Thailand financed the first dam on the Mekong River in Laos. Just months after the turbines began churning, it is Thai towns that are suffering. PAGE 6 INTERNATIONAL 4-13 A Lifeline Drained of Life When California’s housing crisis came to a wealthy suburb, one public servant became a convert to a radically simple doctrine: Build more homes. PAGE 1 SUNDAY BUSINESS The Disciple of Development Stephanie Coontz PAGE 4 SUNDAY REVIEW U(D547FD)v+z!/!/!?!" SYDNEY, Australia — In a country where there has always been more space than people, where the land and wildlife are cherished like a Picasso, nature is closing in. Fueled by cli- mate change and the world’s refusal to address it, the fires that have burned across Austral- ia are not just destroying lives, or turning forests as large as na- tions into ashen moonscapes. They are also forcing Austral- ians to imagine a new way of life. When summer is feared. When air filters hum in homes that are bunkers, with kids kept indoors. When bird song and the rustle of marsupials in the bush give way to an eerie, smoky silence. “I am standing here a traveler from a new reality, a burning Australia,” Lynette Wallworth, an Australian filmmaker, told a crowd of international executives and politicians in Davos, Switzer- land, last month. “What was feared and what was warned is no longer in our future, a topic for debate — it is here.” “We have seen,” she added, “the unfolding wings of climate change.” Like the fires, it’s a metaphor that lingers. What many of us have witnessed this fire season does feel alive, like a monstrous gathering force threatening to devour what we hold most dear on a continent that will grow only Learning to Fear Summer in Scorched Australia By DAMIEN CAVE Devastation in New South Wales. Bush fires or smoke directly affected 57 percent of Australians. MATTHEW ABBOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK Continued on Page 13 U.S. troops at Ayn al Asad Air Base in western Iraq hunkered down in concrete bunkers last month as Iranian missile strikes rocked the runway, destroying guard towers, hangars and build- ings used to fly drones. When the dust settled, Presi- dent Trump and military officials declared that no one had been killed or wounded during the at- tack. That would soon change. A week after the blast, Defense Department officials acknowl- edged that 11 service members had tested positive for traumatic brain injury and had been evacu- ated to Kuwait and Germany for more screening. Two weeks after the blast, the Pentagon an- nounced that 34 service members had been experiencing symptoms associated with brain injuries and that an additional seven had been evacuated. By the end of January, the number of potential brain inju- ries had climbed to 50. Last week, it grew to 109. The Defense Department said the numbers had increased be- cause of an abundance of caution. It noted that 70 percent of those who tested positive for a trau- matic brain injury had since re- turned to duty. But experts in the brain injury field said the delayed response and confusion had been caused primarily by a problem both the military and civilian world have struggled with for more than a decade: There is no reliable way to determine who has a brain injury and who does not. Top military leaders have for years called traumatic brain inju- ry one of the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; at the height of the Iraq war in 2008, they started pouring hun- dreds of millions of dollars into re- search on detection and treat- ment. But the military still has no objective tool for diagnosing brain injury in the field. Instead, medi- cal personnel continue to use a pa- per questionnaire that relies on answers from patients — patients who may have reasons to hide or exaggerate symptoms, or who may be too shaken to answer Military Fights Brain Injuries, But Lacks Test By DAVE PHILIPPS and THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF Continued on Page 15 Up to 109 U.S. troops may have sustained traumatic brain injuries at Ayn al Asad Air Base in Iraq during an Iranian attack on Jan. 8. SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES In the fall of 2018, Emily’s List had a dilemma. With congres- sional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kava- naugh underway, the Democratic women’s group was hosting a ma- jor fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled head- line speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to Emily’s List over the years. Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepti- cism about the #MeToo move- ment and questioning sexual mis- conduct allegations against Char- lie Rose, the disgraced news an- chor. Senior Emily’s List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg’s invitation, ac- cording to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg. And when he ad- dressed the luncheon on Sept. 24 — before an audience dotted with women clad in black, to show soli- darity with Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault — Mr. Bloomberg demonstrated why. “I will be putting more money into supporting women candi- dates this cycle than any individ- ual ever has before,” he declared. It was not an idle pledge: Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $100 million helping Democrats take control of the House of Represent- atives in the midterm elections. Of the 21 newly elected lawmakers he supported with his personal su- per PAC, all but six were women. The decision by Emily’s List, to mute its misgivings and embrace Mr. Bloomberg as a mighty ally, foreshadowed the choice Mr. Bloomberg is now asking Demo- crats to make by anointing him their presidential nominee. There are, after all, numerous dimensions to Mr. Bloomberg’s persona and record that give Democrats pause. A former Re- publican who joined the Demo- cratic Party in 2018, Mr. Bloom- berg has long mingled support for progressive causes with more conservative positions on law en- forcement, business regulation and school choice. He has often given voice to views that liberals find troubling: Over the past week, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign was on the defensive over past re- cordings that showed him linking the financial crisis to the end of discriminatory “redlining” prac- tices in mortgage lending, and de- fending physically aggressive po- licing tactics as a deterrent against crime. Yet in a primary campaign de- In Bloomberg, Liberals See A Wallet Too Big to Offend Laying the Foundation for a Presidential Bid With Largess to Progressive Causes By ALEXANDER BURNS and NICHOLAS KULISH Michael R. Bloomberg has bankrolled many Democrats. CALLA KESSLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES Continued on Page 18 SHANGHAI — China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busy- bodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest so- cial control campaigns in history. The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from ev- eryone but their closest kin. The nation is battling the coro- navirus outbreak with a grass- roots mobilization reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades not seen in China in decades, essentially entrusting front-line epidemic prevention to a supercharged ver- sion of a neighborhood watch. Housing complexes in some cit- ies have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from enter- ing cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the country- side, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other im- provised barriers. Despite China’s arsenal of high- tech surveillance tools, the con- trols are mainly enforced by hun- dreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their move- ments, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away A Quarantine, Mao-Style, of 760 Million People By RAYMOND ZHONG and PAUL MOZUR China Deploys Citizens to Help Battle Virus Continued on Page 8 WASHINGTON — President Trump suggested in recent days that he had, in fact, learned a lesson from his now-famous telephone call with Ukraine’s president that ultimately led to his impeachment: Too many people are listening to his phone calls. “When you call a foreign leader, people listen,” he ob- served on Geraldo Rivera’s radio show. “I may end the practice entirely. I may end it entirely.” Mr. Trump has always been convinced that he is surrounded by people who cannot be trusted. But in the 10 days since he was acquitted by the Senate, he has grown more vocal about it and turned paranoia into policy, purging his White House of more career officials, bringing back loyalists and tightening the circle around him to a smaller and more faithful coterie of confi- dants. The impeachment case against Mr. Trump, built largely on the testimony of officials who actu- ally worked for him, reinforced his view that the government is Post-Acquittal, Distrust Reigns During a Purge NEWS ANALYSIS By PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN Continued on Page 22 WASHINGTON — In an email a few days ago to the 270 lawyers he oversees, Nicola T. Hanna, the United States attorney in Los An- geles, offered a message of re- assurance: I am proud of the work you do, he wrote. Other U.S. attorneys in the