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WIMBLEDON, England — On a day that featured 31-year-old Serena Williams defeating 42-year-old Kimiko Date-Krumm, youth had its moment in the sun. Yes, the sun was out at Wimbledon on Saturday after two days of on-and-off rain.
This tournament had already tied the Open era record for fewest men's and women's top-10 seeds reaching the third round, and the 20-year-old Bernard Tomic sent another out, defeating the No. 9 seed Richard Gasquet, 7-6 (7), 5-7, 7-5, 7-6 (5).
Britain's favorite teenager, Laura Robson, rallied to reach the fourth round of a Grand Slam tournament for the first time. Sloane Stephens, 20, won her suspended match to set up a fourth-round meeting with Monica Puig, 19.
And Madison Keys, 18, nearly knocked off another top-10 seed, taking No. 4 Agnieszka Radwanska to three sets before running out of answers to Radwanska's shot-making in a 7-5, 4-6, 6-3 loss.
"It's good to see young people doing well," Tomic said. "In this sport, it's very difficult to mature and get these sort of results at a Grand Slam."
Tomic would know. Great things were expected of him when he reached the quarterfinals here in 2011 as an 18-year-old qualifier. His inconsistent results and off-the-court distractions have spurred questions about his development. He came into this tournament ranked 59th and mired in more controversy, with his father, who is also his coach, barred from the grounds after being accused of assaulting Tomic's training partner in Madrid in early May.
Coming into the tournament, Tomic had lost his last 11 matches against top-10 players and had won only two matches since his father's incident in Madrid. Against Gasquet, he showed how well grass suits his game, but his attitude may be what suits him best as Wimbledon heads into its second week.
"I'm trying to relax as much as I can," said Tomic, who will play No. 7 Tomas Berdych in the fourth round Monday. "In the year 2011, I had nothing to lose, I really stepped up and played really good. Now I'm feeling very similar. I'm going to keep this up, relax on court, have fun, see where it takes me here."
He dismissed the notion that he was having success without his father's help.
"When I have my time off, when I leave the site, I'm with my dad," said Tomic, the youngest man left in the draw. "He's helping me at this tournament. We're doing the right things. This is why the results are showing off now. I'm not doing it on my own. My dad is still involved. That's why I've gotten to where I am in the tournament."
Robson, 19, was close to being out of the tournament despite the raucous support of the Court 2 crowd. Against Marina Erakovic of New Zealand, Robson came out sluggishly, unable to handle Erakovic's serve, and lost the first set, 6-1.
Erakovic served for the match at 5-4 in the second set, but Robson finally broke her serve. In the 12th game, Erakovic gave Robson a set point with a double fault. On the next point, a Robson shot was called out, but a video review showed it was barely in. The point was replayed, and Markovic double-faulted again to give Robson the second set.
Robson broke Erakovic in the second game of the third set and rolled from there, closing out a 1-6, 7-5, 6-3 victory with a forehand winner down the line. She is the first British woman to reach the fourth round of Wimbledon since 1998.
"It's good to do well, especially at Wimbledon," Robson said. "But, you know, I'm going to be playing for, like, another 10 years, so, you know, it's all bonuses for now."
Stephens, a semifinalist at the Australian Open this year, has reached the fourth round of a Grand Slam tournament for the third straight time, but she, too, was in a precarious position. After winning the first set Friday against No. 196 Petra Cetkovska, Stephens lost the second by 6-0, showing little fight and complaining about the darkness.
When the match resumed Saturday, Stephens seemed to pick up where she left off, losing the first two games.
"Yeah, it was definitely tough; lost focus there," Stephens said, adding that it was "weird" to have to go out and play only one set.
Luckily for Stephens, Cetkovska, who upset No. 9 Caroline Wozniacki in the previous round, was having even more trouble. Four straight games featured a break of serve. After Stephens held in the sixth game of the set, Cetkovska gave the next one away with three double faults, and Stephens went on to win, 7-6 (3), 0-6, 6-4.
Playing the bottom half of the draw vacated by No. 2 Victoria Azarenka, No. 3 Maria Sharapova, No. 5 Sara Errani and Wozniacki, the No. 17 Stephens has yet to face a seeded player. In the fourth round Monday, she will play the No. 65-ranked Puig in a matchup of two of the most promising players on the tour.
Puig, who represents Puerto Rico but has lived in Miami for much of her life, is competing in her first Wimbledon main draw as a professional, but she has already beaten Errani here and defeated two top-20 players while reaching the third round at the French Open.
Stephens said she and Puig had briefly attended the academy run by Nick Saviano in South Florida at the same time, but she added, "We're not besties."
Like Puig, Keys has had a successful first full season on the ATP tour. She reached the third round here and at the Australian Open, and the second round at the French. Ranked No. 52, she will soon break into the top 50.
She nearly claimed the biggest win of her career against Radwanska, a Wimbledon finalist last year. Keys and Radwanska engaged in an entertaining, 2-hour-22-minute slugfest that included a 57-minute first set. (By comparison, Novak Djokovic dispatched Jérémy Chardy in 86 minutes, losing only six points on his serve.)
The last time they played, in 2012 on the Miami hardcourts, Radwanska demolished Keys, 6-1, 6-1. Keys acknowledged she just wanted to do better than that. Indeed, she showed how much she had grown as a player.
"I was really happy with how well I fought and how I really stayed in there," Keys said. "I was really happy with my serve, being able to keep using it and keep going for it the entire match. I don't think I've ever done that in the past."
The young players are not having all the fun. Nine players 30 and older are in the Round of 16, tying the 1975 tournament for the most at Wimbledon in the Open era. The players include No. 13 Tommy Haas, 35; Lukasz Kubot of Poland, 31, who upset No. 25 Benoit Paire; and fourth-seeded David Ferrer, 31, who fell behind Alexandr Dolgopolov, but won, 6-7 (6), 7-6 (2), 2-6, 6-1, 6-2.
QUITO, Ecuador — President Rafael Correa of Ecuador said Saturday that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had asked him in a telephone call not to grant asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive former security contractor wanted in the United States.
Mr. Correa, speaking on his weekly television broadcast, said that the two had a "cordial" conversation on Friday initiated by Mr. Biden, but said he could not decide on Mr. Snowden's request until he entered Ecuador.
The fallout from Mr. Snowden's disclosures widened Saturday, as the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the United States had eavesdropped on European Union offices in Washington, Brussels and at the United Nations in New York. Mr. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who revealed details about American surveillance programs, fled to Hong Kong last month and then left there in a bid to find a haven to escape charges of violating espionage laws in the United States. He arrived in Moscow last Sunday, where he has remained out of sight, apparently cloistered in a transit area of the airport there.
Ecuadorean officials have said that Mr. Snowden asked them for asylum. But after initially signaling that his government was studying the request, Mr. Correa said Thursday that under his country's laws, the request could not be processed unless Mr. Snowden was in Ecuador or one of its embassies.
In Washington, Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, called the discussion between Mr. Correa and Mr. Biden "a broad conversation regarding the bilateral relationship."
"They did discuss Mr. Snowden, but we are not going to provide details on their discussion," she said in an e-mail.
Still, Mr. Biden's call to Mr. Correa, the highest-level contact between an American official and the Ecuadorean president since revelations about Mr. Snowden's role in releasing classified N.S.A. documents, raised new questions about whether Ecuador is having qualms about granting asylum to Mr. Snowden.
White House officials have said in recent days that in their contacts with foreign governments about Mr. Snowden, they have warned those governments about the felony charges that Mr. Snowden faced in the United States and urged that they not further aid his international flight.
Mr. Correa regularly denounces the United States, calling it an imperialist power that tries to bully small countries like Ecuador. But he said he told Mr. Biden that Ecuador would take the opinion of the United States into account if it eventually had to make a decision in the case.
