Isles magazine, July edition by Sham Mohamed

ISLES Magazine

Chief Editor Mohamed Visham Creative Director / Chief Designer Sham Mohamed Photography Ahmed Shuraau Afsheen Naseer

Cover Photo by Maldives Airports Company Limited (MACL) Conceptual domestic terminal at Velana International Airport

Marketing Mariyam Maeesha Contributors, ISLES Magazine Mohamed Afrah Shahudha Mohamed Nadhwa Mohamed Moosa Rasheed Contributors, The New York Times Jane Perez and Yufan Huang Gaia Pianigiani Geeta Anand Rachel Nuwer Doug Clark Neil Gough Steve Lohr Farhad Manjoo Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura Keith Bradsher Nicole Perlroth Jared Whitlock Motoko Rich Karen Weintraub Jane E. Brody Sui-Lee Wee Daniel Petrova Jon Pareles Dionnne Searcey Holland Cotter Dave Itzkoff

Contact ISLES Magazine H. Coral Reef (6th Floor) Boduthakurufaanu Magu, Malé 2008, Maldives. info@islesmag.com www.islesmag.com Tel : +960 3011533 Fax. +960 3011533

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In this Issue... 9

A Journey through Maldivian Masterpieces

China’s bet to reshape global economy

Coal goliath India, turning green

Singapore pressured to end secret banking

A look into Japan’s sand museum

Venice biennale

FEATURED ARTICLE

Letter from the Editor

P41

Dear readers, Greetings and a warm welcome to the very first issue of ISLES, the first Maldives-based international magazine providing an unprecedented insight into both local and global topics spanning business, lifestyle, travel and culture. We are delighted and proud to partner with The New York Times to bring a monthly publication that offers a dual perspective – local and global – on a diverse range of topics. Our standard-setting publication, distributed widely to ensure its reach to an extensive global audience, allows you to gain valuable insight into the archipelago’s business, travel and hospitality industry. In the first edition, we provide an in-depth look into the mega expansion project of Maldives’ main airport and the recent commercial real estate boom, while The New York Times International Report, tailor-made to ISLES, features China’s One Belt One Road Initiative among a host of intriguing and informative reads.

Mohamed Visham Chief Editor

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Laos is at the center of Beijing’s strategy to assert its dominance in countries throughout Southeast Asia. A new road near Luang Prabang. Top, a tunnel being created near Vang Vieng, Laos.

‘ONE BELT, ONE ROAD’

China Makes $1 Trillion Bet To Reshape Gobal Economy BY JANE PERLEZ AND YUFAN HUANG

Vang Vieng, Laos — Along the jungle-covered mountains of Laos, Chinese engineers are drilling hundreds of tunnels and bridges to support a 420-kilometer railway, a $6 billion project that will connect eight Asian countries. Chinese money is building power plants in Pakistan to address chronic electricity shortages, part of an expected $46 billion worth of investment. Chinese planners are mapping out train lines from Budapest to Belgrade, Serbia, providing another artery for Chinese goods flowing into Europe through a Chinese-owned port in Greece. These and hundreds of other infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa and Europe form the backbone of China’s economic and geopolitical agenda. President Xi Jinping is creating new markets for his

country’s construction companies and exporting its model of state-led development to create deep economic and diplomatic ties. The initiative, called “One Belt, One Road,” has a scope and scale with little precedent, promising more than $1 trillion in infrastructure and spanning more than 60 countries. Mr. Xi wants to use China’s wealth and industrial know-how to refashion the global economic order, drawing countries and companies more tightly into China’s orbit. The projects serve China’s economic

interests. With growth slowing at home, China is producing more steel, cement and machinery than the country needs. So Mr. Xi is looking to the rest of the world to keep its economy going. China’s Marshall Plan “President Xi believes this is a longterm plan that will involve the current and future generations to propel Chinese and global economic growth,” said Cao Wenlian, director general of the International Cooperation Center of the National Development and Reform Commission,

a group dedicated to the initiative. “The plan is to lead the new globalization 2.0.” It amounts to a more audacious version of the Marshall Plan, America’s postWorld War II reconstruction effort that secured alliances in Europe. China is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in state-backed loans to win new friends around the world. Mr. Xi’s plan stands in contrast to President Donald J. Trump and his “America First” mantra. The Trump administration walked away from the Trans-Pacific BELT CONTINUED ON PAGE 19

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

JULY 2017

Leading Off WARMING = SLEEP LOSS Social scientists have been wrestling with the question of how climate change will impact human welfare. Now comes a prediction: In a hotter world, people will get less sleep. Scientists said in a paper published online that the poor, who are less likely to have air-conditioning, and the elderly would be hit hard. By 2050, an extra six nights of sleeplessness for every 100 Americans can be expected every month, the scientists said. By 2099, the estimate is 14 additional nights of lost sleep.

A LITTLE COFFEE TALK At HotBlack Coffee in Toronto, there’s one thing never on the menu: Wi-Fi. Jimson Bienenstock, the president, said the shop opened last year with the intent of getting customers to talk to one another instead of burying their faces in laptops. Mr. Bienenstock said he measured success by the din in his shop. “We’re a vehicle for human interaction,” he said, “otherwise it’s just a commodity.”

THE DRAWING BOARD Feeling bad because you haven’t made it big (yet)? Then schedule a visit to the Museum of Failure, which opened in Helsingborg, Sweden, on June 7 with a collection of over 60 products that, its website says, can provide insight into the “risky business of innovation.” Among the flops: the HarleyDavidson fragrance, the Rejuvenique mask, for facial toning, and Coca-Cola Blak, a coffeeinspired drink.

INTERNATIONAL REPORT NANCY LEE Executive editor TOM BRADY Editor ALAN MATTINGLY Managing editor The New York Times International Weekly 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 EDITORIAL INQUIRIES: nytweekly@nytimes.com SALES AND ADVERTISING INQUIRIES: nytweeklysales@nytimes.com

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The 12,000 apartments built in the Parco Saraceno neighborhood of Villaggio Coppola violated zoning laws and are now mostly abandoned.

VILLAGGIO COPPOLA JOURNAL

Italian Seaside Utopia Fades to a Paradise Lost BY GAIA PIANIGIANI

Villaggio Coppola, Italy — When Villaggio Coppola was built in the 1960s along the western Mediterranean coast of Italy, just north of Naples, the aspiration was of a utopian residential area. But utopia took a wrong turn. Around 12,000 apartments, along the seaside and in the nearby town of Castel Volturno, were built in violation of zoning laws, at a time when the local authorities ignored development on the coast. Eventually, many residents were forced to leave. What remains today looks less like a utopia than a paradise lost, a site of abandonment and degradation, and a concentration of southern Italy’s abiding troubles: criminality, lax local governance and extreme poverty. The section originally designed for wealthier residents, Parco Saraceno, stands as a ghost town, including a now vacant but once popular hotel built to resemble a castle. Most of the once colorful constructions are a portrait of neglect. All along the coast, for dozens of kilometers, single-story buildings occupy the waterfront, steps from the beach and the sea. But the beach has become a dumping ground for dirty mattresses, and is lined

by seafront porches where hardly anyone sits. That is not to say there are no residents in Parco Saraceno. A few residents were able to negotiate amnesties with the local authorities in the late 1980s and early 2000s, to avoid eviction. Some still live there. Other abandoned buildings have squatters. But Parco Saraceno receives little in the way of municipal services, existing in a quasi-legal limbo. Inhabitants did not want their full names published because of the village’s gray legal status. Salvatore, 40, a house painter, and his partner, Maria, 41, a cleaning woman, moved into the village from Castel Volturno’s historical center after they found the rents there to be too high. Today, they live in Parco Saraceno with three of their four children in an apartment that overlooks the local soccer fields and Villaggio Coppola in the distance. Prostitution flourishes in the area, a boon for mobsters. By dusk, virtually ev-

ery evening, the Via Domitiana, an ancient Roman road that runs parallel to the sea, is transformed into a runway for women, many from Africa, who offer their bodies to passing drivers for a little money. The authorities have sporadically tried to restore the area. But the plan for a tourist harbor has long been stalled. While the juxtaposition of tourist development so close to such poverty may be jarring, the seaside remains the allure for all. Almost every resident in Parco Saraceno has a sea view, albeit sometimes obstructed by rusty satellite dishes. From a distance, it is almost impossible to imagine the village’s utter decay and easy to envision it as the utopia it was intended to be. A nearby 18-hole golf course enhances the illusion. Even on closer inspection, it is hard to tell which of the dozens of little balconies have dwellers who might walk out to enjoy the view, and which of the homes are simply the shell of a forgotten dream.

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY AND INTERNATIONAL REPORT APPEAR IN THE FOLLOWING PUBLICATIONS: CLARÍN, ARGENTINA n DER STANDARD, AUSTRIA n LA RAZÓN, BOLIVIA n O ESTADÃO, BRAZIL n THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR, TORONTO STAR AND WATERLOO REGION RECORD, CANADA n LA SEGUNDA, CHILE n LISTIN DIARIO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC n SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, GERMANY n PRENSA LIBRE, GUATEMALA n ASAHI SHIMBUN, JAPAN n AVVAS MEDIA, ISLES MAGAZINE, THE MALDIVES n EL NORTE, EXPRESO AND REFORMA, MEXICO n BAUER MEDIA, NEW ZEALAND n CORREO, PERU n NEDELJNIK, SERBIA

JULY 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

China’s Global Ambitions Under the “One Belt, One Road” plan, President Xi Jinping is remaking global trade and nurturing geopolitical ties. The audacious plan, with little precedent, promises more than $1 trillion in infrastructure investments that span 60-plus countries across Europe, Asia and Africa.

Selected major Chinese international investment projects

Countries participating in the plan and selected African countries expected to receive the most investment from China from 2017 to 2021

RUSSIA $53-80 STEFAN WERMUTH/REUTERS

KAZAKHSTAN

ROMANIA

$7-11

IRAQ EGYPT $13-20

IRAN

PAKISTAN

CHINA

$7-11 $11-16

$17-26 SAUDI ARABIA

1 BRITAIN: NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

2 AFRICA: RAILWAY

China is financing more than a third of the $23.7 billion cost of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant, on the Somerset coast of southwest England. The project, in a major Western economy, was added to the Belt and Road plan to give additional prestige.

China financed most of the $4 billion cost of Africa’s first transnational electric railway, which opened this year and runs for 750 kilometers from Djibouti to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Chinese companies designed the system and supplied train cars and also the engineers who built the line over a six-year period.

