De Blasio’s Plans for New York City Schools Are at the Mercy of Outside Laws

But with expectations high for a new era of school reform, Mr. de Blasio, who takes office on Wednesday, may soon find that his powers are constrained. The strict testing regimen in reading and math that has irked some parents and students across the city is for the most part enshrined in state and federal law. While Mr. de Blasio has sought to slow the growth of charter schools, he will not have the power to block their creation.

More broadly, Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Fariña, a longtime city educator from Brooklyn with a reputation for bluntness, will confront a national political environment on education that has shifted during Mr. Bloomberg's tenure.

During his three terms, Mr. Bloomberg spent millions of dollars to build support for his ideas, which included weakening tenure protections for teachers and awarding A-through-F grades to schools. And he helped draw important Democrats to his causes, winning accolades from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and President Obama.

At a news conference on Monday announcing the appointment, Mr. de Blasio and Ms. Fariña took several swipes at the way Mr. Bloomberg ran schools, and the incoming chancellor pledged to review every one of the departing mayor's policies. "We know that there are things that need to happen, but they need to happen with people, not to people," she said.

But in significant ways, Mr. Bloomberg's mark on education will endure into his successor's term.

Mr. de Blasio acknowledged that his agenda could face obstacles.

"We understand certain actions are taken in Washington or Albany that set a reality for us," he said. "But there's typically a lot of flexibility or options within that reality."

Mr. de Blasio is likely to face the most immediate pressure to make changes around testing, a cause that has unified parents in wealthy and poor neighborhoods alike. Mr. Bloomberg was criticized for elevating the importance of student test scores, using them to grade teachers and schools and to decide which students to promote to the next grade level.

Mr. de Blasio has some flexibility in deciding whether to eliminate some tests administered by the city and how scores are used. But federal law mandates math and reading exams in grades three through eight each year, and high school exams in English, math, and science.

At times, Mr. de Blasio has argued that the focus on test scores has helped perpetuate a system of socioeconomic segregation in the city. During his campaign for mayor, he promised to change the admissions criteria for elite high schools so that they factored in portfolios of student work and extracurricular activities — not just scores on an admissions test. But changing the entry requirements for the three largest specialized high schools would require the approval of Albany.

Mr. de Blasio is also facing pressure to do something about teacher evaluations, another contentious Bloomberg innovation. The evaluations have become commonplace across the country, trumpeted as a way of identifying ineffective teachers and sharing best practices. In New York, state law requires that at least 20 percent of a teacher's rating be based on test scores, making it difficult for Mr. de Blasio to change course.

Even some of Mr. de Blasio's supporters acknowledged that he would face difficulties in confronting mandates from the federal and state governments.

"There is a very fundamental clash of philosophies," said Diane Ravitch, an education historian and an informal adviser to Mr. de Blasio.

Still, Ms. Ravitch said she was hopeful that Mr. de Blasio would follow through on a promise to end one signature policy of the Bloomberg administration: the practice of awarding A-through-F letter grades to schools, based in large part on test scores.

Mr. de Blasio's supporters expect that a focus of his first year will be his plan to charge rent to charter schools, which had enjoyed free space under Mr. Bloomberg. Mr. de Blasio is seeking to slow the growth of charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately managed, so that resources can be focused on traditional public schools.

Annie Correal and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 30, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the employer of Carmen Fariña's father. He worked as head of maintenance at New York University Hospital, not New York University.

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Australia Plans Evacuation Of Passengers Stranded in Ice

Andrew Peacock, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An image from one of the passengers of the Akademik Shokalskiy shows the Russian research ship icebound off Antarctica.

Maritime safety officials began preparations on Tuesday for a helicopter rescue of scientists and others aboard a chartered research ship that has been stuck in Antarctic ice for a week.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said all 52 passengers aboard the Russian ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, would be airlifted to a Chinese icebreaker. The ship's 22 crew members would stay behind, the authority said.

Bad weather in the area made it very unlikely that a helicopter rescue would begin before Wednesday, the authority said. But in preparation, a landing zone had been marked on the ice near the Shokalskiy.

The 233-foot Shokalskiy became stuck last Tuesday when strong winds pushed loose pack ice up against it near Cape de la Motte, about 1,700 miles south of Hobart, Tasmania. The ship set sail from Bluff, New Zealand, on Dec. 8, and is carrying scientists, tourists and several journalists on what is billed as the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, a planned monthlong voyage to study the changes to the environment of East Antarctica since the region was first explored by the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson a century ago.

The authority, which is coordinating the rescue, said the crew of an Australian icebreaker, the Aurora Australis, had advised officials earlier Tuesday that the ship would not be able to make another attempt to reach the Shokalskiy. The icebreaker "would be at risk of becoming beset by ice itself if it continued to make further rescue attempts," the authority said in a statement.

The passengers are expected to be airlifted in groups of 12 and will be taken to the Chinese ship, the Xue Long. The passengers will then be transferred to the Aurora Australis, by barge, the authority said.

Snow and winds of up to 35 miles an hour on Monday had forced the Aurora Australis to abandon its first attempt to reach the icebound ship. The icebreaker had been diverted from a resupply operation at an Australian Antarctic base, Casey Station, about 1,000 miles to the west.

The Xue Long, which was about two months into a five-month national Antarctic expedition when it was asked to help, failed in a similar attempt on Saturday, but has remained in the area. The Xue Long's helicopter will be used in the evacuation.

The safety authority statement did not say where the evacuees would be taken on the Aurora, but in addition to Casey Station, there is a French station, Dumont d'Urville, about 100 miles to the west, and several other stations to the east along the Ross Sea, including the United States base, McMurdo, which is the largest on the continent.

Chris Turney, a leader of the research expedition and a professor of climate change at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said in a phone interview on Sunday that those on board had been told of the possibility of a helicopter rescue, and that there was a sense of relief.

Dr. Turney said that all aboard were well and that morale was good, echoing assessments by some passengers posted in short YouTube videos. In one posted over the weekend, an expedition member named Mary Regan stood on the ice with the stranded ship behind her.

"Having a wonderful time," she said, looking around. "You can see we have this wonderful snowy wonderland."

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Accountability Is Elusive in Garment Supply Chain

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

A fashion designer at an office of Mango in Barcelona, where the workplace is in contrast to factories in places like Bangladesh.

PARETS DEL VALLÈS, Spain — From a sleek gray distribution center near Barcelona, the global fashion brand Mango ships 60 million garments in a year. Automated conveyor belts whir through the building like subway lines, sorting and organizing blouses, sweaters and other items to be shipped around the world. Human hands barely touch the clothes.

Five thousand miles away in Bangladesh, the Phantom Tac factory in the industrial suburb of Savar was a hive of human hands. Hundreds of men and women hunched over sewing machines to produce garments in an assembly line system unchanged for years. Speed was also essential, but that just meant people had to work faster.

Last spring, as it pushed forward with global expansion plans, Mango turned to Phantom Tac to produce a sample order of polo shirts and other items. Then, on April 24, the Rana Plaza factory complex collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people in the deadliest disaster in garment industry history, and destroying Phantom Tac and other operations in the building.

Now, eight months later, the question is what responsibility Mango and other brands should bear toward the victims of Rana Plaza, a disaster that exposed the murkiness and lack of accountability in the global supply chain for clothes. Under intense international pressure, four brands agreed last week to help finance a landmark $40 million compensation fund for the victims.

But many other brands, including Mango, have so far refused to contribute to the fund. Mango argues that it is not responsible because it had not "formalized a commercial relationship" with Phantom Tac. Company officials say that Mango was still conducting quality inspections and factory audits of Phantom Tac, and that the factory had not started producing samples for an order of 25,000 items.

But in interviews conducted over several months, supervisors and other employees from Phantom Tac said work to make samples for Mango had already begun when Rana Plaza collapsed. Fabric was being marked and cut, and some workers say some sample shirts were already being stitched.

"There was an urgency among the bosses," said Mohammed Mosharuf Hossain, 28, who worked in a cutting section. "The managers told us to finish the Mango products urgently. They said if we could finish this work quickly, we might get more orders from Mango."

For global brands and retailers, Rana Plaza has forced a reckoning over how to reconcile the mismatched pieces in their supply chains. Technology and investment are transforming the upper end of the industry, enabling Mango and other brands to increase sales, manage global inventories with pinpoint precision and introduce new clothes faster than ever — all as consumers now expect to see new things every time they visit a store.

