The Many Sides of Shaq

After an impressive college career at Louisiana State, Shaquille O'Neal, center, was selected as the first pick in the 1992 draft. His N.B.A. career would go on to span 19 years and include four N.B.A. titles and an MVP award. But his life off the court drew plenty of attention as well.

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Brain Injuries Are Seen in New Scans of Veterans

A new study may help explain why some military personnel exposed to blasts have symptoms of brain injury even though their CT and M.R.I. scans look normal.

Using a highly sensitive type of magnetic resonance imaging, researchers studied 63 servicemen wounded by explosions in Iraq or Afghanistan and found evidence of brain injuries in some that were too subtle to be detected by standard scans. All the men already had a diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury (synonymous with concussion), based on symptoms like having lost consciousness in the blast, having no memory of it or feeling dazed immediately afterward.

About 320,000 American troops have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them mild, according to a 2008 report by the RAND Corporation. The injuries are poorly understood, and sometimes produce lasting mental, physical and emotional problems.

“This sort of mild traumatic brain injury has been quite controversial,” said Dr. David L. Brody, an author of the new study and an assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. “Is it due to structural abnormalities in the brain, chemical dysregulation, psychological factors or all three? We show that at least in some there are structural abnormalities.”

The pattern of the damage differed from that found in head injuries not caused by blasts, and matched computer simulations predicting how explosions would affect the brain, Dr. Brody said. If the new findings hold up, he added, they may eventually influence the design of helmets to provide more protection against blasts.

But Dr. Brody and other researchers cautioned that the study was only “a small first step.” The study and an accompanying editorial were published online on Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine.

The special M.R.I. technique, known as diffusion tensor imaging, is also being studied to help improve the diagnosis of concussions. It can be performed by most M.R.I. machines and does not take longer or cost more than a standard M.R.I. The test measures the movement of water in nerve fibers in the brain; abnormal flow may indicate injury. Changes can be detected in bundles of thousands of axons, the fibers that carry signals.

Dr. Brody and others from Washington University collaborated with military researchers at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, to which troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are evacuated for treatment.

In 2008 and 2009, the researchers performed diffusion tensor imaging on 63 men who had recently sustained mild traumatic brain injuries from blasts; all but one had normal results on a standard M.R.I. For comparison, 21 control subjects were also scanned — men exposed to blasts recently but with no symptoms of concussion.

Eighteen of the 63 men with traumatic brain injury had abnormalities consistent with nerve injury in two or more brain regions, areas not usually damaged by other types of mild head injury. The researchers said that only 2 of 63 healthy subjects would be expected to have such abnormalities. Twenty other men with traumatic brain injury had abnormalities in one area, and 25 had none.

“A negative scan, even with these advanced methods, does not rule out traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Brody said.

Although the findings suggested that blasts may cause a specific pattern of brain injury, the researchers could not be sure, because their study subjects had experienced blows to the head in addition to blast exposure.

Dr. Allan H. Ropper, the executive vice chairman of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who wrote the editorial, said in an interview, “It’s never been clear that a blast alone could cause brain damage without some kind of impact on the head, so it’s a very important finding that there may be a structural brain representation of a blast injury.”

Katherine Helmick, deputy director for traumatic brain injury at the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, said the Defense Department was eager for information that would “help us understand what blast is doing to the brain, and help us get what we really want in diagnosing traumatic brain injury, which is objective markers.”

The new study helps, but is by no means definitive, she said.

The researchers did not tell the study participants the results of their tests. “We were specifically directed by the Department of Defense not to do so,” Dr. Brody said. “Many of them were hoping we could give results to their care providers to document or validate their concerns. It was anguishing for us, because as a doctor I would like to be able to help them in any way I can. But it was not the protocol we agreed to.”

Nick Colgin, 26, an Army veteran with a brain injury from the war in Afghanistan, who was not involved in the study, said he would like very much to have one of the sensitive M.R.I. scans, to better understand his injury. After a blast in 2007, he developed problems with speech, balance, thinking and focusing his eyes. For a while, he could not write his own name. But nothing showed up on his M.R.I. He has improved gradually and is now attending the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, but he still has severe headaches.

Christine L. MacDonald, a research instructor in neurology at Washington University and another author of the study, said the scans were still a research tool and not ready for widespread use. Researchers are trying to perfect the technique as quickly as possible for use in the care of wounded service members, she said in an e-mail, adding, “I wish we could help them now, but we aren’t there yet.”

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Soccer Leader Wins Vote, Immune to Scandal

The scandals of the past weeks and months were silenced by triumphal music and a thunderous standing ovation. Mr. Blatter carried a bouquet of yellow flowers, and the coronation was complete. “Together we will have four years, providing the Lord gives me life, the energy and the force to continue on our path,” Mr. Blatter, a 75-year-old Swiss, told the delegates at FIFA’s annual congress.

With that, it was settled. FIFA would counter the controversies swirling around it by putting its future in the hands of the man who has led the organization since 1998. It may be a dysfunctional family — or even a corrupt one, according to some members — but it is Mr. Blatter’s family.

Whatever the outside world thinks of Mr. Blatter and his organization these days, there was little but warmth for him inside the Hallenstadion convention center Wednesday. Perhaps Mr. Blatter’s primary skill has been his endurance as one of the world’s most powerful sports administrators in the face of relentless charges of corruption that have come from inside and outside FIFA.

The string of bribery accusations — at least one leveled at Blatter — are related to the votes for future World Cups and the election campaign that concluded on Wednesday, calling into question the integrity of the world’s most popular sport. FIFA took in $4 billion from television rights fees and corporate sponsorship fees in the four years leading to the 2010 World Cup. Some fans and corporate partners have grown uneasy with reports that their money is being diverted into the pockets of unscrupulous officials who seek to enrich themselves instead of the game.

Mr. Blatter insists that he is just the person to fix the problems. With the world watching, FIFA’s members resoundingly stood behind him, voting for Mr. Blatter on 186 of 203 ballots cast. England soccer officials, the most publicly critical of FIFA in recent days, tried to postpone the vote, but that idea was quashed, 172 to 17.

Under Mr. Blatter’s leadership, FIFA’s financial reserves have grown to more than $1 billion, and he is credited with democratizing soccer, taking the world’s largest sporting event to Africa for the first time last summer. The World Cup is scheduled to make its debut in Eastern Europe (Russia) in 2018 and in the Middle East (Qatar) in 2022.

“With everything going on, it’s hard to step back,” said Alan I. Rothenberg, a former president of the United States Soccer Federation who began working with Blatter in 1984. “But if the measure of FIFA is the progress of the sport, as president Sepp has been nothing short of extraordinary.”

But those votes for Russia and Qatar, last December, sparked the latest scandal that has spread, fire-like, since.

Two of FIFA’s 24 executive committee members were barred after they were recorded soliciting money for their votes. Similar accusations, voiced in the news media and the British parliament, have been made against others, but FIFA has cleared those involved. A recently revealed e-mail shows the secretary general Jérôme Valcke saying that Qatar “bought” the 2022 World Cup. Mr. Valcke said this week that he merely meant that Qatar was aided by its well-financed campaign.

Theo Zwanziger, president of the German soccer federation, called for an investigation of the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar over the United States, saying in a German television interview that “there is a considerable degree of suspicion that one cannot simply sweep aside.”

Last month, two high-level FIFA executives were accused of offering $40,000 each to a couple of dozen officials of Caribbean soccer federations in order to secure votes for the presidential election. One of the men, Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar, was Mr. Blatter’s only competition for FIFA’s top position. Mr. Bin Hammam dropped out of the race late Saturday. On Sunday, he and Jack Warner, an executive board member from Trinidad and Tobago, were suspended from FIFA indefinitely.

John Branch reported from Zurich.

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U.K. Company Suspends Controversial Drilling Procedure

PARIS — A British company said Wednesday that it would temporarily halt the use of a controversial gas exploration technology after indications that it might have set off two small earthquakes near a test well in Lancashire, England.

The company, Cuadrilla Resources, which is exploring for gas in shale formations deep underground, said it would postpone hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations at the Preese Hall site near Weeton.

“We take our responsibilities very seriously,” Mark Miller, the chief executive of Cuadrilla, said in a statement, “and that is why we have stopped fracking operations, to share information and consult with the relevant authorities and other experts.”

Fracking is a procedure in which water, chemicals and sand are injected deep underground to free oil or gas trapped in dense shale formations.

The technology is widely used in the United States, where it has contributed to a boom in natural gas production. It has been criticized because the fracking chemicals are believed to have the potential to contaminate groundwater.

“We have discussed this with Cuadrilla and agreed that a pause in operations is appropriate so that a better understanding can be gained of the cause of the seismic events,” the British Department of Energy and Climate Change said in a statement.

Experts from the British Geological Survey, the government and Keele University are examining the data, “and we will need to consider the findings into the cause of the event,” the department said.

The halt was called after the British Geological Survey recorded an earthquake early on May 27 at a depth of about 1.25 miles, with a magnitude of 1.5.

“Any process that injects pressurized water into rocks at depth will cause the rock to fracture and possibly produce earthquakes,” the survey said on its Web site.

