Chasing Riches From Africa to Europe and Finding Only Squalor

But Europe beckoned.

In his West African homeland, Mr. Jallow’s salary was the equivalent of just 50 euros a month, barely enough for the necessities, he said. And everywhere in his neighborhood in Serekunda, Gambia’s largest city, there was talk of easy money to be made in Europe.

Now he laughs bitterly about all that talk. He lives in a patch of woods here in southern Spain, just outside the village of Palos de la Frontera, with hundreds of other immigrants. They have built their homes out of plastic sheeting and cardboard, unsure if the water they drink from an open pipe is safe. After six years on the continent, Mr. Jallow is rail thin, and his eyes have a yellow tinge.

“We are not bush people,” he said recently as he gathered twigs to start a fire. “You think you are civilized. But this is how we live here. We suffer here.”

The political upheaval in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa has opened the way for thousands of new migrants to make their way to Europe across the Mediterranean. Already some 25,000 have reached the island of Lampedusa, Italy, and hundreds more have arrived at Malta.

The boats, at first, brought mostly Tunisians. But lately there have been more sub-Saharans.

Experts say thousands more — many of whom have been moving around North Africa trying to get to Europe for years, including Somalis, Eritreans, Senegalese and Nigerians — are likely to follow, sure that a better life awaits them.

But for Mr. Jallow and for many others who arrived before them, often after days at sea without food or water, Europe has offered hardships they never imagined. These days Mr. Jallow survives on two meals a day, mostly a leaden paste made from flour and oil, which he stirs with a branch.

“It keeps the hunger away,” he said.

The authorities estimate that there are perhaps 10,000 immigrants living in the woods in the southern Spanish province of Andalusia, a region known for its crops of strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, and there are thousands more migrants in areas that produce olives, oranges and vegetables. Most of them have stories that echo Mr. Jallow’s.

From the road, their encampments look like igloos tucked among the trees. Up close, the squalor is clear. Piles of garbage and flies are everywhere. Old clothes, stiff from dirt and rain, hang from branches.

“There is everything in there,” said Diego Cañamero, the leader of the farm workers’ union in Andalusia, which tries to advocate for the men. “You have rats and snakes and mice and fleas.”

The men in the woods do not call home with the truth, though. They send pictures of themselves posing next to Mercedes cars parked on the street, the kind of pictures that Mr. Jallow says he fell for so many years ago. Now he shakes his head toward his neighbors, who will not talk to reporters.

“So many lies,” he said. “It is terrible what they are doing. But they are embarrassed.”

Even now, though, Mr. Jallow will not consider going back to Gambia. “I would prefer to die here,” he said. “I cannot go home empty-handed. If I went home, they would be saying, ‘What have you been doing with yourself, Amadou?’ They think in Europe there is money all over.”

The immigrants — virtually all of them are men — cluster by nationality and look for work on the farms. But Mr. Cañamero says they are offered only the least desirable work, like handling pesticides, and little of it at that. Most have no working papers.

Occasionally, the police bring bulldozers to tear down the shelters. But the men, who have usually used their family’s life savings to get here, are mostly left alone — the conditions they live under are an open secret in the nearby villages.

The mayor of Palos de La Frontera did not return phone calls about the camp. But Juan José Volante, the mayor of nearby Moguer, which has an even larger encampment, issued a statement saying the town did not have enough money to help the men. “The problem is too big for us,” he said. “Of course, we would like to do more.”

Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.

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Life in Prison for Kidnapper of Smart

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Elizabeth Smart finally got her chance Wednesday to confront the street preacher convicted of holding her captive and raping her for months when she was just 14. Now 23, she stood tall in the courtroom — stoic, with an even voice and a strength Brian David Mitchell clearly lacked.

Mitchell, frail and skinny with a long, peppery white beard, sang hymns softly and closed his hollow eyes, just as he did throughout his trial, just as he would moments later as the judge gave him two life sentences without parole. That did not stop Smart from looking right at him and coolly speaking her piece.

It took her about 30 seconds.

"I don't have very much to say to you. I know exactly what you did," said Smart, wearing a houndstooth checked skirt, an ivory jacket and pearls. "I know that you know that what you did was wrong. You did it with full knowledge ... but I have a wonderful life now and no matter what you do, you will never affect me again.

"You took away nine months of my life that can never be returned. You will have to be held responsible for those actions, whether it's in this life or the next, and I hope you are ready for when that time comes."

Mitchell's sentencing closed a major legal chapter in the heartbreaking ordeal that stalled for years after he was declared mentally ill and unfit to stand trial in state court. A federal jury in December unanimously convicted the 57-year-old of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor across state lines for sex.

When the judge asked if he had anything to say, Mitchell, whose hands and feet were bound, kept right on singing. His bizarre demeanor changed just once during the hearing: As he was sentenced, he sang louder.

