Cuomo and Legislators Strike Deal on New Ethics Rules

In the wake of scandals that have felled two New York governors and multiple state lawmakers, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and leaders of the Legislature announced an agreement on Friday to overhaul the state’s ethics laws as part of an effort to stem corruption and misconduct in Albany.

The agreement would force legislators, many of whom have part-time law practices, to disclose the names of clients who have business before the state; would allow prosecutors to seek to strip pensions from future elected officials convicted of felonies; and would for the first time allow officials appointed by a governor a role in overseeing legislative compliance with ethics laws.

“Government does not work without the trust of the people,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement. “And this ethics overhaul is an important step in restoring that trust.”

The agreement followed months of tortuous negotiations conducted in secret. The governor, who has made overhauling ethics rules a priority, tried to pressure the Legislature by traveling the state with a PowerPoint presentation listing the names of lawmakers charged with corruption; two continue to serve and will be eligible to vote on ethics changes even while awaiting trial.

Mr. Cuomo had repeatedly warned that if the Legislature did not agree to revise ethics rules, he would use a century-old law known as the Moreland Act to appoint an investigative commission charged with ferreting out legislative abuses.

Government watchdog groups were guardedly optimistic about the ethics overhaul after being allowed to inspect a draft agreement.

“It’s novel and untested, but promises to be a success because of its different approach,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union. “For there now to be external oversight of the State Legislature by a separate body is significant.”

The agreement is to be announced on Monday in Albany, but the governor and legislative leaders issued a joint statement on Friday describing the details. If approved by the Legislature, the agreement would be the second major overhaul of the state’s ethics enforcement apparatus in the last four years, and would create a joint ethics commission with oversight over both the executive and legislative branches.

“Time will tell,” said Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “There are no guarantees. But it is better than what we have now.”

The commission would include six people appointed by a governor, split between Democrats and Republicans. In addition, the majority leaders of both legislative houses would make three appointments each, and the minority leaders would each make one.

In a concession to Republican concerns that Democrats would use the commission for partisan purposes, the structure of the new commission gives de facto veto power to the appointees of the Assembly speaker and the Senate majority leader to block investigations of sitting lawmakers. And if the commission voted against pursuing a complaint, that decision would remain secret — as would any vote to block a public finding of wrongdoing after an investigation.

To help insulate appointees from political influence, board members will serve five-year terms. No member may be a lawmaker, senior state official or lobbyist.

In addition to requiring lawmakers to disclose their own clients, the state will create a public database of people or firms who represent private interests before state agencies. The new disclosure is intended to allow closer public scrutiny of firms that employ lawmakers, even in cases where the lawmakers do not personally represent clients before state agencies.

The State Senate leader, Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, are paid for part-time work at large law firms; both men say they do not personally represent any clients with business before the state, but partners at Mr. Skelos’s firm do represent such clients.

The deal gives Mr. Cuomo another victory, on top of his successful budget negotiation and his brokering of a pact to cap property taxes. But it does not accomplish another of his goals: to improve the state’s campaign finance laws, widely criticized by government watchdog groups as outdated, weakly enforced and overly permeable.

The last round of ethics improvements was won in 2007 by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, who persuaded the Legislature to enact a ban on gifts to public officials and new limits on lobbying for former public officials.

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City Report Finds No Work Slowdown in Blizzard Cleanup

The councilman, Daniel J. Halloran, became something of a national news celebrity for a more than week. Commentators said his evidence showed how public employee unions were harming America.

But on Friday, a report by the city’s Department of Investigation said that investigators, after interviewing more than 150 witnesses and reviewing video from surveillance cameras and from angry residents, had found no evidence of an organized slowdown. In fact, the report found, Mr. Halloran had no evidence for his accusation, and his account of conversations with two workers differed sharply from what the workers told investigators.

“In toto,” the report said, “Mr. Halloran’s information about city employee statements contributed no actual evidence about a possible slowdown.”

The report did find fault with elements of the city’s response to the Dec. 26 snowstorm, which left 20 inches of snow in Central Park and paralyzed the city for days. A half-dozen trucks, among hundreds reviewed, were inexplicably idle, or moving through snowbound streets with their plows raised for no apparent reason. Some workers remained with stuck vehicles for as long as 12 hours, investigators found. About 44 percent of the snow chains on trucks broke during the cleanup.

And a few workers were photographed buying beer or coffee when they were supposed to be cleaning the streets. The investigators said those workers were doing so only while stuck with broken-down equipment, and not as part of a labor slowdown, but the workers caught drinking now face disciplinary charges.

The city also made choices that might have slowed the cleanup. A decision to stop salting roads as the snowfall warnings increased was controversial within the Sanitation Department. And because the city elected not to declare a snow emergency, many drivers became stuck in roadways, and their cars impeded the cleanup.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who initially dismissed complaints about the storm response, said through a spokeswoman on Friday that many of the new report’s findings would be addressed “to ensure that snow removal operations function well in the future, as they have in many other storms.”

Harry Nespoli, the president of the sanitation workers union, said the report vindicated his members and supported what he had said in testimony to the City Council and in numerous news media interviews in the weeks after the storm.

“The report confirms my contention that the members of this union would never participate in an organized action that puts our city and its people at risk,” Mr. Nespoli said in a statement.

Mr. Halloran released a statement through his spokesman pointing out that while the investigation found no evidence of a slowdown, it did not “come to any definite conclusion” that one did not happen.

“I am proud that my constituents felt I would have the courage of my convictions to take on the city,” the statement said. “They expect me to stand up for them and be their voice and I am going to keep doing that.” Mr. Halloran had been quoted saying that workers had come to his office during the storm and told him they had been directed to take part in a slowdown to embarrass Mr. Bloomberg, who had proposed work force changes in the Sanitation Department.

Mr. Halloran has said he based his slowdown accusations, which first appeared in The New York Post, on conversations he had with two Transportation Department supervisors who had been assigned to the cleanup and with three Sanitation Department workers.

But he refused to give the names of the sanitation workers to investigators, citing attorney-client privilege. A footnote in the report notes that after Mr. Halloran raised attorney-client privilege as a basis to withhold information, a Department of Investigation lawyer informed him that city conflict-of-interest rules bar public servants from doing work that “is in conflict with the proper discharge of his or her official duties."

When city investigators spoke to the transportation supervisors, the two said they had no evidence of a slowdown.

One said he did not reach out to the councilman, as Mr. Halloran had said, but had been summoned to his office by a mutual friend. The supervisor, who was not named in the report, said he submitted to a brief “grilling” by Mr. Halloran, but told the councilman that he knew nothing about a slowdown other than the rumors he had heard in the news media.

The supervisor said Mr. Halloran appeared to be upset with that answer.

The other supervisor also said he knew nothing about a slowdown and was present only because he had happened to tag along with his colleague. He said Mr. Halloran appeared annoyed.

According to the report, one of the transportation supervisors told investigators that as they were leaving the meeting, Mr. Halloran said, “If you don’t want to talk, I will find a disgruntled worker who is ready to retire who is.”

In February, Mr. Halloran was called to testify before a grand jury investigating the supposed slowdown. No announcements have been made about whether its investigation has concluded. A spokesman for Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York, declined to comment.

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Connecticut House Debates Requiring Sick Pay

The Connecticut House of Representatives debated late into Friday night as members considered a bill that would make Connecticut the nation’s first state to mandate that some employers provide paid sick days to employees.

The State Senate approved the bill on May 25 in an 18-to-17 vote, with one Republican voting in favor and five Democrats opposed.

The House has 52 Republicans and 99 Democrats. None of the Republicans are considered likely to approve the measure, but party officials concede that getting enough Democratic votes to kill it would be a challenge. The Republicans on Friday had drawn up about 100 amendments and were promising a contentious and protracted debate.

The issue is being closely followed nationally, as liberal groups have presented similar legislation in other states and cities. The bill would require only service companies with 50 or more workers to provide paid sick days.

The measure was significantly toned down from earlier versions, but opponents raised the same objections, that the bill was antibusiness and counterproductive at a time of high unemployment and low job creation in a state that has consistently lagged behind the nation in creating jobs. Proponents said it offered major and overdue protections for workers and for the public health, particularly at a time when workers’ rights were under attack.

Manufacturing companies and nationally chartered nonprofit organizations would be exempt. The bill would not cover day laborers or temporary workers. It would apply only to service workers, a broad category that includes waiters, cashiers, crossing guards and hairstylists. The proposal would allow each covered employee to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 40 hours worked, with the number of days capped at five a year.

The legislation has been a major priority for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who lobbied wavering senators to support the bill. He has pledged to sign the bill if it reaches his desk. Mr. Malloy, who is in his first term, made the issue an important part of his platform during his campaign against Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary last year.

“This piece of legislation is a reasonable compromise that represents good public policy,” he said in a statement after the Senate passed it. “It exempts industries where appropriate, it ensures that the benefit won’t be abused, and most importantly, it protects public health. It shouldn’t be the case that people who are frontline service workers — people who serve us food, who care for our children and who work in hospitals, for example — are forced to go to work sick to keep their jobs.”

But Republicans said the bill was onerous and ill timed. They said that it would put an excessive burden on companies that had to provide paid sick days and that its language provided a broad cause of action for any employees who claimed their employment was unfairly affected by using paid sick days.

The Senate Republican leader, John McKinney, said the bill would give other states one more argument in competing for companies and jobs, but he seemed resigned to House passage.

Assuming it passes, he said, “by being the first state in the nation to pass a paid sick leave mandate, Connecticut has further cemented its reputation as being an unfriendly place to do business.”