He contrasted Mr. Biden's courteous attitude with what he has characterized as the bad manners of some members of Congress who have threatened to end trade benefits for Ecuador's exports to the United States if the country decides to give refuge to Mr. Snowden.
The Ecuadorean president also said last week that Ecuadorean officials had had little contact with Mr. Snowden since his arrival in Moscow.
Mr. Correa said Thursday in a news conference: "The only contact that there has been given Mr. Snowden's asylum request, which the foreign minister made public, is that the ambassador went to see him in the Moscow airport. He wasn't able to see him the first day, according to what the ambassador informed me, but he saw him the second day. He saw that he was in good health. He repeated his desire that Ecuador grant him asylum. Since then we really haven't had any further contact."
It is not clear how Mr. Snowden could get to Ecuador or one of its embassies. The United States has revoked his passport, and Mr. Correa denied reports that Ecuador gave him papers permitting him to travel internationally.
Last year, Ecuador granted asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who has been stuck in the country's embassy in London ever since.
On Saturday, Der Speigel reported that it was able to review "top secret" N.S.A. documents in Mr. Snowden's possession dated September 2010 that showed that the agency had infiltrated European Union computers in two locations to monitor telephone conversations, e-mails and other documents.
The magazine said that surveillance devices were installed in the European Union's offices in Washington and that the organization's computer networks in Brussels had been infiltrated.
The lead writer of the article was Laura Poitras, 49, a documentary filmmaker who emerged as the pivotal connection between Mr. Snowden and writers for The Guardian and The Washington Post who published his leaked documents about government surveillance. She has shared bylines with reporters of those publications in their coverage of the N.S.A. leaks.
If Mr. Snowden, through Ms. Poitras, showed parts of his trove to Der Spiegel, it would mark an expansion of his journalistic collaborations, which so far have included The Guardian, The Post and The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong. The Morning Post reported this month that Mr. Snowden had provided detailed data showing the dates and Internet protocol addresses of specific computers in mainland China and Hong Kong that the N.S.A. penetrated over the last four years.
Maggy Ayala contributed reporting from Quito, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Associated Press
Bangladeshi officials at the Tazreen Fashions garment factory near Dhaka last year. A fire at the factory killed 112 workers.
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Inside Courtroom 21, the two judges peered down from high wooden chairs as lawyers in formal black robes presented their motions. Activists and victims watched from the back. And a few steps away, a portly man with a thick black beard remained silent. He was the suspect. He did not seem especially nervous.
Perhaps that is because the man, Delowar Hossain, has not yet been charged with anything — and may never be. He has been a vilified figure since his garment factory, Tazreen Fashions, caught fire last November, killing 112 workers who were making clothes for retailers like Walmart and Sears. A high-level government investigation found fire safety violations and accused Mr. Hossain of "unpardonable negligence."
"How do you sleep at night?" a woman screamed as Mr. Hossain left the courtroom after the hearing on June 19. The more pertinent question might be this: In Bangladesh, where the garment industry powers the economy and wields enormous political clout, is it possible to hold factory owners like Mr. Hossain accountable?
Now is undeniably the test. The Tazreen Fashions fire was followed by the April collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building, in which 1,129 people were killed in the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry. A global supply chain that delivers low-cost clothes from Bangladeshi factories to stores in the West was suddenly redefined by images of mutilated bodies pulled from the rubble. The Obama administration responded last week by rescinding a special trade privilege for Bangladesh over concerns about safety problems and labor rights violations in its garment industry.
But Bangladeshi factories have always suffered fires and accidents, usually without attracting international attention. One study estimated that more than 1,000 workers died in hundreds of factory fires or accidents from 1990 to 2012. Not once was a factory owner charged with any crime, activists say.
"We want to set a legal precedent that factory owners can't get away with this," said Saydia Gulrukh, an anthropologist and social activist.
One way to interpret the hearing for Mr. Hossain was as an act of exasperation. It was not a criminal trial. Instead, Ms. Gulrukh and a handful of other activists and lawyers had become so frustrated that they petitioned the Bangladesh High Court to overstep the stalled police investigation and decide whether criminal charges should be filed. The proceeding is already bogged down and could take months, or longer.
"They are just delaying the process," said Jyotirmoy Barua, the lawyer handling the petition, speaking of Mr. Hossain's defense team. "They think we will lose the spirit of fighting. But they have miscalculated."
Bangladesh's legal system has rarely favored anyone confronting the power structure. Much of the legal code has remained intact since the British imperial era, when laws were devised to control the population and protect the colonialist power structure. Legal reformers continue to push to modernize the criminal code, but the pace of change has been slow. Moreover, the police and other security forces are deeply politicized, with a bloody legacy of carrying out extrajudicial killings.
Many garment factory owners are now entrenched in the nation's power elite, some as members of Parliament. Garments represent 80 percent of the country's manufacturing exports, giving the industry vast economic power, while factory owners also finance campaigns during national elections, giving them broad political influence.
The April 24 collapse of Rana Plaza, located in Savar, an industrial suburb of Dhaka, seemed to shock a system often inured to factory accidents. On the morning of the collapse, factory workers had been ordered into the building, even though cracks had appeared a day earlier and an engineer had warned that the structure was unsafe. The building's owner, Sohel Rana, disappeared amid speculation that he would avoid prosecution because he was affiliated with the governing political coalition, the Awami League.
But incensed High Court judges ordered the police to arrest Mr. Rana, as well as the owners of the garment factories inside the building. Mr. Rana was hauled into the courthouse, along with the factory bosses, surprising some legal activists who could not remember a single case in which judges had taken such action against members of the garment industry.
"That was very unusual," said Sara Hossain, a Supreme Court lawyer and legal activist, who is not related to Delowar Hossain. "I think it was only possible because of the level of national and international outrage."
Ms. Hossain has fought the garment industry for years over the 2005 collapse of the Spectrum sweater factory in Savar, in which at least 64 workers died. Soon after the collapse, she and other lawyers petitioned the court and pressed for affidavits from different agencies to determine who was to blame, in hopes of stirring a prosecution.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian military used airstrikes and heavy artillery to assault rebel-held areas of the central city of Homs on Saturday, residents and antigovernment activists said, as the government renewed efforts to retake that perennially restive and divided city.
A new government push in Homs has been expected since the Syrian Army, backed by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, took over the nearby border town of Qusayr this month after it was held by rebels for about a year.
The new fighting suggested that President Bashar al-Assad was continuing his push to consolidate control of areas from the capital, Damascus, and up the country's western spine along the Lebanese border to Syria's Mediterranean coast, the president's ancestral homeland and a bastion of his supporters.
Homs has existed as a divided city throughout much of the two-year uprising, with some neighborhoods under rebel control. The government's bombardment of the Baba Amr neighborhood in early 2012 was one of the first assaults to herald the escalation of the state's use of heavy weapons against residential areas harboring rebels; the government has periodically retaken some areas, sometimes losing them again months later.
Fighting raged in several areas of the city, including the historic city center and around the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque, and explosions sent columns of smoke rising skyward, according to residents and video posted by activists.
Dr. Walid Fares, an activist in Hamidiyeh, an area of the Old City in Homs, said the government had spent several days mobilizing troops around rebel areas in Homs, then pummeled some of them with airstrikes.
Then, he said, "they used rocket launchers for hours." He said government troops "shelled us with heavy mortar shells" and "raided us from four different directions."
Dr. Fares said that electricity and telecommunications in the Old City had long been blocked or damaged, and that he relied on satellite connections. As he talked, explosions echoed in the distance.
"They've blocked everything here — electricity, phones, water," he said. "The only thing they haven't blocked is the air we breathe."
About 30 Christian families remain in Hamidiyeh, along with mostly Sunni supporters of the rebellion, he said.
