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INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

Sanctity of Truth

Latin America Balks at U.S. War on Drugs

By WILLIAM NEUMAN and SIMON ROMERO

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombia just discarded a cornerstone of the American-backed fight against drugs, blocking the aerial spraying of coca, the plant used to make cocaine. Bolivia kicked out the United States Drug Enforcement Administration years ago and allows farmers to grow small amounts of the crop.

Chile, long one of Latin America’s most socially conservative countries, is gathering its first

medical marijuana harvest.

Across the Americas, governments are increasingly resisting the tenets of the United Statesled approach to fighting drugs, challenging strategies like prohibition, the eradication of crops and a militarized stance to battling growers.

“For the first time in 40 years, there is significant pushback from Latin American countries, which endured much of the drug war’s suffering,” said Paul Gootenberg, a historian on Latin America.

In many ways, the resistance reflects the declining influence of the United States in Latin America and a sweeping sense that its methods to fight drugs in the region have failed.

“If you use the same tools for 50 years and the problem isn’t solved, something is not working right,” said Yesid Reyes, the justice minister in Colombia.

The shift comes at a time of changing attitudes and concerns in the United States as well.

Political figures in countries

like Uruguay, which is cautiously regulating its legal marijuana industry, are looking at American states like Colorado and Washington that have legalized the sale of recreational marijuana.

Officials from Uruguay even insist that their controls are more stringent in some ways than Colorado’s.

The reasons Latin American countries are calling for an overhaul of drug policies vary from country to country, but they largely involve attempts

to diminish the bloodshed from the drug trade and relieve prison systems strained by surging inmate populations. Latin America’s emergence as a major drug market — Brazil now ranks among the world’s largest cocaine consumers — is also influencing the debate.

“The cost in blood and treasure from the drug war has been overwhelming,” said Bruce M. Bagley, a specialist on the

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 26

Defeating Drought In Israel

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — At the peak of the drought, Shabi Zvieli, an Israeli gardener, feared for his livelihood.

A hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption. Many of Mr. Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants. “I worried about where gardening was going,” said Mr. Zvieli, 56.

Across the country, Israelis were told to cut their shower time by two minutes.

Washing cars with hoses was outlawed, and those few wealthy enough to absorb the cost of maintaining a lawn were permitted to water it only at night.

“We were in a situation where we were very, very close to someone opening a tap somewhere in the country and no water would come out,” said Uri Schor, the spokesman for the government’s Water Authority.

That was about six years ago. Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. “The fear has gone,” said Mr. Zvieli.

A revolution has taken place in Israel. A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced.

“Now there is no problem of water,” said Shaul Ben-Dov, an agronomist at Ramat Rachel. “The price is higher, but we can live a normal life in a country that is half desert.”

INTELLIGENCE

Echoes of Mao when Chinese talk. PAGE 24

URIEL SINAI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A hotel pool in the Negev desert, filled with water delivered from a replenished Sea of Galilee in the north.

With its pa rt-Mediterra nea n, part-desert climate, Israel had suffered from chronic shortages and exploitation of its natural water resources for decades.

The natural fresh water at Israel’s disposal in an average year does not cover its total use of about two trillion liters.

The demand for potable water is projected to rise to 1.95 trillion liters by 2030, from 1.2 trillion this year.

The turnaround came with a seven-year drought that began in 2005 and peaked in the winter of 2008 to 2009. The country’s main natural water sources —

WORLD TRENDS

A tourist spot’s ties to Wahhabism. PAGE 28

the Sea of Galilee in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers — were severely depleted, threatening an irreversible deterioration of the water quality.

Measures to increase the supply and reduce the demand were accelerated, overseen by the Water Authority, a new agency.

Four major, privately owned desalination plants went into operation over the past decade. A fifth one should be ready in months. They will produce more than 492 billion liters of potable water a year, with a goal of 757 billion liters by 2020.

MONEY & BUSINESS

Overhead view of fields aids farmers. PAGE 29

Israel has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 percent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about 55 percent of the total water used for agriculture.

Spain is second to Israel, recycling 17 percent of its effluent, according to Water Authority data.

Before the establishment of the Water Authority, various ministries were responsible for different aspects of the water issue, each with its own interests

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 26

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Retracing a continental crash. PAGE 32

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY

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

U.S. Pushes Back In South China Sea The United States has good reason to push back more forcefully against China’s grab for power in the South China Sea, as Defense Secretary Ashton Carter did on a recent trip to Asia.

Beijing has repeatedly ignored earlier warnings to moderate the aggressive behavior that is unsettling its regional neighbors and further undermining its relations with the United States.

On May 29, American officials disclosed that China had installed two mobile artillery vehicles on an artificial island it is building in the sea, which is rich in natural resources like oil and gas and where China clearly hopes to establish some form of

hegemony.

The weapons are not considered a threat to American naval forces. Still, they reinforce fears that China intends to militarize the Spratly Islands, a collection of reefs and rocks also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan, and use them to control the waterway’s shipping lanes and dominate its smaller neighbors.

China’s ambitions have become increasingly clear since 2012 when it publicly asserted a claim to 80 percent of the South China Sea. In recent months, photographic evidence from commercial satellites and American spy planes has left little doubt

that China is moving with alarming speed to turn the Spratlys into more substantial land masses, complete with runways and harbors.

Some American officials now believe China regards its claims in the South China Sea as nonnegotiable. If so, that’s terrible news for the region but also ultimately for China, which claims it prizes stability but will find it impossible to realize its economic goals if Asia is in constant tension. China’s bullying on the South China Sea has already caused many Asian countries to forge closer defense ties with the United States.

Now the Obama administra-

tion has decided to more firmly underscore America’s intention to remain a Pacific power and to ensure that the region and its waters remain accessible to all nations. That is a role the United States has played constructively for decades, promoting a stability that has allowed Japan, South Korea and other countries, including China, to develop. “There should be no mistake: The United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, as forces do around the world,” Mr. Carter said in his speech. He also called for “an immediate and lasting halt to land reclamation by all claimants.”

Although the administration would prefer a peaceful resolution of all South China Sea disputes, it cannot allow China’s claims to go unchallenged. It sent a surveillance plane close to one of China’s artificial islands, is considering air and sea patrols that could go closer to disputed reefs and shoals, and is expanding military exercises with regional partners.

President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping of China plan to meet later this year. In the meantime, American officials and their Chinese counterparts must avoid any miscalculation that could lead to a direct confrontation.

INTELLIGENCE/MURONG XUECUN

Decades of Communist Party blather have washed through a mighty propaganda machine straight into people’s minds in China, some say. A Chinese government propaganda billboard with the words ‘‘China dream, is my dream’’ near a construction site in Beijing.

Corrupting The Chinese Language Hong Kong On a recent walk along a street in the southern Chinese city of Sanya, I heard a shop pumping out a rock version of the famous Communist Party anthem “Socialism Is Good.” Although I loathe this song, as the music became louder, I still found myself singing along under my breath. “The reactionaries toppled / Imperialists flee with their tails between their legs. ... The Communist Party is good / The Communist Party is good / The Communist Party is a good leader of the people.”

For decades, Communist Party songs like this one have been ringing in Chinese people’s ears.

For many people, myself included, these songs formed the soundtrack to our youth. Even today, though the party has become Communist in name only, they still flood the airwaves. It’s difficult to overestimate the extent of their influence not only on the Chinese spirit, but on the Chinese language itself.

More than 60 years of Communist hate education, inane propaganda and the comprehensive Murong Xuecun is a novelist and blogger and the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.”

This article was translated

by The New York Times from Chinese. Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

destruction of classical civilization have spawned a new style of speaking and writing. The Chinese language has become brutalized — and the Communist Party is largely to blame.

It’s not only government proclamations that clank with harsh cadences and revolutionary fervor, but also literary and scholarly works, and most disturbing, private speech. The default lingo of high party officials includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”

The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr’s blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform no-

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ble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”

Decades of this party blather have washed through a mighty propaganda machine straight into people’s minds and into the Chinese vernacular. In recent years, I have even heard many friends, some dissidents, using the language of our propagandists, and not ironically.

Two years ago, in a small town in central Shanxi Province, I overheard two old farmers debating whether a bowl of rice or a steamed bun was more satisfying. As the argument became more heated, one farmer accused the other, without irony, of being a “metaphysicist.”

Mao was skeptical of metaphysics and thus it became a dubious concept, used in Chinese propaganda as a pejorative term. It’s fair to assume these two farmers didn’t know much about metaphysics, yet they were using the term as an insult, straight out of the party lexicon.

Other phrases like “idealist” and “petit bourgeois sentimentalist” have become everyday terms of abuse, even when those who use them clearly have no real idea what they mean.

Revolutionary language is ubiquitous among normal Chinese people. We commonly refer

to economic sectors like industry and agriculture as “battle fronts.” Continuing to work while sick is likened to “the wounded not leaving the front line.” Many big enterprises talk about their marketing teams as “armies” or “troops,” and their sales territories as “battle zones.”

The literary scholar Perry Link and others have called this “Mao language.” In a 2012 essay on ChinaFile, the Asia Society’s website, Mr. Link wrote that such talk is “much more freighted with military metaphors and political biases than most.” In that same article, he gave some pointed examples of how Mao language has seeped into everyday usage: “At the ends of banquets, even today, mainland Chinese sometimes urge their friends to xiaomie [annihilate] the leftovers; a mother on a bus, the last time I was in Beijing, answered her little boy, who said, “Ma, I really need to pee!” by saying, “Jianchi! [Be resolute!] Uncle bus driver can’t stop here.”

In his 1942 Yan’an speech exhorting authors and artists to “serve the people,” Mao called for writers to use language people can understand. Even in essays he wrote before the Communist Party took power, Mao rebuked

the use of “shady” words that “the masses” wouldn’t understand. In direct response to Mao’s dictates, the party promoted “the people’s language” — a plain and easy- to-understand style.

The Communist Party’s dumbing down of our language was a deliberate effort to debase public discourse. In this atmosphere, words lose real meaning. The party can then use words to obfuscate and lie.

High party officials talk about building a socialist state under the “rule of law,” but when they use the phrase, they mean that the party uses the law to rule the people.

