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Bettmann/Corbis
Bob Turley around 1955. A few years later, he would lift the Yankees to a World Series victory.
Bob Turley, a Cy Young-winning, right-handed pitcher whose blazing fastball bore in on baffled hitters like a dissolving aspirin and lifted the Yankees to a come-from-behind victory over the Milwaukee Braves in the 1958 World Series, died in Atlanta on Saturday. He was 82.
Turley, who lived in Alpharetta, Ga., died in hospice care at Lenbrook, a retirement community in Atlanta. The cause was liver cancer, his son, Terry, told The Baltimore Sun.
On a Casey Stengel team loaded with legends — including Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, Moose Skowron and Elston Howard — Turley was a mainstay of a pitching staff led by Whitey Ford and Don Larsen, whose perfect game in the 1956 World Series symbolized a golden era of Yankee dominion.
They called him "Bullet Bob," and if any proof were needed beyond the 1,265 strikeouts and 101 wins he racked up in 12 seasons in the American League, it was provided early in his career by a DuMont cathode-ray oscilloscope, whose photoelectric eye clocked his fastball at 94 to 98 miles an hour.
He was no herky-jerky tangle of arms and legs like Dizzy Dean or Cleveland's fireballing Bob Feller, with whose fastball his was sometimes compared. Like the great Walter Johnson, he pitched with practically no windup, and had a remarkably smooth delivery for his 6-foot-2, 215-pound frame. He had a curve, a slider and a change-up, but the fastball was his magic.
To a batter's naked, unflinching eye, it was an intimidating marvel to behold: the ball perfectly hidden as Turley looked in for the sign, paused to inspect the crowd, and let fly — an incoming rocket, a white blur barely visible for just over four-tenths of a second, and then — smack! — gone into the catcher's mitt.
"Man!" Roy Campanella, the Brooklyn Dodgers' catcher, exclaimed after Turley struck him out three times in succession in a 1956 game. "When you see me take three swings at three fastballs and not even foul tip one, the fellow throwing 'em must have something. Maybe he was using a little gun to fire that ball up there."
Turley, a popcorn-gobbling Midwesterner with a ski-jump nose like Bob Hope's and personal habits — no drinking, smoking, womanizing or sideburns — that would have made George Steinbrenner proud, played eight years with the Yankees, from 1955 to 1962, winning three World Series rings and building a win-loss record of 82-52, with 58 complete games, 909 strikeouts and an earned run average of 3.64.
But his best year by far was 1958, when he won a league-leading 21 games with only 7 losses, including 19 complete games and 6 shutouts, while striking out 168 and compiling a 2.97 E.R.A. And all that was just the season's prelude to a World Series that baseball fans still talk about as one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the game.
To set the stage: The Milwaukee Braves were the defending world champions, having beaten the Yanks in the 1957 Series on the strength of three complete-game victories by Lew Burdette. The Yankees, winners of 7 of the previous 11 World Series, were burning for revenge. But besides Burdette, the Braves had Warren Spahn on the mound and the sluggers Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews and Joe Adcock.
After four games, New York trailed 3 games to 1, and the Yankee prospects looked bleak. Only the 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates had come back from a 3-1 deficit to win a 7-game Series. With the Yankees just one game from elimination, Turley went to work. He threw a shutout in Game 5, picked up a 10th-inning save in Game 6 and won his second in three days in Game 7, giving up only two hits in 6 2/3 innings of shutout relief.
Turley was overwhelmed with honors. He was named the Most Valuable Player of the Series, won the $10,000 diamond Hickok Belt as the year's top professional athlete, took the New York Baseball Writers' Mercer Award as player of the year, and became the third to win the Cy Young Award as baseball's best pitcher. (Starting in 1967, it was given to one pitcher in each league.)
Emergency crews worked Saturday to contain several thousand gallons of crude oil that spilled from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline in central Arkansas.
Crews from Exxon Mobil were still investigating the cause of the rupture, which occurred on Friday afternoon in a section of the Pegasus pipeline near the town of Mayflower, which has about 1,700 people and is 25 miles north of Little Rock.
The local authorities said in a statement on Saturday that 22 homes in the vicinity of the spill had been evacuated.
As soon as the spill was detected, the pipeline was shut down and isolation valves were closed to prevent further leakage, Exxon Mobil said in a statement.
About 2,000 feet of boom was set up to contain the oil, and 15 vacuum trucks were deployed to clean it up, Exxon Mobil said. About 4,500 barrels of oil and water had been removed by Saturday evening, the company said.
Crews were working to make sure no oil entered nearby Lake Conway.
The Environmental Protection Agency classified the leak as a "major spill," Exxon Mobil said.
Richard Perry/The New York Times
Michael Zamansky, center, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School, who has been trying to revitalize computer science education in New York City schools, at a mixer for present and former students over pizza at the offices of Foursquare in Manhattan.
At last year's State of the City speech, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of a public high school called the Academy for Software Engineering. The school would be part of an ambitious expansion of computer science education in the city, and Mr. Bloomberg called it the "brainchild" of a local teacher named Michael Zamansky.
Mr. Zamansky was seated on the stage, a few steps from the mayor. But by that point, he said recently, the project was his in name only: he said he had been effectively cut out of the school's planning process, and his vision of an elite program had given way to one that was more focused on practical job skills.
"I don't know if they think my plans are too grandiose, or too unrealistic or if I'm an elitist snob," he said.
The mayor spoke about other efforts to train the city's future engineers and entrepreneurs. But Mr. Zamansky worried that the new school would be too small: not enough students, not enough ambition.
Mr. Zamansky, 45, had spent two decades developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant High School. Former students now working at Google and Facebook call him a mentor, a role model, a man who showed them their future.
He liked to say he "hacked the school" to get what he wanted at Stuyvesant. But hacking the city's education bureaucracy was proving more difficult.
When Mr. Zamansky first came to Stuyvesant's math department in 1993, technology education there included wood shop and telescope-building along with basic courses in Cisco Systems networking and robotics. He introduced the first advanced computer science electives, and started advocating for the subject to be a universal requirement, like math or biology.
Now, more than 300 juniors and seniors routinely vie for the 150 seats available in his advanced classes, which emphasize putting programming to real-world use. And last year, after nearly two decades of arguments, Mr. Zamansky persuaded the school to add a yearlong computer science requirement for the school's approximately 800 sophomores.
His students have built a movie-recommendation Web site, an app that searches for language patterns in celebrity Twitter posts and Pixar-style animations. Mr. Zamansky says his best students graduate "Google-ready."
But even with six full-time staff members, he feels Stuyvesant takes his program less seriously than subjects with their own departments. "We're just considered math teachers by the school and city," he said. "All of this could go away at the whim of the principal."
So in 2010, he decided that if he could not have his own department, he would have his own school.
He envisioned an elite institution with roughly 300 students per grade, all of whom would be admitted after demonstrating math proficiency. Computer science would be a standard part of the curriculum. Initially, he received encouraging feedback from the Board of Education, he said, but his proposal was rejected after the first application round.
Everything changed, however, after Fred Wilson came calling.
Mr. Wilson, 51, is a founder of Union Square Ventures, one of the bigger players in New York's growing technology start-up scene, and had invested in some of the companies where Mr. Zamansky's graduates now work. He learned about Mr. Zamansky's proposal after his own son experienced frustration trying to learn to write computer code in middle school.
The two agreed that the public schools needed to become incubators for tech talent. "I was really impressed by what Mike was doing," Mr. Wilson remembered. "He had lots of alums who'd gone onto Carnegie Mellon and M.I.T. and Stanford, and had come back to the city because they were born and raised here. And I thought: that's amazing, that's what we want to happen."
Mr. Wilson went back to the Department of Education with Mr. Zamansky's proposal, but this time with a significant sweetener: he promised to cover the one-time costs of starting a new school. Space was available in Washington Irving High School in Gramercy, near the city's tech corridor. But the budget for hiring staff, a principal and designing a new curriculum was considerable.
This time, the project was approved.
A flurry of meetings followed. The city advocated for a small school of about 100 students per class whose electives would focus almost solely on computer science. They also wanted the school to be unscreened — meaning no entrance examinations.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 31, 2013
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Washington Irving High School in Manhattan had closed.
LOS ANGELES — Gregg Marshall sat atop a stage, squinted at the bright lights that reflected off his glasses and tried to make sense of all that had occurred the past two weeks. He needed a few more hours, both to process and to explain.