BANGLADESH

3 $7-19

ANDREW JACOBS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

$8-12 INDIA

$84-126

THAILAND

NIGERIA

VIETNAM

PHILIPPINES

$8-12 $12-18

$4-12

2 $19-29

INDONESIA

Forecast investment from China 2017 - 2021, in billions

S. AFRICA $13-19

$50 10

Maximum forecast Minimum

Source: Credit Suisse

$35-52

AKHTAR SOOMRO/REUTERS

4 LAOS: RAILWAY

This deepwater port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea will be linked by new roads and rail to western China’s Xinjiang region, creating a shortcut for trade with Europe. The port is part of $46 billion China says it is spending on infrastructure and power plants in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

China is leading a $6 billion investment to build a 420-kilometer rail line from northern Laos to the capital, Vientiane. Mountainous terrain means bridges and tunnels will account for more than 60 percent of the line, and construction is further complicated by the need to clear unexploded land mines left from American bombing of the country during the Vietnam War.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BELT CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

Partnership, the trade pact that was envisioned as a buttress against China’s growing influence. “Pursuing protectionism is just like locking oneself in a dark room,” Mr. Xi said at the World Economic Forum in January. Mr. Xi is promoting global leadership in China’s own image, emphasizing economic efficiency and government intervention. And China is corralling all manner of infrastructure projects under the plan’s broad umbrella, without necessarily providing the funds. China is moving so fast and thinking so big that it is willing to make short-term missteps for long-term gains, even in corruption-ridden countries like Pakistan and Kenya. The United States and many of its allies have taken a cautious approach. Some, like Australia, have rebuffed Beijing’s requests to sign up for the plan. Despite projects on its turf, India is uneasy because Chinese-built roads will run through disputed territory in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. But it is impossible for any foreign leader, multinational executive or international banker to ignore China’s push to remake global trade. And Western industrial giants like General Electric and Siemens are looking for lucrative contracts to help China execute its plan. Influence Via Infrastructure As the sun beat down on Chinese workers driving bulldozers, four huge trac-

tor-trailers rolled into a storage area here in Vang Vieng, a difficult three-hour drive over potholed roads from the capital, Vientiane. They each carried massive coils of steel wire. About a kilometer away, a Chinese cement mixing plant with four bays glistened in the sun. Nearby, along a newly laid road, another Chinese factory was providing cement for tunnel construction. Nearly everything for the Laos project is made in China. Almost all the labor force is Chinese. At the peak of construction, there will be about 100,000 Chinese workers. When Mr. Xi announced the “One Belt, One Road” plan in September 2013, it was clear that Beijing needed to do something for the industries that had succeeded in building China’s new cities, railways and roads. China did not have a lot left to build, and growth started to sputter. Along with the economic boost, tiny Laos, a landlocked country with six million people, is a linchpin in Beijing’s strategy to chip away at American power in Southeast Asia. After Mr. Trump abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership in January, American influence in the region is seen to be waning. The rail line through Laos would provide a link to countries that China wants to bring firmly into its fold. Each nation in Mr. Xi’s plan brings strategic advantages. The power plants in Pakistan, as well as upgrades to a major highway and a $1 billion port expansion, are a political bulwark. By prompting growth in Pakistan,

GILLES SABRIE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

3 PAKISTAN: PORT

China wants to blunt the spread of Pakistan’s terrorists across the border into the Xinjiang region, where a restive Muslim population of Uighurs resides. It has military benefits, providing China’s navy future access to a remote port at Gwadar managed by a state-backed Chinese company with a 40-year contract. Many countries in the program have serious needs. The Asian Development Bank estimated that emerging Asian economies need $1.7 trillion per year in infrastructure to maintain growth, tackle poverty and respond to climate change. In Kenya, China is upgrading a railway from the port of Mombasa to Nairobi that will make it easier to get Chinese goods into the country. The rail line is the first to be built to Chinese standards outside China. The country will benefit for years from maintenance contracts. “China’s Belt and Road initiative is starting to deliver useful infrastructure, bringing new trade routes and better connectivity to Asia and Europe,” said Tom Miller, author of “China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the New Silk Road.” “But Xi will struggle to persuade skeptical countries that the initiative is not a smokescreen for strategic control.” Calculating the Risks China is making calculations that the benefits will outweigh the risks. The investments could complicate Beijing’s effort to stem the exodus of capital outflow that has been weighing on the economy. The cost could also come back

to haunt China, whose banks are being pressed to lend to projects that they find less than desirable. By some estimates, over half the countries that have accepted Belt and Road projects have credit ratings below investment grade. Laos is one of the risky partners. The Communist government is a longstanding friend of China. But fearing China’s domination, Laos is casting around for other friends as well, including Japan and Vietnam. After five years of negotiations over the rail line, Laos finally got a better deal. Laos has an $800 million loan from China’s Export-Import Bank and agreed to form a joint venture with China that will borrow much of the rest. Still, Laos faces a huge debt burden. The International Monetary Fund warned this year that the country’s reserves stood at two months of prospective imports of goods and services. It also expressed concerns that public debt could rise to around 70 percent of the economy. As construction gathers steam, nearby communities are starting to rumble. Farmers are balking at giving up their land. Some members of the national assembly have raised questions about property rights. At Miss Mai’s Noodle Shop in Vang Vieng, a customer who uses only one name, Mr. Sipaseuth, pondered the project. “We need civilization. Laos is very poor, very underdeveloped,” he said. “But how many Chinese will come here? Too many is not a good idea.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

JULY 2017

KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

SUSTAINABIITY

Once a Coal Goliath, India is Turning Green BY GEETA ANAND

Mumbai, India — Just a few years ago, the world watched nervously as India went on a building spree of coal-fired power plants, more than doubling its capacity and saying more were needed. Coal output, officials said, would almost triple, to 1.4 billion metric tons, by 2020.

Renewable energy will become cheaper than coal within a decade, experts say, and India is embracing solar power. Its air pollution, shown in New Delhi in 2014, is among the world’s worst.

India’s plans were cited by American critics of the Paris climate accord as proof of the futility of advanced nations trying to limit their carbon output. But now, even as President Donald J. Trump pulls the United States out of the pact, India has undergone an astonishing turnaround, driven in great part by a steep fall in the cost of solar power. Experts now say that India not only has no need of any new coal-fired plants for at least a decade, given that existing plants

are running below 60 percent of capacity, but that after that, it could rely on renewable sources for all its additional power needs. Rather than building coal-fired plants, it is now canceling many in the early planning stages. And in May, the government lowered its annual production target for coal to about 545 million metric tons from about 600 million metric tons. The sharp reversal, welcome news to world leaders trying to avert the deadly

JULY 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

effects of global warming, is a reflection of both the changing economics of renewable energy and a growing environmental consciousness in a country with some of the worst air pollution in the world. What India does matters, because it is the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China and the United States. And its energy needs are staggering — nearly one-quarter of its population has no electricity and many others get it only intermittently. With India’s power needs expected to grow substantially as its economy continues to expand, its energy use will heavily influence the world’s chances of containing the greenhouse gases that scientists believe are driving global warming. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has committed India to achieving 40 percent of its electricity capacity from nonfossil-fuel sources by 2030. Harsh Pant, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based research organization, said Modi’s plan makes economic and political sense. “Modi’s constituency is the middle class, and the middle class in Indian cities is choking on pollution,” Mr. Pant said. Two major economic factors lie at the heart of India’s move away from coal. The first is that the country’s growth rate slipped to 6.1 percent for the most recent quarter, down from 7 percent in the previous quarter. And much of that growth has come in service industries rather than in power-hungry manufacturing. Equally important is the startling drop in the price of renewable energy sources. Many energy experts say renewables are poised to become a less expensive alternative to coal within the next decade. “The train has left the station. Mr. Trump has come too late” to slow the transition to renewable energy, said Ajay Mathur, director general of the Energy Resources Institute, a New Delhi policy center. “By the time the coal-fired plants come up to full capacity because of increasing demand, the price of renewables will be lower than the price of coal.” When approving proposals for new solar power plants, the Indian government seeks bids from prospective builders who compete to pledge the lowest price at which they anticipate selling power. Five years ago, the lowest bid came in at 7 rupees, or 11 cents, per kilowatt-hour. In early May, the lowest bidder came in at 2.44 rupees per kilowatt-hour, a little under 4 cents, experts say. The latest bid makes solar power less expensive than coal, which sells for about 3 rupees per kilowatt-hour. Storage costs, a critical component of renewable energy systems, have also fallen. “The crucial question has been, ‘Yes, but what do you do when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?’” said Adair Turner, the chairman of the EnerAyesha Venkataraman contributed reporting.

AIJAZ RAHI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In a sharp reversal, India has decided to scale back the construction of coal-fired power plants. An official said steps were being taken to ensure that only electric cars would be sold there by 2030. Traffic in Hyderabad.

ATUL LOKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

gy Transitions Commission, which studies climate issues. The cost of lithium ion batteries, the best available for solar power storage, has fallen significantly, Mr. Turner said, largely because of economies of scale. Where the price was about $1,000 per kilowatt-hour more than five years ago, it was recently $273, Mr. Mathur said. The price needs to fall to $100 per kilowatt-hour for renewable energy to be comparable in price to coal, Mr. Mathur says. Mr. Turner thinks that will happen before 2030. Piyush Goyal, India’s power minister, said in late April that the country would take steps to assure that by 2030 only electric cars would be sold. “That’s rather ambitious,” Rahul Ton-

gia, a fellow at Brookings India, said. “The targets are there. The vision is there. The question is: ‘Is it going to happen? How?’ ” The government’s policy research arm, the National Institution for Transforming India, recently released a report in collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colorado, that calculated India could save $60 billion and reduce its projected carbon emissions by 37 percent by 2030 if it adopted widespread use of electric vehicles and more public transportation. Mr. Mathur says that even if India falls short of those goals, just coming close will have a huge impact on the concentration of greenhouse gases in the world and pollution within the country.

Besides reducing the choking pollution in cities, moving to electric vehicles also makes sense because the country has excess generation capacity in the coal-fired plants and is too heavily reliant on petroleum imports. “There has for a very long time been a push to reduce the growth in imports,” Mr. Mathur said. “This is one of those perfect policy opportunities, with short-term and long-term benefits.” Navroz Dubash, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, cautions that even though India is likely to meet its additional energy needs in the future, that does not mean it is about to stop burning coal tomorrow. “It is important not to draw from this that India’s tryst with coal is necessarily done,” Mr. Dubash said, “just that there are signs it will end sooner and at a lower level than expected.” This is hopeful news for the world, Mr. Tongia said, because the only way for the world not to grow too warm is for “developing countries, especially India, to do more, to come in lower than budget, to do their unfair share.” And, Mr. Tongia said, “the good news” is that India has decided that it is in its interest to do its “unfair share.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

JULY 2017

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

At the Kings Romans complex in Laos, tigers roam cages, and waitresses, below, serve tiger meat dishes, which can be paired with tiger wine. A Chinese tourist at Thailand’s Tiger World, below.