This use of language to obscure and confuse serves a clear objective: to conceal the reality of China’s lack of democracy and to pretend that democracy exists.

I can’t claim to have the answer for how to resist the party’s use of language. Nor do I know how to stop it from seeping into our vernacular. Even someone like me, a writer who is acutely aware of how the party tries to manipulate us, can’t avoid humming party songs from time to time.

My big fear is best summed up

by George Orwell, who wrote, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

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MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

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WORLD TRENDS NEWS ANALYSIS

Keeping Peace, Accused of Abuse

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

ment is sending the troops back to their home countries and barring them from serving in future missions.

The audit, carried out by the Office of Internal Oversight, found that despite the United Nations’ promise of zero tolerance of sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers, effective enforcement “is hindered by a complex architecture, prolonged delays, unknown and varying outcomes and severely deficient assistance.”

United Nations officials point to signs of improvement.

Allegations of sexual abuse against peacekeepers have declined, they say, though they concede that underreporting is a problem. And they argue that troop-contributing countries are getting better at pursuing accountability and telling the United Nations about it.

Sexual abuse by peacekeepers plagues more than United Nations missions. Human Rights Watch compiled a report on rape and sexual exploitation by African Union troops in Somalia in 2012 and 2013. The African Union investigated the allegations, promising zero tolerance, but it said it could not substantiate the majority of cases because the accused soldiers had been sent home.

In the Central African Republic case, French and United Nations officials have blamed each other for delays in the investigation.

According to the ERIC FEFERBERG/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES Boys in the Central African Republic have children’s testimonies, the suspected accused French peacekeepers of sexual abuse began in abuse, but no one has been charged.

December 2013.

In May 2014, the troops in Bangui — it is up to the United Nations human rights soldiers’ countries to investigate office appointed an employee in and prosecute such cases. The Bangui to interview children.

United Nations has no legal auBy mid-July, the report was sent up the United Nations hierthority to prosecute or punish a country’s soldiers. archy to a director of field operFrance has announced an ations, who said he told his boss official investigation into the of the findings and then gave the accusations against its troops. report to French diplomats in But in many instances, some Geneva. countries do not respond to Not until March 28 did the queries from United Nations United Nations send an official headquarters about how — or copy of its Bangui inquiry to the whether — they investigate their government of France. soldiers abroad, according to a In March, Secretary General recent internal audit obtained Ban Ki-moon recommended

by The New York Times. When speedier investigations, a fund countries do punish their troops, to assist victims and the naming the sanctions vary widely. and shaming of those countries The audit found that of all the that do not disclose how they sexual abuse allegations lodged investigate and prosecute their against United Nations persontroops.

“Zero tolerance,” for sexual nel, both military and civilian, abuse, he said in a report to the between 2008 and 2013, roughly General Assembly, must mean one-third involved children. working with governments Yet there is a long list of ob“to ensure violators are held stacles to holding perpetrators responsible through financial, responsible, the audit found: disciplinary and/or criminal acInvestigations are mired in bureaucracy; commanders are countability measures.” not held accountable for what Two months later, the story of happens in their ranks; and the French soldiers in the Central most common form of punishAfrican Republic came out.

UNITED NATIONS — “Petit, viens,” — little boy, come here — a French soldier called out at a checkpoint in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

For five months, an unknown number of people in the French forces, sent to protect civilians from the violence tearing the country apart, forced boys to perform oral sex on them, according to testimonies collected by the United Nations. The boys, ages 9 to 15, said they had sometimes been lured with the promise of military rations.

Nearly a year after the allegations came to light, no one has been charged, let alone punished.

The allegations and the aftermath have highlighted an abiding problem of international peacekeeping: How can foreign forces be held accountable when those who are sent to protect civilians in war zones end up hurting them instead?

Whether peacekeepers serve the United Nations or are under their own national commanders — as in the case of the French

PHOTOGRAPHS BY SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Asian Migrants’ Nightmare Persists

By CHRIS BUCKLEY and AUSTIN RAMZY

GELUGOR, Malaysia — The more than 3,000 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar who have landed in Indonesia and Malaysia ended weeks of a nightmare at sea only to fall into an administrative limbo that could last years, even decades.

Malaysia and Indonesia have agreed to shelter the migrants, and thousands more who may still be at sea, on the condition that they be returned home or resettled in third countries within a year. But few countries seem willing to accept the migrants, even the ones who qualify as refugees deserving asylum. There is also a tremendous backlog of applicants seeking resettlement, and the agencies that deal with them are overwhelmed.

“Even if we get the U.N. refugee status, we still don’t know how long we must wait before we can be resettled,” said Hasinah Ezahar, 28, who survived illness, hunger and threats from the smugglers she paid for the three-week sea journey with three of her children from western Myanmar. “Until then, our lives are just waiting.”

Her family was part of a wave of migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar seeking to escape poverty and, in the case of ethnic Rohingya like Ms. Hasinah, religious persecution. There are at least 200,000 Rohingya migrants from Myanmar in Bangladesh, and only 32,600 of them have been granted protection as refugees fleeing persecution, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Several hundred have been resettled from refugee camps in Bangladesh to other countries.

In Malaysia, those determined to be refugees and eligible for resettlement, a process that could take years, would join more than 45,000 Rohingya who are classified as refugees and are waiting to be taken in Chris Buckley reported from Gelugor; Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong. Michael Forsythe contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

Over 3,000 migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar landed in Indonesia and Malaysia. A make-shift hospital in Indonesia. Top, Rohingya at a shelter in Indonesia. by another country.

They receive no government aid while they wait, nor can they legally take jobs. They also cannot send their children to government-accredited schools and are suspended in a social and legal limbo that local charities and undocumented jobs can only partly relieve.

“It’s very frustrating for us,” said Anwar Ahmad, a Rohingya who has lived in Malaysia for 18 years and makes a living in the informal labor market. “We’re grateful that we can stay here, and grateful for the help we receive, but without a stronger official status, I have no future here in Malaysia.”

Even winning recognition as refugees through the United Nations refugee agency has become forbiddingly slow. Amy Smith, an executive director of Fortify Rights, a human rights group focusing on Southeast Asia, said the United Nations refugee agency gave priority to those held in detention.

About 1,000 recent arrivals are housed in the Belantik immigration detention depot in northern Malaysia. Those detainees, she said, might have their cases decided in seven to nine months. The others will wait even longer.

Migration experts say about half of the latest wave are economic migrants from Bangladesh who do not meet the re-

quirements for refugee status.

They will be sent home, the Malaysian and Indonesian governments say, where their government may not embrace them.

The Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people who have long faced discrimination and have been deprived of basic rights in Myanmar, are likely to meet the criteria for refugee status under international law, namely having “a well-founded fear” of persecution for reasons of race, religion or nationality in their home country. They would be entitled to resettlement in third countries.

The foreign ministers of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia said in late May their countries would host any refugees permanently.

About 1,000 Rohingyas were resettled in the United States in the last year, and Gambia said that it would take in all the Rohingya migrants, but experts questioned whether it had the capacity. Europe has its own migration crisis.

Ms. Hasinah, who lives with her husband and children in a single room, has a more pressing concern: a 13-year-old son she left behind because she could not afford to pay the smugglers to take all four children. Her family is seeking the means to bring him to Malaysia.

“Wherever we go,” she said, “it must be with my son.”

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

WORLD TRENDS

Latin America Balks At War on Drugs Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 Latin American drug trade at the University of Miami.

“Leaders are looking at the militarized approach and saying they don’t want 40 more years of Colombian-like policies.”

But the alternative is unclear.

In Colombia, government officials recently suspended aerial spraying of the coca crop, citing concerns that the herbicide used may cause cancer in humans. But while Mr. Reyes advocates the decriminalization of drug use, he and his government have made no concrete proposals to put that into effect.

Mr. Reyes said that Colombia had achieved much success in the fight against drug traffickers and would not back off, and might even resume spraying if it found a safer chemical.

Colombia is one of the closest allies of the United States in

Eradication and incarceration failed to cut drug use.

Latin America, so its decision to stop aerial spraying was highly symbolic. The tactic was a central part of its American-backed antidrug effort, and Colombia’s decision was made over objections from Washington. But once it was clear that Colombia would go its own way, American officials offered public support.

Many Latin American countries are still trying to figure out what their new policies should be. Voters in the region have not embraced the drive to legalize drugs. Politically, it is rarely a win.

In Guatemala, President Otto Pérez Molina has said he would consider creating legal, government-regulated markets Randal C. Archibold, Michael S. Schmidt, Susan Abad and Andrea Zarate contributed reporting.

for some drugs to neutralize the power of drug gangs. But he has made no concrete proposals.

President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico has said he is open to a debate on legalization, but he has done little to propel discussions on it. Even in Mexico City, a progressive bastion in an otherwise conservative country, decriminalization efforts have faltered. Mr. Peña Nieto came into office with a focus on improving the economy, playing down the country’s problems with drug gangs and organized crime. But in response to the violent attacks of criminal groups, he has captured or killed their top leaders.

In Bolivia, President Evo Morales kicked out American D.E.A. agents in 2009 and won an exception to a United Nations antidrug convention that acknowledges the right of Bolivia to allow traditional uses of coca. He also has pushed ahead with a system permitting farmers to grow small plots of coca, which has been chewed as a mild stimulant for centuries.

Yet he has not joined calls for legalization of cocaine or other drugs.

In Peru, another major producer of cocaine, Congress is considering a law that would allow the armed forces to shoot down planes suspected of carrying drugs. That would reverse a ban that went into place in 2001, after a plane carrying American missionaries was shot down by mistake and two Americans were killed.

Brazil passed a drug law intended to keep recreational drug users out of prison, substituting measures like community service. But loopholes in the law have led it to have the opposite effect, and the number of people sent to prison in Brazil for drug offenses, including minor ones, has soared.

“There is no consensus in Latin America as to what drug policy should look like,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution.

“What we are definitely going to see is countries increasingly adopting their own policies and experimenting with policies.”