Let's see. The N.F.L. quarterback Tim Tebow addressed Marshall's Wichita State Shockers on their team plane. His forward, Carl Hall, cut off his dreadlocks and mailed them home to his mother. His glasses, the ones with the bright yellow frames, were analyzed on social media.
At the end of all that, his team, the one that lost its top five scorers from last season, the one with a mascot called WuShock, dispatched Ohio State in a 70-66 thriller on Saturday at Staples Center to advance to the Final Four. There stood the Shockers (30-8) atop a ladder late Saturday, scissors in hand, snipping at the nets.
Back on stage, Marshall took one final question, "West Regional Champion" spelled out on the banner behind him. He was asked, as he is often asked, whether he considered this a lucky N.C.A.A. tournament run, a confluence of favorable factors, whether he considered Wichita State a Cinderella.
"If you get to this point, you can win the whole thing," Marshall said. "I think Cinderella just found one glass slipper. I don't think she found four."
In two weeks, Wichita State managed to introduce its basketball team to the casual sports fan, advance to the N.C.A.A. tournament national semifinals for the first time since 1965 and somehow redefine its nickname. From upset to upset to upset, the Shockers became less about wheat and more about, well, shock.
Perhaps it should have been less shocking.
On Saturday, the Shockers faced another team favored to end their season. There was Ohio State, the second seed in the West Region, the Big Ten bully, its roster stocked with prized recruits, its athletics' budget among the country's largest.
In comparison, Wichita State was smaller. It did play in a less prominent conference. But the term midmajor also provided an inaccurate description. The Shockers flew to away games on private planes, same as the major schools. Marshall's salary reportedly went over $1 million.
Marshall knew his team could rebound, knew it could play defense. Beyond that, he told the Shockers to play angry, which became their mantra, which meant tough and physical, football without pads. Then his team began to shoot well, or better, which made the Shockers dangerous, served three ways.
They did not, it should be noted, luck into a national semifinal into Atlanta. They battered four opponents, beat each soundly, beat two by double digits. Along the way, three higher seeds fell: first Pittsburgh (No. 8), then Gonzaga (No. 1), then the Buckeyes.
"I understand they're shooting off fireworks back in Wichita," Marshall said.
After upsets became the new normal, of course the West Region of the N.C.A.A. tournament ended this way, with the No. 9 seed left standing. A team with a nickname sure to inspire puns from coast to coast until the Final Four tips off.
Ohio State had taken the improbable route to this point, behind back-to-back buzzer-beaters, a pair of shots hoisted in the final seconds to snatch consecutive victories over Iowa State and Arizona. Aaron Craft made the first and assisted on the second, and the Internet nearly exploded. Someone even said Chuck Norris planned to shave his head to look more like Craft, after Craft battered him in a fistfight.
So there was that.
Wichita State entered this game with its usual underdog status and a more impressive tournament résumé. The Shockers won their first three tournament games by a combined 38 points.
Fans filed into the Staples Center early, the majority clad in red. Supporters of the Shockers filled the section behind the team bench, a spot of yellow in a sea of red, and the assembled refused to sit until the halftime buzzer sounded.
Wichita State made its run over the final 11 minutes of the first half. The score was 19-15, advantage Shockers, when guard Tekele Cotton made a 3-pointer. Guard Demetric Williams followed with another 3 from almost the same spot. As Ohio State called a timeout, Williams danced back to the sideline, full of swagger, as WuShock implored the crowd to stand.
They were already standing.
Ohio State (29-8) trailed by 20 points with 12 minutes 39 seconds left. As the second half continued, that 20-point lead dwindled.Deshaun Thomas, so cold in the first half he nearly froze solid, called for the ball, fought into double teams, scored and rebounded as if possessed. At the end of a 28-11 run, Ohio State trailed, 62-59.
Here was the same Wichita State team that lost at home against Evansville in late February, that lost twice to Creighton in early March. Another Buckeyes comeback seemed inevitable.
In the stands, a fan waved a sign that read "100 percent Cotton." Indeed. Indicative of a team that lacks a true superstar but makes up for it with balance, Cotton, quiet for much of Saturday, made a series of key plays down the stretch. This included the 3-pointer that made it 65-59 and an offensive rebound that extended the next possession.
"We just did what we've been doing all year," guard Fred VanVleet said.
Afterward, Ohio State could only lament its missed shots, 42 of them, to be exact. The Shockers had wanted to stop Craft from driving, to force the Buckeyes outside. That game plan worked well. Ohio State took 25 3-point attempts. It made five.
Asked for his assessment of why the Buckeyes lost, Coach Thad Matta clenched his teeth and started back at his questioner.
"Were you in there?" Matta said, then added, referring to the team's field goal percentage: "Thirty-one percent."
When the final horn sounded, the Shockers' fans were standing, clad in yellow, as they waved their signs. Coaches fist-bumped other coaches. WuShock signed autographs and posed for photographs. Forward Cleanthony Early made a beeline for Marshall, nearly knocked him over, nearly knocked off those yellow glasses.
Early screamed, "Here we go, baby!" Next stop: Atlanta for the national semifinals.
KAUFMAN, Tex. — The chief prosecutor in a county just south of Dallas and his wife were found dead in their home on Saturday, two months after one of his assistant district attorneys was shot to death in a parking lot a block from his office.
Local police and sheriff's officers as well as F.B.I. agents deputies were investigating the deaths of the prosecutor, District Attorney Mike McLelland of Kaufman County, and his wife, Cynthia, said Lt. Justin Lewis of the Kaufman County Sheriff's Department.
Lieutenant Lewis said he could not discuss the investigation in further detail, including the nature of the couple's deaths and whether the authorities believe they are linked to the Jan. 31 fatal shooting of the assistant district attorney, Mark Hasse.
The Dallas Morning News reported that Police Chief Chris Aulbaugh said the McLellands had been shot in their home and that investigators were not discounting a connection to Mr. Hasse's death.
"It is a shock," Chief Aulbaugh told The Morning News. "It was a shock with Mark Hasse, and now you can just imagine the double shock, and until we know what happened, I really can't confirm that it's related, but you always have to assume until it's proven otherwise."
Sam Rosander, who lives in the same unincorporated area of Kaufman County as the McLellands, told The Associated Press that sheriff's deputies were parked in the district attorney's driveway for about a month after Mr. Hasse was killed.
Chief Aulbaugh said recently that the F.B.I. was checking to see if Mr. Hasse's shooting death could be related to the killing of the head of the Colorado prison system, Tom Clements, who was gunned down after answering the doorbell at his home less than two weeks ago.
A man suspected in Mr. Clements's killing, Evan Spencer Ebel, a former Colorado inmate and white supremacist, was killed March 21 in a shootout with Texas law enforcement officials in Wise County, Texas, about 100 miles northwest of Kaufman.
Chief Aulbaugh had said there was no indication that Mr. Hasse, 57, had been afraid that he might be killed and although the prosecutor was a licensed peace officer, officials refused to say whether he was carrying a weapon.
Mr. Hasse was chief of the organized crime unit when he was an assistant prosecutor in Dallas County in the 1980s, and he handled similar cases in Kaufman County, just southeast of Dallas.
Mr. McLelland had said that Mr. Hasse was one of 12 lawyers on his staff, all of whom handle hundreds of cases at a time.
"Anything anybody can think of, we're looking through," Mr. McLelland said after Mr. Hasse was killed.
In recent years, Mr. Hasse played major roles in Kaufman County's most high-profile cases, including one in which a justice of the peace was convicted on theft and burglary charges, and another in which a man was convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her 10-year-old daughter.
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LONDON — Big-ticket savers at the Bank of Cyprus may be forced to accept losses on their deposits that exceed 60 percent in order to keep the stricken bank afloat, bankers briefed on the negotiations said on Friday.
The more sizable haircut, coming soon after the imposition of tough capital controls, is the latest and perhaps most profound reminder of the financial punishment being visited upon this small island economy as it struggles to comply with the conditions that Europe is demanding of it before it gets a desperately needed 10 billion euro loan.
Europe has demanded that large depositors in the country's two largest banks — Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank — accept across-the-board losses in order to pay for the 17 billion bailout.
Over the past week, government officials have been saying that depositor losses would not exceed 40 percent — even though bankers and lawyers involved in the negotiations have been warning for some time that the final figure would need to be higher if the bank was to re emerge as a viable entity.
Under the terms of the transaction, large depositors would have 77.5 percent of their savings turned into different forms of equity, with the rest remaining as a frozen, non-interest-bearing deposit that they would be able to access in the future.
