Klan Protests Renaming of 3 Confederate Parks in Memphis

Lance Murphey for The New York Times

Shun Abram, left, a minister, confronted Joseph Cartwright Jr. near the site of a Ku Klux Klan rally in Memphis on Saturday.

MEMPHIS — The Ku Klux Klan rallied in Memphis on Saturday to protest the City Council's decision last month to rename three city parks that honored Confederate troops.

About 75 members of the white supremacist group marched under police supervision inside a small fenced area downtown. No violence was reported and no arrests were made.

The Memphis police asked residents to avoid the rally site, and city leaders advertised a festival across town with live music and an Easter egg toss featuring Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr.

The Klan had called members across the country to Memphis. The rally was the latest response to the council's decision on Feb. 5 to rename parks whose names it felt were racially insensitive and unwelcoming to black residents.

The old names were Confederate Park; Jefferson Davis Park, named for the Confederacy's president; and Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, named for a Confederate lieutenant general and the Klan's first grand wizard. The new names are Memphis Park, Mississippi River Park and Health Sciences Park, but the council may change those, too.

The last time the Klan rallied in Memphis, in 1998, fighting broke out between members and counterprotesters, and the police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. They arrested 20 people.

On Saturday, the group paraded with signs bearing swastikas and proclaiming "Save Our Parks." The group's megaphone malfunctioned and chants of "white power" were barely audible outside the protest area.

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.

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West: Wichita State 70, Ohio State 66: N.C.A.A. Tournament — Wichita State Beats Ohio State to Emerge From West

LOS ANGELES — Gregg Marshall sat atop a stage, squinted at the bright lights that reflected off his glasses and tried to make sense of all that had occurred the past two weeks. He needed a few more hours, both to process and to explain.

Let's see. The N.F.L. quarterback Tim Tebow addressed Marshall's Wichita State Shockers on their team plane. His forward, Carl Hall, cut off his dreadlocks and mailed them home to his mother. His glasses, the ones with the bright yellow frames, were analyzed on social media.

At the end of all that, his team, the one that lost its top five scorers from last season, the one with a mascot called WuShock, dispatched Ohio State in a 70-66 thriller on Saturday at Staples Center to advance to the Final Four. There stood the Shockers (30-8) atop a ladder late Saturday, scissors in hand, snipping at the nets.

Back on stage, Marshall took one final question. He was asked, as he is often asked, whether he considered this a lucky N.C.A.A. tournament run, a confluence of favorable factors, whether he considered Wichita State a Cinderella.

"If you get to this point, you can win the whole thing," Marshall said. "I think Cinderella just found one glass slipper. I don't think she found four."

In two weeks, Wichita State managed to introduce its basketball team to the casual sports fan, advance to the N.C.A.A. tournament national semifinals for the first time since 1965 and somehow redefine its nickname. From upset to upset to upset, the Shockers became less about wheat and more about, well, shock.

Perhaps it should have been less shocking.

On Saturday, the Shockers faced another team favored to end their season. There was Ohio State, the second seed in the West Region, the Big Ten bully, its roster stocked with prized recruits.

Marshall knew his team could rebound, knew it could play defense. Beyond that, he told the Shockers to play angry, which became their mantra, which meant tough and physical, football without pads. Then his team began to shoot well, or better, which made the Shockers dangerous.

They did not, it should be noted, luck into a national semifinal into Atlanta. They battered four opponents, beat two by double digits. Along the way, three higher seeds fell: first Pittsburgh (No. 8), then Gonzaga (No. 1), then the Buckeyes.

"I understand they're shooting off fireworks back in Wichita," Marshall said.

After upsets became the new normal, of course the West Region ended this way, with the No. 9 seed left standing.

Ohio State had taken the improbable route to that point, behind back-to-back buzzer-beaters, to snatch consecutive victories over Iowa State and Arizona. Aaron Craft made the first and assisted on the second, and the Internet nearly exploded. Someone even said Chuck Norris planned to shave his head to look more like Craft, after Craft battered him in a fistfight.

So there was that.

Wichita State entered this game with its usual underdog status and a more impressive tournament résumé. The Shockers won their first three tournament games by a combined 38 points.

Wichita State made its run over the final 11 minutes of the first half. The score was 19-15, advantage Shockers, when guard Tekele Cotton made a 3-pointer. Guard Demetric Williams followed with another 3 from almost the same spot. Ohio State (29-8) trailed by 20 points with 12 minutes 39 seconds left. As the second half continued, that 20-point lead dwindled. Deshaun Thomas, cold in the first half, called for the ball, fought into double teams, scored and rebounded as if possessed. At the end of a 28-11 run, Ohio State trailed, 62-59.

Here was the same Wichita State team that lost at home against Evansville in late February, that lost twice to Creighton in early March. Another Buckeyes comeback seemed inevitable.