The government's news agencies said the army was making progress against "armed terrorist gangs" in Homs.
The opposition Syrian National Coalition issued an appeal for international powers to help the rebels and said the government offensive "threatens the unity of Syria" by reinforcing the possibility that supporters of Mr. Assad could create a rump state. Supporters of Mr. Assad in Syria and elsewhere have said that is not his goal, and that he seeks to maintain a united Syria.
Hala Droubi contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
People infected with H.I.V. should be put on antiretroviral therapy even sooner than they are now, the World Health Organization said Sunday as it released new treatment guidelines.
While the new guidelines, issued at an international AIDS conference in Malaysia, were an aggressive step forward, they also represent a compromise between how much the world could do to suppress the epidemic if money were no object and how much donor countries are willing to pay for.
Dr. Margaret Chan, the W.H.O.'s director general, called the guidelines "a leap ahead in a trend of ever-higher goals and ever-greater achievements," while Michel Sidibé, the executive director of the United Nations AIDS agency, who several years ago called for universal treatment, said the step-by-step rise of the guidelines "gets most of the people we want on treatment, but not all — so it shows that you have limits to the system."
The new guidelines recommend that drugs be initiated as soon as a patient's CD4 count falls below 500 cells per cubic millimeter of blood. CD4s are the white blood cells that the virus first attacks. The count is an index for how much of the immune system has been destroyed; 500 is the bottom of the normal range while a patient below 200 is at high risk of fatal infections. The previous cutoff point, recommended in 2010, was a count of 350; a decade ago, when donors first began buying drugs, it was 200.
For some subgroups, the new guidelines recommend starting treatment immediately upon a positive H.I.V. test, regardless of CD4 count. Those include people with active tuberculosis or hepatitis B liver disease, those whose regular sex partners are not infected, women who are pregnant or breast-feeding, and children under age 5.
Many scientists now recommend that all patients start treatment immediately regardless of CD4 levels. The evidence is overwhelming that they are far less likely to infect anyone else if they do so. They also may live longer, healthier lives because their immune systems are not allowed to sink before being revived. In rare cases when the infection is caught very early, some may even be able to safely stop treatment after a year or two.
W.H.O. guidelines, however, are used mostly by the health ministries of poor countries that depend on donors. Not nearly enough money is contributed each year to treat everyone infected, so poor countries perform triage, telling about half of their infected citizens to wait until they get sicker.
The new guidelines mean that about 26 million people in poor and middle-income countries will be eligible for the drugs, up from 17 million under the previous guidelines. Almost 10 million people are on the drugs now. Globally, more than 34 million people are infected.
Two trends are helping increase the number of people getting treatment. The prices of drugs and diagnostic tests keep dropping, and middle-income countries are relying less on donors. South Africa, for example, has increased its AIDS budget by 500 percent in recent years.
The new guidelines also call for universal use of the simplest, most effective treatment with the least side effects: a once-daily pill containing three drugs — tenofovir, efavirenz and either lamivudine or emtricitabine.
For diagnosis, the guidelines suggest that, in addition to CD4 counts, countries do more expensive viral load tests. Tracking viral loads is the best way to tell when a patient needs a new drug regimen, said Dr. Gilles van Cutsem, medical coordinator in South Africa for Doctors Without Borders, the medical charity. And, he said, there is "no greater motivating factor for people to stick to their treatment than knowing the virus is 'undetectable' in their blood."
The guidelines do not call for giving healthy people who are at high risk — drug addicts, prostitutes, gay men, male prisoners and people whose sex partners are infected — a daily tenofovir pill to keep them uninfected.
Mr. Sidibé called that "a missed opportunity" and said that it was still being discussed.
The new guidelines drew mixed reactions from advocates.
Doctors Without Borders, which treats 285,000 H.I.V. patients in 21 countries, applauded the guidelines.
But Asia Russell, an activist with Health GAP, which lobbies for more generosity from donors and drug makers, called them "the absolute bare minimum steps that needed to be taken — because stingy donors and U.N. technocrats and national governments in the global south tend to seek incrementalism."
Behind the scenes, the proposed guidelines engendered a long debate. One fear is that countries already struggling to reach rural citizens who are close to death will run out of drugs if they start treating people who live near government clinics and have CD4 counts just below normal.
In coming years, Mr. Sidibé said, he expects the guidelines to keep shifting toward treatment upon testing, especially as recognition spreads that reducing the viral load early, when people are teeming with the virus, is the best way to stop them from spreading the disease.
"What is holding us back is that we lack a vision for ending the epidemic," he said. "If we think we'll just manage it like a chronic disease for the next 50 years, we'll never get to the end."
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Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
When the Nets swung a deal to obtain Paul Pierce, left, and Kevin Garnett from Boston, a trade that is not official until July 10, they acquired more than talent.
The lights will go up, the "Broook-lyn" chants will resume and, in the giddy haze of opening night at Barclays Center next fall, a brooding, solitary figure will approach the basket stanchion closest to the home team's bench — and ram his head into it. Repeatedly.
Kevin Garnett will fiddle with his waistband. He will mutter things only he can hear or comprehend. Then he will skip around the court, right fist clenched, thumping his chest, howling into the night, rousing the masses.
When the Nets swung a deal late Thursday to obtain Garnett and Paul Pierce from Boston — a trade agreed to in principle but not official until July 10 — they acquired more than talent, more than marquee value, more than Hall of Fame credibility. They acquired a new attitude, which — aside from shooting and athleticism — was their greatest need of all.
The Nets were perfectly competent in their maiden season in Brooklyn, winning 49 games and making the playoffs on the strength of Deron Williams, Joe Johnson and Brook Lopez. But they inspired neither fear nor loathing. The Nets had poise but no pulse, a personality that fell somewhere between "eh" and "meh." They didn't play much defense, either.
When a Chicago columnist reported during the playoffs that the Bulls viewed the Nets as "heartless and gutless," few people disagreed (even some wearing Nets ID badges).
These are no longer relevant concerns.
Garnett and Pierce built their brilliant careers on tenacity and fire, driving the Celtics to five straight Atlantic Division titles, two finals appearances and the 2008 championship, which ended with Pierce clutching the Most Valuable Player trophy. Their commitment and professionalism are unquestioned, and they will become the Nets' most important voices on Day 1.
Despite their advanced ages — Garnett is 37; Pierce will be 36 next fall — they will also significantly improve the Nets' lineup.
Pierce is still an effective scorer who averaged 18.6 points a game last season, and he is a feared clutch shooter who converted 38 percent of his 3-pointers. An underrated playmaker, Pierce also averaged 4.8 assists, often directing the offense after Rajon Rondo was lost to a knee injury.
Garnett is among the best jump-shooting big men of his era and, when inclined, a solid post scorer.
They are directly replacing Gerald Wallace and Reggie Evans, two nonscorers who were easily ignored when opponents double-teamed Johnson or Lopez. The Nets will have All-Stars at every position, players who will demand attention and keep defenses honest. (Also, no one sets an illegal screen as well as Garnett.)
While Garnett and Pierce have each slowed a bit, they are still stout, smart defenders who will help close the lane and relieve some pressure on Lopez. Their presence alone should raise the Nets' defensive efficiency rating, which ranked 18th last season.
Durability is always a concern, but Pierce played 77 games last season and Garnett 68, more than Carmelo Anthony (67 games). After six years of carrying the Celtics, Pierce and Garnett will have the luxury of playing a supporting role in Brooklyn, with Williams, Johnson and Lopez already carrying the offense.
While the trade for two aging stars will inspire obvious comparisons to the Knicks' go-old campaign last summer, the Nets can expect much better results. Pierce and Garnett are not who they were in 2008, but they are still playing at a high level, each ranking in the top 40 in John Hollinger's player efficiency ratings last season. The Knicks, by contrast, imported players who were either already retired (Rasheed Wallace) or played like it (Marcus Camby, Kurt Thomas, Jason Kidd).