RAUL ARBOLEDA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

The feeling in Latin America is that America’s tactics to fight the drug trade have failed. Colombian soldiers burning a coca field last year.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY URIEL SINAI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Israel Defeats an Old Enemy, Drought Israel says it gives Palestinians more water than it is obliged to. A man showering at a beach in Tel Aviv. Above, an ancient aqueduct in the West Bank.

Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 and lobbies.

“There was a lot of hydro-politics,” said Eli Feinerman of the faculty of agriculture, food and environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who served for years as a public representative on the authority’s council.

“The right hand did not know what the left was doing.”

The Israeli government began by making huge cuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagant overuse of heavily subsidized water for agriculture.

The tax for surplus household use was dropped at the end of 2009, and a two-tiered tariff system was introduced. Regular household water use is now subsidized by a slightly higher rate paid by those who consume more than the basic allotment.

Water Authority representatives went house to house offering to fit free devices on shower heads and taps that inject air into the water stream, saving about a third of the water used while still giving the impression of a strong flow.

Officials say that wiser use of water has led to a reduction in household consumption of up to 18 percent.

And instead of the municipal authorities being responsible for the maintenance of city pipe networks, local corporations have been formed. The money collected for water is reinvested in the infrastructure.

Mekorot, the national water company, built the national water carrier 50 years ago, a system for transporting water from the Sea of Galilee in the north through the heavily populated center to the arid south. Now it is building new infrastructure to carry water west to east, from the Mediterranean coast inland.

Desalination, long shunned by many as a costly energy-guzzler with a heavy carbon footprint, is becoming cheaper, cleaner and more energy efficient as technologies advance. Sidney Loeb, the American scientist who invented the popular reverse osmosis method, came to live in Israel in 1967 and taught the

ONLINE: WATER REVOLUTION

Images from the battle Israel is winning against dryness: nytimes.com Search Israel water

water professionals here.

The Sorek desalination plant rises out of the sandy ground about 15 kilometers south of Tel Aviv. Said to be the largest plant of its kind in the world, it produces 151 billion liters of potable water a year, enough for about a sixth of Israel’s roughly eight million citizens.

Miriam Faigon, the director of the solutions department at IDE Technologies, the Israeli company that built three of the plants along the Mediterranean, said that the company had cut energy levels and costs with new technologies and a variety of practical methods.

Under a complex arrangement, the plants will be transferred to state ownership after 25 years.

For now, the state buys Sorek’s desalinated water for a relatively cheap 58 cents a cubic meter — more than free rainwater, Ms. Faigon acknowledged, “but that’s only if you have it.”

Some Israelis are cynical about the water revolution. Tsur Shezaf, who grows wine and olives in the southern Negev, argues that desalination is essentially a privatization of Israel’s water supply that benefits a few tycoons, while recycling for agriculture allows the state to sell the same water twice.

Israeli environmentalists say the rush to desalination has

partly come at the expense of alternatives like treating natural water reserves that have become polluted by industry, particularly the military industries in the coastal plain.

“We definitely felt that Israel did need to move toward desalination,” said Sarit Caspi-Oron, a water expert at the nongovernment Israel Union for Environmental Defense. “But it is a question of how much, and of priorities. Our first priority was conservation and treating and reclaiming our water sources.”

Some environmentalists also say that the open-ocean intake method used by Israel’s desalination plants, as opposed to subsurface intakes, can destroy sea life, sucking in billions of fish eggs and larvae.

But Boaz Mayzel, a marine biologist at the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, said that the effects were not yet known and would have to be checked over time.

In the parched Middle East, water also has strategic implications.

Struggles between Israel and its Arab neighbors over water rights in the Jordan River basin contributed to tensions leading to the 1967 Middle East war.

Israel, which shares the mountain aquifer with the West Bank, says it provides the Palestinians with more water than it is obliged to under the existing peace accords. The Palestinians say it is not enough and too expensive. A new era of water generosity could help foster relations with the Palestinians and with Jordan.

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

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WORLD TRENDS NEWS ANALYSIS

More Students in School, but Not Always Learning An educated population is critical for shared prosperity, which is essential to a country’s economic growth. A classroom in King Williams Town, South Africa.

By EDUARDO PORTER

A quarter of a century ago, barely half the children of primary school age in sub-Saharan Africa were enrolled in school. By 2012, the share was 78 percent.

In South Asia, primary school enrollment jumped to 94 percent from 75 percent over the same period.

Policy makers around the world have come to understand the importance of learning for every aspect of human development. Universal primary education was one of the United Nations’ core Millennium Development Goals, which mobilized large amounts of aid in the first decade of the century for poor countries to expand access.

But despite this advance, a peek under the headline statistics suggests that much of the world has progressed little. If the challenge was to provide a minimum standard of education for all, what looks like an enormous improvement too often amounted to a stunning failure.

“We’ve made substantial progress around the globe in sending people to school,” said Eric Hanushek, an expert on the economics of education at Stanford University in California. “But a large number of people who have gone to school haven’t learned anything.”

Can the world do better? Experts and diplomats have been working for two years to create a set of Sustainable Development Goals to succeed the previous millennium goals in guiding development strategy and steering international aid over the next 15 years. The targets are expected to be adopted by the United Nations in September.

An educated population is a critical precondition for broadly

TODD HEISLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

shared prosperity — an essential tool for nations seeking a role in the global production chains driving economic growth around the world. But simply pursuing “universal education” will not get us there. It cannot do the job alone.

Aiming resources at expanding access will probably be fruitless without an understanding of what a quality education means. And without some clear, measurable standards laying out the skills that must be achieved, the strategy is likely to fall short again.

A report published recently by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs the PISA standardized tests taken every few years by a sample of 15-year-olds in some 75 countries, offers a distressing take on the state of the world’s learning. Even among relatively wealthy countries, many students fail to master the most basic skills.

Take Mexico, a middle-income economy with its near-universal primary education and a secondary school enrollment of 70 percent. In the 2012 PISA test, 54 percent of Mexican students failed to meet the most basic level of proficiency, which the

A U.N. document with hazy promises of ‘effective’ education.

O.E.C.D. considers “necessary for participating productively in modern economies.”

Achieving PISA’s Level 1 requires only a sort of functional literacy. Among 15-year-olds, 89 percent of Ghanaians failed to reach this level, as did 74 per-

cent of Indonesians, 64 percent of Brazilians and 24 percent of Americans.

It is not surprising that the world settled for targets on the quantity of education but skimped on quality.

“Universal education is an agenda with no opposition; it offers free services and swells public employment,” said Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development. “Quality is a little more politically contentious.”

Policies aimed at promoting enrollment, like subsidies or the conditional cash transfers offered to parents who sent their children to school in Mexico or Brazil, added students to the system without improving its capacity.

“Systems were overburdened by the influx of children coming in,” said Chandrika Bahadur, director for Education Initiatives at the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Solutions

Network, “and very quickly it became a problem to ensure that they were learning well.”

They weren’t. There is still little information on how well — or badly — children are doing at school in many countries. But a recent effort by the World Bank to measure the quality of education systems in some African countries painted a dismal tableau of what they are being offered.

In Uganda, only one in five elementary schoolteachers meets the minimum standard of proficiency in math, language and pedagogy. Few of them spend much time teaching anyway. In surprise visits to public schools, survey takers found that 27 percent of teachers were absent. Of those present, 56 percent were not in the classroom during teaching hours.

The O.E.C.D. report proposes providing universal secondary education by 2030 that ensures all students achieve the basic level of skill as measured by PISA. The economic gains, it argues, would more than pay for the effort.

The goals under discussion do not focus on quality. The draft of the United Nations document hazily promises “equitable and effective” universal secondary education with “relevant and effective” learning outcomes. But it fails to define the terms.

Achieving quality will be tough. But without an improvement not just in the inputs to education (like the number of teachers and time devoted to instruction) but in student performance as well, much of the effort may go to waste.

“Equity at the price of poor overall outcomes,” said Andreas Schleicher, who heads PISA at the O.E.C.D., “is not doing anyone any good.”

Man and Machine March On We were supposed to be doomed. It turns out we’re not, at least not right now.

The Times recently looked back at the 1960s, a period when the demise LENS of the human race was on many minds.

The big worry was overpopulation, a topic that inspired books, pop music and scientific research.

Among the notable works was “The Population Bomb,” a 1968 book by Paul R. Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford University in California, which predicted the next 15 years would bring “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” Hundreds of millions were to have starved to death in the 1970s.

So what went wrong — or rather, what went right?

For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

One of the big advancements, The Times noted, was in agricultural production. High-yield, disease-resistant crops vastly improved the world’s ability to feed itself. And birthrates are falling, for a variety of reasons.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns about running out of resources. But much of the concern has shifted from overpopulation to overconsumption. The Times highlighted the warnings of Fred Pearce, a British writer specializing in population issues. “Rising consumption today far outstrips the rising head count as a threat to the planet,” Mr. Pearce wrote in the magazine Prospect five years ago.

Given worries about issues like carbon emissions and water shortages, changing the behavior of those doing the consuming has become a science of its own.

A group of researchers from Harvard and Yale wrote in The Times that one traditional approach to lowering consumption — raising the cost, be it a higher water bill or a carbon tax — is

often ineffective.

What does work, they wrote, is appealing to “people’s desire for others to think highly of them.” This means making it obvious to everyone who is being cooperative and who is being selfish. As an example, they imagined putting up lawn signs in California noting those who pledged to reduce water consumption. They noted a San Francisco software company that sends mailers letting people compare their water use to their neighbors’.

“Making others better off is not our main motivation to give,” the researchers wrote. “We cooperate because it makes us look good.”

Dr. Ehrlich, the “Population Bomb” author, would probably doubt such efforts. Now 83, he still sees things ending badly, soon. If he were issuing his warning today, he said, “my language would be even more apocalyptic.”

Others might still bet on technology’s ability to keep pace with the challenges. While

PASCAL ROSSIGNOL/REUTERS

A biologist predicted in the 1960s that humans would very soon be incapable of feeding the exploding world population. the warnings of gloom were happening back in the 1960s, Gordon Moore was making his own predictions. Then the head of research for Fairchild Semiconductor and later a founder of Intel, he foresaw continuing advances in computing power that have happened so reliably his prediction is known as Moore’s Law. “Moore pretty much anticipated the personal computer,

the cellphone, self-driving cars, the iPad, Big Data and the Apple Watch,” The Times’s Thomas L. Friedman wrote.

