VOL. CLXVII . . . No. 57,899 © 2018 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, MONDAY, MARCH 12, 2018

C M Y K Nxxx,2018-03-12,A,001,Bs-4C,E2

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After buying Time Inc. for $2.8 billion,Meredith of Des Moines is the largestmagazine company in the UnitedStates, but it’s not about to change itsunassuming style. PAGE B1

BUSINESS DAY B1-7

Media Giant Sticks to Its RootsOhio Democrats are honing a messageof economic populism as they try toreclaim working-class voters who wentfor the president in 2016. PAGE A11

NATIONAL A11-17

Taking a Page From Trump

After lessons on Nazi Germany failed tostir students, a teacher took his 10th-grade class to Sachsenhausen. PAGE A8

INTERNATIONAL A4-10

History Class at a Death CampIn New Jersey, social justice is drivingthe case for, and against, legalizing therecreational use of the drug. PAGE A19

NEW YORK A18-19, 22

Marijuana’s Link to Racism

David Leonhardt PAGE A21

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21The Cavaliers are the No. 1 overall seedin an N.C.A.A. tournament shadowed byscandal, Marc Tracy writes. PAGE D4

On the Top Line: Virginia

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Busi-nessmen once considered giantsof the Saudi economy now wearankle bracelets that track them.Princes who led military forcesand appeared in glossy magazinesare monitored by guards they donot command. Families who flewon private jets cannot gain accessto their bank accounts. Evenwives and children have been for-bidden to travel.

In November, the Saudi govern-ment locked up hundreds of influ-ential businessmen — many ofthem royals — in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton in what it called an anti-corruption campaign.

Most have since been releasedbut they are hardly free. Instead,they are living in fear and uncer-tainty.

During months of captivity,many were subject to coercionand physical abuse, witnessessaid. Early in the crackdown, atleast 17 detainees were hospital-ized for abuse and one later died incustody with a neck that appearedtwisted, a badly swollen body andother signs of abuse, according toa person who saw the body.

In an email to The New YorkTimes on Sunday, the governmentdenied accusations of physicalabuse as “absolutely untrue.”

To leave the Ritz, many detain-ees not only surrendered hugesums, but also signed over to thegovernment control of preciousreal estate and shares of theircompanies — all outside of anyclear legal process.

The government has yet to ac-tually seize many of the assets,leaving the former detainees andtheir families in limbo.

One former detainee, forced to

wear a tracking device, has sunkinto depression as his businesscollapses. “We signed away ev-erything,” a relative of his said.“Even the house I am in, I am notsure if it is still mine.”

As Crown Prince Mohammedbin Salman, the architect of thecrackdown, prepares to travel tothe United States this month tocourt investment, Saudi officialsare spotlighting his reforms: hispromise to let women drive, hisplans to expand entertainmentopportunities and his moves to en-courage foreign investment. Theyhave denied any allegations ofabuse and have portrayed the Ritzepisode as an orderly legalprocess that has wound down.

But extensive interviews withSaudi officials, members of theroyal family, and relatives, advis-ers and associates of the detain-ees revealed a murkier, coerciveoperation, marked by cases ofphysical abuse, that transferredbillions of dollars in private

Saudis Held in Gilded JailPaid Billions for Release

Claims of Abuse and Coercion in CedingAssets in Name of Corruption Fight

This article is by Ben Hubbard,David D. Kirkpatrick, Kate Kellyand Mark Mazzetti.

The Riyadh Ritz-Carlton wasmade into a royal jail.

TASNEEM ALSULTAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Continued on Page A9

KAKUMA, Kenya — These bar-ren plains of sand and stone havealways known lean times: timeswhen the rivers run dry and thecows wither day by day, until theirbones are scattered under the aca-cia trees. But the lean times havealways been followed by normaltimes, when it rains enough to re-build herds, repay debts, give milkto the children and eat meat a fewtimes each week.