Jus- tice Department’s far-flung 93 field offices relayed similar mes- sages of encouragement after President Trump’s efforts to influ- ence a politically fraught case pro- voked the kind of consternation the department has rarely seen since the Watergate era. “All I have to say,” another United States attorney wrote to his staff, “is keep doing the right things for the right reasons.” But the fact that the depart- ment’s 10,000-odd lawyers needed reassurances seemed like cause for worry all by itself. In more than three dozen inter- views in recent days, lawyers across the federal government’s legal establishment wondered aloud whether Mr. Trump was un- dermining the Justice Depart- ment’s treasured reputation for upholding the law without favor or political bias — and whether At- torney General William P. Barr was able or willing to protect it. Trump’s Prying Breeds Anxiety At Justice Dept. Continued on Page 22 This article is by Katie Benner, Sharon LaFraniere and Nicole Hong. A 14-year-old boy faces murder charges over the stabbing of the Barnard fresh- man Tessa Majors during a robbery in a Harlem park. PAGE 25 NATIONAL 14-25 Arrest in Killing of Student TIMELINE Xi Jinping, under fire, says he led the fight against the outbreak early on. PAGE 8 Luka Doncic is an N.B.A. All-Star at age 20. His swift rise was confirmed last year when Kobe Bryant trash talked him in his native Slovenian. PAGE 1 SPORTSSUNDAY Rising Star, in Any Language Late Edition VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,605 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2020 Today, clouds giving way to some sunshine, high 46. Tonight, partly cloudy, low 35. Tomorrow, clouds and sunshine, remaining mild, high 48. Weather map is on Page 24. $6.00
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C M Y K Nxxx,2020-02-16,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
Thailand financed the first dam on theMekong River in Laos. Just monthsafter the turbines began churning, it isThai towns that are suffering. PAGE 6
INTERNATIONAL 4-13
A Lifeline Drained of LifeWhen California’s housing crisis cameto a wealthy suburb, one public servantbecame a convert to a radically simpledoctrine: Build more homes. PAGE 1
SUNDAY BUSINESS
The Disciple of Development Stephanie Coontz PAGE 4
SUNDAY REVIEW
U(D547FD)v+z!/!/!?!"
SYDNEY, Australia — In acountry where there has alwaysbeen more space than people,where the land and wildlife arecherished like a Picasso, nature
is closing in.Fueled by cli-mate changeand the world’s
refusal to address it, the firesthat have burned across Austral-ia are not just destroying lives, orturning forests as large as na-
tions into ashen moonscapes.They are also forcing Austral-
ians to imagine a new way of life.When summer is feared. Whenair filters hum in homes that arebunkers, with kids kept indoors.When bird song and the rustle ofmarsupials in the bush give wayto an eerie, smoky silence.
“I am standing here a travelerfrom a new reality, a burningAustralia,” Lynette Wallworth, anAustralian filmmaker, told acrowd of international executivesand politicians in Davos, Switzer-
land, last month. “What wasfeared and what was warned isno longer in our future, a topicfor debate — it is here.”
“We have seen,” she added,“the unfolding wings of climatechange.”
Like the fires, it’s a metaphorthat lingers. What many of ushave witnessed this fire seasondoes feel alive, like a monstrousgathering force threatening todevour what we hold most dearon a continent that will grow only
Learning to Fear Summer in Scorched Australia
By DAMIEN CAVE
Devastation in New South Wales. Bush fires or smoke directly affected 57 percent of Australians.MATTHEW ABBOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
REPORTER’SNOTEBOOK
Continued on Page 13
U.S. troops at Ayn al Asad AirBase in western Iraq hunkereddown in concrete bunkers lastmonth as Iranian missile strikesrocked the runway, destroyingguard towers, hangars and build-ings used to fly drones.
When the dust settled, Presi-dent Trump and military officialsdeclared that no one had beenkilled or wounded during the at-tack. That would soon change.
A week after the blast, DefenseDepartment officials acknowl-edged that 11 service membershad tested positive for traumaticbrain injury and had been evacu-ated to Kuwait and Germany formore screening. Two weeks afterthe blast, the Pentagon an-nounced that 34 service membershad been experiencing symptomsassociated with brain injuries andthat an additional seven had beenevacuated. By the end of January,the number of potential brain inju-ries had climbed to 50. Last week,it grew to 109.