SCIENCE

Illegal Wildlife Trade Puts Tigers on the Menu Conservationists say zoos and farms in Southeast Asia peddle endangered species. By RACHEL NUWER

BOKEO PROVINCE, LAOS — The tiger paced back and forth in its cage, groaning mournfully. A second big cat slept soundly in the corner, while a third stared blankly at the bars. Next to this cage was another containing three more tigers, and after that three more cages: a line of small pens, each holding at least one cat. Most likely, none had long to live. The tigers were property of Hong Kongbased Kings Romans Group, which operates a casino here, along with hotels, a shooting range, a cockfighting and bullfighting ring, a Chinatown-themed shopping center, and this shabby zoo, in what is called the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone. Conservationists maintain that this zoo is actually a farm raising animals for slaughter, and that it helps perpetuate the

illegal wildlife trade, swapping tigers with similar operations in Thailand and illegally butchering animals for their bones, meat and parts. Farms throughout Southeast Asia are part of an industry whose profitability by some estimates is surpassed only by the global trade in drugs and arms, and by human trafficking.

Restaurants at Kings Romans offer plates of bear paw, endangered pangolin and sautéed tiger meat, which can be paired with tiger wine. “The place is just a mess,” said Debbie Banks of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency in London. “Pretty much anything goes.” In 2015, Ms. Banks and her colleagues, along with the nonprofit group Education for Nature-Vietnam, reported that meals, medicine and jewelry made from protected species — including tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, bears and elephants — were openly sold in the economic zone. This spurred the Laotian government to raid

some businesses and to burn tiger skins on television. But Ms. Banks said little had changed since that “cosmetic effort.” Some 700 tigers live on farms in Laos. Thousands more are believed to be kept throughout Southeast Asia, and an additional 5,000 to 6,000 are housed in over 200 breeding centers in China. Fewer than 4,000 of the big cats remain in the wild. One source who works closely with the government, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said that some Laotian politicians remained involved in the farms and that the country’s forestry department lacked the authority to shut them down.

JULY 2017

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

According to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, or Cites, a treaty to which China and all Southeast Asian nations are signers, tigers are to be bred only for conservation. In Laos and several other Asian countries, conservationists have compiled ample evidence that many zoos and farms serve as fronts for commercial breeding. In 2016, monks at Tiger Temple in Thailand were accused of abusing tigers and selling them into the illegal wildlife trade. Eventually, 40 dead cubs were discovered in a freezer, along with pelts and other products. Temple representatives said that the bodies and parts did not prove wrongdoing. Conservationists also have accused tiger farms in China — two of which are supported by government investment — of illegal activity. Meng Xianlin, executive director-general of the Chinese Cites management authority, declined to be interviewed. Some, including government officials, believe that such facilities should be legal, arguing that they relieve pressure to hunt wild animals. Others say there is no evidence to back this assertion. “I can’t think of any species in Southeast Asia that benefits from commercial captive breeding,” said Chris Shepherd, the Southeast Asia regional director for Traffic, a nonprofit wildlife trade-monitoring group. Scott Roberton, the director of counterwildlife trafficking at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Asia program, said that the risks associated with legalizing trade in endangered species are the same as those associated with the ivory trade. “Legal trade stimulates demand, confuses law enforcement efforts, and opens a huge opportunity for laundering illegal products, which is why ivory markets are now being closed globally,” he said. “Laundering” of animals as farmed when they were actually caught in the wild is a frequent practice. A 2008 investigation by Vietnamese officials and the Wildlife Conservation Society found that about half of 78 wildlife farms surveyed regularly launder animals caught in the wild. In 2016, a study of 26 Vietnamese wildlife farms found that all engaged in laundering. Conservationists believe that international pressure may be crucial to persuading Asian governments to close tiger, bear and other wildlife farms, but that strategy’s effectiveness is compromised by an awkward fact: An estimated 5,000 tigers are held, predominantly as pets, in backyards, petting zoos and even truck stops across the United States. Leigh Henry, a senior policy adviser at the World Wildlife Fund, said: “When fingers are pointed at China about their tiger farms, they tend to point the finger back at the U.S. and say, ‘They have as many tigers as we have, why are you not criticizing them?’ ”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MINZAYAR OO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hairs from Buddha are said to be held at this pagoda on Indawgyi Lake, which faces environmental threats. Below, pilgrims headed to the pagoda.

THE ENVIRONMENT

Lake Reflects the Strains in Myanmar BY DOUG CLARK

Lonton, Myanmar — After we crest a mountain pass on a freshly bulldozed road, Indawgyi Lake and its valley appear below. The clouds are reflected in the 775-square-kilometer surface, one of the largest freshwater bodies in Southeast Asia. There are few signs of the globalization swamping Myanmar as the nation opens itself after half a century under a military dictatorship. For centuries, the indigenous Kachin people here in Myanmar’s remote north planted rice when the lake flooded their fields during the monsoon, fished its waters and hunted its wetlands and the surrounding mountains. As Ma Thwe Thwe Win, 32, a local birding guide, explained: “The lake gives us fish, waters our fields, and brings the birds here. It is everything to my people.”

Today, every morning and afternoon, fishermen still paddle out, singing Burmese songs, trailing gillnets with soda bottle buoys. But despite the remoteness, Indawgyi Lake is straining under the same environmental and conflict-related challenges that are stressing the fragile nation. In the mid-1990s, Myanmar’s army captured the Hpakant jadeite mine, the world’s richest, from the Kachin Independence Army, a rebel force of around 10,000 men, about 56 kilometers north of Indawgyi Lake. The mine was expanded, and soon many of Indawgyi’s inhabitants had moved to squalid mining camps where heroin addiction ran rampant. Increasing commercialization of

the region’s economy also led to the

expansion of illegal gold mines in the mountains above Indawgyi Lake. Young men from other regions began to pour into the valley as their elder brothers inherited what land remained in their hometowns and a dam flooded farmland nearby. They introduced fishing techniques like small-gauge gillnets and electroshock fishing that began depleting the lake’s fish stocks. Foreign tourists also appeared. Adventurous souls would ride the colonialera train north from Mandalay and ride over the mountains on motorbike taxis to Lonton, a row of lakeside houses on stilts with about 2,800 inhabitants. But then in 2011, a cease-fire broke down, and the army occupied the valley while the K.I.A. locked down the highlands. Today, peasants riding ox carts and dump trucks line up at checkpoints. Soldiers inspect the traffic. Most foreigners visit Inn Chit Thu, a nonprofit ecotourism group. There, young workers rent out kayaks and bicycles. If fighting is low, they lead treks into the mountains. They also offer birdwatching tours to see Pallas’s fish-eagles, Oriental darters and sarus cranes. About 73,000 hectares of the valley were designated a wildlife reserve in 1999, and in 2014 it was nominated as a Unesco World Heritage sanctu-

ary for supporting a “diversity of globally threatened wildlife,” including the white-rumped and slender-billed vultures, and at least three endemic fish species. Hog deer, Asian elephants and clouded leopards also lurk in its jungles. In addition to foreigners, 80,000 pilgrims camp on the lake’s shores during the annual festival at the Shwemyitzu Pagoda, which is said to contain several of the Buddha’s hairs. A decade ago, the Khaung Tong Creek coursed pristinely into Indawgyi Lake, but it has since become choked with mud and chemicals from an illegal K.I.A. gold mine. Illegal logging is thinning the forests that once protected hillsides from eroding into the lake. Nongovernmental organizations, fishermen and the government are addressing the problems. Oliver Springate-Baginski, a professor at the University of East Anglia who has led an environmental survey of the area, said, “The conflict has undermined the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms, and powerful people have been able to exploit the natural resources at the expense of less influential locals.”

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JULY 2017

WORLD FINANCE

Singapore Is Pressured To End Secret Banking BY NEIL GOUGH

Singapore — Last year, American law enforcement officials pressed the Swiss bank UBS about Henry Hsiaw, a Taiwan-born American whom they accused of failing to file tax returns. The world has changed since the days when Swiss banks stood as the peak of privacy for the rich. Already, UBS had paid $780 million in fines and disclosed details of thousands of Swiss bank accounts held by Americans — including one controlled by Mr. Hsiaw. Still, UBS balked at handing over information about Mr. Hsiaw’s account with the bank in Singapore, citing the Asian city-state’s bank secrecy laws. Singapore is an increasingly popular destination for money that wants to stay unnoticed. Tight bank secrecy laws have helped draw $1.1 trillion in foreign funds to the city, according to an estimate from Boston Consulting Group, a consulting firm. Singapore is set to become the largest cross-border financial center in the world by 2028, the firm forecasts. But in the face of complaints from abroad about its measures to stop illicit money, Singapore has jailed local and foreign bankers and closed down branches of two Swiss banks related to more than $3 billion that was said to have been siphoned from 1Malaysia Development Berhad, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, some of which moved through the city’s banks. American officials are trying to recoup more than $1 billion that they say was taken from 1MDB and spent in the United States by family and friends of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak. Ravi Menon, chief of the city state’s top financial regulator, has said that 1MDB showed Singapore can do better. “There is no doubt that the recent findings have made a dent in our reputation as a clean and trusted financial center,” Mr. Menon said in a speech last July. The Financial Action Task Force, a multicountry advisory group set up to combat money laundering, said last year that Singapore’s financial firms had “a less developed understanding of the risk of illicit flows into and out of Singapore.” “Singapore is the new Switzerland,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai. Mr. Xie was fired as chief Asia economist at Morgan Stanley in 2006 after a private email he wrote calling Singapore a money laundering center became public. “Since the U.S. Department of Justice went after Swiss banks for hiding tax dodgers years ago, Singapore has filled the role,” he said. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, its top financial regulator, disputed that allegation. “There is no doubt some in-

A scandal involving a Malaysian sovereign fund touched Najib Razak, Malaysia’s prime minister, and Singapore. Right, Le Freeport, a duty-and-tax-free storage facility, caters to the rich.

creased risk of illicit fund flows associated with the rapid growth of private banking flows into Singapore,” a spokeswoman said. Nevertheless, she said, Singapore “will not tolerate its financial system being used as a refuge or conduit for illicit fund flows.” Singapore encouraged private wealth managers to use the city as a regional base in the 1990s just as China’s rise created a new generation of wealthy. Today, big names like Credit Suisse, Julius Baer and UBS keep offices in gleaming skyscrapers among the squat facades of century-old colonial British buildings. Billionaires can fly in to a private terminal, gamble at high-stakes tables at the two new casinos, and buy and sell on the world’s first diamond trading exchange. They can store art, wine, gemstones or gold bullion bars in an ultra-secure, dutyand-tax-free facility called Le Freeport. In its report in September, the Financial Action Task Force said that in some cases, the Singaporean authorities did not know enough about what was going on at Le Freeport, given the risks. Lincoln Ng, the chief executive of Le Freeport and a former Singapore police

REUTERS; ABOVE LEFT, MOHD RASFAN/AGENCE-FRANCE PRESSE —GETTY IMAGES

officer, said local regulators “are aware of the activities through stringent checks and audits.” Le Freeport cannot gain access to the vaults once they have been leased to customers. In marketing materials, many tenants highlight confidentiality as a selling point. In the case of Mr. Hsiaw, the American born in Taiwan, the United States dismissed its charges after UBS produced information on his Singapore accounts. UBS said it had complied with all applicable laws, but did not elaborate. Singa-

pore’s monetary authority said Singapore officials “can render assistance so long as there are legitimate grounds.” Lawyers say the case, the first of its kind in the United States to target Singapore accounts, is a warning shot. Jeffrey Neiman, a lawyer in Florida who was one of the lead prosecutors on the federal government’s initial 2009 case against UBS’s Swiss bank, said “the ultimate death knell for secrecy in any jurisdiction would be a bank getting served one of these subpoenas and choosing to litigate, then losing in court.”

