VOL. CLXVIII . . . No. 58,389 © 2019 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, MONDAY, JULY 15, 2019

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Tropical Storm Barry dropped heavyrain, but fears of catastrophic flooding inthe state’s biggest cities eased. PAGE A10

NATIONAL A10-17

Louisiana Escapes the WorstThe creator of “A Strange Loop” talksabout his process, Liz Phair, soap op-eras and everything else. PAGE C1

Who Is Michael R. Jackson?

The Golden Lion winner at this year’sVenice Biennale depicts a deceptivelyrelaxing day at the beach. PAGE C1

ARTS C1-8

Disaster Cloaked in BeautyThe Greens, challenging both tradi-tional and far-right parties, strive toshow that environmental policy can becompatible with social justice. PAGE A4

INTERNATIONAL A4-9

Taking Root Around EuropeFacts brought to light by the award-winning investigative reporting team of“In the Dark” have made their way tothe Supreme Court. PAGE B1

BUSINESS B1-6

Justice in a PodcastThe nation finally won its first CricketWorld Cup, edging New Zealand in anextraordinary tiebreaker. PAGE D5

SPORTSMONDAY D1-5

England Rules Sport It Invented

Two senior members of Gov. Ricardo A.Rosselló’s cabinet have stepped downamid a political crisis. PAGE A17

Calls to Resign in Puerto Rico

India is poised to launch an unmannedrover into space. If successful, it willjoin a select group of nations capable oflanding on the moon. PAGE A8

India Captivated by Moon Shot

Hong Kong’s top broadcaster, TVB, hasbeen scorned by demonstrators, whoaccuse it of a pro-Beijing bias in itsnewscasts. PAGE A7

A Battle Over Protest Coverage

The social network may have escapedrestrictions with one settlement, but itspain is just beginning. PAGE B1

Closing In on Facebook

Some candle-roasted wieners or poppedchampagne from a warming fridge. “It’sbeautiful,” said a New Yorker. PAGE A22

NEW YORK A18-19, 22

A Blissed-Out Blackout

Procter & Gamble, donating more than$500,000, backed the World Cup cham-pions against U.S. Soccer. PAGE D4

In Support of U.S. Women

Kevin McCarthy PAGE A21

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21

LOS ANGELES — Dolly Partonrecently held court there, big wigand all. Leonardo DiCaprio andJohn Kerry arrived at the sametime last month. Cindy Crawfordon the left, David Letterman onthe right. And isn’t that Beyoncéby the espresso bar?

Welcome to the hottest see-and-be-seen spot in Hollywood: Net-flix’s first-floor waiting room.

Scratch that. It’s a “lobby expe-rience” and “creative gateway,”according to a design firm thatworked on the space. An 80-footby 12-foot video screen makes vis-itors feel like they are inside Net-flix shows — visiting the “Narcos”cocaine lab, for instance, or sitting

on the Blue Cat Lodge boat dockfrom “Ozark.” Another wall is cov-ered by at least 3,500 plants, a liv-ing mural that includes red Fla-mingo Lilies, known for their bigpistils.

Every era in Hollywood has asymbolic epicenter, a place thatsums up everything, especiallypower and sometimes absurdity.Gifting suites at the Sundance

Film Festival epitomized the over-heated indie boom of the 2000s.The monolithic new Creative Art-ists Agency headquarters arrivedon cue at the end of that decadeand represented an increasinglycorporate film business. Nextcame Comic-Con International, asweaty July convention for super-

Netflix’s Lobby Offers Flash and Freebies to Hollywood’s A-ListBy BROOKS BARNES

Continued on Page A17

GETTY IMAGES

Novak Djokovic, right, edged Roger Federer in a fifth-set tiebreaker for his 16th major title. Page D1.A Wimbledon Final Like None Before

DOBRUSA, Moldova — Thirtyyears ago, the village of Dobrusahad about 200 residents. At thestart of this year, it had just

three.Then two were

murdered.And now there is

just one: GrisaMuntean, a short, mustachioedfarmer often found in a flat-cap, achecked shirt and a ripped pairof blue trousers held up by adrawstring.