Brian Baptie, the top seismology official for the organization, said in a statement that measuring instruments had been installed close to the drill site after a magnitude 2.3 earthquake occurred on April 1.

“The recorded waveforms are very similar to those from the magnitude 2.3 event,” Mr. Baptie said, “which suggests that the two events share a similar location and mechanism.”

The two quakes were barely perceptible to humans.

Industry officials say Europe is a decade or more behind the United States in its effort to recover “unconventional” hydrocarbons like the oil and gas in shale. Governments and energy companies have viewed technologies like fracking as a means to reduce European Union dependence on imported oil and gas, but there can be no certainty that exploitable deposits exist without further testing.

Cuadrilla’s announcement came as the French Senate on Wednesday began a debate on a proposed fracking ban.

The lower house of Parliament on May 11 passed its own bill, which would prohibit fracking in the exploration and recovery of oil and gas, and would revoke existing exploration contracts that relied on the procedure. The Senate, though, is considering a measure that would leave open the door to fracking for research.

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Advocates and Bankers Join to Fight Loan Rules

That left consumer advocates and civil rights groups frequently at odds with bankers, mortgage lenders and their lobbyists during the debate over the financial regulation act last year, which aims to rein in the subprime mortgage excesses that inflated the housing bubble.

Now, as banking regulators are rewriting the rules for the mortgage market, unusual alliances have sprung up in opposition to tighter lending standards. Advocacy groups like the N.A.A.C.P. and the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization, on the one hand, and the American Bankers Association on the other, are joining together to fight rules they say could make home loans less affordable for minority and working-class Americans.

The growing alliance between civil-rights organizations and banking lobbyists could extend beyond the current round of financial rule-making. If Congress turns its focus to restructuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example, the same groups could voice similar concerns over anything that restricts the availability of credit for first-time home buyers.

“I think everybody agrees that the enthusiasm for promoting home ownership went way too far,” said David Stevens, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “But now the risk is that we go too far the other way. We still need to be able to make affordable mortgages that don’t just go to the wealthy, who can afford the biggest down payments and who have the most positive credit ratings.”

For the uncommon alliance, the first point of attack is on a proposal that would require sellers of mortgage-backed securities to retain part of the risk should a package of loans go sour. The sellers would have to keep on their books at least 5 percent of the value of any baskets of loans they purchase from lenders and then resell to investors. One of the few exceptions to the requirement would be for mortgages on which the home buyer has made a down payment equal to 20 percent of the purchase price.

“Most people don’t have 20 percent to put down,” said Janis Bowdler, a project director in La Raza’s office of research, advocacy and legislation. “These rules will so significantly deter the ability of first-time buyers to break into the market that we will see a real decline in home ownership.”

The initial proposals on “risk retention” by sellers of mortgage-backed securities are likely to have limited effect, largely because Congress provided an exemption for loans that are sold to the Federal Housing Administration and Ginnie Mae, the Government National Mortgage Association. Regulators want to extend that exemption to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those and other government-sponsored housing finance enterprises currently purchase about 90 percent of new mortgage loans made today.

Republicans in Congress and the Obama administration have vowed to get the government out of the mortgage business, letting the private market take over Fannie and Freddie’s functions of supporting the market for home loans. But lenders and consumer advocates say any privatizations could disrupt lending, making matters worse and outweighing the protections they were designed to offer.

Any standards that apply to the private mortgage market will have to be reflected in government housing finance entities that help low-income and minority borrowers, said Barry Zigas, director of housing policy for the Consumer Federation of America. “Are you going to tell taxpayers that the F.H.A. should have lower standards and take more risk than you expect private investors to take?,” he said.

Even the legislators who wrote the law on risk retention say that the proposal misses the mark. A bipartisan group of three United States senators — Mary L. Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, Kay R. Hagen, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican — wrote to regulators last month that a required 20 percent down payment “goes beyond the intent and language of the statute.”

Edward Wyatt reported from Washington and Ben Protess from New York.

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Economic Memo: Employment Data May Be the Key to the President’s Job

Seventeen months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that President Obama must defy that trend to keep his job.

Roughly 9 percent of Americans who want to go to work cannot find an employer. Companies are firing fewer people, but hiring remains anemic. And the vast majority of economic forecasters, including the president’s own advisers, predict only modest progress by November 2012.

The latest job numbers, due Friday, are expected to provide new cause for concern. Other indicators suggest the pace of growth is flagging. Weak manufacturing data, a gloomy reading on jobs in advance of Friday’s report and a drop in auto sales led the markets to their worst close since August.

But the grim reality of widespread unemployment is drawing little response from Washington. The Federal Reserve says it is all but tapped out. There is even less reason to expect Congressional action. Both Democrats and Republicans see clear steps to create jobs, but they are trying to walk in opposite directions and are making little progress.

Republicans have set the terms of debate by pressing for large cuts in federal spending, which they say will encourage private investment. Democrats have found themselves battling to minimize and postpone such cuts, which they fear will cause new job losses.

House Republicans told the president that they would not support new spending to spur growth during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

“The discussion really focused on the philosophical difference on whether Washington should continue to pump money into the economy or should we provide an incentive for entrepreneurs and small businesses to grow,” said Eric Cantor, the majority leader. “The president talked about a need for us to continue to quote-unquote invest from Washington’s standpoint, and for a lot of us that’s code for more Washington spending, something that we can’t afford right now.”

The White House, its possibilities constrained by the gridlock, has offered no new grand plans. After agreeing to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and reducing the payroll tax last December, the administration has focused on smaller ideas, like streamlining corporate taxation and increasing American exports to Asia and Latin America.

“It’s a very tough predicament,” said Jared Bernstein, who until April was economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Is there any political appetite for something that would resemble another large Keynesian stimulus? Obviously no. You can say that’s what we should do and you’d probably be right, but that’s pretty academic.”

More than 13.7 million Americans were unable to find work in April; most had been seeking jobs for months. Millions more have stopped trying. Their inability to earn money is a personal catastrophe; studies show that the chance of finding new work slips away with time. It is also a strain on their families, charities and public support programs.

The Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, has the means and the mandate to reduce unemployment by pumping money into the economy.

As financial markets nearly collapsed in 2008, the Fed unleashed a series of unprecedented programs, first to arrest the crisis and then to promote recovery, investing more than $2 trillion. The final installment, a $600 billion bond-buying program, ends in June.

Now, however, the leaders of the central bank say they are reluctant to do more. The Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said in April that more money might not increase growth, but there was a growing risk that it would accelerate inflation.

Congress charged the Fed in 1978 with minimizing unemployment and inflation. Those goals, however, are often in conflict, and the Fed has made clear that inflation is its priority. Fed officials argue in part that maintaining slow, steady inflation forms a basis for enduring economic expansion.

Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said in a recent interview that the Fed had reached the limits of responsible policy.

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Virulent E. Coli Strain Spreads in Germany and Puzzles Health Officials

The source of the outbreak, which has killed at least 16 people — 15 in Germany and a Swede who visited there recently — remained unknown.

Public health officials are alarmed because a startlingly high proportion of those infected suffer from a potentially lethal complication attacking the kidneys, called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which can provoke comas, seizures and stroke. Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of food-borne disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the rate of cases of acute kidney failure in the outbreak was unprecedented. “That makes this an extraordinarily large and severe event,” he said.

While most of the infections were among people who had traveled to northern Germany, the authorities acknowledged that the outbreak had spread to virtually every corner of the country.

Shoppers and vegetable sellers in Berlin expressed a blend of confusion, anger and stoicism; about 20 cases of E. coli infection have been reported in the capital city. “A lot of people are afraid or worried,” said Nursan Usta, 43, who runs a fruit and vegetable stall in Berlin’s blue-collar Neukölln district. “They aren’t even buying cherries” — even though the authorities have mentioned only cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes as potential sources of infection. In Motril, a town in Spain’s agricultural heartland, greenhouses were empty of workers as demand for vegetables collapsed after the German authorities initially — and most likely mistakenly — pointed to Spain as a source of the outbreak.

“Working in a greenhouse can be tough, but I’ve never felt more exhausted and empty inside than now,” said Miguel Rodríguez Puentedura, who had been picking cucumbers until Monday, when the greenhouse that employed him shut down.

Health officials in Hamburg, the center of the outbreak, appealed Wednesday for donors to contribute blood.

Scientists are at a loss to explain why this little-known organism, identified as E. coli 0104:H4, has proved so virulent.

The European authorities have reported several differences from previous outbreaks, including that women make up more than two-thirds of those affected and that young and middle-aged adults account for a very high percentage of the most severe cases. Dr. J. Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute of the University of Florida, said that the German strain might have undergone genetic changes or mutations to make it more potent.

The high number of cases of acute kidney failure represents a much higher percentage of the total number of illnesses than in previous outbreaks associated with different strains of E. coli. Generally, 5 to 10 percent of E. coli illnesses result in this complication. Among the confirmed cases, according to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control agency, 470 people had been diagnosed with the kidney syndrome.

That could be because German doctors are using a broader definition of kidney failure that captures more cases. Or it could mean that the total number of illnesses is much greater than has so far been revealed, which ultimately would lower the percentage of acute cases. Or it could be a signature of this form of E. coli.