Mr. Friedman asked Mr. Moore what he had learned from being so right.

“I guess one thing I’ve learned,” Mr. Moore answered, “is once you’ve made a successful prediction, avoid making another one.”

ALAN MATTINGLY

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

WORLD TRENDS DIRIYAH JOURNAL

Restoring the Birthplace of the Modern Saudi State

By BEN HUBBARD

DIRIYAH, Saudi Arabia — More than 250 years ago, the ancestors of the Saudi royal family and an outcast fundamentalist preacher formed an alliance that has shaped this land ever since.

In return for political supremacy, the House of Saud endorsed the doctrine of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahhab and followed it to wage jihad against anyone who rejected their creed.

That alliance laid the foundations of the modern Saudi state, which has in more recent times used its oil wealth to make the cleric’s rigid doctrine — widely known as Wahhabism — a major force in the Muslim world.

And now, this site, the birthplace of it all, is becoming a tourist attraction. Hundreds of laborers are rehabilitating mud palaces once home to the Saud family and building museums celebrating its history. Nearby stands a sleek structure that will house a foundation dedicated to the sheikh and his mission.

The project comes at a tough time for Saudi Arabia. Popular revolts and civil wars have shaken the regional order; the drop in oil prices has hit the national budget; and the kingdom is again being accused of promoting an intolerant brand of Islam similar to that of the Islamic State.

The development of Diriyah is a pet project of the new king, Sal-

A deal 250 years ago spawned a modern petro-state.

TOMAS MUNITA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The mud palaces of the Saud family in Diriyah are being rehabilitated, and museums celebrating Saudi Arabian history and Wahhabism are under construction. man. The complex is expected to open in two years at a total cost of about a half-billion dollars.

Saudi officials hope the project will link citizens to their past and rehabilitate the reputation of Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab, which they say has been wrongly sullied. While Wahhabism has adherents around the world, many Muslims detest it, because it considers Shiites and followers of other non-Sunni sects — not

to mention Christians and Jews — to be infidels. Others blame Saudi Arabia’s promotion of Wahhabism abroad for giving theological fuel to groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

“It is important for Saudis who are living now, in this century, to know that the state came from a specific place that has been preserved and that it was built on an idea, a true, correct and tolerant ideology that respected others,”

said Abdullah Arrakban of the High Commission for the Development of Riyadh.

After the city lay abandoned for centuries, families moved in in the mid-1900s and built new mud-brick homes. The government bought the site in 1982 and the development program began around 1990, when King Salman was the governor of Riyadh Province. He remains among the development’s champions

and has built a palace next door.

The complex will feature parks, restaurants, underground parking and a series of museums about traditional Saudi life, warfare and the Arabian horse.

Visitors will also be able to stroll through the old mud settlement, Turaif, which was named a Unesco World Heritage site in 2010; shop in a traditional market; and sleep in a boutique hotel.

On a recent evening, footpaths snaking between restaurants and coffee shops filled with children playing and riding bicycles, while families picnicked under date palms.

Others came for the history.

“France is based on the revolution, America is based on the founding fathers and Saudi Arabia is based on the mission of Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab,” said Turki al-Shathri, scion of a prominent clerical family.

He dismissed any suggestion that Sheikh Abdul-Wahhab was intolerant or had anything in common with the Islamic State.

“Look around,” he said, gesturing at Saudi families strolling and eating ice cream. “Where is the extremism and the terrorism?”

French Veil Bans Widen a Divide

By SUZANNE DALEY and ALISSA J. RUBIN

WISSOUS, France — Malek Layouni was not thinking about her Muslim faith, or her head scarf, as she took her excited 9-year-old son to an amusement site near Paris. But, as it turned out, it was all that mattered.

Local officials blocked her path to the inflatable toys on a temporary beach, pointing at regulations that prohibit dogs, drunks and symbols of religion. And that meant barring women who wear head scarves.

Mrs. Layouni still blushes with humiliation at being turned away in front of friends and neighbors, and at having no answer for her son, who kept asking her, “What did we do wrong?”

More than 10 years after France passed its first anti-veil law restricting girls from wearing veils in public schools, the head coverings of observant Muslim women have become one of the most highly volatile issues in the nation’s tense relations with its growing Muslim population.

Mainstream politicians continue to push for new measures to deny veiled women access to jobs, educational institutions and community life. They often say they are doing so for the benAya Kordy and Laure Fourquet contributed research from Paris.

efit of public order or in the name of laïcité, the French term for the separation of church and state.

But critics say these efforts have encouraged rampant discrimination against Muslims.

The result has been to fuel a sense among many Muslims that France, which celebrates Christian holidays in public schools, is engaging in state racism. The ban, some critics say, also serves Islamists, who are eager to drive a deeper wedge between Mus-

Muslim women say they have become the targets of abuse. lims and non-Muslims in the West.

France has passed two laws, one in 2004 banning veils in public elementary and secondary schools, and another, enacted in 2011, banning full face veils, which are worn by only a tiny portion of the population. But observant Muslim women in France say the constant talk of new laws has made them targets of abuse, from being spat at to being pushed when they walk on the streets.

France, where Muslims make

up an estimated 8 percent of the population, has long displayed discomfort with Muslim women who cover their heads, behavior that is in keeping with the Quran’s teachings on modesty.

But in recent years, French leaders have been driven by several factors, including the rise of a far-right movement that deplores what it calls the Islamization of France and the reality that homegrown Muslim extremists have carried out two of the worst attacks in France, including the shootings at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January.

Many French officials say the ban on full face veils is needed for security reasons, noting that Belgium has a similar ban, and the Netherlands is considering one.

They say the ban in schools is in pursuit of laïcité. (Skullcaps and large crosses and other religious signs were banned too, they say.)

The concept of laïcité was developed during the French Revolution, and was intended to limit the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the government.

More recently, however, experts say it has become the rallying cry of the right, which has redefined it as a weapon to defend the traditions of French life against what many see as the frightening influence of a growing Muslim population.

France’s most recent law, which bars veils that cover the

DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

French politicians want more restrictions on veiled women. face, has proved problematic. In the three years since the law took effect, only about 1,000 fines, which can go as high as 150 euros, have been issued. Several women, it seems, have enjoyed goading the police. One woman received more than 80 fines. Few paid them. A wealthy Algerian businessman created a fund to pay for any ticket issued.

Many French Muslims scoff at the law, saying wealthy tourists from the Middle East wearing full face veils and carrying expensive handbags are able to stroll down the Champs-Élysées or vacation on the Côte d’Azur without ever being ticketed.

They also say that the constant debates over veil laws have confused many people about what is illegal.

Defending his ban on veiled women at the temporary beach, Richard Trinquier, the mayor of Wissous, told a court that he was protecting France’s commitment to secularism. According to newspaper accounts, the mayor said that the presence of religious symbols in public was becoming “an obstacle to living together.”

The judge in the Wissous case disagreed, and the beach was eventually opened to Mrs. Layouni. But the event left her traumatized and divided this village.

“My husband said that I lost my inner light,” Mrs. Layouni said.

After the ruling, the couple, who owned a tearoom in Wissous, also saw their business fall off. They closed it this year, and moved to a neighboring town.

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

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MONEY & BUSINESS

Tech Investors See No Bubble in Froth

By CONOR DOUGHERTY

SAN FRANCISCO — It is a wild time in Silicon Valley. Twoyear-old companies are valued in the billions, ramshackle homes are worth millions, and hubris is at the point where otherwise sane businesspeople muse about seceding from the United States. put reason aside and instead But the tech industry’s venbuy into a story.

“It’s a complicated social ture capitalists — the finanphenomenon that gets people ciers who bet on companies into trouble, just like smoking when they are little more than too much and drinking too an idea — are going out of their much,” Mr. Shiller said. way to avoid the one word that And bubbles happen again could describe the situation and again, from the Dutch tulip around them. Bubble. bubble of 1636, to the 1929 stock “I guess it is a scary word bubble that led to the Great Debecause in some sense no one wants it to stop,” said Tomasz pression, to the housing bubTunguz, a partner at Redpoint ble that buckled Wall Street in Ventures. “And so if you utter it, 2008. do you pop it?”

Even the smartest get caught A bubble, in the economic up. Isaac Newton, whose laws sense, is a period of excessive of motion and gravity arguably speculation in something, make him the most important whether it is tulips, tech compascientist ever, bought into the South Sea Bubble of 1720. It was nies or houses. And it is a loada bad bet on a company granted ed term in the tech industry, a monopoly on trade with South because it reminds people of America by the British. the 1990s dot-com bubble, when He reportedly said: “I can companies with little revenue calculate the motions of the and zero profits sold billions in stock to a naïve public. In 2000, tech stocks crashed, venture capital dried up and many companies were vaporized.

“Anybody who lived through that will always wake up and see ghosts,” said Jerry Neumann, founder of Neu Venture Capital in New York.

Today, people see shades of 2000 in the valuations assigned to private companies like PETER DASILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Uber, the on-demand cab The valuations of some company, which is raising $1.5 billion at terms companies may remind people of that deem the company the dot-com bust. Palantir, a dataworth $50 billion, and analysis company in California.

Slack, the corporate messaging service that heavenly bodies, but not the is about a year old and valued madness of people.” at $2.8 billion in its latest fundSo, do the staggering values ing round. of today’s private tech compaA few years ago, private companies worth more than $1 nies look like yet another bubbillion were rare enough that ble? venture capitalists called them “There’s definitely some cra“unicorns.” Today, there are ziness and people overpaying” 107, according to CB Insights, for stakes in companies, said an analytics firm focused on Anand Sanwal, founder of CB the venture capital industry.

Insights. “But a bunch of bad Nobody doubts that many of decisions don’t necessarily tech’s unicorns are real busimean we are in a bubble.”

