INTERNATIONAL EDITION...BY STEVEN ERLANGER It is impossible to visit China these days and not...
1
.. INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2018 JACK JOHNSON QUEST TO CLEAR BOXER’S NAME PAGE 13 | SPORTS NIGHTCLUBS THE ORIGINAL SOCIAL NETWORK PAGE 15 | CULTURE GOING ONCE, TWICE ... BIDDING FOR PIECES OF THE ROCKEFELLER MYSTIQUE PAGE TWO past few months, 10 beoutQ channels were live, almost all of them screening the ostensibly exclusive and very ex- pensive content of beIN, which owns some of the most valuable sports rights in France, Spain and Turkey. The coalition countries have sub- What do you do when your multibillion- dollar sports network has been stolen? Executives at beIN Sports in Qatar pondered that question last week as they stared at a bank of screens inside their sprawling headquarters here in Doha, the capital. On the night of May 2, the network’s main channel televised the deciding soccer game of the Champi- ons League semifinal between A.S. Roma and Liverpool. They watched the beIN feed as Liver- pool scored to take an early lead. Then they watched the same play 10 seconds later on live coverage from beoutQ, a bootlegging operation that is seemingly based in Saudi Arabia and has roots in the bitter political dispute between Qa- tar and a coalition of countries led by its neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That night, as in every night for the jected Qatar to a blockade over the past year, accusing it of financing terrorism, disrupting regional unity by warming up to Iran and harboring fugitives. Qa- tar has denied the allegations. Now, one month before the start of soccer’s World Cup, the planet’s most- watched sporting event and beIN’s sig- nature property, the audacious piracy operation is positioned to illicitly deliver the tournament’s 64 games to much of the Middle East. Qatar, despite abun- dant resources, has been powerless to stop it. Decoder boxes embossed with the be- outQ logo have for months been avail- able across Saudi Arabia and are now for sale in other Arab-speaking coun- tries. A one-year subscription costs $100. A Bangladeshi worker reached by phone at Sharif Electronics in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this week said his shop had been selling the boxes for months. “Many people buy them,” he said. As the Champions League semifinal unfolded last week, Tom Keaveny, beIN’s managing director for the Middle East who has worked in television for three decades, gathered with a half-doz- en beIN engineers in a small room known as the lab with a mandate: Dis- rupt beoutQ. So far they have not been successful. Mr. Keaveny said beoutQ’s operation “takes industrial scale knowledge and ability and multimillion-dollar funding.” “This isn’t someone in their bed- room,” he said. BeoutQ’s website claims its backers QATAR, PAGE 8 A brazen act of piracy DOHA, QATAR Qatar sports network believes Saudi Arabia is bootlegging its broadcasts BY TARIQ PANJA A monitoring room at beIN, a sports network in Doha, Qatar, that has paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive rights to major events, only to see them pirated. OLYA MORVAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES The most uncomfortable thing about being naked in a museum, it turns out, is the temperature. A half-hour into the first nudist tour of the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art museum in Paris, I had gotten used to the feeling of expo- sure, but I hadn’t acclimatized to the cold air circulating through the cavern- ous galleries. Standing in a politically themed exhibition by the French-Algerian artist Neïl Beloufa, I began shaking my arms for warmth. Museums, I was discovering, are not temperature- controlled for people wearing only sneakers. In drawing this conclusion, it seemed, I wasn’t alone. Jacqueline Bohain, a 65-year-old retiree who had taken an eight-hour bus trip from the Alsace region of eastern France to attend the event on Saturday, tried to warm herself in a sliver of sunlight. Other members of the group jiggled around to heat up. “Maybe we should walk around the corner, so we can stand in the sun,” Marion Buchloh- Kollerbohm, the tour guide, suggested, and maneuvered us to another area of the exhibition. The Palais de Tokyo’s “Visite Natur- iste” — the first of its kind in France — has garnered a remarkable amount of public interest since it was announced in March. Over 30,000 people indicated on Facebook that they were interested in the tour, and, according to Laurent Luft, 48, the president of the Paris Naturist Association, more than two million people visited the group’s