Saturday, March 1, 2014

Antigay Laws Gain Global Attention; Countering Them Remains Challenge



UNITED NATIONS — After Uganda criminalized homosexuality, the White House immediately warned that the law would “complicate” the country’s relationship with Washington, and the Netherlands and Norway cut off bits of development aid.
When Nigeria banned same-sex unions and began arresting those it suspected of being gay, the European Union’s Foreign Ministry sternly reminded its president of his “obligations” under international law.
And after Russia passed a measure widely seen as an effort to squelch its gay rights movement, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, used his speech at the Winter Olympics to condemn attacks on gays and lesbians.
The issue of gay rights has catapulted up the diplomatic agenda in recent years, as international organizations have extended rights protections to gays and lesbians and donor nations have faced new challenges in dealing with governments that discriminate.
Antigay legislation is nothing new. The United Nations estimates that 78 countries ban homosexuality, and seven countries allow the death penalty for those convicted of having consensual homosexual relationships. Until a few years ago, the issue barely registered in diplomatic affairs. Global outcry was limited to protest petitions organized by gay advocacy groups.
“What’s unique about this moment is the compassion and public attention there is at the global level,” Jessica Stern, executive director of the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
But to what end?
Conservative governments around the world openly flout the warnings of international leaders, developing new measures to repress their citizens based on sexual orientation. There is little that international organizations like the United Nations can do, except issue statements of concern. And rich countries like the United States confront awkward new questions about how to handle important gay-bashing allies.
Take Uganda, for instance, the recipient of significant American aid, for both the military and development. The Obama administration has said it is reviewing its aid programs to Uganda, and Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday through his spokeswoman that he had spoken to the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, to reiterate that message.
Mr. Kerry earlier likened the law to South Africa’s apartheid-era ban on interracial unions. So did South Africa’s influential Anglican archbishop emeritus, Desmond M. Tutu.
But whether the United States will impose punitive sanctions on Uganda remains to be seen.
American development aid includes funding for AIDS treatment, among other things. Military cooperation is aimed in part at the hunt for the warlord Joseph Kony and dealings with terrorist groups in Somalia. A senior administration official said Friday in an interview that United States policy objectives and the interests of Ugandans were being weighed in “a thoughtful, deliberate way.”
“We have not yet made decisions,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of rules against public discussion of internal talks. “We are working on this very intensively. There will be real consequences.”
At the United Nations, Mr. Ban expressed alarm. After meeting with the Ugandan envoy last week, Mr. Ban issued a statement calling on Uganda to revise or repeal the measure, a prospect that seems unlikely. Even the United Nations needs Mr. Museveni’s cooperation on many conflicts in and around Uganda, including the one in South Sudan.
For his part, Mr. Museveni has so far played to his domestic audience, rebuffing outside meddling and saying that his country would do fine without aid. There is plenty of aid to Africa coming from China, which tends not to wag its finger about human rights.
Mr. Museveni’s bluster also showed the limits of international influence and the backlash that international support can engender.

“It’s quite common, when you see a ratcheting up of pressure from domestic groups or foreign governments,” said Laurence R. Helfer, a Duke University law professor who studies international gay rights. “There is a period of counterreaction; we’re seeing that now.”
The turning point came in 2011, when the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a landmark resolution, led by South Africa, to extend human rights principles to lesbians and gay men around the world.
Mr. Ban became known as a forceful advocate. In January, he issued a statement about the Nigerian law, calling it a breach of fundamental human rights. He also posed for a photograph holding a placard that read, “Human rights are for everyone, no matter who you are or who you love.”
Around the same time, defending gay rights became a foreign policy priority for the United States and the European Union. European donors increasingly looked askance at countries that criminalized homosexuality. And last fall at the General Assembly ministers from 10 countries and the European Union endorsed the statement “Those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (L.G.B.T.) must enjoy the same human rights as everyone else.”
It is another thing, though, to deal with countries that violate those principles.
Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, signed into law in January a measure that effectively outlaws pro-gay organizations; since then, arrests of gay Nigerians have multiplied. The Obama administration condemned the law but has so far taken no concrete measures against Nigeria, one of its most important partners in West Africa.
The issue is divisive not only with Africa but also with traditional American allies in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a crime.
After India’s highest court affirmed a criminal ban on homosexuality in December, the Obama administration did not specifically condemn the court decision, except to express its concern about measures that criminalized homosexuality.
It is something of a paradox that some of today’s antigay laws reflect considerable Western influence. American evangelists have played a crucial role in fomenting Uganda’s strong antigay sentiments. The Indian law criminalizing homosexuality dates to the early days of the British colonial era.
One of the most difficult issues for donor countries is whether to cut off aid, especially when it goes to promoting H.I.V. prevention and treatment in countries like Uganda.
As for the United Nations, the issue of gay rights remains so complex that its advocates are moving exceptionally slowly. There is no treaty that enshrines gay rights, for instance, and therefore nothing to hold countries accountable to. “There is a recognition that something is needed,” José Luis Díaz of Amnesty International said. “There is also a recognition that there is huge resistance, and you need to move ahead on this very, very carefully.”
The United Nations is no more than a collection of sovereign nations. And every country is free to enact its own laws, as Jan Eliasson, the deputy secretary general of the United Nations, pointed out, even laws that clash with principles of human rights.
“Our job is to diminish the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is,” he said in an interview, adding, “Our mechanisms of enforcement are very limited.”
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Making Russia Pay? It’s Not So Simple

WASHINGTON — President Obama has warned Russia that “there will be costs” for a military intervention in Ukraine. But the United States has few palatable options for imposing such costs, and recent history has shown that when it considers its interests at stake, Russia has been willing to pay the price.
Even before President Vladimir V. Putin on Saturday publicly declared his intent to send Russian troops into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, Mr. Obama and his team were already discussing how to respond. They talked about canceling the president’s trip to a summit meeting in Russia in June, shelving a possible trade agreement, kicking Moscow out of the Group of 8 or moving American warships to the region.
That is the same menu of actions that was offered to President George W. Bush in 2008, when Russia went to war with Georgia, another balky former Soviet republic. Yet the costs imposed at that time proved only marginally effective and short-lived. Russia stopped its advance but nearly six years later has never fully lived up to the terms of the cease-fire it signed. And whatever penalty it paid at the time evidently has not deterred it from again muscling a neighbor.
“The question is: Are those costs big enough to cause Russia not to take advantage of the situation in the Crimea? That’s the $64,000 question,” said Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, a retired Army officer who served as defense attaché in the American Embassy in Moscow and now, as a Harvard scholar, leads a group of former Russian and American officials in back-channel talks.
Mr. Obama announced the first direct response after a 90-minute telephone call with Mr. Putin on Saturday as he suspended preparations for the G-8 summit meeting in Russia in June. The White House said that “Russia’s continued violation of international law will lead to greater political and economic isolation.”
Michael McFaul, who just stepped down as Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, said the president should go further to ensure that Russia’s business-minded establishment understands that it would find itself cut off. “There needs to be a serious discussion as soon as possible about economic sanctions so they realize there will be costs,” he said. “They should know there will be consequences and those should be spelled out before they take further actions.”
Mr. Putin has already demonstrated that the cost to Moscow’s international reputation would not stop him. Having just hosted the Winter Olympics in Sochi, he must have realized he was all but throwing away seven years and $50 billion of effort to polish Russia’s image. He evidently calculated that any diplomatic damage did not outweigh what he sees as a threat to Russia’s historic interest in Ukraine, which was ruled by Moscow until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Mr. Putin may stop short of outright annexation of Crimea, the largely Russian-speaking peninsula where Moscow still has a major military base, but instead justify a long-term troop presence by saying the troops are there to defend the local population from the new pro-Western government in Kiev. Following a tested Russian playbook, he could create a de facto enclave loyal to Moscow much like the republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that broke away from Georgia. On the other hand, the White House worries that the crisis could escalate and that all of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine may try to split off.