Kidd is now the Nets' rookie head coach, and while expectations keep rising, his job perhaps just got a little easier. As the former star guard Tim Hardaway noted on Friday, Kidd now has two dominant personalities to rule the locker room.
"Now he really don't have to coach," Hardaway said. "He's got guys that can coach themselves."
Still, the Nets have a two-year window at best to win a championship before Pierce and Garnett fade into history. Or possibly one year, if Pierce were to leave as a free agent or retire in 2014.
In the short term, this was an easy gamble for General Manager Billy King to take, costing him no key players and no erosion in payroll flexibility — because the Nets had no flexibility for the next few years anyway.
The final deal will send Wallace, Kris Humphries, MarShon Brooks, Keith Bogans and Kris Joseph to Boston. Brooks replaced Reggie Evans, who was originally in the deal. The Nets will miss none of them, although they now have a lot of holes to fill on the bench.
The real risk is the three first-round picks the Nets surrendered, in 2014, 2016 and 2018, the latter two unprotected, plus a right to swap picks in 2017. If the Nets crash and burn, those picks will haunt them.
But those are concerns for another day. With one bold stroke Thursday night, the Nets got deeper, sturdier, tougher, much more compelling and considerably more snarly. They sent another shot across the bow of the Knicks. They stole all the headlines on draft night. With a little good fortune, they might even steal a title.
Richard Drew/Associated Press
Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, wrapping up the month.
Given the wild trading of late, it was a calm close to the month.
After flitting between tiny gains and losses most of Friday, the stock market closed mostly lower, a peaceful end to the most volatile month in nearly two years.
"It's a dull Friday," said Gary Flam, a stock manager at Bel Air Investment Advisors. A bull market, he added, is "rarely a straight march up."
The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index ended its bumpy ride in June down 1.5 percent, the first monthly loss since October. The index still had its best first half of a year since 1998.
Investors seemed unsure how to react to recent statements by Federal Reserve officials about when the central bank might end its support for the economy.
Mixed economic news on Friday added to investor uncertainty after big stock gains. An index of consumer confidence was up, but a gauge of business activity in the Chicago area plunged.
"Investors don't know what to make of the news," said John Toohey, vice president for stock investments at USAA Investment Management. "I wouldn't be surprised to see more ups and downs."
The S.& P. 500 closed down 6.92 points, or 0.4 percent, to 1,606.28. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 114.89 points, or 0.8 percent, to 14,909.60. The Nasdaq composite index rose 1.38 points, or 0.04 percent, to 3,403.25.
Stocks have jumped around in June. By contrast, the first five months of the year were mostly calm, with small but steady gains as investors bought on news of higher home prices, record corporate earnings and an improving jobs market.
By May 21, the S.& P. 500 had climbed to a record 1,669, up 18 percent for the year. The Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, spoke the next day and prices began seesawing.
Investors have long known that the central bank would eventually pull back from its bond purchases, which are intended to lower interest rates and get people to borrow and spend more. Last week, Mr. Bernanke got more specific about the timing, saying the Fed could start purchasing fewer bonds later this year and stop buying them completely by the middle of next year if the economy continued to strengthen.
Investors dumped stocks, but then had second thoughts this week as other Fed officials stressed that the central bank would not pull back on its support soon.
Bonds have also been on a bumpy ride in recent weeks, mostly down.
The prospect of fewer purchases by the Fed sent investors fleeing from all sorts of bonds — municipals, United States Treasury securities, corporate bonds, foreign government debt and high-yield bonds. Investors withdrew a record $23 billion from bond mutual funds in the five trading days that ended Wednesday, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Bond yields, which move in the opposite direction of bond prices, have rocketed. On Friday, the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell 3/32 to 93 19/32, bringing the yield up to 2.49 percent, from 2.47 percent late Thursday. Last month, the yield was as low as 1.63 percent.
Joao Silva/The New York Times
People visited a small shrine to Nelson Mandela in Pretoria, South Africa, where he was hospitalized and is in critical condition with a lung infection. More Photos »
JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela always wanted to go quietly. Despite his stature as a global icon, he sought a dignified withdrawal from public life in recent years; privately he told aides of his desire for a quiet funeral, stripped of pomp.
That is not how it is happening now. With Mr. Mandela in critical condition in a hospital from a serious lung infection, and as President Obama arrived Friday for a state visit, the country was in the grip of passions, ceremony and controversy as its people come to terms with finally bidding Mr. Mandela farewell.
Outside the hospital gates, South Africans of all races prayed, sang and dropped flowers for their revered father figure. Less harmoniously, a simmering family feud over his funeral arrangements burst into public view. A 65-year-old woman claiming to be his illegitimate daughter stepped forward, demanding to be let into the hospital to meet him.
In the evening, Mr. Obama entered the fray, faced with a delicate diplomatic balancing act involving statesmanship, policy and respect for a fading hero. Mr. Obama, who had planned weeks ago to visit Mr. Mandela during this trip, wishes to honor the man who inspired his career in politics, mindful that he is arriving as South Africans are sorrowful over their beloved former president's condition.
"I don't need a photo-op," Mr. Obama said while on his way to South Africa, where he landed just a few miles from the Pretoria hospital where Mr. Mandela has been lying in intensive care. "Right now, our main concern is with his well-being, his comfort, and with the family's well-being and comfort."
At any other time, Mr. Obama's arrival would have been a symbolically potent moment with resonance for both countries: America's first black president visiting a nation that only two decades ago shook off the yoke of white minority rule.
But for South Africans, their hearts, if not their eyes, were focused on something else.
"This trip is overshadowed by Nelson Mandela's illness," said Justice Malala, a political commentator and columnist. "Its impact will be blunted because people's attention is elsewhere."
Some unfolding events seemed to be exactly what Mr. Mandela had hoped to avoid. A court hearing in a provincial town on Friday exposed a bitter family rift over arrangements for his funeral.
Mr. Mandela has long been painfully aware of the divides within his family, and on Friday lawyers and magistrates confirmed that 16 Mandela relatives, led by his eldest daughter, Makaziwe Mandela, had filed a lawsuit against a grandson, Mandla Mandela, a tribal chief.
A report from South Africa's national broadcaster pointed to a macabre squabble at work: the plaintiffs want to compel Mandla to rebury three relatives, who had been exhumed and moved some years ago from the family graveyard at Qunu, Nelson Mandela's home village, back in their original graves.
The court action appeared to stem from an argument over where Mr. Mandela should be buried. Mandla prefers a site at the headquarters of his tribal village of Mvezo, where Mr. Mandela was born; the rest of the family wants him to be buried at Qunu, where he grew up.
Among some South Africans, the government's careful management of news about Mr. Mandela even stoked speculation that it was somehow keeping him alive in order to facilitate Mr. Obama's trip. The government flatly rejected such rumors.
"Urban legend," said Mac Maharaj, the presidential spokesman. "That has been put to us before, and it is wrong. People take the government's report as accurate."
Mr. Obama, who is accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and their daughters, Sasha and Malia, arrived from Senegal and was due to travel to Tanzania on Sunday. His long-awaited African tour is intended to stress the importance of trade, not aid, for the continent.
"Everything we do is designed to make sure that Africa is not viewed as a dependent, as a charity case, but is instead viewed as a partner," he told reporters on Friday.
In South Africa, Mr. Obama plans to salute Mr. Mandela's life with a visit on Sunday to Robben Island, the prison where Mr. Mandela spent 18 years in a tiny cell, now a somber tourist attraction inhabited mainly by penguins.