JULY 2017

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TECHNOLOGY

The Ticker

In High Tech, Trump Politics Turn Canada Into a Magnet

CHINA’S OBSESSION

By STEVE LOHR

Amir Moravej, an Iranian computer engineer in Montreal, quietly worked last year on building software to help people navigate the Canadian immigration system. He saw it as a way for others to avoid the same immigration travails he suffered a few years earlier. Then came the American presidential election. “Trump accelerated everything,” said Mr. Moravej, 33, the chief executive of a software start-up named Botler AI. Botler AI began putting more resources into building a chatbot tailored to one of Canada’s immigration programs. The start-up recently announced that Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, is joining the company as a strategy adviser. Mr. Bengio is adding his intellectual prowess to ease the way for what could become a migration of high-tech talent. Canada stands to benefit from the American political climate and the Trump administration’s efforts to sharply restrict travel into the United States from six predominantly Muslim nations. After Mr. Trump’s election, applications to Canada for student and temporary visas surged. Immigration is a linchpin in Canada’s economic policy. One-fifth of the country’s population of 36 million is foreign-born. Major American technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and IBM, have also been adding to their A.I. research teams in Canada. The ride-hailing service Uber is opening a branch of its advanced technologies group in Toronto, the company’s first outside the United States. The lab will develop self-driving car technology. Canada also has well-funded programs intended to persuade A.I. researchers, educated at Canadian universities, to remain in Canada. And it wants to persuade expatriate engineers and entrepreneurs to return to Canada. Ross Intelligence, an A.I. start-up founded in Toronto, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area two years ago. But last month, Ross opened an office in Toronto. The Toronto outpost, said Jimoh Ovbiagele, chief technology officer of Ross, “allows us to really recruit from the global talent pool.”

DOUG CHAYKA

INNOVATION

Silicon Valley, Not the Government, Is Hard at Work to Change the World To ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all, more public investment is needed. By FARHAD MANJOO

One persistent criticism of Silicon Valley is it no longer works on big, world-changing ideas. But don’t be fooled. Tech companies aren’t just funding big things — they are funding the most world-changing things. Look at the cars, the rockets, the internet-beaming balloons and gliders, the voice assistants, drones, augmented and virtual reality devices, and every permutation of artificial intelligence you’ve ever encountered in science fiction. They are spending on ideas that we may come to see as having altered life on Earth. At the same time, the American government’s appetite for funding scientific research and out-of-this-world technology keeps falling, and it may decline further under President Donald J. Trump. This sets up a looming complication: Technology giants, not the government, are building the artificially intelligent future. And unless the government vastly increases how much it spends on research into such technologies, it is the corporations that will decide how to deploy them. Consider Google. The company is using artificial intelligence to teach computers to understand language, to see and hear, to diagnose diseases, and even to create art. The company understands that the A.I.based projects that succeed could be transformational: They will alter existing industries and create huge new ones, including a stream of new businesses from which Google can profit. Google is not alone in building a future out of A.I. Its parent company, Alphabet, is spending billions to inject machine intelligence into much of the global economy, from self-driving cars to health care. Then there are the other members of the Frightful Five — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — which are also spending heavily on the intelligent future. Collectively, the five are among the biggest investors

in research and development. According to their earnings reports, they are on track to spend more than $60 billion this year. By comparison, in 2015, the United States government spent about $67 billion on all nondefense-related scientific research. One could be optimistic about the tech industry’s huge investments in the intelligent future. The technologies the tech giants are working on will have a huge impact on society. Self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year, for instance. But the industry’s huge investments in A.I. might also be cause for alarm, because they are not balanced by anywhere near that level of investment by the government. In its waning days, the Obama administration published a report on artificial intelligence. According to the report, the government spent only $1.1 billion on unclassified A.I. research in 2015. It argued for increasing spending on artificial intelligence several times over, to give the government a greater say in how the technology develops. Greg Brockman, a founder of OpenAI, a research firm, echoed this idea. “We created OpenAI partly because industry is investing such vast sums of money into A.I. research that commercial, private entities were on track to create the first powerful A.I. systems, and these entities don’t have a built-in mechanism to ensure that everyone benefits from advances,” he said. Mr. Brockman noted that one reason the internet has been so successful is that it was created through government funding to be open and accessible to everyone, a broadbased engine of economic opportunity. “As powerful A.I. systems come online, the intent and motivations of their creators will be major factors in determining their impact,” Mr. Brockman said. “If A.I. development is done entirely in for-profit companies, then these systems are likely to be deployed to benefit just one organization and group of people.”

A boom in bike-sharing has Chinese city streets blanketed with unused bicycles. Now, Chinese start-ups want to share umbrellas, concrete mixers and mobile phone power banks. “China is finally embracing its communist roots. That’s the essence of communism: communal sharing,” said Andy Tian, an entrepreneur. “But can you really share everything?” One company lets users rent basketballs from lockers at courts around the country. It charges about one renminbi, or about 15 cents, per hour. A deposit of $10 is required if a user has a low credit rating.

TOWN HIRES UBER Uber has fought its way into cities around the world and now operates in 70 countries, despite being hit by roadblocks in Montreal and Toronto, fires in Paris and smashed windshields in Mexico City. But Innisfil, a small Canadian town north of Toronto, hired Uber as an alternative to costly public transportation. The town recently started a pilot program for Uber to provide transportation for its 36,000 people and set aside 100,000 Canadian dollars (about $74,000) to pay Uber for subsidized rides.

COFFEE IN CALIFORNIA There is a new crop growing in Southern California’s famous avocado groves — coffee. About two dozen farms are nurturing coffee bushes under the canopies of old avocado trees. The farmers are dealing with the aging of California’s avocado trees, which are producing less fruit. At the same time, climate change threatens to damage the coffee crop in the tropical highlands that produce nearly all the world’s beans, potentially opening up a lucrative opportunity in the $20 billion export market for beans.

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JULY 2017

SOCIAL MEDIA

Now Instagram Is Looking a Lot Like Facebook New features being offered for 700 million users, and counting. By FARHAD MANJOO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIANE OHANESIAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Uber provides rare job opportunities in parts of Africa, but its drivers take home meager earnings from a day on Nairobi’s crowded streets.

LABOR

In Kenya, Uber Poses A Threat to Its Own Drivers may face competition from a cheaper service offered by their company. By KIMIKO de FREYTAS-TAMURA

NAIROBI, KENYA — James Njoroge, an Uber driver in Nairobi, earns barely $5 at the end of a grueling 10-hour workday ferrying customers through snarled traffic across the Kenyan capital. Now, a new competitor is in town, threatening to undercut even these meager earnings. That rival is none other than Mr. Njoroge’s own employer. Uber in Kenya, already one of the company’s most affordable services in the world, charges customers in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, a minimum fare of $2.90. Uber is aiming to beat back competing services by pushing its prices even lower. In April, the company announced it was introducing an even cheaper service at half that price, $1.45, by allowing its drivers to use much older, lower-quality cars. Drivers say they’re bearing the brunt of the price cuts. In February, drivers went on strike to protest fare cuts that they said made it difficult for them to break even. The new pricing is much lower than that. The prospect of losing what is already a meager living is making Mr. Njoroge, 29, nervous. “We’ve been working for them so much, but now they’re slashing us,” he

said recently, slowing down his Toyota, a seven-year-old model, hardly brand-new but newer than the cars expected to be part of the fleet for the coming service, uberGO. “Kenyans always go for cheapcheap, so this is worrying,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.” Uber has quickly expanded across parts of Africa, where it is seen by those signing up as drivers — or “partners” in the Uber lingo — as a rare job opportunity on a continent with high levels of unemployment. But the service has stirred debate over how low fares should go, and the company has faced a series of strikes from South Africa to Lagos. Last month, drivers in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, went

on strike after fares were slashed by 40 percent. Faced with competition from other ride-hailing apps, Uber’s latest service in Kenya, critics say, would pit its own drivers against each other in a kind of race to the bottom, eroding what little they already earn. “To live in Nairobi, it’s very hard,” Mr. Njoroge said recently in his home in Umoja, a dusty but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Nairobi. “You have to hustle on all sides,” he said. “If we don’t have many clients,” he said, “we’ll need to find new options for work.” Uber insists that the new service would allow drivers to save on fuel and other expenses, ultimately making their jobs more profitable. “Revenues might not be higher, but the costs will be lower, so ultimately profits will be higher,” said Alon Lits, Uber’s general manager for sub-Saharan Africa. “We believe our economics make sense,” he said, but added that the company was in the process of getting feedback from drivers in order to “interrogate our assumptions before moving forward.” Ride-hailing services in Nairobi are highly competitive, even among apps for motorcycle taxis, or bodabodas.

Instagram is, it seems, Facebook’s next Facebook. Not long ago, the Facebook-owned photo-based social network was growing at a steady clip. Every nine months, it would add 100 million users. Then, last year, it grew to 600 million users from 500 million in only six months. Now about 700 million people use Instagram every month, with about 400 million of them checking in daily. The network feels the way Facebook did from 2009 to 2012, when it silently crossed over from one of those tech things that some people sometimes did to one of those tech things that everyone you know does every day. In some ways, this is not surprising. Instagram has been growing like crazy essentially since it went live in 2010, and under Facebook — which bought the company for $1 billion five years ago — it has had ample resources to keep that up. But with 700 million users, it’s virtually in uncharted territory. Kevin Systrom, chief executive of Instagram, said it was deliberately increasing the pace of change to attract more users. He said the service tried to get rid of bottlenecks and quickly seized on opportunities to improve. One bottleneck involved technical fixes. More than 80 percent of Instagram’s users are outside the United States, and the service is growing especially quickly in parts of Asia and South America that are dogged by underpowered Android phones and slow cellular networks. A huge part of Instagram’s engineering efforts are thus devoted to making its Android app work better outside the United States. And then there’s Instagram’s decision to incorporate features developed by Snapchat. Mr. Systrom was unapologetic. He credited Snapchat with creating Stories, a video-slide show, but argued that it was no mere feature, but instead a brandnew digital format that could be broadly reinterpreted across different products. “I don’t know much about the history of cars, but let’s say the Model T was the first car,” he said. “So what do you think the first car company other than Ford was thinking? Are we copying Ford, or is this a new mode of transportation that everyone is going to have different takes on?” Stories on Instagram feels different from Stories on Snapchat because there are different people on both networks using it for different purposes. And, for some, the Instagram version often offers a superior experience for one obvious reason: There are more people there.

