The New York Times International - 29.07.2019

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I NTERNATIONAL EDITION | MONDAY,JULY 29, 2019

HARD SELL

CHINA’S GROWING

SURPLUS OF STUFF

PAGE 7| BUSINESS

TOUR DE BALKANS

A2-WHEELED TRIP

ACROSS BOSNIA

BACK PAGE| TRAVEL

LESSONS IN RECYCLING

TURNING PLASTIC INTO

BRICKS FOR SCHOOLS

PAGE 3| WORLD

The destruction of the Amazon rain for-

est in Brazil has increased rapidly since

the nation’s new far-right president took

over and his government scaled back ef-

forts to fight illegal logging, ranching

and mining.

Protecting the Amazon was at the

heart of Brazil’s environmental policy

for much of the past two decades. At one

point, Brazil’s success in slowing the de-

forestation rate made it an international

example of conservation and the effort

to fight climate change.

But with the election of President Jair

Bolsonaro, a populist who has been

fined personally for violating envi-

ronmental regulations, Brazil has

changed course substantially, retreat-

ing from the efforts it once made to slow

global warming by preserving the

world’s largest rain forest.

While campaigning for president last

year, Mr. Bolsonaro declared that

Brazil’s vast protected lands were an ob-

stacle to economic growth and promised

to open them up to commercial exploita-

tion.

Seven months into his term, that is al-

ready happening.

Brazil’s part of the Amazon has lost

more than 1,330 square miles of forest

cover since Mr. Bolsonaro took office in

January, a 39 percent increase over the

same period last year, according to the

government agency that tracks defor-

estation.

In June alone, when the cooler, drier

season began and cutting trees became

easier, the deforestation rate rose drasti-

cally, with roughly 80 percent more for-

est cover lost than in June of last year.

The deforestation of the Amazon is

spiking as Mr. Bolsonaro’s government

pulls back on enforcement measures

like fines, warnings and the seizure or

destruction of illegal equipment in pro-

tected areas.

A New York Times analysis of public

records found that such enforcement ac-

tions by Brazil’s main environmental

agency fell by 20 percent during the first

six months of the year, compared with

the same period in 2018. The drop means

that vast stretches of the rain forest can

be torn down with less resistance from

the nation’s authorities.

The two trends — the increase in de-

forestation and the government’s in-

creasing reluctance to confront illegal

activity — is alarming researchers, en-

vironmentalists and former officials,

who contend that Mr. Bolsonaro’s ten-

ure could lead to staggering losses of

one of the world’s most important re-

sources.

“We’re facing the risk of runaway de-

forestation in the Amazon,” eight former

environment ministers in Brazil wrote

in a joint letter in May, arguing that

A MAZON, PAGE 4

Trees fall faster in Amazon

BRASÍLIA

As Brazil’s new leader

cuts away protections,

deforestation accelerates

BY LETÍCIA CASADO

AND ERNESTO LONDOÑO

An aerial view from 2017 showing a deforested area in the Amazon rain forest. Brazil’s

new president has promised to increase development in protected areas.

CARL DE SOUZA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Chaos reigned in the bomb-ravaged

streets of Munich on April 29, 1945.

American troops were closing in. Hitler

was a day away from killing himself in

his bunker in Berlin. The Nazi guards

who protected important buildings had

fled.

Hungry crowds stormed the

Führerbau, the Führer’s building. First

they looted the food, the liquor and the

furniture. Then they turned to the air-

raid cellar, which was filled with art,

climbing over piles of Panzerfaust anti-

tank grenades to get at the paintings.

“By the end of the second day,” Edgar

Breitenbach, an art intelligence officer

in the United States Army, wrote in a

1949 report “when the looting was fi-

nally stopped, all the pictures were

gone.”

It was a moment of incongruity:

Hitler, the man who had turned the ille-

gal seizure of art into a national trade,

had his own plunder ransacked.

Now the Central Institute for Art His-

tory in Munich has conducted the first

comprehensive investigation into what

happened to the art that was stored in

the Führer’s building and the adjacent

Nazi headquarters.

A lot of it had been ferried there by

dealers who scavenged for art across oc-

cupied Europe to help fill Hitler’s

planned “Führermuseum” in Linz, Aus-

tria, his hometown. Most of those works

were already stored in Austrian salt

mines to protect them from bombings.

But the Munich buildings still held

some 1,500 works, the researchers

found, and at least 700 were looted in the

two-day spree — many more than previ-

ously thought. Much of the art was al-

ready stolen property, having been con-

fiscated by the Nazis from Jewish col-

lections. Hundreds of the works stored

there, for example, had been taken from

the family of Adolphe Schloss, a French

LOOT, PAGE 2

Allied tanks entering Munich on April 29, 1945. Knowing that American troops were

arriving, crowds began looting, taking food, furniture and parts of Hitler’s art collection.