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Golden Age for Older Women At Highest Levels of the Game

“I’m not old,” she said. “Why do you think I’m old?”

Well, in tennis years, at least, Li is old. She is 29. And her opponent in the final, Francesca Schiavone of Italy, is even older. Schiavone was 29 when she won here a year ago, becoming the oldest first-time women’s Grand Slam winner since professionals began competing in 1968.

The Li-Schiavone final captures a shift that is under way in women’s tennis. The days of child stars like Tracy Austin, Monica Seles and Jennifer Capriati appear to be in the past. The top players are getting older.

For a record sixth major in a row, each finalist is at least 25.

With a combined age of 60 years 79 days, Li and Schiavone make up the oldest French Open final pairing since 1986, when Chris Evert beat Martina Navratilova (61 years 37 days combined). They are the fifth oldest pairing in any Grand Slam women’s final.

Now, they are placed in the odd position of having to explain, if not defend, why older players are dominating the biggest events in a sport long recognized for its teenage sensations. No matter who wins, the average age of the women’s winner of the last 12 Grand Slam tournaments will be close to 28.

“Age just paper,” said Li, seeded sixth and trying to become the first player from Asia, man or woman, to win a Grand Slam event. “It’s just plus one.”

Schiavone, who speaks with a flair and imagination that accent her game, has faced the questions two years in a row. Last year she was seeded 17th. She is fifth this time.

“Is like the wine,” she said. “Stay in the bottle more is much, much better.”

Navratilova, 54, has watched the re-emergence of the older set. “You will see players excelling more between the ages of 25 and 30 than from 20 to 25,” she said Friday. “Everything’s getting older, and the players take a little bit longer to mature, perhaps. I don’t know how much of it has to do with the sport, and how much has to do with the setup.”

Physically, players of all ages are stronger than ever in a game now dominated by big-hitting baseliners. Even the sturdiest of teenage players struggle against veterans who have made fitness a years-long priority.

Mentally, experienced players are accustomed to the grind of the travel and the pressure of the big tournaments. Younger players are surrounded by entourages — families, coaches, trainers — designed to make them better. Navratilova wondered if that is not the case.

“They don’t have to mature because they don’t have to fend for themselves,” Navratilova said. “I was flying around the world by myself when I was 17 years old, booking everything myself. Getting myself to and from airports and cities and practices and all that. I didn’t have a coach until I was 25, and that teaches you have to be self-reliant.”

The last teenager to win a Grand Slam was Maria Sharapova, who was 19 when she won the 2006 United States Open. Before that, tennis was lined with teenage champions. Now, it is at least as likely that Grand Slam winners will be over 30 as under 20.

“It’ll level off somewhere,” Navratilova said. “I don’t think you’ll see people win Slams at 35, but 30 is not the cutoff point that it used to be.”

When Evert defeated Navratilova at Roland Garros 25 years ago, Evert won the 18th and final Grand Slam singles title of her career. Navratilova had 13, on her way to 18.

They dominated women’s tennis for much of a decade. That they remain the second-oldest singles pairing in women’s Grand Slam history (trailing Virginia Wade and Betty Stove, an even 64 years combined, at the 1977 Wimbledon) speaks to their career longevity. They were young stars once, too, occasionally and finally relenting to others, like Austin, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Capriati, the Williamses, Martina Hingis and Sharapova.

The women’s tour implemented age-eligibility restrictions in the mid-1990’s, including a rule that prohibits players younger than 14 from competing on the tour.

Li did not play her first major tournament until she was 22, and her rise through the rankings was steady and slow, until she could not be ignored. Now on her way to the top five, her ranking has climbed four years in a row, all since her mid-20s.

Schiavone, who will turn 31 on June 23, spent most of her 20s ranked in the top 40 but was seen as a small, 5-foot-5 all-court throwback stuck in the wrong era. Still, Navratilova told Schiavone years ago that she was good enough to win a Grand Slam.

She did not reach the semifinals of one until last year’s French Open romp.

“Francesca could have been better earlier,” Navratilova said. “I think she just didn’t believe in herself that much. Then she finally realized, yeah, I can play with the best of them. Now you can’t stop her. You need a bloody bulldozer to hold her back.”

Li and Schiavone might represent the making of a trend toward older players, but they are still relative anomalies.

Serena Williams (5 major victories in the last 12 tournaments), Clijsters (3) and Venus Williams (1) and Svetlana Kuznetsova (1) all won Grand Slam events under the age of 25, too. They did not need all those years to mature into great players.

But they have crowded out the rest of the field, like the current No. 1, Caroline Wozniacki, a 20-year-old Dane.

The true test of the trend will come over the next 12 events, or the 12 after that, if and when the Williams sisters and Clijsters retire for good. Maybe that will create the room for younger stars like Wozniacki, Victoria Azarenka and others to show that youth can prevail again.

Of course, they will be older, too. But not old.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 3, 2011

An earlier caption for the photo in this article incorrectly identified the tennis player on the right. Her name is Li Na, not Na Li.

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St. Ann’s Warehouse Scrambles to Find New Home

St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Brooklyn theater whose versatile and cavernous playing space has become a magnet for New York and overseas acting troupes, is now confronting a likely fate that its leaders had worked years to avoid: homelessness.

Scheduled to lose its 14,000-square-foot home next May because of commercial development, St. Ann’s thought its long-term future was secure after the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation approved the theater’s plans to move across the street after renovating the old Tobacco Warehouse on the Dumbo neighborhood’s waterfront. But some Brooklyn civic groups oppose handing over that landmark ruin — a shell of a 19th-century building, mainly walls but no roof — to any single organization, and in April the groups won a court decision on a technical issue that probably will preserve the Tobacco Warehouse as an open neighborhood site for the next few years, at least.

All of this leaves St. Ann’s with little more than an inch-thick prospectus of ambitious artistic dreams: its submission to the park corporation, titled “The Future Tobacco Warehouse: Where Global, Regional and Local Communities Converge.” That appendices-stuffed proposal included maps for a 7,000-square-foot public garden and a 2,100-square-foot community hall intended to house some of the concerts and dance presentations that are now held intermittently at the Tobacco Warehouse.

The proposal’s centerpiece was a 10,250-square-foot theater that would have sustained St. Ann’s reputation as a rare New York City space that allows ensembles to configure a high-ceilinged, column-free and technically sophisticated room to their needs. Among the renowned companies that have played St. Ann’s in recent years are Kneehigh Theater from England (“Brief Encounter”), the National Theater of Scotland (the Iraq war play “Black Watch”) and the downtown Wooster Group (“The Emperor Jones”).

After the artistic staff and board members of St. Ann’s fixed their sights last year on the Tobacco Warehouse, they gave up developing a Plan B for a future home. Like other arts organizations in New York recently — the theater company Performance Space 122 and New York City Opera among them — St. Ann’s is facing a nomadic future until a permanent site can be found or a new home can be built, options that could take years.

“Our vision was to turn the Brooklyn waterfront into a cultural center by transforming the Tobacco Warehouse into both a theater and a public arts space,” said Susan Feldman, artistic director of St. Ann’s. “It leaves us maybe having to leave Dumbo. Perhaps even leaving Brooklyn. None of us want that, but the theater we do at St. Ann’s doesn’t easily fit into pre-existing spaces that we’ve seen, and we want to continue to do that work.”

Ms. Feldman founded Arts at St. Ann’s in 1979 at a historic church site in Brooklyn Heights, then opened its current home in an old spice-milling factory in 2001. The owner of the space is now developing it, with plans to construct an apartment complex and a middle school. Well known as a blunt-speaking, strong-willed artistic programmer, Ms. Feldman did not self-edit at first in discussing the opposition to St. Ann’s plans.

“When we won approval to move into the Tobacco Warehouse, you had a few people in Brooklyn who felt such defeat and anger that they are now fighting all-out to keep this space as a ruin, an urban ruin,” Ms. Feldman said. After a pause, she spoke a bit more diplomatically: “Well, I know everyone is fighting for what they believe in. I can respect that. We’re just heartbroken. And a little desperate.”

Jim Walden, a lawyer for the Brooklyn Heights Association and others fighting to keep the Tobacco Warehouse as is, said the neighborhood groups admired the work of St. Ann’s and supported keeping the theater in Dumbo. At the same time, the groups wanted to maintain the Tobacco Warehouse as the kind of site that has featured photo and art exhibitions, hip-hop and food festivals, and even a memorable “Macbeth,” presented by St. Ann’s in 2008 on a two-story, roofless set.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea for governments to just give away national landmarks to organizations that they like, if those are good organizations, because eventually there will be a person in charge who is giving landmarks to an organization that you don’t like,” Mr. Walden said. “What you need is the same standardized process that has integrity and is followed in all decisions like this.”

In April a federal judge ruled that the National Park Service broke the law when it redrew the lines of the old Empire Fulton Ferry State Park without public hearings — a process that led to the Tobacco Warehouse and another building’s being left outside of the park’s borders. (The Empire Fulton Ferry State Park has since been subsumed by Brooklyn Bridge Park.) The park service and New York City, defendants in the case, argued that the two buildings had been put within those borders by mistake, and that neither building was eligible for inclusion in the parkland, anyway, because they were not suitable for outdoor recreation.

But the judge, Eric N. Vitaliano, found evidence that the two structures were intentionally included in the park map early on, and ruled — in favor of Brooklyn neighborhood groups and others — that the proper process was not followed.

Regina Myer, president of Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, said that the Tobacco Warehouse is now used less frequently for recreation than other parts of the park, and that St. Ann’s proposal “was far and away the most exciting we received, and had so many opportunities for neighborhood groups and arts organizations to continue using the space.”

