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Ms. Fariña, 70, the daughter of immigrants from Spain who fled the Franco regime, is a veteran of the city's school system, having served as a teacher, principal and superintendent of a Brooklyn school district. She retired as a deputy chancellor in 2006.
The choice reflected Mr. de Blasio's desire to depart radically from the educational policies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, including his emphasis on data and his policy of shuttering low-performing schools. The choice is also in keeping with Mr. de Blasio's pattern of appointing people with deep governmental experience.
As a principal and superintendent, Ms. Fariña gained a reputation as a stern manager. She worked briefly as a top official in the Education Department early in the Bloomberg administration, overseeing teaching and learning, but departed amid philosophical differences.
Last year, when he was a Democrat in a crowded field of mayoral contenders, Mr. de Blasio said that candidates for chancellor should receive "serious public screening," criticizing the way Mr. Bloomberg had appointed Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive, as chancellor in 2010. She resigned after three months.
As the leader of the nation's largest school district, with 1 million students, Ms. Fariña will also face a host of thorny issues, including calming tensions over a new set of academic standards, rolling out a plan to charge rent to charter schools and negotiating a contract with the city's teachers' union, which is demanding billions of dollars in retroactive raises.
Mr. de Blasio has spoken often about his desire to break with several hallmarks of the Bloomberg era, including its support of charter schools. He has said he will decrease the emphasis on standardized testing and give more input to parents.
Ms. Fariña shares Mr. de Blasio's skepticism of standardized testing and his focus on early education. As chancellor, she will help shape his proposal to expand access to preschool and after-school programs.
The announcement was expected on Monday at William Alexander Middle School in Brooklyn.
Reached at her home late Sunday, Ms. Fariña declined to comment. Aides to Mr. de Blasio did not respond Sunday night to a request for comment.
Ms. Fariña brings to the office a deep knowledge of New York City and its schools. In a 1999 interview, she recalled being the only Spanish-speaking student in kindergarten at St. Charles Borromeo, a parochial school in Brooklyn. She was marked absent by a teacher for six weeks because her teacher mispronounced her name.
Ms. Fariña initially resisted the prospect of being chancellor, saying publicly that she was content in retirement and eager to spend time with her grandchildren. But in recent weeks, Mr. de Blasio continued to prod her.
"Bill is a very persuasive person," Ms. Fariña said in an interview this month.
"My grandchildren are important to me," she added. "I spent a lot of years in the system. But I will do whatever the new mayor wants me to do."
The search for chancellor stretched on for almost two months. It was considered one of Mr. de Blasio's most important appointments, given the emphasis he placed on education during his mayoral bid, including his signature prekindergarten proposal.
But the process of picking a chancellor did not always appear easy. Several candidates withdrew from the process, including Kaya Henderson, chancellor of the schools in Washington, D.C. Other high-profile contenders included Joshua P. Starr, who leads Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, and Kathleen M. Cashin, a longtime city educator and member of the Board of Regents.
Ms. Fariña has stood out throughout her career with her blunt style and egalitarian ideals.
She became known within the system as a principal at Public School 6 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, drawing wealthy families into the school. In 2004, she was named a deputy chancellor, but departed two years later, uneasy about the growing use of student test scores to evaluate schools.
At P.S. 6, Ms. Fariña turned a school once ranked as 76th on a citywide reading test to fourth. Her strategy included replacing 80 percent of the staff — a difficult task, given tenure protections for teachers. "Once you create a climate in a building that is hard-working, people will find out whether they are comfortable with it or not," she explained in 1999. "And then they have decisions to make."
As a principal, Ms. Fariña had a soft side, offering to preside over classes for teachers on their birthdays, so they could go to lunch.
Since her retirement in 2006, Ms. Fariña has emerged as a critic of Mr. Bloomberg's educational policies. "I want to see us have a system where people do things because they have a sense of joy about it, not because they have a sense of fear," she said at a speech in November, according to the education blog GothamSchools.
It was unclear how long Ms. Fariña planned to remain as chancellor. Mr. de Blasio had at one point considered appointing a deputy who might succeed her after a year or two, according to a person with knowledge of the process. But one such candidate, Dr. Starr, said he was not interested in the position, the person said.
Al Baker contributed reporting.
In selecting Zachary W. Carter as corporation counsel, Mr. de Blasio appeared to be taking a legal posture markedly different from that of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. That difference was underscored by a pledge on Sunday to reverse course on two of his predecessor's hardest-fought court battles: the litigation over the Police Department's stop-and-frisk practices and the lawsuit stemming from the Central Park Five case.
"We start with our values," Mr. de Blasio said. "We start with the positions we took and made public throughout the last year. We will drop the appeal on the stop-and-frisk case, because we think the judge was right about the reforms that we need to make. We will settle the Central Park Five case because a huge injustice was done."
Mr. Carter, 63, is a partner in the firm Dorsey & Whitney. He lives in Westchester County and plans to move to New York City, a spokesman for Mr. de Blasio said.
At the news conference, Mr. Carter said he and Mr. de Blasio share a belief in ensuring opportunities for the poor. "We've failed as a society when we do not meet the needs of the least advantaged."
He will replace Michael A. Cardozo, who has served as corporation counsel and overseen the Law Department through all three of Mr. Bloomberg's terms.
The announcement was the latest from Mr. de Blasio as he assembles his cabinet ahead of his swearing-in on Wednesday. The most anticipated remaining appointment is his choice for schools chancellor.
Mr. de Blasio chose William J. Bratton as police commissioner this month, returning him to the post he held almost two decades ago. Mr. Bratton and Mr. Carter are likely to play significant roles in shaping the new administration's positions on policing.
Under Mr. Cardozo, the city has been aggressive in defending its stop-and-frisk practices, even as it became clear that Mr. de Blasio would pursue a different course in the litigation.
In the case known as the Central Park Five, five black and Hispanic teenagers were convicted in the 1989 attack of a Central Park jogger. Their convictions were later thrown out. A $250 million suit against the prosecutors and the police has been pending for a decade.
As the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 1993 to 1999, Mr. Carter brought federal charges in the beating and torture of Mr. Louima in 1997 by police officers in a police station bathroom. Alan Vinegrad, who was the chief prosecutor in the case, said Mr. Carter "felt passionate about taking the case and what lay underneath it — the problem of excessive force by the Police Department." The abuse led to criminal convictions and an $8.7 million civil settlement by the Police Department.
Mr. Carter's tenure had no shortage of other high-profile cases, including the prosecution of the real Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, and those responsible for the death that set off the Crown Heights riots in 1991.
The appointment of Mr. Carter was praised by critics of the Law Department's hard-line stance in suits against the Police Department.
"Under Cardozo, the policy has been to fight every police misconduct case tooth and nail," said Joel Berger, a former city lawyer who now represents plaintiffs in lawsuits against the Police Department. "I certainly hope that Carter will pay more attention to the causes of police misconduct lawsuits rather than just fighting them."
The Rev. Al Sharpton called the appointment an "unprecedented and huge step for progress."
"I know he was very concerned about the excesses of the stop and frisk program," said Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., a former corporation counsel who has known Mr. Carter since the 1980s and served with him on the boards of the Vera Institute and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.
Mr. Schwarz, who helped select Mr. Carter as a criminal court judge during the Koch administration, described him as a "winning personality" who cared about fairness and good government. "He was in law enforcement, but what he really cares about is justice," he said.
J. David Goodman contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 29, 2013
An earlier version of this article gave incorrect attribution regarding a statement that Mr. Carter would provide the "legal architecture" to carry out the new administration's plans. Mr. Carter said so, not Mr. de Blasio.
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Mark Graham for The New York Times
Harold Simmons, in 1997, started out with a Dallas drugstore.