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Stolen by Hitler, then stolen again

New research is helping

in effort to find works

lost after World War II

BY CATHERINE HICKLEY

The New York Times publishes opinion

from a wide range of perspectives in

hopes of promoting constructive debate

about consequential questions.

The police officers wrestled with Colin

Cheung in an unmarked car. They

needed his face.

They grabbed his jaw to force his head

in front of his iPhone. They slapped his

face. They shouted, “Wake up!” They

pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr.

Cheung had disabled his phone’s facial-

recognition login with a quick button

mash as soon as they grabbed him.

As Hong Kong convulses in weeks of

protests, demonstrators and the police

have turned identity into a weapon. The

authorities are tracking protest leaders

online and seeking their phones. Many

protesters now cover their faces, and

they fear that the police are using cam-

eras and possibly other tools to single

out targets for arrest.

And when the police stopped wearing

identification badges as the violence es-

calated, some protesters began to ex-

pose officers’ identities online. One fast-

growing channel on the social messag-

ing app Telegram seeks and publishes

personal information about officers and

their families. The channel, “Dadfind-

boy,” has more than 50,000 subscribers

and advocates violence in crude and

cartoonish ways. Rival pro-government

channels seek to unmask protesters in a

similar fashion.

Mr. Cheung, who was arrested on a

suspicion of “conspiring and abetting

murder,” subscribes to the “Dadfind-

boy” channel, although he denied being

among its founders, as the police have

said, and he condemned posts calling for

violence. He believes he was targeted by

the police because he developed a tool

that could compare images with a set of

photos of officers to find matches — a

project he later abandoned.

“I don’t want them to be like secret po-

lice,” said Mr. Cheung, who was released

on bail and has not been charged with

wrongdoing. “If law enforcement offi-

cers don’t wear anything to show their

identity, they’ll become corrupt. They’ll

be able to do whatever they want.”

“With the tool, ordinary citizens can

tell who the police are,” he added.

Hong Kong is at the bleeding edge of a

significant change in the authorities’

ability to track dangerous criminals and

legitimate political protesters alike —

and in their targets’ ability to fight back.

Across the border in China, the police of-

ten catch people with digital finger-

prints gleaned from one of the world’s

most invasive surveillance systems.

The advent of facial-recognition tech-

nology and the rapid expansion of a vast

network of cameras and other tracking

tools have begun to increase those capa-

H ONG KONG,PAGE

Faces

become

weapons in

Hong Kong

HONG KONG

Protecting anonymity

critical for both sides on

technological battleground

BY PAUL MOZUR

A protester covered a security camera on the outside of the Chinese government’s liaison office in Hong Kong. Protesters fear cameras are being used to identify targets for arrest.

CHRIS MCGRATH/GETTY IMAGES

Winston Churchill’s ghost still hovers

over Washington and London. Ameri-

can presidents have often modeled

themselves after the British wartime

leader, especially in times of conflict.

George W. Bush was a great admirer.

And so in the buildup to the Iraq war,

Prime Minister Tony Blair lent him a

bust of Churchill, while another one,

which had been in the White House for

several decades, was being repaired.

When President Barack Obama re-

turned the bust after the old one was

fixed — as had been agreed before Mr.

Obama came to the White House — he

was accused by a British politician of

doing so out of spite, because of his

“ancestral dislike of the British Em-

pire, of which Churchill had been such

a fervent defender.”

That politician was

Boris Johnson, who

became prime min-

ister of Britain on

Wednesday. He once

wrote a fawning

biography of Church-

ill and did nothing to

discourage the im-

pression that he

identified with the

great man: the up-

per-class manner-

isms, the jokes, the love of grandeur

and the appeal, post-Brexit, to the

myth of wartime Britain standing

alone against the Nazi menace, the

much-vaunted “Dunkirk spirit.”

President Trump, who placed a

Churchill bust in the Oval Office with

great fanfare, has no upper-class man-

nerisms or, indeed, manners at all. But

he, too, is an admirer of Churchill, and

of Mr. Johnson, whom he called, some-

what oddly, the “Britain Trump.” Some

supporters of Mr. Johnson see this as a

sign that the special Anglo-American

relationship will revive in all its old

glory. If so, this relationship will stand

for everything Churchill — and espe-

cially his great wartime ally Franklin

D. Roosevelt — despised.

Churchill was indeed a defender of

empire and held some serious racial

prejudices, especially against Indians,

whom he detested. But he was also an

internationalist. Far from wanting

Britain to go it alone during the evacu-

ation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in

the spring of 1940, he even entertained

the idea that Britain and France should

merge as one nation to fight Hitler.

The idea of Britain’s special relation-

ship with the United States was also

very much Churchill’s. His mother was

American, so there were sentimental

reasons. And Churchill was a great

Churchill

would not

like Johnson

Ian Buruma

OPINION

Britain’s

new leader

has a sadly

exaggerated

sense of the

importance

his country

will have

after Brexit.

B URUMA, PAGE 11

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