If the bank does well, depositors would be able to sell their stock. But even in the best case, in which the bank thrives on the back of a quickly recovering economy — a long shot most economists believe — the loss is likely to exceed 60 percent and could well be much more than that.
Lawyers and bankers who have analyzed the transaction believe the ultimate loss to the depositor could be anywhere between 60 and 77.5 percent.
There has been no official announcement of the deal and, given the political sensitivities involved, there could be further changes in the coming days. But news of the terms is already rocketing through Cyprus.
How much of a loss uninsured depositors with accounts of more than 100,000 euros at the bank would have to bear has become a hotly disputed topic in the past two weeks, pitting Cyprus's creditors — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and in particular the International Monetary Fund, known widely as the troika — against the Cyprus government.
In the past week, as it has become evident that the country's 18-billion-euro economy was going to enter a tailspin after the controversial move to impose capital controls and freeze bank deposits equal to one half the size of the country's economic output, it has become increasingly clear that the bank would need a much larger capital cushion if it is to survive the next year.
Projections of an economic slump of 3 percent that were once seen as a worst case now seem wildly optimistic, with most economists expecting the economy to plunge between 5 and 10 percent this year.
While many of the Bank of Cyprus' largest depositors are wealthy Russians, numerous Cypriot businesses and wealthy individuals also had significant amounts of capital in the bank. Economists believe that wiping out such a large amount of savings will be devastating — not just on the economy but on Cyprus's future as a center for financial services.
The lawyers drafted the lawsuits by the dozens, claiming that local businesses had violated federal law by not providing access to people with disabilities — and generating thousands of dollars per case in legal fees for themselves.
The approach prompted accusations that the lawyers were less interested in helping disabled people than in exploiting federal law to squeeze business owners for cash.
Now a Brooklyn federal court judge has ruled squarely against two lawyers who bring most of such lawsuits in New York, writing in a cutting opinion on Thursday that their tactics lacked expertise, possibly violated the rules of professional conduct and were "disingenuous at best." The judge, Sterling Johnson Jr., denied them legal fees and took the rare step of ordering them to stop filing such cases.
The ruling came a year after an article in The New York Times pointed to scores of lawsuits brought by lawyers who identified local businesses that were not in compliance with federal law — because of problems like steep entry ramps and narrow aisles — and then recruited people with disabilities as plaintiffs, even against businesses they had never visited before. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, people who have been denied safe and equal access can sue businesses to make physical improvements. They are not entitled to significant monetary damages, but their lawyers are entitled to legal fees.
Though such arrangements have typically been shielded by confidentiality agreements, Judge Johnson revealed how much money the lawyers — Adam Shore and B. Bradley Weitz — claimed in fees, typically $425 per hour for a total of $15,000 per case even though the cases were so similar that he described them as boilerplate. The two lawyers had filed as many as 10 cases in a single day.
"These tactics will no longer be tolerated," Judge Johnson wrote. "The court will not be shy about informing the appropriate state bar authorities and chief judges across this country should Shore and Weitz unadvisedly continue to litigate in this fashion."
The practice is hardly limited to the lawyers cited in the ruling; it has also flourished in California, Florida and other states. Mr. Shore declined to comment and Mr. Weitz did not respond to a request for comment.
Judge Johnson's ruling came in response to a request for fees in one such case. Mr. Shore and Mr. Weitz represented Mike Costello, a plaintiff who never showed up for court but won a default judgment against the owners of a Subway restaurant in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. The owners of the restaurant were ordered to make repairs; Mr. Shore sought the fees to close the case.
Mr. Shore said in court documents that he and Mr. Weitz had spent more than 35 hours working on the case from September 2010 to May 2012, incurring more than $15,000 in legal fees. But he offered little substantiation. And Judge Johnson questioned the quality of his representation.
Judge Johnson wrote that Mr. Shore had been "ill prepared" for an oral argument in the case and had been unable to answer simple questions about his client. Mr. Shore argued in a court hearing that he was entitled to the fees because of his expertise in bringing disability cases, a claim that Judge Johnson rebuked in his opinion.
"When the court inquired about Shore's experience with A.D.A. cases, he stated that he has 'successfully' litigated over 40 cases," Judge Johnson wrote. "After further inquiry, Shore admitted that of the 40, only 1 case went to trial."
Judge Johnson continued, "The vast majority have settled or resulted in default judgment under circumstances that do not require expertise."
Mr. Shore also requested compensation for preparing for the lawsuit and drafting court documents. In response, Judge Johnson wrote, "It is clear that the 'drafting' refers to counsel's efforts in cutting and pasting old defendants in place of new defendants."
The opinion also noted that many of the violations cited in lawsuits filed by Mr. Costello did not even exist. For example, Mr. Costello claimed that the Subway restaurant had failed to provide a bathroom that was accessible by wheelchairs. The judge determined that, in fact, the restaurant had no bathroom at all. "More troublesome is the fact that the court's best efforts have failed to prove that an individual named 'Mike Costello' exists, is wheelchair-bound and has visited any of those establishments."
The world's biggest banks won a major victory on Friday when a judge dismissed a "substantial portion" of the claims in private lawsuits accusing them of rigging global benchmark interest rates.
Sixteen banks had faced claims totaling billions of dollars in the case, which had been considered their biggest legal threat aside from investigations being pursued by regulators in the United States and Europe into manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor. The list of banks includes Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase.
The banks had been accused by a diverse body of plaintiffs, as varied as bondholders and the City of Baltimore, of conspiring to manipulate Libor, a benchmark at the heart of more than $550 trillion in financial products.
But in the ruling on Friday, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of United States District Court in Manhattan, while acknowledging that her decision "might be unexpected," granted the banks' motion to dismiss federal antitrust claims and partly dismissed the plaintiffs' claims of commodities manipulation. She also dismissed racketeering and state-law claims.
Judge Buchwald allowed a portion of the lawsuit to continue: the claims that banks' purported manipulation of Libor had harmed traders who bet on interest rates. Small shifts in rates can mean sizable gains or losses.
The decision may also make it more likely that banks will have an advantage in potential settlement talks.
Richard Termine
The Los Angeles Philharmonic performing John Adams's "Gospel According to the Other Mary."
During the "Infernal Dance" of Stravinsky's "Firebird," which depicts the subjects of the ogre Kastchei spinning with such savagery that they drop in exhaustion, the music builds to vehement, searing chords. In his performance of the complete "Firebird" on Thursday night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, the second of two programs, Gustavo Dudamel drew such blazing colors, slashing attacks and sheer terror from the orchestra that at the climax of the dance some people in the hall broke into applause and shouted "Bravo." This temporarily drowned out the transition that immediately follows: the powerful chords disperse to reveal mysterious, hushed sonorities.
The formal protocols of classical music concerts that can make audiences feel uptight should be tossed out. And to his immense credit, Mr. Dudamel is drawing newcomers into concert halls. So if some listeners on Thursday could not help expressing their excitement, why not?
For me, though, it was also a revealing moment. Like most ballet scores, "The Firebird," based on a Russian folk legend, is episodic. Still, this 45-minute piece has an overall structure and should unfold inexorably. For all the intensity, imagination and excitement Mr. Dudamel, conducting from memory, brought to bear, the performance lacked some cohesion and depth.
I liked that the dynamic 32-year-old Mr. Dudamel did not go for the obvious and simply pump up the piece with youthful energy. Quite the contrary, during long stretches he drew out the music, often taking slow tempos so as to convey the strangeness embedded in the score. But there were some oddly languid passages. "The Firebird" has seldom seemed so long.
It is exciting to hear this charismatic conductor taking risks and following a vision. Now in his fourth season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he has galvanized the city and become for all conductors a model of community outreach and education. Not bad.
He has also fostered working relationships with living composers. This visit by the orchestra to New York will be remembered especially for Wednesday night's performance of John Adams's ambitious and powerful oratorio "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," which tells the story of the Crucifixion from the perspective of Mary Magdalene, with a libretto compiled by the director Peter Sellars, drawn from the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament sources, with poems and texts by Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Primo Levi and others woven in.
Mr. Dudamel and the Philharmonic gave the premiere of this work in a concert performance last spring at Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Early this month the piece was performed there in a semi-staged version directed by Mr. Sellars. That staging was presented on Wednesday for the work's New York premiere.
