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The plan tries to balance preserving thecity’s character with a desire for spend-ing by tourists on cruises. PAGE A4

INTERNATIONAL A4-8

Venice Puts Curbs on Big Ships

The measure requires judges to orderprosecutors to search their files and todisclose in a timely manner all evidencethat could help the defense. PAGE A18

NEW YORK A18-23

A New Rule for Prosecutors

Rules designed to protect wild salmonhave ignited anger from the industry aswell as environmentalists. PAGE A7

Norway Pressures Fish FarmsRobert M. Gates PAGE A25

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A24-25

SUBURBAN ANGERAT TRUMP ECHOESDOWN THE BALLOT

RICHMOND, Va. — The Ameri-can suburbs appear to be in revoltagainst President Trump after amuscular coalition of college-edu-cated voters and racial and ethnicminorities dealt the RepublicanParty a thumping rejection onTuesday and propelled a diverseclass of Democrats into office.

From the tax-obsessed suburbsof New York City to high-techneighborhoods outside Seattle tothe sprawling, polyglot develop-ments of Fairfax and PrinceWilliam County, Va., votersshunned Republicans up anddown the ballot in off-year elec-tions. Leaders in both parties said

the elections were an unmistak-able alarm bell for Republicansahead of the 2018 campaign, whenthe party’s grip on the House ofRepresentatives may hinge on thesocially moderate, multiethniccommunities near major cities.

“Voters are taking their angerout at the president, and the onlyway they can do that is by goingafter Republicans on the ballot,”said Representative Charlie Dent,Republican of Pennsylvania.

The Democrats’ gains signaleddeep alienation from the Republi-can Party among the sort of up-scale moderates who were oncecentral to their coalition.

Democrats not only swept Vir-

By ALEXANDER BURNSand JONATHAN MARTIN

SWEEPS BY DEMOCRATS

G.O.P. Alarmed as a KeyVoting Bloc Signals Its

Deep Alienation

Continued on Page A15

Election LossesIntensify PushTo Act on Taxes

WASHINGTON — Senate Re-publicans, under pressure to passa sweeping tax rewrite beforeyear’s end, are expected to unveillegislation on Thursday thatwould eliminate the ability of peo-ple to deduct state and local taxesbut would stop short of fully re-pealing the estate tax, accordingto lobbyists and other people fa-miliar with the bill.

The Senate plan is taking shapeas Republicans digest the drub-bing they suffered on Tuesdaynight in affluent suburbs acrossthe country, many of them repre-sented by Republicans in theHouse. Those areas are stockedwith well-off voters who would bedisproportionately hit by the elim-ination of state and local tax de-ductions.

But in the Senate, those high-tax areas are often represented byDemocrats, which puts less pres-sure on Republican leaders tokeep the state and local deduction,in any form, in their version of thebill.

Each of the bills reflects deli-cate political and fiscal calcula-tions as Republican leaders seekto deliver on President Trump’scampaign promises to cut taxeson the middle class and on busi-nesses — but also find the moneyto pay for them. Eliminating thestate and local tax deductionwould increase tax receipts andtherefore lessen the overall cost ofthe legislation, which by congres-sional budget rules cannot exceed$1.5 trillion over the next decade ifit is to pass without Democraticsupport.

After the elections, Republicansunderstand they have to pass atax bill in order to show a signifi-cant accomplishment. Big lossesin Virginia and New Jersey onTuesday exposed their vulnerabil-ities going into next year’smidterm elections.

But in the Senate, the emergingbill suggests party leaders areless concerned with the potentialfallout of eliminating breaks thatbenefit upper-middle-class tax-payers in high-tax states such asNew York and California.

Republican officials say manymore changes will be included inthe Senate plan, which is plannedfor release on Thursday, the sameday that the House Ways andMeans Committee is expected topass its version of the bill ahead ofa full House vote next week.

This article is by Jim Tankersley,Alan Rappeport and Thomas Kap-lan.

Senate’s Vision of CutsTargets Deductions

Continued on Page A15

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Xi Jinping and his wife received President Trump and his wife, Melania, in Beijing. North Korea was on the agenda later. Page A8.First the Opera. Then Business.