There are many types of E. coli, most of which are harmless. But a small number have come under increasing scrutiny as dangerous pathogens. These all produce a poison known as shiga toxin and generally have the ability to cling to a person’s intestinal wall, allowing them to release the poison in large enough amounts to make people sick.

Dr. Phillip Tarr, a professor of microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said that there were two main forms of shiga toxin found in E. coli, and that the strain detected in the outbreak in Germany appeared to have the more potent version. But he said the organism appeared to have other quirks that made it unusual, and potentially difficult to detect by conventional means.

“This outbreak is still evolving, and everyone is still in the fog of case definition,” Dr. Tarr said. With the source of the contagion unknown, the Robert Koch Institute on Wednesday warned against eating “raw tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuces to prevent further cases,” particularly in northern Germany.

European and German officials pledged to track down the cause of the outbreak and to pinpoint where in the food supply chain the contamination had taken place. “Hundreds of tests have been done,” the German agriculture minister, Ilse Aigner, said in a television interview. So far, those tests had determined that “most of the patients who have fallen ill ate cucumbers, tomatoes and leaf lettuce primarily in northern Germany.”

Alan Cowell reported from Berlin, and William Neuman from New York. Reporting was contributed by James Kanter from Brussels; Victor Homola, Stefan Pauly and Judy Dempsey from Berlin; and Raphael Minder from Motril, Spain.

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Lawmaker Denies Sending Suggestive Photo but Doesn’t Rule Out It’s of Him

“This was essentially a hacked account that had a gag photo sent out on it,” Mr. Weiner, a Democrat, said during an interview in his office here. “I can’t say with certainty very much about where the photograph came from.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Weiner presided over two testy news briefings at which he had dodged a variety of questions. On Wednesday, he adopted a strikingly different approach, sitting patiently for a series of interviews at which he insisted he had done nothing wrong and marveled at what he said on MSNBC was the “Alice in Wonderland world” in which a wayward Twitter message had become the talk of the town.

Mr. Weiner, one of Congress’s most enthusiastic users of social media to engage with constituents and supporters, said he believed his Twitter account, or a related photo-sharing site, had been infiltrated by a hacker or a prankster, who had then sent the offending photo out late Friday.

He said that he had hired an Internet security company and a lawyer to look into the matter, but that he did not believe the episode merited investigation by federal law enforcement. He did not rule out the possibility that the photo was of him, but said he did not know who could have sent it.

He said he did not know the woman who received the photo, Gennette Cordova, a student at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Wash.; she followed him on Twitter. He said he regretted that Ms. Cordova was caught in the middle of the controversy. She issued a statement over the weekend saying she had never met him, and she has not spoken out since.

“I just feel terrible for her,” Mr. Weiner said, adding that he had never corresponded with her. “She has committed no crime except to follow me on Twitter.”

The congressman also expressed concern about the toll the episode was taking on his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I’m protecting my wife, who every day is waking up to these insane stories that are getting so far from reality,” he told CNN. “You know, we’ve been married less than a year.”

Asked on CNN whether he still wished to be mayor, he said, “Put it this way: It’s the only better job than the one I have.”

Jack Levin, the chief executive of yFrog, the Twitter-affiliated image and video service that was used to upload the photo, said in an interview on Wednesday that his company did not have reason to believe that its user passwords were exposed or stolen. He said it was possible that the photo could have been sent from Mr. Weiner’s yFrog account through his Twitter password or through a yFrog password.

Mr. Levin said neither Mr. Weiner’s office nor any law enforcement authorities had contacted him or his company to inquire about the photo.

Twitter, which does not comment on individual user accounts for privacy reasons, has declined to say whether Mr. Weiner’s account was hacked.

Despite the swirl of events that has buffeted him for several days, Mr. Weiner has not abandoned his sharp humor. Suggesting that the photo might have been altered, he alluded to a “Daily Show” sketch on Tuesday in which the comedian Jon Stewart, a longtime friend, had joked that the photo could not have been of the congressman.

“I don’t have memory of this photograph,” Mr. Weiner said in the interview in his office. “But I also ... you know, Jon Stewart might have had it right last night: that there were elements of this photograph that might have been doctored.”

He paused, then added: “But I don’t know that. And I don’t want that to be the headline.”

Ashley Parker and Jennifer Preston contributed reporting from New York.

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DealBook: SAC Capital Said to Face Insider Trading Inquiry

Steve Marcus/ReutersSteven A. Cohen’s firm, SAC Capital Advisors, is under scrutiny.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether trades in health care stocks by the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors as recently as last year were made using inside information, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday.

The investigation comes as SAC, one of the most prominent hedge funds in the world with $12 billion in assets under management, has become something of a focal point for authorities. Two former SAC portfolio managers have pleaded guilty to criminal charges of using inside information to trade technology stocks.

And Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has questioned how the S.E.C. handled referrals from Wall Street’s self-regulator, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, regarding 20 stock trades by SAC.

But the S.E.C.’s investigation into trading by SAC appears to be much broader. In addition to the inquiry into trading in health care stocks — trades that took place from at least 2007 through 2010 — the agency is examining SAC’s use of expert network firms, companies that connect Wall Street investors with outside experts in various industries, the person briefed on the matter said.

Separately, the S.E.C. is looking into whether the hedge fund used inside information about the 2007 takeover of MedImmune, a biotechnology company, the person said. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported about the inquiry into MedImmune.

A spokesman for the S.E.C. declined to comment.

Neither SAC nor its billionaire founder, Steven A. Cohen, has been accused of wrongdoing by the S.E.C. or by any other authority. A spokesman for SAC declined to comment on Thursday.

The inquiries into the SAC trades are part of an accelerating effort by the S.E.C. and the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan to crack down on insider trading, with a particular focus on hedge funds. The criminal investigations by federal prosecutors have resulted in charges against 49 people, 39 of whom have pleaded guilty.

Two people who have pleaded guilty were the former SAC employees Noah Freeman and Donald Longueuil. Mr. Freeman is expected to testify Thursday at the trial of Winifred Jiau, a consultant for an expert network firm who is charged with leaking inside information. SAC has said that it is “outraged” by the conduct of the two former employees.

The cases against Mr. Freeman and Mr. Longueuil are part of the government’s examination of expert network firms, which developed over the last decade alongside the proliferation of hedge funds. The government has filed criminal charges against 13 people connected to the firms, eight of whom have pleaded guilty.

The former SAC employees admitted to obtaining inside information about public companies and then using it to make profitable trades. The charges against the men detailed a cover-up straight from a television drama that involved destroying a hard drive with pliers and spreading the parts throughout the city.

Others with past ties to SAC have also been ensnared in the insider trading investigation. Earlier this year, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided two hedge funds founded by former SAC executives, Level Global Investors and Diamondback Capital Management. In 2009, Richard Choo-Beng Lee pleaded guilty to insider trading related to activity after he left SAC.

The S.E.C. has faced criticism that it failed to bring significant cases against prominent hedge funds as well as cases stemming from the financial crisis.

In April, Senator Grassley asked the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in a letter to provide information on the “potential scope of suspicious trading activity” at SAC.

Last month, he followed up with a letter to the S.E.C. requesting to know how it handled past referrals about SAC’s trading activity.

MedImmune is not among those trades referred by Finra, according to people briefed on the matter.

SAC executives including Peter Nussbaum, the firm’s general counsel, and its outside lawyers met with staff members in Mr. Grassley’s office to discuss his inquiry.

Additionally, federal prosecutors are examining trades in an account overseen by Mr. Cohen.

Court filings related to the cases of the two former SAC portfolio managers who have pleaded guilty to insider trading, indicate that the government is reviewing trades made in Mr. Cohen’s account at the suggestion of the former employees.

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Google Says Hackers in China Stole Gmail Passwords

In a blog post, the company said the victims included senior government officials in the United States, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel and journalists.

It is the second time Google has pointed to an area of China as the source of an Internet intrusion. Its latest announcement is likely to further ratchet up the tension between the company and Chinese authorities.

Last year, Google said it had traced a sophisticated invasion of its computer systems to people based in China. The accusation led to a rupture of the company’s relationship with China and a decision by Google not to cooperate with China’s censorship demands. As a result, Google decided to base its Chinese search engine in Hong Kong.

The more recent attacks were not as technically advanced, relying on a common technique known as phishing to trick users into handing over their passwords. But Google’s announcement was unusual in that it put a spotlight on the scale, apparent origins and carefully selected targets of a coordinated campaign to hijack e-mail accounts.

Google said that once the intruders had logged into the accounts, they could change settings for mail forwarding so that copies of messages would be sent to another address. The company said it had “disrupted” the campaign and had notified the victims as well as government agencies. Executives at Google declined to comment beyond the blog post. The company recommended that Gmail users take additional security steps, like using a Google service known as two-step verification, to make it more difficult to compromise their e-mail accounts. But it emphasized that the password thefts were not the result of a general security problem with Gmail.

Google acknowledged that it had been alerted to the problem in part by Mila Parkour, a security researcher in Washington who posted evidence of a type of phishing attack on her blog in February. She documented examples of what has recently been described as a “man-in-the-mailbox” attack, in which the intruder uses the account of one victim and his e-mail contacts to gain the trust of a new victim.

