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The City Council overwhelmingly passed two bills on Wednesday that would further restrict New York's cooperation with federal authorities seeking to deport immigrants.
The bills were introduced in response to Secure Communities, a federal program that has become a cornerstone of the Obama administration's immigration enforcement strategy.
Under the program, the fingerprints of a suspect booked at a local jail are sent to the Homeland Security Department and compared with those in its files. If officials find that a suspect is in the country illegally or is a noncitizen with a criminal record, they may issue "a detainer" — a request that the police hold the person so that he or she can be transferred to federal custody.
The program has drawn the opposition of immigrants' advocates, and some elected officials across the country have sought to limit their jurisdictions' participation, in part by restricting cooperation with detainer requests.
The Council, which is dominated by Democrats, approved each bill by 40 to 7. Three Democrats joined the Council's four Republicans in opposition.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is expected to sign both bills.
The bills ban the city from honoring detainers except in limited circumstances. For example, immigrants must have had a previous felony conviction or be facing a felony charge; or they must have been included in a federal gang database or on a terrorist watch list; or they must have had outstanding criminal warrants or previous orders of deportation; or they must have been charged with one of several misdemeanors, including sexual abuse, assault and gun possession.
In addition, the proposed laws would allow the city to honor a detainer request for an immigrant convicted of a misdemeanor as long as the conviction occurred within the past decade and was not for unlicensed driving, prostitution or loitering for the purposes of prostitution.
But the laws would block detainers for immigrants facing all but the most serious misdemeanor charges.
The measures expand the restrictions on detainers that were passed by the Council and signed into law by Mr. Bloomberg in 2011.
"We have seen too many families torn apart by current detention and deportation practices," the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said in a statement. "Our legislation will ensure that the city does not enable such a harmful policy."
Still, the practical effects of the bills are unclear because they roughly echo guidelines issued recently by the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which handles detentions and deportations.
In a Dec. 21 memorandum, the director, John Morton, instructed field agents to issue detainers only for certain immigrants, including those who had been convicted of serious crimes, had been deported once and returned illegally or posed a threat to public safety.
The guidance, the agency said in a news release at the time, "restricts the use of detainers against individuals arrested for minor misdemeanor offenses such as traffic offenses and other petty crimes, helping to ensure that available resources are focused on apprehending felons, repeat offenders and other ICE priorities."
By Mac William Bishop, Ben Werschkul, Erica Berenstein, Lisa Desai, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Abe Sater, Kriston Lewis and Robin Lindsay
Voting Procedures: A lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund talks about arguing in favor of the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court.
If the court overturns the provision, nine states, mostly in the South, would become free to change voting procedures without first getting permission from federal officials.
In a vivid argument in which the lawyers and justices drew varying lessons from the legacies of slavery, the Civil War and the civil rights movement, the court's conservative wing suggested that the modern South had outgrown its troubled past and that the legal burdens on the nine states were no longer justified.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked skeptically whether "the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North." Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose vote is probably crucial, asked whether Alabama today is an "independent sovereign" or whether it must live "under the trusteeship of the United States government."
Justice Antonin Scalia said the law, once a civil rights landmark, now amounted to a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."
That remark created the sharpest exchange of the morning, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the other end. "Do you think that the right to vote is a racial entitlement?" she later asked a lawyer challenging the law, with an edge in her voice that left little doubt she was responding to Justice Scalia's statement. "Do you think that racial discrimination in voting has ended, that there is none anywhere?"
The outcome of the case will most likely remain in doubt until the end of the court's current term, in June. Many legal observers predicted that the justices would overturn part of the voting law in 2009, when the court had the same conservative-leaning majority, only to be proven wrong.
One important change, however, is that Chief Justice Roberts suggested in the 2009 ruling that Congress update its formula to determine which parts of the country should remain subject to the law. Congress has not done so.
The question at the heart of Wednesday's argument was whether Congress, in reauthorizing the provision for 25 years in 2006, was entitled to use a formula based on historic practices and voting data from elections held decades ago.
Should the court strike down the law's central provision, it would be easier for lawmakers in the nine states to enact the kind of laws Republicans in several states have recently advocated, including tighter identification standards. It would also give those states more flexibility to move polling places and redraw legislative districts.
The four members of the court's liberal wing, citing data and history, argued that Congress remained entitled to make the judgment that the provision was still needed in the covered jurisdictions. The law passed the Senate unanimously and House overwhelmingly, by a vote of 390 to 33 in 2006.
"It's an old disease," Justice Stephen G. Breyer said of efforts to thwart minority voting. "It's gotten a lot better. A lot better. But it's still there."
Justice Kennedy said that history taught a different lesson, referring to the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. "The Marshall Plan was very good, too," he said. "But times change."
Justice Breyer looked to a different conflict.
"What do you think the Civil War was about?" he asked. "Of course it was aimed at treating some states differently than others." He also said that the nation lived through 200 years of slavery and 80 years of racial segregation.
Debo P. Adegbile, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which joined the government in defending the law, echoed that point. "This statute is in part about our march through history to keep promises that our Constitution says for too long were unmet," he said.
The law was challenged by Shelby County, Ala., which said that its federal preclearance requirement, in Section 5 of the law, had outlived its usefulness and that it imposed an unwarranted badge of shame on the affected jurisdictions.
The county's lawyer, Bert W. Rein, said that "the problem to which the Voting Rights Act was addressed is solved."
Jacquelyn Martin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
John Kerry, on his first overseas tour as secretary of state, met with President François Hollande of France in Paris on Wednesday.
WASHINGTON — The United States is significantly stepping up its support for the Syrian opposition, senior administration officials said on Wednesday, helping to train rebels at a base in the region and for the first time offering armed groups nonlethal assistance and equipment that could help their military campaign.
The training mission, already under way, represents the deepest American involvement yet in the Syrian conflict, though the size and scope of the mission is not clear, nor is its host country. The offer of nonlethal assistance is expected to come from Secretary of State John Kerry at a meeting on Thursday in Rome with opposition leaders. Mr. Kerry is also expected to raise the prospect of direct financial aid, though officials cautioned that the White House still had to sign off on all the elements.
Before arriving in Rome on Wednesday, Mr. Kerry declared in Paris that the Syrian opposition needed additional assistance and indicated that the United States and its partners planned to provide some.
Under a broad definition of "nonlethal," assistance to the opposition could include items like vehicles, communications equipment and night vision gear. The Obama administration has said it will not — at least for now — provide arms to the opposition.
One major goal of the administration is to help the opposition build up its credibility within Syria by providing traditional government services to the civilian population. Since the conflict erupted two years ago, the United States has sent $365 million in humanitarian aid to Syrians. American officials have been increasingly worried that extremist members of the resistance against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, notably the Al Nusra Front, which the United States has asserted is affiliated with Al Qaeda, will take control of portions of Syria and cement its authority by providing public services, much as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon.
"Some folks on the ground that we don't support and whose interests do not align with ours are delivering some of that help," Mr. Kerry said.
To blunt the power of extremist groups, the United States wants to help the Syrian Opposition Council, the coalition of Syrian resistance leaders it backs and helped organize, deliver basic services in areas that have been wrested from the control of the Assad government.
Another major goal in providing assistance is to jump-start negotiations over a political transition by sending a message to Mr. Assad that the rebels would ultimately prevail on the ground.
"He needs to know that he can't shoot his way out of this," Mr. Kerry said of Mr. Assad.
The main significance of the policy shift, officials said, is not just the type of equipment that would be sent to the opposition, but who the recipients would be.
Until now, none of the aid the United States has supplied has been sent to the Free Syrian Army fighters, who are doing battle with Mr. Assad. Rather, the distribution of assistance has been limited to local councils and unarmed groups. But this would change if the administration expanded its assistance.