But these brands depend on factories in developing countries like Bangladesh, where wages are very low and the pressure to work faster and cheaper has spawned familiar problems: unsafe buildings, substandard work conditions and repeated wage and labor violations. Consumers know little about these factories, even as global brands promise that their clothes are made in safe environments.

Phantom Tac could be regarded as an unlikely attempt to prove that a Bangladeshi factory could be socially responsible and make a profit. It was partly owned by a Spaniard, David Mayor, who had won orders from several Spanish brands. He had teamed up with a Vatican missionary in rural Bangladesh to offer a training program for female workers. And he had experimented with creating a website to allow consumers in the West to connect virtually with the workers sewing their clothes.

But the pressures on Phantom Tac to meet deadlines and make money made those social goals difficult to achieve. Employees said the factory was busy but had suffered setbacks: Inditex, the global clothing giant that owns Zara and Lefties, had canceled orders a year earlier after the factory failed a social compliance audit. And several employees said other problems had arisen after underage workers were discovered working as helpers.

Now, Mr. Mayor has disappeared. He did not respond to email requests for interviews, and his family in Spain declined to reveal his whereabouts. His Bangladeshi business partner, Aminul Islam, is in jail in connection with the collapse.

Factories like Phantom Tac in Bangladesh and the Mango operations in Spain are part of the same supply chains, but might as well be from different worlds.

Jim Yardley reported from Parets Del Vallès, Spain, and Savar, Bangladesh. Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Savar, and Silvia Taulés from Parets Del Vallès.

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A Moment for the Flames That Went Out in 2013

They were headline names, and when accompanied by just one profound word, "died," nothing more needed to be explained. The news could startle or even shock when it was unexpected, arouse a sympathetic sigh when it seemed to be in the natural order of things, shake loose a memory.

It may have come to us over the Internet or from the television, or it may have been in the newspaper that morning. Or perhaps the news reached us in the truly old-fashioned way: by word of mouth, which we duly passed along, links in a social chain as old as humankind, prefacing it with a "Did you hear?"

There may have been time for reflection later, in the evening, as the dust of the day settled and the mind cleared. Maybe talking heads were paying tribute on cable news, their voices overlapping a film-clip montage. Maybe the disembodied voice of the deceased sounded from the radio. Then it was to bed, to ready ourselves for another day, when the thrust, again, would be forward, not back.

December, the evening of the year, is a time to pause, too. We wind down, reflect and take stock before the calendar turns. And we remember those who were here a year ago but who will not be tomorrow, when we, the survivors, start anew.

Future generations may scratch their heads at many of the names we so easily recognize today, but it's safe to say that Nelson Mandela's will draw no such blanks. The father of his country, he offered another persuasive exhibit for the Great Man theory of history.

In death he followed others whose footsteps across the world stage may have been smaller, but nevertheless resounded in their day. Margaret Thatcher's flinty brand of British conservatism acquired a namesake "ism" all its own. No friend of the French or American governments, Vo Nguyen Giap nevertheless earned their respect with a tenacious if brutal generalship that threw off in succession the grip of colonialism and the might of a superpower. Half a world away, Hugo Chávez would lead with his strongman swagger no more, to the end a defiant nemesis to the United States but an up-by-his-bootstraps hero to Venezuela's poor.

American politics may have been in ferment, but even ideological opposites could achieve rare unanimity in honoring the memories of Thomas S. Foley, a courtly exponent of bipartisanship in his years as speaker of the House; Lindy Boggs, who forged a long and effective career on Capitol Hill from the wreckage of her husband's — and predecessor's — fatal airplane crash; William H. Gray III, the Baptist minister who for a time was the highest-ranking black lawmaker in the country, as House majority whip; Frank R. Lautenberg, the self-made businessman turned liberal stalwart in the Senate and its last veteran of World War II; and Edward I. Koch, New York's inimitable, irrepressible Hizzoner, who was more than a match for his beloved, boisterous city.

In the overlapping worlds of art and entertainment the death toll registered somehow on a more personal level, even if those we recalled were never closer than a screen or a stage and always pretending to be other people; or painters, musicians and writers who, in expressing themselves to the world, never had you or me specifically in mind. We felt we knew them nevertheless.

We said goodbye to Peter O'Toole and Julie Harris, royalty of the acting trade, and to James Gandolfini, whose sudden death at 51 was met with something like universal dismay. The blackout finale of "The Sopranos" was nothing compared to this.

Those of us with longer memories, or a fondness for Turner Classic Movies, noted the passing of Joan Fontaine, Esther Williams and Deanna Durbin, stars in a more distant Hollywood firmament. And fans of those lush, literate Merchant Ivory films mourned the death of the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose words, they knew, were the essential bridge between producer and director, the silent hyphen in the trademark name.

It's a cliché to say of the departed that there will never be another like him, or like her. So be it; let's say it again anyway, because there's truth in the truism when recalling Jonathan Winters, that genius of quicksilver comic madness, and Jean Stapleton, whose brilliant Edith Bunker, for all the hilarity she provoked, was never so daft as Archie made her out to be and was in fact, we knew, the shrewdest person in the house.

Baby boomers have grayed enough by now to mourn, with some regularity, the passing of their '60s musical heroes, if not their own generational peers. But it was not just they who grieved for Lou Reed, Richie Havens and Ray Manzarek of the Doors. Their posterity, succeeding waves of musicians and listeners, also understood the depth of the loss.

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Stanford’s Distinct Training Regimen Redefines Strength

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Inside the Stanford weight room earlier this football season, there were weight vests and wooden sticks and core boards. There were kettle bells and roller pads and something called a Bod Pod, a white, egg-shaped contraption that measures body fat.

There were football players, too: pairs with legs bent, a towel held between them for balance; others climbing ropes like back in gym class; working on hip mobility and shoulder stability; the focus not on brute strength, even for a team as physical as Stanford.

And there was Shannon Turley, the architect of a training regimen among the most distinct in college sports. He is Stanford's director of football sports performance, and for years, he felt it necessary to write letters to N.F.L. scouts to explain the Cardinal's nontraditional approach. He stopped that practice this year in the wake of Stanford's success.

Turley's impact speaks as much to availability as ability. The coaches recruit speed and size and talent. He believes the best players, the ones most on the field, who sustain the most collisions, also carry the most injury risk. His first priority is to keep them on the field.

From 2006, the year before Turley arrived on the Farm, as Stanford's campus is known, through last season, the number of games missed because of injury on the two-deep roster dropped by 87 percent. In 2012, only two Cardinal players required season-ending or postseason surgical repair; this year, only one.

In an era in which injuries are more scrutinized than ever, this has made Turley something of a celebrity strength coach. Counterparts from other colleges visited. As did N.F.L. personnel. As did Australian Rules football teams. The student newspaper wrote a three-part series about Turley. Bleacher Report compiled a big article. The National Strength and Conditioning Association named Turley its strength and conditioning coach of the year in 2013.

Stanford lost quarterback Andrew Luck, running back Toby Gerhart and Coach Jim Harbaugh to the N.F.L., and yet the Cardinal will make their fourth consecutive Bowl Championship Series appearance Wednesday in the Rose Bowl against Michigan State. The year before Turley arrived, Stanford went 1-11.

Turley considered all that inside his weight room, as he surveyed the flurry of activity around him. "This," he said, "is real-world applicable man strength."

This is the era of the strength coach in college football. Strength coaches oversee conditioning in the off-season. They also deal with being allowed fewer scholarships.

Turley is a strength coach, and he is not a strength coach, or not exactly. Strength is not his focus. Function is. Balance is. Flexibility is.

His approach is grounded in physics, on the premise that low man wins on contact, that to get low requires mobility and stability and the ability to apply force in the opposite direction. His players bench press, but he cares more about how they lift — with hands closer together, without bouncing the bar off their chests — than how much. He wants them to bend all the way down when they squat.

Freshmen in Turley's program do not lift weights upon arrival. Instead, for the first few weeks, they do "body work," or push-ups and pull-ups and squats or lunges without weights; basically old-school, military calisthenics.

"You have all these different genres of training, and we steal from them all," Turley said. "CrossFit. Bodybuilding. Power lifting. But ultimately, it's none of those. It's a system we've developed to train football players."

A self-described terrible athlete, Turley was always better at training for a sport than playing it. At Virginia Tech, he volunteered as a student assistant trainer. He noticed the best players in the weight room often were not the best players on the field. That made little sense.