Harold Simmons, a billionaire who helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack ads against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election and donated substantially to other conservative causes, died on Saturday in Dallas. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, in a statement.
Mr. Simmons, who started out in business with a single drugstore in Dallas, became a buyout investor and made his fortune by buying stakes in major companies. This year, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $10 billion.
He was one of the largest donors in the 2012 presidential election, giving more than $26.9 million to "super PACs" opposing President Obama, whom he called "the most dangerous American alive" in an interview with The Wall Street Journal because, he said, the president wanted to "eliminate free enterprise in this country."
In 2004, Mr. Simmons donated $2 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose advertisements against Mr. Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, included one impugning his military service as a Swift boat captain during the Vietnam War. The allegations were later discredited. Mr. Simmons gave heavily to other groups through the Dallas-based Harold Simmons Foundation, which is run by two of his daughters, Lisa Simmons and Serena Simmons Connelly.
Harold Clark Simmons was born in Golden, Tex., on May 13, 1931. His parents were teachers in the rural East Texas town. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and built a chain of 100 drugstores across the state.
He sold the stores and began to invest in companies. He made much of his fortune from running the Contran Corporation, a holding company that owns stakes in companies that produce chemicals and computer support systems, among others.
In 2012, he contributed millions of dollars to American Crossroads, a super PAC co-founded by Karl Rove. His company also contributed to the presidential campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.
"I've got the money, so I'm spending it for the good of the country," Mr. Simmons told The Wall Street Journal.
His animosity for Mr. Obama was not new. In 2008, he gave nearly $2.9 million to a conservative group running advertisements highlighting Mr. Obama's association with the 1960s radical William Ayers.
Mr. Simmons and his wife, Annette, have been among the largest donors to charities in Dallas, including the Children's Medical Center of Dallas, the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Dallas Zoo, and Southern Methodist University.
More recently, his foundation made contributions that were surprising for someone with his political views. It gave $600,000 to Planned Parenthood and its North Texas affiliate in 2011 and $600,000 this year to the Resource Center, a group that supports the gay community and those affected by H.I.V., The Dallas Morning News reported.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Simmons endured a messy legal dispute with two older daughters from previous marriages. After the daughters sued to challenge his control of trusts Mr. Simmons had established, he struck back in unusually personal terms, saying that one daughter had problems with drug addiction and both had trouble managing money.
He eventually agreed to give them $50 million each if they dropped all claims.
In an authorized biography in 2003, the author John J. Nance said that the lawsuit — and Mr. Simmons's two divorces — were among the most painful chapters in his life.
"Still, he considers his life a blessing," Mr. Nance wrote, "and displays his appreciation through major philanthropic projects."
Stuart Palley for The New York Times
Michigan State players at Lawry's, a prime rib restaurant in Beverly Hills, Calif. At the so-called Beef Bowl, servings are now limited.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Don't let the elastic waistbands fool you. When Michigan State's football players paraded down the red carpet in their green-and-white traveling sweats, serenaded by a band playing the university's fight song, they had not come to Lawry's 58th Beef Bowl to devour the competition — or the racks of prime rib that were waiting to be sliced.
The Spartans had arrived, mostly, in the name of moderation.
"I'm eating a little beef, not too much — but the corn is great," said Denzel Drone, describing what would seem like hors d'oeuvres for a powerfully built 6-foot-2, 245-pound defensive end.
The Beef Bowl has long had a place on the itineraries of Rose Bowl teams. Conceived by one of the owners of Lawry's, a well-known prime rib restaurant in Beverly Hills, the Beef Bowl quickly became an informal eating competition, and in many respects it has changed little over the decades.
To the Michigan State secondary coach Harlan Barnett, who played for the Spartans in their last Rose Bowl, 26 years ago, it all looked familiar: The restaurant's carvers were wearing the same tall white hats, the servers were wearing the same nurselike uniforms with sensible white shoes, and the first slab of prime rib was still sliced almost precisely at 16 ounces.
But something profound has changed in recent years. Nutrition is now emphasized as an important component in athletic performance, and players are as likely to count calories as the pounds of meat they can eat.
Lawry's has contributed to this change by limiting the amount of prime rib it serves each player: a 16-ounce cut followed by a 12-ounce second helping. It no longer publicizes how much each team eats, although the team and individual marks are believed to be held by Purdue in 2001 (734 pounds) and Michigan offensive lineman Ed Muranksy in 1978 (8 pounds).
Richard R. Frank, the president and chief executive of Lawry's, cautioned both teams during their visits — Friday night for Michigan State and Saturday night for Stanford — that the Beef Bowl was no longer a competition.
"Save that for Wednesday," he told them, referring to the day of the game.
Stanford, playing in the Rose Bowl for the second consecutive year, did not need such an admonishment. The Cardinal had offensive lineman Josh Garnett, a 6-foot-5, 315-pound sophomore who, as Stanford Coach David Shaw noted, "made his name here before he ever made it on the football field."
A year ago, Garnett was prodded by several senior offensive linemen to go for the record. Others at their long table ordered seconds and sent them down to Garnett, who ate 10 cuts of prime rib, which he estimated to be 7 pounds' worth.
"There were a lot of noises a normal man shouldn't hear — or make," said Kevin Danser, a senior guard who sat next to Garnett last year. "Joshua was in a lot of pain."
Garnett said practice the next day "was not good."
He added, "I moved like somebody who ate 7 pounds of meat and an extra side."
As Garnett left Lawry's on Saturday night, he expected the day-after practice to be much better. He ate one cut of prime rib Saturday, though he allowed himself an extra side.
(Another testament to the benefits of slow eating and bite-size chunks occurred two years ago when Oregon lineman Mark Asper put his Eagle Scout training to good use, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a patron who was choking on a piece of meat.)
Whereas the evening's experience was familiar to Stanford — "We're seasoned," Danser said — it was new to the Spartans, many of whom recorded their entrance on video cameras or phones. But like the Cardinal players, they were mostly content to savor their meal.
Michigan State Coach Mark D'Antonio, who had a heart attack in 2010 and typically avoids eating red meat, allowed himself an indulgence. Offensive lineman Shawn Kamm, who ate 65 chicken wings last year at a Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl event, put away four slices of prime rib. But at most tables, the Spartans were satisfied with a single serving.
Sally Nogle, the Spartans' head athletic trainer, said it was a marked contrast from her visit for the 1988 Rose Bowl. "The last time, it was how much can you eat," she said.
"But there's so much more focus and research and thought that goes into what we eat now," Nogle said. She added, "This wouldn't be the best pregame meal, but it's early in the week, so it's O.K. to enjoy yourself a little."
Over the two nights, none seemed to be enjoying themselves more than Frank.
The Beef Bowl was conceived by his father, Richard N. Frank, now 90, a Stanford business school dropout whose family — along with the Van de Kamp family — has owned and operated Lawry's for 75 years. He thought it would be good publicity for the restaurant to feed the players. In the event's first year, Iowa was served as it came off the practice field.
Woody Hayes, the renowned Ohio State coach, often refused to let his team participate, but for many players on many teams, the meal created enduring memories. When Richard N. Frank was honored after the third quarter of the 2005 Rose Bowl, Texas quarterback Vince Young jogged over to give him a congratulatory hug.
In a place like Los Angeles, whose ethos is about reinvention, Lawry's and the Tournament of Roses have survived by holding tight to tradition. The parade is never held on Sunday, the floats must be completely covered in flowers, and the Rose Bowl long resisted corporate naming rights and joining the Bowl Championship Series.
The Beef Bowl, steeped in its own tradition, endures without any formal contract with the Rose Bowl, the younger Frank said.
"It's based on trust," Frank said. "It works for us; it works for them. Why mess it up?"