Does George Zachary, a partnesses and that some could prosper for decades. But bener in CRV, a venture capital firm, think we’re in a bubble? “I cause of low interest rates, tech think we’re in a period of overcompanies are raising gobs of money from investors whose valuation and frothiness,” he urgent need for returns has said. pushed them into riskier terSome investors go so far to avoid the word bubble that they ritory. Start-ups have begun describe situations that sound attracting money from funds quite a bit worse. that don’t usually invest in tech Take Charlie O’Donnell, companies before they are pubfounder of Brooklyn Bridge lic.

Ventures. When it becomes The problem with the bubble harder to raise money, comquestion is nobody seems to agree on what a bubble is. Robpanies that are funding lossert Shiller, an economist whose es with outside money will be work on stock prices earned forced to cut jobs and slow exhim the 2013 Nobel Prize and pansion, Mr. O’Donnell said. who wrote the book “Irrational But that is not a bubble, he Exuberance,” defined speculasaid. Rather, that would be “the coming zombie start-up apocative bubbles as “a psychological epidemic” in which people lypse.”

Start-ups may be overvalued, but the b-word is taboo.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL CIAGLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Farmers’ Work Gets Help From Above

By JULIE TURKEWITZ

NUNN, Colorado — As the sun peeks over the fields of organic grain in this grassy patch of the state, some mornings, a dark dot appears in the sky as well, and a loud buzz slices through the pastoral scene.

It is a drone, and its pilot is a farmer named Jean Hediger, one of a growing number of American agrarians who have taken to using unmanned aircraft — better known for their use in war, far from the wheat fields of eastern Colorado — to gather information about the health of their crops.

In doing so, these farmers are breaking the law. It is illegal to fly drones for commercial purposes without federal permission, and those who do so risk penalties in the thousands of dollars. But the technology holds such promise that farmers are using it anyway, dotting rural skies with devices saddled with tiny video cameras.

“This has really become a big deal in ag,” said Ms. Hediger, who is in her early 60s.

“Our intent is pure,” she added.

“Without being able to fly drones over our fields, they are asking us to remain in the dark ages.”

Soon, however, farmers may be able to fly their drones openly.

In February, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed new rules that would allow people to fly small unmanned aircraft for commercial reasons.

If the regulations are approved, there will be implications across the country: Drones could be used by construction workers, firefighters, filmmakers and others.

But few are as excited about this technology as farmers.

Ms. Hediger estimated that the device would save her tens of thousands of dollars in the coming years because she would be able to pinpoint which parts of her fields needed fertilizer, water, weed killer or seed.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group, said that it expected agriculture to make up

Jimmy Underhill, a drone specialist at Agribotix in Boulder.

Top, Jean Hediger using a drone on her Colorado farm.

80 percent of the market for unmanned aircraft after commercial flight is allowed.

“It’s invaluable,” said Corey Jacobs, a corn farmer who lives in rural Indiana. Mr. Jacobs, 28, used to spot weeds or weather damage by walking for kilometers through his cornstalks. Now, he simply launches a drone.

He built his first unmanned aircraft in 2013 and quickly saw a business opportunity. Today, he

Devices so useful many have broken the law for them. is the founder and sole employee of Extreme UAS, which sells drones to fellow farmers. When he is not on a tractor, he is on Twitter, scouting for new clients.

Ms. Hediger, in Colorado, is one of his customers. She runs a 1,375-hectare farm with her husband and her son, Bryce, 26. On a recent spring day, she stood in a wheat field as Bryce sent their newly bought quadcopter hurtling toward the horizon, a cam-

era swinging from its belly.

He gripped a white control panel as he peered at a monitor that showed him a bird’s-eye view of the land. He scoured the monitor for weeds, which in past years have devastated their crop, forcing them to halt cultivation on more than half of their land.

“Having an aerial view is fabulous,” said Ms. Hediger.

Though it could take two years for regulations to change, technology companies are moving quickly in anticipation of wider uses for drones, positioning themselves for an explosion in demand — and catering to rogue fliers in the meantime.

Agribotix, in Boulder, Colorado, has sold about 100 drones to farmers and crop consultants — people who travel from farm to farm, deploying drones for growers.

But concerns about crowded skies and the possibility of collisions continue to haunt the drone industry remain.

Andrew D. Moore, the executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association, which represents pilots who fly over farms, laying seed and other products, said he is worried about pilots crashing into drones.

“It could be lethal,” he said.

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Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

MONEY & BUSINESS

Religions Push to Align Investments With Their Faith

By VINOD SREEHARSHA

RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian investment fund is taking to heart the Vatican’s endorsement of leveraging capitalism’s tools to help address inequality.

An investment firm, First, is on track this year to raise the country’s largest impact investing fund, which aims to promote social good as well as profitable returns. And it is being supported by players like JPMorgan Chase and the World Bank’s private investment arm.

First is also being backed by a major player: a trust established by a 199-year-old international order of the Roman Catholic

Avoiding gunmakers and seeking socially responsible firms.

Church. The capital provided by the Oblate International Pastoral Investment Trust is its initial investment in a Brazilian impact fund. The amount, about $7 million, may seem small, but it reflects the growing interest in the sector by Catholic groups worldwide. And for the Catholic Church, the concept seems to dovetail with Pope Francis’s focus on addressing inequality.

Ensuring that faith-based investments are consistent with Catholic values has long been difficult. But many people increasingly see impact investing as one way to do so. The fund gauges whether its investments are providing social improvements, such as in education, health care

or the environment. This asset class is making inroads in Brazil, home to the world’s largest Roman Catholic population.

First’s fund-raising is expected to soon surpass $98 million and hit its $125 million target this year, according to a person briefed on the fund’s activities.

First attracted the attention of the Oblate trust, which manages the assets of more than 230 Roman Catholic congregations in 53 countries and holds about $400 million. Friar Seamus Finn, 65, oversees the trust’s investment to be sure they are consistent with the church’s faith. Its participation reflects a growing interest in impact investing. He travels to Brazil roughly once a year.

The trust invested $35.5 million in such funds last year. “We feel we are much closer to the principles than we are at a global multinational,” Friar Finn said.

Impact investing is growing globally. The number of organizations catering to interested investors rose 17 percent this year, and they expect to invest $12.2 billion, an increase of 16 percent from last year, according to a report by ­JPMorgan and the Global Impact Investing Network.

The Vatican has long spoken about the need for the markets to reduce inequality, from Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum on Capital and Labor to Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio in 1967.

Yet Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America, has made this a top priority. He said last year, “It is increasingly intolerable that financial markets are shaping the destiny of peoples rather than serving their needs.”

Faith-based investing has

Impact funds balance profits with ethics. Friar Seamus Finn oversees the $400 million Oblate Investment Pastoral Trust.

T. J. KIRKPATRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

been a part of many religions.

Islamic financing goes back centuries and has grown in recent decades. The Dow Jones Islamic Market Indexes screen for compliance with Shariah law. The United Methodist Church holds $21 billion in assets in 5,000 companies.

The investment strategy has shifted, however, from what has long been an exclusionary approach. For example, the Oblate trust prohibits investing in companies that develop assault weapons and handguns. But those rules do not provide a guide on what it should invest in “It suits and fits better with our desire to be constructive and look for positive impact investments rather than excluding things,” Friar Finn said.

He said that impact investing was an important asset class in terms of diversifying and manag-

ing the group’s portfolio.

Ascension Investment Management, which manages the assets of the largest Catholic nonprofit health care system in the United States, is raising its first dedicated impact investing fund, looking to raise $50 million to $100 million. Catholic Relief Services has set aside $5 million to invest in impact investing funds.

The shift to impact investing is likely to be gradual. The Oblate trust does not plan to replace its traditional investments overnight. And multiple challenges remain. One is the number of adequate companies.

Rebeca Rocha, the head of Brazil for the Aspen Network, said that although the number of impact investors in the country had tripled since 2012, “it’s very difficult to find a lot of entrepreneurs who have the right profile, understand social impact and

have companies that can scale.”

The Catholic Church has faced divisive issues as well.

Many in Brazil and the region still have ties to liberation theology, which emphasizes the poor but also shares some aspects of Marxist philosophy and therefore opposes the United States economic system and style of investing. In the past, that view had some basis after several military dictatorships in Latin America received backing by the United States government.

The region is much different today, but Friar Finn said he expected some doubters.

“Some folks will push back and criticize this and say it is just another way of making the capitalist model look good,” he acknowledged, adding that he welcomed the scrutiny “It is important to not overstate what this can accomplish.”

Ethan Yorke, a California video gamer, says energy drinks help his performance.

while playing Call of Duty and I definitely see improvement, and it gives me very natural energy,” he said. His parents didn’t care, he said, until he started drinking the product every day.

The makers of the new drinks say they are natural, without chemicals. People who drink them say they don’t cause jitters or crashes like other energy drinks.

G Fuel’s caffeine content, 150 milligrams per 355 milliliters, is higher than many of the Monster and Red Bull drinks, according to Caffeine Informer. GungHo does not disclose its caffeine content, according to Danny Mason, the company’s chief executive The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked energy drink makers for more data on caffeine. Caffeine is not the only concern, Dr. Schneider said. Taurine and guarana, a plant extract, also act as stimulants, she said.

Ethan Yorke, a high school junior in Lancaster, California, said drinking G Fuel helped him improve his home run average significantly on a baseball video game he plays.

“It really feels like you have genuine energy, like you’ve just had a 30-minute-to-an-hour nap,” he said. “And you just have pure energy.”

Sale of ‘Gaming Fuel’ Raising Health Issues

By HILARY STOUT

Two popular video gamers posed as snipers wielding real semi-automatic guns at an outdoor range, blasting orbs of fruit and cups of deep orange liquid in ultra slow motion. “Introducing Blood Orange,” announced a video of the spectacle.

In the days afterward, online followers ordered tubs of the latest flavor of a powdered energy drink called G Fuel that is marketed as a secret sauce to enhance focus and endurance for virtual battles.

“Oh, this is gonna taste so good!” exclaimed one cherub-faced YouTuber, Michael.

G Fuel and a competitor called GungHo are a new incarnation of energy drink, growing in popularity while the energy drink industry as a whole has been under scrutiny because of deaths and hospitalizations linked to consumption of caffeine- and sugar-laden beverages. Traditional energy drink makers have played to the growing gamer culture, too.

