Memo From Baghdad: Clashes Carry Worries of a New Civil War

BAGHDAD — In the final days before the United States withdrew its troops from Iraq, American intelligence officers worried that a future Sunni insurgency here might be led not by Al Qaeda but by an organization whose leaders are former high-level members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

Now, after large numbers of Sunni tribesmen clashed with government forces last week, Iraqis of all sects are asking two questions: Is the country headed toward a new civil war? And, if so, will the group of former Baathists lead one side of it?

The group, the Men of the Army of the Naqshbandia Order, commonly known by the initials of its Arabic name, J.R.T.N., has emerged as a potential alternative to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for Sunnis who have long felt deeply marginalized under Iraq's Shiite-led government and are taking up arms once again. Passions were ignited last week after a raid by security forces on a Sunni protest camp in the northern village of Hawija, a stronghold for the group, left dozens dead.

Biding its time, as Al Qaeda has continued to carry out car bombings and suicide attacks, the group has armed itself. It has enlisted recruits from the ranks of Mr. Hussein's Republican Guard units and devised a well-executed media campaign, with an online magazine, pamphlets and a social media presence, to hone its message that its members are the protectors of Sunni Arab nationalism and guardians against Iranian influence.

"They are playing the long game," said Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who has researched the Naqshbandia group. "This is the next step in the long game. J.R.T.N. is very well positioned to exploit what's going on."

Iraq careers from one crisis to another — clashes between Sunni gunmen and government forces continued over the weekend — but diplomats and experts say events may have finally pushed the country to the brink of a new civil war. Martin Kobler, the United Nations' representative in Iraq, recently warned that the country "could head towards the unknown." The International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization, said Iraq "has begun a perilous, downward slide toward confrontation."

The fear that has gripped Iraq reflects the shifting nature of the recent violence. Random explosions have only a limited ability to challenge the authority of the state, partly because so many leaders, Sunnis and other citizens have disavowed such attacks. But what Iraqis are seeing now is entirely different: large numbers of Sunni men are picking up weapons, forming militia units and pledging to fight the government.

The likelihood of a civil war could hinge on two things: Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's ability to defuse the crisis by offering meaningful concessions to Sunnis, in the form of judicial overhaul and the release of Sunni prisoners held without charges; and the ability of groups like the Naqshbandia organization to persuade Sunnis to embark on a campaign of armed resistance.

In the wake of the Hawija raid, which set off a wave of revenge attacks against Iraqi security forces, some Sunnis say they are ready to join armed groups like the Naqshbandia organization to fight a government that they regard as loyal to Iran and unwilling to accommodate a meaningful role for Sunnis in public life. Sunnis, a minority in Iraq, lost the recent sectarian civil war here. But now their anger at the government has converged with a sense of empowerment wrought by the civil war in neighboring Syria, where Sunnis are fighting to topple the government, reviving their impulse for insurrection.

"What happened in Hawija is a trap that the government is falling into, to impose the same thing that is happening in Syria," said Ghazi al-Zaidi, 62, a Sunni in Diyala Province. "The violence is going to inflame Iraqis to prepare for a revolution against the government, and bring more sympathy to those who are forming forces that will fight against the government."

In its statements in recent days, the Naqshbandia group, which is said to be led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Mr. Hussein's top adviser and the highest-ranking member of the former government to elude capture, has sounded emboldened. It has said once-peaceful protesters have "joined our army and are fighting" under the group's banner and has vowed to march on Baghdad.

"The orders were issued to our groups and to our people to complete all preparation to march into our beloved capital, Baghdad, and we will strike relentlessly and with an iron fist on the heads of the traitors, agents and Safavid enemies of Arabism and Islam," the group said in a statement posted on its Web site. (The term "Safavid" is used to refer to Iran, which was ruled by the Safavid Empire in the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries, and is perceived by Sunnis to dominate Iraq and its Shiite government.)

Yasir Ghazi contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an employee of The New York Times from Diyala Province, Iraq.

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DealBook: Frank Bisignano, Top Lieutenant of Dimon, Is Leaving JPMorgan

A senior executive in the inner circle of Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase's chief executive, is leaving, the latest departure after the bank reported a multibillion-dollar trading loss last year.

Frank J. Bisignano, co-chief operating officer, will become chief executive of First Data Corporation, a payment processing firm, Mr. Dimon said in a statement on Sunday. The trading losses at the bank, the nation's largest, have swelled to more than $6.2 billion since they were first disclosed almost a year ago.

Mr. Dimon said Matthew E. Zames, who shared the role of chief operating officer with Mr. Bisignano, would take over all aspects of the job, effective immediately.

"He is a proven business executive, who has performed exceptionally well since coming into his corporate role in May of last year," Mr. Dimon said.

Mr. Bisignano's departure is voluntary, according to two people close to the bank, adding that the top post at First Data would be a perfect role for him.

His departure is less fraught than others during more tumultuous periods, these people say. Ina R. Drew, who ran the chief investment office, the unit at the center of the huge trading loss, resigned under pressure in May last year, for example.

The bank is well positioned to make the shift more seamless, these people added, saying Mr. Zames enjoyed widespread confidence.

JPMorgan reported record profit in the first quarter, buoyed by gains in investment banking and a surge in mortgage lending. With Mr. Bisignano's departure, the ranks of executives who once surrounded Mr. Dimon as he helped steer the bank through the 2008 financial crisis will be even thinner. Several other executives have already left, including Heidi Miller, James E. Staley, William T. Winters and Steven D. Black.

Mr. Bisignano was promoted to co-chief operating officer last July as part of a broad reshuffling of management. During his time at JPMorgan, Mr. Bisignano gained a reputation as a kind of Mr. Fix-It. His reputation had not been tarnished by the outsize bets made by traders in JPMorgan's chief investment office.

He took the reins of JPMorgan's floundering mortgage unit in 2011, just as the bank was grappling with thorny legal issues, including investors who accused the bank of selling shaky mortgage-backed securities that later imploded.

To root out the problems, Mr. Bisignano revamped the mortgage unit and announced a policy to address cases in which JPMorgan had wrongfully foreclosed on active-duty members of the military, a violation of federal law. He was a skilled manager, and he kept a tight watch over the mortgage operations.

Mr. Bisignano is leaving at a challenging time for JPMorgan, which once held special sway with federal regulators, in part because the bank largely sidestepped the financial crisis.

Now, JPMorgan is facing a criminal inquiry about whether it misled investors and regulators about the botched derivative trades. Besides that inquiry, JPMorgan is facing investigations by at least eight federal agencies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Prosecutors are examining a variety of issues, including possible breakdowns in the bank's controls to prevent money-laundering activities.

The bank is also working to bolster its risk and compliance controls, while seeking to repair frayed relationships with regulators in Washington. The breakdown between JPMorgan and its primary regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, was illuminated during a Senate hearing in March and in a report by the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which described a bank that sometimes took a defiant position with regulators.

Mr. Dimon has testified before Congress about the trading losses and has repeatedly apologized for the bank's mistakes.

In his annual letter to shareholders this month, Mr. Dimon remained contrite, vowing to continue improving risk controls while again expressing that the bank had "let our regulators down."

Mr. Dimon promised to redouble efforts to fix compliance problems. "We are reprioritizing our major projects and initiatives," he said.

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Tears and Rage as Hope Fades in Bangladesh

Kevin Frayer/Associated Press

Bangladeshi rescue workers reacted Sunday after a fire broke out in a tunnel that the workers were using to search for survivors in the collapsed building near Dhaka. More Photos »

SAVAR, Bangladesh — The mother stood at the edge of the wreckage, pressing her lips to photos of her two children — Asma, who had worked in a garment factory on the fourth floor, and Sultan, who worked on the fifth.

For five days after the building collapsed, rescue teams had retrieved corpses and survivors, but not her son and daughter. Tears on her cheeks, she began to shout: at a soldier sweating beneath a hard hat, at the shattered building, at her god, and finally at her children, calling out their names, beckoning to them, "Today, I'm here! But you haven't come back!"

Thousands of people surrounded the site on Sunday, watching the huge rescue operation, even as hopes faded that many more victims would be found alive. For nearly 12 hours, rescuers tried to save a trapped woman, lowering dry food and juice to her as they carefully cut through the wreckage trying to reach her. But then a fire broke out, apparently killing the woman, leaving many firefighters in tears.

With national outrage boiling over, Bangladeshi paramilitary officers tracked down and arrested Sohel Rana, the owner of the building, who was hiding near the Indian border, and returned him by helicopter to Dhaka. When loudspeakers at the rescue site announced his capture earlier in the day, local news reports said, the crowd broke out in cheers.