Times are changing, though.Northern Kenya — like its aridneighbors in the Horn of Africa,where Secretary of State Rex W.Tillerson paid a visit last week, in-cluding a stop in Nairobi — has be-come measurably drier and hot-

ter, and scientists are finding thefingerprints of global warming.According to recent research, theregion has dried faster in the 20thcentury than at any time over thelast 2,000 years. Four severedroughts have walloped the areain the last two decades, a rapidsuccession that has pushed mil-lions of the world’s poorest to theedge of survival.

Amid this new normal, a peoplelong hounded by poverty and

strife has found itself on the front-line of a new crisis: climatechange. More than 650,000 chil-dren under age 5 across vaststretches of Kenya, Somalia andEthiopia are severely malnour-ished. The risk of famine stalkspeople in all three countries; atleast 12 million people rely on foodaid, according to the United Na-tions.

A grandmother named MariaoTede is among them. Early one re-cent morning, on the banks of adry stream, with the air tasting ofsoot and sand, Ms. Tede stoodover a pile of dark embers, makingcharcoal. A reed of a woman whodoesn’t keep track of her age, shesaid she once had 200 goats,enough to sell their offspring at

Fastest Drying in 2,000 Years Imperils MillionsBy SOMINI SENGUPTA

Turkana County in Kenya. More than 650,000 children under age 5 across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia are severely malnourished.JOAO SILVA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Many of World’s Poorest Face Warming Crisis

in Horn of Africa

Continued on Page A7

PITTSBURGH — The specialelection deep in Trump country insouthwest Pennsylvania on Tues-day has become an acid test forthe allegiance of working-classvoters, and organized labor hasgone all in for the Democrat in therace, Conor Lamb.

Union activists have beenknocking on members’ doors,standing at the gates of steel millsand generally trying to claw backvotes from 2016, when HillaryClinton failed to connect withblue-collar workers across the in-dustrial Midwest.

If Mr. Lamb is able to score thestunning upset he is hoping for, heis clear about who should get thecredit.

“You’ve been the heart and soulof this campaign,” he told a rally ofunion steelworkers at their Pitts-burgh headquarters. He notedthat a statue of their union’s firstpresident stands in a Catholicchurch near his suburban home,because “that’s how we feel aboutour unions.”

The race in the 18th Congres-sional District has captured the at-tention of both parties nationally,attracting millions of dollars fromG.O.P. “super PACs” and fromsmall-donor Democrats acrossthe country.

Democrats are hoping Mr.Lamb’s kitchen-table campaignwill show how they can win backthe white working-class voterswhose disaffection in 2016 cost

Voters’ Choice:Their PresidentOr Their Union

By TRIP GABRIEL

Continued on Page A13

WASHINGTON — The Iranianand North Korean nuclear pro-grams, drastically different butoften spoken of in the samebreath, are now being thrust

together, as Presi-dent Trump’s deter-mination to kill thelandmark 2015

accord limiting Tehran’s capabili-ties is colliding with his scrambleto reach a far more complex dealwith Pyongyang.

For years, as the Iranianswatched the North Koreans buildan arsenal and make deals withthe West only to break them,they learned what the world wasprepared to do — or was unwill-ing to risk — to stop them. Morerecently, the North Koreanspicked apart what Tehran got inreturn for agreeing to a 15-yearhiatus in its nuclear ambitions,weighing whether the promisedeconomic benefits were worthgiving up its nuclear capabilities.

The North will be watchingespecially closely in May, whenMr. Trump will face anotherdeadline on deciding whether toabandon the Iran deal, which hehas called a “disaster.”

The same month, if all goes asMr. Trump plans, he will headinto a face-to-face negotiationwith North Korea’s dictator, KimJong-un — the first time anAmerican president has everspoken with the leader of thatcountry — confident in his ability

Iran Deal PutsTrump in BindFor Kim Talks

By DAVID E. SANGER

Continued on Page A6

NEWSANALYSIS

The balancing act plays out ev-ery day in restaurants acrossAmerica: Servers who rely on tipsdecide where to draw the linewhen a customer goes too far.

They ignore comments abouttheir bodies, laugh off proposalsfor dates and deflect behavior thatmakes them uncomfortable or an-

gry — all in pursuit of the $2 or $20tip that will help buy groceries orpay the rent.