Dr. Marcie Schneider, an ad-

olescent-medicine specialist in Greenwich, Connecticut, worries that most parents do not recognize the dangers of the drinks.

“I feel like we have a better sense of how many kids are smoking pot than how many kids are using energy drinks,” Dr. Schneider said. She was an author of a study for the American Academy of Pediatrics that recommended that children and adolescents should never consume energy drinks because of caffeine’s potential to disturb sleeping patterns, increase heart rates and slow brain development.

The industry is tapping into the celebrity allure and online fan base of “professional e-athletes,” analysts say, with sponsorships of gaming competitions and players. Gamma Labs, the company selling G Fuel, heavily promotes a Call of Duty clan including those would-be snipers in the video ad.

While major energy drink makers ­— including Red Bull, Rockstar and Monster — voluntarily agreed to stop marketing to children under 12 because of

EMILY BERL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Some doctors say caffeine is harmful to teenagers. the adverse health effects publicly associated with them, a United States congressional report released this year excoriated those companies and others for continuing to target teenagers, whose brains and bodies are not yet fully developed.

The newer gamer drinks are sugar-free and vitamin-infused, but they often contain caffeine that rivals or exceeds that of

some other well-known products, according to Caffeine Informer, which provides information on caffeine levels in food and drink.

But business is still booming.

Sales of energy drinks and shots internationally are projected to rise to $21 billion by 2017 from $12.5 billion in 2012, according to Packaged Facts, a publisher of market research.

In Melbourne, Australia, Finlay Sturzaker spent 100 Australian dollars to order several tubs of a powdered G Fuel drink, only to have his father confiscate it, he said. Finlay, 14, said he found out about the drink on YouTube through the FaZe Call of Duty clan in the commercials.

“It makes me more focused

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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31

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY NEWS ANALYSIS

Closer Look At the Oceans’ Tiny Creatures

Working Moms May Benefit Children

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

CHRISTIAN SARDET/CENTRE NACIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE/TARA EXPEDITIONS; BELOW, M.ORMESTAD/KAHIKAI/TARA OCEANS

A four-year ocean expedition found that microbes are profoundly affected by warmer waters.

A medusa from the Mediterranean. Below, parasitoid crustaceans eating salps.

By KAREN WEINTRAUB

Climate change scientists have known for years that rising temperatures affect sea creatures, from the biggest fish to the microscopic plankton at the base of the ocean food chain.

Now, a four-year expedition by a schooner named Tara that sampled microbes from across the world’s oceans is bringing the mechanisms of that change into focus. These tiny creatures, which may be among the oldest on Earth, absorb carbon dioxide, make oxygen, break down waste and nourish other creatures.

And they are profoundly affected by water temperature, according to five studies published in Science about Tara’s voyage.

“Temperature is the most important environmental factor

Microbes battle to keep the ecosystem in balance. determining the composition of these communities,” said Chris Bowler, an author on all five studies and a genomics expert with the École Normale Supérieure and the National Center for Scientific Research in France. “This would imply that climate change, warming of the oceans, is going to have a strong impact on these organisms and the functions these organisms perform for the well-being of our planet.”

The Tara expedition’s findings, researchers said, have added an order of magnitude to what we know of the Tree of Life, expanding its base. The microbes studied range from viruses and bacteria too small to see under a microscope to the single-celled

amoebas or paramecia that children study in biology classes.

The new research showed that these microbes are in a const a nt da nce with one another, collaborating and fighting just below the water’s surface.

Their interactions keep the ecosystem in balance, preventing any one species from dominating the seas.

“A lot of what we didn’t really ever see before in the ocean are predators and parasites, zombies and vampires that are floating through this incredible set of diversity, battling it out,” said Stephen Palumbi, a Stanford University marine biologist who was not involved in the studies.

The researchers on the Tara Oceans project, a consortium of 18 institutions, identified roughly 40 million genes in the upper layers of the world’s oceans.

The raw data produced by the expedition should allow scientists to predict how microbial life will change as a function of changes in water temperature, said Eric Karsenti, a cell biologist and scientific director of the consortium.

One of the new papers tracks the effects warming waters have on bacterial diversity, suggesting that other microbes, like viruses and single-celled organisms, are probably affected as well. Future analysis should allow researchers to build predictive models for what will happen to microbial communities as water temperature changes, Dr. Karsenti said, and how much that will affect oxygen production and carbon dioxide absorption.

Life on Earth started in the oceans, so the Tara data also provides new insights into creatures descended from those of a billion

years ago, Dr. Bowler said. “By matching DNA-level information with what these organisms look like, we can learn more about them, more about how they work, and hopefully learn more about our own origins as well.”

From 2009 to 2013, the 33-meter research schooner had to evade pirates off the coast of Saudi Arabia, ice in the Arctic and hurricane-force winds in the Magellan Straits linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

As the Tara docked in 210 ports along the way, expedition scientists turned into advocates for the sea, educating children and adults about the creatures they live near but do not know.

The research team, which totaled more than 200 people, included experts from 35 countries.

Members have begun analyzing their 35,000 samples, with just 579 explored in these five papers.

The boat, which has continued to sample in the Arctic and the Mediterranean since 2013, will sail up the Seine this year to highlight ocean security at climate change negotiations in Paris.

“Nobody is speaking for the oceans,” said Romain Troublé, the Tara Foundation’s executive director.

Nearly three-quarters of American mothers with children at home are employed.

Forty-one percent of adults say the increase in working mothers is bad for society, while just 22 percent say it is good, according to the Pew Research Center.

Yet evidence is mounting that having a working mother has some economic, educational and social benefits for children of both sexes.

That is not to say that children do not also benefit when their parents spend more time with them — they do. But we make trade-offs in how we spend our time, and research shows that children of working parents also accrue benefits.

In a new study of 50,000 adults in 25 countries, daughters of working mothers completed more years of education, were more likely to be employed and in supervisory roles and earned higher incomes.

Having a working mother didn’t influence the careers of sons, which researchers said was unsurprising because men were generally expected to work — but sons of working mothers did spend more time on child care and housework.

“Part of this working mothers’ guilt has been, ‘Oh, my kids are going to be so much better off if I stay home,’ but what we’re finding in adult outcomes is kids will be so much better off if women spend some time at work,” said Kathleen McGinn, a professor at Harvard Business School and an author of the study.

“This is as close to a silver bullet as you can find in terms of helping reduce gender inequalities, both in the workplace and at home,” she said.

Other researchers are less confident that the data has proved such a large effect, because it is difficult to know whether a mother who worked caused her daughter to work, or whether other factors were more influential.

“The problem is we don’t know how these mothers differed,” said Raquel Fernandez, an economics professor at New York University. “Was it really her mother working who did this, or was it her mother getting an education?”

The new study is part of a shift away from focusing on whether working mothers hurt children and toward a richer understanding of the relationship between work and family.

A 2010 meta-analysis of 69 studies over 50 years found that in general, children whose mothers worked when they were young had no major learning, behavior or social problems, and tended to be high achievers in school and have less depression and anxiety. The positive effects

were particularly strong for children from low-income or single-parent families; some studies showed negative effects in middle-class or two-income families. Sons raised by working mothers were significantly more likely to have a wife who worked, one study led

by Ms. Fernandez found.

Ms. McGinn said parents seemed to be serving as role models. “This is our best clue that what’s happening is a real role modeling of skills that somehow conveys to you, ‘Here’s a way to behave, here’s a way you can cope with the various demands of work and home,’” she said.

Ms. McGinn said she ran dozens of tests to see if the results could be explained by something other than the mother’s time at work — like the influence of a broader culture in which women worked more frequently, or the benefits of a mother’s increased income — but they could not.

She controlled for factors including age, education and family makeup. The effects shrank after she controlled for these, but Ms. McGinn said the difference was still statistically significant.

Across 25 countries, 69 percent of women with a working

Role models for the girls, and their sons do housework. mother were employed, and 22 percent were supervisors, compared with 66 percent and 18 percent of those whose mothers stayed home. Daughters of working mothers earned 6 percent more.

Sons of working mothers in those countries spent an additional hour a week caring for family members and 17 minutes more per week on housework — which research has found increases women’s labor force involvement and might lead to more stable marriages.

The effect was strongest in countries in which there was a bigger divide in opinions about the role of women, like the United States and Israel, and in countries where gender attitudes were more conservative, like Russia and Mexico. It was smallest in countries where there was widespread acceptance of working women, like the Nordic countries.

In the United States, attitudes about working parents depend a lot on a family’s circumstances.

“We found that most people believe the right decision for a family is the one that works best for them,” said Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at New York University.

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Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

India’s Perplexing, and Destructive, Collision Course

By KENNETH CHANG

When an unstoppable force like the Indian subcontinent crashes into an immovable object like the Eurasian plate, the consequences include the tallest mountains in the world, earthquakes like the major one that struck Nepal in April and the strong aftershock in the region in May. Many questions about the collision remain unanswered. How did the Indian subcontinent get so quickly to where it is today?

How big was India originally?

Even the simplest of questions — when did India meet Eurasia, the tectonic plate that Europe and Asia sit on? — is up for debate, with researchers offering answers that differ by some 30 million years.

“It’s going to be hard to convince anyone,” said Oliver E. Jagoutz, a geologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and part of a team that outlined its ideas about the collision in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Another mystery is why India is still moving at a quick pace — 3.8 to five centimeters a year — driving the devastating earthquakes.

“That is one of the biggest problems that we have in plate tectonics,” said Douwe J.J. van Hinsbergen, a professor of earth sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “It may not seem much, but it’s the rate at which your fingernails grow.”

The geologists are like accident investigators trying to decipher what happened from the wreckage, pondering how rocks from the ocean floor ended up high in the Himalayas. Much of the evidence, namely the chunk of India that is jammed under Tibet and the Himalayas, is out of reach.

Throughout Earth’s four-anda-half-billion-year history, the chunks of land have alternated between periods when they combined into supercontinents like Pangea, 300 million years ago, and periods when they moved apart, like today.