The collapse of the building, the Rana Plaza, is considered the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry. It is known to have claimed at least 377 lives, and hundreds more workers are thought to be missing still, buried in the rubble.

The Rana Plaza building contained five garment factories, employing more than 3,000 workers, who were making clothing for European and American consumers. Labor activists, citing customs records, company Web sites or labels discovered in the wreckage, say that the factories produced clothing for JC Penney; Cato Fashions; Benetton; Primark, the low-cost British store chain; and other retailers.

Everywhere near the building, the stench of death was overpowering. Men in surgical masks sprayed disinfectant in the air. Others sprayed air freshener. At one point, the police said, searches inside the structure were suspended because some rescuers were overcome by dust and the odor of decomposing bodies.

Savar is a crowded industrial suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and the disaster has overwhelmed local institutions. A high school near Rana Plaza is now a staging ground for the identification of corpses. Nazma Begum, 25, stood beside a crude coffin that contained the remains of her sister, Shamima. She was standing guard over it until her father arrived to take the sister back to their home village to be buried. Sticks of burning incense had been wedged into the coffin to fight the awful smell.

"I had hoped that my sister was still alive," she said softly. "But that hope is now shattered."

Like so many young women in the country, the two sisters had gotten work in garment factories to help support their families. Ms. Begum makes about $85 a month; her sister made $56. Now Ms. Begum wants to quit her job. She has heard rumors that the building where she works is unsafe.

Just then a group of young men placed another coffin nearby, slid open the wooden lid and sprayed the body with disinfectant. A man on a megaphone made an announcement: "We have a new body," he said, as a crowd surged toward the coffin. "You can come and see the body to identify it."

For days, rescuers crawled though pancaked spaces on their hands and knees, afraid that using heavy machinery would collapse the building further. Lowered precariously into holes, they called out through the rubble and the darkness, listening for the voices of survivors. Many were saved in the painstaking process.

"We were shouting, asking if anyone was alive," said Sharif ul-Islam, 35, a firefighter. "We would say, 'If anyone is alive, please make a sound! We will come to you!' "

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Anthony R. Foxx to Be Nominated for Transportation Secretary

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday plans to nominate Anthony R. Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte, N.C., to be the next secretary of transportation, choosing a rising young African-American from the South to balance out a cabinet criticized for a lack of diversity.

Mr. Obama also appeared close to nominating Penny Pritzker, a hotel magnate, longtime friend and fund-raiser, as the next commerce secretary, and Michael Froman, his international economics adviser, as the United States trade representative, although neither nomination was scheduled to be announced on Monday.

The selections, all of which would require Senate confirmation, would help fill out Mr. Obama's second-term cabinet more than five months after his re-election. Consumed by fiscal clashes and legislative battles and delayed by painstaking vetting, Mr. Obama has been slow to finish assembling a team to carry him through the second half of his administration.

Word of Mr. Foxx's nomination, confirmed on Sunday by White House officials who insisted on anonymity to discuss it before the formal announcement, comes at a time when the president has been scrutinized for the demographic makeup of his circle. After drawing criticism that many of his initial second-term national security picks were men, Mr. Obama has named a succession of women and minorities to other top-level posts.

The issue provoked one of the laugh lines at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association on Saturday night. "Mr. President, your hair is so white it could be a member of your cabinet," Conan O'Brien joked.

Mr. Foxx, who turns 42 on Tuesday, has served as mayor for nearly four years. But just three weeks ago, he announced that he would not seek re-election this year because he wanted to spend more time with his family, including two children born after he joined the Charlotte City Council in 2005. "I do not want to be a father who looks back and wishes I had spent more time with them," he said in a statement on April 5.

Mr. Foxx, who was raised by a single mother and his grandparents, became the first black student body president at Davidson College and earned a law degree from New York University. He worked as a lawyer for a private firm as well as for the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department before returning to Charlotte to begin his career as an elected politician.

He has said that during his four years as mayor, he has turned around an economically afflicted city, adding 13,000 jobs, making Charlotte more hospitable to business and hosting the Democratic National Convention last year.

While Mr. Foxx does not have a transportation background, he did work as mayor to extend a light-rail line, open another runway at the airport, complete a major highway widening, improve a major bridge and bring streetcars back to Charlotte.

He would be the second black member of the cabinet, joining Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. He would succeed Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman who led the Transportation Department for four years and said in January that he would step down as soon as his successor was confirmed.

The commerce job has been open for nearly a year since John E. Bryson stepped down in June, citing medical reasons after a sequence of car crashes. The deputy secretary, Rebecca M. Blank, has filled in since then. Ms. Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune, has been in the wings for months as the likely candidate, but vetting her family's wealth and intricate business ties evidently delayed the nomination.

Mr. Froman, a former managing director of Citigroup and a law school friend of Mr. Obama who serves as his deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, appears likely to be the new trade representative, a cabinet-level post. Ron Kirk, a former Dallas mayor who had the job in the first term, stepped down last month; he spent time with Mr. Obama during the president's trip to Dallas last week and played golf with him over the weekend.

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Tsarnaev’s Contacts on Russian Trip Draw Scrutiny

F.B.I. agents are working closely with Russian security officials to reconstruct Tamerlan Tsarnaev's activities and connections in Dagestan during his six-month visit last year, tracking meetings he may have had with specific militants, his visits to a radical mosque and any indoctrination or training he may have received, law enforcement officials said Sunday.

At the same time, the bureau is also still looking for "persons of interest" in the United States who may have played a role in the radicalization of Mr. Tsarnaev, 26, and his younger brother Dzhokhar, 19, before the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on ABC News's "This Week" on Sunday. But Mr. Rogers said "the big unknown" remains what happened in Russia.

Investigators believe it is likely the Tsarnaev brothers were self-radicalized and got their bomb-making instructions strictly from the Internet. But they are still exploring the possibility that other people in Russia or the United States were critical influences, if not accomplices, and officials say it may be weeks before the full picture of their plot is clear.

Officials said they were still examining the conduct of the Tsarnaev brothers' mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, and Tamerlan's wife, Katherine Russell, 24, who converted to Islam when she married him in 2010.

On Saturday, the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Mr. Tsarnaev had sought to join the Muslim insurgency in Dagestan and had been in contact with several rebels who were killed by Russian authorities in late spring of 2012 while he was staying in Makhachkala, the regional capital. Mr. Tsarnaev left Dagestan in July 2012, just two days after a shootout between militants and the police in which several militants were killed, including William Plotnikov, 23, a Russian-born Canadian. Investigators are trying to determine whether Mr. Tsarnaev and Mr. Plotnikov met, one official said on Sunday.

In 2011, Russian officials sent a warning about Mr. Tsarnaev's extremist views to both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., saying they believed he was coming to Dagestan, a republic in southern Russia, to connect with underground groups. That warning was based on telephone conversations intercepted by Russian intelligence, including one between Mr. Tsarnaev and his mother, in which they discussed jihad, Russian authorities have told the F.B.I.

Experts on the effort by Russian authorities to contain the Muslim insurgency in Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus region said that if officials were aware of Mr. Tsarnaev's arrival in Dagestan in January 2012, he probably would have been under scrutiny throughout his time there.

"He would have been flagged at the airport, when he entered Dagestan and when he went to the mosque," said Jean-Francois Ratelle, a Canadian scholar at George Washington University who is studying the insurgency in Dagestan. Mr. Ratelle said that in his own research trips to Dagestan, he had been stopped almost every day on the street by police officers checking his registration papers, in part because he has a beard, which is seen as a possible sign of religious devotion.

It is unclear how closely the police were tracking Mr. Tsarnaev, but his mother described at least one instance in which her son was stopped by the police along the beach in Makhachkala, where Mr. Tsarnaev's parents live, and brought in for questioning.

"He's like: 'The police came there and they asked for documents,' " Ms. Tsarnaeva said at a news conference last week. "They asked him to follow. He was asking them, he was like in shock. He's like: 'What, is there something wrong with me? Am I strange, or don't look like everybody?' "

At the news conference, the brothers' father, Anzor Tsarnaev, acknowledged that Mr. Tsarnaev had occasionally prayed at a mosque on Kotrova Street in Makhachkala that is known as a gathering spot for some Salafists with extremist views. The mosque is just a short walk from the soccer stadium for the local Dynamo team. Graffiti, written in stark red on a white wall nearby the mosque says, "Victory or paradise."

Andrew Roth and Ian Austen contributed reporting.

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Young Inmates Find a Voice Through Short Films

Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

Amirah Harris, a former inmate on Rikers Island, had her work shown last week at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

An expectant hush fell over more than 300 young adults packed into a theater at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center as a screening of short films was about to start. Amirah Harris was palpably excited — this would be not only her first time seeing her work on the big screen, but also her first time seeing it outside of jail.

