BOMB AT CONCERT
CHILDREN, BLOOD
SHOES ALL OVER
ANTARCTICA
WHY IS THE ICE
SHELF MELTING?
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
RETROSPECTIVE SHOWS
SOCIAL NATURE OF HIS ART
PAGE 3 | WORLD
PAGE 9 | SCIENCE
PAGE 18 | CULTURE
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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 2017
Trip abroad
puts Trump
family on
center stage
Resilience
of Iran’s
reformers
Laura Secor
JERUSALEM
OPINION
While President Trump basked in the
flattery of Saudi Arabia’s absolute
monarchy on Friday, about 75 percent
of Iranian voters turned out to repudiate an authoritarian populist and reelect their moderate president, Hassan
Rouhani. Mr. Rouhani ran against
extremism and on the promise of human rights, civil liberties, rational
economic management and engagement with the world — a platform that
won him 57 percent of the vote to his
opponent’s 38.5 percent.
It wasn’t the first time Iranian voters
expressed their preference for these
values. They have done so repeatedly,
overcoming every obstacle a repressive state can thrust in their way. The
fact that such demands may not be
met — and may even result in significant sacrifice for those who make them
most vociferously — does not
The patience
make them less
and persistmeaningful, but
ence of Iranian more so.
It’s true that
civic culture
the Iranian sysare the longer
tem offers
story of Iran’s
limited choice
and the president
revolution.
has limited
power. The regime has policed
its boundaries and eliminated true
challenges to the entrenched interests
of its security apparatus and clerical
elite. But that is precisely why Iranian
voter behavior deserves attention.
Because the vehicles that carry the
popular will to the highest echelons of
the Iranian regime are imperfect, the
electorate and the politicians seeking
its favor have learned, over the course
of decades, to play a long game, wedging the system open with the force of
their numbers and refusing to acquiesce silently in their exclusion. The
patience and persistence of Iranian
civic culture are the longer story of
Iran’s revolution, and one of the longest stories in the Middle East, having
outlived many uprisings and protest
movements.
Mr. Rouhani, a pragmatic centrist
when he came to the presidency in
2013, ran to his own left this year. Having concluded the historic nuclear
agreement with world powers in 2015,
he now emphasized priorities he’d
abandoned in his first term: rights,
freedoms and the release of the opposition leaders held under house arrest
since 2010. He directly challenged the
abuses of the judiciary and the political
overreach of the Revolutionary Guards
Corps, with which he has vied for
authority throughout his presidency.
What he hadn’t accomplished already,
he claimed, he hadn’t been permitted
SECOR, PAGE 17
9-day foray underscores
influence of wife, daughter
and president’s son-in-law
BY MICHAEL D. SHEAR
ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Micromoguls of Myanmar
A prospector at the Nga Naung Mone oil field in Myanamar stirring the day’s haul in a lined pit; later it is trucked to a collection
station. Competition and small scale mean nobody makes much money, and most drillers figure the field has at most two years left before it is pumped dry. PAGE 3
Testing the nuclear limits
U.S. history offers clues
to North Korea’s progress
in strengthening weapons
BY WILLIAM J. BROAD
It started with Einstein. His famous E =
mc2 revealed a vast asymmetry in the
cosmic relationship between matter and
energy. In time, experts looked into the
possibility of exploiting the disparity.
Today, North Korea is hard at work on
that agenda. Its nuclear program has
succeeded in producing blasts in the Hiroshima range. In each case, trillions of
atoms in a tiny smidgen of matter — estimated at roughly one gram, the weight
of a dollar bill — broke their nuclear
bonds in violent bursts of primal energy.
The North now seeks to turn bits of
nuclear fuel into even more powerful
blasts. Experts say its ultimate goal is to
transform an ordinary atom bomb into a
hydrogen bomb, which can raise its destructive force by 1,000 times.
“I can’t imagine they’re not working
on true thermonuclear weapons,” said
Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor
who from 1986 to 1997 directed the Los
Alamos weapons laboratory in New
Mexico, the birthplace of the atom
bomb.
“But that’s a big step,” cautioned Dr.
Hecker, whom North Korea, in seeking
recognition as a nuclear power, has repeatedly let into its atomic facilities.
“You have to pay attention to what
they’re doing but take their claims with
a grain of salt.”