During the age of dinosaurs, Pangea had broken into two con-

EURASIA NORTH AMERICA

EURASIA

LAURASIA

TIBET N E PA L INDIA

NORTH AMERICA

AFRICA

PANGEA 255 million years ago

TODAY SOUTH AMERICA AUSTRALIA

SOUTH AMERICA

AFRICA

GONDWANA

TIBET

INDIA AUSTRALIA A N TA R C T I C A

A N TA R C T I C A THE NEW YORK TIMES

AHMAD MASOOD/REUTERS

The Indian subcontinent, which broke away from an ancient continent, is still running into Asia. Quake damage in Nepal. tinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, and India was a piece of Gondwana, attached to Antarctica and between Africa and Australia.

More than 100 million years ago, India broke away and accelerated northward. According to the widely accepted picture, that runaway continental fragment collided with Eurasia 50 million to 55 million years ago in one of the few places today where a piece of continent runs into a continent rather than an ocean plate.

But not all of the pieces of the conventional wisdom fit together.

New analyses of the magnetism in rocks suggested that the southern edge of Eurasia was farther

north than some had thought, raising the question of whether India was close enough to make contact with Asia by then.

Another key question: How much of India has disappeared?

If the collision occurred more than 50 million years ago, almost 3,200 kilometers of India must have been pushed under Asia.

Scientists agree that something collided. “The question is not so much whether there is a continent colliding 50 million years ago,” Dr. van Hinsbergen said. “The question is whether that is India.”

In 2007, Jonathan Aitchison, now a professor of geosciences

at the University of Queensland in Australia, put together an alternative timeline. The collision that people thought was India meeting Asia was actually India hitting an arc of islands south of Asia, and India then pushed these islands into Asia 20 million years later. “We believe the evidence shows India bumped into other things before Asia,” Dr. Aitchison said.

Dr. van Hinsbergen came up with a different idea. He proposed that 70 million to 120 million years ago, India split in two as it was moving north. The first piece reached Asia 50 million to 55 million years ago, but the main part lagged behind, not colliding until 20 million to 25 million years ago.

Dr. Jagoutz and Leigh H. Royden, a professor of geology and geophysics at M.I.T. looking at rocks in the western Himalaya, have come to a conclusion similar to Dr. Aitchison’s — that India ran into an island arc before it hit Asia — but put the second collision about five million years earlier.

In the Nature Geoscience paper, Dr. Royden and Dr. Jagoutz show that the island arc could explain the speed of India’s travels.

Generally, the motion of continents is driven by subduction zones — where one tectonic plate passes beneath another and then descends into the Earth’s mantle, pulling everything behind it.

Geologists knew there was one

Geologists wonder why a subcontinent is moving so fast. subduction zone where the Indian plate dived under Asia. With an island arc between Asia and India, there would have been two subduction zones pulling on India, SLUG which could explainTECTONICS its velocity.

SCOOP But none of this explains why India is still moving so fast.

SECTION sci Whatever was of India SIZEnorth 9.05" x 3.1"has long since disappeared into the ORIGIN Jonathan x4340 mantle, and continental crust Graphics x1839 does not provide same downDATE the 0519 ward pull.

“It’s yet to be resolved what keeps India moving to the north,” Dr. Royden said. “At the moment, it’s still a work in progress.”

Geologists will be hard pressed to deduce what happened to India from the seismological data. Simon L. Klemperer, a geophysicist at Stanford University, said he hopes that the mix of helium isotopes in geothermal springs will help tell whether the mantle below the Himalayan crust is part of the Indian plate or Asian plate.

“I agree the jury should still be out,” Dr. Klemperer said. “If I want to hold onto my view, then I need to eventually be able to demolish the arguments.”

Scientists Battle to Save Turtle Species

By RACHEL NUWER

An international team of scientists, veterinarians and zookeepers gathered at the Suzhou Zoo near Shanghai.

Their desperate mission: the first artificial insemination ever of a softshell turtle, to try to save the species from oblivion.

“Even if we get just one or two hatchlings, I will be very happy,” said Gerald Kuchling, a project leader for the Turtle Survival Alliance, a nonprofit conservation group. “Even a single one would give hope for the recovery of this magnificent animal. It would be a turn.”

The Yangtze giant softshell turtle — thought to be the largest freshwater turtle in the world — was once common in the Yangtze and Red Rivers. But by the late 1990s, pollution, hunting, dams and development had driven it to

Hopes rest on an 85-year-old female’s eggs. the brink of extinction.

There are only four known specimens remaining, and only one female — an 85-year-old resident of the Suzhou Zoo. For years, biologists have been trying to coax her and her 100-year-old mate to produce hatchlings. So far the female has laid clutch after clutch of unfertilized eggs.

On May 6, Dr. Kuchling and Lu Shunqing, a turtle specialist from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s China branch, with a team that included turtle experts from the United States, drained the

Suzhou Zoo male’s pond and used a cargo net to wrangle the 60-kilo male turtle onto a stack of car tires that served as a makeshift examination stand. Putting him under anesthesia, the scientists used an electrical probe to induce a partial penile erection.

The problem became immediately clear to the scientists: This turtle’s penis was mangled.

Two decades earlier, another Yangtze giant softshell turtle had been added to the male’s pond in an attempt to mate the animals.

The second turtle turned out to be male, as well, and the two fought. The second male was killed, and the victor suffered serious damage to his shell and, it now appears, to his reproductive organ.

The team also examined the male’s sperm — extracted using electrical stimuli — and finally

GERALD KUCHLING/TURTLE SURVIVAL ALLIANCE

Pollution, hunting, dams and development have driven the Yangtze giant softshell turtle to the brink of extinction. discovered good news. While motility was low, the sperm were viable. The scientists decided to proceed with artificial insemination of the female.

Two other male Yangtze giant softshell turtles are believed to be in Vietnam — one in Hoan Kiem Lake, in the center of Hanoi.

But those animals “are pretty much off limits for any non-Vietnamese,” Dr. Kuchling said,

and so a collaborative breeding program seems unlikely.

When the female lays her first clutch of eggs, probably by late June, the scientists will know if this first effort was fruitful.

“Nobody has ever done this before, and it’s probably a long shot,” Dr. Kuchling said. “But we are all hopeful, and if it doesn’t work this time, we’ll definitely try again. Despair is not an option.”

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

33

N E W YO R K

Affordable Units Set Off a Frenzy

By MIREYA NAVARRO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL APPLETON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Looking Out From a New Summit

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

With a step-right-up showmanship that does credit to the memory of P. T. Barnum, Legends Hospitality has lifted the curtain on its three-level, $32-a-head observatory near the top of 1 World Trade Center.

Everything about the design of One World Observatory and the publicity campaign leading up to its May 29 opening was meant to whet the public’s anticipation of a trip that might be difficult — if not impossible — for some people to make, either because of the cost or because of the emotional trauma that clings to the site of the September 11 attacks.

Before the opening, David W. Checketts, the chairman and chief executive of Legends, gave tours to news organizations, including one during heavy fog, making it impossible to verify the observatory’s “See Forever” motto.

But the windows in the new tower clearly offer far wider panoramas than those of the old trade center observatory, which were divided into deep, narrow bays between columns.

And an interactive mobile tablet, rentable for $15, makes orientation easy no matter the weather, as the screen clearly depicts and annotates whatever part of the skyline one is facing.

Acrophobes should be warned about the four-meter-diameter “sky portal,” which looks as if it is suspended over the streets below. The portal’s glass floor is actually looking down on two dozen high-definition screens carrying a live feed from cameras mounted at the base of the building’s spire. But the illusion is unnervingly convincing.

And it does not seem farfetched to predict that the bar seats facing the Hudson River on the 101st floor may soon be among the most coveted in New York, though Steve Cuozzo, the restaurant critic at The New York Post, has complained that one cannot dine or drink there without paying the admission fee, because the 60-seat steakhouse and the more casual

The sky portal gives the feeling of being suspended 100 floors above New York’s streets. Live-feed cameras create the illusion. Above, the observatory at 1 World Trade Center opened May 29 on the site of the September 11 attacks.

100-seat cafe and bar and grill are within the observatory.

Legends will not disclose the cost of the project. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which selected Legends as the operator, expects to receive about $875 million over the 15-year contract term, said Erica Dumas, a spokeswoman.

Mr. Checketts said he expected annual attendance to run from three million to four million visitors. Though its

Panoramic views and dark memories 100 stories up. primary audience is tourists, Legends has evidently paid attention to ever-attentive and critical New Yorkers. Visitors will see a panorama of Lower Manhattan’s history on their 48-second elevator ride to the observatory.

Aesthetically, the observatory is appropriately understated, given that the show is on the outside. The walls are of whiteoak veneer and the floors are in black terrazzo, with enormous and helpful compass points

ONLINE: VIEW FROM THE TOP

Slide show offers view of New York: nytimes.com Search Manhattan observatory early

inlaid at each corner. Calming music plays in the background.

The 102nd floor, by far the most restrained, is principally to serve as rented event space.

The main public observation area is on the 100th floor. Visitors may stay as long as they wish, Mr. Checketts said. But of course, they cannot leave without passing through the gift shop. The most expensive souvenir is a $200 crystal model of 1 World Trade Center.

While waiting to board the five elevators, visitors will see and hear the voices and faces of those who built the skyscraper, including Steven Plate, the director of World Trade Center construction for the Port Authority. “You look out, and on a clear day, you can actually see the curvature of the Earth,” Mr. Plate says, adding with a laugh, “So, other than that, there’s nothing to see.”

In truth, one has to be quite a bit higher than 386 meters to discern the curvature of the Earth. But One World Observatory is about showmanship, after all.

A glassy new tower in New York City attracted an outcry for featuring one entrance for condominium owners and another for low-income tenants.

But having to walk through a so-called poor door has not deterred those seeking an affordable place to live. More than 88,000 people put their name in for the 55 low-priced units, the developer said. “I guess people like it,” said Gary Barnett of Extell Development Company, the developer. “It shows that there’s a tremendous demand for high-quality affordable housing in beautiful neighborhoods.”

The separate entrances at the building, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, drew heavy criticism last year from some officials and affordable-housing advocates who saw the configuration as representing unequal treatment. The arrangement puts the affordable apartments in a segment attached to the condo building and is allowed under zoning rules that the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio says it is now working to change.