Finding powerful levers to influence Mr. Putin’s decision-making will be a challenge for Mr. Obama and the European allies. Mr. Obama has seen repeatedly that warnings often do not discourage autocratic rulers from taking violent action, as when Syria crossed the president’s “red line” by using chemical weapons in its civil war.

Russia is an even tougher country to pressure, too formidable even in the post-Soviet age to rattle with stern lectures or shows of military force, and too rich in resources to squeeze economically in the short term. With a veto on the United Nations Security Council, it need not worry about the world body. And as the primary source of natural gas to much of Europe, it holds a trump card over many American allies.
The longer-term options might be more painful, but they require trade-offs as well. The administration could impose the same sort of banking sanctions that have choked Iran’s economy. And yet Europe, with its more substantial economic ties, could be reluctant to go along, and Mr. Obama may be leery of pulling the trigger on such a potent financial weapon, especially when he needs Russian cooperation on Syria and Iran.
“What can we do?” asked Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institution scholar who was the government’s top intelligence officer on Russia during the Georgia war when Mr. Putin deflected Western agitation. “We’ll talk about sanctions. We’ll talk about red lines. We’ll basically drive ourselves into a frenzy. And he’ll stand back and just watch it. He just knows that none of the rest of us want a war.”
James F. Jeffrey was Mr. Bush’s deputy national security adviser in August 2008, the first to inform him that Russian troops were moving into Georgia in response to what the Kremlin called Georgian aggression against South Ossetia. As it happened, the clash also took place at Olympic time; Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin were both in Beijing for the Summer Games.
Mr. Bush confronted Mr. Putin to no avail, then ordered American ships to the region and provided a military transport to return home Georgian troops on duty in Iraq. He sent humanitarian aid on a military aircraft, assuming that Russia would be loath to attack the capital of Tbilisi with American military personnel present. Mr. Bush also suspended a pending civilian nuclear agreement, and NATO suspended military contacts.
“We did a lot but in the end there was not that much that you could do,” Mr. Jeffrey recalled.
Inside the Bush administration, there was discussion of more robust action, like bombing the Roki Tunnel to block Russian troops or providing Georgia with Stinger antiaircraft missiles. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bristled at what she called the “chest beating,” and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, urged the president to poll his team to see if anyone recommended sending American troops.
None did, and Mr. Bush was not willing to risk escalation. While Russia stopped short of moving into Tbilisi, it secured the effective independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while leaving troops in areas it was supposed to evacuate under a cease-fire. Within a year or so, Russia’s isolation was over. Mr. Obama took office and tried to improve relations. NATO resumed military contacts in 2009, and the United States revived the civilian nuclear agreement in 2010.
Mr. Jeffrey, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Mr. Obama should now respond assertively by suggesting that NATO deploy forces to the Polish-Ukrainian border to draw a line. “There’s nothing we can do to save Ukraine at this point,” he said. “All we can do is save the alliance.”
Others like Mr. Ryan warn that military movements could backfire by misleading Ukrainians into thinking the West might come to their rescue and so inadvertently encourage them to be more provocative with Russia.
Ms. Hill said the Russian leader might simply wait. “Time,” she said, “is on his side.”
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Kremlin Deploys Military in Ukraine, Prompting Protest by U.S.

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Russian armed forces seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula on Saturday, as the Russian Parliament granted President Vladimir V. Putin broad authority to use military force in response to the political upheaval in Ukraine that dislodged a Kremlin ally and installed a new, staunchly pro-Western government.
Russian troops stripped of identifying insignia but using military vehicles bearing the license plates of Russia’s Black Sea force swarmed the major thoroughfares of Crimea, encircled government buildings, closed the main airport and seized communication hubs, solidifying what began on Friday as a covert effort to control the largely pro-Russian region.
In Moscow, Mr. Putin convened the upper house of Parliament to grant him authority to use force to protect Russian citizens and soldiers not only in Crimea but throughout Ukraine. Both actions — military and parliamentary — were a direct rebuff to President Obama, who on Friday pointedly warned Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Mr. Obama accused Russia on Saturday of a “breach of international law” and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty.