As her 90-second short began last week, Ms. Harris started mouthing the words to the score she had chosen, "Complicated," by Nivea. Then the script began unfolding, with Ms. Harris nodding her head as the audience digested her words.

She beamed when the audience applauded at the end of her film, which she made while incarcerated on Rikers Island.

"I was blunt, I was being me," she said moments later. "I felt loved."

Ms. Harris, 20, is a graduate of Tribeca Teaches, a program that instructs young people in 21 schools in New York City and Los Angeles on how to make movies. She was part of the inaugural class of about 40 female inmates at East River Academy, an alternative high school at Rikers.

Administrators do not consider such instruction indulgent or frivolous. They hope that mastering a difficult computer program and creating a work of art will raise inmates' self-esteem and confidence, familiarize them with computers and prepare them for their eventual release.

Dora B. Schriro, commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, called Tribeca Teaches "spot on" and an invaluable addition to the Rikers curriculum.

"We were focusing in particular on creating a robust after-school program, first to reduce idleness because that keeps the kids safer," Ms. Schriro said, "but not just to fill the time but to provide opportunities that might enrich their lives and help them find something to pursue."

In November, Flonia Telegrafi, a teaching artist from the Tribeca Film Institute, which facilitates the program, began joining classes at East River Academy twice a week. She said she showed the Peter Sollett short film "Five Feet High and Rising" to the inmates and had each create video responses titled "Letters to Donna," among other activities.

"I got a great response from the students because they've seen it in their communities, or in their lives," Ms. Telegrafi said. "They were earnest in a way I hadn't really experienced."

Two of the video letters, including Ms. Harris's, were shown at the screening last Tuesday, which featured short films by Tribeca Teaches' students from all the schools.

"The students are ecstatic" about their work being shown to peers outside of jail, Ms. Schriro said. "The whole school is quite jazzed about this."

Of course, teaching at Rikers involves challenges unlike those in even the most troubled public schools. Video cameras are forbidden, so footage for the films either had to be archival or shot off the island, by volunteers from the Maysles Institute. All media had to be approved by the Department of Correction before it was allowed into the classroom. The roster of students changed regularly, as inmates were released or transferred to other institutions and 50-minute class periods were occasionally truncated by alarms (Ms. Telegrafi emphasized that she had never been concerned about her safety while teaching there).

Ms. Telegrafi said the most important attribute for a teacher at Rikers was patience, both with the time-consuming procedures of a disciplinary institution and with students of different ages, skill and comfort levels. She said the program served several purposes like giving the young women a sense of control over their futures, and that perhaps the films created would help the outside world face its prejudices against former inmates.

"It ultimately brings up their confidence and validates their experience," Ms. Telegrafi said. "It's important to show that just because they're inside Rikers doesn't mean they don't have a voice."

Ms. Harris was sent to Rikers last summer and released in February. She is taking classes toward the General Education Development test, known as the G.E.D., and lives in Brownsville with her mother and one-year-old son, Divine. She would not discuss why she went to jail.

After the show, Ms. Harris said she thought Tribeca Teaches was a wonderful experience and hoped it continued at Rikers.

"Being in there, it's like you don't really get to do things and you're bounded to certain activities," she said.

Moments before the screening Ms. Harris met the actress Taraji P. Henson. She posed for photos on the red carpet with Ms. Henson, then gushed "That's so going on Facebook." She immediately began tapping away on her smartphone, star-struck, then walked in to take her seat in the theater.

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The Caucus: Lawmakers Call for Stronger U.S. Action in Syria

WASHINGTON — Republicans on Capitol Hill took President Obama to task Sunday for what they characterized as dangerous inaction in Syria, while Democrats urged the White House to step up its humanitarian response to the two-year-old civil war that has killed 70,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

The lawmakers' comments came after revelations last week that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is believed to have used chemical weapons against his own people. On Sunday, several leading Republicans — including Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona, both of whom are members of the Armed Services Committee — used appearances on television talk shows to warn that failure to intervene in Syria would embolden nations like Iran and North Korea.

"If we keep this hands-off approach to Syria, this indecisive action toward Syria, kind of not knowing what we're going to do next, we're going to start a war with Iran because Iran's going to take our inaction in Syria as meaning we're not serious about their nuclear weapons program," Mr. Graham said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation."

Mr. Graham added, "There's nothing you can do in Syria without risk, but the greatest risk is a failed state with chemical weapons falling in the hands of radical Islamists, and they're pouring into Syria."

Mr. Obama has previously said the use of chemical weapons in Syria would be a "red line" that would set off an American response. On Friday, one day after his administration disclosed that it believes Mr. Assad's forces have used sarin gas against Syrian citizens, the president called it "a game changer." The White House has said it wants to establish who used the weapons and whether their use was deliberate or accidental before deciding whether a red line has been crossed.

So far, the United States has taken limited military steps in Syria but has sent supplies like night-vision goggles and body armor to the rebels fighting the Assad government. Now Mr. Graham, Mr. McCain and others would like the United States to do more, possibly by arming the rebels or establishing a no-fly zone to neutralize Syria's air defense, though they disagreed on the particulars.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, who also serves on the Armed Services Committee, said on "Face the Nation" that he had spoken last week with King Abdullah II of Jordan about a no-fly zone, while Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said lawmakers had received classified information that suggests the Assad government has been using chemical weapons for the past two years.

"The problem is, you know, the president has laid down the line," Mr. Rogers said on the ABC News program "This Week. "And it can't be a dotted line. It can't be anything other than a red line. And more than just Syria, Iran is paying attention to this. North Korea is paying attention to this."

The Republicans agreed that the United States should not send in ground troops. "The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria," Mr. McCain said on the NBC program "Meet the Press." "That would turn the people against us."

Democrats, including Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, seemed less inclined to support stepping up military aid and focused more on providing humanitarian assistance to Syrians who have fled the fighting.

"I believe the United States could play a greater role in dealing with the humanitarian crisis," Mr. Ellison said on "Meet the Press." "We have spillage and refugees in Jordan, in Lebanon and internally displaced people in Syria. The suffering is intense, and I don't think the world's greatest superpower, the United States, can stand by and not do anything."

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11 Years Later, Debris From Plane Is Found Near Ground Zero

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Obama Avoids Swift Response to Report on Syria Arms

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Friday that he would respond "prudently" and "deliberately" to evidence that Syria had used chemical weapons, tamping down any expectations that he would take swift action after an American intelligence assessment that the Syrian government had used the chemical agent sarin on a small scale in the nation's civil war.

Mr. Obama's remarks, before a meeting here with King Abdullah II of Jordan, laid bare the quandary he now faces. The day after the White House, in a letter to Congressional leaders, said that the nation's intelligence agencies had assessed "with varying degrees of confidence" that the Syrian government had used sarin, the president said he was seeking further proof of culpability for chemical weapons attacks. It is a laborious process that analysts say may never produce a definitive judgment. But Mr. Obama is also trying to preserve his credibility after warning in the past that the use of chemical weapons would be a "game changer" and prompt a forceful American response.

"Knowing that potentially chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria doesn't tell us when they were used, how they were used," Mr. Obama told reporters in the Oval Office. "We have to act prudently. We have to make these assessments deliberately."

"But I meant what I'd said," the president added. "To use potential weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line with respect to international norms and international law. And that is going to be a game changer."

At the same time, the White House cited the Iraq war to justify its wariness of taking action against another Arab country on the basis of incomplete or potentially inaccurate assessments of its weapons of mass destruction. The press secretary, Jay Carney, said the White House would "look at the past for guidance when it comes to the need to be very serious about gathering all the facts, establishing chain of custody, linking evidence of the use of chemical weapons to specific incidents and actions taken by the regime."

As Mr. Obama and his aides walked a fine line on how to confront the evidence about chemical weapons, they engaged in an intensified round of diplomacy with Arab leaders to bolster support for the Syrian opposition and to try to develop a consensus on how to deal with the escalating strife.

In addition to King Abdullah, Mr. Obama met in recent days with leaders from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the Saudi foreign minister. Next month, he will meet Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, which borders Syria and is among the countries most exposed to the threat of a chemical weapons attack.

"If their policy is premised on not going it alone, even in response to chemical weapons," said Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress, "you're going to need a lot of people reading from the same song sheet."

The more pressing problem, Mr. Katulis said, was that the president's strong warnings to Syria "are running ahead of their policy." In his remarks, King Abdullah did not address the American suspicions about chemical weapons or Mr. Obama's warnings, but expressed confidence that the president, working with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries, could "find a mechanism to find a solution."

