLFERS

The Internet has burned recently with commentary about women’s alleged new interest in the soft, doughy “dad bod.”

How much softer does a man’s body get, on average, when he becomes a father?

Every few years the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey herds about 5,000 men and women into medical trailers to be poked, prodded, measured and weighed. On average, the survey found, dads are 5 kilos heavier than nondads; they are carrying nearly an extra five centimeters on their waist; and their bellies stick out an extra centimeter or so.

Health care workers measure the sagittal abdominal diameter by having the subject lie flat on a table so that they can measure how high the navel sits above the table surface to get a measurement.

Half the non-dads in the 18to-45 age bracket had a sagittal abdominal diameter of less than 20 centimeters, but only 29 percent of the dads did. But dads seem to wear their extra paunch with some degree of comfort. Despite the extra five kilos, nearly as many dads described themselves as being “about the right weight” as those who are not dads. (The exact proportions are 49 percent and 53 percent.)

When asked their ideal weight, dads volunteered a number that was two kilos heavier than what non-dads did. And fathers seemed to be making no particular effort to fight the dad bod. They were no more likely than non-dads to say they had tried to lose weight in the last year, with 70

percent saying they hadn’t.

Two pieces of evidence suggest there is something about dads’ lives that causes the dad bod. Although dads weigh five kilos more than non-dads, when those 27 and older in both groups are asked how much they weighed at age 25, the weight difference was much smaller, only a kilo. And the dad bod is barely evident among recent dads while it is much more prominent among those with older children. That relaxation does not seem to be just about getting older. Even after adjusting for differences in age and marital status, a noticeable difference between dad and nondad bods persists.

Some in the news media have called the “dad bod” phenomenon a double standard.

Nobody’s talking approvingly about the “mom bod,” even though the same data show approximately equal parenthood gains in weight, waistline and belly size for men and women.

Parents of both sexes adjust their expectations in the same way: Moms in our age bracket were about four kilos heavier than the non-moms, but much like the dads, they adjusted their average desired weight targets up (by less than two kilos). Yet both moms and nonmoms are much more likely than dads and non-dads to report that they tried to lose weight in the last year, and on average women report they would like to lose about twice as much weight as men.

The “dad bod” fascination seems to be one of the manifestations of the double standard, and perhaps it’s something men have already internalized, by deciding it’s O.K. to let themselves go at least a little.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2015

ARTS & DESIGN

Inner City Is Revisited in Film, This Time With Wit

By JON CARAMANICA

When Shameik Moore got the part of Malcolm, the soft guy in a tough world at the heart of the film “Dope,” he had a problem.

“Dope” is an answer to, a repudiation of and a reconciliation with the streetwise black cinema of the early 1990s, films like “Juice,” “Boyz N the Hood,” “Menace II Society.”

But Mr. Moore, who is just 20 and spent much of his youth in Christian schools, hadn’t seen any of those foundational films.

So for a week before filming began, he embarked on a crash course guided by Rick Famuyiwa, the writer-director of “Dope.”

What Mr. Moore found was context, but not inspiration. “I think what Rick did, how he shot it and edited it, makes it similar,” Mr. Moore said, “but how we performed is totally opposite.”

That’s because “Dope,” now showing in the United States and in select theaters in Europe, is a sort of photonegative of those films, keeping their structure while upending their conventions. The harshness of that era of movies, and its reliance on gangster narratives, is replaced with joy and wit.

In the early 1990s, the antiheroes were as appealing, if not more so, than the heroes. By contrast, “Dope” takes a character type that was effectively invisible in that time — the black nerd — and imbues it with glory. It’s a modern-day black coming-of-age tale for an era in which the heroes are more likely to be creative experimenters like Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Donald Glover than the gangster rappers of decades past.

“There are some gangsters, but it wasn’t shot from the perspective of a gangster,” said Mr. Williams, the music and fashion superstar who served as one of

RACHEL MORRISON/OPEN ROAD FILMS

Shameik Moore as Malcolm in ‘‘Dope,’’ a coming-of-age tale set in a tough black neighborhood. the film’s executive producers and also wrote and produced its music. “It homes in on the mentality of someone who’s from there but not of there. And it doesn’t exclude the ’hood — it includes the ’hood. It’s encouraging.”

Much like those early ’90s films, “Dope” was made on a relatively small budget. After its premiere at Sundance in January, it became one of the most lauded films of this year’s festival circuit, starting a bidding war among distributors (Open Road and Sony won, paying $7 million).

What “Dope” does is reinvigorate the milieu with new characters and perspectives. Malcolm and his two friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori), fetishize 1990s hiphop; play in a punk band, Awreeoh (pronounced oreo); and try to steer clear of trouble. They are on the bottom of the high

A film where the ‘gangsters’ use the computer lab. school food chain, largely anonymous except when being muscled by the local hoodlums.

Malcolm aspires to get into Harvard University, and in his quest, an unlikely series of events propel him and his friends into a caper that takes them into the gang and drug underworlds they’ve spent years avoiding.