Ms. Parkour wrote that the method used in this attack “is far from being new or sophisticated,” but that she was posting information about it because of “the particularly invasive approach of the attack.”

She highlighted a fake document titled “Draft US-China Joint Statement” that was circulated among people with e-mail accounts at the State Department, the Defense Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Gmail. Clicking to download the document directed users instead to a fake Gmail log-in page that captured their passwords.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the White House was looking into the matter.

“We have no reason to believe that any official U.S. government e-mail accounts were accessed,” Ms. Hayden said in an e-mail.

Google said the attacks apparently originated in Jinan, a provincial capital in eastern China. The city is a regional command center for the Chinese military, one of seven in the country. It is also home to the Lanxiang Vocational School, which was founded with military support. Last year, investigators looking into the attack on Google’s systems said they had traced some of the hacking activity back to the school.

At the time, government and school officials strongly denied any connection with the attack, and China’s foreign ministry said linking the Chinese authorities to such attacks was “baseless, highly irresponsible and hype with ulterior motives.”

That earlier attack appeared to be aimed at gathering information on human rights activists who were involved in political campaigns aimed at China. It was part of a wave of attacks that hit a range of American companies beginning in mid-2009 and that was first publicly disclosed by Google in January 2010.

Chinese government media officials were not immediately available to comment on Google’s latest announcement.

Rafal Rohozinski, a network security specialist at the SecDev Group in Ottawa, said it was impossible to lay blame for the campaign on the Chinese government with any certainty. Because of the borderless nature of the Internet, it is easy for intruders to connect through a series of countries to mask their identities. “The fact that someone is harvesting Gmail credentials is not surprising,” Mr. Rohozinski said.

This year, the Chinese government has stepped up its controls over the Internet within the country, with increased scrutiny of news and blog sites, particularly in the wake of political upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East.

The government has also apparently crippled some virtual private network services, or VPNs, which have been used by Chinese and expatriates to gain access to corporate e-mail or get around controls that block many Web sites from being entered in China, like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Security specialists said the Google warning to users was an indication that efforts to place the responsibility for Internet security on individuals was failing.

“I think this is impossible to solve by going to one user at a time and trying to teach them how to behave on the Internet,” said Nir Zuck, founder and chief technology officer of Palo Alto Networks. “It doesn’t matter how much education you put into it — you will always have end users that will make a mistake.”

John Markoff reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai.

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Fighting Spreads in Yemen, Raising Fear of Civil War

The violence here has transformed a largely peaceful uprising into a tribal conflict with no clear end in sight. The United States and Yemen’s Arab neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which have tried and failed to mediate a peaceful solution to the country’s political crisis, are reduced to sitting on the sidelines and pleading for restraint.

The bloodshed also threatens to unleash a humanitarian catastrophe, as Yemen, already the poorest country in the Arab world, runs desperately low on gasoline, cooking oil and other basic supplies. It also raises fears that Islamic militants who use Yemen as a base will have even freer rein to operate in the country.

The rising chaos has become a major concern for the White House, which announced Wednesday that John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, would be traveling to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates this week to discuss “the deteriorating situation in Yemen.”

On Wednesday afternoon, tanks and armored vehicles could be seen rolling into Sana, the capital, from the south. The streets of Sana were largely empty, as residents fled for the safety of surrounding villages. Exploding artillery shells and sporadic machine-gun fire could be heard across the city.

Despite his repeated public offers to step aside to ease the crisis in the country, Yemen’s authoritarian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, appeared to be gearing up for a major assault on the Ahmar family, the tribal rivals and political opposition leaders he has been battling for 10 days.

“This is the worst fighting we have seen since 1994,” when Yemen fought a two-month civil war, said one Yemeni official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under diplomatic protocol. “And it’s the worst fighting in Sana since the civil war of the 1960s.” Some estimates of the death toll in fighting late Tuesday and early Wednesday ranged as high as 41 on both sides. All told, at least 120 people have been killed since the violence began early last week. A brief cease-fire struck over the weekend collapsed on Tuesday, with each side blaming the other.

In recent days, the government’s tenuous hold has slipped further outside the capital, as tribal fighters and Islamist militants seized a major coastal town in the south, and tribesmen took over critical checkpoints east of Sana. The city of Taiz, south of the capital, remained in a state of lockdown, days after government forces and plainclothes gunmen opened fire on a vast crowd of peaceful protesters who had been holding a sit-in for months. Dozens of people were killed, according to witnesses and human rights groups, and the episode provoked condemnations from the United States and other countries.

In the capital, government security forces have tried in recent days to disrupt a similar peaceful sit-in by protesters that has lasted for months. But Maj. Gen. Ali Moshin al-Ahmar’s troops have protected them. Most of the protesters in Sana and in cities across Yemen have held fast to their belief in nonviolent resistance, but some have begun to call for war against Mr. Saleh, especially after the massacre in Taiz.

“For me and others like me here in the square, we are convinced that peaceful means would not work, since they did not work over these last four months,” said Ahmed Obadi, a young protester and teacher.

The forces arrayed against the government have diverse and sometimes conflicting agendas, but the rising chaos appears to have emboldened them all, including the Yemen-based group that calls itself Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has become a major concern for the United States.

Nasser Arrabyee reported from Sana, and Robert F. Worth from Washington. J. David Goodman contributed reporting from New York, Laura Kasinof from Washington and Khaled Hammadi from Sana.

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Four Are Killed in Massachusetts Tornado

Residents of Springfield, Mass., sought cover Wednesday after a warning about another possible tornado. An earlier storm damaged buildings, toppled trees and caused numerous injuries.

BOSTON — At least four people were killed when tornadoes touched down Wednesday in Springfield, Mass., and a number of nearby towns. The twisters flipped vehicles, collapsed buildings and stunned residents who are not used to such violent storms.

A child ran for cover as bad weather moved back into the area following a tornado touchdown in the south end of Springfield, Mass., on Wednesday.

Gov. Deval Patrick activated the National Guard and declared a state of emergency. He said that at least two tornadoes had hit and that serious damage had been reported in 19 communities, many of them small towns along the Massachusetts Turnpike.

One man was killed when his car overturned in West Springfield, Mr. Patrick said. Two other deaths were reported in Westfield and one in Brimfield, he said, though he had no details.

With storms continuing into the night, Mr. Patrick found himself in the unusual position of instructing New Englanders more accustomed to blizzards to take shelter in basements and bathrooms if necessary.

The scope of the damage was still unclear, but photos and videos showed buildings with roofs and sides sheared off. The police were going door to door in some neighborhoods to make sure residents were unharmed.

“There’s just total destruction,” said Michael Day, a plumbing inspector from Agawam who was driving through West Springfield shortly after the first tornado struck around 4:30 p.m. “All I can hear is ambulances. There’s a lot of police sirens around and fire trucks.”

Tornado warnings had been issued for much of the state earlier Wednesday. One of the confirmed tornadoes traveled east from Westfield to Douglas, Mr. Patrick said, and the other traveled east from North Springfield to Sturbridge.

Mr. Patrick said 1,000 members of the Massachusetts National Guard were being dispatched to help with debris removal and, if necessary, search-and-rescue efforts.

He said that State Senator Stephen Brewer had told him that Monson, a town of about 9,000 east of Springfield, appeared to have suffered some of the worst damage.

“He said, ‘You have to see Monson to believe it,’ ” Mr. Patrick said. “I think he made a reference to ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”

While tornadoes are relatively rare in New England, one that hit Worcester in 1953, known as the Worcester Twister, killed 94 people and injured more than 1,000.

At least 48,000 customers lost power in the storms, Mr. Patrick said, and school was to be canceled Thursday in the affected communities to allow for debris to be cleared. Amtrak reported some service disruptions.

“We are hoping and praying and working as hard as possible to keep the fatalities limited,” the governor said.

Katie Zezima contributed reporting.

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Retroactive Reductions Sought in Crack Penalties

WASHINGTON — In a proposal that could allow as many as 5,500 federal inmates to apply for reduced prison terms, the Obama administration on Wednesday backed retroactively lightening some sentences for past crack cocaine convictions.

Testifying before the United States Sentencing Commission, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. cited the Fair Sentencing Act, a 2010 law that increased the volume of crack cocaine necessary to result in a mandatory minimum prison term.

The panel, which advises federal judges on how much prison time they should hand down for particular offenses, revised its crack cocaine sentencing guidelines last fall in response to the 2010 law. Mr. Holder said that it should make those changes retroactive for certain offenders, allowing them to seek a reduction in their prison terms.

“Because of the Fair Sentencing Act, our nation is now closer to fulfilling its fundamental, and founding, promise of equal treatment under law,” Mr. Holder said. “But I am here today because I believe — and the administration’s viewpoint is — that we have more to do.”

At the same time, citing public safety concerns, Mr. Holder urged the commission to make an exception for inmates who had significant criminal histories or who had possessed or used a gun at the time of their drug offense. Because such inmates could be more dangerous, he argued, they should not be eligible to seek reduced sentences.

The administration’s position prompted some political criticism. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, issued a statement on Wednesday accusing the administration of “supporting the release of dangerous drug dealers,” saying the proposal “shows that they are more concerned with well-being of criminals than with the safety of our communities.”