During a recent interview Ms. Feldman leafed through her prospectus and read aloud from the two dozen letters of support from Brooklyn cultural and arts groups for St. Ann’s occupying the Tobacco Warehouse. Almost lovingly, she traced her fingers over the outlines of the maps for the renovated space, including diagrams of how different acting troupes had each reconfigured the open floor plan of the current theater.

“There is something so special, we found, in having this sort of warehouse space that can be refashioned with every production to suit a different artist’s dream,” she said. “We could have made that work at the Tobacco Warehouse. It would have worked so well. And now you just feel hopeless.”

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Captive’s Own Account of 18 Years as a Hostage

Such are the scenes that emerge from testimony released this week in the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held against her will for 18 years.

On Thursday, Phillip and Nancy Garrido were sentenced to lengthy terms for Ms. Dugard’s kidnapping, rape and imprisonment. After the sentencing, Judge Douglas C. Phimister of El Dorado County Superior Court released a redacted version of grand jury testimony Ms. Dugard gave in September, revealing new details about her captivity.

It also offers a glimpse into the twisted thinking of Mr. Garrido — a convicted sex offender on parole for a 1976 attack on a Nevada casino worker — and his justification for his crime.

Ms. Dugard says, for instance, that she was raped shortly after she was kidnapped, and repeatedly thereafter during sessions that Mr. Garrido — who used methamphetamine — described as “runs.” But Mr. Garrido told Ms. Dugard that she was simply “helping him” with a “sex problem.”

He said “he got me so that he wouldn’t have to do this to anybody else,” Ms. Dugard recalls.

The accounts also include a chilling description of the morning of Ms. Dugard’s kidnapping — June 10, 1991 — near her home in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Ms. Dugard said she had been walking to a bus stop when she was spotted by the Garridos, who had been hunting for a young girl.

“This car comes up behind me,” Ms. Dugard said in her testimony. “I didn’t feel it was weird at the time, but it kind of pulled in close,” adding she thought that the person was going to ask for directions.

Suddenly, however, Ms. Dugard said she felt a shock through her body — the Garridos used a stun gun — and she fell into a bush. It was then she saw Phillip Garrido for the first time.

“He gets out and I stumble back into the bushes,” Ms. Dugard recalled.

She was thrown into the back seat and covered by a blanket. “And then I heard voices in the front, and the man said, ‘I can’t believe we got away with it,’ and he started laughing,” Ms. Dugard said.

Later, Ms. Dugard describes being taken to the Garridos’ home outside Antioch, Calif., a Bay Area suburb, where she pleaded for her release.

“I just wanted to go home,” she said. “I kept telling him that, you know, ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. If you’re holding me for ransom, my family doesn’t have a lot of money.’ ”

“I didn’t know his purpose,” she said.

When the Garridos were arrested in August 2009, the authorities discovered a hidden backyard compound made up of ramshackle tents and sheds, including a small, sparsely furnished two-room building where Ms. Dugard said she was held.

Ms. Dugard spent most of the first year alone — except during Mr. Garrido’s sexual assaults — though Mr. Garrido gave her a cat to keep her company. (He eventually took the animal away after the smell of urine got too strong in her room.)

Ms. Dugard was eventually introduced to Ms. Garrido, who took over feeding their captive, and the Garridos moved into the shed themselves. “Basically, we were all sleeping in the same room,” she said. “We watched TV together. I didn’t feel as lonely anymore.” They also gave her Barbie dolls to play with.

But there was also intimidation from Mr. Garrido, including attack dogs and threats to use the stun gun.

“He would turn it on and say something like, you know, ‘You don’t want it to happen again. You should be good.’ ”

In 1993, Mr. Garrido returned to prison for a short time for an unspecified parole violation, a period during which Ms. Dugard remembers asking Ms. Garrido where he was. She said “he was on this island for a little vacation,” Ms. Dugard said. “And he came back with an ankle bracelet.”

Ms. Dugard was glad not to suffer any more sexual attacks during that period, and the rapes were less frequent after Ms. Dugard got pregnant at age 13. She gave birth to a daughter in 1994 in the building where she was held, with Ms. Garrido helping with the delivery.

“He knew I was really scared about getting pregnant again,” Ms. Dugard said. “He said he just couldn’t help himself, but he was really trying to stop.”

Ms. Dugard did eventually get pregnant again, giving birth to a second daughter in 1997, a result of a final attack by Mr. Garrido. “That’s the last time he had sex with me, was when she was conceived,” Ms. Dugard said.

Soon after, they just started “acting like a family,” celebrating birthdays, and “just trying to be normal, I guess.” There was a backyard pool and a family printing business.

At one point during her testimony, Ms. Dugard was shown a journal she kept, including entries in which she called herself a coward for not trying to escape, though longing for freedom. But, she said, “I couldn’t leave. I had the girls.”

Near the end of the testimony, Ms. Dugard describes the final days of her ordeal, in August 2009, after Mr. Garrido had been brought in by parole officers for questioning after a campus officer at the University of California, Berkeley, had raised their suspicions.

Ms. Dugard, who went with Mr. Garrido to the meeting, had been told to lie for him and to give her name as “Alissa,” but parole officers soon began peppering her with questions about her identity, flustering her.

Moments later, an officer came in and said Mr. Garrido had confessed to the kidnapping.

“I started crying,” Ms. Dugard said. “And she said, ‘You need to tell me your name.’ ”

“And I said that I can’t because I hadn’t said my name in 18 years,” Ms. Dugard said. But then, she said, “I wrote it down.”

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A Stream of Postcards, Shot by Phone

The rising star of these is Instagram, a start-up in San Francisco with just four employees. In eight months, the company has attracted close to five million users to its iPhone-only service — no doubt earning the envy of its more established rivals. And Instagram is steadily growing, adding about a million users a month.

The app emphasizes simplicity. Users can choose from a variety of special effects to layer over photos, sharpening the contrast or applying a vintage, weathered look. Then they upload the photo to their Instagram feed, forming a river of pictures, not unlike a photo-only version of Twitter.

As on Twitter, users can follow others to see what they are posting. They can also tap to “like” pictures and comment on them, making Instagram a slimmed-down social network. People snap and post pictures of anything, like pretty wallpaper at a restaurant or artsy close-ups of their cat climbing on the bed in the morning, offering a behind-the-scenes look at their lives.

Those who study the way people socialize online say cellphone photos are becoming an integral part of sharing and communicating.

“It’s another way to start a conversation online, and so much easier than sitting in front of a computer because it’s mobile,” said S. Shyam Sundar, the co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.

Professor Sundar said people once tended to take photos on special occasions, like birthdays and vacations, then post a big batch on services like Picasa and Flickr and share a link with friends. But with the introduction of smartphones with improved cameras, coupled with the rise of services like Facebook and Twitter, people are more accustomed to constantly documenting moments and sharing throughout the day.

“Instagram came on the scene right when people were beginning to work that into their regular broadcasting routine,” he said. “The convenience of a way to do it from your mobile phone — very easy.”

Kevin Systrom, a founder and the chief executive of Instagram, said the service’s early traction stemmed from its ability to make casual cellphone pictures look like works of art, with the help of filters.

“We set out to solve the main problem with taking pictures on a mobile phone,” he said, which is that they are often blurry or poorly composed. “We fixed that.”

The service has benefited from being easier to use than some of its rivals, said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner. “You take a photo, add a filter, post it online,” he said. “It’s the equivalent of firing off a tweet; it doesn’t require much thought or effort.”

Mr. Blau said Instagram’s early emphasis on opening its service to outside developers had helped it spread. For example, the service has given rise to a healthy network of companies and applications that offer ways to turn your shared photos into photobooks, framed prints and postcards. “You have a whole work force of software developers and entrepreneurs building products on top of your product,” he said.

The service is also attracting celebrities, brands and news organizations that see it as a new and nuanced way to interact with an audience. News outlets including NPR, ABC News, National Geographic, MTV and NBC are using Instagram to share picture updates and give audiences an insider’s view of their operations.

Joe Ruffalo, a senior vice president at ABC News Digital, said the company was experimenting with delivering news photos on Instagram as a way to reach people on a more intimate level.

“It provides a very different perspective to our followers than what they encounter on the Web or TV,” he said. ABC News has about 26,000 followers on Instagram, far fewer than on Facebook and Twitter.

Snoop Dogg and Rosie O’Donnell are Instagrammers, and Jamie Oliver, the British chef, uploads pictures of the meals he makes at home, as well as reminders to watch his TV show.

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Syrian Protesters Mass Again Despite Harsh Crackdown

The crowds protesting the authoritarian rule of President Bashar al-Assad appeared fueled in part by escalating anger about the torture and killing of a 13-year-old boy. Witnesses said protesters in dozens of communities on Friday dedicated their marches to him and other children killed during the uprising.

They defied the continuing brutal crackdown that has killed more than 1,000 people, with hundreds more rounded up in mass arrests.

On Friday, more than 30 protesters were killed in the city of Hamah, according to Rami Abdelrahman, a human rights monitor. That report could not be immediately confirmed.

The boy who was killed, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, has become a symbol of government oppression after a video of his mutilated body was circulated on YouTube.

“We won’t forgive, we will kill the child killer,” chanted protesters in Homs, a center of dissent, according to a witness who gave his name as Mohamed. “We will continue until your end.”

Earlier this week, Unicef issued an unusual statement describing “extreme violence against children in Syria.”