In Crimea, scores of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across the center of the regional capital, Simferopol. They wore green camouflage uniforms with no identifying marks, but spoke Russian and were clearly part of a Russian mobilization. In Balaklava, a district of Sevastopol, a long column of military vehicles blocking the road to a border post bore Russian plates.
Large pro-Russia crowds rallied in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv, where there were reports of violence. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, fears grew within the new provisional government that separatist upheaval would fracture the country just days after a winter of civil unrest had ended with the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Kremlin ally who fled to Russia.
In addition to the risk of open war, it was a day of frayed nerves and set-piece political appeals that recalled ethnic conflicts of past decades in the former Soviet bloc, from the Balkans to the Caucasus.
Mr. Obama, who had warned Russia on Friday that “there will be costs” if it violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, spoke with Mr. Putin for 90 minutes on Saturday, according to the White House, and urged him to withdraw his forces back to their bases in Crimea and to stop “any interference” in other parts of Ukraine.
In a statement afterward, the White House said the United States would suspend participation in preparatory meetings for the G-8 economic conference to be held in Sochi, Russia, in June, and warned of “greater political and economic isolation” for Russia.
The Kremlin offered its own description of the call, in which it said Mr. Putin spoke of “a real threat to the lives and health of Russian citizens” in Ukraine, and warned that “in case of any further spread of violence to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Russia retains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population of those areas.”
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron said that “there can be no excuse for outside military intervention” in Ukraine.
Canada said it was recalling its ambassador from Moscow and, like the United States, suspending preparations for the G-8 meeting.
Armed men guard a government building in Simferopol, in the Crimea region of Ukraine on Saturday. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
At the United Nations, the Security Council held an emergency meeting on Ukraine for the second time in two days. The American ambassador, Samantha Power, called for an international observer mission, urged Russia to “stand down” and took a dig at the Russian ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, on the issue of state sovereignty, which the Kremlin frequently invokes in criticizing the West over its handling of Syria and other disputes.
“Russian actions in Ukraine are violating the sovereignty of Ukraine and pose a threat to peace and security,” she said.
The secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also spoke with Mr. Putin on Saturday and described himself as “gravely concerned” and urged Mr. Putin to negotiate with officials in Kiev.
Mr. Yanukovych’s refusal, under Russian pressure, to sign new political and free trade agreements with the European Union last fall set off the civil unrest that last month led to the deaths of more than 80 people, and ultimately unraveled his presidency. The country’s new interim government has said it will revive those accords.
Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, said at a briefing in Kiev on Saturday evening that he had ordered Ukraine’s armed forces “to full combat readiness.” A Ukrainian military official in Crimea said Ukrainian soldiers had been told to “open fire” if they came under attack by Russian troops or others though it was unlikely they could pose a serious challenge to Russian forces.
Officials in Kiev demanded that Russia pull back its forces, and confine them to the military installations in Crimea that Russia has long leased from Ukraine.
“The presence of Russian troops in Crimea now is unacceptable,” said acting Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk. Decrying the Russian deployment as a “provocation,” he added, “We call on the government of the Russian Federation to immediately withdraw its troops, return to the place of deployment and stop provoking civil and military confrontation in Ukraine.”
Sergey Tigipko, a former deputy prime minister of Ukraine and one-time ally of Mr. Yanukovych, said he flew to Moscow in hopes of brokering a truce.
The fast-moving events began in the morning, when the pro-Russia prime minister of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, declared that he had sole control over the military and the police, and appealed to Mr. Putin for Russian help in safeguarding the region. He also said a public referendum on independence would be held on March 30.
Rostov-on-Don
50 Miles
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UKRAINE
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Azov
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CRIMEA
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Simferopol
Belbek Airport
Sevastopol
Black Sea
The Kremlin quickly issued a statement saying that Mr. Aksyonov’s plea “would not be ignored,” and within hours the upper chamber of Russia’s Parliament had authorized military action.