At Heart of AT&T Merger, Another Fight Brews: Trump vs. CNN

It seemed like a match made inmedia heaven. AT&T is a telecom-munications giant whose reachstretches to millions of people allover the country, and TimeWarner, the owner of CNN, HBO

and Warner Bros., has content ga-lore. Together, the two companieswould create a colossus strad-dling the worlds of internet ac-cess, news and entertainment.

Until last week, AT&T’s pend-ing $85.4 billion acquisition ofTime Warner seemed destined toclose by the end of the year. OnWednesday, however, tensions be-tween the Justice Department

and executives at the two compa-nies spilled out into the open.

Now it seems possible that theJustice Department and AT&Twill end up battling each other incourt. The continuing negotia-tions have also demonstrated howthe Trump administration mayregulate big-ticket mergers andacquisitions, representing thefirst major test for the govern-

ment’s antitrust strategy.A central component of the dis-

pute, according to people fromboth companies and the JusticeDepartment, is CNN — the net-work that Mr. Trump has fre-quently attacked as a purveyor of“fake news.”

Late last week, AT&T called the

This article is by Michael J. de laMerced, Emily Steel, Andrew RossSorkin and Cecilia Kang.

Continued on Page A17

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS,Tex. — Families have buried theirdead, one by one, in the cemeteryon the edge of town since the1850s, when a settler named Dr.John Sutherland put down stakeson an old Spanish land grant.

Since then the graveyard hasendured for generations as a rest-ing place for pioneers and cow-boys, matriarchs and masons,overdose victims and those whopassed away silently in theirsleep.

But the cemetery’s caretakersnever before faced the colossal di-lemma they do now: How to buryso many people in such a shortspan of time.

So Lynda Ragen, the owner ofVinyard Funeral Home, is talkingto a Dallas company about bor-rowing additional hearses. JoeGarza, a local resident, is donating

concrete liners for burial vaults.Audrey Louis, the district attor-ney, is rushing to provide moneyfor funeral expenses from a com-pensation fund for crime victims.

And Bertha Cardenas-Lomas,the head of the town’s cemeteryboard, has been sorting out the on-slaught of funerals so that not ev-eryone is buried at once. She hasalso been busy mowing the grassat the grave sites.

“This feels like a terrifying,crushing nightmare except thatI’m somehow awake,” said Ms.Cardenas-Lomas, 57.

In the span of a year, Ms. Carde-nas-Lomas said, the cemetery

normally handles fewer than 15burials, far fewer than the gravesthat need to be dug in the comingdays after a gunman killed 26 atthe First Baptist Church in one ofthe worst mass shootings in thehistory of the United States.

With the church still cordonedoff by investigators, the town’s fo-cus is now shifting to the ceme-tery, one of the few other institu-tional fixtures binding people to-gether here.

A couple who had just begun toenjoy retirement, Richard Rodri-guez, 64, a railroad foreman, andTherese Rodriguez, 66, whoworked as a receptionist, will beburied on Saturday, the first in aseries of funerals that will test thenerves of this threadbare town ofabout 400 people.

“It would be different if theywere killed in a car crash or fromsickness,” said Regina Rodriguez,

Texas Cemetery Strains in Massacre’s AftermathBy SIMON ROMERO

The small, simple Sutherland Springs Cemetery, where many of those killed at the First BaptistChurch will be buried, is looked after by town residents. It usually has fewer than 15 burials a year.

TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Town Braces for MoreBurials Than in a

Typical Year

Continued on Page A10

EndowmentsRise as Schools

Bury Earnings

In 2006, the endowments of In-diana University and Texas Chris-tian University invested millionsof dollars in a partnership, hopingto mint riches from oil, gas andcoal.

The partnership was formed bythe Houston-based Quintana Cap-ital Group, whose principals in-clude Donald L. Evans, an influen-tial Texan and longtime supporterof former President George W.

Bush. Little more than a year ear-lier, Mr. Evans had left his cabinetposition as commerce secretary.

Though the group had an im-pressive Texas pedigree, presi-dential cachet and ambitions foroperations in the United States,the new partnership was estab-lished in the Cayman Islands. Thefounders promised their univer-sity and nonprofit investors thatthe partnership would try to avoidfederal taxes by exploiting a loop-hole called “blocker corpora-tions,” which are typically estab-lished in tax havens around theworld.