THE NEW YORK TIMES | INTERNATIONAL REPORT

JULY 2017

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIULIA MARCHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Cars at a Ford plant in Hangzhou are assembled and painted by some 650 robots, a sign of China’s push to automate its factories. There are also 2,800 workers there, who do some of the welding.

AUTOMATION

A Robot Revolution In China’s Factories BY KEITH BRADSHER

Hangzhou, China — Even a decade ago, car manufacturing in China was still a fairly low-tech, labor-intensive endeavor. Thousands of workers in a factory, earning little more than $1 an hour, performed highly repetitive tasks, while just a handful of industrial robots dotted factory floors. No longer. At Ford’s newest car assembly plant in Hangzhou in east-central China, at least 650 robots resembling huge, white-necked vultures, bob and weave to assemble the steel structures of utility vehicles and midsize sedans, with workers in blue uniforms and helmets doing only some of the welding, but much of the process has been automated. The state-of-the-art factory exemplifies the vast transformation that has taken place across manufacturing in China. General Motors opened a similarly automated ultra-modern Cadillac factory in the eastern suburbs of Shanghai, as well as one in Wuhan. Other automakers are also pouring billions of dollars into China, now the world’s largest auto market. Robots are critical to China’s economic ambitions. The Ford assembly plant is

across the street from a robot-producing factory owned by Kuka, the big German robot manufacturer that a Chinese company bought last summer. For carmakers, the reliance on robots is driven partly by cost. Blue-collar wages have soared because multinational companies have moved much of their production to China even as its labor force is rapidly changing. The combination of the one-child policy, which cut the birth rate through the 1980s and ’90s, and an eightfold increase in college enrollments has cut by more than half the number of people entering the work force each year who are willing to consider factory work. Blue-collar wages are now $4 to $6 an hour in large, prosperous cities, though still far lower than in the West. Automation is also a competitive neces-

sity. As carmakers jockey for customers, they have no choice but to deploy the latest technologies. The challenge is how to keep a competitive edge, while trying to prevent intellectual property from being copied by Chinese rivals. “We’re basically building an R&D center here in China, and test track, that is on par with other parts of Ford,” in North America, Europe and Australia, said Mark Fields when he was still Ford’s chief executive. (He has been replaced by Jim Hackett.) Robots perform tasks like welding the same way every time, improving quality control. But they require a lot of fine-tuning along the way. Painting is also mostly automated. Elaborate spraying robots snake back and forth across each car body, spraying

it. Workers still apply protective sealant to the vehicles’ interiors and underbodies, as Ford has been leery of depending entirely on robots for this step until it is sure they work well. Automation doesn’t elicit the same fear of job losses in China as in the United States. With car demand in China growing quickly, ever more factories and workers are needed to produce more cars. The Ford factory here in Hangzhou may have 650 robots, but it also has 2,800 workers. Other automakers continue to hunt for skilled workers to fill vacancies in their factories. “Robots aren’t the threat,” said Paul Buetow, the director of China manufacturing at General Motors. “The threat is not being able to run your business with products that people want to buy.”

JULY 2017

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DAMIEN MEYER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

A recent ranswomware attack targeted the public health system in Britain, FedEx in America, universities in Asia and this computer in France.

INTERNET CRIME

A Cybertheft Tool for the Unskilled Ransomware makes it easier for nonexperts to control others’ computers and demand payment.

A cancer hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia, was among the victims of an attack in May that seized control of computers around the world.

By NICOLE PERLROTH

SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers are discovering it is more profitable to hold data hostage than to steal it. A decade-old internet scourge called ransomware went mainstream on May 13 when cybercriminals seized control of computers around the world, from the delivery giant FedEx in the United States to Britain’s public health system, universities in China and even Russia’s powerful Interior Ministry. Across Asia, several universities and organizations said they had been affected. Renault, the European automaker, said its operations had been hit. Some clues point to North Koreans as the culprits. But it could all have been worse if a 22-year-old British cybersecurity researcher had not stopped the attack from spreading by registering a domain name he found in the ransomware. Computer criminals are discovering that ransomware is the best way to make money quickly. This method of cybertheft has become much easier with the advent

Mark Scott and Nick Wingfield contributed reporting.

MAST IRHAM/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

of tools that wrap victims’ data with tough encryption technology; hard-to-trace digital currency like Bitcoin, and even online sites that offer to do the ransoming for a commission. “You don’t even need to have any skills to do this anymore,” said Jason Rebholz, a director at the Crypsis Group who has helped victims of ransomware. The May 13 attacks were a powerful escalation of earlier, much smaller episodes. Hackers exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft servers that was first discovered by the United States National Security Agency and then leaked online by a group of unknown hackers in April. It allowed the ransomware to spread from server

to server, encrypting as many files as it could, and holding more than 70,000 organizations hostage. By the next afternoon, several Bitcoin accounts associated with the ransomware had received the equivalent of $33,000, according to Elliptic, a firm that tracks online financial transactions. Usually, half the victims of ransomware pay the ransom, which ranges from one Bitcoin, which is worth about $1,700, to as many as 30 Bitcoin, nearly $51,000, with the median ransom being four Bitcoin. Anyone now can visit a web page, generate a ransomware file with the click of a mouse, encrypt someone’s systems and demand a ransom to restore access to the

files. If the victim pays, the ransomware provider takes a cut of the payment. Ransomware criminals also have customer service lines that victims can call to get help paying a ransom. There are even live chat options. And while some amateur ransomware attackers may not restore victims’ data once the ransom is paid, the more professional outfits worry that if they do not decrypt a victim’s data, their reputation and “business” may suffer, Mr. Rebholz said. The most notorious of these attackers, SamSam, is known for demanding the highest ransoms, 25 to 30 Bitcoin. But it reliably decrypts a victim’s data after being paid. Cybercriminals have found a soft target in universities, which usually have more open systems that allow for the free flow of information. More recently, they have found a niche in health care, where ransomware attacks take on a new level of urgency as doctors and emergency rooms in Britain discovered. Imperial College Healthcare in London, for example, was hit with ransomware 19 times over 12 months, according to freedom-of-information requests submitted by SentinelOne, a security firm. In the United States, the number of reported ransomware attacks rose fourfold between 2015 and 2016, as did the ransom payments to hackers, to $1 billion, according to the F.B.I. Last year, hospitals in California, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland and Texas were hit with ransomware. And in February, a Los Angeles hospital paid $17,000 to hackers. On May 11, Dr. Krishna Chinthapalli published an article in the British Medical Journal warning that such an attack was imminent. Dr. Chinthapalli cited a report that one out of every three British National Health Service trusts were hit by ransomware last year. Nearly half of ransomware attacks begin by persuading an employee to click on an email. But the methods used can be more complex. A “watering hole attack,” for example, infects a website with ransomware code. When users visit the site, that code is downloaded. Hackers can also attack with “brute force” methods, scanning an organization for software vulnerabilities and weak passwords. And ransomware attackers are not above playing martyr. In one recent attack that Mr. Rebholz tracked, the attackers tried to convince their victim that paying a “contribution” — or ransom — would benefit sick children around the world. “That’s where we are,” Mr. Rebholz said. “Threat actors are now trying to play people’s emotions, trying to put a pretty face on criminal activity by pretending to be a charity case.”

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JULY 2017

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DONALD MIRALLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ADVENTURE SPORTS

Braving Ocean Perils To Ride Night Waves BY JARED WHITLOCK

San Diego, California — The ocean and the sky melted together in a gray mass, making it tough for the surfer to size up the coming waves. Would they crash down on top of him and hold him under — or break in just the right spot for him to catch the perfect ride? By day, the surfer, Helmut Igel, is not fazed by two-meter waves. But it was after midnight, on a moonless sea. Surfing is not the same in darkness. Mr. Igel, 55, is among a small subculture of surfers who dot coastlines from San Diego to Sydney after sunset. Visibility is but one of the perils. Sharks, while rare along the coast here, can hunt at night. And surfers cannot count on being rescued by lifeguards; they left hours ago. So why paddle out under the stars? Fewer surfers, mainly. “These days, on a full moon,

you can still paddle out to a crowd,” Mr. Igel said. The International Surfing Association says the global population of surfers is at 35 million and growing. More surfers means more traffic as they wait for waves, continually battling for position. Surf etiquette calls for only one rider per wave (or two on a twoway peak). Mr. Igel agreed to a request to shadow him in the water, on one condition: no naming the precise spot he frequents. Before hitting the seas, Mr. Igel strapped on a helmet that was

Solitude and ambience draw surfers to the water at night, but sharks are a threat. Surfers wear glow sticks to keep from running into one another.

crusty from exposure to salt water. Taped to the helmet were orange and purple glow sticks, a night surfer accessory that alerts riders to paddlers in their path. Glow sticks can seem primitive next to the LED technology employed by pro surfers on social media in recent years. The most famous night ride took place in 2011: The Australian big-wave surfer Mark Visser — equipped with a vest and a board with specially engineered lights — surfed nine-meter waves at the Hawaiian break Jaws. “It started off as, ‘This is the most terrifying thing,’ but once

I settled down and was able to really feel what was happening and be in the moment, it was the most amazing experience,” said Mr. Visser, noting that the stunt had required four years of preparation. Light from glow sticks was the only sign of Mr. Igel as he rode a wave, drew S-shaped turns and kicked out before the wave dumped him on the shore. He

immediately began clawing his way back to the takeoff spot. In 20 years of night surfing, Mr. Igel has encountered collisions — and a nearly four-meter sudden wave that flipped him

JULY 2017

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and a friend. But those incidents have not kept him from going out a few times a month. Yet, for all its allure, night surfing is linked to tragedy. On October 27, 2015, as night fell, the big-wave surfer Alec Cooke paddled out at Waimea Bay in Oahu, Hawaii. After Mr. Cooke was reported missing, emergency responders found his surfboard washed up on shore, but not him. Three days later, the body of Kenneth Mann, a master surfboard sander who was known to ride waves at night, was found tethered to his broken surfboard on the beach in Encinitas, California. Given the lack of light, it is common for surfers’ eyes to play tricks on them: Is that kelp or something worse? “Sharks are a big part of night surfing, even if they are not actually there,” James McDonald said. “The thought is always with me.” He half-jokingly added that if he had the misfortune of encountering a shark, he would receive “an amazing epitaph: ‘Eaten by Great White Whilst Night Surfing.’” Brad Benter, also a San Diego night surfer, said he had once spotted a shark’s dorsal fin 30 meters from him under a full moon about 4:30 a.m. These days, he wears an anklet meant to ward off sharks, although he is not confident it works. Still, the surfers come out after dark. “Your eyes start to adjust after a while, and while still hard to see, you catch a wave,” Mr. McDonald said. “And in your head, it feels like you ride two miles. Time stops.” Night surfing is not new. A 1909 Collier’s magazine article on surfing in Hawaii described the annual Waikiki beachside carnival, in which surfers rode with acetylene lamps. In 1969, Hawaii’s Jock Sutherland rode sixmeter monsters at Waimea Bay well after sundown, according to Matt Warshaw, author of “The History of Surfing.”

