DINOSAUR FAMILY FASHION CHANGE
NEW THEORY
ANOTHER SHIFT
ON LINEAGE
IN TOP RANKS
ROME’S STREETLIGHTS
THE BATTLE OF GOLDEN
GLOW VS. HARSH WHITE
PAGE 8 | SCIENCE
PAGE TWO
PAGE 14 | BUSINESS
..
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, MARCH 29, 2017
Youths shed
their apathy
and startle
the Kremlin
Why ‘Brexit’
is essential
for Britain
Alan Johnson
NEWS ANALYSIS
MOSCOW
OPINION
Harsh response to protests
suggests government fears
widespread unrest
LONDON On Wednesday, Britain’s
prime minister, Theresa May, is to
deliver a letter to the president of the
European Council, Donald Tusk, informing him that after 44 years of
membership, her nation is leaving the
European Union. Approximately two
years later, after negotiating the terms
of that departure, the union will lose at
a stroke “an eighth of its population, a
sixth of its G.D.P., half its nuclear-arms
cache and a seat on the U.N. Security
Council,” as Susan Watkins, the editor
of New Left Review, noted recently.
Ms. Watkins is a “Lexiteer,” as leftwing supporters of Brexit like me are
known. We were hardly a significant
force among the 52 percent of Britons
who voted to leave in the referendum of
June 23. But we were an influence. A
counterweight to the anti-immigrant
fear mongering of the
The E.U. is all
former leader
about elite
of the rightwing U.K.
management,
Independence
treaty law and
Party, Nigel
money-grubbing.
Farage, LexiBritain must take teers argued a
left-wing,
back democratic
democratic
control.
and internationalist case
for Brexit. The
position was expressed crisply by
Perry Anderson, the former longtime
editor of New Left Review: “The E.U. is
now widely seen for what it has become: an oligarchic structure, riddled
with corruption, built on a denial of any
sort of popular sovereignty, enforcing a
bitter economic regime of privilege for
the few and duress for the many.”
Although Lexiteers have little patience for the national nihilism of “Davos Man,” the globalist elite, we are no
xenophobes. We voted Leave because
we believe it is essential to preserve the
two things we value most: a democratic
political system and a socialdemocratic society. We fear that the
European Union’s authoritarian project
of neoliberal integration is a breeding
ground for the far right.
By sealing off so much policy, including the imposition of long-term austerity measures and mass immigration,
from the democratic process, the union
has broken the contract between mainstream national politicians and their
voters. This has opened the door to
right-wing populists who claim to
represent “the people,” already angry
at austerity, against the immigrant.
It was the free-market economist
Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual architect of neoliberalism, who called in 1939
for “interstate federalism” in Europe to
prevent voters from using democracy
JOHNSON, PAGE 11
BY ANDREW HIGGINS
AND ANDREW E. KRAMER
PROTESTS, PAGE 6
Famine risk sweeps Africa
BAIDOA, SOMALIA
Drought and war heighten
threat of not just one
hunger epidemic, but four
BY JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
First the trees dried up and cracked
apart.
Then the goats keeled over.
Then the water in the village well began to disappear, turning cloudy, then
red, then slime-green, but the villagers
kept drinking it. That was all they had.
Now on a hot, flat, stony plateau outside Baidoa, thousands of people pack
into destitute camps, many clutching
their stomachs, some defecating in the
open, others already dead from a
cholera epidemic.
“Even if you can get food, there is no
water,” said one mother, Sangabo
Moalin, who held her head with a left
hand as thin as a leaf and spoke of her
body “burning.”
Another famine is about to tighten its
grip on Somalia. And it’s not the only crisis that aid agencies are scrambling to
address. For the first time since anyone
can remember, there is a very real possi-
bility of four famines — in Somalia,
South Sudan, Nigeria and Yemen —
breaking out at once, endangering more
than 20 million lives.
International aid officials say they are
facing one of the biggest humanitarian
disasters since World War II. And they
are determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
One powerful lesson from the last
famine in Somalia, just six years ago,
was that famines were not simply about
food. They are about something even
more elemental: water.
Once again, a lack of clean water and
proper hygiene is setting off an outbreak
of killer diseases in displaced persons
camps. So the race is on to dig more latrines, get swimming-pool quantities of
clean water into the camps, and pass out
more soap, more water-treatment
tablets and more plastic buckets — decidedly low-tech supplies that could
save many lives.
“We underestimated the role of water
and its contribution to mortality in the
last famine,” said Ann Thomas, a water,
sanitation and hygiene specialist for
Unicef. “It gets overshadowed by the
food.”