The Defense Department saidthe numbers had increased be-cause of an abundance of caution.It noted that 70 percent of thosewho tested positive for a trau-matic brain injury had since re-turned to duty. But experts in thebrain injury field said the delayedresponse and confusion had beencaused primarily by a problemboth the military and civilianworld have struggled with formore than a decade: There is noreliable way to determine who hasa brain injury and who does not.
Top military leaders have foryears called traumatic brain inju-ry one of the signature wounds ofthe wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;at the height of the Iraq war in2008, they started pouring hun-dreds of millions of dollars into re-search on detection and treat-ment. But the military still has noobjective tool for diagnosing braininjury in the field. Instead, medi-cal personnel continue to use a pa-per questionnaire that relies onanswers from patients — patientswho may have reasons to hide orexaggerate symptoms, or whomay be too shaken to answer
Military FightsBrain Injuries,But Lacks Test
By DAVE PHILIPPSand THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF
Continued on Page 15
Up to 109 U.S. troops may have sustained traumatic brain injuries at Ayn al Asad Air Base in Iraq during an Iranian attack on Jan. 8.SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
In the fall of 2018, Emily’s Listhad a dilemma. With congres-sional elections approaching andthe Supreme Court confirmationbattle over Judge Brett M. Kava-naugh underway, the Democraticwomen’s group was hosting a ma-jor fund-raising luncheon in NewYork. Among the scheduled head-line speakers was Michael R.Bloomberg, the former mayor,who had donated nearly $6 millionto Emily’s List over the years.
Days before the event, Mr.Bloomberg made blunt commentsin an interview with The NewYork Times, expressing skepti-cism about the #MeToo move-ment and questioning sexual mis-conduct allegations against Char-lie Rose, the disgraced news an-chor. Senior Emily’s List officialsseriously debated withdrawingMr. Bloomberg’s invitation, ac-cording to three people familiarwith the deliberations, who spokeon the condition of anonymity.
In the end, the group concludedit could not risk alienating Mr.Bloomberg. And when he ad-dressed the luncheon on Sept. 24— before an audience dotted withwomen clad in black, to show soli-darity with Christine Blasey Ford,the woman who accused JudgeKavanaugh of sexual assault —Mr. Bloomberg demonstratedwhy.
“I will be putting more moneyinto supporting women candi-dates this cycle than any individ-ual ever has before,” he declared.
It was not an idle pledge: Mr.Bloomberg spent more than $100million helping Democrats takecontrol of the House of Represent-atives in the midterm elections. Ofthe 21 newly elected lawmakershe supported with his personal su-per PAC, all but six were women.
The decision by Emily’s List, tomute its misgivings and embrace
Mr. Bloomberg as a mighty ally,foreshadowed the choice Mr.Bloomberg is now asking Demo-crats to make by anointing himtheir presidential nominee.
There are, after all, numerousdimensions to Mr. Bloomberg’spersona and record that giveDemocrats pause. A former Re-publican who joined the Demo-cratic Party in 2018, Mr. Bloom-berg has long mingled support forprogressive causes with more
conservative positions on law en-forcement, business regulationand school choice. He has oftengiven voice to views that liberalsfind troubling: Over the pastweek, Mr. Bloomberg’s campaignwas on the defensive over past re-cordings that showed him linkingthe financial crisis to the end ofdiscriminatory “redlining” prac-tices in mortgage lending, and de-fending physically aggressive po-licing tactics as a deterrentagainst crime.
Yet in a primary campaign de-
In Bloomberg, Liberals SeeA Wallet Too Big to Offend
Laying the Foundation for a Presidential BidWith Largess to Progressive Causes
By ALEXANDER BURNS and NICHOLAS KULISH
Michael R. Bloomberg hasbankrolled many Democrats.
CALLA KESSLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Continued on Page 18
SHANGHAI — China hasflooded cities and villages withbattalions of neighborhood busy-bodies, uniformed volunteers andCommunist Party representativesto carry out one of the biggest so-cial control campaigns in history.