In a series of late-night emails, JPMorgan Chase executives in Hong Kong lamented the loss of a lucrative assignment.
"We lost a deal to DB today because they got chairman's daughter work for them this summer," one JPMorgan investment banking executive remarked to colleagues, using the initials for Deutsche Bank.
The loss of that business in 2009, coming after rival banks landed a string of other deals, stung the JPMorgan executives. For Wall Street banks enduring slowdowns in the wake of the financial crisis, China was the last great gold rush. As its economy boomed, China's state-owned enterprises were using banks to raise billions of dollars in stock and debt offerings — yet JPMorgan was falling further behind in capturing that business.
The solution, the executives decided over email, was to embrace the strategy that seemed to work so well for rivals: hire the children of China's ruling elite.
"I am supportive to have our own" hiring strategy, a JPMorgan executive wrote in the 2009 email exchange.
In the months and years that followed, emails and other confidential documents show, JPMorgan escalated what it called its "Sons and Daughters" hiring program, adding scores of well-connected employees and tracking how those hires translated into business deals with the Chinese government. The previously unreported emails and documents — copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times — offer a view into JPMorgan's motivations for ramping up the hiring program, suggesting that competitive pressures drove many of the bank's decisions that are now under federal investigation.
The references to other banks in the emails also paint for the first time a broad picture of questionable hiring practices by other Wall Street banks doing business in China — some of them hiring the same employees with family connections. Since opening a bribery investigation into JPMorgan this spring, the authorities have expanded the inquiry to include hiring at other big banks. Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have previously been identified as coming under scrutiny. A sixth bank, UBS, is also facing scrutiny, according to interviews with current and former Wall Street employees. Neither JPMorgan nor any of the other banks have been accused of wrongdoing.
Still, the investigations have put Wall Street on high alert, said the current and former employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Some banks, they said, have adopted an unofficial hiring freeze for well-connected job candidates in China.
The investigation has also had a chilling effect on JPMorgan's deal-making in China, interviews show. The bank, seeking to build good will with federal authorities, has considered forgoing certain deals in China and abandoned one assignment altogether.
The pullback comes just as JPMorgan had regained a significant share of the Chinese market. Its deal-making revived a few years after it escalated the Sons and Daughters program in 2009, an analysis of data from Thomson Reuters shows. In 2009, JPMorgan was 13th among banks winning business in China and Hong Kong. By 2013, once other banks had scaled back their Chinese business, it had climbed to No. 3. Other data shows that the bank was eighth in 2009 and — after losing market share in 2011 and 2012 — is now No. 4 in deal-making. While the hiring boom coincided with the increased business, the data does not establish a causal link between the two.
Yet the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, which are leading the JPMorgan inquiry, are examining whether the bank improperly won some of those deals by trading job offers for business with state-owned Chinese companies. The S.E.C. and the prosecutors, which might ultimately conclude that none of the hiring crossed a legal line, did not comment.
JPMorgan, which is cooperating with the investigation, also declined to comment. There is no indication that executives at the bank's headquarters in New York were aware of the hiring practices. The six other banks facing scrutiny from the S.E.C. declined to comment on the investigations, which are at an early stage.
Economic forces fueled the hiring boom by Wall Street banks.
An era of financial deregulation in Washington coincided with a roaring economy in China, enabling questionable hiring practices to escape government scrutiny. The hiring became so widespread over the last two decades that banks competed over the most politically connected recent college graduates, known in China as princelings.
Goldman's employee roster briefly included the grandson of the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. And Feng Shaodong, the son-in-law of a high-ranking Communist Party official, worked with Merrill Lynch.
In recent months, though, federal authorities have adopted a tougher stance toward Wall Street firms suspected of trading jobs for government business. The S.E.C. and the Brooklyn prosecutors have bolstered enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which effectively bans United States corporations from giving "anything of value" to foreign officials to gain "any improper advantage" in retaining business. JPMorgan would have violated the 1977 law if it had acted with "corrupt" intent.
While the JPMorgan emails provided to federal authorities and reviewed by The Times most frequently referred to Deutsche Bank and Goldman, other banks might have also inspired JPMorgan's hiring.
Both JPMorgan and Credit Suisse, for example, did business with Fullmark, a consulting firm run by the only daughter of Wen Jiabao, then the prime minister of China. Another prized JPMorgan hire, whose father is the chairman of a state-owned financial conglomerate, previously held internships at Citigroup and Goldman.
JPMorgan executives in Hong Kong also studied the hiring movements of banks with a firmer foothold in China, the documents and emails show. "Learned from GS," one JPMorgan executive wrote in an email to colleagues, referring to Goldman Sachs's hiring practices.
JPMorgan's legal woes extend beyond China. In November, JPMorgan struck a $13 billion settlement with government authorities over the bank's sale of questionable mortgage-backed securities.
But unlike the mortgage pact, which focused on the bank's financial crisis-era business, the China investigations take aim at hiring practices that lasted until this year. And while the $13 billion payout involved civil settlements with various authorities, the bribery inquiry carries the threat of criminal penalties. A few top JPMorgan executives in Hong Kong have hired criminal defense lawyers, interviews show.
The fallout from the investigation may also hamper the bank's relationships with clients. As the investigation intensified in recent months, JPMorgan withdrew from a deal in which it was advising Cofco, a large state-run food company. JPMorgan offered the daughter of the company's chairman a short-term internship in 2011, according to securities filings, and another internship in 2012.
"We really need her to be back," a JPMorgan executive in Hong Kong wrote in an email. "Her father called and emailed me."
The bank created the Sons and Daughters program in 2006 to ensure that the hiring would pass legal and regulatory muster.
But then JPMorgan's investment banking business began to lose market share in China, the data from Thomson Reuters shows. By the time JPMorgan lost the 2009 deal to Deutsche Bank, the Hong Kong executives at JPMorgan's investment bank decided that it needed to step up its hiring.
"A missed opportunity for us this year," an executive said in an email upon learning of the loss to Deutsche Bank. "Can you guys craft a program that could work for us?"
The investment banking unit experimented with a program that would have offered well-connected hires a one-year contract worth $70,000 to $100,000. The program, internal documents said, might offer "directly attributable linkage to business opportunity."
Still, some Hong Kong executives pushed for more of what they called "client referral" hiring to keep pace with rivals.
"We do way, way, way too little of this type of hiring and I have been pounding on it with China team for a year," a JPMorgan employee wrote to a colleague in a 2010 email. In that same email, the employee added: "confidential, just added son of #2 at SinoTruk to my team," referring to a company that is part of a state-owned trucking enterprise.
He added: "I got room for a lot more hires like this (Goldman has 25)."
JPMorgan's expanded program had an apparent coup when Tang Xiaoning, whose father is the chairman of the financial conglomerate China Everbright Group, was hired. Until that 2010 hiring, which has been previously reported by The Times, the bank had missed out on deal after deal from China Everbright, including one assignment that went to Morgan Stanley.
But since the younger Mr. Tang was hired, China Everbright and its subsidiaries hired JPMorgan at least three times, according to Standard & Poor's Capital IQ, a research service.
When pursuing an assignment from Taikang, a life insurer that was not owned by the state, JPMorgan executives drew a similar link between hiring and deal-making. Hoping to get the nod to advise Taikang on an initial public offering of stock, emails show, JPMorgan sought to hire the chairman's niece. But it had stiff competition.
"Regarding to the juicy size, every existing active banks are trying to lobby with them," a JPMorgan banker wrote in an email, which is unlikely to become a focus of the federal investigation, because it involves a private company. Goldman, which employed the chairman's son, had a direct investment in the company. And the Royal Bank of Scotland was "trying to approach" the chairman's niece, the banker wrote, "to compete us."