A major focus of the meeting, a senior administration official said, was coordinating more robust aid for the Syrian opposition. The United States pledged last weekend to double its nonlethal assistance, and the official said it was working with regional allies to direct it to reliable opposition groups.

On Friday, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain echoed Mr. Obama's cautious assessment of the use of chemical weapons, saying that there was limited but growing evidence that such weapons had been used, probably by government forces.

The British government, like the Obama administration, is concerned about avoiding a repetition of the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when the presence of unconventional weapons, cited as justification for military action, had not been corroborated.

Mr. Cameron said that while definitive information was limited, "there's growing evidence that we have seen, too, of the use of chemical weapons, probably by the regime."

"It is extremely serious; this is a war crime, and we should take it very seriously," he added.

Still, Mr. Cameron said, the British authorities were trying to avoid "rushing into print" news about the use of chemical weapons. And he repeated that Britain had no appetite to intervene militarily.

"I don't want to see that, and I don't think that is likely to happen," he said. "But I think we can step up the pressure on the regime, work with our partners, work with the opposition in order to bring about the right outcome. But we need to go on gathering this evidence and also to send a very clear warning to the Syrian regime about these appalling actions."

The United States has called on the United Nations to carry out a thorough investigation of the suspected use of chemical weapons by the government. But the government of President Bashar al-Assad has so far not allowed United Nations inspectors into the country, and backed by its supporter Russia, it is insisting on limits to the scope of the investigation.

"As long as Damascus refuses to let the U.N. investigate all allegations, and as long as Russia provides the regime with political cover at the Security Council, it may be impossible for Washington to meet that standard," Michael Eisenstadt, director of the military and security studies program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in a report.

The risk of not responding now, even with less than definitive proof, Mr. Eisenstadt said, is that it could embolden Mr. Assad to use chemical weapons on a wider scale. American officials said the administration had privately warned the Syrian government not to take that step.

On Thursday, the head of the United Nations agency for disarmament sent another letter to Syria demanding "unconditional and unfettered access" for inspectors investigating the use of chemical weapons, said Martin Nesirky, the spokesman for the secretary general.

The top inspector for the team of some 15 members, the Swedish scientist Ake Sellstrom, is due in New York on Monday to brief Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, on its work.

"Members of that team have been collating and analyzing the evidence and information that is available to date from outside," Mr. Nesirky said, adding that there was a concern about the evidence degrading.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker from Washington, Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Alan Cowell from London, and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.

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House Approves Bill Seeking End to Flight Delays

Larry Downing/Reuters

The measure passed by the House on Friday is intended to end the furloughs of airport workers that caused airport delays.

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Congressional Democrats on Friday abandoned their once-firm stand that growing airport bottlenecks would be addressed only in a broader fix to across-the-board spending cuts, accepting bipartisan legislation that would bring the nation's air traffic control system back up to full strength.

With remarkable speed, the House overwhelmingly approved legislation to give the secretary of transportation enough financial flexibility to shift as much as $253 million to the air traffic control system, less than a week after the onset of politically problematic flight delays driven by across-the-board spending cuts. The money will be shifted from airport improvement funds, and none would come from additional revenues, once a key demand of Mr. Obama and the Democrats. The 361-to-41 vote came less than 24 hours after the Senate rushed the measure through.

Republicans claimed victory. "Consider that the Democrats' opening position was they would only replace the sequester with tax increases," Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, said in a memo to members before the vote. "By last night, Senate Democrats were adopting our targeted 'cut this, not that' approach. This victory is in large part a result of our standing together."

The Congressional action effectively undoes one of the thorniest results of "sequestration," the $85 billion in spending cuts that took effect March 1 and have rippled across the federal government. With the president's promised signature, Democrats will lose significant leverage they had hoped would force Republicans into a larger agreement since the flight delays were seen as the sort of inconvenience that could force a reversal of the cuts.

The action also brought charges that lawmakers known for gridlock could move only when affluent travelers like themselves felt the sting of Congress's indecision and that the struggles of lower-income Americans affected by the spending cuts were being ignored. House members who have cleared precious little legislation this year made swift work of the air travel bill minutes before flying out themselves for a weeklong break, a pile of cars stacked up behind the Capitol waiting to ferry them to Washington's airports.

"We're leaving the homeless behind," said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont. "We're leaving a lot of National Guard folks behind. We're leaving seniors who depend on Meals On Wheels in the dust. Children who rely on Head Start can teach themselves to read. That's basically what's happening."

The shifting of $253 million from the airport improvement program to air traffic operations in the Federal Aviation Administration should be enough to stop further furloughs and keep the air traffic control system operating at a normal pace through Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

"This is a Band-Aid solution," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, even as he said Mr. Obama would sign it. "It does not solve the bigger problem."

Republicans — and some Democrats — had been pushing for much of the month for a rescue of the air traffic control system. But lawmakers who wanted a separate budget rescue for the F.A.A. met resistance from some lawmakers who questioned why air travel was being rescued when children were being thrown out of early education programs, food safety inspections were being curtailed and checks to the long-term unemployed were shrinking.

With those cuts largely invisible to most Americans, some Democrats argued that mounting delays at airports might be the only pressure point left to force Republicans to negotiate a broader deal to reverse the cuts, with a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases.

That position held sway with Democrats into Thursday evening, when Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, cornered Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader.

"We made the pitch that this wasn't about elite Americans. This is about all Americans," Mr. Udall said, singling out hotel and restaurant workers, airport workers and others who would be affected by a sharp decline in air travel.

Opponents also feared that a rifle-shot rescue of the air traffic-control system would open the floodgates for other supplicants seeking relief from the cuts. That fear was realized almost the moment the bill cleared Congress. Cancer clinics, Head Start administrators, housing advocates and teachers all demanded that their programs be addressed next.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

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Dutch Man Said to Be Arrested in Powerful Internet Attack

Dutch authorities say police officials in Spain have arrested a man believed to be connected to an online attack on a spam-fighting site that snarled the Internet last month.

While the authorities did not give the full name of the man in a statement published on a Dutch government Web site, they identified him as "S.K." A source close to the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the arrested man was Sven Olaf Kamphuis, a 35-year-old Dutch man who has been the spokesman of a group that was protesting a European antispam group's tactics.

Spanish police arrested the man on Thursday at his home in Barcelona, at the request of the Dutch police, and seized his computers and mobile phones. He is expected to be sent to the Netherlands. Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for Dutch national prosecutor's office, said "S.K." was suspected of playing a role in a wave of attacks last month.

His arrest came after an investigation by authorities in the Netherlands and other European countries into Mr. Kamphuis's involvement in one of the largest attacks on the Internet. Mr. Kamphuis has been suspected of starting a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack against Spamhaus, the antispam group. Such attacks are a criminal offense under Dutch law.

Mr. Kamphuis calls himself the "minister of telecommunications and foreign affairs for the Republic of CyberBunker." But many consider him to be the Prince of Spam. He runs CB3ROB, an Internet service provider, and CyberBunker, a Web hosting company that in the past has hosted sites like WikiLeaks and the Pirate Bay, a site accused of abetting digital content piracy.

Antispam groups say they believe CyberBunker acts as a conduit for vast amounts of spam. Last month, Spamhaus, an antispam group based in Geneva, added CyberBunker to its blacklist, which is used by major e-mail providers to block spam.

In the days and weeks after the blacklisting, Spamhaus was targeted with an DDoS attack, which flooded the site with traffic until it fell offline.

After Spamhaus hired a Silicon Valley Internet security firm, CloudFlare, to defend against the attack, the attackers turned their ire on CloudFlare. When efforts to bring down CloudFlare were unsuccessful, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet's core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or D.N.S.

Their attack quickly reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second, which resulted in slowing Internet traffic for millions of Internet users around the world.

Mr. Kamphuis has denied his role in the attack and said he was only a spokesman for Stophaus, a loose organization set up to take down Spamhaus. Asked about his involvement in the attacks last month, Mr. Kamphuis told The New York Times, "We are aware that this is one of the largest DDoS attacks the world has seen so far, yes."

But through his Facebook page, Mr. Kamphuis has actively called on hackers to take Spamhaus offline.

"Yo anons, we could use a little help in shutting down illegal slander and blackmail censorship project 'spamhaus.org,' which thinks it can dictate its views on what should and should not be on the Internet," he said on Facebook on March 23.

Dutch prosecutors singled out Mr. Kamphuis because of his vocal role. Greenhost, a Dutch Internet hosting service, said in a blog post that it had found CB3ROB's digital fingerprints while studying the attack traffic directed at Spamhaus.