"The Gospel According to the Other Mary" depicts the events of the Crucifixion by showing three siblings — Mary Magdalene, Martha and Lazarus — as both biblical and contemporary characters. This Mary Magdalene is a social activist who runs a center for unemployed women with Martha. When we meet them, they have been jailed for protesting on behalf of the poor. Martha is responsible and somber; Mary is searching and troubled.
In a video interview online Mr. Adams describes the challenge of writing this work, comparable in length to his operas. Since the premiere last year, he has made some trims. It remains a long piece: Act I lasts some 70 minutes; Act II about an hour. As a structure, the oratorio sometimes seems overextended, and the narrative thrust loses momentum.
Still, this is an extraordinary work, containing some of Mr. Adams's richest, most daring music. At this point in his career he has a masterly ability to write multi-textured scores where layers of music swirl and spin simultaneously, yet everything is audible. Though his language draws from recognizable inspirations, like big-band jazz, Bach, Copland, Ives, Ravel and more, his voice could not be more personal and fresh. I will not soon forget the entrancing sound of the three countertenors, who both relate, and participate in, the story. Their music hovers on a border between the celestial and the eerie.
Mr. Sellars's production blends the cast of three singers, three dancers and the countertenors into a fluid choreography of gestures that mingle singing, acting and movement. Though Jesus does not appear, the singers and dancers voice his words and become him.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 30, 2013
An earlier version of this review misstated the timing of one of two Gustavo Dudamel's programs at Avery Fisher Hall. As mentioned elsewhere in the article, the works by Vivier and Debussy were performed on Thursday, not Wednesday.
8:55 p.m. | Updated
Friends of Michael S. Steinberg had always marveled at his good fortune.
In his mid-20s, he landed a job a SAC Capital Advisors, then a small hedge fund owned by Steven A. Cohen, who was fast developing a reputation on Wall Street as a stock trading wizard. As SAC posted stupendous returns year-after-year and became one of the world's largest hedge funds, Mr. Steinberg earned tens of millions of dollars trading as a close associate of Mr. Cohen, and rose within the firm.
When Mr. Steinberg married at the Plaza Hotel a few years after joining SAC, his boss attended the black-tie affair. Mr. Steinberg and his family moved into an $8 million Park Avenue co-op and summered in the Hamptons. He also gave back, helping found Natan, a philanthropy that promotes Israel and Jewish culture.
Then, his charmed life came undone.
On Friday, Mr. Steinberg became the most senior SAC employee to be ensnared in the government's multiyear insider trading investigation. F.B.I. agents showed up at his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and arrested him in the pre-dawn hours. Just the day before, Mr. Steinberg had returned from a vacation in Florida, where he and his family visited relatives and took a trip to Disney World.
Later on Friday, Mr. Steinberg, 40, in a black V-neck sweater and charcoal-gray slacks, appeared in Federal District Court in Manhattan and pleaded not guilty. Judge Richard J. Sullivan freed him on $3 million bail.
"Michael Steinberg did absolutely nothing wrong," Barry H. Berke, a lawyer for Mr. Steinberg, said in a statement. "Caught in the cross-fire of aggressive investigations of others, there is no basis for even the slightest blemish on his spotless reputation."
The arrest was the latest in a whirlwind of activity related to the government's investigation of SAC. For years, federal agents have been building a case against the fund. This month, SAC agreed to pay $616 million to settle two civil insider trading actions brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Thursday, a federal judge refused to approve the larger settlement of $602 million, raising concerns over a provision that lets SAC avoid an admission of wrongdoing.
Including Mr. Steinberg, nine current or former SAC employees have been linked to insider trading while at the company; four have pleaded guilty. Some of the former employees who have been implicated hardly knew Mr. Cohen, who operates a sprawling $15 billion fund with more than 1,000 employees across the globe.
But Mr. Cohen and Mr. Steinberg were close. Mr. Steinberg is one of SAC's most veteran employees, though he was recently placed on leave soon after being tied to an earlier case. He joined SAC shortly after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. When he began at SAC, it was just Mr. Cohen and several dozen traders. For years, he sat near Mr. Cohen on the trading floor in the fund's headquarters in Stamford, Conn., and he was part of a team of tech-stock traders that posted outsize returns during the dot-com boom and bust. Later, he helped start Sigma Capital, an SAC unit in Midtown Manhattan.
While years apart, the two share the same hometown — Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, where both attended Great Neck North High School. They also share a love of art; Mr. Steinberg introduced Mr. Cohen to his childhood friend Sandy Heller, who became Mr. Cohen's longtime art adviser.
In the past, SAC has distanced itself from former employees charged with insider trading, but on Friday, it issued a statement in support of Mr. Steinberg: "Mike has conducted himself professionally and ethically during his long tenure at the firm. We believe him to be a man of integrity."
Federal investigators have tried to press lower-level SAC employees for information in helping them build a case against Mr. Cohen. In one instance, F.B.I. agents showed a former trader a sheet of paper with headshots of his former colleagues, with Mr. Cohen at the center. The agents compared the SAC founder to an organized-crime boss who sat atop a corrupt organization.
The pressure on Mr. Cohen, 56, escalated in November, when prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former SAC portfolio manager, with trading in the drug stocks Elan and Wyeth based on confidential drug trial data that a doctor had leaked to him. Mr. Cohen was involved in drug stock trades, but the government has not claimed that he possessed any secret information. Those trades were the subject of the S.E.C. civil action that SAC settled for $602 million. Mr. Martoma has pleaded not guilty and has refused to cooperate with investigators.
Mr. Cohen has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has told his investors that he believes he has acted appropriately at all times.
Amid his legal woes, Mr. Cohen, whose net worth is estimated at about $10 billion, has gone on a shopping binge in recent days, paying $155 million for the Picasso painting "Le Rêve" and $60 million for an oceanfront estate in East Hampton on Long Island.
Mr. Steinberg's name surfaced last fall, when a former SAC analyst pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading ring that illegally traded the technology stocks Dell and Nvidia. As part of his guilty plea, the analyst, Jon Horvath, implicated Mr. Steinberg, saying that he gave the confidential information to Mr. Steinberg and that they traded based on that data. On Friday, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Steinberg with conspiracy and securities fraud, accusing him of participating in the illegal Dell and Nvidia trades. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil lawsuit against Mr. Steinberg.
Last year, a jury convicted two hedge fund managers at other firms related to the Dell and Nvidia trades. E-mails from Mr. Steinberg that emerged in that trial were included in the indictment on Friday.
In one e-mail from August 2008, sent a few days before Dell's quarterly earnings announcement, Mr. Horvath disclosed secret details about Dell's financial data to Mr. Steinberg.
Mr. Horvath wrote that he had "a 2nd hand read from someone at the company." He added, "Please keep to yourself as obviously not well known."
Mr. Steinberg replied: "Yes normally we would never divulge data like this, so please be discreet."
In another e-mail from the trial, Mr. Steinberg told Mr. Horvath and another portfolio manager, Gabe Plotkin, about a conversation he had with Mr. Cohen about conflicting views of Dell inside SAC. Mr. Plotkin owned a large Dell position, while Mr. Steinberg was short, meaning that he thought shares of Dell would drop in value.
"Guys, I was talking to Steve about Dell earlier today and he asked me to get the two of you to compare notes before the print" — meaning ahead of the company's earnings release — "as we are on opposite sides of this one," Mr. Steinberg wrote.
Since his name surfaced in the investigation, Mr. Steinberg has occasionally spent evenings in New York hotels to avoid being handcuffed at home in front of his two children. Federal agents refused to let Mr. Steinberg surrender of his own volition at F.B.I. headquarters downtown, expressing the view that white-collar defendants should not be given special treatment.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 29, 2013
Because of incorrect information supplied by prosecutors, an earlier version of this article gave the wrong age for Michael Steinberg, the SAC Capital Advisors portfolio manager who was arrested on Friday. He is 40, not 41.
Mike Stone/Reuters
Michigan guard Trey Burke's 3-pointer over Kansas' Kevin Young tied the score in the second half.
ARLINGTON, Tex. — The shot was not a pedestrian 3-pointer, a casual 3 from 20 feet 9 inches. This was a heave. When Trey Burke stepped back, he was at least nine feet beyond the regulation 3-point line. He was drifting and Kansas' 6-foot-8 Kevin Young was jumping toward him. The chances of the ball going in were about the same odds many gave Burke and Michigan when they trailed by 14 with less than seven minutes remaining.
"It didn't matter how far that shot was," Burke said. "It was all or nothing. I had a lot of faith in that shot, and it went in."