David Barboza contributed reporting.
The first public screening in Russia of a documentary about the activist group Pussy Riot was canceled by the government at the last minute on Saturday, organizers said.
The film, "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer," was to have been screened in Moscow on Sunday afternoon, less than a week after two members of Pussy Riot were released from prison. Their two-year sentence, on charges of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for performing a protest song in a Moscow cathedral, was commuted under an amnesty from the Kremlin on Monday.
But on Saturday, the directors of the Gogol Center, a state-financed theater, received a call from the authorities threatening their jobs if they screened the documentary, said Maxim Pozdorovkin, who directed the film with Mike Lerner. A letter from the Department of Culture in Moscow formally banning the screening followed.
The letter, which was posted online by one of the center's directors, accused the artists and filmmakers involved of being provocateurs, and said their brand of culture had no place in a government building.
The role of art, it said, "is to save the world, make it better, not to inflame the public with scandalous stories that have no cultural merit."
"Let's hold tight to those principles," it concluded, "and keep everybody safe."
"The letter is amazing," Mr. Pozdorovkin said Saturday in an interview from Moscow. He had arrived there from his home in Brooklyn with several copies of the film hidden in his luggage. "I thought that once I got past the border," it would be safe to proceed with the screening, he said.
The event was organized with just a few days' notice once the amnesty was granted for the members, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Since their release from separate prisons, the women have continued to actively criticize President Vladimir V. Putin in remarks that have been broadcast widely in Russia and abroad.
On Saturday evening, the women, Mr. Pozdorovkin and others gathered in a supporter's apartment in Moscow, debating how to proceed. "In the view of the cultural department, we're such amoral persons that we can't perform," even on film, "within a government structure," Ms. Alyokhina said.
The cancellation follows two other scuttled screenings in Moscow, Mr. Pozdorovkin said; both were also called off at the last minute, possibly under pressure from the authorities. The film was released in the United States in the summer, and shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination in the documentary category this month.
The Pussy Riot case has proved tantalizing for Russian authorities; in March, immigration officers, Cossacks and police officers raided a Moscow theater where a Swiss director was staging a re-enactment of the Pussy Riot trial. (The show went on.)
Mr. Pozdorovkin said he might show the film on Sunday anyway. "If there are people there, I'm going to bring a laptop and play it off that, on headphones, and see what happens," he said.
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WASHINGTON — Tucked into the mammoth defense budget bill that President Obama signed into law on Thursday is a measure that virtually bars Russia from building about a half-dozen monitor stations on American soil that critics fear Moscow could use to spy on the United States or worse.
Russia first broached the idea of erecting the domed antenna structures here nearly two years ago, saying they would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of its version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers bomb-bearing warplanes to their targets and wayward motorists to their destinations.
Congressional Republicans, however, harbored suspicions that Russia had nefarious motives behind its plan, which the State Department supported as a means to mend bruised relations between the two rival nations. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency sided with congressional critics, concerned about handing the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders.
The monitor stations have been a high priority of President Vladimir V. Putin for years as a means to improve Moscow's global positioning network — known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System — not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.
As the White House sought to reconcile the internal squabbling among government agencies, skeptical members of the intelligence and armed services committees in Congress intervened in recent weeks to deal a near-crippling blow to the prospect of Glonass stations in the United States.
Under the new law, unless the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence certify to Congress that the monitor stations would not be used to spy on the United States or improve the effectiveness of Russian weaponry — or unless they waive that requirement altogether on national security grounds — the plan is dead.
"The idea was to make it next to impossible, if not impossible, to do this," said a House Republican aide involved in the legislative process, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of committee rules prohibiting officials from talking publicly to the news media. "We also took the State Department out of the loop since they were the ones who caused all the trouble in the first place."
The snub to the Kremlin's request came as the White House received a State Department report on Friday trumpeting United States-Russian cooperation in a wide range of areas, including national security and science. Glonass did not make the cut.
American relations with Russia are now at a nadir because of Moscow's granting asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, and its backing of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
Administration officials on Friday sought to play down the significance of the new constraints, saying that discussions with the Russians continue but that no decisions have been reached. The Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions to the State Department, which is taking the lead on the issue for the government. A State Department statement said, "Any decision taken will be in compliance with all relevant legislation."
A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington did not return phone or email messages. The Russian effort is part of a larger race by several countries, including China and European Union nations, to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS.
"There isn't any question that their system would be more accurate and reliable if they had some stations somewhere in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere," said Ralph Braibanti, a former director of the State Department's Office of Space and Advanced Technology. "The more stations you have, the more corrections you can make, and the more reliable the system you have."
Mr. Braibanti said that rebuffing the Russians would deal a blow to efforts by the State Department to work with other countries to make their positioning systems more accurate.
"There is a significant argument in favor of going the extra mile to accommodate what the Russians feel are their needs," he said, because it would improve all systems amid demands from consumers for more accurate GPS readings, he said.
After The New York Times reported in November that there were divisions between the State Department and the intelligence agencies about whether to allow the Russian structures, congressional Republicans publicly opposed acquiescing to the Russians' request.
The new law requires the certification from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies or a waiver from the defense secretary and director of national security to ensure that any data collected or transmitted from the monitor stations are not encrypted; that anyone involved in building, operating or maintaining the structures is an American; and that none of the stations are near "sensitive United States national security sites." The waiver would also require that the stations not pose a cyberespionage threat or weaken the American GPS technology for consumers.
"The provision," said Roger Zakheim, a former general counsel of the House Armed Services Committee, "certainly creates a high bar for the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence to authorize or permit this type of construction."
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
An image of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan in Kabul. He has not endorsed a successor.
KABUL, Afghanistan — In the 12 years since the United States helped oust the Taliban, Afghanistan has held four national elections. But Afghans are only now experiencing a phenomenon that has been upending conventional wisdom in more established democracies for decades: polling.
Three recent polls are giving Afghans a crash course in front-runners, horse-race coverage and candidates who eagerly dismiss any numbers that do not put them out front, topics familiar to Americans.
With the focus on fighting a war and rebuilding the country, there has been little publicly available polling done here for the two presidential and two parliamentary elections.
But now, before the presidential vote in April, Afghans are finding out which politicians have popular appeal ahead of the voting. How the information plays out remains to be seen, but it appears that Afghans — and the Western diplomats who are watching the campaign — would do well to heed an axiom of electoral politics: Do not trust the conventional wisdom.
Exhibit A appears to be the ability of President Hamid Karzai to influence the election. The widely held view in Kabul is that the candidate Mr. Karzai decides to back will be favored to win. As the sole elected leader in Afghan history, he is uniquely influential in a country where politics center on personalities, not political parties. At the same time, he controls the machinery of the state — the police, a growing bureaucracy, even the schools.
Most of the candidates appear to believe they need his support. Of the 11 men currently running, 10 have sought his blessing and support. But Mr. Karzai has yet to endorse any of them.
Even if he does, a poll conducted for the State Department by Glevum Associates, a research company based in Washington, indicates that the ability to influence voters simply by endorsing a candidate may be far more limited than most here believe.
Among the 2,148 likely voters surveyed by Glevum, 85 percent said they would not be swayed if Mr. Karzai decided to endorse a candidate or that it would not matter. The poll, conducted through face-to-face interviews and obtained ahead of its release on Sunday, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus about two percentage points.
The poll results did not offer a clear sense of what accounted for Mr. Karzai's apparently limited influence. In many respects, those polled seemed to want a candidate much like Mr. Karzai: 61 percent would vote for someone who wanted to open talks with the Taliban, 51 percent thought it was important to have good relations with Pakistan and 71 percent wanted positive relations with the United States, as the Afghan leader says he does.