He read research papers and went to clinics and peppered trainers and physical therapists and doctors with questions. He watched YouTube clips. He devoured training manuals.

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De Blasio Is Said to Choose Schools Chancellor

Ms. Fariña, 70, the daughter of immigrants from Spain who fled the Franco regime in the 1930s, is a veteran of the city's school system, having served as a teacher, principal and superintendent of a Brooklyn school district. She retired as a deputy chancellor in 2006.

The choice reflected Mr. de Blasio's desire to depart radically from the educational policies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, including his emphasis on data and his policy of shuttering low-performing schools.

As a principal and superintendent, Ms. Fariña gained a reputation as a stern manager. She worked briefly as a top official in the Education Department during the early years of the Bloomberg administration, overseeing teaching and learning, but departed amid philosophical differences.

Given its high profile, the schools job is arguably one of the most difficult positions in city government. The chancellor must run a large agency with a work force of teachers who have not had a contract in four years.

Mr. de Blasio will also benefit from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's move to take control of the schools. Last year, when he was a Democrat in a crowded field of mayoral contenders, Mr. de Blasio said that candidates for chancellor should receive "serious public screening," criticizing the way Mr. Bloomberg had appointed Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive, as chancellor in 2010. She resigned after three months on the job.

As the leader of the nation's largest school district, Ms. Fariña will also face a host of thorny issues, including calming tensions over a new set of academic standards, rolling out a plan to charge rent to charter schools, and negotiating a contract with the city's teachers' union, which is demanding billions of dollars in retroactive raises.

Mr. de Blasio has spoken often about his desire to break with several hallmarks of the Bloomberg era, including its support of charter schools. He has said he will decrease the emphasis on standardized testing and give more input to parents in decision-making.

Ms. Fariña shares Mr. de Blasio's skepticism of standardized testing and his focus on early education. As chancellor, she will help shape his proposal to expand access to preschool and after-school programs.

As the superintendent of District 15 in Brooklyn, Ms. Fariña formed a relationship with Mr. de Blasio when he was a member of the district's board, and has informed his thinking on education ever since. 

The announcement was expected on Monday at William Alexander Middle School in Brooklyn.

Reached at her home late Sunday, Ms. Fariña declined to comment. Aides to Mr. de Blasio did not respond Sunday night to a request for comment.

Ms. Fariña brings to the office a deep knowledge New York City and its schools. In a 1999 interview, she recalled being the only Spanish-speaking student in kindergarten at St. Charles Borromeo, a parochial school in Brooklyn. She was marked absent by a teacher for six weeks because her teacher mispronounced her name.

Ms. Fariña initially resisted the prospect of being chancellor, saying publicly that she was content in retirement and eager to spend time with her grandchildren. But in recent weeks, Mr. de Blasio continued to prod her.

"Bill is a very persuasive person," Ms. Fariña said in an interview this month.

"My grandchildren are important to me," she added. "I spent a lot of years in the system. But I will do whatever the new mayor wants me to do."

The search for chancellor stretched on for almost two months. It was considered one of Mr. de Blasio's most important appointments, given the emphasis he placed on education during the mayoral bid, including his signature prekindergarten proposal.

But the process of picking a chancellor did not always appear easy. Several candidates withdrew from the process, including Kaya Henderson, chancellor of the schools in Washington, D.C. Other high-profile contenders included Joshua P. Starr, who leads Montgomery County Public Schools, and Kathleen M. Cashin, a longtime city educator and member of the Board of Regents.

Ms. Fariña has stood out throughout her career with her blunt style and egalitarian ideals.

She became known within the system as a principal at Public School 6 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, drawing wealthy families into the school. In 2004, she was named a deputy chancellor, but departed two years later, uneasy about the growing use of student test scores to evaluate schools.

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Harold Simmons Dies at 82; Backed Swift Boat Ads

Mark Graham for The New York Times

Harold Simmons, in 1997, started out with a Dallas drugstore.

Harold Simmons, a billionaire who helped finance the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack ads against Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election and donated substantially to other conservative causes, died on Saturday in Dallas. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, in a statement.

Mr. Simmons, who started out in business with a single drugstore in Dallas, became a buyout investor and made his fortune by buying stakes in major companies. This year, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $10 billion.

He was one of the largest donors in the 2012 presidential election, giving more than $26.9 million to "super PACs" opposing President Obama, whom he called "the most dangerous American alive" in an interview with The Wall Street Journal because, he said, the president wanted to "eliminate free enterprise in this country."

In 2004, Mr. Simmons donated $2 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose advertisements against Mr. Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, included one impugning his military service as a Swift boat captain during the Vietnam War. The allegations were later discredited. Mr. Simmons gave heavily to other groups through the Dallas-based Harold Simmons Foundation, which is run by two of his daughters, Lisa Simmons and Serena Simmons Connelly.

Harold Clark Simmons was born in Golden, Tex., on May 13, 1931. His parents were teachers in the rural East Texas town. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and built a chain of 100 drugstores across the state.

He sold the stores and began to invest in companies. He made much of his fortune from running the Contran Corporation, a holding company that owns stakes in companies that produce chemicals and computer support systems, among others.

In 2012, he contributed millions of dollars to American Crossroads, a super PAC co-founded by Karl Rove. His company also contributed to the presidential campaign of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

"I've got the money, so I'm spending it for the good of the country," Mr. Simmons told The Wall Street Journal.

His animosity for Mr. Obama was not new. In 2008, he gave nearly $2.9 million to a conservative group running advertisements highlighting Mr. Obama's association with the 1960s radical William Ayers.

Mr. Simmons and his wife, Annette, have been among the largest donors to charities in Dallas, including the Children's Medical Center of Dallas, the AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Dallas Zoo, and Southern Methodist University.

More recently, his foundation made contributions that were surprising for someone with his political views. It gave $600,000 to Planned Parenthood and its North Texas affiliate in 2011 and $600,000 this year to the Resource Center, a group that supports the gay community and those affected by H.I.V., The Dallas Morning News reported.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Simmons endured a messy legal dispute with two older daughters from previous marriages. After the daughters sued to challenge his control of trusts Mr. Simmons had established, he struck back in unusually personal terms, saying that one daughter had problems with drug addiction and both had trouble managing money.

He eventually agreed to give them $50 million each if they dropped all claims.

In an authorized biography in 2003, the author John J. Nance said that the lawsuit — and Mr. Simmons's two divorces — were among the most painful chapters in his life.

"Still, he considers his life a blessing," Mr. Nance wrote, "and displays his appreciation through major philanthropic projects."

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De Blasio Names City’s Top Lawyer, Appearing to Signal a Further Shift in Policy

In selecting Zachary W. Carter as corporation counsel, Mr. de Blasio appeared to be taking a legal posture markedly different from that of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. That difference was underscored by a pledge on Sunday to reverse course on two of his predecessor's hardest-fought court battles: the litigation over the Police Department's stop-and-frisk practices and the lawsuit stemming from the Central Park Five case.

"We start with our values," Mr. de Blasio said. "We start with the positions we took and made public throughout the last year. We will drop the appeal on the stop-and-frisk case, because we think the judge was right about the reforms that we need to make. We will settle the Central Park Five case because a huge injustice was done."

Mr. Carter, 63, is a partner in the firm Dorsey & Whitney. He lives in Westchester County and plans to move to New York City, a spokesman for Mr. de Blasio said.

At the news conference, Mr. Carter said he and Mr. de Blasio share a belief in ensuring opportunities for the poor. "We've failed as a society when we do not meet the needs of the least advantaged."

He will replace Michael A. Cardozo, who has served as corporation counsel and overseen the Law Department through all three of Mr. Bloomberg's terms.

The announcement was the latest from Mr. de Blasio as he assembles his cabinet ahead of his swearing-in on Wednesday. The most anticipated remaining appointment is his choice for schools chancellor.

Mr. de Blasio chose William J. Bratton as police commissioner this month, returning him to the post he held almost two decades ago. Mr. Bratton and Mr. Carter are likely to play significant roles in shaping the new administration's positions on policing.

Under Mr. Cardozo, the city has been aggressive in defending its stop-and-frisk practices, even as it became clear that Mr. de Blasio would pursue a different course in the litigation.

In the case known as the Central Park Five, five black and Hispanic teenagers were convicted in the 1989 attack of a Central Park jogger. Their convictions were later thrown out. A $250 million suit against the prosecutors and the police has been pending for a decade.

