Today, sunny, cooler, more season- able, high 59. Tonight, clear, chilly, low 45. Tomorrow, plenty of sun- shine, seasonable, high 61. Weath- er map, SportsSunday, Page 12. $6 beyond the greater New York metropolitan area. $5.00 Late Edition By ALEXANDRA ALTER On a recent Friday night, Tyler Knott Gregson, a blond, tattooed poet from Montana, took the stage at a Manhattan bookstore and beamed at the crowd that had come to celebrate his new haiku collection. “This is rad. I appreciate it,” he said, taking in the roughly 150 people who had crowded into Barnes & Noble. The response from the mostly young, mostly fe- male audience amounted to a col- lective swoon. Seven years ago, Mr. Gregson, 34, was scraping by as a freelance copywriter, churning out descrip- tions of exercise equipment, hair products and medical imaging devices. Now, thanks to his 560,000 Instagram and Tumblr followers, he has become the lit- erary equivalent of a unicorn: a best-selling celebrity poet. Mr. Gregson belongs to a new generation of young, digitally as- tute poets whose loyal online fol- lowings have helped catapult them onto the best-seller lists, where poetry books are scarce. These amateur poets are not win- ning literary awards, and most have never been in a graduate writing workshop. Instead, their appeal lies in the unpolished flavor of their verses, which often read as if they were ripped from the pages of a diary. And their poems are reaching hundreds of thousands of read- ers, attracting the attention of lit- erary agents, editors and pub- lishers, and overturning poetry’s longstanding reputation as a lofty art form with limited popular ap- peal. The rapid rise of Instapoets probably will not shake up the lit- erary establishment, and their writing is unlikely to impress lit- erary critics or purists who might sneer at conflating clicks with ar- tistic quality. But they could re- shape the lingering perception of poetry as a creative medium in decline. Mr. Gregson’s first poetry book, “Chasers of the Light,” be- came a national best seller and has more than 120,000 copies in Web Poets’ Society: New Breed Succeeds in Taking Verse Viral Continued on Page 17 Barbara Broccoli and her half brother, Michael G. Wilson, have controlled Bond’s every move for 20 years. Now, a battle over his next studio home. PAGE 1 SUNDAY BUSINESS James Bond’s Secret Agents VOL. CLXV ... No. 57,044 © 2015 The New York Times NEW YORK, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2015 By ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL R. GORDON AL UDEID AIR BASE, Qatar — As the United States prepares to intensify airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria, the Arab allies who with great fanfare sent warplanes on the initial missions there a year ago have largely vanished from the campaign. The Obama administration heralded the Arab air forces fly- ing side by side with American fighter jets in the campaign’s ear- ly days as an important show of solidarity against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh. Top commanders like Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who oversees operations in Syria and Iraq, still laud the Arab countries’ contributions to the fight. But as the United States enters a critical phase of the war in Syria, or- dering Special Operations troops to support rebel forces and send- ing two dozen attack planes to Turkey, the air campaign has evolved into a largely American effort. Administration officials had sought to avoid the appearance of another American-dominated war, even as most leaders in the Persian Gulf seem more preoccu- pied with supporting rebels fight- ing the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Now, some of those officials note with resignation, the Arab partners have quietly left the United States to run the bulk of the air war in Syria — not the first time Washington has found allies wanting. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have shifted most of their aircraft to their fight against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Jordan, reacting to the grisly execution of one of AS U.S. ESCALATES AIR WAR ON ISIS, ALLIES FADE AWAY ARABS SHIFT CAMPAIGNS Partners Slow Strikes in Syria as Attention Turns Elsewhere Continued on Page 4 By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON LOUISVILLE, Miss. — In sin- gle strokes after the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston in June, Confederate battle flags were taken from statehouse grounds in South Car- olina and Alabama, pulled from shelves at major retailers like Walmart and declared unwel- come, if to limited effect, at Nas- car races. What happened so swiftly else- where is not so simple in Mis- sissippi. The Confederate battle flag is not simply flying in one hotly disputed spot at the State Capitol but occupying the upper left corner of the state flag, which has been flying since 1894. And as recently as 2001, Mississippians voted by a nearly two-to-one ra- tio to keep it. Recent polling sug- gests the majority have not changed their minds. “My flag’s been flying for 33 years, and I’m not about to take it down,” said Nancy Jenkins, 58, a postal worker who is white and who flies the Mississippi flag and the United States flag at her house a block south of Louisville City Hall. “It doesn’t stand for hate. It means a lot of people fought and died.” Over the past few months, there have been scattered out- breaks of municipal defiance by those who find the Confederate flag offensive, as mayors and city councils from the Delta to the Pine Belt have decided to no longer fly the state flag. But beyond these sporadic ges- tures, any organized effort was always going to wait until poli- ticians were on the safe side of Continued on Page 16 Flag Protesters Set Their Sights On Mississippi Fighting Its Banner’s Confederate Image By STEPHANIE