What remains off the table, at least as far as the White House is concerned, are weapons. President Obama last year rejected a proposal by the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the Pentagon to arm a select cadre of rebels. American officials indicated Wednesday that the White House was still opposed to providing weapons.
Still, one official said that the financing the United States planned to send to the resistance might indirectly help the rebels arm themselves as it might free up other funds to purchase weapons.
The United States is not the only nation that is planning to take the step of sending nonlethal assistance to armed groups. Last week, the European Union agreed to a British proposal that nonlethal equipment could be sent. Britain and other members are currently discussing precisely what sort of equipment would be allowed under the terms of the European decision.
"In the face of such murder and threat of instability, our policy cannot stay static as the weeks go by," the British foreign secretary, William Hague, said after a meeting with Mr. Kerry in London on Monday. "We must significantly increase support for the Syrian opposition. We are preparing to do just that."
The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, also called for increased support to the opposition after a meeting with Mr. Kerry in Paris on Wednesday, although he did not specify what sort of aid France planned to provide.
"If we want to have a new regime, we have to encourage the opposition," Mr. Fabius said. "We have to help the situation to move."
The comments of the secretary of state and allied officials have generated considerable expectations for the Thursday meeting, which will be attended by Moaz al-Khatib, the leader of the Syrian opposition coalition, and other coalition members.
Earlier this week, Mr. Khatib had balked at attending the meeting, reflecting the deep disappointment in the Syrian opposition over what it feels is the failure of major powers to help in its effort to defeat Mr. Assad. But he relented after a phone call from Mr. Kerry, which was followed up by a call from Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Kerry's meeting with Mr. Khatib will be his first with the Syrian opposition leader. Mr. Kerry said the input from the opposition would enable the administration to assess what steps were needed.
Among the unanswered questions is how additional American aid would be channeled to the rebel groups. If it flows through the Supreme Military Council affiliated with the Syrian opposition coalition, some experts said, it may not reach the armed groups that are making the biggest gains against the Assad government.
"The problem is the Supreme Military Council does not have tentacles on the ground," said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert and senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If you provide a bunch of bandages and body armor to them, it may not matter much."
Still, Mr. Tabler said the administration's decision to take this step was a welcome sign that its policy of steering clear of any military involvement in the conflict was no longer tenable.
"They're still reluctant, so they're moving incrementally," he said. "But the Obama administration has to look at one reality: what they have done isn't working."
Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Michael R. Gordon from Rome.
For much of Wednesday morning, grotesque threats and ruminations of torture and cannibalism filled the courtroom, one bizarre chat-room discussion after another about kidnapping, killing and eating young women.
In one message read to the jury by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Officer Gilberto Valle of the New York City police wrote that he had picked out a victim and planned to use a stun gun on her. He would then place her in an oven, and cook her at a relatively low heat, "just for my own entertainment and for her suffering," Officer Valle wrote to a man who claimed to be a butcher in Pakistan.
"My mouth is WATERING," the officer had written.
But when a defense lawyer cross-examined the agent about the thousands of Officer Valle's chats and messages that the F.B.I. had reviewed, the tenor of the trial, in its third day in Federal District Court in Manhattan, changed.
The agent, Corey Walsh, testified that investigators had concluded that only three of the two dozen people Officer Valle had exchanged messages with online had been involved in the plotting of real crimes with him. In his communications with about 21 other people, the agent said, Officer Valle had been engaged in fantasy role play.
In a series of withering questions, the lawyer, Robert M. Baum, appeared to try to show that the government had selectively introduced the most damaging of the officer's messages to portray Officer Valle as someone plotting real crimes, while rejecting other chats that did not fit that portrayal.
The clash between real and fantasy was a recurring theme in the courtroom, as Mr. Baum introduced messages for the jury that the bureau had concluded were fantasy role-playing, in which Officer Valle had written that he was not involved in actual crimes.
In one message last April, the officer wrote that it was "fun to chat and push the envelope." When asked how many he had "done," an apparent reference to killing and eating people, he wrote, "in my imagination a lot. Haha."
"I just like to get a little dirty with the ideas," he wrote to another person in February 2012. "I just have a world in my mind and in that world, I am kidnapping women and selling them to people interested in buying them."
The crux of the dispute in Officer Valle's trial has been the government's contention that the officer was plotting actual crimes through his online communications with co-conspirators like the man in Pakistan, and that he also carried out additional acts like conducting surveillance of potential victims. The officer's lawyers have argued that their client was merely engaged in playing out dark fantasies on fetish Web sites that are used by thousands of people. Charges against the officer include conspiracy to commit kidnapping.
Agent Walsh also testified under cross-examination that the F.B.I. did not conduct surveillance of Officer Valle for more than a month after his wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, first told the bureau last September about her husband's disturbing e-mails and behavior. He was arrested in late October. Mr. Baum also noted that Officer Valle had written about placing a body in the trunk of his car and asked whether the bureau had searched the trunk or checked for DNA there. The agent answered no.
"You didn't search to determine whether there was ever a body in that trunk?"
"No sir," the agent said.
Agent Walsh had cited the factors he used to differentiate communications that involved real crimes from fantasy role play. The factors included the use of actual victims' names in messages and discussions of past crimes.
Mr. Baum introduced copies of communications that the bureau had concluded were part of fantasy role playing to show that they, too, included the same kinds of discussion of actual victims as well as having other similarities, like methods of torture and even bargaining over the price of the kidnap victims, $4,000 and $5,000.
Earlier in the day, Agent Walsh, under direct examination by a prosecutor, Hadassa Waxman, read aloud additional messages that Officer Valle had exchanged with the man in Pakistan.
"I am not into the humane stuff either," Officer Valle wrote about one woman, Andria Noble, a friend from college, who had testified earlier in the week. "It's personal with Andria. She will absolutely suffer."
Mel Evans/Associated Press
The Revel casino and resort in Atlantic City, which opened last year, has announced it is entering bankruptcy. This week, New Jersey legalized Internet gambling.
TRENTON — A generation ago, New Jersey introduced casino gambling to Atlantic City to boost the sagging fortunes of the nation's most famous boardwalk resort.
Now, with the casinos themselves ailing — a shimmering $2.6 billion resort built with tax incentives announced last week that it was entering bankruptcy less than a year after it opened — the state is doubling down.
Having grown accustomed to the boost that gambling dollars provides its budget, the state is leading the race to embrace increasingly popular but still controversial models that would extend betting well beyond the destination casino approach.
Gov. Chris Christie signed a bill on Tuesday authorizing Internet gambling, which would allow people to play casino games from their mobile phones or laptops. He is also in court fighting a federal ban on sports betting, having signed a law last year that would legalize it.
At the same time, hotels in Atlantic City are experimenting with in-room gambling, as accessible and private as a minibar or on-demand movies. And lawmakers on the opposite side of the state envision pop-up casinos — one legislator likened them to county fairs — at concerts or sporting events.
Much as Atlantic City set the model for the explosion of casinos across the country over the last 20 years, New Jersey's move signals the future of gambling, as states try to tap into the money already flowing to the black market or offshore betting companies, and entice a new generation of gamblers who might graduate from FarmVille to online blackjack, and ideally to an actual casino.
Mr. Christie, a Republican, called the Internet gambling bill a "historic opportunity to continue the state's leadership as a premier destination for tourism and entertainment."
He also pointed to the damage Hurricane Sandy brought to the state, saying, "In the wake of devastating losses suffered by our residents in recent months, we must embrace new ideas to fuel our reconstruction and continued prosperity."
While New Jersey is pushing hardest, other states are not far behind. Delaware and Nevada recently signing bills to allow online betting.
It remains unclear, however, whether the moves will save the traditional gambling industry and provide a boon in tax revenues, or ultimately produce more competition for a limited pool of gamblers.