Mr. Obama's host here will be President Jacob Zuma, a controversial figure who in some ways epitomizes the disappointments of the post-Mandela era.
Rick Lyman contributed reporting from Johannesburg, Lydia Polgreen from New York and Alan Cowell from London.
Sponsors have cut ties with Paula Deen, who has admitted using racist language. But some fans have rallied to her side.
Paula Deen got a rare bit of good news on Thursday: Her new cookbook hit No. 1 on the best-seller list at Amazon.com, as thousands of fans — many of them springing to her defense as she faces accusations of racism — ordered the book months before its October release.
But on Friday, its publisher, Random House, said it would not publish the cookbook, and would cancel a five-book contract it signed with Ms. Deen last year.
The book deal was one of the last remaining lucrative business relationships for the embattled celebrity chef. Its cancellation came on a day when Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney announced that they would stop selling products, including cookbooks, branded with her name.
Since last week, the Food Network, Smithfield Foods, Walmart, Target, Caesars Entertainment, QVC and the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk have decided to suspend or sever ties with Ms. Deen after her admission in a legal deposition that she had used racist language in the past and allowed racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes in one of her restaurants. Ms. Deen was deposed on video as part of a discrimination lawsuit filed last year by a former employee.
Her frantic efforts to stanch the flow of negative opinion by defending herself on the "Today" show and posting apologetic videos on YouTube have rallied many of her admirers. They have threatened boycotts of Walmart, created a "We Support Paula Deen" Facebook page that has well over half a million "likes," and started a campaign to flood the Food Network offices with empty butter wrappers, a symbol of Ms. Deen's indulgent cooking style.
But these efforts have not, apparently, made a difference to Ms. Deen's corporate partners.
Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, said in a statement Friday afternoon, "After careful consideration, Ballantine Books has made the difficult decision to cancel the publication of 'Paula Deen's New Testament: 250 Favorite Recipes, All Lightened Up.' "
The book, co-written by Melissa Clark, a dining columnist for The New York Times, was to feature lighter fare than the fat- and sugar-laden recipes Ms. Deen has promoted in previous books and on her television shows.
A person with knowledge of Random House's decision to cancel the contract said, "When Walmart, Target and J. C. Penney all announced they are discontinuing their Paula Deen business, including books, it is awfully tough to stay the course of a publication. It was a business decision."
Ms. Deen has published 14 cookbooks, starting in 1998 with "The Lady and Sons Savannah Country Cookbook." Together, they have sold more than eight million copies.
But many of the sales outlets that normally sell thousands of Ms. Deen's books — like Walmart, Target, Kmart and QVC — would have refused to carry the new one.
Random House would not disclose the amount Ms. Deen was to be paid, but a person with knowledge of the contract said it involved millions of dollars. It is unclear whether Ms. Deen will have to return any of it, or whether a clause in the contract would allow the publisher to cancel the pact because of Ms. Deen's behavior.
"That's why God invented lawyers," said Mr. Applebaum.
On Thursday, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it was suspending its use of Ms. Deen as a spokeswoman for the drug. The company, which has the top-selling portfolio of diabetes medications in the United States, has reached out vigorously to black Americans in its marketing and medical sponsorships.
Ms. Deen began a multiplatform campaign to promote the drug on the same day last year she revealed she had Type 2 diabetes. That set off public criticism that she had misserved her audience. She had received the diagnosis two years earlier, yet had continued to promote recipes high in sugar and fat.
Didra Brown Taylor, the executive director of the Beautyshop Project, a national diabetes screening initiative that offers free blood tests in hair salons in low-income neighborhoods, said that Ms. Deen's conflict of interest was noted by program participants at the time, and that the current crisis had confirmed many in their beliefs that Ms. Deen might be more opportunistic than honest.
"She was cooking food that a diabetic would not eat," Ms. Taylor said. "And to profit from that and then to profit from a diabetes drug, that's hypocrisy."
She said African-Americans were unlikely to forget Ms. Deen's more recent admission that she used racial epithets. "It's more than a rumor," Ms. Taylor said. "She can't say that she didn't say it."
Leslie Kaufman contributed reporting.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, who have been together for more than 15 years and have four sons, were married at San Francisco City Hall by Attorney General Kamala Harris on Friday.
LOS ANGELES — The two couples who sued to overturn California's ban on same-sex marriage were married late Friday afternoon, just hours after the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, lifted the stay that had been in place.
The court had stopped same-sex marriages while the case wound its way through the Supreme Court, which issued its decision to clear the path for same-sex marriages in California on Wednesday.
Attorney General Kamala Harris rushed to San Francisco City Hall within minutes of the ruling to perform the wedding for Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, who have been together for more than 15 years and have four sons.
Many legal experts and advocates had expected the court to wait for an official decision from the Supreme Court, as is the normal practice. But after the initial ruling was issued on Wednesday, Ms. Harris urged the Circuit Court to act immediately and said she would ensure that all counties in the state were prepared to issue licenses to same-sex couples.
Just after 3 p.m. Friday, the three-judge panel issued a one-sentence ruling lifting the stay on a district judge's injunction to not enforce the ban on same-sex marriages.
Gov. Jerry Brown issued a statement late Friday afternoon saying that he had directed the state's Department of Health to notify all 58 counties in the state that "same-sex marriage is now legal in California and that marriage licenses must be issued to same-sex couples immediately."
While Sacramento County officials said they planned to stay open late Friday to issue licenses, most applicants were probably waiting until Monday, when all counties will be open for regular business.
Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, on his last workday in office, officiated at the Friday evening wedding of Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, the two other plaintiffs in the case. Until Friday afternoon, they had no idea when their marriage could take place.
"Nobody really knew; that's what our lawyers are there for. We don't really care about any of that at this point, but we're on our way to see the mayor," Mr. Zarrillo told KCRW, a public radio station in Los Angeles.
The pair were stuck in traffic en route from their home to the county office to obtain their marriage license and then to City Hall downtown. But by 6:30 they walked in front of dozens of television cameras, kissed Mayor Villaraigosa and were pronounced married.
"Your relationship is an inspiration to us all," Mr. Villaraigosa said. "Today, your wait is finally over."
"Equal feels different," Mr. Katami said. Mr. Zarrillo added, "Equal feels good."
John J. Duran, a councilman from West Hollywood, said that within hours of the court ruling Friday he had promised to officiate at two weddings next week.
Andy Pugno, the general counsel for ProtectMarriage.com, said the court had rushed a decision on Proposition 8, the state's ban on same-sex marriage, and called it a "disgraceful day for California."
"This outrageous act tops off a chronic pattern of lawlessness, throughout this case, by judges and politicians hellbent on thwarting the vote of the people to redefine marriage by any means, even outright corruption," he said in a statement.
Six months after the State Supreme Court ruled that gay men and lesbians had the right to be married, California voters approved the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.
An estimated 18,000 couples were married during that six-month window in 2008, and while the state's highest court ruled that the ban was legal, it said same-sex marriages that had already occurred remained valid.
In City Hall in San Francisco, hundreds packed the rotunda — some weeping with joy — to watch Ms. Perry, in a beige suit, and Ms. Stier, in an eggshell dress, marry.
After standing in silence for the ceremony, the crowd erupted into cheers when Ms. Harris announced them "spouses for life."
"These marriages are legitimate, they are legal and they are going to continue, and it's about time," Ms. Harris said.
Dozens of couples were lined up to follow the brides. The San Francisco County Clerk planned to stay open three hours later on Friday and from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. Saturday to issue marriage licenses and perform weddings.
Cathy Sutton, 57, and Christina Segatto, 56, were having lunch in their apartment nearby when they heard the news that weddings would begin immediately.
"We ran over here," said Ms. Sutton, her brow still sweaty. "We didn't even have time to change."