Burke's faith was justified as his prayer found the bottom of the net with 4.8 seconds left in regulation to tie top-seeded Kansas, 76-76. Burke, the Big Ten player of the year, then scored 5 quick points in overtime as the fourth-seeded Wolverines beat the Jayhawks, 87-85, on Friday night in the Round of 16 in front of a crowd of 42,639 in Cowboys Stadium.
Burke, a sophomore, was shut out in the first half, but finished with 23 points to lead Michigan (29-7) back after it trailed, 68-54, with 6 minutes 50 seconds to play.
It was a stunning collapse for the Jayhawks (31-6), who controlled the game for 37 minutes in front of a large throng of K.U. fans that dominated the grandstands.
While Burke was providing the heroics, the Jayhawks went away from the two things that had carried them through most of the season: defense and the freshman star Ben McLemore. Just as troublesome was ignoring McLemore when the game was on the line. The 6-foot-5 guard broke out of his slump to score 20 points, but he did not score in the last 11:11 of the game.
It was not McLemore who took the 3-point shot with a chance to win the game with two seconds left; it was the reserve point guard Naadir Tharpe. With Kansas trailing by 2 points, the senior point guard Elijah Johnson drove down the right side of the lane, but found his path blocked by Jordan Morgan. Johnson passed to Tharpe, whose shot missed just before the final buzzer.
The Michigan players were delirious as they celebrated around Burke. The Kansas players were stunned, particularly the senior Johnson, who missed a free throw with 12 seconds left in regulation that would have put the Jayhawks up by 4. Johnson stayed on the floor with his hands on his knees, as responsible for the loss as any player because of two late turnovers and a failure to get McLemore more involved in the offense.
"You score 76 points you should win the game, period, especially a team that leads the country in field-goal percentage defense," said Kansas Coach Bill Self, whose team had limited opponents to 35.7 percent shooting for the season.
Kansas built its double-digit lead because it dominated on the inside. The Jayhawks scored a season-high 60 points in the paint and shot 54.5 percent from the field.
But the Michigan freshman Mitch McGary was more crafty and successful than anticipated against Kansas' 7-foot center Jeff Withey, who had blocked 12 shots in his team's first two wins of the tournament.
McGary, who is 6-10, made 12 of 17 shots and scored 25 points to go with 14 rebounds.
"I am about 6-10 and he thought I was shorter than that, I heard. I showed all of 6-10," McGary said. "He did a pretty good job, got some buckets, but that's basketball."
Kansas led by 72-62 with 2:58 to play following a dunk by Withey, and the Jayhawks seemed to expect Michigan to just go away.
"We definitely didn't see fear," said Michigan guard Tim Hardaway Jr. when asked what he saw in his team when it trailed by 14. But Johnson committed a turnover and the Michigan freshman Glen Robinson III scored to make it 72-64. Johnson was then stuck in the backcourt and committed a 10-second violation, and McGary scored with 1:54 to play and it was 72-66 and suddenly a two-possession game.
Kansas led, 76-71, after Johnson made two free throws, but Burke drove for any easy 2 and it was 76-73 with 14 seconds left. Johnson was fouled and missed a free throw with 12 seconds to play and Michigan had the ball.
And Burke.
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David J. Phillip/Associated Press
Florida Gulf Coast after practice Thursday. "We did make history," an Eagles guard said. "No 15 seed has done this."
ARLINGTON, Tex. — The team from so-called Dunk City had yet to rattle a rim or shake a backboard, and about 2,000 fans at Cowboys Stadium appeared bored as they watched a practice filled with drills of floating jumpers, entry passes and — gasp! — free throws.
Finally, the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles gathered around Coach Andy Enfield at midcourt and then quickly reorganized into two lines facing the same basket. Five minutes later, they reminded everyone how they had become the pledges crashing this South Region party of storied basketball fraternities.
Lob passes led to tomahawk jams. Ricochets off the glass were finished off as windmill dunks. Even the Eagles' botched attempts were spectacular, eliciting oohs and aahs. By the time that Chase Fieler tossed a bounce pass toward the hoop, grabbed the ball as he gained momentum, threaded it between his legs and threw down a jarring dunk, Florida Gulf Coast had recaptured the crowd's imagination.
"Dunk City in the house!" someone shouted.
The Eagles still embraced the underdog role Thursday, but they looked and sounded as if they had shaken off the stardust from victories over Georgetown and San Diego State as they prepared for Friday night's game against third-seeded Florida.
"We did make history," guard Brett Comer said. "No 15 seed has done this. We feel like we shocked the world. We're going to prepare for Florida the same way. We didn't come just to play one game or two games. We're coming out to compete and go as far as we can."
After a week in the spotlight, Enfield said the Eagles were refocused and taking a businesslike approach to their improbable appearance in the Round of 16, as if sharing a stage with elite programs like Kansas, Michigan and Florida were familiar turf.
"This is not fluff," Enfield said. "They are really enjoying themselves; they enjoy being here; they enjoy themselves as teammates. We've become more successful, and our players have developed quicker on their skills and confidence because of that culture in the program."
Loose and fun-loving, Florida Gulf Coast was clearly soaking in the atmosphere. Players held mock interviews with one another on the court and turned their smartphone cameras toward the crowd as practice ended, savoring the moment for their scrapbooks.
The gigantic video board at Cowboys Stadium caught their attention. The Eagles were already envisioning how they might look on replays and highlights Friday night.
"We talked about it already," Fieler said. "Even if you make the big plays, it's hard to get a good angle on that TV. You have to stand right on the edge. We'll have to run more towards the sideline to see it."
No. 1 seed Kansas faces fourth-seeded Michigan in Friday night's first game, and win or lose, fans of those two teams are expected to jump on the Eagles' bandwagon.
"We want to see the hype," said LeRoy Aikens, a Michigan fan who stayed after the Wolverines practiced to watch Florida Gulf Coast. "Those guys are like rock stars. A 15 seed in the Sweet 16, that's history."
The Michigan fan Kevin Morris said of the matchup between Florida and Florida Gulf Coast, "It's big brother and little brother," before changing his mind and calling the Eagles a nephew. Still, he said he would root for Florida Gulf Coast if his team did not advance.
The Gators have been cast as spoilers, a role they have relished before. In 2006, they ended George Mason's storybook run to the Final Four en route to winning the national championship. Last year, Florida ousted 15th-seeded Norfolk State, which had upset No. 2 seed Missouri.
"I don't view it that way," Florida Coach Billy Donovan said. "Florida Gulf Coast would like to advance in the tournament as much as we would. The name of the game right now is to try to survive and move on."
Yet the Gators have been overshadowed to an extent as they make their third consecutive appearance in the Round of 16. They face the pressure of not having broken through to the Final Four in both previous trips.
The Eagles, too, have added motivation, having been overlooked as recruits by Florida.
"They're the well-known school, the well-known players and team," Comer said. "I feel like honestly deep down they might not be taking us seriously, just like other teams, because we weren't the high recruited guys."
WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, he was presented with an obvious question with a less obvious answer: Would he keep enforcing a law he now deemed unconstitutional?
A debate in the White House broke out. Some of his political advisers thought it made no sense to apply an invalid law. But his lawyers told Mr. Obama he had a constitutional duty to comply until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise. Providing federal benefits to same-sex couples in defiance of the law, they argued, would provoke a furor in the Republican House and theoretically even risk articles of impeachment.
Two years later, that decision has taken on new prominence after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. accused Mr. Obama from the bench on Wednesday of not having "the courage of his convictions" for continuing to enforce the marriage law even after concluding that it violated constitutional equal protection guarantees. The chief justice's needling touched a raw nerve at the White House. "Continuing to enforce was a difficult political decision," said an aide who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations, "but the president felt like it was the right legal choice."
Other presidents have enforced laws that they no longer defended in court, including the first George Bush, whose acting solicitor general, a man named John Roberts, once asked the Supreme Court to overturn an affirmative action program at the Federal Communications Commission.
But the fuss this week underscored the awkward balancing act for Mr. Obama, whose administration refused to refund federal estate taxes to an 83-year-old lesbian even though he thought it was wrong not to.
"I'm sure there are people in our community who would agree with the chief justice that the president should go farther and not enforce" it, said one leader in the fight for same-sex marriage, who declined to be named while the case was pending. But leaders in the fight came to accept the decision "because without enforcement, there's no means to challenge the law" in court.
The decision to repudiate the Defense of Marriage Act came two years into Mr. Obama's term. Although the Justice Department had defended it in the past, the courts were being asked to examine the law for discrimination under a tougher standard.