Arguments about the dangers of people's gambling their savings away have been all but absent. Lawmakers here were mostly concerned about who would get what piece of the pie — the casinos, the racetracks or the state. The one senator to vote against Internet gambling, Michael Doherty, objected only because he argued the smarter move was to build casinos close to big population centers.
Donald Weinbaum, the director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, said: "Increased access to gambling increases the incidence of gambling addictions, and the Internet could not be more accessible. It's going to accelerate the progression of problems for people who are already at risk."
When casinos first opened in Atlantic City, New Jersey voters were firm that they wanted to limit the growth of gambling. They rejected a 1974 referendum to allow casinos statewide, but narrowly approved one two years later that allowed them only within the confines of the city, a once-glamorous beach community that had the nation's first boardwalk but had lost tourists to other resorts and gained a reputation for crime.
For a time, it was the Eastern capital of American gambling. Casino revenues rose every year, even as Indian casinos opened new fronts in Connecticut.
But in 2007, gross operating profits tumbled 9.6 percent, to $1.25 billion. Casino profits declined around 25 percent in subsequent years, lost to the lure of casinos in neighboring Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania.
Still, New Jersey counts on the casinos for about $300 million in tax revenue. Recognizing Atlantic City's importance, Mr. Christie adopted in 2010 a five-year plan to save it, creating a tourism district and a $30 million marketing plan. When investors threatened not to build Revel, the first new casino since 2003, the governor offered $261 million in tax incentives to prop it up.
With Revel now in bankruptcy, the focus is on the new gambling options to save Atlantic City.
Mr. Christie's budget counts on taking in $180 million in tax revenue from Internet gambling next year. Supporters estimate that New Jersey's casinos and racetracks would take in more than $1 billion annually.
Internet gambling will route through servers in the casinos and be available only to people using the Web inside New Jersey. The casinos hope to be able to connect with new players and lure them with vouchers for the free rooms and other bonuses they now offer the highest rollers.
Regulators have escalated an investigation into suspicious trades placed ahead of the $23 billion takeover of H. J. Heinz, focusing on a complex derivative bet routed through London, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The development builds on a recent regulatory action mounted against a Goldman Sachs account in Switzerland that bought Heinz options contracts. It also comes a week after the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it opened a criminal inquiry.
An unusual spike in trading volume in Heinz options a day before the deal was announced first attracted investigators. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also examining fluctuations in ordinary stock trades. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street's self-regulatory group, recently referred suspicious stock trades to the S.E.C., a person briefed on the matter said.
Now the S.E.C. is looking into a more opaque corner of the investing world, examining a product known as a contract-for-difference, a derivative that allows investors to bet on changes in the price of stocks without owning the shares. Such contracts are not regulated in the United States, but are popular in Britain. Regulators there recently opened an inquiry into the Heinz trades, one of the people briefed on the matter said.
The expansion of the Heinz investigation illustrates the growing challenges facing American regulators. Charged with policing the American exchanges, authorities increasingly find themselves having to hunt through a dizzyingly complex global marketplace.
After a number of prominent crackdowns on insider stock trading, a campaign that scared the markets, investors are seeking subtler and more sophisticated tools to seize on confidential tidbits. Trading operations also flocked overseas, a careful move that forces the S.E.C. to navigate a maze of international regulations before identifying suspect traders.
The Heinz case illustrates the shift, as the S.E.C. relies on Swiss authorities to expose the trader behind the Heinz options bets.
The suspicious options trades were routed through a Goldman Sachs account in Zurich, where laws prevent the firm from sharing details of the account holder's identity. In a complaint filed two weeks ago, the S.E.C. froze the account of "one or more unknown traders." A federal judge upheld that freeze last week, a move that will prevent the traders from spending their winnings or moving the money.
The series of well-timed options trades, bets that produced $1.7 million in potential profits, came just a day before Berkshire Hathaway and the investment firm 3G Capital announced that they had agreed to buy the ketchup maker. News of the deal sent the company's shares, and the value of the options contracts, soaring.
The S.E.C. called the trading "highly suspicious," given that there was scant options trading in Heinz in previous months.
"Irregular and highly suspicious options trading immediately in front of a merger or acquisition announcement is a serious red flag," Daniel M. Hawke, head of the commission's market abuse unit, said recently.
While the identity remains a secret, the account holder is a Goldman private wealth management client, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record. Goldman executives in Zurich know the identity of the person, but laws prohibit those executives from sharing the name with American regulators and even Goldman executives outside of Switzerland.
Finma, the Swiss regulator, is the gatekeeper for American regulators. The S.E.C. contacted Finma in an effort to learn more about the trading, and the Swiss regulator has promised to help. It could take weeks to identify the traders.
Goldman has hired outside counsel to advise it on the situation, according to people briefed on the situation who were not authorized to speak on the record. The bank, which is not accused of wrongdoing, is cooperating with the investigation.
An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment.
The agency's inquiry may cast a cloud over the Heinz deal. After the traders are identified, the focus will turn to the insiders who had information on the deal and could have leaked details. Dozens of people had confidential information about the deal, including bankers, lawyers and executives for both the buyers and the seller.
As the agency continues to build its case against the options trades, it also is examining suspicious contracts-for-difference.
Investors increasingly favor the contracts because they require little capital investment and can be traded on margin. They are popular on the London Stock Exchange, where regulators are now focusing some attention.
In essence, the derivatives contracts are a side bet on the price of a stock. They have drawn criticism for being opaque, in part because users are not actually trading the shares of a company, but rather a contract linked to those shares.
Regulators have examined the use of the contracts before when accusations of insider trading have arisen. In 2008, the British Financial Services Authority fined an investor for market abuse, saying the investor had used a contract-for-difference to profit from inside information on the Body Shop, a retailer. The person was making a bet in this case that the shares would fall in value.
Despite the focus on such complex products in the Heinz case, the S.E.C. is also examining more mundane activity in equity trades ahead of the deal.
Finra is helping the agency build its investigation. The group's Office of Fraud Detection and Market Intelligence is coordinating with the S.E.C.
A Finra official declined to comment on Wednesday.
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Anthony Orlando Williams was released last week after nearly three years in an immigration detention center in Georgia.
Federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from detention centers around the country in recent days in a highly unusual effort to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said Tuesday.
The government has not dropped the deportation cases against the immigrants, however. The detainees have been freed on supervised release while their cases continue in court, officials said.
But the decision angered many Republicans, including Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, who said the releases were a political gambit by the Obama administration that undermined the continuing negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform and jeopardized public safety.
"It's abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration," said Mr. Goodlatte, who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is running the House hearings on immigration reform. "By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives."
A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, said the detainees selected for release were "noncriminals and other low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal histories."
Officials said the releases, which began last week and continued on Tuesday, were a response to the possibility of automatic governmentwide budget cuts, known as sequestration, which are scheduled to take effect on Friday.
"As fiscal uncertainty remains over the continuing resolution and possible sequestration, ICE has reviewed its detained population to ensure detention levels stay within ICE's current budget," the agency's spokeswoman, Gillian M. Christensen, said in a statement. The agency's budget for custody operations in the current fiscal year is $2.05 billion, officials said, and as of Saturday, ICE was holding 30,773 people in its detention system.
Immigration officials said Tuesday that they had no plans to release substantially more detainees this week, though they warned that more releases were still possible depending on the outcome of budget negotiations.
They refused to specify exactly how many detainees were released, or where the releases took place. But immigrants' advocates around the country have reported that detainees were freed in several places, including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk County, Tex.; Broward County, Fla.; New Orleans; and from centers in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and New York.
While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release, immigration advocates said that the surge of recent releases — so many in such a short span of time — was extraordinary.
Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at a regional immigration office as well as wearing electronic monitoring bracelets, officials said.
Advocacy groups, citing the cost of detaining immigrants, have for years argued that the federal government should make greater use of less expensive alternatives to detention for low-risk defendants being held on administrative charges.