As the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York from 1993 to 1999, Mr. Carter brought federal charges in the beating and torture of Mr. Louima in 1997 by police officers in a police station bathroom. Alan Vinegrad, who was the chief prosecutor in the case, said Mr. Carter "felt passionate about taking the case and what lay underneath it — the problem of excessive force by the Police Department." The abuse led to criminal convictions and an $8.7 million civil settlement by the Police Department.

Mr. Carter's tenure had no shortage of other high-profile cases, including the prosecution of the real Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, and those responsible for the death that set off the Crown Heights riots in 1991.

The appointment of Mr. Carter was praised by critics of the Law Department's hard-line stance in suits against the Police Department.

"Under Cardozo, the policy has been to fight every police misconduct case tooth and nail," said Joel Berger, a former city lawyer who now represents plaintiffs in lawsuits against the Police Department. "I certainly hope that Carter will pay more attention to the causes of police misconduct lawsuits rather than just fighting them."

The Rev. Al Sharpton called the appointment an "unprecedented and huge step for progress."

"I know he was very concerned about the excesses of the stop and frisk program," said Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., a former corporation counsel who has known Mr. Carter since the 1980s and served with him on the boards of the Vera Institute and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

Mr. Schwarz, who helped select Mr. Carter as a criminal court judge during the Koch administration, described him as a "winning personality" who cared about fairness and good government. "He was in law enforcement, but what he really cares about is justice," he said.

J. David Goodman contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave incorrect attribution regarding a statement that Mr. Carter would provide the "legal architecture" to carry out the new administration's plans. Mr. Carter said so, not Mr. de Blasio.

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New Order for a Pre-Rose Bowl Tradition: Hold the Gluttony

Stuart Palley for The New York Times

Michigan State players at Lawry's, a prime rib restaurant in Beverly Hills, Calif. At the so-called Beef Bowl, servings are now limited.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Don't let the elastic waistbands fool you. When Michigan State's football players paraded down the red carpet in their green-and-white traveling sweats, serenaded by a band playing the university's fight song, they had not come to Lawry's 58th Beef Bowl to devour the competition — or the racks of prime rib that were waiting to be sliced.

The Spartans had arrived, mostly, in the name of moderation.

"I'm eating a little beef, not too much — but the corn is great," said Denzel Drone, describing what would seem like hors d'oeuvres for a powerfully built 6-foot-2, 245-pound defensive end.

The Beef Bowl has long had a place on the itineraries of Rose Bowl teams. Conceived by one of the owners of Lawry's, a well-known prime rib restaurant in Beverly Hills, the Beef Bowl quickly became an informal eating competition, and in many respects it has changed little over the decades.

To the Michigan State secondary coach Harlan Barnett, who played for the Spartans in their last Rose Bowl, 26 years ago, it all looked familiar: The restaurant's carvers were wearing the same tall white hats, the servers were wearing the same nurselike uniforms with sensible white shoes, and the first slab of prime rib was still sliced almost precisely at 16 ounces.

But something profound has changed in recent years. Nutrition is now emphasized as an important component in athletic performance, and players are as likely to count calories as the pounds of meat they can eat.

Lawry's has contributed to this change by limiting the amount of prime rib it serves each player: a 16-ounce cut followed by a 12-ounce second helping. It no longer publicizes how much each team eats, although the team and individual marks are believed to be held by Purdue in 2001 (734 pounds) and Michigan offensive lineman Ed Muranksy in 1978 (8 pounds).

Richard R. Frank, the president and chief executive of Lawry's, cautioned both teams during their visits — Friday night for Michigan State and Saturday night for Stanford — that the Beef Bowl was no longer a competition.

"Save that for Wednesday," he told them, referring to the day of the game.

Stanford, playing in the Rose Bowl for the second consecutive year, did not need such an admonishment. The Cardinal had offensive lineman Josh Garnett, a 6-foot-5, 315-pound sophomore who, as Stanford Coach David Shaw noted, "made his name here before he ever made it on the football field."

A year ago, Garnett was prodded by several senior offensive linemen to go for the record. Others at their long table ordered seconds and sent them down to Garnett, who ate 10 cuts of prime rib, which he estimated to be 7 pounds' worth.

"There were a lot of noises a normal man shouldn't hear — or make," said Kevin Danser, a senior guard who sat next to Garnett last year. "Joshua was in a lot of pain."

Garnett said practice the next day "was not good."

He added, "I moved like somebody who ate 7 pounds of meat and an extra side."

As Garnett left Lawry's on Saturday night, he expected the day-after practice to be much better. He ate one cut of prime rib Saturday, though he allowed himself an extra side.

(Another testament to the benefits of slow eating and bite-size chunks occurred two years ago when Oregon lineman Mark Asper put his Eagle Scout training to good use, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a patron who was choking on a piece of meat.)

Whereas the evening's experience was familiar to Stanford — "We're seasoned," Danser said — it was new to the Spartans, many of whom recorded their entrance on video cameras or phones. But like the Cardinal players, they were mostly content to savor their meal.

Michigan State Coach Mark D'Antonio, who had a heart attack in 2010 and typically avoids eating red meat, allowed himself an indulgence. Offensive lineman Shawn Kamm, who ate 65 chicken wings last year at a Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl event, put away four slices of prime rib. But at most tables, the Spartans were satisfied with a single serving.

Sally Nogle, the Spartans' head athletic trainer, said it was a marked contrast from her visit for the 1988 Rose Bowl. "The last time, it was how much can you eat," she said.

"But there's so much more focus and research and thought that goes into what we eat now," Nogle said. She added, "This wouldn't be the best pregame meal, but it's early in the week, so it's O.K. to enjoy yourself a little."

Over the two nights, none seemed to be enjoying themselves more than Frank.

The Beef Bowl was conceived by his father, Richard N. Frank, now 90, a Stanford business school dropout whose family — along with the Van de Kamp family — has owned and operated Lawry's for 75 years. He thought it would be good publicity for the restaurant to feed the players. In the event's first year, Iowa was served as it came off the practice field.

Woody Hayes, the renowned Ohio State coach, often refused to let his team participate, but for many players on many teams, the meal created enduring memories. When Richard N. Frank was honored after the third quarter of the 2005 Rose Bowl, Texas quarterback Vince Young jogged over to give him a congratulatory hug.

In a place like Los Angeles, whose ethos is about reinvention, Lawry's and the Tournament of Roses have survived by holding tight to tradition. The parade is never held on Sunday, the floats must be completely covered in flowers, and the Rose Bowl long resisted corporate naming rights and joining the Bowl Championship Series.

The Beef Bowl, steeped in its own tradition, endures without any formal contract with the Rose Bowl, the younger Frank said.

"It's based on trust," Frank said. "It works for us; it works for them. Why mess it up?"

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DealBook: On Defensive, JPMorgan Hired China’s Elite

In a series of late-night emails, JPMorgan Chase executives in Hong Kong lamented the loss of a lucrative assignment.

"We lost a deal to DB today because they got chairman's daughter work for them this summer," one JPMorgan investment banking executive remarked to colleagues, using the initials for Deutsche Bank.

The loss of that business in 2009, coming after rival banks landed a string of other deals, stung the JPMorgan executives. For Wall Street banks enduring slowdowns in the wake of the financial crisis, China was the last great gold rush. As its economy boomed, China's state-owned enterprises were using banks to raise billions of dollars in stock and debt offerings — yet JPMorgan was falling further behind in capturing that business.

The solution, the executives decided over email, was to embrace the strategy that seemed to work so well for rivals: hire the children of China's ruling elite.

"I am supportive to have our own" hiring strategy, a JPMorgan executive wrote in the 2009 email exchange.

In the months and years that followed, emails and other confidential documents show, JPMorgan escalated what it called its "Sons and Daughters" hiring program, adding scores of well-connected employees and tracking how those hires translated into business deals with the Chinese government. The previously unreported emails and documents — copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times — offer a view into JPMorgan's motivations for ramping up the hiring program, suggesting that competitive pressures drove many of the bank's decisions that are now under federal investigation.

The references to other banks in the emails also paint for the first time a broad picture of questionable hiring practices by other Wall Street banks doing business in China — some of them hiring the same employees with family connections. Since opening a bribery investigation into JPMorgan this spring, the authorities have expanded the inquiry to include hiring at other big banks. Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have previously been identified as coming under scrutiny. A sixth bank, UBS, is also facing scrutiny, according to interviews with current and former Wall Street employees. Neither JPMorgan nor any of the other banks have been accused of wrongdoing.