So Ms. Sutton was married wearing a faded Super Bowl sweatshirt and Ms. Segatto in jeans. They planned to celebrate over drinks Friday night.
"Since we didn't have time to plan our wedding we're going to go plan our honeymoon," Ms. Segatto said.
Malia Wollan contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Ian Lovett from Los Angeles.
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Robert W. Hart for The Texas Tribune
State Senator Wendy Davis of Texas, was flanked by her father, left, and her two daughters while giving her victory speech on Nov. 6. Senator Davis, a Democrat, was first elected in 2008.
AUSTIN, Tex. — She was a state senator Tuesday morning. By Wednesday, she was a political celebrity known across the nation. But also hoarse, hungry and thirsty.
The leg-numbing filibuster by Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat — in which she stood and talked for more than 11 hours at the Capitol here, never sitting, eating, drinking or even using the bathroom to help block passage of an anti-abortion bill supported by the state's top Republicans — was not the longest such marathon, by Texas standards.
But it didn't matter.
Her feat of stamina and conviction gained thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours. Pictures of the sneakers she wore beneath her dress zoomed across computer and television screens. The press corps demanded to know her shoe brand. (Mizuno, it turned out.) Hundreds of men, women and children waited for hours at the Capitol to sit in an upstairs gallery and watch her in action, standing in lines that snaked around the rotunda. Even President Obama noticed, posting a Twitter message on Tuesday that read, "Something special is happening in Austin tonight."
Ms. Davis, 50, has known long odds and, for Democrats, was the perfect symbol in a fight over what a woman can do. She was a teenager when her first child was born, but managed as a single mother to pull herself from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to a hard-fought seat in the Texas Senate, a rare liberal representing conservative Tarrant County. According to Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston, she had the second-most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2011.
"We have a State Capitol that is made up of people, for the most part, who are elected by Anglo communities, suburban and rural, and they are the majority voice in the Capitol, although they aren't reflective of the majority of the state of Texas," she said in a previous interview.
On Tuesday night, as she stood in her salmon-colored running shoes on the green carpeted floor of the Senate chamber and spoke about the bill from 11:18 a.m. to about 10 p.m., Republicans monitored virtually her every move and word, waiting to catch her violating Texas' obscure filibuster rules, which prohibited her from leaning on her desk or straying off topic. At one point they objected when a fellow Democrat tried to help put a back brace around Ms. Davis, who at that point had been standing for about seven hours straight.
"I'm tired, but really happy," Ms. Davis told reporters in the Senate chamber at 3:20 a.m. Wednesday as she finally made her way out of the building. "I'm pleased to know that a spotlight is shining on Texas, a spotlight is shining on the failure of our current leadership." She was congratulated by lawmakers and women's rights advocates. But the celebration was short-lived. Hours later, Gov. Rick Perry announced that a second special session would begin Monday so lawmakers could take up the abortion bill once more. Analysts said the bill would probably pass this time because Democrats in the Republican-controlled Senate would be unable to delay for an entire 30-day session.
As a lawmaker elected to the Senate in 2008, Ms. Davis has shown charisma and guts, and her life story has moved voters. At the age of 14, she worked after-school jobs to help support her mother and three siblings.
"My mother only had a sixth-grade education, and it was really a struggle for us," she said in a 2011 video for Generation TX. She said she fell through the cracks in high school, and shortly after she graduated, she got married and divorced, and was a single mother by age 19.
"I was living in a mobile home in southeast Fort Worth, and I was destined to live the life that I watched my mother live," she said in the video. A co-worker showed her a brochure for Tarrant County College, and she took classes to become a paralegal, working two jobs at the same time. From there she received a scholarship to attend Texas Christian University in Fort Worth — becoming the first person in her family to earn a bachelor's degree — and then went on to Harvard. "When I was accepted into Harvard Law School, I remember thinking about who I am, and where I came from, and where I had been only a few years before," she said.
Brian Stelter contributed reporting from New York.
George Rizer for The Boston Globe, via Getty Images
Aaron Hernandez was taken into custody at his home in Massachusetts, less than a mile from where a 27-year-old man was found dead.
ATTLEBORO, Mass. — An agitated and armed Aaron Hernandez complained that he could not trust anyone. Calling from his suburban home, Hernandez, a tight end for the New England Patriots, summoned two accomplices from out of state, and together they embarked on a middle-of-the-night, 45-minute drive to Boston to pick up his friend Odin Lloyd, who, prosecutors said, had angered Hernandez for talking to the wrong people during a long visit to a nightclub two nights earlier.
Their trip in the early hours of June 17 included a stop at a gas station to buy, among other things, blue bubble gum that would factor into the murder investigation.
Within hours, Lloyd was dead, shot five times and left in an industrial park less than a mile from Hernandez's home.
These accounts were laid out Wednesday by prosecutors in Attleboro District Court, where Hernandez was charged with murder and five gun-related offenses. He is believed to be the third N.F.L. player charged with murder while active, and he was, until Wednesday morning, a member of the league's most celebrated team over the past decade.
But about an hour after Hernandez, 23, was arrested Wednesday morning — and before he was arraigned on murder charges — the Patriots released him, calling it "the right thing to do." Less than a year ago, the Patriots had signed Hernandez to a $40 million contract extension.
In court, Hernandez, who pleaded not guilty and was held without bail, showed no emotion as the charges against him were read. He rarely looked at the packed rows of seating in the courtroom and did not seem to notice when there was a commotion as members of Lloyd's family were escorted from the court crying.
One of Hernandez's lawyers, Michael K. Fee, described the district attorney's case against his client as, "at bottom, a circumstantial case; it is not a strong case."
Hernandez, dressed in the same white T-shirt and red athletic shorts he was wearing when he was arrested at his elegant home Wednesday morning, was led away in handcuffs, pausing briefly to wipe sweat from above his eyebrow. He was ordered to appear in court again July 24 for a probable cause hearing. On the murder charge, he faces a life sentence without parole.
Hernandez's arraignment came on the same day that the Cleveland Browns rookie linebacker Ausar Walcott was charged with attempted murder after he reportedly punched a man in Passaic, N.J. The Browns released Walcott on Wednesday.
The killing of Lloyd, according to the prosecutor William McCauley, was a protracted drama, and it included Lloyd's apparently growing nervous about Hernandez's intentions as he sat in a car with him. In his final moments alive, Lloyd texted his sister to alert her. When she asked whom he was with, he answered, "NFL," and added, "Just so you know."
The murder on June 17, the prosecutors said, was gruesome. Lloyd, a semipro football player, was shot multiple times, with the two final shots fired by someone standing directly above him. Hernandez, the prosecutors said, felt betrayed; Lloyd, who had been dating his fiancée's sister, had talked to some people Hernandez "had troubles with" when the men were out together on June 14.
The motive for the killing might have been age-old, but the police used a variety of modern investigative methods and relied on the technology of connected and interactive devices to build their case against Hernandez. Piecing together cellphone tower tracking, text messages and surveillance tapes — including video recorded by 14 cameras trained on the outside and inside of Hernandez's home — the police constructed a timeline and concluded, in the words of McCauley, that Hernandez "orchestrated the execution" of Lloyd, 27.
Prosecutors said that home surveillance videos from Hernandez's house showed him in possession of firearms before and after Lloyd was killed; that Hernandez was observed picking up Lloyd at 2:30 a.m. on the night he was killed; that a silver Nissan Altima — the same make of vehicle Hernandez had rented — was seen going to and coming from the site where Lloyd's body was found; and that Hernandez was seen leaving his vehicle with a gun at his home at 3:29 a.m., shortly after the authorities say Lloyd had been murdered.
By Channon Hodge and Jordan Ehrlich
A California Couple Celebrates Equality: David and Bob Schneiderman, who have been together for more than 20 years, said the best thing about the Supreme Court's decision was sharing the news with family.