Some at the Justice Department argued that the administration should continue to defend the law. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. decided the law did not meet the higher standard. He talked the issue through with Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and the president agreed. They would no longer defend the law against court challenges.
But administration lawyers researched the matter and concluded that the president should still enforce it while the courts deliberated. Even then, not every lawyer agreed. One Justice Department lawyer thought the administration should refuse to enforce the law as well.
The question comes down to the president's obligation under Article II of the Constitution to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." The meaning of that phrase has been debated at least since 1860, when the attorney general at the time concluded that the president could disregard a law purporting to appoint a government officer because it was unconstitutional.
The debate played out into the next century. After President Woodrow Wilson refused to comply with a law preventing him from removing postmasters without Senate approval, the Supreme Court struck down the statute in 1926 as an encroachment on executive power in a case that was seen as implicitly agreeing that a president is not required to execute unconstitutional laws.
A 1977 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under President Jimmy Carter concluded that a president could ignore a statute he considered unconstitutional, depending on the circumstances. A memorandum by the same office in 1994 said the president could do so when the law tried to improperly limit executive power or when it was "probable that the Court would agree with him."
But when a reasonable argument could be made on the other side, lawyers said, the president should still comply until the courts rendered a definitive verdict. That was what President Bill Clinton did in refusing to defend in court a 1996 law expelling all H.I.V.-positive soldiers from the military even as he said he would enforce it. Congress ultimately repealed the law.
Mr. Obama's lawyers leaned on that precedent in 2011 as they made their determination on the Defense of Marriage Act.
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Shahi Syed of the Awami National Party in Pakistan said, "We are the Taliban's first enemy."
KARACHI, Pakistan — This seaside metropolis is no stranger to gangland violence, driven for years by a motley collection of armed groups who battle over money, turf and votes.
But there is a new gang in town. Hundreds of miles from their homeland in the mountainous northwest, Pakistani Taliban fighters have started to flex their muscles more forcefully in parts of this vast city, and they are openly taking ground.
Taliban gunmen have mounted guerrilla assaults on police stations, killing scores of officers. They have stepped up extortion rackets that target rich businessmen and traders, and shot dead public health workers engaged in polio vaccination efforts. In some neighborhoods, Taliban clerics have started to mediate disputes through a parallel judicial system.
The grab for influence and power in Karachi shows that the Taliban have been able to extend their reach across Pakistan, even here in the country's most populous city, with about 20 million inhabitants. No longer can they be written off as endemic only to the country's frontier regions.
In joining Karachi's street wars, the Taliban are upending a long-established network of competing criminal, ethnic and political armed groups in this combustible city. The difference is that the Taliban's agenda is more expansive — it seeks to overthrow the Pakistani state — and their operations are run by remote control from the tribal belt along the Afghan border.
Already, the militants have reshaped the city's political balance by squeezing one of the most prominent political machines, the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party, off its home turf. They have scared Awami operatives out of town and destroyed offices, gravely undercutting the party's chances in national elections scheduled for May.
"We are the Taliban's first enemy," said Shahi Syed, the party's provincial head, at his newly fortified office. "They burn my offices, they tear down my flags and they kill our people."
The Taliban drift into Karachi actually began years ago, though much more quietly. Many fled here after a concerted Pakistani military operation in the Swat Valley in 2009. The influx has gradually continued, officials here say, with Taliban fighters able to easily melt into the city's population of fellow ethnic Pashtuns, estimated to number at least five million people.
Until recently, the militants saw Karachi as a kind of rear base, using the city to lie low or seek medical treatment, and limiting their armed activities to criminal fund-raising, like kidnapping and bank robberies.
But for at least six months now, there have been signs that their timidity is disappearing. The Taliban have become a force on the street, aggressively exerting their influence in the ethnic Pashtun quarters of the city.
Taliban tactics are most evident in Manghopir, an impoverished neighborhood of rough, cinder-block houses clustered around marble quarries on the northern edge of the city, where illegal housing settlements spill into the surrounding desert.
In recent months, Taliban militants have attacked the Manghopir police station three times, killing eight officers, said Muhammad Aadil Khan, a local member of Parliament.
In interviews, residents describe Taliban militants who roam on motorbikes or in jeeps with tinted windows, delivering extortion demands in the shape of two bullets wrapped in a piece of paper.
A factory owner in Manghopir, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, said that several Pashtun businessmen had received demands for $10,000 to $50,000. The figure was negotiable, he said, but payment was not: resistance could result in an assault on the victim's house or, in the worst case, a bullet to the head.
Mr. Khan said he had not dared to visit his constituency in months. "There is a personal threat against me," he said, speaking at the headquarters of his party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which represents ethnic Mohajirs, in the city center.
The militant drive has even distressed Manghopir's most revered residents: the dozens of crocodiles who inhabit a pool near a Sufi shrine here.
The Muslim pilgrims who come here to pay homage to the shrine's saint have long also brought scraps of meat for his reptile charges.
But lately, as visitor numbers have dwindled from hundreds per day to barely a few dozen, the roughly 120 crocodiles here have grown hungry, according to the animals' elderly caretaker.
Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from North Waziristan, Pakistan.
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Johan Santana will be making $25.5 million in the sixth and final year of his enormous contract with the Mets. But it is highly unlikely that he will throw a pitch for the club this season and it is unclear if he will pitch again in the major leagues.
Instead, the 34-year-old Santana, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, will probably spend the season rehabilitating a new tear in his pitching shoulder, which Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson disclosed in a conference call Thursday evening.
The injury, a recurrence of the issue that led him to miss all of the 2011 season, adds an unhappy final chapter to his time with the Mets. The team acquired him in a trade with the Minnesota Twins in the winter of 2008, signed him to a $137.5 million contract — the remainder of which Alderson said was not insured — and then watched as physical ailments began to cut into his effectiveness after a strong first season in Queens.
To some degree, the announcement was not a big surprise because Santana had reported weakness in his pitching shoulder since arriving at spring training. He had not pitched in a single exhibition game and, under the best-case picture, was not expected to pitch in the regular season until late April or late May. Now it appears he will not pitch at all.
"I'm not a doctor nor am I a medical historian," Alderson said in the conference call, "but these injuries are very difficult to recover from after one surgery, and I don't know the history of recovering from a second."
Alderson said Santana had flown to New York on Wednesday to consult with Dr. David Altchek, the Mets' team physician, who performed a magnetic resonance imaging exam on Santana's left shoulder and concluded that he had retorn the anterior capsule. Alderson said that Altchek, at the request of Santana's agent, Peter Greenberg, then reviewed the M.R.I. with two prominent sports orthopedists — Dr. James Andrews and Dr. Lewis Yocum — and that both had agreed with Altchek's assessment.
Alderson said Santana would remain in New York over the weekend as he decided his next step. "A second surgery is a strong possibility," Alderson said.
Santana had hoped to represent Venezuela in March in the World Baseball Classic but encountered a succession of negative developments once he reported to camp. At one point, in early March, Alderson even questioned if Santana had reported to camp in proper shape. The comment did not sit well with Santana, who, perhaps unwisely, threw a bullpen session to try to prove a point.
Alderson spent part of Thursday's conference call trying to clarify how everything had deteriorated so quickly.
"We don't know when it happened or how it happened," he said, "but we do know that at some point the symptoms worsened."
Asked if the bullpen session might have contributed to the new diagnosis, Alderson said, "We just don't have facts."
The disclosure is more of a blow to Santana, who had been thought of as a potential Hall of Famer, than it is to the Mets, who did not have great ambitions for the 2013 season and were not counting on Santana to propel them into the postseason. The Mets are looking to turn things around in 2014, with a core of young players that was clearly not going to include Santana.
If he does not pitch again for the Mets, Santana will be remembered for two games. The most recent came last June, when he pitched the first no-hitter in the team's history. But it was a bittersweet accomplishment because he was forced to throw 134 pitches to get through nine innings, substantially more than the Mets wanted him to throw at that point in the wake of his first shoulder surgery.
After that game, Manager Terry Collins expressed misgivings about what harm might have been done, and his instincts might have been correct. In the 10 games he started after the no-hitter, Santana had an earned run average of 8.28, and he was eventually shut down for the season.
Santana's other standout effort came in the next-to-last game of the 2008 season, his first in New York, when the Mets were in the process of collapsing for the second September in a row. Against the Marlins, with his team reeling, Santana pitched a three-hit, 2-0 shutout. The victory temporarily drew the Mets even in the wild-card standings, although they proceeded to lose the next day, finishing out of the postseason.