Yet his refusal to sign a deal that would keep American and European troops here beyond next year did not appear entirely unpopular, according to the poll. Only 40 percent of those surveyed said it was important that candidates wanted to keep foreign forces here after 2014.
Nearly 90 percent said they would not vote for a candidate with a history of corruption. But almost every candidate has faced allegations of graft, and the Afghan government is considered among the world's most corrupt.
Aimal Faizi, a spokesman for the president, said neither he nor Mr. Karzai had seen the poll. But "these polls are a new experience for Afghans," he said. "People are suspicious about why they are being done, about the possible motivations behind them."
Mr. Karzai has no plans to endorse any candidate, Mr. Faizi said, adding that the president wanted only to see a peaceful election "that is free of influence from the government — and interference from outside of Afghanistan, as well."
Mr. Karzai is particularly fearful of interference from the United States, which he believes tried to unseat him in the 2009 elections.
American officials insist that their sole intention is to help Afghanistan, not get involved in its politics. The poll was intended "to help promote inclusive, credible, and transparent elections in Afghanistan," the United States Embassy in Kabul said in a statement.
Habib Zahori contributed reporting from Kabul.
Danese Kenon/The Indianapolis Star, via Associated Press
Andrew Jacobs Jr. was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1964.
Andrew Jacobs Jr., a former Democratic Representative from Indiana who fought in the Korean War and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, died on Saturday at his home in Indianapolis. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by Gary Taylor, a former campaign manager.
Mr. Jacobs was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1964, but lost his seat in 1972 along with several other Democratic members of Congress in President Richard Nixon's landslide re-election win.
In 1974, months after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon's resignation, Mr. Jacobs regained his House seat and served until his retirement in 1997, representing a district in his native Indianapolis.
A former Marine, Jacobs was among the early critics of the Vietnam War. He also helped write the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a touchstone of civil rights legislation, and was a longtime member on the House Ways and Means Committee.
"Congressman Andy Jacobs personified the kind of principled and compassionate leadership that Hoosiers most admire & will be greatly missed," Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican, said on his Twitter page.
Mr. Jacobs suffered a number of health problems in recent years, Mr. Taylor said.
He is survived by his wife, Kim Hood Jacobs, an Emmy Award-winning television reporter and documentary producer, and sons Andy and Steven Jacobs.
His father, Andrew Jacobs, was also a Democratic congressman from Indiana, serving in the House from 1949 to 1951.
HONOLULU — President Obama celebrated a low-key Christmas in Hawaii this year. He sang carols, opened presents with his family, and visited a nearby military base to wish the troops "Mele Kalikimaka" — the Hawaiian phrase meaning "Merry Christmas."
But the one thing the president and his family did not do — something they have rarely done since he entered the White House — was attend Christmas church services.
"He has not gone to church, hardly at all, as president," said Gary Scott Smith, the author of "Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush," adding that it is "very unusual for a president not to attend" Christmas services.
Historically, watching the nation's first family head to church dressed in their Sunday best, especially around the holiday season, was something of a ritual. Yet Mr. Obama's faith is a more complicated, more private, and perhaps — religious and presidential historians say — a more inclusive affair.
And his religious habits appear to be in step with a changing America, with fewer people these days reporting that they attend church on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. According to a Pew Research Center study released this month, 54 percent of adults said they planned to attend Christmas religious services, while 69 percent said they traditionally did so as children.
Mr. Obama has gone to church 18 times during his six years in the White House, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, an unofficial White House historian, while his predecessor, Mr. Bush, attended 120 times during his eight years in office.
But those numbers do not reflect the depth of Mr. Obama's faith, said Joshua DuBois, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. "President Obama is a committed Christian," said Mr. DuBois, who sends the president a daily devotional by email, and is the author of "The President's Devotional."
"He has a serious practice of faith even though he doesn't necessarily wear it on his sleeve," he said.
Mr. Obama's religion first garnered national headlines during the 2008 campaign; after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. — Mr. Obama's spiritual mentor — included inflammatory remarks, Mr. Obama was ultimately forced to renounce the minister and sever ties with the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which he and his family had attended for 20 years.
But rumors that he was a "pretend Christian" or a Muslim Manchurian candidate — fueled by his Kenyan background and the boyhood years he spent in Indonesia — dogged him. A 2010 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that nearly one in five Americans thought the president was a Muslim, and 43 percent did not know what his religion was.
"I would argue that Obama's faith has been one of the most misunderstood of any president out there," Mr. Smith said.
People close to the president say that Mr. Obama's spiritual beliefs are profoundly held. In addition to the daily devotional he receives — which contains lines of Scripture and quotations from people as wide-ranging as Nina Simone and Johnny Cash — Mr. Obama regularly speaks to spiritual leaders on a variety of topics. Every year on his birthday, Mr. DuBois said, the president convenes a phone call with ministers "to thank God for the year that was and pray for the year ahead."
He has turned to his faith during difficult times, and is comfortable invoking Scripture; his speeches and remarks are peppered with the phrase "I am my brother's keeper," echoing the Old Testament phrase.
His vision of faith is also an inclusive one, perhaps an outgrowth of his own eclectic upbringing. He spent several childhood years in Indonesia, with its predominantly Muslim population, but attended a private Catholic grade school for much of that time; he later lived in Hawaii, a melting pot of cultures.
Mr. Obama set his own inclusive tone early, declaring during his first Inaugural Address, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers." He was the first president to hold an Easter prayer breakfast, and he also held the first Passover Seder at the White House, traditions he has repeated.
"He's very conscious of the fact that this is a pluralistic nation," said Randall Balmer, the chairman of Dartmouth College's religion department and the author of "God in the White House: A History."
Yet the public rituals of religion have proved tricky for Mr. Obama. When he arrived in Washington after his election in 2008, many of the city's churches began furiously vying to have him and his family join their congregation. As president, he has attended services at several of the city's African-American churches, as well as St. John's Episcopal Church, which is across the street from the White House. But he ultimately opted against choosing a spiritual home in the nation's capital.
"I think part of the reason he's been wary of affiliating with a church in Washington is that he got so burned by the Jeremiah Wright situation, and he's kind of backed away from that," Mr. Balmer said.
The public has long cared about the religion of its president. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, was not a regular churchgoer before he entered office. After he was elected, at the urging of the Rev. Billy Graham, he joined the Presbyterian Church, and was baptized, becoming a diligent member of the faith.
Part of Mr. Obama's decision to largely opt out of religious services reflects a desire to avoid disruptions by his Secret Service detail and security requirements, echoing concerns of Ronald Reagan, who presidential historians say rarely went to church.
"The important thing to President Obama isn't where you worship God, but how you serve God by serving other people," Mr. DuBois said.
Mr. Balmer put it more bluntly: "If the calculus is, 'Do I spend two hours going to church Sunday morning or do I get to watch college basketball Sunday afternoon?' If he had to choose between the two, and knowing Obama, he'd probably choose college basketball."
He added, with a laugh, "And that's a calculation many Americans make on a weekly basis."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 29, 2013
An earlier version of this article contained an incorrect statement about the Obamas' church attendance. They attended a Christmas church service in 2011; it is not the case that they never attended Christmas church services while at the White House.
JUBA, South Sudan — Regional leaders in East Africa announced Friday that they had made progress on a peace deal to help end the crisis in South Sudan, but there was no indication that either side in the conflict was abiding by a cease-fire.
Clashes between the rebels and the military continued as government forces launched a major offensive to retake a city in an oil-producing region. Soon after, the military announced that it had seized control of the city, Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile State and the scene of intense fighting in recent days.
"The push against Malakal began at 6:30 a.m. and was done by noon," said Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the military.
Having recaptured the strategic city of Bor this week, the government seemed to have the upper hand, however fleetingly, in the seesaw battle for control of this two-year-old country.