Outside the courthouse, a beaming Smart, now a Brigham Young University music student, told reporters that the sentencing "is the ending of a very long chapter and the beginning of a very beautiful chapter for me." She said she wants to work with other crime victims and lend her support to the cause of missing children.

Smart was snatched from her Salt Lake City bedroom by knifepoint in the early hours of June 5, 2002. The massive search to find the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl riveted the nation, as did her improbable recovery while walking with her captor on a suburban Salt Lake City-area street on March 12, 2003.

At trial, she testified in a steady, clear voice about her "nine months of hell." Mitchell whisked her away to his camp in the foothills near the family home. She was stripped of her favorite red pajamas, draped in white, religious robes and forced into a polygamous marriage with Mitchell. She was tethered to a metal cable strung between two trees and subjected to near-daily rapes while being forced to use alcohol and drugs.

Mitchell, who outlined his religious beliefs in a rambling 27-page manifesto he called "The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah," took Smart to California for five of the months she was held captive. She recalled being forced to live homeless, dress in disguises and stay quiet or lie about her identity if ever approached by strangers or police. She said he threatened her life and the lives of her family every day.

U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball said Mitchell deserved a life sentence because the facts of the case were "unusually heinous and degrading."

Carlie Christensen, U.S. attorney for Utah, said the resolution was long overdue for Smart and her family. "It is a measure of justice for Elizabeth and it will certainly ensure Brian David Mitchell will never inflict such intolerable and unspeakable cruelty on anyone else again," Christensen said.

The defense waived its closing remarks before sentencing. Parker Douglas, a member of Mitchell's defense team, said outside the courthouse that the sentence was not unexpected.

"I wish Elizabeth Smart and her family the best. I hope they get to move on," Douglas said. He added that the decision about whether to appeal depends largely on what Mitchell wants.

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In Jam on Van Wyck? Try to Say It Right

For traffic reporters, linguists and some Dutch purists, however, the gridlocked highway also poses a serious phonetic hazard nearly as perilous as its bottlenecks.

After decades of pronouncing Van Wyck like “candlestick,” an enlightened few now call it the “Van Wike,” which some Dutch say is the more proper pronunciation.

But even that is in dispute.

Agnes Treuren, an officer in the Dutch Consulate in New York, insisted that both pronunciations were emphatically wrong. “It is ‘Fon Weig,’ with the last syllable pronounced like leg or beg,” she said, before adding: “I have never been on the Fon Weig Expressway. I live on the Upper East Side.”

The latest tongue-twisting debate has been reignited in some phonetically correct circles because of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan for the $3 billion Willets Point development in the shadow of Citi Field, which opponents complain will make the already congested Van Wyck unbearable. They have gone to court to press the city to build two ramps to ease traffic on the expressway, which is once again being mispronounced — by lawyers on both sides, and even the judge — with reckless abandon.

The 9.3-mile highway, which was designed by Robert Moses and built from 1947 to 1963, connects the Whitestone Expressway with Kennedy Airport. It was named after Robert Anderson Van Wyck, who in 1898 became the first mayor of New York as a five-borough city.

But whatever Ms. Treuren and other Dutch natives might think, the descendants of the mayor have no doubt about the correct pronunciation of the highway that bears their name. “It rhymes with like — not lick,” said Bronson Van Wyck, 38, a party planner for the billionaire set, whose great-great-great-grandfather was a cousin of Robert Van Wyck.

Mr. Van Wyck’s cavernous apartment contains a 600-page tome on the Van Wyck lineage, which is perched on a bookshelf near a small drawing of the Archangel Michael by the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (“pronounced dike”).

Sighing with the resignation of someone who has also grappled his whole life with a first name that sounds like a last name, he lamented that at least half of New Yorkers seemed to mangle the family name.

“Robert Van Wyck himself pronounced it Van Wike; that is what the family says,” said Mr. Van Wyck, the president of Van Wyck & Van Wyck, an event production and marketing company whose clients have included George Soros and Rupert Murdoch. “That is the correct way.”

The eminently proper Mr. Van Wyck, whose ancestors settled in New York in the 1660s when it was New Amsterdam, traced the bungling of “Van Wyck” to 1963, when local radio traffic reporters unschooled in the intricacies of Dutch pronunciation clung stubbornly to the more roll-off-the-tongue “Wick.”

In a city filled with linguistic perils (think HOW-ston, not HEW-ston), the matter of phonetic faux pas resurfaced in recent weeks after the killing of Osama bin Laden, which prompted television reporters to descend on Vesey Street next to ground zero and to mispronounce it live on air as VES-see (it is VEE-zee, some local residents say).

Traffic and phonetic experts said generations of New Yorkers had been stumped by the Van Wyck — even those without a driver’s license.

Tom Kaminski, managing editor of traffic and transit information at WCBS-AM (880), said that in the pantheon of mispronounced New York landmarks, Van Wyck was neck-and-neck with the Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Queens and Brooklyn and was named in the 1940s for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian hero of the Revolutionary War.