The authorization cited Crimea, where Russia maintains important military installations, but covered the use of force in the entire “territory of Ukraine.” Parliament also asked Mr. Putin to withdraw Russia’s ambassador to the United States.
By nightfall, the scores of armed men in uniform who first appeared on Crimea’s streets on Friday had melted away from the darkened center of Simferopol, vanishing as mysteriously as they arrived.
For the new government in Kiev, the tensions in Crimea created an even more dire and immediate emergency than the looming financial disaster that they had intended to focus on in their first days in office.
A $15 billion bailout that Mr. Yanukovych secured from Russia has been suspended because of the political upheaval, and Ukraine is in desperate need of financial assistance. Mr. Yatsenyuk, the acting prime minister, had said that the government’s first responsibility was to begin negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and start to put in place the economic reforms and painful austerity measures that the fund requested in exchange for help.
In Crimea, however, officials said they did not recognize the new government, and declared that they had taken control.
Mr. Aksyonov, the regional prime minister, said he was ordering the regional armed forces, the Interior Ministry troops, the Security Service, border guards and other ministries under his direct control. “I ask anyone who disagrees to leave the service,” he said.
As soldiers mobilized across the peninsula, the region’s two main airports were closed, with civilian flights canceled, and they were guarded by heavily armed men in military uniforms.
Similar forces surrounded the regional Parliament building and the rest of the government complex in downtown Simferopol, as well as numerous other strategic locations, including communication hubs and a main bus station.
Demonstrators put up a Russian flag near an administration building in Donetsk, Ukraine. Photomig/European Pressphoto Agency

Near the entrance to Balaklava, the site of a Ukrainian customs and border post near Sevastopol, the column of military vehicles with Russian plates included 10 troop trucks, with 30 soldiers in each, two military ambulances and five armored vehicles.
Soldiers, wearing masks and carrying automatic rifles, stood on the road keeping people away from the convoy, while some local residents gathered in a nearby square waving Russian flags and shouting, “Russia! Russia!”
As with the troops in downtown Simferopol, the soldiers did not have markings on their uniforms.
There were also other unconfirmed reports of additional Russian military forces arriving in Crimea, including Russian ships landing in Fedosiya, in eastern Crimea.
Crimea, while part of Ukraine, has enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under an agreement with the federal government in Kiev since shortly after Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union.
The strategically important peninsula, which has been the subject of military disputes for centuries, has strong historic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia. The population of roughly two million is predominantly Russian, followed by a large number of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, people of Turkic-Muslim origin.
In eastern Ukraine, which is also heavily pro-Russian, demonstrators in Kharkiv rallied and then seized control of a government building, pulling down the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag and raising the blue, white and red Russian one. Scores of people were injured as protesters scuffled with supporters of the new government in Kiev.
In Donetsk, also in the east, several thousand people held a rally in the city center, local news agencies reported, with many chanting pro-Russian slogans and demanding a public referendum on secession from Ukraine.
In Moscow, the parliamentary debate on authorizing military action was perfunctory, but laced with remarks that echoed the worst days of the Cold War. Underscoring the extent to which the crisis has become part of Russia’s broader grievances against the West, lawmakers focused on Mr. Obama and the United States as much as on the fate of Russians in Ukraine.
“All this is being done under the guise of democracy, as the West says,” Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, one member of Parliament, said during the debate. “They tore apart Yugoslavia, routed Egypt, Libya, Iraq and so on, and all this under the false guise of peaceful demonstrations.” He added, “So we must be ready in case they will unleash the dogs on us.”
Yuri L. Vorobyov, the body’s deputy chairman, said Mr. Obama’s warning on Friday was a cause for Russia to act. “I believe that these words of the U.S. president are a direct threat,” he said. “He has crossed the red line and insulted the Russian people.”
Correction: March 1, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the ousted Ukrainian president. He is Viktor F. Yanukovych, not Yanuovych.