Clashes began last week after what President Salva Kiir described as an attempted coup led by his former vice president, Riek Machar. Mr. Machar denied that he was part of a plot to overthrow the government, but has since demanded that Mr. Kiir step down. Mr. Machar's political allies were arrested, and he fled Juba, remaining in an undisclosed location.
"We don't know his whereabouts; if we knew his whereabouts we would have arrested him," said Michael Makuei Lueth, the government information minister. Asked about the penalties facing Mr. Machar or other suspects in the coup plot, he raised the possibility of the death penalty, "either by firing squad or to be hanged by the neck."
Even so, the United States special envoy Donald Booth said Friday that Mr. Kiir had agreed to release most of Mr. Machar's colleagues who had been detained, a significant step toward fulfilling Mr. Machar's demands to formally begin negotiations, according to a State Department official.
The political struggle quickly took on an ethnic dimension, with attacks against civilians and reprisals between the two largest groups, the Dinka and the Nuer. The United Nations says more than 1,000 people have been killed in the conflict, though some observers said that with fighting in more than 20 cities and towns, the number of dead was likely to grow significantly.
The conflict in South Sudan has been the subject of grave concern in East Africa, with fears of a protracted and bloody civil war in the landlocked nation. Regional leaders said at a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, on Friday that they would not accept a violent overthrow of Mr. Kiir, who was democratically elected.
The meeting followed a trip to South Sudan by President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn of Ethiopia on Thursday.
"We have a very small window of opportunity to secure peace, which we urge all stakeholders to seize," Mr. Kenyatta said Friday.
It was clear, however, that no formal recognition of a cease-fire had been made by the rebels, and the government's military assault on Friday seemed to indicate that strategic considerations on the battlefield, more than politics, were ruling the day.
In a communiqué after the meeting, the leaders of the neighboring countries said they "welcomed the commitment by the government of the Republic of South Sudan to an immediate cessation of hostilities and called upon Dr. Riek Machar and other parties to make similar commitments."
In a statement on Friday, Doctors Without Borders said more than 70 wounded people had "flooded into the hospital" in Malakal. Witnesses there confirmed the government's account that it was in control of the city.
Bishop Hilary Garang Deng of Malakal said days of fighting had prevented residents from celebrating Christmas, as "bullets were flying in the air."
Rebel fighters looted the market, and those who tried to prevent that "were beaten up," he said.
"There was lawlessness," he added. "No water, no food, no electricity."
Nicholas Kulish reported from Juba, and Isma'il Kushkush from Khartoum, Sudan.
Seth Wenig/Associated Press
Paul Pierce, center, started for the Nets after coming off the bench in several recent games.
In a week when their tumultuous season may have reached its lowest point — a week marred by back-to-back 17-point losses, a season-ending injury to the All-Star center Brook Lopez and reports of locker-room turmoil — the Nets finished a three-game home stand by showing a glimpse of the play that many had envisioned when they talked of a title contender budding in Brooklyn.
"Losing is not something that we're getting comfortable with," Kevin Garnett said Friday after a 104-93 victory at home over the Milwaukee Bucks. "Tonight was definitely, Come out here, let's get a win, try and change this momentum around here."
The good vibes from the victory may not last long. On Saturday, the Nets (10-19) begin a three-game trip that will pit them against a series of teams — Indiana, San Antonio and Oklahoma City — that have proved themselves contenders. Before Friday's game, the Nets also announced that Andray Blatche would miss the next three games.
Coach Jason Kidd said that Blatche was out for "personal reasons" and that he would not accompany the team on the trip.
Despite the uninspiring play of the Nets and the Knicks this season, there are teams outside New York that are playing even worse. The Bucks, who have the league's worst record at 6-23, shot 37.5 percent from the field.
Milwaukee proved to be a remedy for the Nets' recent woes. After Lopez broke his right foot last Friday against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Nets entered the week facing a daunting challenge. The Eastern Conference-leading Pacers came first, easily defeating the Nets at Barclays Center, 103-86. Afterward, Kidd said his team was reaching a point where it seemed to accept losing.
"When things get tough, do we just give in? Most of the time, right now, we do," he said.
Two days later, on Christmas, the Nets were outplayed by the Chicago Bulls on national television, 95-78. The Bulls, another preseason pick to be a contender, have been decimated by injuries, but they out-hustled the Nets much as they did in last season's first-round playoff victory. After the loss, Deron Williams called the season a "nightmare." The following day, reports surfaced that Kidd and Kevin Garnett had voiced their displeasure in the locker room.
Before Friday's game, Kidd clarified his message. "It wasn't to call them out," Kidd said. "It was just a conversation in the locker room that we've got to compete."
Garnett said he did not want to share what had been said after the Chicago loss. "That has nothing to do with anybody here," he said. "That was a personal thing that I had with the team, and I want to keep it personal."
In the short term, the messages resonated with the players, who make up a $190 million roster.
The Nets played their 13th starting lineup Friday, adding the reserve point guard Shaun Livingston — who led the team with 20 points — to the backcourt alongside Deron Williams. Paul Pierce, who played seven of the last eight games coming off the bench, started in the frontcourt along with Joe Johnson and Garnett. Kidd said he had been looking for a more energetic lineup.
The revamping of the starting five paid off immediately, as the Nets took a 31-18 lead after the first quarter. Livingston and Williams combined for 11 of the Nets' first 15 points, while their smaller defensive lineup held the Bucks to 29.2 percent shooting.
"I thought it was the first quarter that really buried us and set the tone," Bucks Coach Larry Drew said.
Mirza Teletovic, who had started the last three games for Brooklyn, added five 3-pointers and scored a career-high 19 points.
Trailing by as many as 23 points in the fourth quarter, the Bucks were able to cut the Nets' lead to 88-79 on two free throws by Giannis Antetokounmpo with 3 minutes 2 seconds remaining. Kidd soon reinserted Williams, who had rested along with Garnett for the entire quarter.
With 1:03 remaining, Williams drew a charge on Milwaukee's Khris Middleton to seal the victory. Williams left the game and was greeted by celebrating teammates on the bench.
Whether the good times continue may hinge on whether the Nets have finally heeded their coach's message or just ran into a team on Friday that is having a worse season than they are.
Garnett, the player many expected to be the vocal leader of this team, said the Nets had displayed the fight and belief he expected of them.
"I wouldn't show up," he said, "if I didn't."
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Beno Udrih, starting again for the depleted Knicks, had 15 points and 10 assists.
A day after James L. Dolan's impromptu meeting with his embattled team, not much changed for the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.
Carmelo Anthony, Raymond Felton and Pablo Prigioni remained injured, relegated to watching from the bench as the Knicks fell to the Toronto Raptors, 95-83, on Friday.
The fans still booed. The offense still sputtered. The fourth quarter still belonged to the opponent, this time to the tune of a 29-12 dismantling by the fresh-legged Raptors.
In brief summation, Coach Mike Woodson may have awaked Friday comforted by a smidgen of security, but the problems that plagued the Knicks (9-20) through the first 28 games remained just as darkly stained on their performance in No. 29.
Dolan's meeting with the team, first reported by ESPN and confirmed by a person in the N.B.A. with knowledge of the situation, occurred at some point before practice or during practice Thursday, an effort to calm the disquiet around the franchise.
Dolan told the players to rest assured there would be no imminent deals and that they should play hard, according to the person, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the meeting.
With trade rumors, J. R. Smith's antics, a time-management fiasco against Washington and swelling criticism of Woodson's handling of the team, few days have passed quietly in the Knicks universe. The team has lost 7 of its last 11 games.