“We are particularly disturbed by the recent video images of children who were arbitrarily detained and suffered torture or ill-treatment during their detention, leading in some cases to their death,” the statement said.

Though Unicef has issued more general warnings about the effects of recent unrest in the Middle East on the lives of children there, the statement is the first time since the Arab Spring began that the organization has called on a specific government to investigate what it called “horrific acts” against children.

The Internet shutdown severely disrupted the flow of the YouTube videos and Facebook and Twitter posts that have allowed protesters and others to keep track of demonstrations, since foreign news media are banned and state media are heavily controlled. Both land lines and cellphones are so frequently monitored by Syria’s feared secret police that Skype had become a major means of communication among activists, and its loss as a tool may be a blow to the protest movement. Government Web sites, including those for the Ministry of Oil and the state news agency, SANA, remained online.

Two-thirds of Syria’s Internet network went offline at 6:35 a.m. Friday, said James Cowie, an analyst at Renesys, an Internet analytic firm, in a cascading blackout that took 30 minutes.

Forty of the country’s 59 Internet pathways were disabled, including Syria’s entire 3G mobile network, run by the country’s only telecom provider, Syriatel, which is owned by Rami Makhlouf, Mr. Assad’s cousin.

“People that want to use their smart phones to Tweet or read Web pages cannot,” Mr. Cowie said. “All of the IPs on those phones appear to be down.”

Phone service was also heavily disrupted across the country, and for the past several days, rights activists have reported that water and electricity had been shut off in a string of towns in central and southern Syria.

Egypt and Libya had earlier shut off access to the Internet in an attempt to crush popular uprisings led by young people and aided by social media networks.

“When a government shuts down the Internet, it shows the disconnection between the governing and the governed,” Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, wrote in a Twitter post on Friday afternoon.

Oula Abdulhamid, a Syrian activist who helped organize a conference for members of the Syrian opposition in Turkey this week, said the protest videos posted Friday were mainly the work of activists who had crossed Syria’s borders.

Liam Stack reported from Cairo, and Katherine Zoepf from New York. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

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Crime Scene: A Missing Bronx 12-Year-Old Is Back Home, but the Mystery Lingers

His case, happily, ended the way so many do, with his return home, but his parents’ relief has given way to new anxiety. They still do not know where he spent nine excruciating days in May.

“He said he was on the subway, he got off the subway, walked the streets,” his mother, Jennifer, said. “Get back on the subway, go to the library. He said he slept on the subway.” The family’s last name is being withheld in hopes of keeping this reminder of a troubled episode out of Internet searches for the rest of the boy’s life.

Children disappear in this city, and the city has a way of nudging them back home. The police send out e-mails with descriptions and pictures, and parents make their own “Missing” posters and put them up on lamp poles and, lately, on Facebook, the new milk carton.

Kids run away, or they get lost, or they are the subject of a communication mix-up between a mother and an aunt. But whatever happened to Denzel has refused to fall into any typical explanation, and suggests countless eyes passed over him without pausing.

If he knows where he was, he is not telling. More is known about what did not happen to him. His mother said he was given a rigorous exam by his doctor, who administered a wide variety of tests for drugs and disease. All negative, she said.

Jennifer, 50, works nights as a nurse’s aide at a nursing home, and Denzel is the baby of her three children. He had received a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and was struggling in school. “His concentration level is very poor,” his mother said. “He doesn’t complain about anything. He’s a jolly child. He’s a bit withdrawn lately, but I don’t see anything that tells me he’s going to run away.”

She was at work and her husband was asleep when the boy disappeared from their brick home in the Wakefield neighborhood of the northern Bronx before dawn on May 17. Denzel ran away from home twice before, but just overnight. The family called the police, and detectives took his school picture from a year ago.

Then, nothing.

No calls. The picture appeared on several Web sites. There was one reported sighting of Denzel, but it was false. Jennifer said she called Facebook, a site Denzel had increasingly visited on their home computer, but Facebook would not give her Denzel’s password without a detective’s request. The police said such a request requires a subpoena, but detectives were able to monitor activity on Denzel’s page, and saw none. Days passed after his disappearance on that Tuesday. The week ended. She was terrified that the boy’s gentle demeanor would bring him harm on the streets.

The weekend came and went.

Where would he go to use a computer? She visited libraries around her neighborhood. “I asked them to put the picture up inside,” Jennifer said, “but not so he could see it,” lest he panic and flee. The Wakefield branch had a better idea: an investigator for the library, Victor Nieves, attached a flag to his account, so that if Denzel used his card, a note with Mr. Nieves’s number would pop up on a librarian’s screen.

Thankfully, the plan did not have time to work. On the night of May 25, Denzel materialized, in the form of a dirty, gaunt boy, at his aunt’s front door in the Bronx. “His eyes were red,” Jennifer said. “Of course, he was skinny. He looked scared.”

His mother peppered him with questions. What did you eat? Where did you sleep? Did anyone abuse you? He said no, but little else.

“He came out of character, is how you would say it,” said Lt. Christopher Zimmerman with the Missing Persons Squad of the police. “I’m trying to be gentle with the wording. He is a 12-year-old boy.”

A psychiatrist examined Denzel on Tuesday, eight days after his reappearance. “The psychiatrist said he’s charming, but not talking,” Jennifer said. He was admitted for more tests. His father thinks hospitalization is an overreaction. The boy needs to talk to someone, that’s all.

For his mother, this not-knowing is torture. Her boy is back, but this piece of his 12-year-old life is still missing. She tells herself she should have seen this, as if mental distress were a bloody nose or a skinned knee.

“I thought I was doing a good job, but something slipped by me,” Jennifer said this week, in tears. “If someone saw him, they can say, ‘I saw him here, begging.’ That would be something.”

Involved in a crime?
E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com.

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Selling J. R., Lock, Stock and Swagger

Mr. Hagman, 79, trotted down Wilshire Boulevard here on Thursday evening, alighting at Julien’s Auctions, across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue. Yes, he was on horseback. Joining him was Linda Gray, 70, who played his vodka-swilling wife, Sue Ellen, on that 1980s-era drama. The pair got a motorcycle escort by the Beverly Hills Police Department.

Odd? A little, perhaps. But Southern California, sophisticated as it may have become, remains show business country — a place where the bizarre is just part of business. Mr. Hagman’s dramatic arrival was part of a preview event for Julien’s Saturday sale of his stash of memorabilia and estate items, many from his days on “Dallas.”

Inside the auction house, potential bidders inspected the goods while eating cubed cheese and scooping guacamole from giant martini glasses. The holy grail, at least for hard-core fans, appeared to be the oil painting of the family patriarch, Jock Ewing, that once hung in the Southfork living room. (Estimated price: $2,000 to $3,000.)

Mr. Hagman, his eyes twinkling, said the horses were his idea. “They came to me in a dream,” he said.

Why is he selling? “There comes a time, even in J. R. Ewing’s life,” he said, “when you have to downsize.” Besides, he added, even with 413 items on the auction block, “I have more left at home than I know what to do with.”

As the “Dallas” theme song trumpeted, Charlene Tilton, the actress who played J. R.’s ne’er-do-well niece Lucy, stood nearby and lamented her lack of forethought about collectibility. “I didn’t save a damn thing,” she said.

Just then, two not-so-convincing drag queens walked by, sending mouths agape. “You never know who’s going to be a ‘Dallas’ fan,” Ms. Tilton said brightly. As it turns out, the two sometimes do security work for Julien’s (as men) and were thus invited.

But Ms. Tilton’s point was that “Dallas” was not just any show. Broadcast on CBS from 1978 to 1991, the series at times seemed to power the era’s culture, celebrating personal wealth and the shoulder pads that came with it. About 84 million Americans tuned in to find out who shot J. R. in 1980, an audience that remains one of the largest in TV history.

The lasting fan base is one reason that TNT and Warner Brothers are working on a “Dallas” reboot centered on the next generation of the Ewing clan. Mr. Hagman and Ms. Gray both appeared in the recently completed pilot.

“We love the ‘Dallas,’ ” said one Eastern European tourist who came running down the street upon spotting Mr. Hagman (and who insisted she was too busy snapping photos to give her name).

“I Dream of Jeannie,” Mr. Hagman’s 1960s comedy, shows up in the sale: a reproduction of that show’s signature purple bottle, priced at about $1,500. Mr. Hagman’s mother, Mary Martin, is represented with “Peter Pan” ephemera and stage costumes. But many items are furnishings from Mr. Hagman’s homes, like a taxidermy coiled snake, with exposed fangs and rattle, $150.

“This is somebody who has a global fan base,” said Darren Julien, owner of the auction house. “All of these things are very marketable.”

Not everyone was so sure outside Julien’s, which occupies a stately corner near Rodeo Drive. A man in a silver Mercedes stopped and, rolling down his window, inquired about the commotion.

“You mean, people are actually waiting in line to see Larry Hagman? Now I’ve seen everything,” he said before speeding off.

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Hiring in U.S. Slowed in May With 54,000 Jobs Added

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the nation added 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month, after an increase of about 220,000 jobs in each of the three previous months. The gain in May was about a third of what economists had been forecasting. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, edged up to 9.1 percent from 9.0 percent in April.

“The economy clearly just hit a brick wall,” said Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics. “It’s almost as if it came to a complete standstill.”

While most analysts do not believe that the country will slide back into a recession — which would technically mean that the economy would start shrinking again — they acknowledge that with such low levels of hiring, the recovery is barely perceptible to many Americans.