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Friday, February 28, 2014

The Mean Streets of New York

WITHIN a two-block radius on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, three pedestrians have lost their lives in separate traffic accidents since Jan. 1. Nineteen more have been killed elsewhere in the city since the beginning of the year. Those 22 are just the latest in the city’s epidemic of traffic fatalities. Last year 176 pedestrians were killed by cars and trucks in the city, according to police data, the most since 2008.
Recently, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new campaign against traffic fatalities, called Vision Zero, including more ticketing, lower speed limits and redesigning intersections. Meanwhile, the police have cracked down on jaywalkers and put up signs and barriers encouraging people to cross with the light, and the department is investing in equipment like laser speed guns and speed and red light cameras. These are all good ideas. But the problem isn’t just inadequate policing, distracted pedestrians or reckless motorists. It’s that the design of our streets does not match the way they are being used.
In urban planning circles, city streets are generally considered to be among the safest kind of roadways. They tend to have narrower lanes, a lot of right angles and a lot of general hustle and bustle — “social friction,” as transportation planners call it. There are trees, parked cars and other “fixed objects,” all things drivers need to navigate around with more precision than, say, a wide open country road.
New York City is full of such streets. So why are pedestrian fatalities increasing?
Consider where the majority of the pedestrian fatalities are happening. Last year, Queens was the deadliest borough for pedestrians, with many of the deaths happening on wide, fast-moving arteries like Northern Boulevard, the Cross Island Parkway and Queens Boulevard.
The Bronx, also home to many of these thoroughfares, had the biggest increase last year, more than double the number in 2012. The fatalities have also occurred on scenic but fast-moving roadways like Prospect Park West in Brooklyn or West End Avenue in Manhattan.
These streets are not intimate village blocks; they are major corridors that more closely resemble arterial roads, those fast-moving stretches of four- to eight-lane thoroughfares that connect one suburban town to another, on which cars travel up to 60 miles an hour.
Such roads are famously dangerous for pedestrians. Eric Dumbaugh, the director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University, has found that every additional mile of arterial road increases traffic fatalities by as much as 15 percent.
But New York City’s fast-moving roadways are different from suburban arterial roads in one big way: The cars share them with millions of pedestrians. We have roadways designed around the car, in a city teeming with ever more people on foot.
Any comprehensive approach to traffic fatalities has to take aim at redesigning these roads. Queens Boulevard, for example, isn’t a city street; it is a highway masquerading as one. We should either call it a highway, and build medians, barriers or even pedestrian bridges, or treat it like a city street and make the lanes narrower, add more stoplights and crosswalks, and install obstacles and other elements of “social friction.” (Another tool: trees with branches that extend over the street creating a canopy that, like social friction, acts as a naturally occurring slowing device.)
Transportation planners talk about the benefits of “street diets,” efforts to slim down car lanes and add elements like bike lanes, planters or pedestrian plazas with tables and chairs. Just look at the groundbreaking work of Janette Sadik-Khan, the former New York City transportation commissioner who re-engineered many of the city’s most sprawling intersections as public plazas, most famously turning the stretch of Broadway in Times Square into 2.5 acres of new pedestrian space. Injuries dropped by 40 percent in the wake of the changes.

These things don’t have to cost a lot of money: Ms. Sadik-Khan initially transformed Times Square with paint and lawn chairs. Besides, it seems like a natural opportunity for a big corporate donor to own a cause that’s just as noble as bike sharing, and will save lives.
It is wrong to place all the blame on drivers for going fast on roads that are designed for them to do just that, and it’s unfair to blame pedestrians for not being careful enough when they are behaving exactly as smart, sensible pedestrians behave. The problem is how we are mixing the two together.
All the pedestrian warnings in the world won’t matter if we’re encouraging foot traffic where motorists are hitting highway speeds. It’s like removing all the guardrails at the top of the Empire State Building and expecting people to use common sense not to fall off.
Traffic fatalities are not like some of our most vexing public health issues with no obvious solution or cure, like autism or cancer. There is a clear and proven way to fix the problem. Why not go for the easy win that’s also the right thing to do? The path forward is obvious — and narrower, safer and better landscaped.