But Julie Stewart, the president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a group that advocates for judicial discretion in sentencing decisions, contended that the commission should make its crack cocaine guidelines retroactive without any exceptions because criminal histories and any gun possession were already factored into sentences under a separate part of the guidelines.

“I think it’s political,” Ms. Stewart said of the Obama administration’s stance. Interviewed by phone, she characterized the Justice Department’s position as “splitting the baby.”

Congress established the sentencing commission in an effort to make federal prison sentences more uniform. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that its guidelines could not be binding, but many judges still follow them.

Several sitting federal judges are members of the commission, which is expected to decide by November whether to make the new guidelines retroactive.

The commission recently released a study showing that about 12,040 federal inmates would be eligible to apply to a judge for a reduction, without the carve-out suggested by Mr. Holder. The study said the inmates would potentially be eligible to have their sentences cut by an average of 37 months.

The study showed that about 513 of those inmates were convicted in one of the four federal districts in the State of New York. The vast majority of the overall group consists of black men, and their average age is 36, the study said.

The commission has also released a study of what happened to inmates who won early release after 2007, when it made retroactive a related set of changes to its crack cocaine guidelines. The study found no statistically significant disparity in the recidivism rate of that group when compared with a control group.

The panel’s deliberations are the latest chapter in a long-running, racially charged debate over severe mandatory minimum penalties for crack cocaine offenses enacted by Congress during the crack epidemic in the 1980s, amid a crime wave fueled by addicts and rival drug traffickers.

Under those laws, a drug dealer selling crack cocaine was subject to the same sentence as one selling 100 times as much powder cocaine. Crack cocaine was disproportionately prevalent in impoverished black communities, while powder cocaine was disproportionately favored by more affluent white users.

Mr. Holder had long argued that the crack-powder sentencing disparity was an injustice, and lobbied Congress earlier in his tenure as attorney general to enact the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the disparity to 18-to-1 by raising the volumes of crack that result in mandatory minimum sentence levels.

But Congress did not make the mandatory minimum changes retroactive. As a result, the commission is considering a proposal that would allow judges to remove prison time in excess of the old statutory minimum sentences, but such inmates would still not be eligible for a reduction to the new minimum sentences established by the 2010 law.

For example, under the old law, a person convicted of selling 75 grams of crack cocaine faced a sentence of 10 years to life in prison, while today he would instead face 5 to 20 years in prison. If the guidelines become retroactive, such an offender who had been sentenced to 12 years in prison several years ago could ask a judge to reduce his sentence to 10 years, the old statutory minimum term.

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Two FIFA Officials Are Suspended; Blatter Is Cleared

But in a hearing Sunday, an ethics panel found no wrongdoing by the FIFA president Sepp Blatter, clearing him to run unopposed for a fourth term. The vote is scheduled for Wednesday.

Suspended on Sunday were Mohamed Bin Hammam of Qatar, who sought to challenge Blatter for the FIFA presidency, and Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago, a longtime power broker in the soccer federation.

Bin Hammam and Warner were accused of offering cash gifts of $40,000 apiece to about two dozen officials representing soccer federations in the Caribbean at a meeting held in Trinidad on May 10 and May 11. In return for the cash, the officials were expected to vote for Bin Hammam as FIFA president.

Accusations against the two officials were made by Chuck Blazer, an American who is also on the FIFA executive committee and had been a longtime ally of Warner’s.

Bin Hammam and Warner could eventually be expelled from FIFA if a further inquiry finds them guilty of the bribery charges. Warner has previously been accused of offering to sell his vote for the 2018 World Cup, which he denied.

“We are satisfied that there is a case to be answered,” Petrus Damaseb, deputy chairman of FIFA’s executive committee, told reporters at a news conference in Zurich, where FIFA is based.

Bim Hammam, who withdrew his presidential bid on Saturday, has claimed that Blatter knew about the cash offers and approved them, perhaps as a kind of development fund to be paid to the Caribbean nations. Blatter was cleared of wrongdoing Sunday.

Still, Blatter’s credibility has suffered greatly, given that his 13-year presidency has faced a number of corruption crises within FIFA. Eight of the 24 members of FIFA’s executive committee have been accused of selling or offering to sell their votes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, which were awarded last fall to Russia and Qatar, respectively.

And there is a chance that more tawdry revelations could undermine Blatter’s presidency ahead of Wednesday’s vote.

In cryptic remarks, Warner, who is also president of soccer’s North American, Central American and Caribbean region, known as Concacaf, said that a “football tsunami” would strike FIFA in the coming days “that will shock you.”

The situation is so chaotic within FIFA that Blatter has not ruled out a re-vote to award the 2022 World Cup. The United States finished second to Qatar in a vote that was compromised by charges of vote-trading and bribery.

Sunil Gulati, president of the United States soccer federation, has been tight-lipped in comments about the FIFA scandals, wanting to keep the United States in the best standing possible in case there is a re-vote for the World Cup.

He would not comment on a potential re-vote in an interview last week, referring instead to recent remarks to Sports Illustrated, in which Gulati said, “Any of us who participate as bidders or anyone watching this from the outside knows that the process needs to be reviewed and reformed.”

Even with a stirring 3-1 victory by Barcelona over Manchester United on Saturday in the European Champions League final, a match that displayed why soccer is known as the beautiful game, the sport finds itself covered by dark clouds of corruption.

Franz Beckenbauer, the former German great who is soon to retire from FIFA’s executive committee, told the BBC on Sunday that the crises were “a disaster for football.”

Hugh Robertson, the British sports minister, has called on FIFA to suspend its presidential election, telling reporters, “I think the process is fast descending into farce.”

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Hollywood Starts to Worry as 3-D Fizzles in U.S.

Ripples of fear spread across Hollywood last week after “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which cost Walt Disney Studios an estimated $400 million to make and market, did poor 3-D business in North America. While event movies have typically done 60 percent of their business in 3-D, “Stranger Tides” sold just 47 percent in 3-D. “The American consumer is rejecting 3-D,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, wrote of the “Stranger Tides” results.

One movie does not make a trend, but the Memorial Day weekend did not give studio chiefs much comfort in the 3-D department. “Kung Fu Panda 2,” a Paramount Pictures release of a DreamWorks Animation film, sold $53.8 million in tickets from Thursday to Sunday, a soft total, and 3-D was 45 percent of the business, according to Paramount.

Consumer rebellion over high 3-D ticket prices plays a role, and the novelty of putting on the funny glasses is wearing off, analysts say. But there is also a deeper problem: 3-D has provided an enormous boost to the strongest films, including “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland,” but has actually undercut middling movies that are trying to milk the format for extra dollars.

“Audiences are very smart,” said Greg Foster, the president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “When they smell something aspiring to be more than it is, they catch on very quickly.”

Muddying the picture is a contrast between the performance of 3-D movies in North America and overseas. If results are troubling domestically, they are the exact opposite internationally, where the genre is a far newer phenomenon. Indeed, 3-D screenings powered “Stranger Tides” to about $256 million on its first weekend abroad; Disney trumpeted the figure as the biggest international debut of all time.

With results like that at a time when movies make 70 percent of their total box office income outside North America, do tastes at home even matter?

After a disappointing first half of the year, Hollywood is counting on a parade of 3-D films to dig itself out of a hole. From May to September, the typical summer season, studios will unleash 16 movies in the format, more than double the number last year. Among the most anticipated releases are “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” due from Paramount on July 1, and Part 2 of Part 7 of the “Harry Potter” series, arriving two weeks later from Warner Brothers.

The need is urgent. The box-office performance in the first six months of 2011 was soft — revenue fell about 9 percent compared with last year, while attendance was down 10 percent — and that comes amid decay in home-entertainment sales. In all formats, including paid streaming and DVDs, home entertainment revenue fell almost 10 percent, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

The first part of the year held a near collapse in video store rentals, which fell 36 percent to about $440 million, offsetting gains from cut-price rental kiosks and subscriptions. In addition, the sale of packaged discs fell about 20 percent, to about $2.2 billion, while video-on-demand, though growing, delivered total sales of less than a quarter of that amount.

At the box office, animated films, which have recently been Hollywood’s most reliable genre, have fallen into a deep trough, as the category’s top three performers combined— “Rio,” from Fox; “Rango,” from Paramount; and “Hop,” from Universal — have had fewer ticket buyers than did “Shrek the Third,” from DreamWorks Animation, after its release in mid-May four years ago.

“Kung Fu Panda 2” appears poised to become the biggest animated hit of the year so far; but it would have to stretch well past its own predecessor to beat “Shrek Forever After,” another May release, which took in $238.7 million last year.

For the weekend, “The Hangover: Part II” sold $118 million from Thursday to Sunday, easily enough for No. 1. “Kung Fu Panda 2” was second. Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” was third with $39.3 million for a new total of $152.9 million. “Bridesmaids” (Universal Pictures) was fourth with $16.4 million for a new total of about $85 million. “Thor” (Marvel Studios) rounded out the top five with $9.4 million for a new total of $160 million.Studio chiefs acknowledge that the industry needs to sort out its 3-D strategy. Despite the soft results for “Kung Fu Panda 2,” animated releases have continued to perform well in the format, overcoming early problems with glasses that didn’t fit little faces. But general-audience movies like “Stranger Tides” may be better off the old-fashioned way.