In Washington, today’s hiring challenges have been receiving less attention than tomorrow’s fiscal ones. But a week of dismal news on manufacturing, housing and car sales may shift the discussion. Some pressure is building on the Obama administration and Congress to delay federal spending cuts, which economists say will weigh down the fragile recovery. Liberal groups have renewed their calls for more aid to the states and more aggressive action from the Federal Reserve.

In some ways the moment is reminiscent of a year ago, when the economy also slowed abruptly just as it seemed to be gaining momentum. At the time, the slowdown was attributed to worries over the European debt crisis, just as Friday’s report was partly attributed to temporary stresses from higher energy prices and natural disasters. Last year’s downshift was followed by additional federal spending and another round of asset purchases by the Federal Reserve.

In remarks to Chrysler workers in Toledo, Ohio, President Obama conceded that the economy was still weak, and that policy makers had more work to do.

“Even though the economy is growing, even though it’s created more than two million jobs over the past 15 months, we still face some tough times,” he said. “You know, it’s just like if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, it’s going to take a while for you to mend.  And that’s what’s happened to our economy.  It’s taking a while to mend.”

Republicans,  meanwhile, countered that Democratic efforts to revive growth through public spending programs have failed and renewed their calls for sharp cuts in federal spending and regulation to spur corporate investment.

Though the White House cautioned against putting too much weight on one report, Friday’s release showed disturbing trends across the economy.

Job growth for April and March was revised downward. State and local governments, struggling with severe budget shortfalls, continued to shed jobs in May. They are expected to keep laying off workers for months to come.

Private companies added jobs, but the pace of hiring fell to its lowest level in a year. The biggest gains were in professional and business services and in health care services, which grew steadily even during the recession.

One particularly unsettling note was the lack of a pickup in temporary help services. Temp hiring is considered a bellwether for broader hiring, since employers often try out temporary employees when considering whether to take on additional permanent staff. Employment in temporary help services was essentially unchanged in May and April.

Another leading indicator — the length of the workweek — was also disappointing. Usually businesses have existing employees work longer hours before hiring more workers. But the average did not budge in May.

Manufacturers delivered another blow by ending a six-month streak of job gains. They instead eliminated 5,000 jobs in May.

“They were our bright spot for so many months,” said Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization. “They were what was pulling the economy forward.”

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Edwards Pleads Not Guilty in Campaign Fund Case

John Edwards with his daughter, Cate, outside the Federal Building in Winston-Salem, N.C. on Friday.

John Edwards, the former Democratic senator from North Carolina and nominee for vice president in 2004, was once one of his party’s most promising young stars. But on Friday he found himself in a stunning fall from grace — in a courtroom in North Carolina, being read his rights.

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John Edwards enters the Federal Building in downtown Winston-Salem, N.C. on Friday. A grand jury indicted the two-time presidential candidate, accusing him of trying to protect his political ambitions by soliciting and secretly spending more than $925,000 to hide his mistress and their baby from the public.

Earlier in the day, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges that he violated federal campaign finance laws by “secretly obtaining and using” contributions from wealthy benefactors to conceal his mistress and their baby while he was running for president in 2008.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges and set the stage for a trial that will most likely dredge up embarrassing details of his affair and his betrayal of his wife and those who believed in his campaign. But Mr. Edwards, a skilled trial lawyer, had rejected a chance to avoid a trial through a plea bargain, opting instead to take his chances in front of a jury.

“I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that I’ve caused to others,” Mr. Edwards told reporters outside the courthouse in Winston-Salem afterward. “But I did not break the law. And I never, ever thought that I was breaking the law.”

The trial was scheduled to begin July 11 in Winston-Salem, but lawyers involved said they expected it would start much later.

The grand jury, which has been investigating the case for two years, indicted Mr. Edwards on six counts — one involving conspiracy, four involving illegal payments and one involving false statements. If he is found guilty, Mr. Edwards, 57, faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

Mr. Edwards’s wife, Elizabeth, died of cancer in December. The couple had two young children and an older daughter, Cate, a lawyer, who accompanied Mr. Edwards to court. Mr. Edwards was released without having to post bail, but was ordered to turn in his passport and to avoid talking with potential witnesses.

The indictment contends that Mr. Edwards and his co-conspirators solicited $725,000 from Rachel Mellon, the 100-year-old heiress to the Mellon banking fortune, and $200,000 from Fred Baron, Mr. Edwards’s campaign finance chairman.

The money, the indictment said, was used to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter, a campaign videographer with whom he had a child, and to pay for her prenatal medical expenses, travel and accommodations.

The fact that Mr. Edwards tried to cover up his affair is not at issue. The Justice Department says that those contributions from two wealthy patrons were campaign donations and therefore subject to federal campaign finance laws that set limits on the amounts that can be donated and received, and require public reporting. Those two donations were well in excess of the limit of $2,300 that an individual can give.

The indictment says the money was actually used for campaign purposes: If the public knew that he was having an affair, his campaign would have been over. (It was over anyway, before he confessed to the affair in August 2008, having lost too many primaries to the political superstars Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it might have imploded even earlier, or never even gotten off the ground.)

“Mr. Edwards is alleged to have accepted more than $900,000 in an effort to conceal from the public facts that he believed would harm his candidacy,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer said in a statement. “As this indictment shows, we will not permit candidates for high office to abuse their special ability to access the coffers of their political supporters to circumvent our election laws.”

The Edwards defense is that the money was used not for political reasons but for personal reasons: he wanted to conceal the affair from his wife.

The Edwards legal team, headed by Gregory B. Craig, who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings, says the government is trying an untested theory and applying a too-broad definition of campaign contributions.

Robbie Brown reported from Winston-Salem, N.C.

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Massey Energy’s Ex-Chief Rejects Finding in Blast

WASHINGTON — Two weeks after an independent government commission concluded that Massey Energy was to blame for the explosion that killed 29 coal miners last year, the company’s former chairman released a report on Thursday disputing the panel’s finding.

The circumstances of the release were peculiar. It was made public this week by Bobby R. Inman, Massey’s former chairman. Mr. Inman no longer has a role in the company, after its purchase last week by Alpha Natural Resources, a Virginia-based company, but he is named in multiple lawsuits by shareholders. In a cover letter on his own letterhead dated Thursday, Mr. Inman said that the report was completed before the merger with Alpha, but that it was held at the request of Alpha executives who wanted to “minimize publicity” pre-sale.

In a terse statement, Alpha stated that it “did not commission or authorize the release of this report or the letter, and was not given the opportunity to review either this report or the letter before their public release.”

Alpha added that it had warned Massey before the merger that it would be “inappropriate” to release any findings before Alpha had a chance to conduct its own review of what happened, a warning that Mr. Inman, a retired Navy admiral, apparently chose not to heed.

“It would have been easy just to let it slide, and I certainly don’t need any additional publicity,” Mr. Inman wrote. He chose to “release the report now on my own,” out of “a strong sense of responsibility for all those who mine coal.”

The 102-page report reiterated Massey’s earlier assertion that the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia on April 5, 2010, was caused by a sudden and massive inundation of natural gas, essentially an “act of God” that would have been impossible to predict or control.

That conclusion directly contradicts the May finding by a commission, led by a former federal mine safety chief, J. Davitt McAteer, that placed the blame for the explosion on Massey’s negligence and culture of putting production over safety.

The Massey report also disputed the panel’s conclusion that coal dust, which had been allowed to accumulate, had carried the explosion through the mine, making it far more lethal than it might otherwise have been.

It defended the mine’s ventilation system, which the commission said had helped create conditions for the blast.

The report spent considerable space detailing what it said were the failures of the federal Mining, Safety and Health Administration, including, it said, secrecy, witness intimidation and obstruction of Massey investigators.

Mr. McAteer disputed that assessment in a telephone interview, and said that some of the report’s conclusions “simply don’t make any sense,” like the assertion that the high levels of natural gas in the mine after the explosion were evidence that a big gas infusion was the cause.

“Quite frankly, that conclusion is uninformed,” Mr. McAteer said, explaining that spikes in methane occur after virtually every mine disaster.

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Hacking of White House E-mail Affected Diverse Departments

WASHINGTON — The computer phishing attack that Google says originated in China was directed, somewhat indiscriminately, at an unknown number of White House staff officials, setting off the Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry that began this week, according to several administration officials.

It is unclear how many White House staff members — or those of other departments in the executive branch — might have been affected, according to two officials with knowledge of the investigation. But the intended victims ranged across various functions in the White House, and were not limited to those working on national security, economic policy or trade areas that would be of particular interest to the Chinese government.

Administration officials said they had no evidence any confidential information was breached, or even that many people fell for the attack by providing information that would allow a breach of their Gmail accounts.

White House classified systems run on dedicated lines and information on those systems, the officials said, cannot be forwarded to Gmail accounts. But investigators were trying to determine if the attackers believed that some staff members or other officials used their personal e-mail accounts for confidential government communications.

“Right now,” said one senior official, “that’s a theory, not a fact.”

Google disclosed the attack this week and said that it was directed at not only American government officials, but also human right activists, journalists and South Korea’s government. Google tracked the attack to Jinan, China, which is the home to a Chinese military regional command center.

But that does not necessarily mean the attackers were Chinese or related to the government. The Chinese government denied any involvement.

The attack used e-mails that appeared to be tailored to their victims, the better to fool them, a technique known as spear phishing. Recipients were asked to click on a link to a phony Gmail login page that gave the hackers access to their personal accounts.

The attacks come as the United States government considers expanding its use of Web-based software for e-mail, along with word processing, spreadsheets and other kinds of documents. Google is one of the many companies vying for the business with its Apps product, as is Microsoft.