SAUL Partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair, Ozella Campbell spends a lot of time watching television. It was under those circumstances in February 2014 that she saw a commercial urging her to call MyHouseIsADump.com, a company that offered to buy houses in as-is condition, in cash, and to close the purchase within sev- en days. She called the toll-free number and within hours, she said, a well-spoken young man appeared at her brownstone, a longtime family home in Bedford-Stuyve- sant, a Brooklyn neighborhood in the throes of transformation. The next day, the man’s associate ar- rived. “He said, ‘You don’t have to pay any more bills,’” said Ms. Campbell, who was $1,000 behind on her electric bill at the time. A third man, named Alex, ostensibly the boss, arrived next. He promised, Ms. Campbell said, to pay her delinquent mort- gage, provide for her housing for two years, and pay her $43,800. He also hired a lawyer for her. All she had to do was sign over the deed to her house. More than a year later, Ms. Campbell, 75, is in limbo. Her former home at 679 Jef- ferson Avenue is owned by an entity called Jefferson Holding LLC and she is left with her delinquent $529,000 mortgage. “He lied,” she said tearfully of Alex in an interview at an illegally converted garage in Canarsie, Brooklyn, where she lives for now. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs. Camp- bell; we’re going to take care of you.’” Ms. Campbell never learned Alex’s sur- name. And when her relatives tried to find Jefferson Holding LLC at its Great Neck, N.Y., address, there was no company there by that name. In Bedford-Stuyvesant and other pock- ets of the city, white-collar criminals are employing a variety of schemes to snatch properties from their owners. Often, they use the secrecy afforded to shell compa- nies to rent out vacated homes until they are caught or sell them to third parties. Victims are left groping for redress, un- able to identify their predators or even, in some cases, to prove a crime has been In the Shadows, Stealing Homes Deed Thieves Hide Behind Shell Companies to Bilk the Vulnerable Continued on Page 22 SASHA MASLOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Susan Green on the stoop of the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, rowhouse she says she lost in a fraudulent deed transfer. This article is by Kareem Fahim, David D. Kirkpatrick and Nicola Clark. SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt — The airport is surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire. Armed sentries are stationed at its entrance, and passengers pass through two security screenings before reaching departure gates; before a recent flight, there were no fewer than eight uniformed guards standing around the checkpoint. But potential inconsistencies in airport security here and else- where in Egypt have never been hard to detect. As guards at a metal detector here forced a de- parting passenger recently to throw out a pack of safety razors found in his luggage, an airport cafe worker breezed past the checkpoint without any search or inspection. At the Cairo airport on Friday, an officer at an X-ray machine sent text messages while he was scanning luggage. Another guard took a passenger at his word when he said the phone in his pocket had caused a metal detector to beep. Those potential gaps are now under a spotlight, as preliminary evidence from the crash of a Rus- sian charter jet on Oct. 31 points to the possibility of a bombing, and several countries have re- stricted flights to and from Sharm el Sheikh. Theories about how a bomb might have gotten onto the plane, whose passengers and crew were all from Russia or its neighboring countries, have focused on the possibility that an airport worker might have been involved. Ayman al-Muqaddam, the Egyptian official leading the multinational committee investi- gating the crash, confirmed some details about the flight at a news conference in Cairo on Saturday, Gaps in Egypt Airport Security Face Scrutiny AHMED ABD EL-LATIF/ASSOCIATED PRESS Tourists walked toward the Sharm el Sheikh airport in Egypt. Continued on Page 12 After a childhood spent shuffling be- tween relatives and foster homes, a Jets rookie experienced an emotional family reunion in Oakland last weekend. PAGE 1 SPORTSSUNDAY Everyone’s Son U(D547FD)v+[!,!/!=!, Gail Collins PAGE 1 SUNDAY REVIEW This weekend, The Times offers its first virtual reality film with a report on the global refugee crisis. Home delivery subscribers received a VR viewer. THE MAGAZINE A New Way of Telling Stories By MICHAEL BARBARO “I only tell true stories,” Carly Fiorina assured employees dur- ing one of her first speeches as the chief executive of Hewlett- Packard in 2000. But the stirring story that Mrs. Fiorina, now a Republican can- didate for presi- dent, told that day about the creation of HP and its first prod- uct, had a glaring problem: It was almost entirely inaccurate, ac- cording to an in- ternal transcript, an oral history of HP, a book and a company his- torian. In the end, it may not matter. In the 2016 presidential cam- paign, the truth is starting to look deeply out of fashion. Donald J. Trump has brazenly denied calling Senator Marco Ru- bio the “personal senator” of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuck- erberg — even though the quote was published on Mr. Trump’s campaign website. Hillary Rodham Clinton has said that all of her grandparents were immigrants, even though her paternal grandmother was born in Pennsylvania. Now it is Ben Carson who ap- pears to have shaded the facts, Candidates Stick to Script, If Not the Truth Continued on Page 20 Ben Carson Marco Rubio released two years of American Express charges, hoping to quiet accusations he used G.O.P. money for personal expenses. PAGE 20 NATIONAL 14-25 Rubio Bares Financial Data