One such group, the National Immigration Forum, estimated last year that it cost from $122 to $164 a day to hold a detainee in the federal immigration system. In contrast, the organization said, alternative forms of detention could cost from 30 cents to $14 a day per immigrant.
Among those released in the past week was Anthony Orlando Williams, 52, a Jamaican immigrant who spent nearly three years in a detention center in Georgia. "I'm good, man," he said. "I'm free."
Mr. Williams, in a telephone interview from Stone Mountain, Ga., said he became an illegal immigrant when he overstayed a visa in 1991. He was detained in 2010 by a sheriff's deputy in Gwinnett County, Ga., when it was discovered that he had violated probation for a conviction in 2005 of simple assault, simple battery and child abuse, charges that sprung from a domestic dispute with his wife at the time. He was transferred to ICE custody and has been fighting a deportation order with the help of Families for Freedom, an immigrant support group in New York.
Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.
CHICAGO — Riding a wave of "super PAC" spending that helped catapult her to the front of a crowded Democratic field, Robin Kelly, whose campaign called for tougher national gun laws, clinched her party's nomination Tuesday in a special primary election for the House seat vacated by Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr.
The outcome of the contest, which had been unexpectedly cast into the center of the national gun debate, was welcome news for Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York and a staunch gun-control advocate. He poured more than $2.2 million into attacking Ms. Kelly's chief opponent, Debbie Halvorson, this month.
Flooding Chicago airwaves, Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC, Independence USA, ran a series of advertisements criticizing Ms. Halvorson for opposing certain gun control measures and endorsing Ms. Kelly as the alternative candidate.
The advertising campaign, a huge amount for a single House race, set up Ms. Halvorson's defeat on Tuesday as a shot across the bow to other Democrats supporting gun rights, a sign of what could await future candidates who do not align with Mr. Bloomberg's quest to change firearm laws across the country.
Because of the political makeup of the district, Ms. Kelly is now all but certain to win the general election on April 9.
"We made a concerted effort to say from the very beginning that this was not going to be about money, it was going to be about people," Ms. Halvorson said. "Little did we know how much it wasn't going to be about the money on our part."
Mr. Bloomberg has been vocal about his plan to spend some of his personal fortune on candidates who share his views on specific policy issues, including firearms. "As Congress considers the president's gun package," he said in a statement after the Chicago results came in, "voters in Illinois have sent a clear message: we need common-sense gun legislation now."
In Illinois's Second Congressional District, which includes parts of the South Side of Chicago and southern suburban counties, Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC financed a wave of mailers and television advertisements that criticized Ms. Halvorson, a former House member, for having gotten an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association in earlier elections and for opposing bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazine clips.
Ms. Halvorson, who supports universal background checks for gun buyers, was forced to defend her positions at campaign stops throughout the district.
Last week, the Illinois State Rifle Association responded to Mr. Bloomberg's effort by sending out mailers asking its members in the district to vote for Ms. Halvorson on Tuesday. Ms. Halvorson said she had not asked for the endorsement.
She was considered a front-runner after Mr. Jackson resigned in November, just weeks after his re-election. He pleaded guilty last week to one count of fraud for spending campaign money on personal expenses and celebrity memorabilia.
Ms. Halvorson, who is white, challenged Mr. Jackson and lost in a primary election last year. She mustered about 29 percent of the vote to Mr. Jackson's 71 percent in the district, which has an African-American majority.
This time, a similar showing was thought to be enough to hand Ms. Halvorson a victory. With the chance that other candidates could divide the support of black voters, African-American community leaders raised concerns about the possibility of losing a seat that has been held by a black congressman for three decades.
In her victory speech, Ms. Kelly, a former state representative who has worked as a chief of staff for the Illinois state treasurer, told supporters they had sent "a message that tells the N.R.A. that their days of holding our country hostage are coming to an end."
Her calls for more gun control came as Chicago has been in the national spotlight for its level of gun violence.
"Guns were in the air," said Don Rose, a longtime political consultant in Chicago. "It would have gotten some attention anyway, but once Bloomberg put the money in there, he defined it."
Kim Kwang Hyon/Associated Press
The former N.B.A. star Dennis Rodman met with reporters Tuesday after arriving in Pyongyang.
Dennis Rodman may not come across as the most natural choice for a sports star turned American diplomat, but North Korea apparently begs to differ. Rodman has traveled to Pyongyang along with three Harlem Globetrotters and a documentary film crew for some basketball exhibitions and, the film company hopes, an audience with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is said to be a devoted basketball fan.
The group landed in Pyongyang on Tuesday, giving a round of interviews to journalists at the airport. "We got invited and we just came over to have some fun," Rodman said. "Hopefully, everything will be O.K. and the kids will have a good time with the games."
The visit to North Korea, a country with a brutal dictatorship, comes at a particularly tense time in U.S.-North Korean diplomacy, with North Korea's recent announcement of a nuclear test aggravating an already strained relationship.
But one warm spot between the countries is apparently basketball, something the Vice magazine founder Shane Smith realized while filming two documentaries in North Korea recently. He visited the country's national museum, the Hall of Trophies, where a Michael Jordan-signed basketball given to the former leader Kim Jong-il in 2000 by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is displayed prominently among national treasures. Kim Jong-il was obsessed with the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s, a fascination he apparently passed along to his son, the current leader.
"It's weird because when you go there, it's all very anti-American," Smith said. "North Korean kids are fed anti-American propaganda from pretty much the day they are born. But it's O.K. to like American basketball."
So Smith hatched a plan to take some of those Bulls players to North Korea for one of the installments of a series Smith will host on HBO, called "Vice," featuring news and footage from around the world, which will make its debut April 5. Smith did not go through the State Department but received permission through his previous contacts and the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations. Smith said he was sure that Kim Jong-un's love of basketball was why the trip was approved.
He quickly found that Jordan was not likely to be a willing ambassador. "But Dennis is up for anything and everything, " Smith said. He then recruited the Globetrotters to round out a team, and they offered up Anthony Blakes, known as Buckets; Alex Weekes, known as Moose; and Will Bullard, known as Bull. Ryan Duffy, a Vice correspondent who is on the trip, will also join in on the games to fill out the team.
"The Harlem Globetrotters are known worldwide as the Ambassadors of Goodwill, and we are proud to continue our storied heritage of entertaining families and breaking down social barriers worldwide," the Globetrotters' chief executive, Kurt Schneider, said in a statement. "Our aim is to entertain and inspire children everywhere. Every child deserves that opportunity."
According to the Globetrotters, team members have traveled to 122 countries in the team's 87-year history. This one might be the oddest trip of all, given North Korea's isolation.
"It is a bizarre place," Smith said. "And this is a bizarre idea."
It certainly qualified as a spectacle when the group arrived, even though Rodman was dressed rather conservatively — for him — in a sweat jacket and pants and an array of facial piercings. In North Korea, after all, men are not allowed to have so much as facial hair. The Globetrotters were more colorful in their bright red gear, with Weekes's trademark Afro in its full expanse.
The group plans to spend four to five days, visit a children's sports camp and play some games with North Korean players.
They tried to make a good first impression with the North Korean news media upon their arrival. "I've always loved Korea — North, South, doesn't matter," Bullard told reporters. "I've always loved Korea personally. We all do. We love every place that we go. They all accept us for who we are. We're role models. We have great characteristics. It's all family fun."
In a bit of unintentional hilarity, one of the reporters asked Rodman whether this was his first visit to North Korea. "It is my first time," he said. "I think it's most of these guys' first time here."
Rodman quickly took to his Twitter account to talk about the trip, writing: "I'm not a politician. Kim Jung Un & North Korean people are basketball fans. I love everyone. Period. End of story." On a less diplomatic note, he also wrote, "Maybe I'll run into the Gangnam Style dude while I'm here," apparently unaware the pop star Psy is South Korean.