And Saturday's rematch with the Raptors looks equally bleak. Woodson said Anthony (sprained ankle) would not travel to Toronto and thus would miss his third consecutive game.
So the vote of confidence was curious timing again by Dolan, who shared his feelings with the team after a 29-point trouncing by Oklahoma City on Christmas Day. On Nov. 19, during his first interview with a news organization about the Knicks in seven years, Dolan told The New York Post: "I have a lot of confidence in Woodson."
The Knicks proceeded to lose seven consecutive games.
Woodson seemed slightly uncomfortable on the matter before the game, too, cutting off a reporter before he could even fully form a question beyond, "There have been some reports ——"
"I'm not commenting on that," Woodson said. He declined to comment when a second question was raised about the meeting as well.
Woodson's sensitivity was not out of the ordinary — he has regularly avoided in-house topics this season — but he has had to answer a lot about his job lately.
Indirectly, his answers typically wind back to his desire to coach with a full and healthy roster at his disposal, a desire that has come close to being fulfilled just once this season: on Monday in Orlando, for one half before Anthony and Felton were hurt.
With a complete team, Woodson said he believes it can still win the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference, which the Raptors lead at 12-15.
"We have not had a full deck," Woodson said before the game. "I'm talking about key guys that have been out. I'm just anxious to see where we are. Because I know if we've got a full deck, we've got a chance to win basketball games. I truly believe that."
Will a "full deck" be on the Knicks' horizon before Dolan decides to make a coaching change? That remains to be seen.
Iman Shumpert, with a left thigh contusion, nearly became the latest to join the team's injury list, but he suited up to play. As did Metta World Peace, who had missed the previous three games with knee soreness, saying before the game, in all apparent seriousness: "Aliens only want to win championships. That's it. Injuries is not a focus."
But neither Shumpert nor World Peace provided much beyond serviceable bodies in uniform on Friday. The Knicks led by as much as 12 in the third, but the Raptors charged back with ease in the fourth. Without Anthony to go to down the stretch, the offense stalled. A 3-pointer by John Salmons with eight minutes remaining gave Toronto its first lead, 74-73, since the second quarter.
"I felt like we had the game in control," center Tyson Chandler said. "We let it dwindle away in the fourth quarter. It's pretty disheartening."
Toronto kept up its attack as the Knicks slogged up and down the court in a daze.
Woodson said the team's short-handed lineup was a factor. The offense shot just 5 of 19 in the fourth.
"I played guys in long stretches based on the fact that we were short-handed," he said. "I rode the guys that got us the lead. I'm not using excuses, I thought maybe the legs kind of set in at the end and shots just weren't falling."
REBOUNDS
Coach Mike Woodson said guards Pablo Prigioni (broken toe) and Raymond Felton (groin) remained out indefinitely. Woodson had no timetable for Felton's return after he sustained his injury on Monday. "Right now he's just going through day-to-day treatment," Woodson said. "When he's ready, they'll let me know." Prigioni will most likely need another week or two, Woodson added.
WASHINGTON — Four American military personnel assigned to the United States Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, were detained Friday and then released after being held for hours by the country's Interior Ministry, American officials said.
The four were believed to have been reviewing potential evacuation routes for diplomats when they were detained, according to the initial reports received by officials in Washington. The State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said they were working on "security preparedness efforts" when they were taken into custody. The area where they were said to have been detained is not far from the main road to the Tunisian border from Tripoli, the capital.
After running into a problem at a checkpoint — many of which are run by local militias — they were detained and later moved to the Ministry of the Interior, said administration officials who asked not to be identified because they were discussing internal reports.
Photographs of two American passports and embassy identity cards were later disseminated on Twitter. It was not known if the passports belonged to any of the four military personnel.
The buzzing sound of drones filled Tripoli's sky for hours as rumors spread through the capital that four Americans were missing. Drones are not usually heard in Tripoli, although the sound is familiar in Benghazi.
The episode took place in a town just southwest of the historic Roman ruins at Sabratha and about an hour's drive from Tripoli, Ms. Psaki said. The area is not known for anti-Western extremists or other obvious threats. In part because it is a tourist area, the district around Sabratha skews relatively liberal and friendly to Westerners.
Since the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens on Sept. 11, 2012, employees of the American Embassy have operated with extraordinary caution.
But two years after the toppling of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, security remains tenuous even in and around Tripoli. Libya's transitional government has not yet managed to assemble a credible national army or police force. Many families or clans around the country keep heavy weapons, as do autonomous local militias formed during and after the Libyan uprising.
Rigorous security rules preclude any movements outside the heavily fortified embassy compound without advance planning and an armed guard. The compound is locked at night, and no one is permitted to enter or exit.
Counterterrorism has become a central focus of the work there, and the compound brims with well-armed security officers.
The area where the Americans were said to have been detained is controlled mainly by local tribes, not the central government, which is relatively weak even in its own capital. And in the Libyan context, it is easy to imagine that a foreigner with a diplomatic passport and a gun who was stopped at a checkpoint would be presumed to be a spy and therefore detained.
The brief detention of the Americans is an experience they share with Prime Minister Ali Zeidan. He was kidnapped from his room in a luxury hotel a few weeks ago, but then released hours later.
In the absence of a strong central government, Libyans have demonstrated both a propensity to use the threat of force to try to settle disputes but also a knack for working through networks of neighbors and clans to try to avoid such standoffs.
Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Buffalo. Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Thom Shanker from Washington.
Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times
"It's as if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing," said Abby Grosslein, a Vista volunteer in New Orleans.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has told Vista volunteers and other AmeriCorps workers that their government-provided health coverage does not measure up to the standards of the new health care law, and that they may be subject to financial penalties unless they obtain insurance elsewhere.
The notice has surprised and worried workers in AmeriCorps, the federal community service program that is often described as a domestic version of the Peace Corps.
Mary Strasser, the director of AmeriCorps' Vista program, described the changes in a bulletin to members on Dec. 16.
The coverage provided by the agency — the AmeriCorps Health Care Benefits Plan — "does not satisfy the individual responsibility requirement of the Affordable Care Act," which takes effect on Jan. 1, Ms. Strasser said. Accordingly, she said, Vista members may be required to pay a tax penalty if they do not have other coverage and do not receive an exemption.
The impact on community service workers is another unanticipated consequence of the health care law, which is making coverage available at little or no cost to many uninsured people but disrupting coverage for others who already had it.
Abby Grosslein, a Vista member in New Orleans, said she thought it was strange that the health benefits provided by a federal agency did not meet the standards of a law adopted more than three and a half years ago. "It would be nice if the government waived the penalty because we are a federally funded program," said Ms. Grosslein, 24, who is completing her third year of service with AmeriCorps. "It's as if the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing."
Moreover, she said: "The Affordable Care Act has been on the books since 2010. Why are we hearing only now that our health plan is not compliant?"
Thousands of private employers and state and local government agencies have revamped their employee health plans to meet the law's requirements. But AmeriCorps says that its members are technically not employees, and that it does not have to provide them with the "minimum essential coverage" they need to comply with the individual mandate. "There will be no changes to the AmeriCorps Health Care Benefits Plan," Ms. Strasser wrote.
Vista, or Volunteers in Service to America, was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963, authorized by Congress in 1964 and folded into the AmeriCorps network of programs in 1993. Its members work in education, housing, jobs and social service programs.
President Obama — a onetime community organizer — is a big supporter, and he has called public service "a central cause" of his administration. In March, the White House said that "AmeriCorps may be one of America's best assets," transforming communities every day.
Rick Christman of Lexington, Ky., a former member of the board of AmeriCorps' parent organization, the Corporation for National and Community Service, said no one expected that Vista workers would be subject to penalties because their health coverage was inadequate.
"It's unfortunate," Mr. Christman said.