Mr. Kamphuis's arrest in Barcelona was made through the European Union's judicial collaboration unit, Eurojust.

An anonymous statement was posted to Pastebin, a Web forum for hackers, on Friday, proclaiming Mr. Kamphuis's innocence and threatening another round of attacks if he is not released. "We demand u to release Sven or we will indeed start the biggest attack u humans have ever experienced toward The Internet, and yourself," the hacker wrote.

Eric Pfanner contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 26, 2013

An earlier version of the Web summary on this article misstated who had arrested a man believed to be connected to an online attack. Dutch authorities announced the development, but it was Spanish police who made the arrest, they said, not the Dutch.

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After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions

BOSTON — Just five hours after the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon last week, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was back at his computer, doing what he did almost every day, posting a message on Twitter.

"Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people," he wrote.

His brother, Tamerlan, 26, returned to his home in Cambridge, which he shared with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, and went about his normal activities, including a trip to the supermarket.

The bombings that turned America's oldest and most prestigious road race into a scene of blood and horror had killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, many of them grievously. President Obama called the episode an "act of terror." The heart of the city, Copley Square and much of Boylston Street, was paralyzed for days as hundreds of city, state and federal law enforcement personnel scoured the area for evidence and later cast a huge dragnet across the metropolitan region for the suspects, who would soon be identified as the Tsarnaev brothers.

During that time, the brothers picked up their daily routines and blended back into the area that had become enmeshed in trauma. For the most part, they appeared calm, according to people who saw them, raising no suspicions that anything was amiss, let alone that they might have had anything to do with the attack.

For more than three days — from the time of the explosions at 2:50 p.m. on Monday, April 15, until the F.B.I. released their photographs to the world at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 18 — the very ordinariness of their activities let the brothers hide in plain sight.

"It's scary to think that he was around here, listening to everyone talking about the bombers and stuff like that," Bobby Kedski, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, said of Dzhokhar, a fellow student there, whom he saw working out in a campus gym on Tuesday night. "He was just amongst us, taking it all in. It's scary to think about that."

Slipping back into a routine after committing a crime, even an atrocity, is fairly typical behavior, said Dr. Stuart W. Twemlow, a retired professor of psychology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He works on threat assessment with the F.B.I. and helped on the Columbine shootings, among other cases.

A return to business as usual helps a criminal "blot out the horror with which he was associated," Dr. Twemlow said.

"That is a normal, dissociative response," he said, adding that the younger brother, whose movements were more public, had most likely "denied and compartmentalized what he had just done."

Dzhokhar may have spent Monday night with his brother in Cambridge, which he often did, because the university had no record of his return to campus on Monday. Wherever he was, he continued to send out Twitter messages.

After his first post-bombing message, at 8:04 p.m. on Monday, he picked up a conversation at 12:11 a.m. Tuesday with a friend on Twitter who has since deleted his account. Dzhokhar's end of the conversation is all that is visible, leaving the context unclear.

What's new with them? Dzhokhar asked. His next post to the friend, a couple of minutes later said: and they what "god hates dead people?" Or victims of tragedies? Lol those people are cooked.

At 12:34 a.m., the next Twitter message was sent from an iPhone: There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don't hear them cuz they're the minority.

He "favorited," or bookmarked, a post on Twitter that had appeared at 1:20 a.m.: The sad part about the events in Boston today, is that some bs Hollywood director is gonna try n make a movie n profit from tragic events.

He was back on Twitter later Tuesday, when he favorited a 11:21 a.m. post from a classmate: Thanks UMD, a freezing shower is exactly what I needed right now.

Between 12:30 and 1 that afternoon, Dzhokhar picked up a car that he had dropped off at a repair shop in Somerville, next to Cambridge, a couple of weeks before to fix a damaged bumper, suddenly saying he needed it immediately.

 This was one of the few times during that week when someone described Dzhokhar as appearing anxious and out of character. Gilberto Junior, who owns the shop, thought Dzhokhar was either nervous or on drugs.

"He was biting his fingernails, and I noticed he was shaking his legs," Mr. Junior said.

Mr. Junior explained that to fix the car's bumper, he had had to remove it, as well as the taillights, so it would be illegal to drive. But Mr. Tsarnaev insisted on taking it anyway, Mr. Junior recalled.

"He said, 'I don't care. I need the car right now,' so I gave him the keys," Mr. Junior said.

He said he was picking it up for a friend, and explained, " 'I need the car now because my friend, she's upset,' " Mr. Junior quoted him as saying. " 'She wants the car, she wants the car, she wants the car.' So I said, 'O.K.' "

By 1:14 p.m. Dzhokhar was back on Twitter. In an exchange with another fellow student, he dispensed some medical advice: you need to get Claritin clear.

The other student has since deleted his account so the reply is no longer visible. Within three minutes, Dzhokhar added: #heavy I've been looking for those, there is a shortage on the black market if you wanna make a quick buck, nuff said.

John Eligon and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Boston, and Jennifer Preston from New York.

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Chargers Take Manti Te’o in Second Round

Winslow Townson/Associated Press; Christopher Jackson/Associated Press

The Chargers selected Manti Te'o, left, and the Jets picked Geno Smith.

It seemed fitting that Aaron Rodgers was rewarded with a lavish contract extension that could make him the highest-paid football player in history — for five years and $110 million, according to multiple reports — just minutes before the second round of the N.F.L. draft began Friday night.

In 2005, Rodgers became the unintentional symbol for agonizing draft day delays. Once thought to be a possibility for No. 1 over all, he plummeted to the 24th pick. But in his wildly successful time as the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Rodgers has also become the face of the soft landing.

As the second round began this year, the question was when the big names — players who stewed through the first round Thursday night as Rodgers once had — would finally get a chance at their prize, too.

It did not take long to get the answers. The San Diego Chargers, perennially underachieving, moved up in the second round to select Notre Dame middle linebacker Manti Te'o with the 38th pick over all. Te'o had been widely projected as a first-round prospect during the college football season, respected for his toughness and his leadership. But a dismal performance in the national championship game, and his entanglement in a bizarre hoax involving a fake dead girlfriend, sullied his image.

Te'o has claimed ignorance of the hoax, but there is little question it will follow him to California. The girlfriend-who-never-was was supposed to be from Southern California, and it was clear from the music chosen to play at Radio City Music Hall right after Te'o's selection that everyone was not quite finished having fun with his weird world: the disc jockey played "It Takes Two" by Rob Base and D.J. E-Z Rock.

In his conference call with San Diego reporters, Te'o gave a hint of the lingering damage done by the hoax. He admitted that when he saw the California area code pop up on his cellphone — it was the Chargers calling to tell him he had been selected — he thought some of his friends were trying to play a prank on him again.

"I did expect to go in the first round," Te'o said. "But things happened, and all it did was give me more motivation."

Te'o was the most high-profile college football player last season, but his tumble was emblematic of a draft class with such significant flaws that many analysts believe it is one of the worst in years.

Much of that doubt was because of a quarterback class with no obvious superstars. Just one of them — the project E. J. Manuel of Florida State — was selected in the first round Thursday, the fewest quarterbacks taken in a first round since 2001. Geno Smith of West Virginia will be the quarterback remembered from this class because he sat in the green room all night Thursday and then deliberated whether to return to the room at all on Friday.

"I watched that draft and I watched Aaron go through that," Smith said. "It was kind of ironic that you see that and then you're put in that position. It was just a test of patience. I'm a patient guy."

It was a good thing he returned to Radio City. Right after the Chargers took Te'o, Smith finally got the call that he, and many television cameras, had waited more than 24 hours for. It came from the Jets, a team that had seemed set not to take a quarterback because they owe Mark Sanchez $8.25 million and are in the middle of rebuilding.

That choice sets up a brutal conundrum: the Jets are either setting themselves up for a potentially poisonous quarterback competition, or for the possibility of releasing Sanchez outright, taking an enormous salary cap hit, and putting the team in the hands of a place-holder quarterback, David Garrard, until Smith is ready to take over.

Smith said all the right things in the moments after he was selected, even as the Jets fans in attendance seemed stunned that he was the pick. He vowed to try to win the starting job. He said the Jets would go to the playoffs. He said it was an honor to join a storied franchise.

But as Commissioner Roger Goodell embraced him, Smith whispered how long the wait had been. And for his trouble, he is now charged with taking over a team in upheaval.

But at least Smith now knew where he was going. After Friday's second and third rounds concluded, many quarterbacks remained available, including Ryan Nassib of Syracuse, who had seemed a possible first-round pick, and Matt Barkley of Southern California, who might have been a first-round pick if he had come out last year.