Smith said the group hoped for a meeting with Kim Jon-un but was not sure it would happen. Even without that, Smith said he could not wait to see the footage. He said that the opportunity to mix with North Koreans was rare, that his previous trips were supervised tours with only government-approved interview subjects.
"I look at this as basketball diplomacy, the same way we had Ping-Pong diplomacy with China," Smith said. "Once you get the Globetrotters involved, I mean, how can you not smile when you see the Harlem Globetrotters?"
Erik Szylard Daenitz for The New York Times
Lone Peak High School center Eric Mika, third from left, during introductions before a game at Lehi High School. Mika has committed to B.Y.U.
HIGHLAND, Utah — Here, among a string of quiet Mormon towns, where the spires of Latter-day Saints churches glint against the Wasatch Mountains, is the home of what many consider the nation's best high schoolboys' basketball team.
Lone Peak, in the dark uniforms against Lehi, built a 23-1 record while winning by an average of nearly 28 points a game.
For the past two years, the Knights of Lone Peak High School, a team of lanky, long-armed teenagers who look only slightly more imposing than a chess club, have not just been beating opponents, they have been crushing them.
At 23-1, the Knights have been ranked as the best high school team in the country for more than a month by the Web site Max Preps and are working their way through the Utah state playoffs, which end Saturday. While Lone Peak has lost to in-state opponents just three times in the past three years, its success nationally is especially surprising. The Knights have won by an average of nearly 28 points this season, including tournament victories over top teams from Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.
"There was one team we played that was literally laughing when we were warming up," the senior center Eric Mika said with a chuckle. "And we beat them by 50."
Unlike many top high school teams that lure talented players from outside their immediate area, Lone Peak, which has a student body of about 2,300, pulls players from the pruned streets of Alpine and Highland — small communities tucked in the foothills about 30 miles from Salt Lake City, so named by Mormon settlers because the landscape reminded them of the Swiss Alps and Scottish Highlands.
The Knights — led by Mika and guards Nick Emery and T. J. Haws — have ascended to the top of the national rankings as relative unknowns, a feat made more remarkable by the simple fact that they hail from a region not recognized for basketball prowess.
"We know we're different whenever we walk into a gym," said Coach Quincy Lewis, who has a 206-35 record over the past decade. "But our guys walk in there with a chip on their shoulder. We know we have something to prove because, honestly, the other teams don't have a great deal of respect for us."
Then Lone Peak starts playing. Its style is a fearless, careening brand of basketball, built on 3-pointers, lobs and dunks, seemingly more suited for a playground than the movie "Hoosiers."
"They play like inner-city teams; how blacks consider black teams play," said Tyrone Slaughter, who coaches Whitney Young High School in Chicago, which is ranked seventh in the country. "I don't know any other way to put it.
"So many times we see the predominantly white teams play a conservative style, a precise style of basketball," he said. "When you see this team play, it is completely different."
Last season, Lone Peak beat Whitney Young in a double-overtime game at the Beach Ball Classic tournament in Myrtle Beach, S.C., a performance that helped burnish its reputation.
Emery set the tournament's four-game scoring record with 119 points. Word of the Knights' lopsided victories spread around Chicago. Now, Slaughter said, if a team is blown out, it is said to have been Lone Peaked.
The most apparent reason for the team's success is the triumvirate of Mika, Emery and Haws, players, Lewis says, who "don't come around very often for anybody, I don't care what program you're a part of."
The 6-foot-2 senior Emery, who averages 19 points, and the 6-4 junior Haws, who scores 17 a game, are continuing a family tradition at Lone Peak.
Emery's older brother, Jackson, who graduated from the school in 2005, was named Utah's Mr. Basketball and was a co-captain at Brigham Young with Jimmer Fredette.
Haws's older brother, Tyler, was also a Lone Peak standout and was 10th in the country in scoring with a 20.9 points-a-game average at B.Y.U. entering Tuesday's games. The 6-foot-10 Mika, who averages 16 points, is in his first season at Lone Peak after transferring from a private school, but he has known Haws and Emery since they were fourth graders playing on youth teams together.
"I feel this is really a once-in-a-life team," said Haws, who can make 3-pointers from beyond the N.B.A. range or slash through the lane with moves that have earned him YouTube fame.
Lewis has coached many of his players since grade school at clinics and camps. Every summer, he takes the team to play against Amateur Athletic Union squads around the country.
Dmitry Lovetsky/Associated Press
St. Peter's Basilica on Tuesday. Roman Catholic cardinals were gathering at the Vatican amid scandal to choose a new pope.
The sudden resignation of the most senior Roman Catholic cardinal in Britain, who stepped aside on Monday in the face of accusations that he made unwanted sexual advances toward priests years ago, showed that the taint of scandal could force a cardinal from participating in the selection of a new pope.
His exit came as at least a dozen other cardinals tarnished with accusations that they had failed to remove priests accused of sexually abusing minors were among those gathering in Rome to prepare for the conclave to select a successor to Pope Benedict XVI. There was no sign that the church's promise to confront the sexual abuse scandal had led to direct pressure on those cardinals to exempt themselves from the conclave.
Advocates for abuse victims who were in Rome on Tuesday focused particular ire on Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the former archbishop of Los Angeles, and called for him to be excluded from the conclave. But Cardinal Mahony, who has vigorously defended his record, was already in Rome, posting on Twitter about the weather.
Even stalwart defenders of the church point out that to disqualify Cardinal Mahony would leave many more cardinals similarly vulnerable. Many of the men who will go into the Sistine Chapel to elect a pope they hope will help the church recover from the bruising scandal of sexual abuse have themselves been blemished by it.
"Among bishops and cardinals, certainly the old guys who have been involved for so long, sure they're going to have blood on their hands," said Thomas G. Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, who has served on the American bishops' national abuse advisory board and has written three books on sexual abuse. "So when Cardinal Mahony says he's being scapegoated, in some respects I think he's right. All the focus is on him, but what about the other guys?"
Among the many challenges facing the church, addressing the wounds caused by sexual abuse is among the top priorities, church analysts say. When Pope Benedict was elected in 2005, many Catholics hoped that his previous experience at the helm of the Vatican office that dealt with abuse cases would result in substantive changes.
Benedict has repeatedly apologized to victims, and listened personally to their testimonies of pain. After the abuse scandal paralyzed the church in Europe in 2010, and began to emerge on other continents, Benedict issued new policies for bishops to follow on handling sexual abuse accusations, and he held a conference at the Vatican on the issue. But despite calls from many Catholics, he never removed prelates who, court cases and documents revealed, put children at risk by failing to report pedophiles or remove them from the priesthood.
It is not that these cardinals behaved so differently from the others, or that they do not have achievements to their names. It is just that they happened to come from pinpoints on the Catholic world map where long-hidden secrets became public because victims organized, government officials investigated, lawyers sued or the news media paid attention.
They include cardinals from Belgium, Chile and Italy. They include the dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, who is accused of taking large monetary gifts from a religious order, the Legion of Christ, and halting an investigation into its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel — who was later exposed as a pathological abuser and liar.
They also include cardinals reviled by many in their own countries, like Cardinal Sean Brady, the primate of All Ireland, who survived an uproar after government investigations uncovered endemic cover-ups of the sexual and physical abuse of minors.
"There's so many of them," said Justice Anne Burke, a judge in Illinois who served on the American bishops' first advisory board 10 years ago. "They all have participated in one way or another in having actual information about criminal conduct, and not doing anything about it. What are you going to do? They're all not going to participate in the conclave?"
Even one cardinal frequently mentioned as a leading candidate for pope has been accused of turning a blind eye toward abuse victims. The Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet issued apologies to the many victims of abuse in church boarding schools in Quebec Province, but left behind widespread resentment when he reportedly refused to meet with them.
Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago, Chile; Ian Austen from Ottawa; and Gaia Pianigiani from Rome.
7:39 p.m. | Updated
Wall Street may be shrinking — cutting thousands of jobs over the last year — but for those who remain, the pay is still very lucrative.
The average cash bonus for those employed in the financial industry in New York last year rose roughly 9 percent, to $121,900, Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State's comptroller, said on Tuesday.
Cash bonuses in total are forecast to increase by roughly 8 percent, to $20 billion this year.
The total, however, is down from 2010, when it was $22.8 billion. Wall Street's peak came in 2006, before the financial crisis, with a total $34.3 billion in bonuses. The year-end bonus can account for the bulk of a finance professional's annual compensation.
The report from the state comptroller's office gives estimates on the bonuses, based on tax withholding data, data from banks and conversations with industry experts. It came the same day that JPMorgan Chase, one of the country's biggest banks, announced it was eliminating 17,000 jobs over the next two years through layoffs and attrition, adding its name to a string of large banks that continue to cut jobs to reduce expenses.
Wall Street has regained 30 percent of the 28,300 jobs lost during the financial crisis, Mr. DiNapoli said. And firms are continuing to streamline as they cope with a sluggish economic recovery, difficult markets and a heavier regulatory burden. While financial industry employment in New York City was steady in the first half of 2012, it was down slightly in the second half of the year, the comptroller's office said.
"Wall Street is still in transition, but it is very slowly adjusting to changes in its economic and regulatory environment," he said.
In an effort to hold down — albeit temporarily — compensation costs, a number of financial firms have deferred cash payments to employees in recent years. Mr. DiNapoli said on Tuesday that part of the increase in 2012 was cash promised in recent years but actually paid out last year. He said that it was difficult to break out what percentage of the total was deferrals, but he believed that it was still a small part of the total.
The ebbs and flows of Wall Street pay have a major impact on the economy of New York City, where 169,700 are employed in finance. Local businesses like restaurants, luxury goods retailers and the upper end of the real estate market pin their fortunes to the flood of cash from year-end bonuses.
Before the start of the financial crisis, business and personal income tax collections from finance-related activities accounted for up to 20 percent of New York State tax revenue. In 2012, that contribution fell to 14 percent.
Yet finance remains the best paying sector in New York City, Mr. DiNapoli told reporters during a conference call.
All told, the average pay package for securities industry employees in New York was $362,900 in 2011, the last year for which data is available, almost unchanged from 2010.
"Profits and bonuses rebounded in 2012, but the industry is still restructuring," Mr. DiNapoli said. Despite its smaller size, the securities industry is still a very important part of the New York City and New York State economies."
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Saudi Arabia has financed a large purchase of infantry weapons from Croatia and quietly funneled them to antigovernment fighters in Syria in a drive to break the bloody stalemate that has allowed President Bashar al-Assad to cling to power, according to American and Western officials familiar with the purchases.
The weapons began reaching rebels in December via shipments shuttled through Jordan, officials said, and have been a factor in the rebels' small tactical gains this winter against the army and militias loyal to Mr. Assad.
The arms transfers appeared to signal a shift among several governments to a more activist approach to assisting Syria's armed opposition, in part as an effort to counter shipments of weapons from Iran to Mr. Assad's forces. The weapons' distribution has been principally to armed groups viewed as nationalist and secular, and appears to have been intended to bypass the jihadist groups whose roles in the war have alarmed Western and regional powers.
For months regional and Western capitals have held back on arming the rebels, in part out of fear that the weapons would fall into the hands of terrorists. But officials said the decision to send in more weapons is aimed at another fear in the West about the role of jihadist groups in the opposition. Such groups have been seen as better equipped than many nationalist fighters and potentially more influential.
The action also signals the recognition among the rebels' Arab and Western backers that the opposition's success in pushing Mr. Assad's military from much of Syria's northern countryside by the middle of last year gave way to a slow, grinding campaign in which the opposition remains outgunned and the human costs continue to climb.
Washington's role in the shipments, if any, is not clear. Officials in Europe and the United States, including those at the Central Intelligence Agency, cited the sensitivity of the shipments and declined to comment publicly.
But one senior American official described the shipments as "a maturing of the opposition's logistical pipeline." The official noted that the opposition remains fragmented and operationally incoherent, and added that the recent Saudi purchase was "not in and of itself a tipping point."
"I remain convinced we are not near that tipping point," the official said.
The official added that Iran, with its shipments to Syria's government, still outstrips what Arab states have sent to the rebels.
The Iranian arms transfers have fueled worries among Sunni Arab states about losing a step to Tehran in what has become a regional contest for primacy in Syria between Sunni Arabs and the Iran-backed Assad government and Hezbollah of Lebanon.
Another American official said Iran has been making flights with weapons into Syria that are so routine that he referred to them as "a milk run." Several of the flights were by an Iranian Air Force Boeing jet using the name Maharaj Airlines, he said.
While Persian Gulf Arab nations have been sending military equipment and other assistance to the rebels for more than a year, the difference in the recent shipments has been partly of scale. Officials said multiple planeloads of weapons have left Croatia since December, when many Yugoslav weapons, previously unseen in the Syrian civil war, began to appear in videos posted by rebels on YouTube.
Many of the weapons — which include a particular type of Yugoslav-made recoilless gun, as well as assault rifles, grenade launchers, machine guns, mortars and shoulder-fired rockets for use against tanks and other armored vehicles — have been extensively documented by one blogger, Eliot Higgins, who writes under the name Brown Moses and has mapped the new weapons' spread through the conflict.
He first noticed the Yugoslav weapons in early January in clashes in the Dara'a region near Jordan, but by February he was seeing them in videos posted by rebels fighting in the Hama, Idlib and Aleppo regions.
Officials familiar with the transfers said the arms were part of an undeclared surplus in Croatia remaining from the 1990s Balkan wars. One Western official said the shipments included "thousands of rifles and hundreds of machine guns" and an unknown quantity of ammunition.
Croatia's Foreign Ministry and arms-export agency denied that such shipments had occurred. Saudi officials have declined requests for interviews about the shipments for two weeks. Jordanian officials also declined to comment.
C. J. Chivers reported from New York, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Robert F. Worth contributed reporting from Washington, and Dan Bilefsky from Paris.
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
Dr. C. Everett Koop, in his office, was 66 when President Ronald Reagan appointed him surgeon general in 1981.
Dr. C. Everett Koop, who was widely regarded as the most influential surgeon general in American history and played a crucial role in changing public attitudes about smoking, died on Monday at his home in Hanover, N.H. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by Susan A. Wills, an assistant at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, which has an institute named after Dr. Koop. In 1981, Dr. Koop had never served in public office when President Ronald Reagan appointed him surgeon general of the United States. By the time he stepped down in 1989, he had become a household name, a rare distinction for a public health administrator.
Dr. Koop issued emphatic warnings about the dangers of smoking, and he almost single-handedly pushed the government into taking a more aggressive stand against AIDS. And despite his steadfast moral opposition to abortion, he refused to use his office as a pulpit from which to preach against it.
These stands led many liberals who had bitterly opposed his nomination to praise him, and many conservatives who had supported his appointment to vilify him. Conservative politicians representing tobacco-growing states were among his harshest critics, and many Americans, for moral or religious reasons, were upset by his public programs to fight AIDS and felt betrayed by his relative silence on abortion.
As much as anyone, it was Dr. Koop who took the lead in trying to wean Americans off smoking, and he did so in imposing fashion. At a sturdy 6-foot-1, with his bushy gray biblical beard, Dr. Koop would appear before television cameras in the gold-braided dark-blue uniform of a vice admiral — the surgeon general's official uniform, which he revived — and sternly warn of the terrible consequences of smoking.