On Sunday, the North fired a mediumrange missile in an act of defiance, its
second in a week. Both tests were successful and seen as demonstrating the
slow improvement of its nuclear arsenal.
Experts say atomic history — especially that of the American program, the
world’s most successful, which other nations often seek to mimic — can help distinguish North Korea’s credible accomplishments from bluster and empty
threats.
The nuclear age began in 1938 over a
snowy Christmas holiday in Sweden
when Lise Meitner and her nephew,
Otto Frisch, tried to make sense of a colleague’s puzzling experiments on uranium.
During a hike, the physicists sat on a
tree trunk and discussed the unlikely
TRUMPS, PAGE 4
RUSSIA COURTS ITALY AS AN ALLY
With the United States’ attention to
Italy wavering, Moscow reaches out to
a receptive Rome. PAGE 5
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
In 1954, the United States exploded the first thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. Experts
suspect North Korea is now trying to turn an atom bomb into a hydrogen bomb.
possibility that its atoms had split in
two.
Dr. Meitner knew Einstein’s equation.
She did a calculation estimating how
much energy a split atom might release.
Timeless, in a bad way
ART REVIEW
VENICE
Biennale does not reflect
a drastically changed
world, and it fails to cohere
BY HOLLAND COTTER
Aftermath of a deadly blast in Britain
OLI SCARFF/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
The police with a young girl on
Tuesday morning in Manchester, England, after a bombing the night before killed
at least 22 at a concert by Ariana Grande, who is popular with teenage girls. PAGE 5
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +%!"!$!?!=
Timing isn’t everything, but it’s a lot. If
the bland, soft-power 2017 Venice Biennale, “Viva Arte Viva,” had arrived
two, or four, or six years ago, it might
have passed muster, even made sense.
But coming post-Brexit and postTrump, 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, for one thing, an off-therack gathering of market-vetted stars.
Most of the 120 artists will be unfamil-
iar 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 — the Giardini and the
Arsenale — into nine sections with
snoozy, 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 dream time, a mode of
passive-resistant creativity in an era of
frantic, art fair-directed production.
Unfortunately, the nodding-off image
reinforces a second reality: the fact
that the current market-addled mainstream art world really is, politically,
out of it. And a lot of the work being
produced, at least on some of the eviBIENNALE, PAGE 2
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At an Israeli children’s hospital, Melania
Trump handed out blue canvas backpacks filled with Dr. Seuss books and
emblazoned with a picture of the White
House. At a forum in Saudi Arabia on
combating extremism, Ivanka Trump
stood in for her father when he got tired.
And in Israel, Jared Kushner stuck by
his father-in-law’s side as President
Trump pushed for peace in the Middle
East.
The president’s first foray overseas is
giving the rest of the world its first real
glimpse of America’s new governing
structure — a White House that has
quickly become an all-in-the-family
business, standard practice in Saudi
Arabia, but rare in the United States.
During the president’s nine-day, multicountry trip that began on Friday, the
world is learning — and Americans are
being reminded of — the significant
overlap between blood relations and
policy advisers in the current White
House. For Mr. Trump, they are almost
interchangeable.
“It is extremely rare that a president
would bring family members, other than
a spouse, and ask them to assume a public role on a foreign trip,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, the historian at the National First Ladies’ Library.
Mr. Anthony said presidents often
brought their children or other relatives
on foreign excursions. But he added, “In
terms of the Trumps assuming public
roles, this is unprecedented.”
The president’s daughter Ivanka
Trump and her husband, Mr. Kushner,
both have offices in the West Wing and
are top White House advisers. The couple reportedly received a rabbinical
pass to travel with the president on Air
Force One on Friday, so they could be by
his side. (As Orthodox Jews, they are
not supposed to travel in a vehicle on the
Sabbath, which begins on Friday at sundown and continues until sundown on
Saturday.)
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Issue Number
No. 41,739
Suddenly, all the experimental facts fell
into place.
“It was beautiful,” her biographer
wrote. “Everything fit.”
NORTH KOREA, PAGE 4
A BUDGET BUILT ON WISHFUL THINKING
Experts say President Trump’s first
budget, promising growth and an end
to deficits, is too good to be true. PAGE 13
SPENDING CUTS AND INCREASES
The White House budget proposal
includes substantial cuts to Medicaid
and other aid for the poor. PAGE 13