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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