“In the ’60s, young surfers would occasionally go out because the ingredients were there: summer, warm water and moonlight,” Mr. Warshaw said. “Later, it became a way to get away from the crowd, and I’m not even sure if that’s true anymore at prime spots.” Back at the midnight break, Mr. Igel stroked into a wave that marched in from the darkness. “This looks like a good one!” he said before dropping in.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KO SASAKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

For the past decade, sand sculptors have gathered every year in Japan to mount an exhibit of intricate tableaus. This year’s theme was the United States.

ART

Sand Museum in Japan Offers Ephemeral Treasures By MOTOKO RICH

TOTTORI, JAPAN — Tottori, a remote outpost on the west coast of Japan, is known for its sand: Undulating golden dunes stretch for about 15 kilometers along the coast. And, for the past decade, sand sculptors have gathered here every year for two weeks at the world’s only indoor sand museum to mount an exhibit of improbably intricate tableaus, all formed from about 2,700 metric tons of sand. This year, 19 artists from countries including Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia traveled to Tottori to sculpt scenes on the theme of the United States. Previous themes have included Africa, Russia and South America. Working nine hours a day, the artists built, among other things, Mount Rushmore, the New York skyline, and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. With Japan’s population declining, Tottori officials want to attract more foreign tourists, and the sand museum is central Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

to their efforts. The museum was founded in 2006 when the city of Tottori decided it wanted to better exploit its proximity to the sand dunes. Although sand from the dunes is off limits because of a national park designation, the city had saved a trove of sand unearthed during a road-building project above the dunes a decade ago. “One attraction of the sand sculptures is their frailty,” said Yoshihiko Fukazawa, the mayor of Tottori. “All the forms will eventually disappear or degrade or collapse.” Treasuring that impermanence, he said, is “a Japanese virtue.” The city spent $5.5 million on a customized building to house a 2,000-square-meter exhibition floor, where sculptures remain standing for eight months before bulldozers reduce them to piles of sand to be used in the following year’s exhibit. Fewer than 500,000 people visit the museum every year. By comparison, two million visit the snow festival in Sapporo, Hokkaido, every year. For artists, the facility, the fine-grained sand and the opportunity to collaborate with

top international sand sculptors make Tottori one of the most coveted spots on the sandsculpting circuit. “There is no other place like this in the world,” said Jon Woodworth, 50, from Leander, Texas. “This is the mack daddy of them all.” Katsuhiko Chaen, the artistic director of the museum, said he hoped it would help raise the profile of sand sculpture as a legitimate art form. “It has been difficult for these sand sculptures to be regarded as art,” he said. “People think of it as an activity that kids do on the beach or as a hobby.” Two weeks before the exhibition’s opening in mid-April, the artists carved the sand with shovels, chisels, painters’ palette knives, pastry wheels, scalpels, masonry levels and garden trowels. They often seemed

to push the bounds of physics as they whittled detailed faces or delicate scenery. Aside from water, they use no adhesives or shellac to keep the sand in place. Sometimes, the sand does not cooperate. Seven days before they were scheduled to finish, the artists working on a Hollywood scene discovered a hairline crack on the head of a bust of Lucille Ball. The artists shaved several kilos of sand off the figure’s head and turned on high-powered fans overnight to help it dry faster. They also reconceived part of the design to give more support to Ms. Ball’s neck. “Sand is different all over the world,” said Daniel Doyle, 43, an Irish artist. “If you go with an idea and try to make the sand do something, the sand may not care.”

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ASK WELL

Do Sanitizers Really Cut Down On Illness? By KAREN WEINTRAUB

Q. With the recent increase in use of sanitizers (hand lotions, wipes for supermarket carts, etc.) has there been any real impact on transmission of colds, flu or other diseases?

PAUL ROGERS

PERSONAL HEALTH

New Hip or Knees? No Place Like Home BY JANE E. BRODY

More people are outliving their knees and hips and having them replaced, and the number is expected to skyrocket. The latest research on the value of inpatient rehabilitation for large numbers of patients suggests that, even if joint replacement patients live alone, the overwhelming majority recover equally well and may experience fewer complications if they go home and get outpatient rehabilitation instead of spending days or weeks in a costly rehab facility. Based on the findings of recent studies, Dr. Javad Parvizi, chairman of research in orthopedics at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, maintains that “we need to re-examine who, if anyone, should go to a rehab facility after joint replacement.” Traditionally, Dr. Parvizi said, patients who live alone, those who have both knees or both hips replaced simultaneously, and those with a serious underlying medical condition are automatically sent to a rehab facility. A small percentage of these patients may truly benefit from inpatient rehab. However, according to the findings of a new Australian study, patients who live alone and can perform a home exercise program recover just as well with homebased rehab as patients who spend 10

days in a rehab facility. Another study, by Dr. Parvizi’s team, involved 769 older patients who underwent either a knee or hip replacement for advanced arthritis. Only 36 of these patients were discharged from the hospital to a rehabilitation facility; the rest, including 138 patients who lived alone, returned home to receive outpatient rehab. Based on an assessment of the patients’ function, pain relief and personal satisfaction three months after their surgery, the team concluded, “Patients living alone can expect a safe recovery, equivalent to those not living alone, when discharged directly home after total joint arthroplasty.” Even if patients who lived alone got home health services in addition to home-based rehab, the cost was much less than if they had been discharged to a rehab facility, they reported. Dr. William J. Hozack, an orthopedic surgeon at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, said: “We found that patients living alone were able to safely recover without any increase in the rate of complications. Even more strikingly, patients were generally happy and content being

in the comfort of their own home during recovery.” Dr. Parvizi noted: “Half or more of the cost of total joint replacements is incurred in the postoperative period. Outpatient rehab is much less expensive.” Without inpatient rehab, and even with an extra day in the hospital before going home, the cost per patient is reduced by more than $10,000, the researchers reported. Their conclusion: “The substantial post-discharge costs of inpatient rehabilitation, sixfold greater than for home discharge, cannot be ignored.” Costs aside, patients who go home directly may be less likely to experience what doctors call “adverse events” – complications like infections, blood clots or worse. Inpatient rehab is not the idyllic experience many patients expect. An analysis of complications experienced by a nationally representative sample of patients, conducted in March 2012 by the United States Office of the Inspector General, found that 29 percent suffered adverse events during their stay in rehab facilities, a rate similar to that incurred in hospitals (27 percent) and in skilled nursing facilities (33 percent). Doctors who reviewed adverse events determined that nearly half of them were “clearly or likely preventable,” most often because of “substandard treatment, inadequate patient monitoring, and failure to provide needed treatment.” Dr. Parvizi said that when patients prepared before surgery for going home directly from the hospital, they are much more likely to do well. “If patients are told they will be going home, they can make preparations beforehand for needed support,” he said. “But if they think they will be going to inpatient rehab, they expect that and are not prepared to manage alone.”

A. No one has studied whether hand sanitizers have cut down on the number of infectious diseases among the public at large. On a personal level, good hand hygiene clearly can make a difference. A 2008 study in The American Journal of Public Health concluded that improvements in hand hygiene, regardless of how the participants cleaned their hands, cut gastrointestinal diseases by 31 percent, and respiratory infections by 21 percent. The key to stopping disease is breaking the chain that allows pathogens to be transmitted from person to person. Either hand washing or sanitizing can do that. Sally Bloomfield, an expert in hand hygiene and an honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said she always carries hand sanitizer with her when she travels. She said some train “loos” leave something to be desired. Grocery carts can be particularly risky. Someone grabbing chicken or meat can leak the juices onto a cart and their hands, transmitting pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli onto the handle. The next person who handles the cart can pick up the bugs. “If you can wipe down the handle bars on the shopping cart with an alcoholcontaining preparation, that’s probably a good idea,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, chief of the division of pediatric infectious disease at Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. That said, every surface around us is coated in bacteria and other microbes, the vast majority of which are neutral or beneficial, said Liz Scott, chairwoman of the department of public health at Simmons College in Boston. “We really need to target our hygiene practices,” she said, focusing on likely chains of transmission. That means washing your hands when you get back from any public place, Dr. Scott said.

TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

JULY 2017

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Well GREEK-STYLE REGIMEN Eating yogurt may lead to stronger bones, according to Irish researchers who tracked more than 4,000 adults 60 and older. They found that compared with those who were not yogurt eaters, people who ate yogurt daily had a 3 percent to 4 percent increase in bone mineral density, and had a 39 percent lower risk of osteoporosis in women and a 52 percent lower risk in men. They also performed better on tests of physical fitness. The study’s lead author cautioned that some yogurts are high in sugar and warned people to check the label.

JASU HU

BUSINESS OF HEALTH

When Medical Tourism Is a Matter of Life or Death Wealthy Chinese are courted by Western hospitals and well-connected companies to pay large sums for life-saving treatments that are not readily available at home. By SUI-LEE WEE

BEIJING — China’s medical system could not stop the cancer eating at Guo Shushi’s stomach. It roared back even after Mr. Guo, a 63-year-old real estate developer, endured surgery, chemotherapy and radiation at two hospitals. Then a relative saw online that — for a price — companies were willing to help critically ill Chinese seek treatment abroad. Soon Mr. Guo was at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston receiving a new immunotherapy drug, Keytruda, which is not available in China. By April, nearly four months later, his tumor had shrunk and his weight had gone up. “When I arrived, I could feel how large the gap was,” said Mr. Guo of the difference in care. The cost: about $220,000 — all paid by him. China’s nearly 1.4 billion people depend on a struggling health care system that belies the country’s rise as an increasingly wealthy global power. But more and more, the rich are finding a way out. Western hospitals and some well-connected companies are reaching for rich Chinese patients who need lifesaving treatments unavailable at home. The trend is a twist on the perception of medical tourism

as a way to save money, often on noncritical procedures like dental work. For these customers, getting out of China is a matter of life or death. Chinese people took an estimated 500,000 outbound medical trips last year, a fivefold increase from a year earlier, according to Ctrip.com International, a Chinese travel booking company. While the bulk of that is focused on plastic surgery and routine examinations, medical travel agencies say the number of critically ill Chinese patients leaving the country for medical treatment is growing. As recently as the 1970s, China’s health care system provided cradle-to-grave medical support. But despite a huge reform plan, its public hospitals are overburdened, with too few beds and doctors to deliver the kind of care that many in the West take for granted. A 2015 study based on United Nations criteria found that China ranked 92 out of 188 countries. The government has increased spending and encouraged private investors to address the problem. A total of about 4.3 million cancer cases were diagnosed in China in 2015, compared with 2.4 million in 2010, according to the state-run news media. The five-year survival rate of Chinese cancer

patients is around 30 percent, compared with about 70 percent in the United States, according to China’s National Cancer Prevention and Research Center. In top public hospitals, lines begin forming just after midnight. Appointments for the best doctors are snapped up before dawn. For those who can afford it, tickets can be bought from scalpers hawking appointment numbers By contrast, Mr. Guo’s experience at Dana-Farber was “more humane,” he said. His doctor let him speak. There was easy access to food. The waiting area had a couch. “In China, the most that we can get is a metal chair,” he said from Boston. But the benefits can be fleeting. “The biggest challenge that we’ve had is ensuring continuity of care when the patient returns back home to China,” said Misty Hathaway, head of Mass General’s Center for Specialized Services. Oscar Zhou, who founded Ryavo Health Management of Shanghai, another medical travel agency, said: “Many patients go overseas, and indeed, for several months, it’s good. But when they return, if their treatment can’t keep up, then it’s useless.” Others are more bullish. Cai Qiang — the founder of Beijing Saint Lucia Hospital Management Consulting Company, says his number of clients has increased to about 1,000 last year, from just two in 2011. Mr. Cai said he had been moved by the friendliness of Australia’s doctors and nurses when his daughter was born. “Every year, there are so many Chinese people who buy imported cars, clothes, cosmetics,” Mr. Cai said. “They go abroad to travel and send their children to study abroad. Why can’t a Chinese person consider going overseas to see a doctor if they are seriously ill?”