Web based e-mail would be vulnerable to hackers who steal login information through phishing attacks. But Web-based systems are not necessarily any easier to hack than traditional e-mail, which a government agency would usually manage using its own servers, said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, a computer security firm in Traverse City, Mich.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said on Thursday that all White House-related electronic mail was supposed to be conducted on work e-mail accounts to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which governs how those communications are protected and archived. Mr. Carney said there was no evidence that any White House accounts were compromised.

White House employees are permitted to have private e-mail accounts, he said, but cannot use them for work purposes.

Officials at the White House and other agencies often keep two computers in their offices, one for unclassified work and another for classified. Senior officials sometimes have a “secure facility” in their homes, in which computers and telephones are on dedicated lines and communications are encrypted.

Given its size, Google and its Gmail system will always make an attractive target.

Other personal e-mail services, including Yahoo and Microsoft’s Hotmail, have faced similar attacks, according to Trend Micro, a computer security company in Cupertino, Calif. “The types of attacks that are happening against Web mail users aren’t confined to Gmail alone and extend to other e-mail platforms,” said Nart Villeneuve, a senior threat researcher for Trend Micro.

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The Lede: Syrians to March for Young Martyrs

A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News on the death of a 13-year-old boy in Syria who has become an icon of the protest movement.

Syrians calling for President Bashar al-Assad to step down plan to march on Friday in memory of children who have been killed during the uprising, The Associated Press reports.

As my colleague Liam Stack explained earlier this week, images of the battered body of one young protester — a 13-year-old boy named Hamza Ali al-Khateeb whose remains were returned to his family last week — have sparked particular outrage since they began to circulate online.

The images come from a very graphic postmortem video, apparently filmed by the boy’s family before his funeral, which appeared to show that he was tortured and mutilated as well as shot and killed. (The video is so disturbing that it was briefly removed from YouTube last weekend, but it has now been reinstated.)

Video posted online by Syrian activists, said to to show last week’s funeral for a 13-year-old protester in Jiza, a southern Syrian village.

A commemorative Facebook page, called “We Are All the Child Martyr Hamza Ali al-Khateeb” — which echoes the “We Are All Khaled Said” page set up in honor of an Egyptian whose death at the hands of the police helped spark the revolution there — urged protesters to take to the streets on Friday for “The Day of Hamza.”

In an apparent attempt to tamp down the anger raised by the video of the young boy, whose death has been compared to that of the Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan, Syrian state television produced a report this week which, it said, “unveiled the truth about the story of martyr Hamza al-Khateeb.”

According to a young man featured in the television report, who claimed to have witnessed the boy’s shooting, he was not killed during a peaceful protest by the security forces but during a gun battle initiated by armed demonstrators who opened fire on Syrian soldiers.

Syria’s official news agency, SANA, added that a “professor of media psychology at Damascus University, Majdi Fares, said the incident of al-Khateeb’s death was used by some satellite channels and media in a biased way for misleading purposes through lies and fabrications.”

After Syrian activists reported that the boy’s father had been detained by the authorities following the release of the video of his son’s body, Syrian television broadcast a prerecorded interview with him on Tuesday, in which he praised Syria’s president.

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The Caucus: Declaring Run, Romney Says Obama Failed

Brian Snyder/ReutersMitt Romney announced that he is formally entering the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday.

2:17 p.m. | Updated STRATHAM, N.H. — Declaring America to be broken, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, on Thursday harshly criticized President Obama and pitched himself as the turnaround specialist the country needs as he formally began his second run for president.

Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of failing to live up to the promise of economic recovery he made in his 2008 campaign. And he blamed the president for high unemployment, rising gasoline prices, falling home values and a soaring national debt.

“At the time, we didn’t know what sort of a president he would make,” Mr. Romney said as he made his announcement from a family farm in New Hampshire. “Now, in the third year of his four-year term, we have more than promises and slogans to go by. Barack Obama has failed America.”

The attacks on Mr. Obama promise to be a centerpiece of Mr. Romney’s campaign as he seeks to present himself as the inevitable choice for Republicans eager to reclaim the White House. In his speech on Thursday, he pledged, without hesitance, to repeal the president’s health care reforms.

“We will return responsibility and authority to the states for dozens of government programs – and that begins with a complete repeal of Obamacare,” he said in his speech. “From my first day in office my No. 1 job will be to see that America once again is No. 1 in job creation.”

At the farm, Mr. Romney invited supporters and members of the news media to a cookout with him and his wife, Ann. Under clear but windy skies and with tractors and hay bales as a backdrop, Mr. Romney hoped to send the message that he intended to win New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.

The choice of the Bittersweet Farm for his announcement is an interesting one for Mr. Romney, who regularly argues for a smaller federal government that spends less. The rolling green hills of the farm were preserved in recent years in part with $1 million in federal money, according to a recent report in Seacoast Online.

A spokesman for Mr. Romney’s campaign told John Harwood of The New York Times: “I don’t think it’s fair to call it a federally subsidized backdrop. It’s a nice farm in New Hampshire, a landmark.”

Mr. Romney has emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination after reassembling a powerful fund-raising apparatus and an extensive campaign operation from his 2008 run. But he faces tough questions from conservatives about the health care plan he pushed through as governor.

Democrats are already firing back at his economic argument. An Internet video released Thursday morning by the Democratic National Committee cast Mr. Romney as someone who takes  positions out of convenience, not principle.

Mr. Romney is “going into this campaign with the same fatal flaws that doomed him the first time around,” said Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic National Committee spokesman. “That he’s seen as a wishy-washy, flip-flopping politician who lacks any core convictions or principles and who you simply can’t trust to shoot straight with you.”

Mr. Romney’s path to the presidency must first go through his potential Republican rivals, who are eager to steal the spotlight. Even as he spoke, they were on the move. Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, criticized Mr. Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan even as her “One Nation” bus tour headed toward the coastal town of Portsmouth, N.H., for a clambake Thursday evening.

“In my opinion, any mandate coming from government is not a good thing, so obviously … there will be more the explanation coming from former Governor Romney on his support for government mandates,” Ms. Palin told reporters in Boston, taking aim at Mr. Romney’s past support for a requirement that individuals in Massachusetts buy health insurance.

“It’s tough for a lot of us independent Americans to accept, because we have great faith in the private sectors and our own families,” Ms. Palin said. “And our own businessmen and women making decisions for ourselves. Not any level of government telling us what to do.”

Asked on Thursday what he thought about Ms. Palin’s arrival in New Hampshire, Mr. Romney said: “I think it’s great. New Hampshire is action central today.” In addition to Ms. Palin, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, was also in New Hampshire on Thursday, speaking to a local Republican committee.

Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former governor of Utah, arrives this weekend for several days in the Granite State. And Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, has said he will compete aggressively in New Hampshire.

Mr. Romney made no mention of his potential rivals. Instead, he painted a picture of a country in crisis. He said that he “believes in America,” but said it is suffering under the current administration.

“We look at our country and we know in our hearts that things aren’t right, and they’re not getting better,” he said.

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For Marion, a Nice Career Despite an Ugly Shot

“I cringe,” said Dennis Scott, the former Orlando Magic shooting legend.

Marion’s wrists flick around chin level, and the ball sails toward the horizon.

“The worst shot I’ve ever seen in my life,” said the shooting guru David Thorpe, dispensing with all diplomacy.

Type the phrase “ugly jump shot” into Google, and the first link is a YouTube video of Marion flinging and shot-putting 3-pointers. The form stays true, and truly hideous, on free throws and practice shots. Scroll down, and a computer-generated Marion is putting up the same unsightly shot in a video-game clip.

“I haven’t seen anything like it,” Charles Barkley says politely, “but it’s just effective.”

As the Dallas Mavericks battle the Miami Heat for the N.B.A. title, the hitches and hiccups in Marion’s supremely unconventional shot have become amplified. But the results have always been much more pleasant than the delivery.

In a dozen N.B.A. seasons, Marion has averaged 16.8 points a game, with a shooting percentage of .485, a .332 rate from 3-point range and an .812 rate at the free-throw line. At 33, he may not be the freakishly athletic Matrix of his Phoenix Suns days, but he remains a skilled scorer from a variety of spots on the court.

But that jump shot. Oh, that jump shot.

“He kind of shoots the ball from his forehead,” said Dan Sparks, who coached Marion for two years at Vincennes University, a junior college in Indiana. “Fundamentally, his jump shot is about as poor as you’re going to get. But he was always successful with it.”

This is one of the great confounding mysteries of modern basketball. Marion violates nearly every precept of proper jump shooting — balance, ball position, arm extension, follow-through. Coaches and purists turn away in horror. Yet the ball keeps finding the net — at least, more than it has a right to.

From 2002-3 to 2006-7, Marion averaged 104 3-pointers a season and nearly 20 points a game for the Suns. He ranks 19th in scoring among active players, with 15,151 points — just behind Chauncey Billups (known as Mr. Big Shot) and not far behind Jason Terry, the Mavericks’ designated shooter.

Marion’s résumé contains 6,186 made shots, or 6,186 moments where someone wondered, “How in the name of James Naismith did that go in?”

To which Marion replies, a bit defensively, “How many people have scored 15,000-plus points in their career?”

This is a touchy area for Marion, a four-time All-Star who has always been reticent to discuss his peculiar form. When the subject was raised this week, he answered with a disarming smile and staccato answers. He turned twitchy, the way Rodney Dangerfield did just before he grabbed his tie knot and declared, “I don’t get no respect.”

“It just goes in,” Marion said. “Hey, what difference does it make?”