“With a blockbuster-filled holiday weekend skewing heavily toward 2-D, and 3-D ticket sales dramatically underperforming relative to screen allocation, major studios will hopefully begin to rethink their 3-D rollout plans for the rest of the year and 2012,” Mr. Greenfield said on Friday.

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Yemeni Forces Battle Islamist Militants for Southern Town

SANA, Yemen — Islamist militants battled Yemeni security forces in the southern province of Abyan on Sunday even as the government struck a deal for a cease-fire in the capital, Sana, with its tribal rivals, bringing relative calm here after days of fierce fighting.

In Sana, Yemeni officials said President Ali Abdullah had agreed to a truce with his historic tribal rivals the Ahmar family. Violence broke out between the two sides last Monday after Mr. Saleh refused to follow through on his promise to sign an agreement leading to his resignation.

“There is a truce and it is still holding,” said Abdul Karim Aleryani, prominent governing party official and adviser to Mr. Saleh. However other officials described the truce as tenuous and far from set in stone.

Still, after more than 100 people were killed last week in fighting that provoked fears of civil war, there were tangible signs of a reduction in tensions. Tribesmen from the Hashid tribal confederation loyal to the Ahmar family began Sunday to hand over to authorities government buildings that they had occupied last week.

“We will hand over the other ministries one by one gradually,” said Hashem al-Ahmar, one of the 10 Ahmar brothers, told reporters on Sunday.

However, a spokesperson for Sheik Sadiq al-Ahmar, Abdulqawi Qaisi, told local reporters that the Ahmars will fully comply with a cease-fire only if the government removes its security forces from their posts in houses near the Ahmar compound in the Hasaba district in northern Sana.

Even if the cease-fire holds, the crisis in Yemen is far from resolved. Peaceful protests calling for Mr. Saleh’s ouster have drawn hundreds of thousands of people on the streets for months. Three times Mr. Saleh has agreed to sign an agreement setting up a transfer of power and three times he has renegged.

In Taiz, a central city and home of the country’s largest demonstration, security forces fired at protesters from a government building on Sunday, killing four, according to local doctor, Abdul Rahim al-Samie. He said he still heard gunshots coming from the building until the evening.

In Abyan, a volatile province in southern Yemen, Yemeni security forces started shelling the coastal city of Zinjibar after several hundred militants took over government institutions there on Friday, residents said. A security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that five soldiers had been killed in the fighting there since Friday.

The militants took over banks, government offices and security headquarters, the residents said. They also said that the militants had been driving around the city in cars with loudspeakers blaring, “We declare that Zinjibar fell in the hands of Mujahideen after it was liberated from the agents of the Americans.”

It was unclear whether the militants, who traveled from Jaar to Zinjibar, belong to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the local branch of the international terrorist network, however the area is filled with citizens who are sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

The terrorist organization has used the lack of rule of law in Abyan to raise its profile, and the fighting in Zinjibar was another example militants in outlying provinces exploiting the chaos in Yemen to advance their causes. Militants took over the nearby city of Jaar in March and in the north Houthi rebels established themselves as the rulers of Saada Province the same month after government officials fled the area.

However protesters and members of Yemen’s opposition blame the fighting in Zinjibar on Mr. Saleh, who they believe is orchestrating the chaos so that he will not have to leave office.

“Saleh instructed to handover Zinjibar to armed groups working for him to frighten others that if he is gone Yemen will become Somalia,” said former minister of defense Abdullah Ali Eliwa, in a televised press statement.

He was speaking on behalf of military leaders who support the protest movement. “Saleh is trying to wrongly portray the army as a failed institution,” he said.

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Afghan Official Says NATO Airstrike Killed 14 Civilians

Local officials said the strike was aimed at Taliban fighters and missed. NATO said it was investigating.

Civilian deaths have strained relations for years between the NATO-led military coalition and the Afghan government, and NATO has made efforts to reduce them.

President Hamid Karzai, who has frequently condemned NATO for civilian casualties, called the deaths in Helmand “shocking,” and said in a statement that “NATO and American forces have been warned repeatedly that their arbitrary and improper operations are the causes of killing of innocent people.”

Witnesses said that an unknown number of bombs fell about 11 p.m. Saturday, landing on two family compounds in the Salaam Bazaar area of Now Zad District, a small farming community about 50 miles north of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province.

Five girls, seven boys and two women were killed as they slept, the provincial governor’s office said in a statement. An additional six people were wounded.

Grieving friends and relatives drove through the night transporting eight bodies to the provincial hospital in Lashkar Gah, a resident of the village, Haji Janan, said. The other bodies remained buried under rubble as villagers tried to dig them out, he said.

The governor’s office released photographs of men carrying the dusty, bruised bodies of dead children swaddled in sheets into the hospital.

“We brought the dead bodies to show it to the officials, to show that the dead are innocent civilians, not the Taliban,” Mr. Janan said.

Lt. Tyler Balzer, a spokesman for the NATO-led military coalition, said several bombs were dropped but said he could not provide more specifics, including what kind of aircraft were used, until the investigation was complete.

“We are aware of the governor’s claims, and there were airstrikes in the area,” he said. “And right now we have an assessment team on the ground working with the Afghan government.”

Local officials said the airstrike came in response to an insurgent attack on a nearby American Marine base earlier in the night, but that the strike hit the wrong homes.

NATO was also investigating an air assault last week in Nuristan Province that drove out Taliban fighters after they had overrun part of a district center. A joint force of NATO soldiers and Afghan commandos called in airstrikes on Wednesday when they came under fire in the district center of Do Ab. The airstrikes drove hundreds of insurgents out of the town and killed more than 10 of them, NATO said then.

But provincial officials now say that NATO helicopters also killed more than 20 police officers dressed in civilian clothes. Qazi Anayatullah, head of the provincial council, said that as coalition forces arrived, the Taliban fled, leaving their white flags flying over police checkpoints they had overrun. When the officers in civilian clothes re-entered the checkpoints, the Taliban flags were still flying, and NATO helicopters bombed them, he said.

“They mistakenly thought they were Taliban because the police were wearing local dress,” Mr. Anayatullah said. Another local official said the police officers had changed into civilian clothes after the initial Taliban assault, hoping to avoid capture.

Lieutenant Balzer said a NATO assessment team had been in Do Ab for several days. “We’re hoping a clearer picture will come out soon and we’ll be able to release the findings,” he said.

But the episode points to the murky nature of the war and the difficulty of distinguishing between Taliban fighters and armed officers or civilians dressed in traditional garb.

In February, Afghan investigators accused NATO of killing 65 civilians in airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan. But NATO maintained that the people were killed were insurgents, and there were conflicting reports, even among the Afghan investigators, about the number of casualties.

Sharifullah Sahak contributed reporting from Kabul, and an employee of The New York Times from Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan.

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Modern Love: What Is Carved in Stone

A few days later we were discussing the details in person. I would join AmeriCorps, a roving volunteer organization. I would be stationed in Denver but moving around. She would visit at Thanksgiving. I’d return to Boston during winter break.

Then I said, “I’m not bringing my laptop,” and her lip turned over and she started to cry. I realized later that she saw my rejection of technology as an assault on the very core of our relationship.

We had gone to the same high school in New Jersey, and when we both ended up at colleges in Boston I fell in love with her familiar face. Together we nursed our dying childhoods, going to the circus and calling each other pet names.

I would call her as I walked to class, alternating my phone hand when it turned pink from the cold, and she would text me during lectures. We’d video chat from our dorm rooms, half-talking while surfing the Internet, calling out occasionally to make sure the other was still there.

This was after communication had become nearly limitless but before people thought much about boundaries. Taking advantage, we fell in love like addicts. All day long the contents of my heart would slide down my arm, past my sleeve and into my phone. When we were together I chafed from overexposure, but when we were apart I would lose my sense of identity and grab my phone.

Our ultimate break-up was confusing and explosive. I landed in Denver around the time the housing market crashed. Deep in heartache, I called my friends while pacing outside my new dorm. Sometimes I called Sarah, until we agreed to stop talking.

During the monthlong orientation I explored and grieved and went to bed early. New friends would invite me to the Mexican bar across the street, but I was dedicated to my loneliness.

I met Patti in an airport van full of idealistic AmeriCorps members. I liked her eyes, which looked like those of the Afghan girl from that famous National Geographic cover. While everyone was discussing the best ways to save the world, she was taking in the passing public art. Forced to weigh in on the conversation, she expressed a bold realism that I found refreshing. Back at the dorms, I watched as she crossed the parking lot and sailed off into the sunset in her boxy 20-year-old Crown Victoria.

Soon I was inventing reasons to hang out with her. She was quiet, pausing for several seconds before answering questions. I would talk until I exhausted myself, fearing that her silence meant she didn’t understand. Then, like Muhammad Ali coming out of the rope-a-dope, she would say something astoundingly true. Knocked out, I couldn’t repress my smile.

We started sitting together during the AmeriCorps meetings. Still, I was resistant to love, fearing a repeat of my past relationship. I opted to join a wildfire-fighting team, assuring that I would spend a majority of the year in isolated mountain towns and away from Patti.