In the third round, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers took North Carolina State quarterback Mike Glennon, just the third quarterback off the board.

Few big-name prospects had as troubling a route to the N.F.L. as Tyrann Mathieu, the Honey Badger, whose exploits ignited YouTube. He was an electrifying defensive back and kick returner for Louisiana State, but he was kicked off the team for failed drug tests. He went to drug rehabilitation, and admitted to teams that he had failed many drug tests while he was in school.

During the scouting combine, he was contrite about his struggles and vowed to give teams reason to trust him. Even in the days before the draft, though, his judgment was questioned when his name was part of an advertisement for a party after the first round of the draft. When the Arizona Cardinals finally plucked him in the third round, Mathieu was shown on camera in tears. They will play him at free safety.

He probably was not the only one crying in a draft that might have been the most unpredictable ever. By the time Friday night ended, several players who might have gone in the first round were still languishing, their futures stalled, their own Aaron Rodgers moments still to come.

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City Room: Mayoral Candidates Quizzed on Use of Drones

Public safety has been a major issue in the campaign for mayor of New York this year, and for weeks the candidates have talked at length about whether they would replace the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, whether they would continue to allow the Police Department's stop-and-frisk practice, and whether the department should be monitored by an inspector general. But on Friday, during a forum on technology, the candidates got a question that posed a new test of their views on police practices: Should the department be allowed to use unmanned drones?

Only Adolfo Carrión Jr., a former Bronx borough president running on the Independence Party line, refused to rule out using drones for surveillance. "I think the responsible answer is you use the tools that are available to you," he said.

For Democrats, the idea was a nonstarter. "I don't want drones peeking in people's homes," said William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller making his second bid for mayor as a Democrat.

John C. Liu, the current comptroller, compared drones to the cyborgs in "RoboCop." Although he said that the movie was one of his favorites, he opposed having RoboCops – or drones – in New York City. And the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, another Democrat, said that, although she supported increased use of mobile cameras, "I don't think drones are a safe security measure" in the city.

The drone question highlighted an unusual forum in which the moderator, Ben Smith, the editor of the Web site Buzzfeed, managed to catch the candidates off guard on a few occasions.

Mr. Smith noted that the venture capitalist Fred Wilson had complained about city laws that, at times, make Airbnb, a Web site that allows people to rent rooms or apartments cheaply by the night, technically illegal in New York. (An Airbnb spokeswoman said later that the legal question involved the rental of entire apartments, not rooms.) Mr. Smith asked the candidates if they thought that Airbnb should be allowed to operate in the city. He posed the question first to Mr. Liu, who seemed unfamiliar with the debate.

"Should who?" he asked quizzically.

Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, and Ms. Quinn then jumped in, both agreeing that Airbnb was potentially troublesome. Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, suggested that it exposed building residents to unwelcome comings-and-goings. Ms. Quinn said the conversion of buildings to rental units for tourists diminished the supply of affordable housing for full-time residents.

Other surprising areas of agreement emerged at the forum, which took place during a conference on technology organized by the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, at New York Law School. Mr. Stringer, a Democrat, is a candidate for comptroller.

After Mr. Liu said that as mayor he would lift the ban on students bringing cellphones to school, the other candidates onstage all quickly said that they would, too, prompting Mr. Smith to quip that "the under-18 vote" was now fully spoken for.

The candidates also all espoused interest in expanding Internet access to city residents and public school students. Mr. de Blasio, in particular, criticized Verizon several times for slowness in expanding its fiber optic service around the city, saying the service was still unavailable in many low-income neighborhoods.

However, the moment most likely to be remembered from the forum was when Mr. de Blasio, picking up on a reference by Mr. Carrión to the city's competition with Silicon Valley for tech companies, decided to try out his Arnold Schwarzenegger impression on the crowd.

"If Arnold Schwarzenegger were here, he would say, 'Noh-thern Califoh-nia, your domination of the tech industry is being teh-minated,'" Mr. de Blasio said, to laughs from the crowd and some groans from the others onstage.

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New Bird Flu Strain Spreads Outside of China

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‘Saturday Night Live’ Archives Moving to Yahoo

When they were performing on "Saturday Night Live" three decades ago, Al Franken, Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy surely didn't expect they would ever be streamed on computers and phones. In fact, they probably would have made fun of the idea.

But it's reality now, as the owner of the "S.N.L." archive, Broadway Video, tries to wring a profit out of the old episodes. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it had acquired the exclusive rights to classic clips from 1975 through 2012, effective in September. The clips will be removed from Hulu and NBC.com, where they currently reside, and be shown instead on Yahoo, which wants to share in the buzz the show creates.

The deal between Broadway Video and Yahoo highlights the jockeying among companies that want to have a library of online videos to call their own. A dizzying number of online video producers are pitching their programs to advertisers this month, ahead of the traditional television upfront sessions in May. While these Web programs' quantity and quality are increasing quickly, there are doubts about whether the advertising dollars are.

"On one hand, digital video advertising is growing fast and its prominence is increasing," said Clark Fredricksen of the research firm eMarketer. "On the other, compared to television, online video is an incredibly competitive market, where you have more companies fighting over far less." Mr. Fredricksen's company estimates that $4.1 billion will be spent on online video ads this year, in contrast to $66.4 billion on television ads.

"There are a handful of major conglomerates who split revenues from the huge TV-ad pie," Mr. Fredricksen said, "while the digital video world features hundreds of companies fighting, comparatively, for scraps from the TV table."

Attaching, barnaclelike, to television might be a way to stand out from the crowd. Yahoo, which is trying for a turnaround under its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, has content-sharing relationships with many major media companies, but its video hub, Yahoo Screen, has lagged rivals like Google, which owns YouTube.

Erin McPherson, a Yahoo vice president who oversees the company's video business, said the company jumped at the "S.N.L." opportunity. She said the "S.N.L." clips would be "widely distributed" across Yahoo, suggesting a strategy that will go beyond the current Yahoo Screen site.

"Rather than competing with Hulu, Netflix or any other platform, we see this as a step toward adding scale and breadth to the great content we are already offering users," Ms. McPherson said.

Yahoo and Broadway Video declined to comment on terms, but people with knowledge of the arrangement said access to the "S.N.L." library had cost upward of $10 million a year in the past.

Hulu, the online video Web site owned by Comcast, The News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, enjoyed an immediate bump in traffic when it added "SNL" to its collection. These days, however, Hulu — which its owners are considering selling — is concentrating on other content. It will promote several of its forthcoming original series at an event for advertisers next week.

Under the deal announced on Wednesday, Hulu will still stream clips and full episodes from the current television season. Yahoo will be able to do that, too. But Yahoo will have the old "S.N.L." clips all to itself, giving it something special to show off — although only for one year. The deal will be up for renegotiation at that point.

Jack Sullivan, chief executive of Broadway Video, said the deal would let "S.N.L." increase its distribution internationally, since the clips of classic episodes have generally only been accessible in North America in the past.

For a company like Yahoo, "having TV-like offerings is really important," said Mike Vorhaus, president of the digital media consulting firm Magid Advisors. That's because online video ads have partly taken the place of Web display ads, sometimes called banner ads, in advertisers' budgets; as Mr. Vorhaus put it, "You can only take so much banner money away before there's no banner money left at all."

"Now they kind of have to pursue TV money," he added.

Along the way they're becoming more like TV. Earlier this year, a sendup of dating reality shows created by Yahoo, "Burning Love," was deemed worthy of running on the cable channel E! as well. Sony, another company that will be presenting to advertisers next week, was recognized for treating Jerry Seinfeld's experimental Web series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" like a TV series when it ordered a 24-episode second season.

And Netflix, the ad-free streaming service that so many other companies want to resemble, was praised for commissioning "House of Cards," the Washington thriller that could have fit right in on HBO or AMC. On Wednesday night, Netflix released a long-term vision statement for investors that summed up why it and so many of its competitors are optimistic about their chances: "While Internet TV is only a very small percent of video viewing today, we think it will grow every year," it said, citing faster Internet speeds, sales of Internet-connected TV sets, improvements to TV apps and the possibilities for personalized online video ads.

The competition for Internet TV viewing, it concluded, "is just beginning."

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GE Capital Cuts Off Lending for Gun Shop Purchases

GE Capital, General Electric's lending arm, recently stopped offering consumer financing programs to retailers whose main business is selling guns, in response to the "industry changes, new legislation and tragic events."

The move, said a GE Capital spokesman, expanded on a policy established in 2008. That year, GE Capital stopped offering new consumer financing for purchases of guns from gun shops, but existing relationships with gun shops were grandfathered in and those programs continued.