LOS ANGELES — For nearly a year now, Alex Webster has painstakingly planned her July wedding to her longtime partner, Sasha Klein. They chose a location, hired a caterer and even wrote the ceremony. They just did not know whether it would be legal.
And even with a decision from the Supreme Court effectively permitting legal gay marriage in California, one basic question remained unanswered: When would same-sex marriages actually begin to happen again?
While Gov. Jerry Brown urged local officials to begin taking steps to issue marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples immediately, public officials and legal scholars said it would probably be about a month before those marriages could be performed. When a lower court threw out the state's ban on same-sex marriage, it issued a stay on new marriages while the case wound its way through the Supreme Court.
So for Ms. Webster, Ms. Klein and other gay and lesbian couples in the state, the decision prompted a mix of elation and confusion. And yet, across the country, gay rights advocates welcomed the court's decision as a significant victory at a time when public opinion is shifting sharply.
"We're going to be celebrating, without a doubt," Ms. Webster, 26, said from her apartment in Davis, Calif. "I've been looking all over to understand what I need to do and when. All of the sudden, we have a lot more questions to deal with, but I've never been happier about that."
At a packed San Francisco City Hall, people stood in silence waiting for the decision to be blared on a big screen. Deafening shouts of joy echoed across the rotunda when the news came that the Defense of Marriage Act had been struck down. But there was mere chatter and a smattering of applause as they saw news of the ruling on California's ballot measure banning same-sex marriage, known as Proposition 8.
In West Hollywood, as people ran to the streets honking horns and donning rainbow flags in celebration, some advocates initially believed weddings could start this week. And while it soon became clear that the change would not come so quickly, that fact did little to dampen their enthusiasm.
"Today is the first day I feel like a real citizen in my country," said Kathleen Sullivan, 47, who has been with her partner, Rebecca Levison, for 15 years. The two married in Oregon in 2004, but the marriage was later annulled by the state. While Ms. Levison said she would run to a California courthouse at the first chance she could marry, Ms. Sullivan said she was eager to plan an event that her entire family could attend. "Now it's easy for them to understand," she said. "It's marriage, just like your marriage. And that acknowledgment is really important to me."
Kamala Harris, the state attorney general and a longtime supporter of same-sex marriage, wrote in a letter to Mr. Brown that the state's Department of Public Health "can and should" tell county officials that they must resume issuing and recording marriage licenses for same-sex couples as soon as the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit lifts the stay.
A spokesman for the Ninth Circuit said that typically it waits 25 days after the Supreme Court decision is finalized. Backers of Proposition 8 said they expected to continue the legal battle, arguing that the lower court's decision applied only in San Francisco and Alameda Counties, where the two couples who sued are from. But during a news conference in Los Angeles, Ms. Harris said she would urge the court to act more quickly and that she would fight any county clerk who refused to issue licenses.
"As soon as they lift that stay, marriages are on — the wedding bells will ring," she said. "It will happen in all 58 counties."
Hours after hearing the court's ruling, Bruce Schwartzmann, 55, and Kurt Harris, 48, went to a post office in San Francisco to mail the invitations to their October wedding. For months now, they had felt confident that the court would strike down Proposition 8. Both have been living with AIDS for the last 25 years and said the decisions were a sign of how much the country had changed in their lifetimes.
"It's the end of discrimination," Mr. Harris said. "I was bullied and harassed and teased." He read a message he had written on Facebook: "For years, decades, people told us we were different and we went out of our way to prove them right. And now we've finally come to realize we are no different and we must go out of our way to prove them wrong."
There is likely to be a flurry of weddings throughout the state. Still, for all the celebration, some saw the court's ruling that the backers of Proposition 8 did not have standing as something of a disappointment.
"I am satisfied with the outcome, but I'm not ecstatic in the sense that they took the weakest route," said John Iglar, 41, as he stopped for his morning coffee in West Hollywood. "They chose not to stand up, and instead cover their eyes and ears and let someone else deal with it."
Ms. Webster, too, said she was disappointed that the ruling would not have any impact in dozens of other states. Still, she saw the day as a victory.
By most estimates, her July 13 wedding would take place just eight days before the court is expected to lift the stay, allowing same-sex marriages to begin. And while Ms. Webster said she had no intention of making her ceremony next month a political event, she was considering rewriting parts of the ceremony. Still, she was already searching the Internet for any sign that local officials might somehow begin sooner. Ms. Klein's sister was already planning to officiate, but now the couple is trying to determine whether she should become ordained by the state.
"We have never had the opportunity to think about what it means to have something legally significant, not only a commitment to each other in front of our families," Ms. Webster said. "It's an honor to think about what that means for our marriage now."
Ian Lovett contributed reporting from West Hollywood, and Thomas Gorman from San Francisco.
Gay couples have long had second-tier status when it came to their finances — many things were more complicated, like filing tax returns, and often more costly, like health insurance.
Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, some of these issues will be wiped away. The ruling makes clear that married gay couples living in states that recognize their unions will immediately gain access to more than 1,000 federal benefits, like Social Security and family leave rights. Less certain is how couples living in the remaining 37 states will fare.
The murkiness exists because federal agencies generally defer to the states to determine a couple's marital status. Some agencies look to the laws in the state in which a couple now live, for instance, while others look to those in the state in which the couple were married.
"Unless the administration changes its practices and rules — and in a couple of cases, unless the law changes — then couples residing in a nonmarriage-equality state may not be recognized for some federal programs," said Brian Moulton, legal director at the Human Rights Campaign. "Now that we have an opinion out, we will be anxiously awaiting what the administration will say about this and urging them to ensure that all married couples, regardless of where they live, are fully recognized."
White House officials said that they had already begun analyzing the hundreds of relevant laws and statutes at issue and were working with the Justice Department to make benefits available as swiftly as possible.
But even if the administration were to apply the ruling broadly, gay married couples would still not be on entirely even ground with their heterosexual peers. Until other states approve the unions, couples will still need to travel to one of 13 states or the District of Columbia to get married. And they will still need to deal with a patchwork of state laws that could make it difficult to get a divorce or establish legal ties to their children.
Of the estimated 650,000 same-sex couples living together nationally, about 114,100 are legally married, according to the Williams Institute. But those figures could increase, given the court's other ruling on Wednesday that effectively removes legal obstacles to same-sex couples marrying in California.
Here's how many of them will be affected:
Social Security
Gay married couples living in states where same-sex marriage is legal can apply for Social Security benefits on their spouses' earnings records, as well as survivor benefits. The Social Security Administration typically looks to the states to determine whether a person is married, which could create problems for couples that move to a state where it is not.
But it is possible that benefits would extend to couples in certain civil unions and registered domestic partnerships. The agency's rules also say that if a person is not married — but would inherit property from a spouse as a married person would without a will according to their state's law — that person is also entitled to benefits.
"Though still untested while DOMA has been in place, we presume that under this provision partners in a civil union or comprehensive domestic partnership (or even in a less comprehensive domestic partnership but one in which you can inherit under state law, as in Wisconsin) could claim spousal benefits," said Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, a gay rights advocacy group
Federal Income Taxes
Married couples living in states where gay marriage is legal will be able to file joint federal returns. That should save some couples money, especially when one person earns much less or does not work at all. High-income couples with two working spouses will probably pay more.
That said, filing jointly can cause even lower-income couples to become ineligible for certain tax savings like the earned-income tax credit. Ultimately, the tax consequences will be based on where couples live, their income and their particular circumstances.
Couples who would have saved significant sums by filing jointly might want to consider amending their recent tax returns. Such amendments have been permitted for the last three tax years, according to Patricia Cain, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and an expert on sexuality and federal tax law. More specifically, that means many taxpayers can refile for tax years 2010, 2011 and 2012. The three-year clock started on April 15 for people who filed on or before that date; those who received a filing extension have three years from the date they filed, she added.