The goal: to keep hundreds ofmillions of people away from ev-eryone but their closest kin.
The nation is battling the coro-navirus outbreak with a grass-roots mobilization reminiscent ofMao-style mass crusades not seenin China in decades, essentially
entrusting front-line epidemicprevention to a supercharged ver-sion of a neighborhood watch.
Housing complexes in some cit-ies have issued the equivalents ofpaper hall passes to regulate howoften residents leave their homes.Apartment buildings have turnedaway their own tenants if theyhave come from out of town. Trainstations block people from enter-ing cities if they cannot prove they
live or work there. In the country-side, villages have been gated offwith vehicles, tents and other im-provised barriers.
Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the con-trols are mainly enforced by hun-dreds of thousands of workers andvolunteers, who check residents’temperature, log their move-ments, oversee quarantines and— most important — keep away
A Quarantine, Mao-Style, of 760 Million PeopleBy RAYMOND ZHONG
and PAUL MOZURChina Deploys Citizens
to Help Battle Virus
Continued on Page 8
WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump suggested in recent daysthat he had, in fact, learned alesson from his now-famoustelephone call with Ukraine’spresident that ultimately led tohis impeachment: Too manypeople are listening to his phonecalls.
“When you call a foreignleader, people listen,” he ob-served on Geraldo Rivera’s radioshow. “I may end the practiceentirely. I may end it entirely.”
Mr. Trump has always beenconvinced that he is surroundedby people who cannot be trusted.But in the 10 days since he wasacquitted by the Senate, he hasgrown more vocal about it andturned paranoia into policy,purging his White House of morecareer officials, bringing backloyalists and tightening the circlearound him to a smaller andmore faithful coterie of confi-dants.
The impeachment case againstMr. Trump, built largely on thetestimony of officials who actu-ally worked for him, reinforcedhis view that the government is
Post-Acquittal,Distrust ReignsDuring a Purge
NEWS ANALYSIS
By PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN
Continued on Page 22
WASHINGTON — In an email afew days ago to the 270 lawyers heoversees, Nicola T. Hanna, theUnited States attorney in Los An-geles, offered a message of re-assurance: I am proud of the workyou do, he wrote.
Other U.S. attorneys in the Jus-tice Department’s far-flung 93field offices relayed similar mes-sages of encouragement afterPresident Trump’s efforts to influ-ence a politically fraught case pro-voked the kind of consternationthe department has rarely seensince the Watergate era. “All Ihave to say,” another UnitedStates attorney wrote to his staff,“is keep doing the right things forthe right reasons.”
But the fact that the depart-ment’s 10,000-odd lawyers neededreassurances seemed like causefor worry all by itself.
In more than three dozen inter-views in recent days, lawyersacross the federal government’slegal establishment wonderedaloud whether Mr. Trump was un-dermining the Justice Depart-ment’s treasured reputation forupholding the law without favor orpolitical bias — and whether At-torney General William P. Barrwas able or willing to protect it.
Trump’s PryingBreeds AnxietyAt Justice Dept.
Continued on Page 22
This article is by Katie Benner,Sharon LaFraniere and Nicole Hong.
A 14-year-old boy faces murder chargesover the stabbing of the Barnard fresh-man Tessa Majors during a robbery in aHarlem park. PAGE 25
NATIONAL 14-25
Arrest in Killing of Student
TIMELINE Xi Jinping, under fire,says he led the fight against theoutbreak early on. PAGE 8
Luka Doncic is an N.B.A. All-Star at age20. His swift rise was confirmed lastyear when Kobe Bryant trash talkedhim in his native Slovenian. PAGE 1
SPORTSSUNDAY
Rising Star, in Any Language
Late Edition
VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,605 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2020
Today, clouds giving way to somesunshine, high 46. Tonight, partlycloudy, low 35. Tomorrow, cloudsand sunshine, remaining mild, high48. Weather map is on Page 24.
$6.00
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