It turned out that Santana pitched the game against the Marlins with a torn meniscus in his left knee. That injury was easily repaired. His damaged shoulder, however, is a different story.
The Mets have one more vacancy to address in a starting rotation that now leans heavily on two young pitchers: Jon Niese and Matt Harvey.
Dillon Gee still has to prove he is capable after having surgery last season for a blood clot in his pitching shoulder, and Shaun Marcum, acquired in the off-season, is sidelined with a neck ailment.
"We'll just have to see," said Alderson, which is about all he could say at the end of one more sobering day for his team.
Rob Carr/Getty Images
Indiana's Christian Watford fighting for the loose ball against Brandon Triche, from left, Baye Keita and Michael Carter-Williams.
WASHINGTON — Indiana could not have looked more lost. The Hoosiers missed layups, dribbled into defenders and threw passes that sailed into the Syracuse bench, as if a gust of wind had suddenly swept through the Verizon Center. And that was just the first few possessions.
Indiana had spent four days preparing for Syracuse's celebrated 2-3 zone defense heading into Thursday's East Region semifinal. The Hoosiers watched film, studied sets and moved the ball at practice with authority.
Up close and personal, they found the Orange to be longer, more athletic and more exasperating than they could have imagined. The result was clear, as Syracuse leaned on its usual brand of swarming defense to topple Indiana, 61-50.
Michael Carter-Williams, a sophomore guard, led fourth-seeded Syracuse with 24 points and 5 rebounds, and the senior guard Brandon Triche finished with 14 points.
Indiana, the top seed, shot 34 percent from the field and committed 18 turnovers. It was not the first time Syracuse's length has given an opponent problems, but the bright stage of tournament has a way of magnifying each hurried shot and every errant pass.
Syracuse, which will face No. 3 seed Marquette on Saturday for a spot in the Final Four, has rebounded nicely from a late-season swoon. The Verizon Center itself was the site of one such debacle, a 61-39 loss to Georgetown on March 9 during which Syracuse scored its fewest points since 1962. When Coach Jim Boeheim was asked about that game on Wednesday, he pretended not to remember it.
His team has a different air about it now, even if Thursday's game did not feature the most artistic basketball. Syracuse's Baye Moussa Keita wore a wrap on his left hand after falling flat on his face in the first half. During one particularly comedic sequence of the second half, these two proud programs combined for five straight turnovers without attempting a shot.
Indiana Coach Tom Crean tried his best to unearth solutions, starting the junior forward Will Sheehey in place of his freshman point guard, Yogi Ferrell, to start the second half. Sheehey seemed to energize the Hoosiers, his pass to Victor Oladipo for a layup slicing Syracuse's lead to 34-27.
But even with Oladipo (team-high 16 points), the Big Ten Conference's defensive player of the year, shadowing him for much of the night, Carter-Williams still found his spots. He scored back-to-back baskets — the first on a layup, the second on a deep 3-pointer — to give Syracuse a 14-point cushion.
It was just the fifth meeting between these tradition-laden programs — and their first in the tournament since their most well-known clash, in 1987 for the national championship. The Hoosiers won that game on Keith Smart's last-second jumper, a shot that he delivered over the outstretched left arm of Syracuse's Howard Triche.
On Wednesday, Boeheim described Triche as "one of the steadiest players we've ever had. It's always difficult. There is nothing you can say after those games." Boeheim used the present tense. So many of these games, particularly the losses, linger for so long.
On Thursday, Triche's nephew had an opportunity to help Syracuse (and his family) add some sort of postscript to that loss, even if it came 26 years later. Brandon Triche said people on campus still mistakenly refer to him as "Howard." It does not bother him, he said, though it does strike him as odd. "I thought they would know my name after being here four years," he said before Thursday's game.
Triche had an immediate impact against Indiana, scoring his team's first four points as Syracuse opened up an 11-3 lead. By the time Syracuse's James Sutherland drilled a deep 3-pointer, Crean was motioning for a 30-second timeout. The Hoosiers were flummoxed. There were possessions when Cody Zeller, the team's star forward, found himself trapped by a pair of defenders 18 feet from the basket.
In the first 10 minutes, Indiana shot 1 of 6 from the field and committed eight turnovers. Syracuse was on its way to leading by 18 points before the Hoosiers cut the advantage to 34-22 at halftime. Carter-Williams had 12 points and 3 steals in the first half.
The Hoosiers figured to have the type of offense that would give Syracuse problems. Most gaps in the zone typically come along the perimeter, and Indiana had been one of the country's most proficient 3-point shooting teams, at 40.8 percent for the season. On Thursday, the Hoosiers were 3 of 15 from 3-point range.
Syracuse has come a long way since its woes in late February and early March. Amid a stretch in which the team lost four of six games, Boeheim grew so disenchanted with his players that he talked about how wonderful it would be if he could just drop everything and go golfing.
Yet the Orange were resilient, reaching the Big East Conference tournament final before defeating Montana and California in the tournament's opening rounds. As always, Syracuse relied on defense in reaching the Round of 16 — one of Boeheim's philosophical staples.
On Thursday, it worked once more, and it looked as terrifying as ever.
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By Ben Werschkul, Marcus Mabry, Channon Hodge and Alyssa Kim
Big Changes for 'Today' Show?: The Times's David Carr and Brian Stelter discuss the possibility of CNN's Anderson Cooper replacing NBC's Matt Lauer.
Last week, it was Jay Leno who learned what NBC imagined his future to be. This week, it is Matt Lauer's turn in the spotlight.
NBC's succession planning at both ends of its weekday schedule is causing no small amount of heartburn within the corridors of Rockefeller Center. It is playing out in public view, enveloping two of the most illustrious shows on television, "Today" and "The Tonight Show," and two of the most successful men who have hosted those shows.
In Mr. Lauer's case, the rumored successor on Wednesday was Anderson Cooper, the biggest star on CNN. Reports of a phone call from an NBC executive to size up Mr. Cooper's interest in co-hosting "Today" renewed speculation about Mr. Lauer's future on the show. NBC tried to quell it by saying, in a blunt statement, "We are not considering replacing Matt Lauer."
The network's plans for "The Tonight Show" are, by all accounts, further along. With Mr. Leno's contract coming due in the fall of 2014, NBC has chosen Jimmy Fallon to be his successor. Though a deal is not yet done, Mr. Fallon is expected to take over "Tonight" that fall, if not earlier.
The plans for "Today" remain murky. Mr. Lauer, a star of the show for the better part of two decades, signed a contract last year — believed to pay him $25 million a year — that keeps him at NBC at least through the end of 2014. But the perception that Mr. Lauer forced his co-host Ann Curry from her job last year has badly damaged his reputation. Within the network, his current contract is widely considered to be his last, so there is clearly some succession planning to do.
The nature of the call to Mr. Cooper, however, raised the possibility that NBC might remove Mr. Lauer before his contract expires, or that Mr. Lauer might ask to be replaced. The inquiry, as reported by Deadline.com on Tuesday night, was about whether Mr. Cooper would consider joining "Today" later this year. His contract at CNN expires this fall, and other networks have expressed interest in hiring him.
Three people in the tight-knit television business, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the outreach was considered confidential, confirmed that the call was made this month. But executives at NBC, while tacitly confirming their interest in Mr. Cooper, strenuously denied that they saw him as a short-term fix to the problems that have plagued "Today," which fell to second place in the ratings last year after 16 years at No. 1.
A news division executive, who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity, said in a statement, "NBC News has many exploratory talks with talent inside and outside of the network, but to read anything specific into that is presumptuous."
The same person also said, "We are confident in our anchor team and are focused on producing great morning TV."
Mr. Lauer still has millions of fans, just as Mr. Leno does at night. But that has not stopped high-ranking NBC executives from wondering aloud whether they should make a change at "Today" before Mr. Lauer's contract expires. The new co-host of the 9 a.m. hour of "Today," Willie Geist, and the moderator of "Meet the Press," David Gregory, are mentioned most often as possible successors.
Ryan Seacrest, the "American Idol" host and a radio D.J., was discussed a year ago as a possible replacement, but his name comes up less frequently these days.
That the names are mentioned at all is a challenge for the network going forward. While NBC News executives say they have resisted the lighter fare and tabloid style of their rival, ABC's "Good Morning America," the "Today" show itself risks becoming tabloid fodder.