To Thorpe, the executive director of Pro Training Center in Clearwater, Fla., it makes all the difference. Thorpe has built a career on fixing errant jumpers and creating jump shots where they did not exist. He has worked with more than 25 N.B.A. players, including the Heat’s Udonis Haslem and the Houston Rockets’ Kevin Martin.

After watching Marion’s pregame routine before Game 1 of the finals, Thorpe summed up his jump shot in two words: “Completely broken.”

The shot starts much lower than it should. Marion’s arms never extend more than halfway on his follow-through. In the moment before the ball is released, Marion’s hands are tucked to his chest, like a Tyrannosaurus rex. Thorpe compared it to a golfer who stops swinging when the club hits the ball.

“He only does 50 percent of the shot,” Thorpe said, adding, “He’s unbelievably talented, though, so he makes it enough to be serviceable as a shooter.”

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DealBook: Groupon Files to Go Public

The social buying site Groupon filed on Thursday to go public with plans to raise an estimated $750 million in a highly anticipated debut that comes amid a frenzy for new technology companies like LinkedIn and Yandex.

Groupon, a Chicago-based start-up, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in its short life. Shortly after starting in 2008, Groupon notched revenue of $94 million. Two years later, it had swelled to $713 million.

The company reported $644.7 million of revenue in the first quarter of 2011 alone, with 83 million subscribers across 43 countries, according to its filing.

As its prospects have grown, so has investor interest.

Last year, the company was worth roughly $1.4 billion, based on a fund-raising round led by D.S.T. Global. Groupon spurned a $6 billion bid from Google in December. A month later, the start-up raised nearly $1 billion from large institutional investors like Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price. Groupon’s value was pegged at $25 billion just a couple of months ago, based on discussions for the initial public offering.

In a letter to prospective shareholders, Groupon’s chief executive, Andrew Mason, highlighted the company’s growth opportunity but cautioned investors to temper their expectations.

“In the past, we’ve made investments in growth that turned a healthy, forecasted quarterly profit into a sizable loss,” he said. “When we see opportunities to invest in long-term growth, expect that we will pursue them regardless of certain short-term consequences.”

Like many start-ups, Groupon is still struggling to turn a profit. Last year, the company’s loss topped $450 million, compared with $6.9 million in 2009 and $2.2 million in 2008.

It’s unclear when its fortunes will turn. The company warned, under the risk factors in its filing, that it had lost money since its inception and that it expected its operating expenses to grow for some time.

The company’s biggest expense is marketing. Groupon spent $263.2 million on online advertising, subscriber e-mails and the like, compared with just $4.5 million the year before.

“We cannot be certain that we will be able to attain or increase profitability on a quarterly or annual basis,” the filing said.

Groupon’s investors and early employees stand to reap a windfall in an I.P.O. The company’s largest shareholder, Eric P. Lefkofsky, a co-founder and board member, would be worth billions of dollars. Mr. Lefkofsky owns 64.1 million shares, or roughly 21.6 percent of the company’s Class A common stock. The venture capital firm, Accel Partners, which invested in Groupon in November 2009, owns a 5.6 percent stake. Mr. Mason, who made $180,000 for his base salary last year, controls 7.7 percent of the company.

Groupon, which will trade under the ticker “GRPN,” has hired Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse as lead underwriters for the offering.

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Despite Cutbacks, Night Court’s Small Dramas Go On

“Look at the bright side, it’s Oct. 27 in this year,” Judge Purificacion said, with a gallows-humor grin.

The New York State courts have taken a $170 million budget cut, and the small-claims courts in New York City are taking an especially big hit, with many night sessions eliminated, growing lines and increasing delays. But life does not stop, so the modest dramas of the small-claims courts are piling up: neighbor disputes, battles over bedbugs, and grudge matches that spill out into the hallways.

“I don’t know how long I’m going to be coming here,” Ms. Carter said, before she gets her day in court — or in this case, night in court.

Visiting the night small-claims court on Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica offers a catalog of the irritations of city life, writ small. A livery-car driver was irate. Two former friends seemed about to spit. And Tashmina Muslima was dejected when her case against her former landlord was postponed until November, the next time an official Bengali interpreter would be available.

“I’m very surprised,” Ms. Muslima said outside Judge Purificacion’s courtroom, “because this is a very important place to come for justice.”

With court budgets cut in some 30 states, small-claims courts have been among the least noted casualties.

But some judges say cutbacks in “the people’s court” can be among the most painful because a small-claims case can keep a little annoyance (under $5,000 in New York) from growing into a big one. No lawyers are required, and night sessions make justice accessible to people who work.

But in some places across the nation, small-claims courts are a little smaller than they used to be because of state financial trouble. In Covelo, Calif., the court that handles small claims and other cases now meets once every other month, instead of once a month. In Clackamas County, Ore., night court for small claims has been eliminated.

In New York, budget reductions that went into effect in April mean that in four boroughs, night small-claims courts that once met four nights a week meet only on Thursday nights.

On Staten Island, night small-claims court meets only once a month.

In Queens, court officials have nearly doubled the list of cases facing the single night court judge every Thursday, to about 200. Even so, they project that newly filed small-claims cases are soon likely to have to wait until 2012 for their first court date, about four times the 45-day wait before the cutbacks. “It’s going to snowball,” said Charles S. Lopresto, the supervising judge in the Sutphin Boulevard courthouse.

By 7:30 on a recent Thursday night, Judge Purificacion was deep into the first of eight trials he would conduct that night. A home improvement contractor, it seemed, had promised a palatial bathroom. But, according to the homeowner, the contractor had arrived with “a vagrant, which is also a convict” as his helper, and when they left “the floor was down here and the bathroom was up here.”

The contractor’s argument had a certain elegant simplicity. “He’s lying in court,” he said. Judge Purificacion, who was a children’s book editor and writer before he was a lawyer, was economical in his use of time. Within minutes he was on to the next trial.

A decision would be in the mail, which is not how Judge Judy does it on television, but it has the advantage that people sometimes leave court calmly when emotions run high.

Judge Purificacion moved on to the case of the shared driveway, a suit by Jose A. Moncada against his neighbors in Ozone Park, Maria and Shawn Charles. Mr. Moncada claimed damage to a piece of his motorcycle, which he said the Charleses knocked over in the driveway.

He seemed to be waving the broken part in an envelope. But he did not get to unveil it. In short order, Judge Purificacion had both sides at his bench under the “In God We Trust” sign. He was putting numbers in an oversize calculator he uses to demonstrate the benefits of settlement. Soon, he had the neighbors agreeing that the Charleses would give Mr. Moncada $250 in three payments.

For the moment, peace seemed to reign.

By now, Judge Purificacion was grimacing in his chair because of a back twinge. He had heard cases all day before starting night court at 6:30.

But, onward: the case of the livery driver, Nurul Afsar, whose dispatcher said he had faked an accident. “That a lie,” Mr. Afsar testified.

The decision would be in the mail.

The bedbug trial was next. It was 10 p.m. But before the landlord’s lawyer, Patrick McGuire, could ask a single Perry Mason question of the tenant, Claudia Medina, there was shouting in the hall.

“He’s a bully!” someone screamed. “I want this man arrested!”

Court officers went running. In the hallway, Mr. Charles and Mr. Moncada, the neighbors with the shared driveway, were nose to nose. The spirit of amiable settlement was gone, despite what Judge Purificacion’s calculator had said. There was some pushing, and Mr. Moncada was hustled by the officers out onto Sutphin Boulevard, while Mr. Charles was told to stay put. They would be allowed to leave only separately.

Peace returned to the courthouse. But Mr. Charles said he and his neighbor were not likely to be friends. They had been in small-claims court before and were likely to be back, he said. .

Inside the courtroom, Mr. McGuire was cross-examining Ms. Medina on what he suggested was her unproven theory that bedbugs had infested her apartment in Kew Gardens as a result of inattention by the landlord. “There is,” he asked, knowing the answer in the almost empty courtroom, “no expert to testify as to the bedbug nature?”

She had not brought an expert, she conceded. It was 10:30, and the decision would be in the mail.

It was time for the case of the former friends. One wanted money for storing furniture for the other.

“Did you hear what she was saying under her breath?” the first one asked.

“I don’t want to see her,” said the other.

It was the last case Judge Purificacion had time for. There were 50 others ready that he had not gotten to.

When he sent the two former friends home at 11:15, he told them to leave the courthouse separately.

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Abramson to Replace Keller as The Times’s Executive Editor

Ms. Abramson has been one of Mr. Keller’s two top deputies since 2003, serving at his side as he steered The Times through a period of journalistic distinction and economic distress. Mr. Keller said that with the paper’s finances now on surer footing, he felt at ease handing the reins to Ms. Abramson.

The move was accompanied by another shift in senior management. Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief and former editor of The Los Angeles Times, will become the managing editor for news.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher and the chairman of The New York Times Company, thanked Mr. Keller, calling him a “truly valued partner” in a speech Thursday morning in the Times newsroom, where the staff stood shoulder to shoulder to hear the publisher announce the first changeover in the top editing jobs in eight years.

Turning toward Ms. Abramson, who will become the first woman to be editor of the paper in its 160-year history, Mr. Sulzberger said, “Jill, Bill’s decision to step down may be bittersweet. But the thought of you as our next executive editor gives me and gives all of us great comfort and great confidence.”

The appointments are effective Sept. 6. John M. Geddes, 59, will continue in his role as managing editor for news operations.

Over the course of Mr. Keller’s tenure, the paper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes and expanded its online audience to some 50 million readers worldwide. But the economic downturn and the drift of readers and advertisers to the Web also forced the paper to lay off members of the news staff and tighten budgets considerably.