Still, the investigations have put Wall Street on high alert, said the current and former employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Some banks, they said, have adopted an unofficial hiring freeze for well-connected job candidates in China.

The investigation has also had a chilling effect on JPMorgan's deal-making in China, interviews show. The bank, seeking to build good will with federal authorities, has considered forgoing certain deals in China and abandoned one assignment altogether.

The pullback comes just as JPMorgan had regained a significant share of the Chinese market. Its deal-making revived a few years after it escalated the Sons and Daughters program in 2009, an analysis of data from Thomson Reuters shows. In 2009, JPMorgan was 13th among banks winning business in China and Hong Kong. By 2013, once other banks had scaled back their Chinese business, it had climbed to No. 3. Other data shows that the bank was eighth in 2009 and — after losing market share in 2011 and 2012 — is now No. 4 in deal-making. While the hiring boom coincided with the increased business, the data does not establish a causal link between the two.

Yet the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, which are leading the JPMorgan inquiry, are examining whether the bank improperly won some of those deals by trading job offers for business with state-owned Chinese companies. The S.E.C. and the prosecutors, which might ultimately conclude that none of the hiring crossed a legal line, did not comment.

JPMorgan, which is cooperating with the investigation, also declined to comment. There is no indication that executives at the bank's headquarters in New York were aware of the hiring practices. The six other banks facing scrutiny from the S.E.C. declined to comment on the investigations, which are at an early stage.

Economic forces fueled the hiring boom by Wall Street banks.

An era of financial deregulation in Washington coincided with a roaring economy in China, enabling questionable hiring practices to escape government scrutiny. The hiring became so widespread over the last two decades that banks competed over the most politically connected recent college graduates, known in China as princelings.

Goldman's employee roster briefly included the grandson of the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. And Feng Shaodong, the son-in-law of a high-ranking Communist Party official, worked with Merrill Lynch.

In recent months, though, federal authorities have adopted a tougher stance toward Wall Street firms suspected of trading jobs for government business. The S.E.C. and the Brooklyn prosecutors have bolstered enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which effectively bans United States corporations from giving "anything of value" to foreign officials to gain "any improper advantage" in retaining business. JPMorgan would have violated the 1977 law if it had acted with "corrupt" intent.

While the JPMorgan emails provided to federal authorities and reviewed by The Times most frequently referred to Deutsche Bank and Goldman, other banks might have also inspired JPMorgan's hiring.

Both JPMorgan and Credit Suisse, for example, did business with Fullmark, a consulting firm run by the only daughter of Wen Jiabao, then the prime minister of China. Another prized JPMorgan hire, whose father is the chairman of a state-owned financial conglomerate, previously held internships at Citigroup and Goldman.

JPMorgan executives in Hong Kong also studied the hiring movements of banks with a firmer foothold in China, the documents and emails show. "Learned from GS," one JPMorgan executive wrote in an email to colleagues, referring to Goldman Sachs's hiring practices.

JPMorgan's legal woes extend beyond China. In November, JPMorgan struck a $13 billion settlement with government authorities over the bank's sale of questionable mortgage-backed securities.

But unlike the mortgage pact, which focused on the bank's financial crisis-era business, the China investigations take aim at hiring practices that lasted until this year. And while the $13 billion payout involved civil settlements with various authorities, the bribery inquiry carries the threat of criminal penalties. A few top JPMorgan executives in Hong Kong have hired criminal defense lawyers, interviews show.

The fallout from the investigation may also hamper the bank's relationships with clients. As the investigation intensified in recent months, JPMorgan withdrew from a deal in which it was advising Cofco, a large state-run food company. JPMorgan offered the daughter of the company's chairman a short-term internship in 2011, according to securities filings, and another internship in 2012.

"We really need her to be back," a JPMorgan executive in Hong Kong wrote in an email. "Her father called and emailed me."

The bank created the Sons and Daughters program in 2006 to ensure that the hiring would pass legal and regulatory muster.

But then JPMorgan's investment banking business began to lose market share in China, the data from Thomson Reuters shows. By the time JPMorgan lost the 2009 deal to Deutsche Bank, the Hong Kong executives at JPMorgan's investment bank decided that it needed to step up its hiring.

"A missed opportunity for us this year," an executive said in an email upon learning of the loss to Deutsche Bank. "Can you guys craft a program that could work for us?"

The investment banking unit experimented with a program that would have offered well-connected hires a one-year contract worth $70,000 to $100,000. The program, internal documents said, might offer "directly attributable linkage to business opportunity."

Still, some Hong Kong executives pushed for more of what they called "client referral" hiring to keep pace with rivals.

"We do way, way, way too little of this type of hiring and I have been pounding on it with China team for a year," a JPMorgan employee wrote to a colleague in a 2010 email. In that same email, the employee added: "confidential, just added son of #2 at SinoTruk to my team," referring to a company that is part of a state-owned trucking enterprise.

He added: "I got room for a lot more hires like this (Goldman has 25)."

JPMorgan's expanded program had an apparent coup when Tang Xiaoning, whose father is the chairman of the financial conglomerate China Everbright Group, was hired. Until that 2010 hiring, which has been previously reported by The Times, the bank had missed out on deal after deal from China Everbright, including one assignment that went to Morgan Stanley.

But since the younger Mr. Tang was hired, China Everbright and its subsidiaries hired JPMorgan at least three times, according to Standard & Poor's Capital IQ, a research service.

When pursuing an assignment from Taikang, a life insurer that was not owned by the state, JPMorgan executives drew a similar link between hiring and deal-making. Hoping to get the nod to advise Taikang on an initial public offering of stock, emails show, JPMorgan sought to hire the chairman's niece. But it had stiff competition.

"Regarding to the juicy size, every existing active banks are trying to lobby with them," a JPMorgan banker wrote in an email, which is unlikely to become a focus of the federal investigation, because it involves a private company. Goldman, which employed the chairman's son, had a direct investment in the company. And the Royal Bank of Scotland was "trying to approach" the chairman's niece, the banker wrote, "to compete us."

David Barboza contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on 12/30/2013, on page A1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: On Defensive, Bank Hired China's Elite .

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Deadly Shootout and Arrest in Iraq Set Off Sunni Protests

BAGHDAD — A raid by Iraqi security forces on the home of a prominent Sunni member of Parliament on Saturday morning in Anbar Province set off a two-hour gun battle that left the lawmaker's brother and five guards dead, along with a soldier, Iraqi security and medical officials said.

Hours later, angry protests erupted over what Sunnis viewed as another crackdown by the Shiite-led government that alienates them from the political process by equating all expressions of Sunni grievance as terrorism.

The lawmaker, Ahmed al-Alwani, was taken into custody on terrorism charges after the raid at his home in Ramadi, in Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, which has been the scene of antigovernment protests for more than a year. Mr. Alwani has been an important supporter of the demonstrators.

The gunfight erupted when Mr. Alwani; his brother, Ali al-Alwani; and the guards opened fire on soldiers as they entered the home, according to Iraq's Ministry of Defense. In addition to those killed, about 10 others in the house were injured in the return fire, including the lawmaker's wife and a 12-year-old boy.

The raid inflamed Sunni anger toward the government and is likely to increase sectarian tensions further in a country that is teetering on the edge of a new civil war.

At a gathering of demonstrators in Falluja in Anbar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tamimi, one of the protest leaders, said: "The war has begun. I call on young people to carry their weapons and prepare. We will no longer allow any army presence in Falluja." Armed demonstrators later carried Ali al-Alwani's coffin through the streets of Ramadi.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has warned protesters to leave their encampment in the western desert of Anbar, which he claims shelters Qaeda militants, who have gained strength over the last year. With violence at its worst since 2008, Mr. Maliki recently ordered a major military operation in the desert, and the United States has rushed new weapons and other equipment to the Iraqis to help them face the increased threat.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defense said the operation Saturday was "part of a plan to restore security, stability and target the organization of Al Qaeda."

It was not the first time the government has targeted a prominent Sunni official. Two years ago, the government sought to arrest the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, on terror charges. He fled and now lives in Turkey. In Iraq, he has received several death sentences.

And last year, the government targeted the Sunni finance minister, Rafe al-Essawi, arresting 10 of his bodyguards.