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How to Get Fit in a Few Minutes a Week

High-intensity interval training, a type of workout that consists of very brief bouts of very strenuous exercise, has become enormously popular in recent years. A main reason is that although such workouts are draining, they can be both very effective and very short, often lasting only a few minutes.
But people take notably different approaches to this form of exercise. Some complete only one sustained, all-out, four- or five- minute bike ride or sprint — a single interval — and then are done. Others practice standard interval training, involving repeated brief bursts of almost unbearably taxing exertion, interspersed with restful minutes of gentler exercise. Some people perform such sessions two or three times per week; others almost every day.
The science of intensive interval training has, though, been lagging behind the workout’s popularity. Past studies of HIIT, as the practice is commonly known, had established that as measured by changes in cellular markers, standard short-burst HIIT training may improve aerobic fitness up to 10 times as much as moderate endurance training. But scientists had not determined whether a single sustained interval likewise improves fitness, or the ideal number of HIIT sessions per week.
So to clarify those issues, researchers at two of the laboratories most noted for HIIT science set out to learn more about the best way to do interval training.
First, for a study published this month in Experimental Physiology, scientists at McMaster University in Ontario gathered 17 healthy young men and women and divided them into groups. Ten of them were asked to exercise on two separate days. On one day they completed a standard HIIT session consisting of four 30-second bouts of all-out, tongue-lolling effort on a stationary bicycle, alternating with four minutes of recovery between. On another day they completed a single uninterrupted interval lasting for about four minutes, by which time each rider had combusted the same amount of energy as during the stop-and-go session. Before and after the workouts, the scientists gathered blood and muscle samples.
Separately, the remaining seven volunteers did the continuous four-minute workout three times a week for six weeks. The researchers again collected blood and muscle samples, and monitored changes in the riders’ athletic performance by having them ride as hard as possible for a specified period of time.
When collated and compared, the data showed that the physiological differences among the two groups of riders were notable and, in some ways, strange.
On the one hand, the scientists found no significant variations in how the muscles of riders in the first group responded to a single session of interval training, whether of the standard stop-and-go variety or a sole sustained effort. In both cases, the riders showed immediate, post-exercise increases in their blood levels of certain proteins associated with eventual improvements in endurance capacity.
But when the researchers checked blood and muscle tissue in the second group of riders after they had completed six weeks of single-interval training, some of the pending improvements seemed to have evaporated. These riders’ muscle tissues now had only average — not augmented — amounts of the chemicals that help cells to produce more energy, a reliable marker of fitness. This finding was in stark contrast to the results of earlier work by the same researchers, in which they found that six weeks of standard short-burst HIIT exercise resulted in significant, sustained gains in these markers.
The implications of the new study are not altogether clear, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University and senior author of the study, but “it would appear,” he said, “that there is something important, even essential, about the pulsative nature” of on-off HIIT training if you wish to reap sustained physiological improvements.
In more practical terms, before you riff on your current workout, check to see whether reliable science supports your improvisation.
That caution is underscored by the results of the other major new study of interval training, this one published this month in PLOS One and undertaken at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. In it, scientists asked volunteers to perform a total of 24 standard HIIT sessions over either three or eight weeks, meaning that the volunteers exercised either three times per week or almost every day and sometimes twice on the same day.
At the end of the prescribed time, those who had completed three HIIT sessions per week had improved their endurance capacity by almost 11 percent. But those exercising daily displayed no such improvements and, in some, endurance declined. Only after those volunteers had quit training altogether did their aerobic capacity creep upward; after 12 days of rest, their endurance peaked at about 6 percent above what it had been at the start, suggesting, the researchers believe, that daily high-intensity interval sessions are too frequent and exhausting. In that situation, fatigue blunts physical adaptations.