“A couple of years ago, everybody was wringing their hands about doomsday for the news business,” Mr. Keller said to the staff, his voice emotional at times. “People talked, some of them rather smugly, about even The New York Times not being long for this world. And now you look around, and we are economically sturdy. We are rich in talent. We are growing.”

Mr. Keller will continue to write for The Times Magazine and as a columnist for the new Sunday opinion section, which will make its debut this month. Mr. Sulzberger said he accepted Mr. Keller’s resignation “with mixed emotions,” adding that the decision to leave was entirely Mr. Keller’s.

Mr. Keller, 62, is still a few years shy of the paper’s mandatory retirement age for senior executives, but he held the top job for roughly the same period of time as Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld, two of the editors who preceded him. Mr. Frankel and Mr. Lelyveld returned to the newsroom for the announcement.

Mr. Keller had asked Ms. Abramson to be his managing editor in 2003 as he assembled a team that he hoped would restore confidence in the paper after the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Ms. Abramson had been part of a group of editors who clashed with Howell Raines, the executive editor who was forced out after Mr. Blair’s fraud was discovered.

Ms. Abramson, 57, said being named executive editor was “the honor of my life” and like “ascending to Valhalla” for someone who read The Times as a young girl growing up in New York. “We are held together by our passion for our work, our friendship and our deep belief in the mission and indispensability of The Times,” she said. “I look forward to working with all of you to seize our future. In this thrilling and challenging transition, we will cross to safety together.”

The selection of Ms. Abramson is something of a departure for The Times, an institution that has historically chosen executive editors who ascended the ranks through postings in overseas bureaus and managing desks like Foreign or Metro.

Ms. Abramson came to The Times in 1997 from The Wall Street Journal, where she was  a deputy bureau chief and an investigative reporter for nine years. She rose quickly at The Times, becoming Washington editor in 1999 and then bureau chief in 2000. She stepped aside temporarily from her day-to-day duties as managing editor last year to help run The Times’s online operations, a move she asked to make so she could develop fuller, firsthand experience with the integration of the digital and print staffs.

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Legal Outsourcing Firms Creating Jobs for American Lawyers

Top American firms have cut hiring or moved to a lower-tier pay system for many new associates. Corporations are reducing their legal departments. Legal temp companies now pay as little as $20 a hour to board-certified lawyers for document reviews that a decade ago might have been billed at $200 an hour.

But there is at least one glimmer of light. And it comes from a surprising direction.

Outsourcing firms, the companies that in recent years added to the financial woes of the American legal profession by sending work to low-cost countries like India, are now creating jobs for lawyers in the United States.

The American salaries for outsourced work, typically in the $50,000 to $80,000 range, may look meager compared with the six figures that new associates might still hope to draw at a big firm. But outsourcing jobs typically pay better than temp work — and certainly better than no work at all.

And at that salary range, American lawyers start to look a bit more competitive with their offshore counterparts — and more attractive to potential American clients that might not be comfortable sending legal work overseas.

“If we’re going to deliver a fantastic client experience, the only way to do it is to have an onshore facility,” said Sanjay Kamlani, co-chief executive of Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with offices in New York and Mumbai.

Pangea3, which was bought by Thomson Reuters in November, has just opened a 400-seat office in Carrollton, Tex., a Dallas suburb. The new office means Pangea3 will have lawyers working during United States business hours, on tasks that, because of logistics or American law, can be difficult to perform outside the country — like writing and vetting export control documents, military contracts and some patent reviews.

Many of Pangea3’s main competitors are already doing legal work in the United States and have been hiring steadily in recent months. And though the industry’s total number of employees in the United States is still estimated to be only in the hundreds, analysts predict fast growth for the field.

Because legal outsourcing companies grew steadily during the recession as corporations trimmed legal staffs, the industry was able to attract investors like Thomson Reuters and Intermediate Capital Group. Now legal outsourcing companies and others are opening offices and hiring lawyers in lower-cost areas in the United States, like West Virginia and North Dakota.

Legal outsourcing companies employ about 16,000 people worldwide, according to Edward Brooks, founder of the LPO Program, which matches legal outsourcing companies with potential clients.

The industry made an estimated $400 million in revenue in 2010, according to the researcher The Datamonitor Group, which was just a tiny fraction of the world’s $200-billion-a-year legal market. But Datamonitor predicts legal outsourcing revenues will grow to $2.4 billion by 2012, based on the industry’s recent rapid expansion. In part because of the harsh economic climate of the last few years, “the reality is that the United States and the United Kingdom have many lower-cost locations and good supplies of legal professionals,” said Mark Ross, a vice president at Integreon, an outsourcing company based in Los Angeles.

Integreon has lawyers and paralegals in 17 offices around the world, including India and South Africa. But the company, which is now hiring lawyers and other legal professionals in its Fargo, N.D., and Bristol, England, offices, currently has about 500 employees in the United States and expects to have 600 by the end of the year.

In the United States, outsourcing companies are hiring lawyers from temporary legal services firms or recruiting them directly out of law school. The pay is often comparable to lawyers’ salaries in smaller cities. And the jobs can come with other benefits, like equity stakes in the company and management opportunities that might not be widely available at conventional law firms.

Lily Liu joined Pangea3’s new Texas office after six years as a temporary lawyer and previous experience as a trial lawyer in Texas.

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E. Coli Strain Was Previously Unknown, Official Says

With hospitals coping with seriously ill victims, sectors of European agriculture staggering and consumers weighing what foods are safe to eat, Russia extended a ban on fresh vegetable imports beyond Spain and Germany to encompass all of the European Union, drawing a sharp response from European officials who called the move “disproportionate.”

In Geneva, Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, said, “What we understand is this is a strain which has never been detected in an outbreak situation before.” He said scientists at “many laboratories” were working to gather more information about the strain.

The origins of the outbreak, which has killed at least 17 people — 16 in Germany and a Swede who visited there recently — remain unknown. Ten countries have now reported cases, but virtually all of them have been traced to northern Germany, where the outbreak began several weeks ago.

In a statement on Thursday, a Chinese laboratory collaborating with German scientists said that the contagion had been caused by a “new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.” The lab, the Beijing Genomics Institute in the southern city of Shenzhen, referred to the strain as “entirely new” and “super toxic,” saying it was similar to one known as EAEC 55989 that is found in the Central African Republic and known to cause serious diarrhea. The Chinese laboratory has been working with scientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

“The situation is still tense,” said Jörg Debatin, director of the medical center. “At the beginning of the week we had been hoping to see a trend towards fewer infections, but that has not happened.”

Holger Rohde, a bacteriologist at the medical center, said that tests conducted with the scientists in Shenzhen had shown that the new strain was a hybrid that causes the virulent complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which attacks the kidneys and can be lethal.

Dr. Rohde said that about 80 percent of the genetic composition derived from the E. coli strain O104, but that the other 20 percent came from another more toxic bacterium.

In recent days, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, a European Union agency based in Stockholm, and other health authorities in Europe had placed blame for the outbreak on a rare strain of E. coli called O104:H4.

Since 2008, only eight cases have been linked to the strain reported in the European Union, according to the agency, whose Web site was still reporting on Thursday that laboratory results indicated O104:H4 carried in contaminated food was “the causative agent” of the outbreak in Germany and had also been detected in Denmark.

Britain’s Health Protection Agency confirmed that the number of cases in Britain had risen to seven from three, with the bacteria found in people who had recently traveled to Germany.

The W.H.O. said that Austria reported 2 cases, Denmark 7, France 6, the Netherlands 4, Norway 1, Spain 1, Sweden 28 and Switzerland 2. The organization said that all but two were people who had recently visited northern Germany or, in one case, had contact with a visitor from northern Germany.

Quite apart from health concerns, the impact of the outbreak spread increasingly to European politics and the Continent’s economic relations.

Russian news reports quoted health officials as saying that Moscow’s ban on European produce would begin immediately. If strictly enforced, the prohibition would magnify the woes of European Union farmers since Russia ranks among their biggest markets. Farmers in Germany and Spain have already complained that public fear of contagion has forced them to destroy their crops.

The spokesman for John Dalli, the European Union health commissioner, said the commission would send a letter later on Thursday to Moscow explaining why Russia should remove the restrictions. Russia relies on imports from the European Union for up to 40 percent of its fruits and vegetables and the market is worth up to $5.5 billion annually, according to the commission.

Late on Wednesday, the European Commission removed an alert about the possible dangers of infection from Spanish cucumbers that the German authorities originally suspected were responsible. The commission said it lifted the alert after tests conducted by the German and Spanish authorities failed to detect the strain of E. coli that caused the illnesses. Mr. Dalli urged the German authorities and other national authorities to “increase their efforts” to identify the source of the contamination.

Germans expressed growing anxiety.

When Sarah Winter, a 22-year-old economics student from Cologne,  first heard about the outbreak, she simply shrugged. “Another typical German food scare,” she said. “We have these scares once a year. One time it’s about contaminated eggs. Another time it’s about fodder fed to pigs. And then you get all this media panic. I ended up simply ignoring all of it.”

But by Thursday, Ms. Winter had changed her mind.

“It’s a big conversation issue among my friends,” she said. “Some are no longer eating salads. Others are ignoring the medical recommendations. As for myself, frankly, people have died. For me, that’s the bottom line. I no longer eat salads. But then again, this E. coli strain could be in milk, meat, whatever. It is very worrying. I have no idea what to eat anymore.”

Alan Cowell reported from Berlin, and James Kanter from Brussels. Judy Dempsey contributed reporting.

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