"Smoking kills 300,000 Americans a year," he said in one talk. "Smokers are 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than nonsmokers, two times more likely to develop heart disease. Smoking a pack a day takes six years off a person's life."
When Dr. Koop took office, 33 percent of Americans smoked; when he left, the percentage had dropped to 26. By 1987, 40 states had restricted smoking in public places, 33 had prohibited it on public conveyances and 17 had banned it in offices and other work sites. More than 800 local antismoking ordinances had been passed, and the federal government had restricted smoking in 6,800 federal buildings. Antismoking campaigns by private groups like the American Lung Association and the American Heart Association had accelerated.
Dr. Koop also played a major role in educating Americans about AIDS. Though he believed that the nation had been slow in facing the crisis, he extolled its efforts once it did, particularly in identifying H.I.V., the virus that causes the disease, and developing a blood test to detect it.
Where he failed, in his own view, was to interest either Reagan or his successor as president, George Bush, in making health care available to more Americans.
Dr. Koop was completing a successful career as a pioneer in pediatric surgery when he was nominated for surgeon general, having caught the attention of conservatives with a series of seminars, films and books in collaboration with the theologian Francis Schaeffer that expressed anti-abortion views.
At his confirmation hearings, Senate liberals mounted a fierce fight against him. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Dr. Koop, in denying a right to abortion, adhered to a "cruel, outdated and patronizing stereotype of women." Women's rights organizations, public health groups, medical associations and others lobbied against his appointment. An editorial in The New York Times called him "Dr. Unqualified."
But after months of testimony and delay, he was confirmed by a vote of 68 to 24, garnering more support than many had expected. Some senators who had been hesitant to support him said he had convinced them of his integrity.
Dr. Koop himself said he had taken a principled approach to the nomination. As he and his wife, Elizabeth, had driven to Washington for the confirmation hearings, he recalled telling her, "If I ever have to say anything I don't believe or feel shouldn't be said, we'll go home."
An Only Child in Brooklyn
Charles Everett Koop was born on Oct. 14, 1916, in Brooklyn, and grew up in a three-story brick house in South Brooklyn surrounded by relatives; his paternal grandparents lived on the third floor, and his maternal grandparents as well as uncles, aunts and cousins lived on the same street. He was the only child of John Everett Koop, a banker and descendant of 17th-century Dutch settlers of New York, and the former Helen Apel.
Dr. Koop traced his interest in medicine to watching his family's doctors at work as a child. To develop the manual dexterity of a surgeon, he practiced tying knots and cutting pictures out of magazines with each hand. At 14 he sneaked into an operating theater at Columbia University's medical college, and he operated on rabbits, rats and stray cats in his basement after his mother had administered anesthesia. By his account, not one of the animals died.
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
Since Marissa Mayer became chief executive of Yahoo, she has been working hard to get the Internet pioneer off its deathbed and make it an innovator once again.
She started with free food and new smartphones for every employee, borrowing from the playbook of Google, her employer until last year. Now, though, Yahoo has made a surprise move: abolishing its work-at-home policy and ordering everyone to work in the office.
A memo explaining the policy change, from the company's human resources department, says face-to-face interaction among employees fosters a more collaborative culture — a hallmark of Google's approach to its business.
In trying to get back on track, Yahoo is taking on one of the country's biggest workplace issues: whether the ability to work from home, and other flexible arrangements, leads to greater productivity or inhibits innovation and collaboration. Across the country, companies like Aetna, Booz Allen Hamilton and Zappos.com are confronting these trade-offs as they compete to attract and retain the best employees.
Bank of America, for example, which had a popular program for working remotely, decided late last year to require employees in certain roles to come back to the office.
Employees, especially younger ones, expect to be able to work remotely, analysts say. And over all the trend is toward greater workplace flexibility.
Still, said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger Gray & Christmas, an outplacement and executive coaching firm, "A lot of companies are afraid to let their workers work from home some of the time or all of the time because they're afraid they'll lose control."
Studies show that people who work at home are significantly more productive but less innovative, said John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who runs a human resource advisory firm.
"If you want innovation, then you need interaction," he said. "If you want productivity, then you want people working from home."
Reflecting these tensions, Yahoo's policy change has unleashed a storm of criticism from advocates for workplace flexibility who say it is a retrograde approach, particularly for those who care for young children or aging parents outside of work. Their dismay is heightened by the fact that they hoped Ms. Mayer, who became chief executive at 37 while pregnant with her first child, would make the business world more hospitable for working parents.
"The irony is that she has broken the glass ceiling, but seems unwilling for other women to lead a balanced life in which they care for their families and still concentrate on developing their skills and career," said Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita of women's history at the University of California.
But not only women take advantage of workplace flexibility policies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly as many men telecommute.
The bureau says 24 percent of employed Americans report working from home at least some hours each week. And 63 percent of employers said last year that they allowed employees to work remotely, up from 34 percent in 2005, according to a study by the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit group studying the changing work force.
During the recession, the institute expected employers to demand more face time, but instead found that 12 percent increased workplace flexibility, said Ellen Galinsky, its president and co-founder. She attributed this to companies' desire to reduce real estate costs, carbon footprints and commuting times.
Technologies developed in Silicon Valley, from video chat to instant messaging, have made it possible for employees across America to work remotely. Yet like Yahoo, many tech companies believe that working in the same physical space drives innovation.
A Yahoo spokeswoman, Sara Gorman, declined to comment, saying only that the company did not publicly discuss internal matters.
One day last September, the wife of a New York City police officer opened her laptop computer and discovered that her husband had used it to visit a fetish Web site on the Internet. She said she went to the site and saw a photograph of a dead girl.
And that, she testified on Monday, was only the beginning.
The wife, Kathleen Mangan-Valle, said that when she later delved into her husband's electronic chat history, she found he had been communicating with others about plans to torture and kill women, including herself.
"I was going to be tied up by my feet and my throat slit, and they would have fun watching the blood gush out of me," she said, sobbing repeatedly through her afternoon on the witness stand.
The officer, Gilberto Valle, has been charged with plotting on the Internet to kidnap, rape, kill and cannibalize female victims. His wife was the first witness in the trial, which began on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
She testified that she uncovered evidence of her husband's desires to rape, maim, torture and kill women, including some of her friends.
When someone participating in the chat suggested to her husband that if she cried, "don't listen to her, don't give her mercy," she testified, "Gil just said, 'It's O.K., we will just gag her.' "
Officer Valle, 28, also wept visibly during his wife's testimony in a day of high emotion at the trial, which attracted a full gallery of observers, some no doubt drawn by the bizarre and lurid charges against the officer.
But at its core, the case rests on a tantalizing, yet basic, question: When does a fantasized crime become an actual crime?
There is no evidence that any of the women that Officer Valle was accused of plotting to kill were kidnapped or harmed.
The trial's opening arguments underscored that theme. A federal prosecutor, Randall W. Jackson, told jurors that the officer had been plotting real crimes to kill actual victims, while Officer Valle's lawyer, Julia L. Gatto, contended that he had merely been living out deviant fantasies in Internet chat rooms, with no intention of carrying them out.
One outside expert, Joseph V. DeMarco, an Internet lawyer and former head of the cybercrime unit in the United States attorney's office in Manhattan, said in a recent interview that beyond its sensationalism, the Valle case highlighted the fact that there were "dark corners" of the Internet "where a whole range of illegal and immoral conduct takes place, and the general public has only a vague and fleeting knowledge that these places exist."
He noted that the Internet, as a medium of expression and communication, also made it possible for people with interests as benign as stamp collecting or as grisly as cannibalism to find and validate one another in community forums.
"If you were someone mildly interested in cannibalism 30 years ago, it was really hard to find someone in real space to find common cause with," Mr. DeMarco noted. "Whereas online, it's much easier to find those people, and I think when you have these communities forming, validating each other, encouraging each other, it's not far-fetched to think that some people in that community who otherwise might not be pushed beyond certain lines might be."