BEER AND THE HEART German scientists studied festivalgoers at the Munich Oktoberfest and have found that moderate drinking may lead to arrhythmias in healthy people. The researchers tested 3,028 men and women who had been drinking at the Munich Oktoberfest and found that more than a quarter had a condition called sinus tachycardia, marked by a resting heart rate over 100 beats per minute. About 1 to 2 percent of the population have episodes of tachycardia, which can pose health risks.

WATER, ANYONE? Sugary beverages are linked with markers of accelerated aging and early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers say. They found the more sugary drinks consumed, the lower the total brain volume, and brain shrinkage is tied to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. Another study found that those who drank one to six artificially sweetened drinks a week had twice the risk of stroke.

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DANIELA PETROVA

The Mirror Foundation’s handicrafts project provides safe work environments for women like this member of the Akha minority group in Thailand.

TRAVEL

Taking aVacation With a Purpose: Fighting Human Trafficking in Thailand On an “advocacy journey,” informational meetings are more important than lounging by the pool.

M YA N M A R

LAOS CHIANG RAI

By DANIEL PETROVA

We sat around a table in a thatched-roof bungalow in the hills of Chiang Rai province in Thailand. I stared at a computer screen, engrossed in P’moo’s video presentation. She spoke passionately, then waited as our guide translated her words into English. I recognized one she used repeatedly: trafficking. “The situation has changed,” she said. “Now, many go knowingly.” Parisutha Suthimongkol, who goes by P’moo, was talking about human trafficking, a lucrative business that takes advantage of illiterate people in desperate circumstances; solicits girls with promises of a better life; and persuades parents to sell their children. Ms. Suthimongkol is a founder of the Mirror Foundation, a group in Chiang Rai. This was not a work-related meeting. I was on vacation, visiting Thailand on what was billed as an advocacy journey, one that, along with sightseeing, provid-

CHIANG MAI

MEKONG R.

THAILAND Bangkok

CAMBODIA GULF OF THAILAND

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In Chiang Rai, Thailand, tour guides help visitors learn about exploitation of the locals.

ed opportunities to learn about the sexual exploitation of children in a country known for sex tourism. “The intention is that everybody will walk away with a deeper understanding of the issues,” said Malia Everette,

the founder of Altruvistas, a tour operator that had organized the trip in partnership with Ecpat-USA, an advocacy group whose name stands for End Child Prostitution and Trafficking. I had booked my trip on the Altruvistas website. Of the $3,500 fee, $500 was a taxdeductible donation to Ecpat-USA and 10 percent of the tour fee was distributed to the groups we visited. This was Ecpat-USA’s inaugural advocacy trip. (The organization offers another one to Thailand in October and to Cartagena, Colombia, in July.) Other trips that are educational in nature and support local communities can be booked through Altruvistas or companies with similar missions, like Crooked Trails, Meaningful Trip and Responsible Travel. An advocacy trip meant that instead of spending our days lounging by the pool between visits to tourist sights and attractions — although we did find time for some of that — we attended meetings with government representatives and local organizations involved in the fight against trafficking. In Bangkok, we visited the offices of

JULY 2017

Ecpat International and the International Labour Organization. We learned that behind the ornate temples, polite smiles and colorful baskets of fruits and vegetables, there was a grim reality. Scores of tribal people in the highlands lacked citizenship and had no access to education, health services or jobs that paid fair wages; children brought from Laos and Myanmar were begging on the streets; girls were being exploited in the sex trade and men were sold into slavery on fishing boats. Thailand has long been a popular tourist destination. International arrivals have more than doubled since 2000, and Bangkok is consistently ranked as one of the most visited cities in the world. But as travel increases, so does sexual exploitation. In 1998, Ecpat created the Code initiative, which provides tools and support to travel companies to build awareness among their employees. In partnership with Ecpat, AccorHotels, a French multinational hotel group, set up an employee training program in 2001. “In Southeast Asia, hotel managers were frequently confronted with child sex tourism, not just in the hotels, but especially in their daily life,” said Arnaud Herrmann, an AccorHotels official. By the end of 2015, 38 of the countries in which the company operates more than 2,700 hotels had signed on to the initiative. About 50 companies and associations have joined the Code in America, including AccorHotels, Altruvistas, Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, Delta Air Lines, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Uber and Wyndham Worldwide. Between 2013 and 2015, some 170,000 hotel employees were trained to respond to human trafficking and child exploitation as a result of Ecpat-USA’s efforts. “We are reaching a point where this is now becoming industry standard,” said Sarah Porter, a former director of development and partnerships at Ecpat-USA and a leader of our trip. Travelers, too, can make a difference by patronizing hotels and tour companies that are members of the Code. We stayed mostly in Code hotels. A large component of the Mirror Foundation’s work is preventive. Its handicrafts project (making clay whistles, bags, handwoven scarves, bracelets and bookmarks) provides local women with a safe work environment and an independent source of income. Ecotours and home stays offer visitors the opportunity to experience life in the hill tribe villages, trekking through the national forests and boarding with a local family. The income they generate helps villagers build wells and send their children to school. The foundation also has a large volunteer program, runs free schools and has established a scholarship fund for advanced education. Ms. Porter said that how people travel and where they choose to stay “really does make a difference.”

JULY 2017

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MUSIC

Liberation for Shakira Flows From New Songs A Colombian star is back, in a ‘perfect state of mind.’ By JON PARELES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ASHLEY GILBERTSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A vendor selling bootleg music in Lagos. Seyi Shay, below, signed with a major label, which is rare for a musician in Nigeria.

MUSIC BUSINESS

In Nigeria, Pirates Cash In Artists have few protections, allowing bootleggers to profit. The music industry is trying to stop the theft. By DIONNE SEARCEY

LAGOS, NIGERIA — Forcing a smile, Seyi Shay, a music star in Nigeria, stood for hours under hot lights to record a video. Three changes of clothes, two wigs and multiple touch-ups later, she was still at it, singing snippets over and over. Across town, her efforts to build a following over the years were paying off — for someone else. At a sewerside market, dozens of customers lined up with their smartphones and flash drives, eagerly handing over cash to pirates with laptops to load up on Ms. Shay’s songs. She earned nothing. “Out here, nobody cares about the rules,” Ms. Shay said. “Everything is kind of cowboy.” Artists across the world battle illegal sales of their work. But Nigeria’s piracy problem is so ingrained that music thieves worry about rip-offs of their rip-offs, slapping warning labels on pirated CDs to insist that “lending is not allowed.” In Lagos, Africa’s biggest city, legitimate music stores are rare and streaming services haven’t caught on, so thousands of pirated CDs are churned out each day. But now, members of the music industry are trying to put a stop to the pilfering, hoping they can turn the popularity of Nigerian music to their advantage. Nigerian music — Afrobeats in particular — is having a moment. It blares in hotel lobbies, airport lounges, nightclubs and the bedroom recording studios where young men and women dream of stardom in this city. While many countries have courts focused on intellectual property cases, artists in Nigeria have only in recent years begun to pursue copyright protection. They complain that laws to protect them are so seldom invoked that some judges don’t even know they exist. The Nigerian government recently announced a new push to protect intellectual property, and the national copyright commission created an institute to train musicians, and judges, about artists’ rights.

“We’re trying to change people’s perception about the use of music,” said Chinedu Chukwuji, chief executive of the Copyright Society of Nigeria. “Music is everywhere, but they don’t know it’s proprietary.” In recent decades, music from abroad — mainly American and British hip-hop and R&B — often dominated the Nigerian scene. Yet international music distributors largely ignored the nation. With few ways of buying overseas music, illegal sales flourished. “American artists would come here to do a show and were stunned to find thousands of people singing their songs back to them,” said Efe Omorogbe, owner of Now Muzik, a local label. Open piracy left little incentive for anyone to set up legitimate music sales. Local musicians, struggling to be heard above international competition, often gave away their work. “It’s descended to a point where people who use your material almost feel like you should celebrate them,” Mr. Omorogbe said. The appetite for Nigerian music is clear. International labels are setting up shop in Lagos. Last year, Wizkid, one of Nigeria’s most popular artists, reached the top of the American singles chart for an Afrobeats collaboration with the Canadian rapper Drake. But for many artists, the more popular they become, the more their music is stolen. “There isn’t exactly a proper structure for us to make money,” said Falz, a Nigerian rapper and songwriter.

Not long ago, the Colombian songwriter and pop star Shakira didn’t know if she would make another album. “I was full of doubts, and I thought I was never going to make good music again,” she said in Manhattan while promoting, yes, a new album, “El Dorado.” It’s an album sung mostly in Spanish, Shakira’s original language — though she is fluent in English — and it’s full of love songs carried by tropical rhythms. The album is named after a mythical golden city sought in the Americas by Europeans. “Finding inspiration itself and realizing it had always been there all along — that was my El Dorado,” she said. “That was a perfect state of mind.” Her inspiration returned, she said, when she decided she didn’t have to make an album — just one song at a time: “It was like a liberation.” Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll became a superstar across Latin America in the 1990s and reached even more of the world with her 2001 album “Laundry Service,” which had songs in English and has sold more than three million copies in the United States alone. Her globally sourced grooves, girlish smile and sinuous hips made her a musicvideo sensation. She went on to sell tens of millions of albums; collaborate with Beyoncé, Rihanna and Wyclef Jean (in the international hit “Hips Don’t Lie”); become a coach on the TV show “The Voice”; and record the World Cup anthem “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” which led to her meeting the Spanish soccer player Gerard Piqué, who is the father of her children. But lately she has been wrapped up in raising the couple’s two children, now 2 and 4 years old. Making her 2014 album, “Shakira,” which CHAD BATKA delved into rock and electronFOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ic dance music in an attempt Shakira’s new album, ‘‘El to court radio play, had takDorado,’’ is sung mostly en a difficult two years, yet it in Spanish and is full of tropical rhythms. did not sell well. “When am I going to retire?” Shakira recalled asking Mr. Piqué. “And he said: ‘When you don’t have anything to say. But that moment hasn’t come yet.’ ” She added: “The creator inside of me was in desperate need of attention. But also my 2-year-old was in the same need. The person, the mother, the creator — all of those little Shakiras were fighting inside of me.” The turning point came last year as Shakira revisited her Colombian roots. The songwriter Carlos Vives, who has had hits with songs based in Colombian traditions, sent her demos for his next album. Shakira heard duet possibilities in a song, and the musician in her got to work. “I felt that it had potential, but I felt that I really wanted to get my hands in the dough,” she said. “I said, ‘Yeah, I like it, but it’s missing something.’ ” She came up with the song’s poppy refrain, “Llévame en tu bicicleta” (“Take me on your bicycle”), and the song became “La Bicicleta.” A video clip of Shakira and Mr. Vives bicycling and dancing through their hometowns on the Caribbean coast, the song became a hit across Latin America. They were “presenting Colombia as I saw it, through my childhood, and not as many people imagine it,” Shakira said. “Not the Pablo Escobar Colombia, which is the cliché that lots of people who are not familiar with the rest of our reality only know about. I wanted to show the other face, the real face.”