In the wake of the Deadline.com report, TMZ.com reported that its sources had said that "Lauer is actually on board with the idea of Anderson replacing him," and that he "planned to have a meeting with Anderson to sit down and discuss it."
A spokeswoman for "Today" who represents Mr. Lauer declined to comment.
It is unclear who at NBC or its parent company, Comcast, made the call to Mr. Cooper. The news division does not currently have a president. Patricia Fili-Krushel, the chairwoman of NBCUniversal News Group, who oversees the news division, previously worked at Time Warner, the parent of CNN, for nearly a decade.
In some ways, Mr. Cooper would be a logical choice for "Today": he is in his mid-40s and has demonstrated that he can juggle hard news interviews with the fun and games that morning television shows serve up.
His presence on "Today" might spur former viewers to give the show another chance. "Today" has fallen about 20 percent in the ratings since Ms. Curry was removed as a co-host next to Mr. Lauer last summer.
Co-hosting "Today" would, however, be a drastic lifestyle change for Mr. Cooper, who is "not a morning person," one friend said, and is used to hosting a prime-time newscast. "Anderson Cooper 360," his nightly hour on CNN, is shown live at 8 p.m. and replayed at 10 p.m.
While "360" is one of CNN's highest-rated programs, it has struggled in the ratings: it currently attracts fewer than one million viewers at 8 p.m.
Furthermore, Mr. Cooper's shot at a daytime talk show in the fall of 2011 has been viewed as a disappointment. It was renewed for a second season but canceled last October, only one month into that season.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cooper at CNN declined to comment. When his CNN contract ends, another option besides "Today" is an expanded role on the weekly CBS newsmagazine "60 Minutes."
He currently contributes a few stories to the newsmagazine each year. His CNN contract prohibits him from doing more, and CBS executives would jump at the chance to change that.
Mr. Cooper may opt to stay at CNN, however, given that it provides him a daily presence on television.
"Today" would provide the same thing, and a much bigger audience. But Mr. Cooper may be leery of appearing to force out Mr. Lauer.
As it became clear that a proposal to place speed-tracking cameras on New York City's streets would fail in Albany, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg let fly a charged and unusually personal attack against state lawmakers on Wednesday, blaming state senators, by name, for the future deaths of children killed by speeding cars.
The next time that word of such a tragedy emerges, Mr. Bloomberg suggested at a news conference near Union Square, "why don't you pick up the phone and call your state senator and ask why they allowed that child to be killed?"
He said his office would even provide contact information for certain senators: Dean G. Skelos, the Republican majority leader; Simcha Felder, who was elected as a Democrat but chose to caucus as a Republican; and Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who has often been a crucial ally to the Bloomberg administration.
"Maybe you want to give those phone numbers to the parents of the child when a child is killed," Mr. Bloomberg said. "It would be useful so that the parents can know exactly who's to blame."
Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Republicans, declined to address the mayor's remarks directly, saying only that "no one has fought harder or longer than Senate Republicans" to promote safety in New York City.
But late Wednesday night, Mr. Felder, who had not seen the mayor's comments initially because of the Passover holiday, condemned them as "inflammatory, reckless and out of touch, as usual."
Though speed cameras, long trumpeted by city officials as an important street safety tool, were initially included in a budget package in the State Assembly, they do not appear in the budget that is expected to be approved by the Legislature this week.
Some opponents of the cameras have called them a warrantless attempt to raise revenue for the city and have expressed doubts as to whether they reduce speeding.
Mr. Golden said on Wednesday that other areas with speed cameras around the country had found them "unreliable."
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner, said on Wednesday that over 100 cities and states were already using cameras "and study after study has proved that they work." The Transportation Department cited the example of Washington, D.C., where the police said last year that speeding at camera locations had fallen significantly since 2001, when the devices were first installed.
Last week, when New York City announced its final 2012 traffic fatality statistics — 274 deaths, the highest since 2008 — officials sought to tie the figures to a need for speed cameras, particularly near schools.
Amid consistent calls from advocates, who are often critical of New York City's traffic enforcement, it appeared that momentum had begun to build in support of the policy, particularly after a spate of high-profile fatal crashes this year.
Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a top Democratic candidate for mayor, pledged her support for speed cameras this month, as did Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner.
But the plan has faced opposition from the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, which, like Mr. Golden, has said that the more effective way to reduce speeding would be to hire more officers.
Mr. Golden suggested that the state revisit the use of cameras "if we can prove that the technology is sound, and document unequivocally that it will reduce speeding and fatalities."
On Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg appeared in no mood to wait.
"We literally are having kids that are getting killed around our schools because people are speeding," he said. "And they don't want to let us use cameras to stop people from doing that."
Peter Hoffman for The New York Times
Fair Oaks Farms in Fair Oaks, Ind., has long used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to fully power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a gift shop and more. More Photos »
FAIR OAKS, Ind. — Here at one of the largest dairy farms in the country, electricity generated using an endless supply of manure runs the equipment to milk around 30,000 cows three times a day.
For years, the farm has used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a cafe, a gift shop and a maze of child-friendly exhibits about the world of dairy, including a 4D movie theater.
All that, and Fair Oaks Farms was still using only about half of the five million pounds of cow manure it vacuumed up from its barn floors on a daily basis. It burned off the excess methane, wasted energy sacrificed to the sky.
But not anymore.
The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials from the federal Department of Energy called the endeavor a "pacesetter" for the dairy industry, and said it was the largest natural gas fleet using agricultural waste to drive this nation's roads.
"As long as we keep milking cows, we never run out of gas," said Gary Corbett, chief executive of Fair Oaks, which held a ribbon-cutting event for the project this month and opened two fueling stations to the public.
"We are one user, and we're taking two million gallons of diesel off the highway each year," he said. "That's a big deal."
The switch comes at a time of nascent growth for vehicles that run on compressed natural gas in the United States, as some industries — particularly those that require long-haul trucking or repetitive routes — have started considering the advantages of cheap natural gas, close to half the price of a gallon of diesel fuel for the same amount of power.
The American Gas Association estimates there are about 1,200 natural gas fueling stations operating across the country, the vast majority of which are supplied by the same pipelines that heat houses.
But the growing market is also drawing interest from livestock farmers, landfill management companies and other industries handling methane-rich material that, if harnessed, could create a nearly endless supply of cleaner, safer, sustainable "biogas," while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
To be sure, no one is pretending that waste-to-energy projects will become a major part of the larger natural gas vehicle market. But supporters say it could provide additional incentive to make biogas systems, which have lagged behind other sustainable energy solutions, more commercially viable.
"You're essentially harvesting manure," said Erin Fitzgerald, a senior vice president at the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, who says that farmers across the country are starting to think about whether the model tried at Fair Oaks will work for them. "It's not glamorous. It doesn't really catch your eye like wind and solar."
Mike McCloskey, a co-owner of Fair Oaks, said he first started looking into renewable energy options for the farm more than a decade ago, when the smell of manure, used as fertilizer on his fields, started drawing complaints from some neighbors.
Today, the farm is running sophisticated $12 million "digester" facilities that process its overabundance of manure, capturing natural gas that runs electric generators or is pumped underground to a fueling station. The leftover byproduct is still spread on the fields as fertilizer.
While Mr. Corbett would not divulge how much money the farm saves by its switch to biogas fuel, he said the gas stations had already brought in new revenue from other trucking fleets.
Dennis Smith, director of the Clean Cities program for the federal Department of Energy, said about 8,000 large-scale dairy and swine farms across the country could potentially support similar biogas recovery projects. When coupled with landfills and wastewater treatment plants, he said, there is potential to someday replace as much as 10 billion gallons of gasoline annually with renewable fuel.
Still, not everyone is convinced that the time is ripe for more manure-powered vehicles, particularly when regular natural gas remains abundant and cheap.
"The market is just not firm yet," said Michael Boccadoro, a bioenergy consultant from California who is finishing a study of the possibility of neighboring dairies in the San Joaquin Valley sharing a single digester. "It's all a tiny bit premature."
That has not stopped AMP Americas, a Chicago company that partnered with Fair Oaks on the fuel project. The company plans to build 15 more natural gas stations this year, with some in Texas and the rest along two major Interstates in the Midwest.
For now, each station will be supplied primarily by traditional pipeline gas, but the company plans to partner with more dairy companies along the way, getting help from Mr. McCloskey and the Fair Oaks story.
"I think the whole country is ready for this," Mr. McCloskey said. "I think you're going to look around in five years and be very surprised at what you see."