Fewer than 75 retailers are affected by the recent policy change, a fraction of 1 percent of gun retailers in the United States, said the spokesman, Russell Wilkerson. The terminated financing programs, as a business, were "immaterial" to the company, he said.

The lending cutoff applies only to retailers whose primary business is selling guns, Mr. Wilkerson said. GE Capital is still offering financing to other retailers who sell many different kinds of merchandise, including guns. Those retailers range from Walmart to sporting goods chains.

The change in GE Capital's lending policy to the gun stores was first reported on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal.

The move by GE Capital comes in the aftermath of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. General Electric, the giant industrial and finance company, is headquartered in Fairfield, Conn., and some employees have children in the Sandy Hook elementary school, where the tragedy occurred. Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook gunman, was the son of Peter Lanza, an executive at General Electric.

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Officer’s Killing Spurred Pursuit in Boston Attack

Eric Thayer for The New York Times

A police helicopter hovered above the scene where an M.I.T. campus police officer was fatally shot late last Thursday.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Officer Sean A. Collier was 27, not much older than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology students he watched over as a campus police officer, and he sometimes joined them in a game of darts or Xbox. So when an ambulance staffed by students rolled past his parked patrol car last Thursday night, he flashed his blue lights to say hello. The students answered with their red lights.

It was just a little after that routine interaction, the police said, that a pair of men approached Officer Collier's squad car from behind and shot him to death, in what some law enforcement officials said appeared to have been a failed attempt to steal his gun. In the anguished scene that followed, the student emergency medical technicians were called back to the patrol car they had just passed, where they tried in vain to save Officer Collier's life.

The killing of Officer Collier, who was mourned Wednesday at a campus memorial at which Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke, was the first bloody altercation in a nearly 24-hour chain of violent events that left one of the brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings dead and ended with the capture of the other. Interviews with law enforcement officials and witnesses painted a clearer picture of what happened during that chaotic period, and correct some of the information that officials gave out as they hunted the most wanted men in America.

Police officials initially announced that officers had "exchanged gunfire" Friday evening with the surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, as he hid in a boat in the backyard of a house in Watertown, Mass. Now several law enforcement officials say no gun was found in the boat, and officials say they are exploring what prompted officers to fire at Mr. Tsarnaev, who some feared was armed with explosives.

Law enforcement officials now say they have recovered only one gun elsewhere, which they believe was used by Mr. Tsarnaev's older brother, Tamerlan — not the three previously reported. And initial reports that the brothers first came to the attention of the police after robbing a 7-Eleven were wrong. The police were called to a gas station convenience store early Friday after a man who said he had been carjacked by the marathon bombers escaped and sought help.

The catalyst that set the violent night in motion was the shooting death of Officer Collier, officials said. It came about five hours after the F.B.I. released pictures of the two suspects in the bombings and asked the public's help in identifying them.

"I consider him a hero," Boston's police commissioner, Edward Davis, said in an interview this week. "It was his death that ultimately led to the apprehension. The report of the shot officer led to all those resources being poured in."

Officer Collier was killed around 10:30 p.m., police officials said — just half an hour before his 3-to-11 shift was to end.

While there is video of two men approaching Officer Collier's car, three law enforcement officials said, it does not clearly show their faces. But investigators now believe the brothers killed the officer to get another gun.

"He had a triple-lock holster, and they could not figure it out," a law enforcement official said. "There is evidence at the scene to suggest that they were going for his gun."

The killing brought a huge influx of police officers into Cambridge, so plenty of officers were in the area later that night when a 911 call reported a carjacking by two men claiming to be the marathon bombers.

The two men apparently split up after the killing, and when the carjacking occurred, before midnight, a lone man approached a parked Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle and tapped on the passenger-side window, officials said. Why the men separated was among the many details of the night that were still unclear even a week later.

After the driver lowered the window, the man reached in, opened the door, climbed in and pointed a gun, saying, "Did you hear about the Boston explosion?" and "I did that," according to an affidavit filed Monday with the criminal complaint charging Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with the bombings.

The gunman, who law enforcement officials believe was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, removed the magazine from his gun and showed the driver that a bullet was in it, according to the affidavit. "I am serious," he was quoted as saying.

Wendy Ruderman reported from Cambridge, Serge F. Kovaleski from Boston, and Michael Cooper from New York. Reporting was contributed by Katharine Q. Seelye from Boston, William K. Rashbaum and Erica Goode from New York, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington.

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DealBook: Size of Down Payments at Heart of Mortgage Debate

It seemed an easy fix to prevent the excesses of the housing market: make home buyers put more money down.

But as the housing market starts to return and the subprime mess fades from memory, the issue is up for debate.

Lenders and consumer advocates — rarely on the same side of the issue — are now cautioning against down payment requirements. They argue that such restrictions could limit lending, and prevent lower-income borrowers from buying homes. They also contend that the new mortgage rules put in place this year will do enough to limit foreclosures, making down payment requirements somewhat superfluous.

The arguments seem to run contrary to long-standing beliefs about homeownership. For decades, experts have emphasized the need for a sizable down payment — a rule of thumb being 20 percent — on the premise that borrowers with a sizable chunk of equity in a home are less likely to walk away when things get bad.

"If our goal is to prevent foreclosures, I can't think of anything more effective than requiring a down payment," said Paul S. Willen, a senior economist and policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

The issue may not be so black and white. Regulators want to protect borrowers and promote homeownership. But they also want to encourage lending and insulate the financial system from future shocks.

And the subprime debacle has only distorted the debate, say some analysts. "The problem with this conversation is that it's like discussing the future of shipbuilding from the deck of the Titanic," said Roberto G. Quercia, director of the Center for Community Capital at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "There's a lack of perspective."

To underscore his point, Mr. Quercia studied mortgages in a special program for low-income borrowers, typically those with minimal down payments. From 1998 through the end of last year, 5.5 percent of the mortgages ended up in foreclosure, he found. Subprime mortgages made during the last housing boom, regardless of down payment size, had far higher foreclosure rates, roughly 25 percent.

It's a critical issue for Washington. Currently, taxpayers, through the Federal Housing Administration, backstop most of the low-down-payment mortgages. But the aim is to curb the government's involvement in mortgages.

As that happens, policy makers are hoping a major part of the mortgage market will come back. Specifically, they need the return of private bond investors, who once bought trillions of dollars' worth of mortgage-backed bonds with no government backing.

Other than some small bond deals, that market remains dormant. A major reason is that the banks that sell the mortgage-backed bonds are waiting for regulators to complete rules aimed at strengthening this market.

This is where down payments could play a crucial role. The proposed rules require banks to hold a slice of the mortgage-backed bonds they sell to investors. Banks do not like those types of restrictions.

But lenders would not have to keep a piece of the bonds if the underlying loans included features that made them less likely to default. These exempt loans would be called qualified residential mortgages. Regulators effectively proposed that these loans should have a 20 percent down payment.

The proposal prompted widespread objections from consumer advocates, bankers and home builders, who said the plan could shut many borrowers out of the housing market. Banks, they argued, are likely to focus heavily on making qualified residential mortgages. And if those mortgages require high down payments, lenders will be hesitant to make loans with little money down.

Consumer advocates make a nuanced case. They do not deny that down payments reduce the risk of default. But they say defaults can be reduced almost as much by applying other rules that curb lending to certain types of borrowers.

Consider another set of mortgage rules, already put in place this year. These rules emphasize the affordability of the loan. Under them, a borrower's overall monthly debt payments cannot exceed 43 percent of personal income.

In his study, Professor Quercia of the University of North Carolina found that loans that complied with those rules defaulted at a relatively low rate during the housing bust. About 5.8 percent of them went bad, irrespective of how much the borrower put down.

He then calculated the losses on loans to borrowers in the same group who had down payments of at least 20 percent. The default rate on that smaller group was lower, at 3.9 percent.

But that lower rate came at a cost. More than half of the borrowers in his study group had to be excluded from the second calculation, because they didn't have down payments of 20 percent or more. This shows how restrictive a down payment rule could be, said Professor Quercia.

Some real estate analysts are skeptical of this approach. They assert that the new mortgage rules, which do not insist on down payments, may be relatively ineffective at preventing high levels of defaults.

The debt-payments-to-income ratio is not a strong predictor of whether a loan will default, said Thomas A. Lawler, a former chief economist of Fannie Mae who founded Lawler Economic and Housing Consulting, a research firm. "It's not even in the top three," he said.

Also, Mr. Lawler and others who favor higher down payments argue that Professor Quercia's analysis underestimates the psychological and practical importance of the down payment. Borrowers who saved up for down payments may have budgeting skills that later help them make their payments, they argue, and borrowers with equity in their homes are less likely to walk away altogether, rather than try to find a solution.