Upon separating she suggested we write letters. A few weeks later I addressed an envelope to Texas, where she was living in a tent city and working for FEMA. At first I poured thoughts onto the page like I was sending a long text message. By the time I finished, the words at the beginning seemed untrue or melodramatic. I crafted and reworked. Sometimes I would rip the letter up and start over.

Her letters were often entirely visual, scattered magazine collages. I would hold an unopened letter for a while, delaying gratification. After reading them, her intimate stories wouldn’t fall to the bottom of my in-box and disappear, but stay with me, under my bed, waiting to be reread.

We started to call each other at night. She told me about her love for the sprawl and beaches in our home state, New Jersey. She told me that, despite her tall, slender frame, she hated sports. I was falling in love, but Patti hesitated, wanting time to allow her feelings to settle. I struggled to accept the uncertainty.

David Mark Simpson, a runner-up in the Modern Love college essay contest, is a senior at Rutgers University.

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In Joplin, Obama Offers Healing Words to Residents

With his European tour behind him, President Obama traveled to Joplin Mo. on Sunday, to offer some healing words to a city ravaged by the worst tornado in decades.

As he did during trips after the tornadoes in Alabama and the flooding along the Mississippi River, the president tried to reassure that survivors that they would not be forgotten.

“The cameras may leave, but we will be with you every step of the way until this community is back on its feet. We are not going anywhere,” the president told a memorial service on the campus of Missouri Southern State University. “That is not just my promise. It is America’s promise.”

In an emotive speech peppered by biblical homilies and pledges of national solidarity, Mr. Obama praised the residents of Joplin for coming together in the face of tragedy. He recounted stories of heroism, including that of a 26-year-old manager of a Pizza Hut restaurant and father of two who died while sheltering a dozen people in a pizza freezer, trying to wedge the door shut, before he was swept away.

“The world saw how Joplin has responded,” Mr. Obama said. “You have shown the world what it means to love thy neighbor.”

Earlier, the president visited with survivors and family of the storm that killed more than 130 people and injured more than 900. At least 40 people remain unaccounted for, as authorities continue to sift through the rubble and accounting for the dead.

Air Force One arrived Sunday around midday, flying over a stretch of landscape flattened by the tornado. The president was greeted by Governor Jay Nixon on the tarmac before they set off on a walk around a devastated neighborhood.

He also was to meet with Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator W. Craig Fugate and local and state officials to coordinate federal assistance and recovery efforts in the city of almost 50,000.

Governor Nixon said the tornado had caused unprecedented devastation even as it had united the people of Joplin like never before. “That storm has brought forward a spirit of resilience the likes of which we’ve never seen,” he said. “What our nation has witnessed this week is the spirit of Joplin, Mo.”

Mr. Obama’s motorcade drove through some of the most devastated neighborhoods, where the houses had no roofs, The Associated Press reported. There, he saw signs of the havoc the tornado had left behind: a recliner sitting amid rubble, a washer-dryer standing next to a decimated house. American flags were planted everywhere.

“Sorry for your loss,” Mr. Obama told an anguished woman, hugging her twice as they talked, the A.P. reported. Another woman told him that her uncle lives up the road — he survived but his house did not. “Tell your uncle we’re praying for him,” the president said.

The president also had words of thanks for the volunteers helping to rebuild the city, including dozens who had streamed in from other states. “It is an example of what the American spirit is all about,” he said.

“We’re going to be here long after the cameras are gone,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re not going to stop until Joplin jumps back on its feet.”

With his re-election campaign fast approaching, Mr. Obama’s ability to connect with voters has been tested in recent months, from the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January, to the tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi, to the more recent floods that devastated parts of Tennessee.

Mr. Obama lost Missouri to Republican John McCain in 2008. But many residents said they were grateful for the president’s visit and for the attention he was bringing to Joplin. When Governor Nixon introduced him at the memorial, the crowd exploded in rapturous applause.

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Republican Legislators Push to Tighten Voting Rules

Republican legislators say the new rules, which have advanced in 13 states in the past two months, offer a practical way to weed out fraudulent votes and preserve the integrity of the ballot box. Democrats say the changes have little to do with fraud prevention and more to do with placing obstacles in the way of possible Democratic voters, including young people and minorities.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas signed laws last week that would require each voter to show an official, valid photo ID to cast a ballot, joining Kansas and South Carolina.

In Florida, which already had a photo law, Gov. Rick Scott signed a bill this month to tighten restrictions on third-party voter registration organizations — prompting the League of Women Voters to say it would cease registering voters in the state — and to shorten the number of early voting days. Twelve states now require photo identification to vote.

The battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania are among those moving ahead on voter ID bills, part of a trend that seems likely to intensify the kind of pitched partisan jousting over voting that has cropped up in recent presidential races.

When voters in predominantly black neighborhoods in Florida saw their votes challenged in the contested Bush-Gore election of 2000, Democrats made charges of disenfranchisement. In 2008 Acorn, a group organizing minority and low-income communities, became a particular target, with Republicans asserting that Acorn was trying to steal the election with large voter-registration drives, some of which were found to be seriously flawed.

Democrats, who point to scant evidence of voter-impersonation fraud, say the unified Republican push for photo identification cards carries echoes of the Jim Crow laws — with their poll taxes and literacy tests — that inhibited black voters in the South from Reconstruction through the 1960s. Election experts say minorities, poor people and students — who tend to skew Democratic — are among those least likely to have valid driver’s licenses, the most prevalent form of identification. Older people, another group less likely to have licenses, are swing voters.

Republicans argue that the requirements are commonplace.

“If you have to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed, if you have to show a picture ID to get on an airplane, you should show a picture ID when you vote,” Gov. Nikki Haley said this month when she signed the bill into law in South Carolina, using a common refrain among Republicans.

Changes to voter law tend to flow and ebb with election cycles as both Democrats and Republicans scramble to gain the upper hand when they hold power. The 2010 midterm election was a boon to Republicans, who now control 59 chambers of state legislatures and 29 governorships. In some states, like Florida and Texas, Republicans hold overwhelming majorities. This has allowed the bills to move forward.

Republicans have tried for years to get photo identification requirements and other changes through legislatures, said Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert in election law. Similar bills were introduced over the past decade, but were largely derailed in the aftermath of a political battle over the Bush administration’s firing of several United States attorneys whom Republicans had criticized for failing to aggressively investigate voter fraud.

“That’s what really killed the momentum of more states’ enacting voter ID laws,” Mr. Tokaji said. “Now with the last elections, with the strong Republican majorities in a lot of states, we’re seeing a rejuvenation of the effort.”

Republicans say that large jumps in the immigrant population have also prompted them to act to safeguard elections.

“Over the last 20 years, we have seen Florida grow quite rapidly, and we have such a mix of populations,” said State Representative Dennis K. Baxley, the Florida Republican who wrote the law to tighten third-party registration here. “When we fail to protect every ballot, we disenfranchise people who participate legitimately.”

Taken together, the state-by-state changes are likely to have an impact on close elections, Mr. Tokaji said.

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Sudan Threatens to Occupy 2 More Disputed Regions

Tensions shot up last week when northern forces stormed into Abyei, a contested region that straddles the border and is claimed by both the northern and southern governments.

Now, according to a letter from the Sudanese military’s high command, the northern army, in the next few days, plans to take over Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan states, two disputed areas with a long history of conflict that are still bristling with arms.

Analysts, local leaders and Western diplomats fear that if the northern army carries through on its threat to push out or forcibly disarm the thousands of fighters allied to the south in these two areas, it could set off a much bigger clash between the northern and southern armies, who have been building up their arsenals for years in anticipation of war.

Malik Agar, Blue Nile’s governor, said Sunday night that northern forces had recently moved “dangerously close” to the bases of southern-allied fighters and that he didn’t think the southern-allied forces would surrender.

“It’s like putting a cat in a corner,” Mr. Agar said. “They will fight.”

Sudan’s border is a dizzyingly complex mosaic of ethnic groups and political loyalties. It is also home to the bulk of the country’s crude oil and some of the most fertile land in the country, making the question of how exactly to draw a line across Sudan one of the most explosive issues the nation confronts as it prepares to split in two.

Under peace agreements signed several years ago, joint forces were supposed to patrol some of these disputed areas. The two sides had agreed that Abyei would hold a referendum to decide if it were to join the north or south, a compromise that was essentially blotted out on May 21 when thousands of northern Sudanese soldiers marched into Abyei. Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile were supposed to conduct a less formal, vaguely defined “popular consultation” process that southerners say has not been completed.

Southern Sudan is just weeks away from attaining independence, a goal that has taken more than 50 years and millions of lives. The region, one of the poorest and least developed places on earth, where four out of five adults cannot read, defied expectations in January by holding an orderly, organized referendum on independence, in which nearly 99 percent voted to split off. In the past week, southern leaders have absorbed the loss of Abyei, complaining bitterly about it but deciding not to respond with military force, saying that could jeopardize all that they had sacrficied for.

On Sunday, southern leaders indicated that they would not fight over Blue Nile or Southern Kordofan either.

“It is not our priority now to get involved in a war,” said Barnaba Marial Benjamin, the information minister for the government of southern Sudan. He also said high-level negotiations were about to begin in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, over several of these border issues.