Despite the controversy, it is not surprising that people are knocking down the poor door eager to get in. Housing lotteries, which the city uses to distribute subsidized apartments in new buildings, have been drawing record numbers after the system began allowing online applications in 2013 and as the rental market has gotten tighter. The lotteries are expected to multiply after Mr. de Blasio’s pledge to produce 80,000 new affordable units over 10 years. Already this year, 10 lotteries have been held for 698 units that received about 486,000 applications, officials with the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development said.

The units at Extell’s building are eligible to households with incomes of $30,240 to $50,340, with rents listed at $1,082 for a two-bedroom, $895 for a one-bedroom and $833 for a studio in a prime location by the Hudson River. (Market rate units in these neighborhoods would be close to triple those prices.) Mr. Barnett argued that the response showed that the poor door issue was a “made-up controversy.” “The most important thing is to provide affordable housing,” he said.

“It’s what people really want.”

Affordable-housing advocates are divided on the issue, with some saying the focus should be on building more homes rather than on where to enter them. Although many buildings in New York integrate low-cost units, developers like Mr. Barnett say that segregating the rentals in a separate part of the building is preferable when market-rate units with the best views and amenities are for sale, and can draw top dollar, in turn allowing them to build more affordable units.

But in the case of the Upper West Side building, that means the poorer tenants will not have access to the pool, the gym, the bowling alley and the private

theater, among the add-ons used to entice buyers passing through the nonpoor door. (The renters will have their own laundry room, a community room and bike storage.) There are even separate addresses: 50 Riverside Boulevard for the condominiums, and 470 West 62nd Street for the rentals.

Mr. Barnett’s company built the low-income rentals in exchange for the freedom to construct more square meters than city rules otherwise allow, a housing strategy called inclusionary zoning. And under current rules, if the developer chooses to attach the affordable segment to the market-rate portion of the project, it is required to provide separate entrances.

But the two-door option, adopted in a minority of new projects, is not in keeping with Mr. de Blasio’s liberal political stance, and officials are looking to change housing codes and programs to prohibit them.

“We oppose so-called poor doors and will change the necessary rules so that when affordable housing is provided on-site,

VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Manhattan building has different entrances for owners paying market rates and renters who are subsidized. we will not allow separate entrances based on income,” Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said.

Councilman Mark Levine said he was seeking ways to keep affordable housing developers from being swamped with ineligible applications.

Shelia Martin, chief operating officer of the NYC Housing Partnership, said the screening of applicants for 470 West 62nd Street began in May. After they are randomly ranked, the top several thousand applications are reviewed, and about 2,000 interviews conducted, to find the 55 households that meet income and size requirements. “It’s not the number of applications that we get,” she said. “It’s the quality of applications.”

The first winners are expected to start moving in as early as August.

On the other side, most of the 219 luxury condos, some of which go for more than $25 million, have sold.

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Sanctity of Truth

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JUNE 8, 2015

ARTS & DESIGN

Ex-Wrestler Reaching Hollywood’s Stratosphere

By MELENA RYZIK

BURLINGTON, Massachusetts — Dwayne Johnson, a wrestler turned actor and better known until recently as the Rock, should be the four-quadrant hero of our time, appealing to old and young, male and female alike.

He is a wide-reaching, multiethnic celebrity at a time when audiences crave diversity, and a keen user of social technology.

Yet he may be the oddest superstar, a known quantity whose accomplishments — box-office champ of 2013, four-time host of “Saturday Night Live” — are a continual surprise.

Unlike the sequels and franchises he has excelled in, his latest film, “San Andreas,” now in worldwide release, is his first top-lining role in a big-budget original story. Along with his HBO series, “Ballers,” debuting this month, and the comedy he is shooting with Kevin Hart here in Massachusetts, “Central Intelligence,” the film could cement his status as a top leading man.

Already, “in terms of consumer appeal, he’s in the league there with Brad Pitt,” said Henry Schafer of the Q Scores Company, which measures celebrity likability. Mr. Johnson has maintained a Q score way above average.

Mr. Johnson’s greatest successes on screen have come in ensemble films. Last year’s “Hercules,” directed by Brett Ratner, was perceived as a flop in the United States. But it still earned more than $170 million overseas.

His allure has grown global.

“Nowadays you’re not going to be a movie star if you don’t have international appeal,” said Jeanine Basinger, the chairwoman of the film studies department at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Mr. Johnson is a third generation wrestler and the only child of a black father and a Samoan mother. To hear him tell it, this moment is the culmination of several years of fighting just to get Hollywood to accept him in

Dwayne Johnson, once known

A leading man named Dwayne, not Brad, gets a shot. all his rippling, jokey glory. The battle entailed switching his management team entirely.

“I am going to take a crack at this,” he said of his A-list career goals, “and I have to be me, I have to be me.”

“Getting into Hollywood,” he added, “I learned that lesson the hard way.”

In 2004, after a sold-out match in New York, Mr. Johnson walked away from wrestling, having

exandra Daddario).

Friends call him D.J., but he also gladly answers to the Rock — that’s what P resident Ba rack Oba ma , whom he’s met a few times, calls him. He didn’t elaborate on his nicknames from Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, though he sa id “we’re all buddies.”

It’s not easy to preserve an Everyman aura when you’re pals with president s. M r.

Johnson seems like he could go for hugs at any time. Or pulverize you if you cross him.

He g raduate d with a criminology degree from the University of Miami, and considered joining the F.B.I., though being a college football star intervened.

“I wanted to play RYAN CONATY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES in the N.F.L., and as the Rock, credits hope and optimism for his varied successes.

I wanted to make a lot of money,” he made inroads into acting, with said, to slim down his 110-kisaid. “I wanted to buy my mom a the support of Vince McMahon, house.” lo-plus physique to look more like the wrestling impresario. It was The N.F.L. never came callother leading men.

Mr. McMahon who cajoled the “If you don’t know any better, ing, but he did buy his parents a producer Lorne Michaels into then you buy into that” stuff, he house, in 1999, before buying one letting the Rock host “Saturday said, cursing. “But it never felt for himself — the first homes anyNight Live” in 2000. Expectagreat to me. Physically, it didn’t one in his family owned. feel great at all.”

He said that by 15 he was worktions were not high, but he thorMr. Johnson inveighed against oughly charmed. “He has a woning out and was his full 1.96 mecynicism he has found in Hollyderful sense of timing, he has an ters, with a mustache. In high innate theatricality and because school, “they thought I was an wood. “You get so much further he projects strength, the audiundercover cop,” he said. “I had with optimism and hope,” he no friends.” said. ence kind of relaxes with him,” His popularity now — nearly 23 For “San Andreas,” he earned Mr. Michaels said. million followers on Twitter and a reported $12 million. In it, Mr. As he blazed his path through Instagram — is a testament to his Johnson plays a Los Angeles Hollywood, moving from bareopenness. search-and-rescue specialist. brawn parts (“The Scorpion Brad Peyton, the director of When most of California is hit King”) to ones requiring a deft “San Andreas,” said, “The bigby an earthquake, he sets out to comic touch (“Get Smart”), save his soon-to-be ex-wife (CarMr. Johnson shed his wrestling ger the room, the more comfortname, and he was advised, he la Gugino) and his daughter (Alable he gets.”

Reintroducing Carlos Lyra, Bossa King

By JAMES GAVIN

RIO DE JANEIRO — It has been nearly 60 years since the bossa nova sprang out of this city.

For most of the world, that cool, minimalist sound, with its insinuating pulse, still defines Brazil.

Inside the country, though, the music is a respected but quaint form of nostalgia.

But to Carlos Lyra, who wrote and sang many of its most famous songs, bossa remains a zenith of elegance and finesse, symbolic, he feels, of a time when those things mattered in Brazil.

Bossa’s most famous composer, Antônio Carlos Jobim, once called Mr. Lyra “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.” But unlike Jobim, whose “The Girl From Ipanema” brought him and bossa worldwide fame in 1964, Mr. Lyra had no comparable breakthrough.

A founder of Brazil’s signature sound laments its demise.

Now 82, Mr. Lyra composes and performs when he feels the urge, and he went to the United States in May to perform in “Bossabrasil,” at the Manhattan jazz club Birdland.

He looks back on his youth as an oasis, reigned over by Juscelino Kubitschek, a democratic president who fostered culture.

“Everything was beautiful,” he said.

Mr. Lyra was born of privilege.

Ensconced in Rio’s fashionable Zona Sul, he studied classical guitar and enjoyed Debussy, Ravel, Villa-Lobos and American film.

In 1958, bossa was born. Most

of its songs dealt with the Carioca good life, carefree romance and the sweetness of despair. Mr. Lyra’s did, too, but they also explored more serious issues, like the hardships of life in the slums.

On November 21, 1962, he joined a sprawling summit of bossa’s founders at Carnegie Hall in New York. That now-fabled concert launched the music as Brazil’s proudest homegrown export. Mr. Lyra’s songs, starting with his first hit, “Maria Ninguém” (Maria No One), showed up on countless albums.

Mr. Lyra had joined the Communist party — a risky move, for Brazil now had a socialist president, João Goulart, whose suspected Communist ties had sparked political tension.

On March 31, 1964, a military coup overthrew Goulart and launched a dictatorship. Mr. Lyra was among the first artists to flee.

EU E A BOSSA: UMA HISTORIA DA BOSSA NOVA; ANDRE VIEIRA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Carlos Lyra in 1964, left, and this year in Rio de Janeiro.

He moved to New York, then to Mexico, where he stayed for five years. By the time he moved back to Brazil with the American wife he had met in Mexico, Katherine Riddell, a new wave of edgy pop rebels had swept bossa aside.

Disgusted with Brazil in the mid-70s, Mr. Lyra took his wife and their daughter, Kay, to live in Los Angeles. After a couple of

years, he was back in Brazil. The dictatorship ended in 1985, but for Mr. Lyra, the damage was done.

“Brazil never rose again,” he said. “It’s been down, down, down. Culture now is so without depth. The other day they were playing my songs in an elevator.

In today’s musical scene, I’d rather hear music in elevators than on the radio.”