The takeaway of both studies is that it is best, if you wish to perform high-intensity interval training, to stick to what is well documented as effective: a few sessions per week of 30- or 60-second intervals so strenuous you moan, followed by a minute or so of blessed recovery, and a painful repetition or four. Done correctly, such sessions, in my experience, get you out of the gym quickly and inspire truly inventive cursing.
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NO BIG DEAL

Everyone knows that the Obama administration’s domestic economic agenda is stalled in the face of scorched-earth opposition from Republicans. And that’s a bad thing: The U.S. economy would be in much better shape if Obama administration proposals like the American Jobs Act had become law.
It’s less well known that the administration’s international economic agenda is also stalled, for very different reasons. In particular, the centerpiece of that agenda — the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or T.P.P. — doesn’t seem to be making much progress, thanks to a combination of negotiating difficulties abroad and bipartisan skepticism at home.
And you know what? That’s O.K. It’s far from clear that the T.P.P. is a good idea. It’s even less clear that it’s something on which President Obama should be spending political capital. I am in general a free trader, but I’ll be undismayed and even a bit relieved if the T.P.P. just fades away.
The first thing you need to know about trade deals in general is that they aren’t what they used to be. The glory days of trade negotiations — the days of deals like the Kennedy Round of the 1960s, which sharply reduced tariffs around the world — are long behind us.
Why? Basically, old-fashioned trade deals are a victim of their own success: there just isn’t much more protectionism to eliminate. Average U.S. tariff rates have fallen by two-thirds since 1960. The most recent report on American import restraints by the International Trade Commission puts their total cost at less than 0.01 percent of G.D.P.
Implicit protection of services — rules and regulations that have the effect of, say, blocking foreign competition in insurance — surely impose additional costs. But the fact remains that, these days, “trade agreements” are mainly about other things. What they’re really about, in particular, is property rights — things like the ability to enforce patents on drugs and copyrights on movies. And so it is with T.P.P.
There’s a lot of hype about T.P.P., from both supporters and opponents. Supporters like to talk about the fact that the countries at the negotiating table comprise around 40 percent of the world economy, which they imply means that the agreement would be hugely significant. But trade among these players is already fairly free, so the T.P.P. wouldn’t make that much difference.
Meanwhile, opponents portray the T.P.P. as a huge plot, suggesting that it would destroy national sovereignty and transfer all the power to corporations. This, too, is hugely overblown. Corporate interests would get somewhat more ability to seek legal recourse against government actions, but, no, the Obama administration isn’t secretly bargaining away democracy.
What the T.P.P. would do, however, is increase the ability of certain corporations to assert control over intellectual property. Again, think drug patents and movie rights.
Is this a good thing from a global point of view? Doubtful. The kind of property rights we’re talking about here can alternatively be described as legal monopolies. True, temporary monopolies are, in fact, how we reward new ideas; but arguing that we need even more monopolization is very dubious — and has nothing at all to do with classical arguments for free trade.
Now, the corporations benefiting from enhanced control over intellectual property would often be American. But this doesn’t mean that the T.P.P. is in our national interest. What’s good for Big Pharma is by no means always good for America.
In short, there isn’t a compelling case for this deal, from either a global or a national point of view. Nor does there seem to be anything like a political consensus in favor, abroad or at home.
Abroad, the news from the latest meeting of negotiators sounds like what you usually hear when trade talks are going nowhere: assertions of forward movement but nothing substantive. At home, both Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, have come out against giving the president crucial “fast-track” authority, meaning that any agreement can receive a clean, up-or-down vote. 
So what I wonder is why the president is pushing the T.P.P. at all. The economic case is weak, at best, and his own party doesn’t like it. Why waste time and political capital on this project?
My guess is that we’re looking at a combination of Beltway conventional wisdom — Very Serious People always support entitlement cuts and trade deals — and officials caught in a 1990s time warp, still living in the days when New Democrats tried to prove that they weren’t old-style liberals by going all in for globalization. Whatever the motivations, however, the push for T.P.P. seems almost weirdly out of touch with both economic and political reality.
So don’t cry for T.P.P. If the big trade deal comes to nothing, as seems likely, it will be, well, no big deal.
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