But what may be more dangerous this time is that there are many more southern-allied fighters stationed in Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan than there were in Abyei — possibily tens of thousands, compared with a few hundred in Abyei who quickly retreated last weekend when faced with a clearly superior northern Sudanese force.

“The move into the Nuba in particular will be explosive,” said Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College and one of the leading academic voices on Sudan. “The amount of weaponry and men under arms is tremendous.”

Nuba is a mountainous region of Southern Kordofan state that is technically part of northern Sudan but became one of the strongholds of the southern rebels during the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now, the southern-allied fighters there are in a more desperate situation than southern troops were in Abyei. These two states are rife with northern forces and northern-backed militia, and the Nuba Mountains are not even contiguous with the south. If the fighters in these areas give up their weapons, they will be at the mercy of the northern Sudanese forces whom they have fought for years.

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Wheldon Wins Second Indy 500

To meet the shortage of primary care doctors, charge to specialize.

Our infatuation with technology provides an easy alternative to love, writes Jonathan Franzen.

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The Caucus: For Palin, a Short Ride With Lots of Rumbling

Damon Winter/The New York TimesSarah Palin at the “Rolling Thunder” bike rally on Sunday.

Sarah Palin made a grand entrance at the Rolling Thunder biker rally on Sunday, wearing a black Harley-Davidson helmet and visibly enjoying herself as a crush of reporters and bikers swarmed her motorcycle.

Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska, was joined by her husband, Todd, who was wearing a matching helmet, and her daughters, Bristol and Piper. Their arrival at the Pentagon North parking lot turned the lazy Sunday morning into a celebrity affair.

Ms. Palin climbed aboard a chopper, assisted by a member of the Rolling Thunder staff, but was unable to move because there were so many members of the press snapping photos. Organizers eventually brought in police, also on motorcycles, to clear a path.

After moving just a few feet, Ms. Palin got off the bike to sign autographs and talk with the crowd. At one point she could be heard discussing “the missing,” a reference to the soldiers still missing in action — a key part of the Rolling Thunder cause.

Her plans for the day had been a closely guarded secret among those in her small circle of advisers. Rumors flew for most of the morning that she was on her way, and that she would ride a motorcycle with the Rolling Thunder bikers.

That’s exactly what she did. Ms. Palin rode on the back as another woman drove her motorcycle. Todd Palin drove another motorcycle, with Piper on the back, and Bristol rode on a third with another driver.

Organizers for the rally said the Palins would not be among the speakers during the Rolling Thunder rally on the National Mall later in the afternoon.

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A Year at War: After Combat, the Unexpected Perils of Coming Home

Capt. Adrian Bonenberger made plans for his final patrol to Imam Sahib. But inside, he was sweating the details of a different mission: going home. Which soldiers would drive drunk, get into fights or struggle with emotional demons, he wondered. What would it take to keep them safe in America?

Sgt. Brian Keith boarded the plane home feeling a strange dread. His wife wanted a divorce and had moved away, taking their son and most of their bank account with her. At the end of his flight lay an empty apartment and the blank slate of a new life.

“A lot of people were excited about coming home,” Sergeant Keith said. “Me, I just sat there and I wondered: What am I coming back to?”

For a year, they had navigated minefields and ducked bullets, endured tedium inside barbed-wired outposts and stitched together the frayed seams of long-distance relationships. One would think that going home would be the easiest thing troops could do.

But it is not so simple. The final weeks in a war zone are often the most dangerous, as weary troops get sloppy or unfocused. Once they arrive home, alcohol abuse, traffic accidents and other measures of mayhem typically rise as they blow off steam.

Weeks later, as the joy of return subsides, deep-seated emotional or psychological problems can begin to show. The sleeplessness, anxiety and irritability of post-traumatic stress disorder, for instance, often take months to emerge as combat veterans confront the tensions of home and the recurring memories of war.

In their new normal, troops must reconnect with children, adjust to more independent spouses and dial back the hypervigilance that served them well in combat — but that can alienate them from civilians.

“The hardest part for me is, I guess, not being on edge,” said Staff Sgt. Francisco Narewski, a father of three who just completed his second deployment. “I feel like I need to do something, like I need to go on mission or I need to check my soldiers. And I’m not.”

For the First Battalion, 87th Infantry out of Fort Drum, N.Y., which recently finished a yearlong tour, leaving Afghanistan proved as deadly as fighting in Afghanistan. In the first 11 months of deployment, the battalion lost two soldiers, both to roadside bombs. During the next month, it lost two more, neither in combat.

On March 9, the day before he was scheduled to leave Kunduz, Specialist Andrew P. Wade, 22, was accidentally shot and killed by a friend who was practicing a drill with his 9-millimeter pistol inside their tent.

Three weeks later, Specialist Jeremiah Pulaski, who had returned from Afghanistan in February, was shot and killed by a police officer after he shot and wounded a man outside a bar in Arizona. He was 24.

Both soldiers were considered among the best in the battalion. Specialist Wade, a whiz with a soccer ball, was a member of the elite scouts platoon and on a fast track to promotion. Specialist Pulaski could be quick to use his fists in an argument but was revered for his fearlessness on the battlefield.

Specialist Pulaski was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor for dashing across an open field during an ambush in December, drawing enemy fire away from his platoon. Later that same day, he killed several insurgents as they were trying to ambush his unit near a village called Haruti.

Captain Bonenberger, Specialist Pulaski’s company commander, said the soldier saved his life twice that day — and it gnawed at him that he had been unable to return the favor.

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City Room: Wanted: City Soundtrack Suggestions

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In New Tack, Syrians Protest at Night to Elude Forces

The new tactics underline the evolution of the nine-week uprising, which has shown growing signs of resilience as it has weathered a ferocious crackdown. Since the uprising erupted with protests in a poor town in southern Syria, activists have tried to bring more organization and coordination to demonstrations that once seemed spontaneous.

Human rights activists estimate the death toll since the uprising started in mid-March at 1,000, and they say that at least 10,000 protesters are in jail. In addition to using live ammunition, security forces have beaten demonstrators with batons and dispersed them with water cannons, all tactics that organizers contend are more difficult to carry out after nightfall.

“The evening demonstrations are not the last thing,” said one activist in the northern city of Aleppo, who provided only his first name, Hudaifah. “We have other tactics for the coming weeks and months. We expect our uprising to continue for a long time.”

The revolt has posed a serious challenge to the authoritarian government of Mr. Assad, 44, an ophthalmologist who received his training in England and inherited his office in 2000 from his father, Hafez. Together, the Assad family has led this country, a strategic linchpin in the region, for four decades.

Activists say that demonstrations occur every evening in cities and towns across the country, including Damascus and its suburbs; Deir al Zour, to the northeast of the capital; Homs and Hama, in central Syria; and Aleppo and Idleb in the north.

Protesters are also gathering at night in the south, in villages near Dara’a, the impoverished town that became a flash point of the uprising when teenagers were arrested after being caught scrawling antigovernment graffiti on walls there.

The protests attract far fewer participants than those held after Friday Prayer. Some put the number just in the few hundreds. But protesters contend that they keep the pressure on the government and exhaust its security forces, which then spend the night patrolling neighborhoods and streets where demonstrations were held.

Organizers said evening protests were popular because they could attract people after they had left work and school. They also argue that it is easier for them to run away and hide from security forces in houses, shops, or dark, narrow alleys, and that the smaller numbers, dispersing quickly, help avoid widespread casualties and arrests.

The strategy is called “tayyara,” which translates as “flying.”

“We come up with ideas that security forces don’t expect,” Hudaifah, 28, said. “The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings sparked our movement, but we are improving the tactics day by day.”

Hudaifah, like many others interviewed for this article, would not give his full name for fear of reprisal. He said he worked during the day for long hours as a tailor in his father’s shop and at night organized small demonstrations in his neighborhood.

Syrian officials have contended that they can end the uprising through force. But the longer the protests continue, the more untenable the government’s position becomes, both to its critics and its own constituents. That has put a premium on organizers to keep up the show of dissent, even on a small scale.

Organizers have begun filming the demonstrations with digital cameras, offering better quality images to the outside world than those of cellphone cameras. In small meetings, activists say, they have also tried to come up with other tactics, like seeking to deceive plainclothes security forces by pretending to be one of them or melting into the neighborhood.

“A few days ago I was in a protest when the security forces came,” said Tarek, 31, who works for a state-run construction company in Damascus. “I acted like an ordinary citizen and walked beside them, without panicking. They couldn’t recognize me. Some others are even behaving like security men.”

By all accounts, the uprising took Syrian officials by surprise. A few weeks before it started, Mr. Assad had declared in an interview that his country would not be affected by the uprisings that toppled leaders in Tunisia and Egypt.

As it has persisted, international criticism has mounted, and both the United States and European countries have imposed sanctions on Mr. Assad himself. The opposition abroad, meanwhile, plans to convene in Turkey next week in a bid to establish a more unified front.

“The protests will continue and will get bigger and stronger because the protesters are now more organized and more experienced,” said Bourhan Ghalioun, director of the Center for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, who is also a prominent Syrian opposition figure.

“And they will keep protesting until they realize all their demands,” he said. “They will no longer accept a government imposed on them by the power of tanks.”

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