Face- book page in recent weeks. “I was imagining about 100 or 200 people might want to come, not 30,000,” he said in a telephone inter- NAKED, PAGE 2 Exposed to art, from his head to his ankles REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK PARIS Visitors wear nothing, except maybe shoes, for tour of the Palais de Tokyo BY THOMAS ROGERS A section of the exhibition “Discord, Daughter of the Night” featured Japanese suits of armor. “Putting on clothing or an armor, it’s a statement,” one participant said. OWEN FRANKEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions. It is by now a familiar, humiliating pat- tern. European leaders cajole, argue and beg, trying to persuade President Trump to change his mind on a vital is- sue for the trans-Atlantic alliance. Mr. Trump appears to enjoy the show, dan- gling them, before ultimately choosing not to listen. Instead, he demands compliance, seemingly bent on providing just the split with powerful and important allies that China, Iran and Russia would like to exploit. Such is the case with the efforts to pre- serve the 2015 Iran nuclear pact. Both the French president, Emmanuel Mac- ron, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, made the pilgrimage to Wash- ington to urge Mr. Trump not to scrap the agreement. Their failure is very sim- ilar to what happened with the Paris cli- mate accord, to what is happening now with unilateral American sanctions im- posed on steel and aluminum imports and to Mr. Trump’s decision to move the United States Embassy in Israel to Jeru- salem. And with each breach, it becomes clearer that trans-Atlantic relations are in trouble, and that the options are not good for the United States’ closest Euro- pean allies. However angry and humiliated, those allies do not seem ready to confront Mr. Trump, wishing to believe that he and his aides can be influenced over time. To some, it is reminiscent of what Samuel Johnson said of second marriages: a tri- umph of hope over experience. But there are signs that patience is wearing thin and that many are search- ing for solutions as Mr. Trump, in the name of “America First,” creates a vac- uum of trans-Atlantic leadership that the Europeans have so far seemed in- capable or unwilling to fill. “The allies are certainly sick of this but don’t seem to have an alternative,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former career State Department official now at the Eu- ropean Council on Foreign Relations. “The Europeans are invested down a path of trying to please the president, not out of belief but more hope against hope that they will convince him,” he added. “And they only pursue this at E.U., PAGE 6 Humiliated, E.U. looks for antidote to Trump BRUSSELS Allies’ patience is tested after president adds Iran deal to long list of snubs BY STEVEN ERLANGER It is impossible to visit China these days and not compare and contrast the drama playing out in Beijing politics with the drama playing out in Wash- ington politics. While the differences are many, I am sorry to report that some of the parallels are getting too close for comfort. Let’s start with the fact that the anti-corruption crackdown by Presi- dent Xi Jinping has created a climate of fear in China these days — whether about interacting with foreigners or saying the wrong thing or behaving too extravagantly so as to attract the state “anti-corruption” detectives. But because “corruption” has not been clearly defined — and can be used to get rid of anyone for any reason — people don’t know where the line is, so they’re extra cau- tious. That’s why during a week in Beijing the most frequent expression I heard was, “You’re not quoting me on this, right?” But if the Chinese are afraid to talk to one another, in America we’ve for- gotten how to talk to one another. In Washington these days it is not uncommon for people to be invited to a dinner or a public gathering and think to themselves: “I hope none of them will be there.” And the them people are talking about is not someone of a dif- ferent faith or race — which would be awful enough — but it’s someone just from a different political party. In other words, in both Beijing and Washington, self-censorship, and biting one’s tongue, is more rife than ever — but for different reasons. In Beijing it’s so you won’t get arrested. In Washing- ton it’s so you won’t get into a fight. In both cases, though, the net results are fewer people talking truth across ideo- logical lines. At the same time, in China today, if you’re a Communist Party official or senior bureaucrat, you have to toe the ruling party’s line or you could be quickly