For company, Mr. Muntean hashis two cats, five dogs, nineturkeys, 15 geese, 42 chickens,about 50 pigeons, 120 ducks andseveral thousand bees. The otherhumans have either died, left forlarger towns and cities inMoldova, or emigrated to Russiaor other parts of Europe.

“The loneliness kills you,” Mr.Muntean, 65, said on a recentafternoon.

His former neighbors’ housesare vanishing almost as fast astheir owners. With few animalsto graze the roadsides, and withonly Mr. Muntean to prune theorchards, the buildings are sink-ing below a canopy of walnutgroves and apple trees.

Dobrusa (pronounced Doh-BROO-shuh) was once a villageof 50 houses that lined two paral-lel streets at the bottom of ashallow valley. Like many settle-ments across Moldova, it emp-tied out after the fall of the SovietUnion in 1991, an exodus mir-rored across Eastern Europe,which has the world’s fastestshrinking population.

Now only a few corrugatediron roofs can still be seen inDobrusa, poking above the un-dergrowth. They are visible fromthe dirt track that connects thevillage to the nearest tarmac

Lone SurvivorHolds DownVillage of One

By PATRICK KINGSLEY

Grisa Muntean is the last survivor of Dobrusa, first settled in the 19th century, when the area was part of the Russian Empire.LAETITIA VANCON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Continued on Page A6

MOLDOVADISPATCH

NEWPORT, Del. — In July 1974,with a federal court in Delawareon the verge of ordering busing tointegrate Wilmington’s over-whelmingly black public schools,Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived at aschool auditorium in this predomi-nantly white suburb to find him-self the target of a political am-bush.

Just two years after narrowlywinning a Senate seat at the age of29, Mr. Biden had recently casttwo votes to protect the practice ofbusing to achieve desegregation— despite his own very public un-ease with it. He thought he hadcome to Newport simply to ad-dress a local civics organization.But when he got there, more than200 people, organized by a largelywhite parent group that opposedbusing, jeered and heckled Mr. Bi-

den, demanding that he more vo-cally join their cause.

“If you think I’m in trouble withyou people,” he said then, seekingto assure the crowd that he was ontheir side, “you ought to hear what

my liberal friends are telling me.”The meeting marked a turning

point for the young senator, whocounted himself a liberal Demo-crat and an ardent defender of civ-il rights. Not long after that verbaldrubbing, Mr. Biden plungedheadfirst into one of the most po-litically fraught and racially divi-sive topics in America. Heemerged as the Democratic Par-ty’s leading anti-busing crusader— a position that put him in leaguewith Southern segregationists, atodds with liberal Republicans andhelped change the dynamic of theSenate, turning even some lead-ers in his own party against bus-ing as a desegregation tool.

“No issue has consumed more

How Biden Became the Anti-Busing DemocratBy ASTEAD W. HERNDON

and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

THE LONG RUN

A Turnabout in Turbulent Times

Continued on Page A14

CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a sena-tor from Delaware in 1974.

WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump said on Sunday that agroup of four minority congress-women feuding with SpeakerNancy Pelosi should “go back” tothe countries they came fromrather than “loudly and viciouslytelling the people of the UnitedStates” how to run the govern-ment.

Wrapped inside that insult,which was widely established as aracist trope, was a factually inac-curate claim: Only one of the law-makers was born outside thecountry.

Even though Mr. Trump has re-peatedly refused to back downfrom stoking racial divisions, hiswillingness to deploy a lowest-rung slur — one commonly andcrudely used to single out the per-ceived foreignness of nonwhite,

non-Christian people — waslargely regarded as beyond thepale.

“So interesting to see ‘Progres-sive’ Democrat Congresswomen,who originally came from coun-tries whose governments are acomplete and total catastrophe,the worst, most corrupt and ineptanywhere in the world,” Mr.Trump wrote on Twitter, “nowloudly and viciously telling thepeople of the United States, thegreatest and most powerful Na-tion on earth, how our govern-ment is to be run.”