But all the usual criminal touchstones are upended: They use their school’s science and computer labs for work space, use the Internet to facilitate distribution primarily to suburban white kids, and the spoils end up largely as Bitcoins.

Malcolm never quite becomes

a full antihero — rather he, like the film, plays with expectations, shifting attitudes and approaches as the situations warrant.

“Dope” not only recasts the outsider as hero but also peels back the outer layer of the tough-guy character to reveal something much more complex.

Malcolm finds himself under the thumb of Dom (ASAP Rocky), a drug dealer who between transactions discusses drone strikes on Al Qaeda and is precise in his use of words.

What Mr. Famuyiwa — who turns 42 this month and spent his teenage years in Inglewood, California, where “Dope” is set — wanted to capture was a sympathy to the circumstances that could lead even a well-intentioned young person down a bad, irreversible path. “In my mind, they were regular kids,” he said.

That speaks to some of the nuance that was lost as films like “Menace” and “Boyz” became

Tech Novel Unveils Layers of Paranoia

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

A strange thing happened when Joshua Cohen was writing “Book of Numbers.” It started to come true. He had already written most of the book, a dizzying story about a struggling novelist named Joshua Cohen who is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of the billionaire founder of Tetration, a technology company whose mission is to “equalize ourselves with data and data with ourselves.”

The fictional Joshua Cohen learns that Tetration is sharing consumers’ search-engine history with government intelligence agencies. Several years ago, the real Joshua Cohen showed a draft to a friend, an expert in cybersecurity and civil liberties who warned him that a plot twist based on such a revelation might be a bit of a stretch.

Then, in the summer of 2013, Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor, leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents revealing the extent of the United States government’s surveillance of its citi-

An author’s world of extensive monitoring comes true. zens, and the role that communications and technology companies played in handing over data.

“The world made this book true while I was writing it, which of course is the paranoid’s greatest fantasy,” Mr. Cohen said. “The question now is not, ‘Is this true,’ but, ‘How can we live with it?’ ” The novelist Adam Ross has called Mr. Cohen’s book “the single best novel yet written about what it means to remain human in the Internet Era.” The narrative explores how technology permeates every aspect of our daily lives and consciousness, altering how we construct our sense of self and infecting our speech.

Mr. Cohen, 34, said a simple, nagging question provided the

spark for the novel. “What are the basic principles behind these devices that have come to dominate every aspect of my life?” he said.

He read more than 180 books about surveillance and cybersecurity, about the history and architecture of the Internet, and about innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse, a German computer pioneer. He visited the National Security Agency’s museum of cryptology. He studied patents.

He learned to write code.

He turned to his friend Ben Wizner, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, for feedback. Mr. Wizner, who ended up representing Mr. Snowden, said the depiction of the “surveillance economy” in “Book of Numbers” was accurate, and added that he hoped the book would drive a more robust discussion about Internet-enabled surveillance.

“There’s a frustration on the law and advocacy side about how abstract some of these issues can seem to the public,” he said. “For

DANNY GHITIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Joshua Cohen read 180 books on technology before writing ‘‘Book of Numbers.’’ some people, the novelist’s eye can show the power and the danger of these systems in ways that we can’t.”

Mr. Cohen grew up in New Jersey and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music. When he was 20, he moved to Berlin with money from a music composition prize.

“I went with this romantic idea that I would just write and live on $300 a month,” he said. “I’ve spent a decade entirely broke, published by small presses, read

phenomena. In the early 1990s, “the most pop thing you could be was a gangster,” said Allen Hughes, who with his brother Albert wrote and directed “Menace II Society,” the bleakest of that era’s movies. “There wasn’t any optimism at all in our film.”

Mr. Famuyiwa presents the Bottoms — the rough section of Inglewood where much of the action takes place — lavishly and with love.

“Dope,” he said, plays to his creative ambitions while also allowing him to close the circle with the films of the early 1990s that helped shape him and the broader conversation about black cinema.

“I was very specific that I wanted ‘Dope’ to be in that genre,” Mr. Famuyiwa said. “I wanted to use everyone’s preconceptions, and also the language those films introduced, to ask why as an audience we’ve accepted those conventions so easily.”

by no one.”

Earlier this month, Random House published “Book of Numbers,” which some have compared to works by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon.

It also shares some literary DNA with classic stories by Poe, Nabokov and Dostoyevsky about doppelgängers and doubles, a theme that Mr. Cohen felt was ripe for reworking in the Internet age. In the novel, the writer Joshua Cohen is handpicked to ghostwrite the memoir of Tetration’s founder partly because they have the same name, and he is irked that his famous subject takes up the first 324 entries on Tetration’s search rankings, making his own writing virtually invisible.

The real Mr. Cohen has been similarly haunted by another Joshua Cohen, a political philosopher. Once, when Mr. Cohen was giving a reading in Berlin, a man approached him with the other Joshua Cohen’s books to sign.

The man could not be reasoned with, so he signed them.

But Mr. Cohen has started to overshadow his Internet twin in search engine rankings. He said, “I’m destroying him on Google, which makes me so happy.”