purged or imprisoned. In America today, if you’re a Republican Party congressman or senator, you, Is the U.S. becoming like China? OPINION The similarities in propaganda, toeing the ruling party’s line and political self-censorship are disturbing. FRIEDMAN, PAGE 11 Thomas L. Friedman Historic victory Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, 92, being congratulated Thursday in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, after his coalition won a na- tional election. It is the first time that the opposition has won more seats than the group of parties that has governed the country since independence in 1957. PAGE 4 MANAN VATSYAYANA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES EUROPEANS’ IRAN VENTURES NOW IN LIMBO Companies that rushed to invest are looking for ways to shield themselves from American sanctions. PAGE 7 NUCLEAR DEAL’S FAILURE WORRIES ASIA Some say that President Trump’s Iran decision sends the wrong signals to North Korea ahead of talks. PAGE 6 Democracy in Danger: Solutions for a Changing World September 16-18, 2018 Register to attend athensdemocracyforum.com Issue Number No. 42,038 Andorra € 3.70 Antilles € 4.00 Austria € 3.50 Bahrain BD 1.40 Belgium € 3.50 Bos. & Herz. KM 5.50 Cameroon CFA 2700 Canada CAN$ 5.50 Croatia KN 22.00 Cyprus € 3.20 Czech Rep CZK 110 Denmark Dkr 30 Egypt EGP 28.00 Estonia € 3.50 Finland € 3.50 France € 3.50 Gabon CFA 2700 Germany € 3.50 Great Britain £ 2.20 Greece € 2.80 Hungary HUF 950 Israel NIS 13.50 Israel / Eilat NIS 11.50 Italy € 3.40 Ivory Coast CFA 2700 Jordan JD 2.00 Serbia Din 280 Slovakia € 3.50 Slovenia € 3.40 Spain € 3.50 Sweden Skr 35 Switzerland CHF 4.80 Syria US$ 3.00 The Netherlands € 3.50 Oman OMR 1.40 Poland Zl 15 Portugal € 3.50 Qatar QR 12.00 Republic of Ireland ¤ 3.40 Reunion € 3.50 Saudi Arabia SR 15.00 Senegal CFA 2700 Kazakhstan US$ 3.50 Latvia € 4.50 Lebanon LBP 5,000 Luxembourg € 3.50 Malta € 3.40 Montenegro € 3.40 Morocco MAD 30 Norway Nkr 33 NEWSSTAND PRICES Tunisia Din 5.200 Turkey TL 11 U.A.E. AED 14.00 United States $ 4.00 United States Military (Europe) $ 2.00 Y(1J85IC*KKNPKP( +,!z!$!=!;
Transcript of INTERNATIONAL EDITION...BY STEVEN ERLANGER It is impossible to visit China these days and not...
..
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2018
JACK JOHNSONQUEST TO CLEARBOXER’S NAMEPAGE 13 | SPORTS
NIGHTCLUBSTHE ORIGINALSOCIAL NETWORKPAGE 15 | CULTURE
GOING ONCE, TWICE ...BIDDING FOR PIECES OF THEROCKEFELLER MYSTIQUEPAGE TWO
past few months, 10 beoutQ channelswere live, almost all of them screeningthe ostensibly exclusive and very ex-pensive content of beIN, which ownssome of the most valuable sports rightsin France, Spain and Turkey.
The coalition countries have sub-
What do you do when your multibillion-dollar sports network has been stolen?
Executives at beIN Sports in Qatarpondered that question last week asthey stared at a bank of screens insidetheir sprawling headquarters here inDoha, the capital. On the night of May 2,the network’s main channel televisedthe deciding soccer game of the Champi-ons League semifinal between A.S.Roma and Liverpool.
They watched the beIN feed as Liver-pool scored to take an early lead. Thenthey watched the same play 10 secondslater on live coverage from beoutQ, abootlegging operation that is seeminglybased in Saudi Arabia and has roots inthe bitter political dispute between Qa-tar and a coalition of countries led by itsneighbors, Saudi Arabia and the UnitedArab Emirates.
That night, as in every night for the
jected Qatar to a blockade over the pastyear, accusing it of financing terrorism,disrupting regional unity by warmingup to Iran and harboring fugitives. Qa-tar has denied the allegations.
Now, one month before the start ofsoccer’s World Cup, the planet’s most-
watched sporting event and beIN’s sig-nature property, the audacious piracyoperation is positioned to illicitly deliverthe tournament’s 64 games to much ofthe Middle East. Qatar, despite abun-dant resources, has been powerless tostop it.
Decoder boxes embossed with the be-outQ logo have for months been avail-able across Saudi Arabia and are nowfor sale in other Arab-speaking coun-tries. A one-year subscription costs$100. A Bangladeshi worker reached byphone at Sharif Electronics in Jeddah,Saudi Arabia, this week said his shophad been selling the boxes for months.“Many people buy them,” he said.
As the Champions League semifinalunfolded last week, Tom Keaveny,beIN’s managing director for the MiddleEast who has worked in television forthree decades, gathered with a half-doz-en beIN engineers in a small roomknown as the lab with a mandate: Dis-rupt beoutQ.