On Saturday, Osama al-Nujaifi, the Sunni speaker of Parliament, called the arrest of Mr. Alwani unlawful and demanded an investigation. Other Sunnis said the raid and arrest would make it more difficult for the government to successfully fight the Sunni-led Qaeda, a fight that to a large extent depends on intelligence from moderate Sunnis.

Yasir Ghazi reported from Baghdad, and Tim Arango from Istanbul.

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Civilians Trying to Flee South Sudan Violence Are Caught Between Two Sides

MALAKAL, South Sudan — When the shooting started last week, Othom Bol quickly fled with his wife and their three young children to what he thought would be the safety of the United Nations peacekeeping base on the outskirts of town.

Instead, as the pitched gun battle between troops loyal to the government of South Sudan and rebels seeking to overthrow it thundered outside on Wednesday, bullets came whistling into the makeshift camp for the internally displaced at the base, striking civilians, including Mr. Bol's daughter Nyauny, 6. The bullet hit her in the stomach, passing through her torso and exiting her back.

The girl lay in a hospital bed on the base here Saturday, metal sutures from an operation to stop the internal bleeding studding her abdomen and an intravenous tube protruding from the gauze wrapping her left hand. The base hospital, overstretched, is out of injectable antibiotics and analgesics, a doctor said.

"We're just civilians and we really don't know who started this," said Mr. Bol, 27, a slender man visibly exhausted by his daughter's ordeal, keeping vigil by her bedside each night in a gray plastic chair. He had not even noticed that he had been shot in the thumb until after he brought his daughter to the hospital. "We are victims."

On Saturday, a day after the South Sudanese military drove the rebels out of Malakal, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in recent days, burned-out huts smoldered. The battle for South Sudan has raged since Dec. 15, a day before President Salva Kiir accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup. Mr. Machar denies the accusation but has in turn demanded Mr. Kiir's resignation.

In the mostly empty town, six men with kerchiefs covering their noses and mouths hefted the body of a soldier in a blanket, carrying it a few paces before setting it down again, turning their faces away. Other bodies lay in ditches at the looted market, by the university, and in one case in the middle of a main road, under the beating hot sun. He was still wearing his camouflage uniform, his feet stripped bare.

"It's politics between two people making thousands of people die," said Simon Monyluk, 21, who lost his father to the prolonged civil war that resulted in the creation of South Sudan, only to see violence flare up again two years after its hard-won independence from Sudan.

Despite efforts by regional leaders to broker a peace deal, there are reports that a column of ethnic Nuer fighters backing Mr. Machar is marching toward Bor, the capital of restive Jonglei State. Although the South Sudan government has said it would be willing to release eight of the 11 senior politicians detained two weeks ago on allegations of plotting a coup, it refused on Saturday to release all of them as a condition for a truce with rebel forces.

"It is not accepted," Michael Makuei Lueth, South Sudan's information minister, said in a phone interview. "That is a condition, and we said we will enter negotiations with no preconditions."

This city is a prize seen as worth fighting over, the capital of Upper Nile, the state with the most oil in South Sudan. It sits on an important road into Sudan and near the city of Renk, which has major food stores. Malakal also has one of the country's best airports.

While diplomats from across East Africa and around the world scramble for a political settlement between the two sides, tens of thousands of South Sudanese have fled to United Nations facilities like the one near Malakal. Their numbers have overwhelmed peacekeepers and humanitarian aid workers at a time when many of them had already left this landlocked African country for their winter vacations.

Mr. Monyluk was at the camp trying to care for his five brothers, the youngest just 12. "A lot of children, they are suffering, taking dirty water," he said. "Kids are sick."

The most conservative estimate of the number of people sheltered at the base is 10,000 to 12,000, though officials admit that they have nothing like the infrastructure needed to accommodate so many. Toby Lanzer, the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator for South Sudan, said the real figure might be as high as 22,000.

"This is a mini city inside a U.N. base in a very hot climate," said Mr. Lanzer, describing the situation in Malakal as "a lot worse than I was expecting" when he arrived for a visit on Saturday.

People in Malakal complained that they had neither food nor water, while the humanitarian workers and United Nations staff members fretted over how to prevent an outbreak of a deadly communicable disease like cholera.

Isma'il Kushkush contributed reporting from Khartoum, Sudan.

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New Law All but Bars Russian GPS Sites in U.S.

WASHINGTON — Tucked into the mammoth defense budget bill that President Obama signed into law on Thursday is a measure that virtually bars Russia from building about a half-dozen monitor stations on American soil that critics fear Moscow could use to spy on the United States or worse.

Russia first broached the idea of erecting the domed antenna structures here nearly two years ago, saying they would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of its version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers bomb-bearing warplanes to their targets and wayward motorists to their destinations.

Congressional Republicans, however, harbored suspicions that Russia had nefarious motives behind its plan, which the State Department supported as a means to mend bruised relations between the two rival nations. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency sided with congressional critics, concerned about handing the Russians an opening to snoop on the United States within its borders.

The monitor stations have been a high priority of President Vladimir V. Putin for years as a means to improve Moscow's global positioning network — known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System — not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.

As the White House sought to reconcile the internal squabbling among government agencies, skeptical members of the intelligence and armed services committees in Congress intervened in recent weeks to deal a near-crippling blow to the prospect of Glonass stations in the United States.

Under the new law, unless the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence certify to Congress that the monitor stations would not be used to spy on the United States or improve the effectiveness of Russian weaponry — or unless they waive that requirement altogether on national security grounds — the plan is dead.

"The idea was to make it next to impossible, if not impossible, to do this," said a House Republican aide involved in the legislative process, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of committee rules prohibiting officials from talking publicly to the news media. "We also took the State Department out of the loop since they were the ones who caused all the trouble in the first place."

The snub to the Kremlin's request came as the White House received a State Department report on Friday trumpeting United States-Russian cooperation in a wide range of areas, including national security and science. Glonass did not make the cut.

American relations with Russia are now at a nadir because of Moscow's granting asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, and its backing of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Administration officials on Friday sought to play down the significance of the new constraints, saying that discussions with the Russians continue but that no decisions have been reached. The Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions to the State Department, which is taking the lead on the issue for the government. A State Department statement said, "Any decision taken will be in compliance with all relevant legislation."

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington did not return phone or email messages. The Russian effort is part of a larger race by several countries, including China and European Union nations, to perfect their own global positioning systems and challenge the dominance of the American GPS.

"There isn't any question that their system would be more accurate and reliable if they had some stations somewhere in the northern half of the Western Hemisphere," said Ralph Braibanti, a former director of the State Department's Office of Space and Advanced Technology. "The more stations you have, the more corrections you can make, and the more reliable the system you have."

Mr. Braibanti said that rebuffing the Russians would deal a blow to efforts by the State Department to work with other countries to make their positioning systems more accurate.

"There is a significant argument in favor of going the extra mile to accommodate what the Russians feel are their needs," he said, because it would improve all systems amid demands from consumers for more accurate GPS readings, he said.

After The New York Times reported in November that there were divisions between the State Department and the intelligence agencies about whether to allow the Russian structures, congressional Republicans publicly opposed acquiescing to the Russians' request.

The new law requires the certification from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies or a waiver from the defense secretary and director of national security to ensure that any data collected or transmitted from the monitor stations are not encrypted; that anyone involved in building, operating or maintaining the structures is an American; and that none of the stations are near "sensitive United States national security sites." The waiver would also require that the stations not pose a cyberespionage threat or weaken the American GPS technology for consumers.

"The provision," said Roger Zakheim, a former general counsel of the House Armed Services Committee, "certainly creates a high bar for the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence to authorize or permit this type of construction."

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Russia Screening of Pussy Riot Film Is Blocked

The first public screening in Russia of a documentary about the activist group Pussy Riot was canceled by the government at the last minute on Saturday, organizers said.

The film, "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer," was to have been screened in Moscow on Sunday afternoon, less than a week after two members of Pussy Riot were released from prison. Their two-year sentence, on charges of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for performing a protest song in a Moscow cathedral, was commuted under an amnesty from the Kremlin on Monday.

But on Saturday, the directors of the Gogol Center, a state-financed theater, received a call from the authorities threatening their jobs if they screened the documentary, said Maxim Pozdorovkin, who directed the film with Mike Lerner. A letter from the Department of Culture in Moscow formally banning the screening followed.

The letter, which was posted online by one of the center's directors, accused the artists and filmmakers involved of being provocateurs, and said their brand of culture had no place in a government building.