Mr. Trump added: “Why don’tthey go back and help fix the to-tally broken and crime infestedplaces from which they came.Then come back and show us howit is done.”

Delivered on the day he hadpromised widespread immigra-

FANNING FLAMES,TRUMP UNLEASHES

A TAUNT: ‘GO BACK’A Slur on 4 Nonwhite

CongresswomenFuels Outrage

By KATIE ROGERSand NICHOLAS FANDOS

Continued on Page A13

President Trump’s commentswere swiftly condemned.

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — PresidentTrump woke up on Sunday morn-ing, gazed out at the nation heleads, saw the dry kindling ofrace relations and decided tothrow a match on it. It was notthe first time, nor is it likely to bethe last. He has a pretty largecarton of matches and a readysupply of kerosene.

His Twitter harangue goadingDemocratic congresswomen ofcolor to “go back” to the countrythey came from, even thoughmost of them were actually bornin the United States, shockedmany. But it should have sur-prised few who have watched theway he has governed a multicul-tural, multiracial country the lasttwo and a half years.

When it comes to race, Mr.Trump plays with fire like noother president in a century.While others who occupied theWhite House at times skirtedclose to or even over the line,finding ways to appeal to theresentments of white Americanswith subtle and not-so-subtleappeals, none of them in moderntimes fanned the flames asovertly, relentlessly and eveneagerly as Mr. Trump.

His attack on the Democraticcongresswomen came on thesame day his administration wasthreatening mass roundups ofimmigrants living in the countryillegally. And it came just daysafter he hosted some of the mostincendiary right-wing voices onthe internet at the White Houseand vowed to find another way tocount citizens separately fromnoncitizens despite a SupremeCourt ruling that blocked himfrom adding a question to theonce-a-decade census.

His assumption that the HouseDemocrats must have been bornin another country — or thatthey did not belong here if theywere — fits an us-against-thempolitical strategy that has been atthe heart of Mr. Trump’s presi-dency from the start. Headinginto next year’s election, heappears to be drawing a deepline between the white, native-born America of his memory andthe ethnically diverse, increas-ingly foreign-born country he ispresiding over, challenging vot-ers in 2020 to declare which sideof that line they are on.

NEWS ANALYSIS

An Assumption ThatSpoke Volumes

By PETER BAKER

Continued on Page A13

With San Francisco banningmenthol cigarettes last year, andthe Food and Drug Administra-tion considering a nationwideban, it seemed like the time wasripe for New York to follow suit.

Then Reynolds American, thetobacco giant, got to work. It en-listed the Rev. Al Sharpton and hisgroup, the National Action Net-work, as well as the boss of theManhattan Democratic Party,Keith L.T. Wright, a former 12-term assemblyman from Harlem,to fight the ban proposed by theCity Council.

In closed-door meetings withCouncil members in May, they ar-gued that a ban would dispropor-tionately affect black New York-ers. They invoked Eric Garner,who was killed on Staten Island bypolice officers enforcing cigaretteregulations, and suggested such

encounters could increase if men-thol cigarettes were to go under-ground.

The bill has since been setaside.

The effort to stop the mentholban was centered on a longstand-ing but increasingly prominentand effective strategy for wagingpolitical warfare in New York: De-ploy the concerns of black resi-dents as a weapon to sway theDemocrat-heavy Council toward astance favored by corporate cli-ents.

The approach has been a cen-tral part of a lobbying effort on be-half of the fur industry, which isworking with black pastors toknock down a proposed ban on fursales in New York, and a feature ofcampaigns mounted by lobbyists

Black New Yorkers Lend a Hand,And Corporate Lobbyists Prevail

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

Continued on Page A19

Late EditionToday, mostly sunny, warm, low hu-midity, high 85. Tonight, clear, low72. Tomorrow, partly sunny, verywarm, increasingly more humid,high 89. Weather map, Page D6.

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