So far they have not been successful.Mr. Keaveny said beoutQ’s operation
“takes industrial scale knowledge andability and multimillion-dollar funding.”
“This isn’t someone in their bed-room,” he said.
BeoutQ’s website claims its backers QATAR, PAGE 8
A brazen act of piracyDOHA, QATAR
Qatar sports networkbelieves Saudi Arabia isbootlegging its broadcasts
BY TARIQ PANJA
A monitoring room at beIN, a sports network in Doha, Qatar, that has paid hundreds ofmillions of dollars for exclusive rights to major events, only to see them pirated.
OLYA MORVAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The most uncomfortable thing aboutbeing naked in a museum, it turns out,is the temperature. A half-hour into thefirst nudist tour of the Palais de Tokyo,a contemporary art museum in Paris, Ihad gotten used to the feeling of expo-sure, but I hadn’t acclimatized to thecold air circulating through the cavern-ous galleries.
Standing in a politically themedexhibition by the French-Algerianartist Neïl Beloufa, I began shaking myarms for warmth. Museums, I wasdiscovering, are not temperature-controlled for people wearing onlysneakers.
In drawing this conclusion, it
seemed, I wasn’t alone. JacquelineBohain, a 65-year-old retiree who hadtaken an eight-hour bus trip from theAlsace region of eastern France toattend the event on Saturday, tried towarm herself in a sliver of sunlight.Other members of the group jiggledaround to heat up. “Maybe we shouldwalk around the corner, so we canstand in the sun,” Marion Buchloh-Kollerbohm, the tour guide, suggested,and maneuvered us to another area ofthe exhibition.
The Palais de Tokyo’s “Visite Natur-iste” — the first of its kind in France —has garnered a remarkable amount ofpublic interest since it was announcedin March. Over 30,000 people indicatedon Facebook that they were interestedin the tour, and, according to LaurentLuft, 48, the president of the ParisNaturist Association, more than twomillion people visited the group’s Face-book page in recent weeks.
“I was imagining about 100 or 200people might want to come, not30,000,” he said in a telephone inter-NAKED, PAGE 2
Exposed to art, from his head to his anklesREPORTER’S NOTEBOOKPARIS
Visitors wear nothing, except maybe shoes, fortour of the Palais de Tokyo
BY THOMAS ROGERS
A section of the exhibition “Discord, Daughter of the Night” featured Japanese suits ofarmor. “Putting on clothing or an armor, it’s a statement,” one participant said.
OWEN FRANKEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.
It is by now a familiar, humiliating pat-tern. European leaders cajole, argueand beg, trying to persuade PresidentTrump to change his mind on a vital is-sue for the trans-Atlantic alliance. Mr.Trump appears to enjoy the show, dan-gling them, before ultimately choosingnot to listen.
Instead, he demands compliance,seemingly bent on providing just thesplit with powerful and important alliesthat China, Iran and Russia would like toexploit.
Such is the case with the efforts to pre-serve the 2015 Iran nuclear pact. Boththe French president, Emmanuel Mac-ron, and the German chancellor, AngelaMerkel, made the pilgrimage to Wash-ington to urge Mr. Trump not to scrapthe agreement. Their failure is very sim-ilar to what happened with the Paris cli-mate accord, to what is happening nowwith unilateral American sanctions im-posed on steel and aluminum importsand to Mr. Trump’s decision to move theUnited States Embassy in Israel to Jeru-salem. And with each breach, it becomesclearer that trans-Atlantic relations arein trouble, and that the options are notgood for the United States’ closest Euro-pean allies.
However angry and humiliated, thoseallies do not seem ready to confront Mr.Trump, wishing to believe that he andhis aides can be influenced over time. Tosome, it is reminiscent of what SamuelJohnson said of second marriages: a tri-umph of hope over experience.
But there are signs that patience iswearing thin and that many are search-ing for solutions as Mr. Trump, in thename of “America First,” creates a vac-uum of trans-Atlantic leadership thatthe Europeans have so far seemed in-capable or unwilling to fill.
“The allies are certainly sick of thisbut don’t seem to have an alternative,”said Jeremy Shapiro, a former careerState Department official now at the Eu-ropean Council on Foreign Relations.