The famines are coming as a drought
sweeps across Africa and several different wars seal off extremely needy areas.
United Nations officials say they need a
Waiting for water next to empty jerrycans at a Baidoa camp. International aid officials
say they are facing one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War II.
huge infusion of cash to respond. So far,
they are not just millions of dollars
short, but billions.
At the same time, President Trump is
urging Congress to cut foreign aid and
assistance to the United Nations, which
aid officials fear could multiply the
deaths. The United States traditionally
BENSALEM, PA.
More people elect to stay
awake, prompting changes
in doctor-patient protocols
BY JAN HOFFMAN
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +@!"!$!#!@
AFRICA, PAGE 5
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mothers tending to their children at a cholera treatment center in Baidoa, Somalia. A lack of clean water from a drought on the continent has triggered an outbreak of the disease.
Having surgery, with eyes wide open
“Do you want to see your tendons?”
Dr. Asif Ilyas, a hand and wrist surgeon, was about to close his patient’s
wound. But first he offered her the opportunity to behold the source of her radiating pain: a band of tendons that
looked like pale pink ribbon candy. With
a slender surgical instrument, he
pushed outward to demonstrate their
newly liberated flexibility.
“That’s pretty neat,” the patient, Esther Voynow, managed to gasp.
The operation Dr. Ilyas performed,
called a De Quervain’s release, is
usually done with the patient under anesthesia. But Ms. Voynow, her medical
inquisitiveness piqued and her distaste
provides more disaster relief than anyone else.
“The international humanitarian system is at its breaking point,” said
Dominic MacSorley, chief executive of
Concern Worldwide, a large private aid
group.
The weekend anticorruption protests
that roiled Moscow and nearly 100 Russian towns clearly rattled the Kremlin,
unprepared for their size and seeming
spontaneity. But perhaps the biggest
surprise, even to protest leaders themselves, was the youthfulness of the
crowds.
A previously apathetic generation of
people in their teens and 20s, most of
them knowing nothing but 17 years of
rule by Vladimir V. Putin, was the most
striking face of the demonstrations, the
biggest in years.
It is far from clear whether their enthusiasm for challenging the authorities, which has suddenly provided
adrenaline to Russia’s beaten-down opposition, will be short-lived or points to a
new era. Nor is it clear whether the object of the anger — blatant and unabashed corruption — will infect the
popularity of Mr. Putin.
But the harshness of the response to
the protests on Sunday — hundreds of
people were arrested, in many cases
simply for showing up — suggested that
Mr. Putin’s hierarchy was taking no
chances.
Artyom Troitsky, a Russian journalist
and concert promoter who for years has
tracked Russian youth culture, said the
fact that so many young people took
part in the protests in Moscow and elsewhere “is exceptionally important.”
The reason, he said, is that “young
people have always been a catalyst for
change,” and their presence suggests a
break from the lack of political interest
they had exhibited in recent years.
This “does not necessarily mean that
the tide has turned,” but “something is
definitely changing,” he said. “But is it
changing on a substantial scale, or is
this again just a tiny minority, which will
mean this all ends up in another flop, another failure like before?”
Aleksei A. Navalny, the anticorruption campaigner and opposition leader
who orchestrated the nationwide
protests — and who received a 15-day
prison sentence on Monday for resisting
arrest — said in court that he was surprised at the turnout on Sunday and that
he was determined to keep up the pressure by running in next year’s presidential election.
“I think yesterday’s events have
shown that there are quite a large number of voters in Russia who support the
program of a candidate who speaks for
the fight against corruption,” he said.
That Mr. Navalny has little to no
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
During her recent surgery, Esther Voynow was shown the tendons in her right wrist that had been causing her intense pain.
for anesthesia pronounced, had chosen
to remain awake throughout, her forearm rendered numb with only an injection of a local anesthetic.
So she had been able to watch as Dr.
Ilyas first sliced into her swollen right
wrist, tugged gently at skin flaps, and
then opened a small bloody crater, exposing the inflamed sheath that had
trapped her tendons. Now she could see
why her thumb and wrist had been relentlessly throbbing.
As he scraped, Dr. Ilyas chatted with
Ms. Voynow, trying to keep her calm.
From a sound system, the Temptations
crooned along, with “The Way You Do
the Things You Do.”
More surgery is being performed with
the patient awake and looking on, for
both financial and medical reasons. But
SURGERY, PAGE 2
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Issue Number
No. 41,692