The role of art, it said, "is to save the world, make it better, not to inflame the public with scandalous stories that have no cultural merit."

"Let's hold tight to those principles," it concluded, "and keep everybody safe."

"The letter is amazing," Mr. Pozdorovkin said Saturday in an interview from Moscow. He had arrived there from his home in Brooklyn with several copies of the film hidden in his luggage. "I thought that once I got past the border," it would be safe to proceed with the screening, he said.

The event was organized with just a few days' notice once the amnesty was granted for the members, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Since their release from separate prisons, the women have continued to actively criticize President Vladimir V. Putin in remarks that have been broadcast widely in Russia and abroad.

On Saturday evening, the women, Mr. Pozdorovkin and others gathered in a supporter's apartment in Moscow, debating how to proceed. "In the view of the cultural department, we're such amoral persons that we can't perform," even on film, "within a government structure," Ms. Alyokhina said.

The cancellation follows two other scuttled screenings in Moscow, Mr. Pozdorovkin said; both were also called off at the last minute, possibly under pressure from the authorities. The film was released in the United States in the summer, and shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination in the documentary category this month.

The Pussy Riot case has proved tantalizing for Russian authorities; in March, immigration officers, Cossacks and police officers raided a Moscow theater where a Swiss director was staging a re-enactment of the Pussy Riot trial. (The show went on.)

Mr. Pozdorovkin said he might show the film on Sunday anyway. "If there are people there, I'm going to bring a laptop and play it off that, on headphones, and see what happens," he said.

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Andrew Jacobs Jr., 81, Ex-Congressman, Dies

Danese Kenon/The Indianapolis Star, via Associated Press

Andrew Jacobs Jr. was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1964.

Andrew Jacobs Jr., a former Democratic Representative from Indiana who fought in the Korean War and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, died on Saturday at his home in Indianapolis. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by Gary Taylor, a former campaign manager.

Mr. Jacobs was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1964, but lost his seat in 1972 along with several other Democratic members of Congress in President Richard Nixon's landslide re-election win.

In 1974, months after the Watergate scandal forced Nixon's resignation, Mr. Jacobs regained his House seat and served until his retirement in 1997, representing a district in his native Indianapolis.

A former Marine, Jacobs was among the early critics of the Vietnam War. He also helped write the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a touchstone of civil rights legislation, and was a longtime member on the House Ways and Means Committee.

"Congressman Andy Jacobs personified the kind of principled and compassionate leadership that Hoosiers most admire & will be greatly missed," Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican, said on his Twitter page.

Mr. Jacobs suffered a number of health problems in recent years, Mr. Taylor said.

He is survived by his wife, Kim Hood Jacobs, an Emmy Award-winning television reporter and documentary producer, and sons Andy and Steven Jacobs.

His father, Andrew Jacobs, was also a Democratic congressman from Indiana, serving in the House from 1949 to 1951.

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Libyan Government Holds 4 U.S. Military Personnel

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Libya Holds Four American Military Personnel for Hours

WASHINGTON — Four American military personnel assigned to the United States Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, were detained Friday and then released after being held for hours by the country's Interior Ministry, American officials said.

The four were believed to have been reviewing potential evacuation routes for diplomats when they were detained, according to the initial reports received by officials in Washington. The place where they were said to be detained is not far from the main road to the Tunisian border from Tripoli, the capital.

After running into a problem at a checkpoint — many of which are run by local militias — they were detained and later moved to the Ministry of the Interior, said administration officials who asked not to be identified because they were discussing internal reports.

The State Department confirmed the detention but provided no information on how it had happened.

"We are seeking to further ascertain the facts and ensure their release," said Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman. "We are in touch with Libyan officials on this issue."

Photographs of two American passports and embassy identity cards were later disseminated on Twitter. It was not known if the passports belonged to any of the four military personnel.

The buzzing sound of drones filled Tripoli's sky for hours as rumors spread through the capital that four Americans were missing. Drones are not usually heard in Tripoli, although the sound is familiar in Benghazi. 

The episode appears to have taken place in a town just southwest of the historic Roman ruins at Sabratha and about an hour's drive from Tripoli. The area is not known for anti-Western extremists or other obvious threats. In part because it is a tourist area, the district around Sabratha skews relatively liberal and friendly to Westerners.

Since the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens on Sept. 11, 2012, employees of the American Embassy have operated with extraordinary caution.

But two years after the toppling of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, security remains tenuous even in and around Tripoli. Libya's transitional government has not yet managed to assemble a credible national army or police force. Many families or clans around the country keep heavy weapons, as do autonomous local militias formed during and after the Libyan uprising.

Rigorous security rules preclude any movements outside the heavily fortified embassy compound without advance planning and an armed guard. The compound is locked at night, and no one is permitted to enter or exit.

Counterterrorism has become a central focus of the work there, and the compound brims with well-armed security officers.

The area where the Americans were said to have been detained is controlled mainly by local tribes, not the central government, which is relatively weak even in its own capital. And in the Libyan context, it is easy to imagine that a foreigner with a diplomatic passport and a gun who was stopped at a checkpoint would be presumed to be a spy and therefore detained. 

The brief detention of the Americans is an experience they share with Prime Minister Ali Zeidan. He was kidnapped from his room in a luxury hotel a few weeks ago, but then released hours later.

In the absence of a strong central government, Libyans have demonstrated both a propensity to use the threat of force to try to settle disputes but also a knack for working through networks of neighbors and clans to try to avoid such standoffs.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Buffalo. Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Thom Shanker from Washington.

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Leaders Say South Sudan May Be Closer to Peace Pact

JUBA, South Sudan — Regional leaders in East Africa announced Friday that they had made progress on a peace deal to help end the crisis in South Sudan, but there was no indication that either side in the conflict was abiding by a cease-fire.

Clashes between the rebels and the military continued as government forces launched a major offensive to retake a city in an oil-producing region. Soon after, the military announced that it had seized control of the city, Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile State and the scene of intense fighting in recent days.

"The push against Malakal began at 6:30 a.m. and was done by noon," said Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the military.

Having recaptured the strategic city of Bor this week, the government seemed to have the upper hand, however fleetingly, in the seesaw battle for control of this two-year-old country.

Clashes began last week after what President Salva Kiir described as an attempted coup led by his former vice president, Riek Machar. Mr. Machar denied that he was part of a plot to overthrow the government, but has since demanded that Mr. Kiir step down. Mr. Machar's political allies were arrested, and he fled Juba, remaining in an undisclosed location.

"We don't know his whereabouts; if we knew his whereabouts we would have arrested him," said Michael Makuei Lueth, the government information minister. Asked about the penalties facing Mr. Machar or other suspects in the coup plot, he raised the possibility of the death penalty, "either by firing squad or to be hanged by the neck."

Even so, the United States special envoy Donald Booth said Friday that Mr. Kiir had agreed to release most of Mr. Machar's colleagues who had been detained, a significant step toward fulfilling Mr. Machar's demands to formally begin negotiations, according to a State Department official.

The political struggle quickly took on an ethnic dimension, with attacks against civilians and reprisals between the two largest groups, the Dinka and the Nuer. The United Nations says more than 1,000 people have been killed in the conflict, though some observers said that with fighting in more than 20 cities and towns, the number of dead was likely to grow significantly.

The conflict in South Sudan has been the subject of grave concern in East Africa, with fears of a protracted and bloody civil war in the landlocked nation. Regional leaders said at a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, on Friday that they would not accept a violent overthrow of Mr. Kiir, who was democratically elected.

The meeting followed a trip to South Sudan by President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn of Ethiopia on Thursday.

"We have a very small window of opportunity to secure peace, which we urge all stakeholders to seize," Mr. Kenyatta said Friday.

It was clear, however, that no formal recognition of a cease-fire had been made by the rebels, and the government's military assault on Friday seemed to indicate that strategic considerations on the battlefield, more than politics, were ruling the day.

In a communiqué after the meeting, the leaders of the neighboring countries said they "welcomed the commitment by the government of the Republic of South Sudan to an immediate cessation of hostilities and called upon Dr. Riek Machar and other parties to make similar commitments."

In a statement on Friday, Doctors Without Borders said more than 70 wounded people had "flooded into the hospital" in Malakal. Witnesses there confirmed the government's account that it was in control of the city.

Bishop Hilary Garang Deng of Malakal said days of fighting had prevented residents from celebrating Christmas, as "bullets were flying in the air."

