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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2017

FOOTBALLTRACKING THEDAMAGED BRAINSPAGE 12 | SCIENCE

MICHAEL MOOREPROVOCATEUR INBROADWAY DEBUTPAGE 14 | CULTURE

HONG KONGTOURING THE CITY’SDARK UNDERBELLYPAGE 3 | WORLD

So the Scaramouch, a stock clownfigure of old Italian comedy, is gone asWhite House communications director.Anthony Scaramucci’s foul mouth wasnever going to pass muster in a WhiteHouse run by a retired United StatesMarine Corps general. John Kelly,President Trump’s new chief of staff,duly took care of him.

Scaramucci was perfect right downto his name. The Scaramouch, to quotemy Webster’s dictionary, was a “brag-gart and a poltroon” in the theater thatemerged in 16th-century Italy. Boast-fulness and cowardice are Trumptrademarks, one the other face of theother. In his White House job, Scara-

mucci communi-cated stupidityabove all.

Good riddanceto him. After he’dunloaded his bile,Scaramucciasked us all in atweet to pray forhis family, whichseemed a bitrich. Still, I dowant to thank the

Scaramouch. He came straight fromCentral Casting. In his total absence ofdignity and decorum, his violence andhis vulgarity, he was the emblem parexcellence of the Trump White House.That reports of his wife filing for di-vorce surfaced during his brief apothe-osis completed the picture. Fast-talk-ing and fatuous, self-important andservile, he embodied the “commediadell’arte” of Trump’s dysfunctionalcrew.

The commedia featured larger-than-life stock characters like the Scara-mouch. They included deluded oldmen, devious servants, craven brag-garts and starry-eyed lovers. Thepresident, at 71, is clearly a “vecchio,”or elder. He is probably best imaginedas the miserly Venetian known asPantalone wandering around in redbreeches with the oversize codpiece ofthe would-be womanizer.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strat-egist, fits the bill as the “Dottore,” who,as Jennifer Meagher writes in anessay, is “usually depicted as obeseand red-cheeked from drinking.” I’mtempted to offer the role of the belliger-ent, windy “Il Capitano,” or Captain, toSebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant toTrump, who recently told the BBC that,“The military is not a microcosm ofcivilian society. They are not there to

A farewellto the oldScaramouch

OPINION

Scaramucciembodied the“commediadell’arte” of Trump’sdysfunctionalcrew.

COHEN, PAGE 11

Roger Cohen

The last time the Kremlin forced asweeping reduction of local staff at theAmerican Embassy in Moscow, a youngdiplomat named Steven Pifer foundhimself working four days a week onarms control, as usual. But on the fifthday, he navigated the capital in a bigtruck to move furniture or haul mam-moth grocery loads.

The entire staff of the embassy, exceptthe ambassador, was assigned one dayeach week to grunt work called All Pur-pose Duty, Mr. Pifer recalled in an inter-view on Monday, when they shed theirdark suits and polished loafers to mowthe lawns, fix the plumbing, cook in thecafeteria and even clean the toilets.

That was a last hurrah for the ColdWar in 1986, and although the embassynow functions on a far more complexscale, many current and former diplo-mats expect a similar effort in the wakeof President Vladimir V. Putin’s an-nouncement on Sunday that the UnitedStates diplomatic mission in Russiamust shed 755 employees by Sept. 1.

“The attitude in the embassy was ifthey think that they will shut us down,we will show them,” said Mr. Pifer, whowent on to become an American ambas-sador to Ukraine and is now a senior fel-low at the Brookings Institution inWashington. “I think the embassy willadapt this time, too.”

Russia demanded that the UnitedStates reduce its diplomatic staff toequal the 455 Russian diplomats work-ing in the United States, including at themission to the United Nations. Thatmeans cutting about 60 percent of awork force estimated at 1,200 to 1,300people, the vast majority of whom areRussians.

“That is a huge shock to the system,”said James F. Collins, the American am-bassador to Russia from 1997 to 2001.“The American government will have tomake the decision about who stays andwho leaves.”

Given the continuing deterioration inrelations between the two countries,core functions like political and militaryanalysis will be preserved, along withespionage, experts said, while pro-grams that involve cooperation on ev-erything from trade to culture to scienceare likely to be reduced or eliminated.