What remains unclear is whether same-sex couples married in states where gay unions are legal could file joint federal returns if they moved to a state where they are not. "There has been a lot of discussion about whether the I.R.S. could recognize someone married in Massachusetts but living in Georgia," Professor Cain said. "I think they have the power to do that, but no one seems to think they will do that. I think they will wait for guidance from the White House."
The other big question is whether couples in civil unions and registered domestic partnerships can file joint returns. The I.R.S. typically looks to the taxpayer's state of residence to determine whether someone is married. But a letter from the office of the chief counsel of the I.R.S., written in 2011, states that an opposite-sex couple in a civil union in Illinois should be treated as married for federal tax purposes. "The I.R.S. would have the power to interpret the word spouse," Professor Cain said, adding that the Internal Revenue Code does not define the word.
Employee Benefits
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 26, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of states where gay marriage is permitted following the Supreme Court rulings on Wednesday. Gay couples marry in 13 states, not 12 states, and the District of Columbia.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board on Thursday will propose new rules for insurance accounting that seem likely to increase volatility in reported profits for many insurers and lower reported revenue for rapidly growing companies.
Some of the largest protests might come from companies that until now have thought insurance accounting rules did not apply to them. The new rules would cover any company that issues contracts that are seen as insurance, or similar to insurance.
Insurance is defined as "accepting significant risk" from another party — the insured policyholder — by agreeing to pay compensation "if a specified uncertain future event adversely affects the policyholder." That could include product warranties issued by third parties, mortgage guarantees and residual value guarantees. Most banks would have at least some products subject to the insurance rules.
But not all products that seem like insurance would be covered. The accounting for credit-default swaps, which pay if a borrower like a company or country defaults, would not change. The logic behind that is that such swaps are sold to speculators, who are betting that a default will come, as well as to bondholders who would suffer from a default.
"The proposed standard is intended to bring greater consistency and relevance to the accounting for contracts that transfer significant risk between parties," said Leslie F. Seidman, the FASB chairwoman. "Current U.S. standards on insurance have evolved over the years as new products have been introduced, leading to some inconsistencies" in insurance accounting.
One important change for some life insurance companies would be the timing on recognizing revenue. Instead of recognizing premiums when they are received, premiums would be recognized over time, when the insurance is being provided. Expenses would also be delayed, so the effect on net income might not be large, but revenue growth might seem much slower for some companies.
Life insurance companies now set up reserves when a policy is sold, based on estimates of factors like life expectancy and the chance the policy will lapse before the policyholder dies. Under the new rules, those assumptions would have to be revised every three months, leading to changes in the book value of the policies. But many of those changes would go into a category called "other comprehensive income" and thus not affect the net income figures.
For property and casualty insurers, an important change would come in how reserves are calculated. Currently, most companies estimate the most likely result. Under the new rules, they would have to average out the possible results, based on probability. So for a company that thought there was a 60 percent chance that it would have to pay $1,000 on a claim, and a 40 percent chance it would have to pay $2,000, its required reserve would rise from $1,000, the most probable number, to $1,400 — the average of the probabilities.
That calculation would have to be updated frequently, leading to changes in earnings in one quarter that could be reversed in the next.
A significant change would be that reserves would now be subject to discounting based on time and interest rates. In the example above, the figure now would be $1,000 whether the company expected to pay the claim next year or 10 years from now. Under the proposal, the reserve for the claim that is not expected to be paid for 10 years would be discounted and would then rise every year as the expected payment date neared.
The new rules would affect only companies that issue insurance. Purchasers of insurance — basically every company — would not have to change their current accounting.
The proposal is similar to one issued by the International Accounting Standards Board last week, although there are some differences. The boards are seeking public comment through Oct. 25 and will then decide whether to change their proposals before issuing final rules.
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Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
President Obama created the Atrocities Prevention Board at the urging of Samantha Power.
WASHINGTON — Samantha Power made her name as a writer, with a fierce, unsparing account of why the United States did so little to prevent genocide during the 20th century, a failure she attributed to a "ruthlessly effective" American political system.
So when Ms. Power, 42, traded academia for a human rights post in the Obama administration in 2009, the question was how she would translate her moral outrage into policy.
The answer lies in her signature project, the Atrocities Prevention Board, a high-level White House task force that Ms. Power urged President Obama to create in 2012 and then served as chairwoman of for its first year. As she faces confirmation hearings next month to be ambassador to the United Nations, the board offers a road map into her thinking — demonstrating both her zeal and the limitations of her approach.
Meeting monthly in the White House Situation Room or the Old Executive Office Building, Ms. Power's board has wrestled with how to stop a wave of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, politically motivated clashes in Kenya and the terrorism campaign of Joseph Kony, the guerrilla leader in Central Africa accused of enslaving children.
The board has prodded Mr. Obama to raise the issue of the treatment of Muslims with the president of Myanmar, Thein Sein. It pushed for war-crimes legislation that enabled the United States to offer a reward of up to $5 million for tips leading to the capture of Mr. Kony. And it took part in a decision to send civilian experts to Kenya before elections last March to help quell violence.
What it did not do is change Mr. Obama's response to the biggest atrocity of the day, the Syrian civil war. He has steadfastly resisted deeper involvement, even as the death toll has surpassed 90,000. That has made the board an easy target for conservatives, as well as some genocide scholars, who condemn it as toothless.
"This is the first time you've had a point person to prevent atrocities in the U.S. government," said Mark Schneider, a senior vice president at the International Crisis Group, a research organization. "But sometimes you fail; sometimes you're not able to come up with alternative policies."
Current and former administration officials said it was naïve to think that an interagency board could shift American policy on Syria, given the enormity and strategic sensitivity of the crisis and that it was already raging when the board was formed.
"It is unrealistic for a new entity that has no real authority to galvanize the government on Syria," said Lanny A. Breuer, a former assistant attorney general who represented the Justice Department on the board until earlier this year. "But what it can do is to raise awareness."
Ms. Power, Mr. Breuer said, brought a "boldness and level of commitment that was impressive." She handpicked the board's members from 11 agencies including the Treasury Department and the C.I.A., and she led meetings that were unusually well attended, another member said, thanks to her intensity.
With ties to Mr. Obama dating to his 2008 campaign, Ms. Power also got him to put his personal imprimatur on the effort. The president, announcing the creation of the board at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 2012, declared that preventing mass atrocities and genocide was a "core national security interest."
"This is not an afterthought," he added. "This is not a sideline in our foreign policy."
Friends of Ms. Power's say that as a senior director on the National Security Council, she argued for a more robust response to Syria — an argument that finally gained traction, months after she left, with Mr. Obama's recent decision to begin supplying small arms and ammunition to the rebels.
For Ms. Power, the experience illustrates the frustrations that human rights advocates have long encountered in government. In her 2002 book, "A Problem From Hell," she noted that during the three months of genocide in Rwanda, the Clinton administration never held a top-level meeting devoted to it.
"You expect to lose these fights," said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, who is a friend of Ms. Power's. "If public opinion doesn't stop you, a reluctant president will. If the bureaucracy doesn't stop you, the Pentagon will."
Ms. Power has had one notable success, which predated the board: allying with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, and Susan E. Rice, who is leaving her job as ambassador to the United Nations to be national security adviser, to persuade Mr. Obama to back a NATO-led military intervention in Libya. By all accounts, it halted a potential slaughter of rebels by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Ms. Power did not respond to a request for comment, and she has been careful not to air her views on Syria. Her friends say that she does not reflexively argue for military force. Much of the board's work has focused on other ways of pressuring abusive governments, including financial sanctions, export controls and travel bans on foreign officials.