Rebel fighters looted the market, and those who tried to prevent that "were beaten up," he said.

"There was lawlessness," he added. "No water, no food, no electricity."

Nicholas Kulish reported from Juba, and Isma'il Kushkush from Khartoum, Sudan.

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Raptors 95, Knicks 83: Reassured or Not, Knicks Still Look Overburdened

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Beno Udrih, starting again for the depleted Knicks, had 15 points and 10 assists.

A day after James L. Dolan's impromptu meeting with his embattled team, not much changed for the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

Carmelo Anthony, Raymond Felton and Pablo Prigioni remained injured, relegated to watching from the bench as the Knicks fell to the Toronto Raptors, 95-83, on Friday.

The fans still booed. The offense still sputtered. The fourth quarter still belonged to the opponent, this time to the tune of a 29-12 dismantling by the fresh-legged Raptors.

In brief summation, Coach Mike Woodson may have awaked Friday comforted by a smidgen of security, but the problems that plagued the Knicks (9-20) through the first 28 games remained just as darkly stained on their performance in No. 29.

Dolan's meeting with the team, first reported by ESPN and confirmed by a person in the N.B.A. with knowledge of the situation, occurred at some point before practice or during practice Thursday, an effort to calm the disquiet around the franchise.

Dolan told the players to rest assured there would be no imminent deals and that they should play hard, according to the person, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the meeting.

With trade rumors, J. R. Smith's antics, a time-management fiasco against Washington and swelling criticism of Woodson's handling of the team, few days have passed quietly in the Knicks universe. The team has lost 7 of its last 11 games.

And Saturday's rematch with the Raptors looks equally bleak. Woodson said Anthony (sprained ankle) would not travel to Toronto and thus would miss his third consecutive game.

So the vote of confidence was curious timing again by Dolan, who shared his feelings with team after a 29-point trouncing by Oklahoma City on Christmas Day. On Nov. 19, during his first interview with a news organization about the Knicks in seven years, Dolan told The New York Post: "I have a lot of confidence in Woodson."

The Knicks proceeded to lose seven consecutive games.

Woodson seemed slightly uncomfortable on the matter before the game, too, cutting off a reporter before he could even fully form a question beyond, "There have been some reports——"

"I'm not commenting on that," Woodson said. He declined to comment when a second question was raised about the meeting as well.

Woodson's sensitivity was not out of the ordinary — he has regularly avoided in-house topics this season — but he has had to answer a lot about his job lately.

Indirectly, his answers typically wind back to his desire to coach with a full and healthy roster at his disposal, a desire that has come close to fulfilled just once this season: on Monday in Orlando, for one half before Anthony and Felton were hurt.

With a complete team, Woodson said he believes it can still win the Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference, which the Raptors lead at 12-15.

"We have not had a full deck," Woodson said before the game. "I'm talking about key guys that have been out. I'm just anxious to see where we are. Because I know if we've got a full deck, we've got a chance to win basketball games. I truly believe that."

Will a "full deck" be on the Knicks' horizon before Dolan decides to make a coaching change? That remains to be seen.

Iman Shumpert, with a left thigh contusion, nearly became the latest to join the team's injury list, but he suited up to play. As did Metta World Peace, who had missed the previous three games with knee soreness, saying before the game, in all apparent seriousness: "Aliens only want to win championships. That's it. Injuries is not a focus."

But neither Shumpert nor World Peace provided much beyond serviceable bodies in uniform on Friday. The Knicks led by as much as 12 in the third, but the Raptors charged back with ease in the fourth. Without Anthony to go to down the stretch, the offense stalled. A 3-pointer by John Salmons with eight minutes remaining gave Toronto its first lead, 74-73, since the second quarter.

"I felt like we had the game in control," center Tyson Chandler said. "We let it dwindle away in the fourth quarter. It's pretty disheartening."

Toronto kept up its attack as the Knicks slogged up and down the court dazedly.

Woodson said the team's short-handed lineup was a factor. The offense shot just 5 of 19 in the fourth.

"I played guys in long stretches based on the fact that we were short-handed," he said. "I rode the guys that got us the lead. I'm not using excuses, I thought maybe the legs kind of set in at the end and shots just weren't falling."

REBOUNDS

Coach Mike Woodson said guards Pablo Prigioni (broken toe) and Raymond Felton (groin) remained out indefinitely. Woodson had no timetable for Felton's return after he sustained his injury on Monday. "Right now he's just going through day to day treatment," Woodson said. "When he's ready, they'll let me know." Prigioni will most likely need another week or two, Woodson added.

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Nets 104, Bucks 93: Nets Get Off the Mat, but Heavyweights Loom on the Schedule

Seth Wenig/Associated Press

Paul Pierce, center, started for the Nets after coming off the bench in several recent games.

In a week in which their tumultuous season may have reached its lowest point — a week marred by back-to-back 17-point losses, a season-ending injury to the All-Star center Brook Lopez and reports of locker room turmoil — the Nets finished a three-game home stand by showing a glimpse of the play that many had envisioned when they talked of a title contender budding in Brooklyn.

"Losing is not something that we're getting comfortable with," Kevin Garnett said Friday after a 104-93 victory at home over the Milwaukee Bucks. "Tonight was definitely, Come out here, let's get a win, try and change this momentum around here."

The good vibes from the victory may not last long. On Saturday, the Nets (10-19) begin a three-game trip that will pit them against a series of teams — Indiana, San Antonio and Oklahoma City — that have proved themselves contenders. Before Friday's game, the Nets also announced that Andray Blatche would miss the next three games.

Coach Jason Kidd said that Blatche was out for "personal reasons" and that he would not accompany the team on the trip.

Despite the uninspiring play of the Nets and the Knicks this season, there are teams outside New York that are playing even worse. The Bucks, who have the league's worst record at 6-23, shot 37.5 percent from the field.

Milwaukee proved to be a remedy for the Nets' recent woes. After Lopez broke his right foot last Friday against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Nets entered the week facing a daunting challenge. The Eastern Conference-leading Pacers came first, easily defeating the Nets at Barclays Center, 103-86. Afterward, Kidd said his team was reaching a point where it seemed to accept losing.

"When things get tough, do we just give in? Most of the time, right now, we do," he said.

Two days later, on Christmas, the Nets were outplayed by the Chicago Bulls on national television, 95-78. The Bulls, another preseason pick to be a contender, have been decimated by injuries, but they out-hustled the Nets much as they did in last season's first-round playoff victory. After the loss, Deron Williams called the season a "nightmare." The following day, reports surfaced that Kidd and Kevin Garnett had voiced their displeasure in the locker room.

Before Friday's game, Kidd clarified his message. "It wasn't to call them out," Kidd said. "It was just a conversation in the locker room that we've got to compete."

Garnett said he did not want to share what had been said after the Chicago loss. "That has nothing to do with anybody here," he said. "That was a personal thing that I had with the team, and I want to keep it personal."

In the short term, the messages resonated with the players, who make up a $190 million roster.

The Nets played their 13th starting lineup Friday, adding the reserve point guard Shaun Livingston — who led the team with 20 points — to the backcourt alongside Deron Williams. Paul Pierce, who played seven of the last eight games coming off the bench, started in the frontcourt along with Joe Johnson and Garnett. Kidd said he had been looking for a more energetic lineup.

The revamping of the starting five paid off immediately, as the Nets took a 31-18 lead after the first quarter. Livingston and Williams combined for 11 of the Nets' first 15 points, while their smaller defensive lineup held the Bucks to 29.2 percent shooting.

"I thought it was the first quarter that really buried us and set the tone," Bucks Coach Larry Drew said.

Mirza Teletovic, who had started the last three games for Brooklyn, added five 3-pointers and scored a career-high 19 points.

Trailing by as many as 23 points in the fourth quarter, the Bucks were able to cut the Nets' lead to 88-79 on two free throws by Giannis Antetokounmpo with 3 minutes 2 seconds remaining. Kidd soon reinserted Williams, who had rested along with Garnett for the entire quarter.

With 1:03 remaining, Williams drew a charge on Milwaukee's Khris Middleton to seal the victory. Williams left the game and was greeted by celebrating teammates on the bench.

Whether the good times continue may hinge on whether the Nets have finally heeded their coach's message or just ran into a team on Friday that is having a worse season than they are.

Garnett, the player many expected to be the vocal leader of this team, said the Nets had displayed the fight and belief he expected of them.

"I wouldn't show up," he said, "if I didn't."

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