“The Europeans are invested down apath of trying to please the president,not out of belief but more hope againsthope that they will convince him,” headded. “And they only pursue this at E.U., PAGE 6
Humiliated,E.U. looks for antidote to TrumpBRUSSELS
Allies’ patience is testedafter president adds Irandeal to long list of snubs
BY STEVEN ERLANGER
It is impossible to visit China thesedays and not compare and contrast thedrama playing out in Beijing politicswith the drama playing out in Wash-ington politics. While the differencesare many, I am sorry to report thatsome of the parallels are getting tooclose for comfort.
Let’s start with the fact that theanti-corruption crackdown by Presi-dent Xi Jinping has created a climateof fear in China these days — whetherabout interacting with foreigners orsaying the wrong thing or behaving too
extravagantly so asto attract the state“anti-corruption”detectives.
But because“corruption” hasnot been clearlydefined — and canbe used to get rid ofanyone for anyreason — peopledon’t know wherethe line is, sothey’re extra cau-
tious. That’s why during a week inBeijing the most frequent expression Iheard was, “You’re not quoting me onthis, right?”
But if the Chinese are afraid to talkto one another, in America we’ve for-gotten how to talk to one another.
In Washington these days it is notuncommon for people to be invited to adinner or a public gathering and thinkto themselves: “I hope none of themwill be there.” And the them people aretalking about is not someone of a dif-ferent faith or race — which would beawful enough — but it’s someone justfrom a different political party.
In other words, in both Beijing andWashington, self-censorship, and bitingone’s tongue, is more rife than ever —but for different reasons. In Beijing it’sso you won’t get arrested. In Washing-ton it’s so you won’t get into a fight. Inboth cases, though, the net results arefewer people talking truth across ideo-logical lines.
At the same time, in China today, ifyou’re a Communist Party official orsenior bureaucrat, you have to toe theruling party’s line or you could bequickly purged or imprisoned. InAmerica today, if you’re a RepublicanParty congressman or senator, you,
Is the U.S. becominglike China?
OPINION
Thesimilarities inpropaganda,toeing theruling party’sline andpoliticalself-censorshipare disturbing.
FRIEDMAN, PAGE 11
Thomas L. Friedman
Historic victory Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, 92, being congratulated Thursday in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, after his coalition won a na-tional election. It is the first time that the opposition has won more seats than the group of parties that has governed the country since independence in 1957. PAGE 4
MANAN VATSYAYANA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
EUROPEANS’ IRAN VENTURES NOW IN LIMBOCompanies that rushed to invest arelooking for ways to shield themselvesfrom American sanctions. PAGE 7
NUCLEAR DEAL’S FAILURE WORRIES ASIASome say that President Trump’s Irandecision sends the wrong signals toNorth Korea ahead of talks. PAGE 6
Democracy in Danger: Solutions for a Changing World
September 16-18, 2018
Register to attendathensdemocracyforum.com
Issue NumberNo. 42,038
Andorra € 3.70Antilles € 4.00Austria € 3.50Bahrain BD 1.40Belgium € 3.50Bos. & Herz. KM 5.50
Cameroon CFA 2700Canada CAN$ 5.50Croatia KN 22.00Cyprus € 3.20Czech Rep CZK 110Denmark Dkr 30
Egypt EGP 28.00Estonia € 3.50Finland € 3.50France € 3.50Gabon CFA 2700Germany € 3.50
Great Britain £ 2.20Greece € 2.80Hungary HUF 950Israel NIS 13.50Israel / Eilat NIS 11.50Italy € 3.40Ivory Coast CFA 2700Jordan JD 2.00
Serbia Din 280Slovakia € 3.50Slovenia € 3.40Spain € 3.50Sweden Skr 35Switzerland CHF 4.80Syria US$ 3.00The Netherlands € 3.50
Oman OMR 1.40Poland Zl 15Portugal € 3.50Qatar QR 12.00Republic of Ireland ¤ 3.40Reunion € 3.50Saudi Arabia SR 15.00Senegal CFA 2700
Kazakhstan US$ 3.50Latvia € 4.50Lebanon LBP 5,000Luxembourg € 3.50Malta € 3.40Montenegro € 3.40Morocco MAD 30Norway Nkr 33
NEWSSTAND PRICESTunisia Din 5.200Turkey TL 11U.A.E. AED 14.00United States $ 4.00United States Military
(Europe) $ 2.00
Y(1J85IC*KKNPKP( +,!z!$!=!;