Samantha Jo Warfield, a spokeswoman for the agency, said AmeriCorps members had several options: They can keep their current coverage; they can shop for coverage on the new insurance exchanges, including HealthCare.gov; and if they are under 26, they may be able to stay on their parents' insurance. In addition, some might be eligible for Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income people, which is being expanded in about half the states.
AmeriCorps members say their existing coverage, which pays for doctors' services, hospital care and prescription drugs, meets most of their needs. However, according to the members' handbook, "AmeriCorps does not provide benefits for any diagnosis that is considered a pre-existing condition," and the coverage for preventive care appears to be less than the law requires.
Sarah L. Sklaw, a 22-year-old Vista member from New York City, said: "I really support the Affordable Care Act, and I don't want to be a naysayer. But it was surprising and frustrating to be told that our health coverage would not meet the law's standards, especially because the Corporation for National and Community Service told us at orientation in August that we did not need to worry about the issue."
Other AmeriCorps members said they occasionally needed more extensive coverage to pay for treatment of pre-existing conditions or injuries requiring specialty care, and they noted that some members did dangerous work, such as fighting wildfires or building trails on steep mountains.
The AmeriCorps health plan is available at no cost to members of Vista and the National Civilian Community Corps, a residential program for young men and women, who help build homes, tutor children and provide disaster relief and other services.
Vista officials said that some members might qualify for exemptions from the individual mandate penalty because of their low incomes. Vista members receive allowances to cover the cost of food, housing and other basic necessities. But the amounts are low because members are expected to live at approximately the same economic level as those they serve.
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Ahmed Ashraf/Associated Press
Egypt's government accuses the Muslim Brotherhood of orchestrating a fatal attack on Tuesday.
CAIRO — Just a day after Egypt's military-backed government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group, a more aggressive crackdown was already emerging Thursday, as the authorities announced dozens of arrests across the country, and the seizure of land, stocks and vehicles belonging to the Islamist movement's members.
Social and charitable groups even loosely associated with the group struggled after their funds were frozen by the state. It was a new level of disruption to a society already riven by violence and suspicion in the months since the military ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president and a Brotherhood leader.
Egypt's new leaders clearly signaled that they had opened a wide-ranging and possibly protracted war on every facet of the Brotherhood's activities, with the terrorism designation giving the security forces greater latitude to stamp out a group deeply rooted in Egyptian social and civic life. The government had also sought to deny the group foreign help or shelter, urging other Arab governments to honor an antiterrorism agreement and shun the organization.
But there were also indications that the government might have overreached. After widespread confusion and concern about the funds cutoff, in particular, government officials partly reversed course on Thursday night, saying that the organizations whose funds had been frozen — more than a thousand of them — would be allowed access to money to continue operating.
One of the operations caught in the whipsaw was the Islamic Medical Association, a network of hospitals founded by a Brotherhood leader in the 1970s that now serves more than two million patients a year, mostly in poor neighborhoods.
At two of the network's hospitals in Cairo, most of the local residents waiting for treatment on Thursday said they did not belong to the Brotherhood and did not regard the facilities as part of the movement's operations. Instead, they saw clean, efficient and affordable alternatives to the government's poorly managed hospitals.
A doctor at one of the facilities, Central Hospital in the Nasr City district of Cairo, said Thursday that admissions had already dropped by nearly half, with many apparently scared away by news that funding had been cut and worried that even going to the hospital would be seen by the security forces as supporting the Brotherhood. An administrator there said the hospital began turning away new patients. At another clinic, in an impoverished corner of the Shubra neighborhood, neonatal incubators were shut down to save on power expenses.
"If it goes on like this, we won't be able to take on any patients," said Medhat Omar, the administrative director at Central Hospital. There was no money to pay salaries or the mounting expenses owed to the state. "The government will not give up what we owe it."
Despite the government's about-face on the frozen funds, it was still unclear how or when cash would be freed up. And the Justice Ministry, which made the announcement, did not clarify whether the organizations would be allowed to accept new donations, which many rely on as their primary source of income.
It also remained to be seen whether the government would carry out the policy uniformly, or selectively reinstate the penalties to punish groups seen as too close to the Brotherhood.
Even so, the reversal underscored the difficulties the government faces in its current campaign against the Brotherhood, a more than 80-year-old movement that officials have tried to portray as an essentially foreign plant that secretly harbored violent ambitions.
The reality — of a movement whose members are deeply integrated into Egypt's economic and social life, and a political force that has emerged after the uprising in 2011 as the most successful competitor in democratic elections — has muddied the government's portrait of the group and stymied a campaign to eradicate it after driving it from power in July.
"You never know what you're going to find," said one of the officers, Sgt. Marshall Winston, who has policed public housing for 23 years. "Sometimes we catch somebody with a gun. Other times we catch somebody with drugs. And sometimes you just catch somebody down on their luck."
The patrols, known as verticals, are painstaking police work, and for the New York City Housing Authority, they do not come cheap. About 2,000 officers are assigned to the projects, and Nycha, as the authority is known, pays the Police Department about $70 million a year. The payment is a legacy of the mergers that brought the transit and housing authority police forces into the New York Police Department almost 20 years ago.
But the housing authority's increasingly strained finances have focused attention on the payments, and Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who will be sworn in on Wednesday, has promised to end them. At a forum during the mayoral campaign, Mr. de Blasio said the money "was taken on the assumption that Nycha was just awash in federal money, all these wonderful resources coming into Nycha. And that hasn't been true for decades."
Indeed, the housing authority has been adapting to a new reality that has left it with far less in subsidies, even as the demand for low- and moderate-income housing has grown. In a bid to raise money for repairs and maintenance, the city has been soliciting ideas for building market-rate apartments on open space in a handful of public housing developments.
For the housing authority, holding onto the money it pays each year to the Police Department would be helpful, though a modest gain. One proposal calls for using the payments to leverage financing for $1 billion in much needed capital improvements in the city's 344 housing projects.
Ending the payment would require the two agencies to recast their relationship for the first time since the merger in 1995. The police commissioner at the time was none other than William J. Bratton, who has been chosen by Mr. de Blasio to lead the Police Department once again.
A change could become entangled in the continuing debate over the Police Department's stop-and-frisk practices. Those tactics were especially common at some projects and fueled tensions between tenants and officers. The police and others have pointed to the relatively high level of crime in public housing. According to the Police Department, about 20 percent of the city's violent crimes take place in projects, home to about 5 percent of city residents.
About two-thirds of crimes in public housing are violent, compared with about one-third citywide. So far this year, 55 of the city's 328 homicides and 144 of the 1,365 rapes have occurred in public housing. (The number of robberies so far this year in public housing — 1,140 out of 18,634 citywide — is roughly proportional to the population.)
The locations of public housing, often in higher-crime neighborhoods, and the layout of the complexes heighten the need for more policing, said Fritz Umbach of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who wrote a history of the housing police, "The Last Neighborhood Cops."
"Public housing is a unique policing context, not because the residents are more criminally prone, but because the architecture is distinctive and where it is in the city is distinctive," he said. "This presents unique police challenges that can only be met with these over-and-above services."
Landlords of thousands of private residential buildings across the city have authorized the Police Department to patrol their hallways and stairwells, and the police do so — at their discretion — without charging.
The opposition to funneling federal housing subsidies to the Police Department has been building as the authority's budget has come up shorter each year. In a report last year, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer, now the comptroller-elect, said public housing "residents are essentially charged twice for policing services — once through local taxes like all other New Yorkers and once through the reimbursement required of their landlord." Public housing developments are exempt from property taxes, but the authority pays the city about $28 million a year in lieu of property taxes.
The housing authority chairman, John B. Rhea, said that discontinuing the police payments "should be on the table," but not at the expense of policing.