It was clear that the prosecutors, in their opening statement and through Ms. Mangan-Valle's testimony, were seeking to bring as much realism to the courtroom as possible.
Ms. Mangan-Valle, who had taught with Teach for America and went on to become a teacher in East Harlem and in the Bronx, indicated that she had been so afraid for herself and their infant daughter that she flew to stay with her parents, who live in Nevada. She said she contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave a statement and granted the bureau access to her laptop and another computer in their home.
Michael Nagle for The New York Times
A backhoe tore down a home damaged by Hurricane Sandy in Roxbury, Queens, last week. The storm sent a wall of water over the Rockaway Peninsula.
Stroll down Seabreeze Walk in Roxbury, Queens, and take a footpath down to the gray blue of Jamaica Bay. There you find a Caterpillar backhoe smashing at, gnawing at and pulling apart a string of once picturesque bungalows.
The metal jaws of this mechanical beast cause roofs to cave in, tear walls apart and hurl couches into the air.
There is an inescapable sadness to this business on this western spit of the Rockaway Peninsula. Four months ago, a 10-foot wall of water swept many middle-, working-class and poor neighborhoods here and left wreckage in its wake.
Vito Mustaciuolo, New York City's longtime deputy commissioner for code enforcement, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the city's many corners and stands with me on the beach. Most winter days he and his staff labor to bring heat to neglected apartment buildings; now he administers last rites to hundreds of homes marked for demolition.
His care for those who have lost homes does not go unappreciated.
"You may have to be Italian to understand this, but one older lady asked to be there when we tore it down," Mr. Mustaciuolo said. "She said it was like being at the funeral of a loved one."
Hurricane Sandy swirled toward its demise over the North Atlantic in October, but New York City and the region still reckons with wrecked lives, the many billions of dollars needed for cleanup and the challenge posed by our globally warmed world. City officials have embarked on the journey, step by uncertain step, with their eyes fixed on keeping residents in place. They guard against letting a rebuilt shoreline turn into a sandbox for the wealthy.
"Our first priority is to build back," said Brad Gair, who directs the mayor's office of housing recovery operations. "We want to help working-class people reclaim their homes."
I spent several days walking the Rockaways with Mr. Gair; Mathew W. Wambua, the city's housing commissioner; and Marc Jahr, the president of the city's Housing Development Corporation, for whom I worked as a tenant organizer in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s.
Theirs is a complicated task, made more difficult by a judgment day that will arrive this summer, when the federal government sets new flood standards. If a home sits in Zone A — and much of the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens; Coney Island and Red Hook in Brooklyn; and Staten Island will — homeowners' insurance rates could jump crazily, to perhaps $10,000 a year from less than $500. There is a deceptively simple way to sidestep this increase: homeowners can raise homes on stilts, and some have set out to do this. But the cost is great, extending into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for some homes.
"If you look at a house and think it will be expensive, you're right," Mr. Gair said.
Farther east, apartment towers with government subsidized rents rise like mountain ridges. Our post-hurricane reality poses troubling questions here, too.
At Dayton Towers, the chief executive, Jeff Goldstein, had installed new boilers, elevators, lobbies and laundry rooms. His tab ran into the millions of dollars. Then Hurricane Sandy blew in. Swells washed across the shore road and turned his boiler room into a briny aquarium.
Mr. Goldstein's men restored electricity and heat within two weeks. And now? Commissioner Wambua stood in the well of Dayton Towers, yelling against the roar of the boilers. "Where do you put these?" he asked. "On the roof?"
You could encapsulate the boilers, making the basement watertight, much as a battleship safeguards its engine room, but the cost is terrific.
For many decades, the federal government rebuilt Southern cities lashed by storms. Now Congressional Republicans want to change course. Talk of storms intensified by global warming sounds suspiciously like science; they insist that New York and New Jersey not use a lot of federal money to armor their coastlines.
New York has traveled this road alone before. In the early 2000s, a developer built Arverne by the Sea, a middle-income housing development in the Rockaways.
City officials told him to take account of rising seas levels. So he trucked in landfill, raising the entire development above flood level. He buried electrical lines and put in catch basins, dunes and black pines. In late October, this neighborhood was one of the few in the area that did not flood.
The trick is to extend that sleight of hand to miles and miles of coastline, and so preserve a necklace of neighborhoods.
As Mr. Mustaciuolo walked amid houses wrecked and smashed, he said: "This is not just a bunch of houses. It's histories, it's family roots."
Which is another way of saying it's New York, and worth saving.
E-mail: powellm@nytimes.com
Twitter: @powellnyt
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Christopher Gregory/The New York Times
A meeting of governors in Washington on Sunday, coinciding with White House budget warnings, included Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, second from right.
WASHINGTON — In an effort to put pressure on Congressional Republicans, the White House warned on Sunday that automatic budget cuts scheduled to take effect this week would have a devastating impact on programs for people of all ages in every state.
Cabinet officers sounded the alarm on television talk shows, and their concerns resonated with state officials, who were in town for the winter meeting of the National Governors Association.
Daniel I. Werfel, the controller of President Obama's budget office, held an unusual Sunday briefing to catalog the effects of the cuts state by state.
He and Jason Furman, the principal deputy director of the National Economic Council, said they were not exaggerating the damage that would be done.
In place of the across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, Mr. Obama wants Congress to agree to what he calls a "balanced plan." The plan includes cuts in selected domestic programs, savings in certain benefit programs and additional tax revenue collected from some corporations and high-income people.
The conflict is shaping up as a real-world test of the importance and value of the federal government. Democrats expressed confidence that Americans would feel the impact of an $85 billion cut in a $3.5 trillion budget, while Republicans insisted that they would not accept new taxes on top of those signed into law by Mr. Obama last month.
The White House intensified its campaign just as Congress was returning to work this week and some governors were expressing anguish over the impact of the impending automatic cuts in federal spending.
"We don't do across-the-board cuts in state government, and it's a stupid idea in the federal government," said Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut, a Democrat.
But Gov. Dave Heineman of Nebraska, a Republican, said in an interview: "The White House is engaged in scare tactics. Every governor in this country knows how to cut their budget by 2 or 3 percent, and the White House ought to learn how to do it."
"The sequester is not the best way to do it," Mr. Heineman added. "We need greater flexibility in that process. But it's hard for me to believe that America is going to be devastated by the federal government cutting its budget 2 or 3 percent. That's a bunch of malarkey."
Another Republican, Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, said in an interview, "The White House is in a campaign mode of trying to scare everybody, rather than sitting down with Congress and working out what the solution is to the budget."
State-by-state estimates of the impact of federal policies have been a staple of White House efforts to mobilize public opinion for more than 20 years.
In its report Sunday, the White House described how the budget cuts would hit states, with an emphasis on jobs lost.
"Ohio will lose approximately $25.1 million in funding for primary and secondary education, putting around 350 teacher and aide jobs at risk," the White House said. "In Georgia, around 4,180 fewer children will receive vaccines for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, whooping cough, influenza and hepatitis B due to reduced funding for vaccinations of about $286,000.
"Pennsylvania could lose up to $271,000 in funds that provide services to victims of domestic violence, resulting in up to 1,000 fewer victims being served. In Texas, approximately 52,000 civilian Department of Defense employees would be furloughed, reducing gross pay by around $274.8 million in total."
In addition, the White House said, many of the nation's 398 national parks would be partly or fully closed.
On Friday, the administration said, $85 billion in cuts will automatically begin to take effect, with many domestic programs facing reductions of 9 percent and some military programs being reduced by 13 percent in the remaining seven months of the federal fiscal year.
Appearing Sunday on the CBS program "Face the Nation," Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland, a Democrat, described the cuts as a threat to the economy.