Supporters of a down payment requirement also make a broader argument. They point out that the financial sector overhaul was not just meant to protect borrowers. It was also intended to make banks and financial markets more resilient to shocks like housing busts. In other words, the legislation always envisioned a trade-off between homeownership and the stability of the financial system.

"The key is what is the right balance between some risk and access," Professor Quercia said. "Just looking at the risks is one-sided."

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Theater Review: ‘I’ll Eat You Last,’ Starring Bette Midler

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

I'll Eat You Last Bette Midler as the agent Sue Mengers in a one-woman show written by John Logan at the Booth Theater.

Chances are you are not a movie star. Chances are equally good that this state of affairs is not likely to change soon. But if you've ever wondered what it might be like to explore that golden realm where the gods and goddesses of the screen dwell, race over to the Booth Theater, where you can enjoy an audience with a woman who consorted almost exclusively with box office luminaries, or "twinklies" as she affectionately calls them.

After Years of Playing Bette, Another Role

By PATRICK HEALY

After a 40-year absence, Bette Midler returns to Broadway, playing the Hollywood agent Sue Mengers in the solo show "I'll Eat You Last."

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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A feeling of perpetual motion without even standing up: Bette Midler during her 90-minute monologue in "I'll Eat You Last" at the Booth Theater.

In "I'll Eat You Last," a delectable soufflé of a solo show by John Logan that opened Wednesday night on Broadway, Bette Midler portrays the Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who at the height of her reign in the 1970s could make a career merely by issuing an invitation to one of her A-list-only dinner parties. For a limited time, the tightly closed doors of the Beverly Hills aerie in which Mengers held court are being thrown open, and for the price of a ticket we all get to feel a little twinkly for a night.

It's a heady sensation, thanks to the buoyant, witty writing of Mr. Logan ("Red"), the focused direction of Joe Mantello and above all to Ms. Midler, who gives the most lusciously entertaining performance of the Broadway season. Dropping names as if to the rhythm of a disco beat, snapping out wisecracks like acid-tipped darts that find the sweet spot every time, proffering profanity-laden advice about how to get ahead in show business: as the frank, brassy, foul-mouthed Mengers, who died in 2011, Ms. Midler cradles a spellbound audience in the palm of her hand from first joke to last toke. (Mengers's love of celebrity was perhaps equaled only by her affection for marijuana.)

Or rather she would so cradle us, if both hands were not otherwise engaged. As she welcomes us, Sue does not deign to rise from the pillow-bestrewn couch on which she sits, or rather slinks ("Forgive me for not getting up," she says, unapologetically. "Think of me as that caterpillar from 'Alice in Wonderland,' the one with the hash pipe"), but her silver-taloned fingers are in continual motion: slicing the air to accentuate a point, fiddling with the white-blond tresses framing her face, adjusting her signature glasses — oversize circles that symbolize a lifelong obsession with stargazing — or grabbing another cigarette or a joint, if not both at the same time.

We have been invited into Sue's private domain to provide a distraction from a dark cloud that has appeared on a formerly cloudless horizon, regarding matters both social and business — which for this woman are one and the same. (The year is 1981, as the décor by the designer Scott Pask tastefully whispers.) Sue is regaling us with tales from her well-stocked larder of Hollywood lore while she awaits a phone call from her great friend Barbra Streisand, who was also the biggest jewel in the crown of her client list — until just a few moments ago. The story of the Streisand defection will be told, but not until Sue has dished up great mountains of glittery Hollywood dirt. We learn how Sue finagled the female lead in "Chinatown" for Faye Dunaway. How Steve McQueen stole Ali MacGraw from the Paramount honcho Bob Evans, turning her into a high-class hausfrau and torpedoing her career. (Not a great loss to cinema history, perhaps, but as a fiercely loyal agent and friend, Sue resented it immensely.)

When the phone rings and it's Sissy Spacek calling, we learn how a good agent engages in the delicate art of client-poaching in the guise of offering maternal advice. "Let's face it," she says, acknowledging the ruthlessness that rules in Hollywood, "if no one's trying to steal your clients, you're doing something wrong."

And of course we are treated to the boilerplate life summary that's de rigueur in bio-plays: How a young immigrant from Germany, burning with the shame of "always feeling outside looking in," escaped into the movies, became obsessed ("That's why I still talk like a gum-cracking Warner Brothers second lead"), quickly abandoned acting ambitions for a role behind the scenes, and climbed the Hollywood agenting ladder rung by rung until she became one of the first women to reach the top in a male-dominated world.

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Study Ties Autism Risk to Creases in Placenta

After most pregnancies, the placenta is thrown out, having done its job of nourishing and supporting the developing baby.

But a new study raises the possibility that analyzing the placenta after birth may provide clues to a child's risk for developing autism. The study, which analyzed placentas from 217 births, found that in families at high genetic risk for having an autistic child, placentas were significantly more likely to have abnormal folds and creases.

"It's quite stark," said Dr. Cheryl K. Walker, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Mind Institute at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. "Placentas from babies at risk for autism, clearly there's something quite different about them."

Researchers will not know until at least next year how many of the children, who are between 2 and 5, whose placentas were studied will be found to have autism. Experts said, however, that if researchers find that children with autism had more placental folds, called trophoblast inclusions, visible after birth, the condition could become an early indicator or biomarker for babies at high risk for the disorder.

"It would be really exciting to have a real biomarker and especially one that you can get at birth," said Dr. Tara Wenger, a researcher at the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study.

The research potentially marks a new frontier, not only for autism, but also for the significance of the placenta, long considered an after-birth afterthought. Now, only 10 percent to 15 percent of placentas are analyzed, usually after pregnancy complications or a newborn's death.

Dr. Harvey J. Kliman, a research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said the placenta had typically been given such little respect in the medical community that wanting to study it was considered equivalent to someone in the Navy wanting to scrub ships' toilets with a toothbrush. But he became fascinated with placentas and noticed that inclusions often occurred with births involving problematic outcomes, usually genetic disorders.

He also noticed that "the more trophoblast inclusions you have, the more severe the abnormality." In 2006, Dr. Kliman and colleagues published research involving 13 children with autism, finding that their placentas were three times as likely to have inclusions. The new study began when Dr. Kliman, looking for more placentas, contacted the Mind Institute, which is conducting an extensive study, called Marbles, examining potential causes of autism.

"This person came out of the woodwork and said, 'I want to study trophoblastic inclusions,' " Dr. Walker recalled. "Now I'm fairly intelligent and have been an obstetrician for years and I had never heard of them."

Dr. Walker said she concluded that while "this sounds like a very smart person with a very intriguing hypothesis, I don't know him and I don't know how much I trust him." So she sent him Milky Way bar-size sections of 217 placentas and let him think they all came from babies considered at high risk for autism because an older sibling had the disorder. Only after Dr. Kliman had counted each placenta's inclusions did she tell him that only 117 placentas came from at-risk babies; the other 100 came from babies with low autism risk.

She reasoned that if Dr. Kliman found that "they all show a lot of inclusions, then maybe he's a bit overzealous" in trying to link inclusions to autism. But the results, she said, were "astonishing." More than two-thirds of the low-risk placentas had no inclusions, and none had more than two. But 77 high-risk placentas had inclusions, 48 of them had two or more, including 16 with between 5 and 15 inclusions.

Dr. Walker said that typically between 2 percent and 7 percent of at-risk babies develop autism, and 20 percent to 25 percent have either autism or another developmental delay. She said she is seeing some autism and non-autism diagnoses among the 117 at-risk children in the study, but does not yet know how those cases match with placental inclusions.

Dr. Jonathan L. Hecht, associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, said the study was intriguing and "probably true if it finds an association between these trophoblast inclusions and autism." But he said that inclusions were the placenta's way of responding to many kinds of stress, so they might turn out not to be specific enough to predict autism.

Dr. Kliman calls inclusions a "check-engine light, a marker of: something's wrong, but I don't know what it is."

That's how Chris Mann Sullivan sees it, too. Dr. Sullivan, a behavioral analyst in Morrisville, N.C., was not in the study, but sent her placenta to Dr. Kliman after her daughter Dania, now 3, was born. He found five inclusions. Dr. Sullivan began intensive one-on-one therapy with Dania, who has not been given a diagnosis of autism, but has some relatively mild difficulties.

"What would have happened if I did absolutely nothing, I'm not sure," Dr. Sullivan said. "I think it's a great way for parents to say, 'O.K., we have some risk factors; we're not going to ignore it.' "

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