A trove of millions of leaked doc-uments from a Bermuda-basedlaw firm, Appleby, reflects some ofthe tax wizardry used by Ameri-can colleges and universities.Schools have increasingly turnedto secretive offshore investments,the files show, which let themswell their endowments withblocker corporations, and avoidscrutiny of ventures involving fos-sil fuels or other issues that couldset off campus controversy.

Buoyed by lucrative tax breaks,college endowments haveamassed more than $500 billion

By STEPHANIE SAUL

PARADISE PAPERS

Colleges’ Offshore Secrets

Continued on Page A14

Disregarding Climate ChangeWhile Preparing for Disaster

When Hurricane Irma sweptthrough the Florida Keys in Sep-tember, it brought a vivid previewof the damage that climate changecould inflict on the region in thedecades ahead.

The storm washed out two sec-tions of the highway connectingthe Keys, leaving residentsstranded for days. With ocean lev-els rising around these low-lyingislands, however, that interrup-tion could end up seeming minor:By 2030, almost half the county’sroads could be affected by flood-ing.

“We know that the water isn’tgoing away,” said Rhonda Haag,the sustainability director forMonroe County, which is prepar-ing to elevate vulnerable road-ways in the Keys. But the task is socostly, up to $7 million per mile ofroad, that the county may ulti-mately require outside help.

In Washington, the Federal

Emergency Management Agencyis leading recovery efforts thatcould cost taxpayers more than$50 billion after devastatingstorms hit Texas, Florida, PuertoRico and the United States VirginIslands. At the same time, theagency is wrestling with an evenharder problem: how to help com-munities prepare for future flood-ing disasters that could be farmore severe than anything seenthis year.

Complicating that task is thefact that the Trump administra-tion has largely been hostile to dis-cussions of global warming. In Au-gust, a week before HurricaneHarvey made landfall in Texas,President Trump rescinded anObama-era executive order thaturged federal agencies to take intoaccount climate change and sea-level rise when rebuilding infra-

By BRAD PLUMER

Continued on Page A12

CARLOS GONZALEZ/STAR TRIBUNE, VIA A.P.

ELECTING DIVERSITY Candidateslike Andrea Jenkins, a trans-gender woman in Minneapo-lis, reflected a shift. Page A9.

Both the home and new book of JaronLanier, so-called father of virtual reality,are filled with strange stuff. PAGE D1

THURSDAY STYLES D1-10

A Silicon Valley Soothsayer

The Met’s 2018 fashion blockbuster willlook at the influence of Catholicism onthe designer imagination. PAGE D1

Blessed Are the Dressmakers

Officials say about 3,000 Puerto Ricoresidents still in shelters will be flownto New York and Florida. PAGE A13

NATIONAL A9-17

A Puerto Rican Airlift

The Republican tax proposal wouldeliminate a deduction that helps mil-lions cope with health costs. PAGE A16

Ending the Medical Tax Break

Like a twisted version of the producersof an unscripted TV show, Kremlin-linked trolls used fake personas toprovoke very real drama. PAGE B1

BUSINESS DAY B1-10

Russia’s Reality TV Twists

An auto glass plant in Ohio could un-ionize, a possible blow to the Chineseowner’s paternalistic model. PAGE B1

An Unusual Union Vote

Benjamin Genocchio, head of the Ar-mory Show, is the latest figure felled bysexual harassment accusations. PAGE C1

ARTS C1-8

Art Fair Director Is Ousted

Jerry Jones is said to be threatening alawsuit to block the commissioner’scontract extension. PAGE B11

SPORTSTHURSDAY B11-14

Cowboys Owner vs. N.F.L.

High schools face a new challenge inhow to define sexes, with guidelinesdiffering from state to state. PAGE B11

Defining Transgender Athletes

Late Edition

VOL. CLXVII . . . No. 57,776 © 2017 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2017

Today, sunshine and clouds, high 53.Tonight, partly cloudy, turning cold-er, low 37. Tomorrow, partly sunny,windy, sharply colder, high 38.Weather map appears on Page A22.

$2.50