There was the young server at aburger joint in Georgia, EmmallieHeard, whose customer held hertip money in his hand and said,“So you gonna give me your num-ber?” She wrote it down, butchanged one of the digits.

There was the waitress in Port-land, Ore., Whitney Edmunds,who swallowed her anger when a

man patted his lap and beckonedher to sit, saying, “I’m a great tip-per.”

And at a steakhouse in Gonza-les, La., Jaime Brittain stam-mered and walked away when agroup of men offered a $30 tip ifshe’d answer a question about herpubic hair. She returned and pro-vided a “snappy answer” thatearned her the tip, but acknowl-edges having mixed feelings

For the Promise of Tips, Enduring Errant Hands

By CATRIN EINHORNand RACHEL ABRAMS

Continued on Page A14

Some athletes who crashed in Sochi in2014 are back on the slopes, with a newoutlook on life and their sport. PAGE D3

SPORTSMONDAY D1-8

Paralympic Skiers ReboundA woodworker who fooled antiqueexperts with a phony Civil War desk issorry — and a little boastful. “I lied,” hesays. “I cheated. I stole.” PAGE C1

ARTS C1-8

A Civil War Fake

Investigators are looking into anony-mous letters that encouraged hatefulacts against Muslims. PAGE A7

Anti-Muslim Messages in U.K.

Drew Houston, chief executive of Drop-box, is set to become a member of asmall club of technology entrepreneurswho steered a start-up through to thepublic markets. PAGE B1

From an Idea to an I.P.O.

ERIE, Pa. — Despite the“Road Closed” barriers blockingcars and trucks, Elizabeth Feli-ciano trudged the other morningon foot across the McBride

Viaduct, late forschool. Archingover a gritty scrap-metal yard and

railway line, the graffiti-scrawled1,170-foot-long bridge links two ofthis city’s poorest neighbor-hoods.

When the viaduct opened inthe late 1930s, the city was grow-ing. The bridge, renovated in the1970s, was an emblem of localpride and progress. It funneledtraffic through what were at thetime thriving neighborhoods.

Then the factories starteddisappearing. The viaduct’slargely German, Polish and Irishdistrict became home to increas-ing numbers of blacks, Latinosand refugees from Africa and theMiddle East, whose arrivals haveslowed the city’s populationdecline.

On one level, the story of thebridge is a microcosm of Ameri-ca’s crumbling infrastructure.Questions about where to spendthe city’s limited resources touchon familiar themes about thefailures of urban renewal andtoday’s widening income gap.

At the same time, the debateover the fate of a decaying relicof midcentury industrial archi-tecture has focused a particularspotlight on Erie’s legacy ofdisenfranchisement and its trou-bled race relations.

The legacy lives on: Erie wasrecently ranked the worst city inthe country for African-Ameri-cans. Using national census data,the news organization 24/7 WallStreet found that 47 percent ofthe city’s black population livesat or below the national povertyline, twice the rate for African-Americans nationally and morethan four times the rate forwhites in Erie.

After the ranking was pub-lished in November, The ErieTimes-News took issue withsome of the survey’s numbers,but not the gist. Median incomefor black residents in the citylanguishes at around half that ofwhite residents; the unemploy-ment rate is more than triple thenational average.

And City Hall is perceived bymany black residents as an en-

Failing BridgeDivides a CityShort on Hope

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

ERIEJOURNAL

Continued on Page A16

Some question whether the laws passedto curb sexual harassment will alter theculture at the State Capitol. PAGE A18

Bad Behavior in the Shadows

I.P.O. DELAYED The Saudis say Aramco, the biggest-ever public offer-ing, is unlikely to begin trading on a public market until 2019. PAGE B7

DARREN ORNITZ/REUTERS

Emergency workers treating a victim of a crash in the East River that killed at least two. Page A22.Helicopter Goes Down Off Manhattan

Late EditionToday, mostly cloudy, high 42. To-night, snow at times, low 32. Tomor-row, morning snow, 1-3 inches total,some afternoon sunshine, windy,high 40. Weather map, Page A12.

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