Mr. Kaminski, whose grandparents came to New York from Gdansk in 1908, said “ ‘Kosciuszko’ was routinely botched by traffic reporters who tended to say “Kos-kee-OOS-ko” rather than the more correct Polish pronunciation “Ka-SHOO-sko.”

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Democrats Put G.O.P. on Spot as Medicare Plan Fails

Democrats staged the vote to press their advantage coming out of their victory on Tuesday in the contest, fought in large part over Medicare, for a House seat in upstate New York that had long been in Republican hands. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, brought the legislation to the floor so that Senate Republicans would either have to vote for it, exposing them to attacks from Democrats and their allies, or against it, exploiting growing Republican divisions on the issue.

Five of 47 Senate Republicans voted against it — four because they said it went too far, one on the ground that the budget measure that contained it did not go far enough fast enough to address the budget deficit.

The House Republican Medicare plan would convert it into a subsidized program for the private insurance market. When they proposed it last month as the centerpiece of their budget plan, Republicans were confident that the wind of budget politics was at their backs.

But the last six weeks have left Republicans pointed into a something more like a headwind. With polls and angry town hall meetings suggesting that many voters were wary of a Medicare overhaul if not opposed, party unity and optimism have given way to a bit of a Republican-on-Republican rumpus.

House leaders have made clear they will not try to pass Medicare legislation this year. Some Republican candidates and elected officials have moved to distance themselves from the plan, even as others remain in chin-out defense of it and others still are declining to commit themselves one way or another.

With the Democratic victory in the House race, many House Republicans argued that Democrats had no credible plan of their own to ensure the long-term survival of Medicare, and reprised their criticism of the health care overhaul, including Medicare spending cuts, that Democrats passed in the last Congress.

But Democrats, hopeful that the Medicare fight is a path to a political turnabout, are clinging to the recent developments like koalas to eucalyptus trees, insisting that the New York race was, as Senator  Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said, “a bellwether for elections to come.”

It is still a long way to Election Day 2012, the underlying problem of a long-term fiscal imbalance remains as pressing as ever, and Democrats face divisions and message problems of their own. After the Senate vote on the House Republican Medicare plan, the Senate voted 97 to 0 on Wednesday to reject the budget put forward early this year by President Obama, reflecting a recognition by Democrats that they will have to do more than they initially proposed to rein in the expansion of the national debt and address the rising costs of Medicare and other entitlement programs.

But after a 2010 election that seemed to signal not only a Republican resurgence but also a rejection of big government and a need for bold, Tea Party-type steps to slash spending, the politics now look much more complicated. Both parties are being reminded anew that voters like the idea of budget cuts, but that they often recoil when those cuts threaten the programs that touch their lives.

The divisions among Republicans over the Medicare plan are in large part situational.

Three of the Republicans senators who voted against the House plan on Wednesday are moderates from Northeastern states: Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts and Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine. A fourth, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, won re-election in November as a write-in candidate after being defeated in the Republican primary. The fifth, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted no on the ground that the House plan, drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the Budget Committee, took too long to pay down the national debt.

Candidates looking to shore up their conservative bona fides among Republican presidential primary voters, like Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah, have praised the plan. Some Congressional incumbents, like Ms. Snowe, weighed the respective threats of Tea Party primary challengers against the wrath of moderate or elderly voters, and decided not to support it.

Some presidential candidates seeking to appeal to a broader base, like former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, are trying to split the difference, saying that the plan is adequate but that they will offer their own that will be even more refined.

Others still, like George Allen, a Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, appear to be trying to figure out where the political minefields are, and refuse to say if they support the plan.

Just as each candidate must take a measure of his own race, the party’s response is also driven by circumstances. Newt Gingrich, a presidential candidate who seemed to think he could walk his party back from an increasingly toxic issue, denounced the plan to great retribution from both the establishment and Tea Party wings, and had to recant. Mr. Brown, who is running for re-election in a tough state, said he would vote against the plan but was greeted largely by silence within his party.

But Democrats by no means have a smooth course, either. While Mr. Obama has tried to set parameters for budget negotiations, his party has yet to settle on a plan for Medicare or the broader budget issues. And failure to address the nation’s fiscal problems aggressively could carry its own risk for Democrats, something former President Bill Clinton warned his party about Wednesday.

“You shouldn’t draw the conclusion that the New York race means that nobody can do anything to slow the rate of Medicare costs,” Mr. Clinton said at a budget forum sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “I just don’t agree with that.”

Instead, he said: “You should draw the conclusion that the people made a judgment that the proposal in the Republican budget is not the right one. I agree with that.”

Representative Steny H. Hoyer, the minority whip, has said Medicare is “on the table” for any agreement with Republicans in the debt limit negotiations, a seeming nod to the notion that many Democrats, especially those in moderate districts, are loath to go back to their districts and brag about doing nothing to rein in the costly entitlement program.

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