Besides the State Department, adizzying array of American government

At embassyin Russia,staff bracesfor deep cuts

RUSSIA, PAGE 5

MOSCOW

Ouster of 755 workersat American mission willstrain basic functions

BY NEIL MACFARQUHAR

For decades it was proudly displayed inthe Greco-Roman galleries of the Metro-politan Museum of Art, a 2,300-year-old,vividly painted Python vase that depictsDionysus, god of the grape harvest, rid-ing in a cart pulled by a satyr.

Today it sits in an evidence room atthe district attorney’s office in New YorkCity after prosecutors quietly seized theantiquity last week based on evidencethat it had been looted by tomb raidersin Italy in the 1970s.

While its significance does not rise tothe level of the far larger EuphroniosKrater, which the Met sent back to Italyafter a 30-year dispute, the newly con-fiscated vessel is a remarkably intact

survivor of an age when the Greeks col-onized Paestum, a Mediterranean cityin the Campania region south of Rome,and created temples and artworks oflegendary beauty.

The forensic archaeologist whotracked the Python vase, ChristosTsirogiannis, a lecturer with the Associ-ation for Research Into Crimes AgainstArt, published his suspicions about theantiquity in The Journal of Art Crime in2014 and said he sent his evidence to theMet then as well.

But Dr. Tsirogiannis said in an inter-view that he never heard back from themuseum and, more recently, grew frus-trated that no action appeared to havebeen taken. So, in May, he sent his evi-dence to a New York prosecutor,Matthew Bogdanos, who specializes inart crime. That evidence included Polar-oid photos shot between 1972 and 1995that he said were seized from the store-houses of an Italian art dealer in 1995

Vase, thought to be looted, is confiscated from the Met2,300-year-old vesselis said to have been dugfrom Italian grave and sold

BY TOM MASHBERG

VASE, PAGE 6

PUTIN’S BET ON TRUMP BACKFIRES

The new sanctions on Russia showthat the American leader’s hands aretied in dealing with Moscow. PAGE 5

The boy did not want to see a beheading,so he held his mother’s hand tight andtried to close his eyes. But seeing it wasmandatory when the Islamic State ruledhis hometown in northern Syria: If youwere out on the street, you had to watch.

The boy, now 11 and a refugee inBeirut, reckons he saw 10 beheadings,and once he saw a man accused of acrime being thrown off the top of a build-ing. Videos of executions were shown af-ter the executions — and children wereinvited to watch inside mosques. “Someof my friends, they used to go andwatch,” said the boy, who gave only hisfirst name, Muhammad. “They liked it.”

Even by the brutal standards of theSyrian civil war, children growing up inareas ruled by the Islamic State have ex-perienced and witnessed astonishingbrutality. Schools have been closed for

years. Polio has made a comeback. Boyshave been recruited to fight.

Now, as foreign militaries and localmilitias try to flush out the Islamic Statefrom its last redoubts in Syria, childrenfleeing the violence have to dodgeairstrikes, snipers and then thirst andscorpions as they make their way across

the desert.Danger looms even when they reach

safety. The militias taking on the IslamicState are also recruiting children tofight, according to aid workers andUnited Nations officials. Aid workerssay children are being lured with money,guns and an inflated sense of impor-

tance — an allegation denied by aspokesman for the Syrian Kurdish fight-ers and Arab militias that are col-lectively known as the Syrian Demo-cratic Forces and are backed by theUnited States.

It is indisputable, though, that mil-

Syrians leaving their homes in Raqqa. Children fleeing the violence have to deal with airstrikes, snipers and then thirst and scorpions as they make their way across the desert.BULENT KILIC/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

The children haunted by ISIS

A camp in Ain Issa, Syria, for people who have been displaced by fighting in the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa.GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS

BEIRUT, LEBANON

Syria’s young, witnesses of shocking brutality, are stalked by new dangers

BY SOMINI SENGUPTAAND HWAIDA SAAD

ISIS, PAGE 4

An iconoclast Sam Shepard, whose hallucinatory plays redefined the land-scape of the American West and its inhabitants, has died at 73. PAGE 6

CHAD BATKA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Issue NumberNo. 41,799

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