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Exhibits on display in Venice include ‘‘Imitazione di Christo,’’ above, by Robert Cuoghi; and below, ‘‘Escalade Beyond Chromatic Lands’’ by Sheila Hicks. The Biennale runs until November 26.

ART

A Venice Biennale Short on Relevance BY HOLLAND COTTER

Venice — Timing isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. If the bland, soft-power 2017 Venice Biennale, called “Viva Arte Viva,” had arrived two, or four, or six years ago, it might have made sense. But coming post-Brexit and post-Trump, it feels almost perversely out of sync with the political moment, and nowhere near strong enough to define a moment of its own. This is particularly disappointing as the main show, organized by Christine Macel, chief curator of the Pompidou Center in Paris, has promising features. It is not a gathering of market-vetted stars. Most of the 120 artists will be unfamiliar to even the most assiduous art world travelers. The ethnic spread is wide; the gender balance, even. Refreshingly, much of the art substitutes touch

and texture for digital gloss. Yet the show doesn’t rise, doesn’t cohere. Thematic tension and critical drive are missing. Ms. Macel has divided the work, installed in two vast spaces — in the Giardini and the Arsenale — into nine sections with New Age-y titles: Pavilion of Joys and Fears, Pavilion of the Earth, Pavilion of Time and Infinity, etc. She even kicks the whole thing

off, in the Giardini, with images of artists napping in their studios. She’s trying to make a point about downtime as dreamtime, a mode of passive-resistant creativity in an era of frantic, art fair-directed production. But the nodding-off image reinforces a second reality: the current market-addled mainstream art world really is, politically, out of it. And a lot of the work being produced

barely rates a second look. There are exceptions in the Giardini, the park that hosts some 30 national pavilions. Two veteran African-American artists look strong: Senga Nengudi, with her stretched-fabric sculptures, and McArthur Binion, with his autobiographical abstraction. (He paints on copies of his 1946 Mississippi birth certificate.)

The installation at the Arsenale, a former medieval shipyard, is more persuasive, thanks to a concentration of fiber-based work by Leonor Antunes (Portugal), Petrit Halilaj (Kosovo), Abdoulaye Konate (Mali), Maria Lai (Sardinia) and Franz Erhard Walther (Germany). Ms. Macel runs into trouble in the Pavilion of Shamans, which has as its centerpiece a

JULY 2017

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large open-weave, tentlike enclosure by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. Viewers are welcome to hang out but at the Biennale opening, it was occupied mainly by ceremonially dressed Amazonian Indians brought by Mr. Neto to perform religious rituals. Their presence was disconcerting. It revived the “primitivism” debate of the last 30 years, its terms unchanged: We in the West continue to import the Other for our pleasure, while remaining complicit in a global economy that is destroying the Other’s world. Only one major piece makes an effort to bridge the art-life divide through what is now known as “social practice,” and that is the traveling project called “Green Light — An Artistic Workshop,” under the direction of the artist Olafur Eliasson. At the Arsenale, Zad Moultaka’s sound-and-light apocalypse in the Lebanon Pavilion, with a bomber fuselage at its center, is something to see, as is Roberto Cuoghi’s sexy sculptural mortuary at the Italian Pavilion, organized by Cecilia Alemani. Otherwise, some of the better national presentations are tucked away in palazzos, churches, apartments and gardens across town. They can be hard to find — I’ve spent half a day looking for a single pavilion — but some are worth the hunt. That’s true of a selection of paintings, by the Caribbean artist Frank Walter, at the Antigua and Barbuda Pavilion, and of excellent group shows at the pavilions sponsored by Iraq and Nigeria. My favorite find was the NSK State Pavilion, dedicated to a country that is basically an art project: NSK stands for Neue Slowenische Kunst and exists only in the minds of its passportbearing citizens, of which, after filing a form and paying a modest fee, I am now one. (Nearest vaporetto: San Stae.) The Tunisian Pavilion is issuing papers this year, too: a Universal Travel Document, stamped with a seal that says “Only Human” and valid anywhere, everywhere. The Biennale also has what it calls “collateral events,” often organized by private foundations or commercial galleries. The Swissbased Hauser & Wirth Gallery has delivered a coup — the thematic survey loan show “Philip Guston and the Poets,” which not only presents that American artist in sovereign form, but also enshrines him in the Vatican of

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Venetian painting, the Gallerie dell’Accademia (through September 3). Would it be worth going all the way to Venice to see Guston? In this case, probably yes. The show won’t travel. The other must-see exhibit, only because a lot of people seem to be seeing it, is the double-barreled rollout of new sculpture by Damien Hirst, presented by the François Pinault Foundation at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana. Titled “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” this show of mostly bronze sculpture is billed as a cache of ancient objects that sank in the Indian Ocean 2,000 years ago and was finally hauled up in 2008. The work ranges from teensy to supersize (one piece is three stories tall), and reveals an unexpected degree of multiculturalism in images that go beyond standard Greek nudes to include Hathor, Kali, Quetzalcoatl, the Buddha and Mickey Mouse. I don’t have much to say about “Treasures From the Wreck” except that it’s there; that some people care; and that it’s irrelevant to anything I know about that matters.

Among the works being shown at the Venice Biennale 2017 are, from top, a piece of sanded paper layers by the American artist Mark Bradford in the United States pavilion; work by Damien Hirst in his exhibit ‘‘Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable’’ at both the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana; and work by Senga Nengudi in the Central pavilion.

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JULY 2017

ON STAGE AND OFF

Kevin Spacey, an Actor Drawn to the Unexpected BY DAVE ITZKOFF

Kevin Spacey was alternately pacing like a panther and beaming like a proud parent at the back of a Juilliard School classroom one recent morning. Students from the school’s drama division, where he had once studied, were performing while he offered advice. He asked one student to play a scene from Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” as if he were talking to someone on the subway. He asked another to slow her lines from Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart” and not get swallowed up in its Southern accent. Mr. Spacey’s eyes lit up when one student gave her rendition of a speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” after the title character is presented with a disdainful gift of tennis balls. “I have such a task for you,” Mr. Spacey said. Then he instructed her to play the scene as if she were in a tennis match. He told her: “You’re going to win this battle. You’re going to send them home in shame.” When he is not teaching seminars like this one, Mr. Spacey, 57, the Academy- and Tony Award-winning actor, can be a fearsome competitor in his own work, making unexpected choices and committing to them steadfastly. Now in a fifth season as the detestable President Underwood on Netflix’s “House of Cards” (released on May 30), Mr. Spacey has revisited a nobler role in “Clarence Darrow,” a one-man show about the civilrights lawyer. Having previously starred in this David W. Rintels play at the Old Vic Theater in London, he just brought it to the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York — a space not known for presenting traditional dramas — for two nights. He appears this summer as a crime boss in Edgar Wright’s action caper

“Baby Driver.” And he recently followed in the footsteps of entertainers like James Corden, Hugh Jackman and Neil Patrick Harris when he hosted the Tony Awards. From the stories he shared on this visit to Juilliard, where Mr. Spacey trained from 1979 to 1981 but did not graduate, he came across as an actor who, even as a young man, possessed singular skill and the conviction that it would take him places, before his résumé caught up. Long after following his high school friend Val Kilmer there, Mr. Spacey still slips into seamless impersonations of beloved instructors like his mentor, Marian Seldes, and the fearsome voice teacher Elizabeth Smith (who once told him his

voice sounded like the end of a frayed rope). Mr. Spacey can also still vividly recall the disagreement he had with Michael Langham, then the director of Juilliard’s drama division, that prompted him to withdraw from the school. Having been reprimanded for focusing too much on his acting classes, and not enough on the history of theater, Mr. Spacey recalled: “I said, ‘For two years, you’ve been teaching us how to carve out what’s important — how to emphasize, how to underscore. And now you’re telling me I can’t do that in my life?’ ” He added: “I went, ‘I think we should call it a day.’ ” Mr. Spacey had no job waiting for him; no agent, no prospects. But, he said, “I never lost faith that I was going to make it at some point. That kind of blind — very often, unsupported — faith.” A Broadway career soon followed: By

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Kevin Spacey is starring in another season of ‘‘House of Cards’’ on Netflix. Below right, Mr. Spacey leading an acting seminar at the Juilliard School, which he dropped out of. In 1981, Val Kilmer, left, and Mr. Spacey both appeared in a Juilliard production of the ‘‘The Wood Demon.’’

1986, he was performing in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” with his idol Jack Lemmon, and in 1991 he won a Tony for “Lost in Yonkers.” Next came the movies, and Oscars for “The Usual Suspects” (released in 1995) and “American Beauty” (in 1999). Mr. Spacey, who has admired “Clarence Darrow” since he saw Henry Fonda perform it in 1974, said he was inspired to bring the play to Arthur Ashe Stadium about two years ago, after attending an opening-night concert for the United

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States Open. “The stage was not lit like a tennis match — it was lit like a concert,” he recalled. “I thought, drama happens on that court all the time, but it’s not used for anything other than tennis. I wonder if it could be.”

Mr. Spacey relishes the moments when he can interact spontaneously with audience members nearest the stage — “You see the terror,” he said. With the Juilliard students, he shared a trick he used to play in his earliest professional days, when he sensed an audition wasn’t going well. Stopping in midsentence, he began to sniff the air and asked, “What’s that smell? It’s me. I stink.” “Sometimes, it’s much better that they think you know you stink,” he joked. More sincerely, Mr. Spacey explained that the young actors would have to learn to trust their instincts. “It’s easy to get trapped in the idea that there’s a way that you have to do these things,” he said. “The only way to do them is the way you feel.” But, he said, worrying too much about the expectations of an audience was the surest route to taking yourself out of a performance. “The last thing you should be thinking about,” he said, “is what they’re going to think.”