In the stands, a fan waved a sign that read "100 percent Cotton." Indeed. Indicative of a team that lacks a true superstar but makes up for it with balance, Cotton, quiet for much of Saturday, made a series of key plays down the stretch. This included the 3-pointer that made it 65-59 and an offensive rebound that extended the next possession.

"We just did what we've been doing all year," guard Fred VanVleet said.

Afterward, Ohio State could only lament its missed shots, 42 of them, to be exact. The Shockers had wanted to stop Craft from driving, to force the Buckeyes outside. That game plan worked well. Ohio State took 25 3-point attempts. It made five.

Asked for his assessment of why the Buckeyes lost, Coach Thad Matta clenched his teeth and started back at his questioner.

"Were you in there?" Matta said, then added, referring to the team's field goal percentage: "Thirty-one percent."

When the final horn sounded, the Shockers' fans were standing, clad in yellow, as they waved their signs. Coaches fist-bumped other coaches. WuShock signed autographs and posed for photographs. Forward Cleanthony Early made a beeline for Marshall, nearly knocked him over, nearly knocked off those yellow glasses.

Early screamed, "Here we go, baby!" Next stop: Atlanta for the national semifinals.

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Bob Turley, Pitcher With a Blazing Fastball, Dies at 82

Bettmann/Corbis

Bob Turley around 1955. A few years later, he would lift the Yankees to a World Series victory.

Bob Turley, a Cy Young-winning, right-handed pitcher whose blazing fastball bore in on baffled hitters like a dissolving aspirin and lifted the Yankees to a come-from-behind victory over the Milwaukee Braves in the 1958 World Series, died in Atlanta on Saturday. He was 82.

Turley, who lived in Alpharetta, Ga., died in hospice care at Lenbrook, a retirement community in Atlanta. The cause was liver cancer, his son, Terry, told The Baltimore Sun.

On a Casey Stengel team loaded with legends — including Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, Moose Skowron and Elston Howard — Turley was a mainstay of a pitching staff led by Whitey Ford and Don Larsen, whose perfect game in the 1956 World Series symbolized a golden era of Yankee dominion.

They called him "Bullet Bob," and if any proof were needed beyond the 1,265 strikeouts and 101 wins he racked up in 12 seasons in the American League, it was provided early in his career by a DuMont cathode-ray oscilloscope, whose photoelectric eye clocked his fastball at 94 to 98 miles an hour.

He was no herky-jerky tangle of arms and legs like Dizzy Dean or Cleveland's fireballing Bob Feller, with whose fastball his was sometimes compared. Like the great Walter Johnson, he pitched with practically no windup, and had a remarkably smooth delivery for his 6-foot-2, 215-pound frame. He had a curve, a slider and a change-up, but the fastball was his magic.

To a batter's naked, unflinching eye, it was an intimidating marvel to behold: the ball perfectly hidden as Turley looked in for the sign, paused to inspect the crowd, and let fly — an incoming rocket, a white blur barely visible for just over four-tenths of a second, and then — smack! — gone into the catcher's mitt.

"Man!" Roy Campanella, the Brooklyn Dodgers' catcher, exclaimed after Turley struck him out three times in succession in a 1956 game. "When you see me take three swings at three fastballs and not even foul tip one, the fellow throwing 'em must have something. Maybe he was using a little gun to fire that ball up there."

Turley, a popcorn-gobbling Midwesterner with a ski-jump nose like Bob Hope's and personal habits — no drinking, smoking, womanizing or sideburns — that would have made George Steinbrenner proud, played eight years with the Yankees, from 1955 to 1962, winning three World Series rings and building a win-loss record of 82-52, with 58 complete games, 909 strikeouts and an earned run average of 3.64.

But his best year by far was 1958, when he won a league-leading 21 games with only 7 losses, including 19 complete games and 6 shutouts, while striking out 168 and compiling a 2.97 E.R.A. And all that was just the season's prelude to a World Series that baseball fans still talk about as one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the game.

To set the stage: The Milwaukee Braves were the defending world champions, having beaten the Yanks in the 1957 Series on the strength of three complete-game victories by Lew Burdette. The Yankees, winners of 7 of the previous 11 World Series, were burning for revenge. But besides Burdette, the Braves had Warren Spahn on the mound and the sluggers Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews and Joe Adcock.

After four games, New York trailed 3 games to 1, and the Yankee prospects looked bleak. Only the 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates had come back from a 3-1 deficit to win a 7-game Series. With the Yankees just one game from elimination, Turley went to work. He threw a shutout in Game 5, picked up a 10th-inning save in Game 6 and won his second in three days in Game 7, giving up only two hits in 6 2/3 innings of shutout relief.

Turley was overwhelmed with honors. He was named the Most Valuable Player of the Series, won the $10,000 diamond Hickok Belt as the year's top professional athlete, took the New York Baseball Writers' Mercer Award as player of the year, and became the third to win the Cy Young Award as baseball's best pitcher. (Starting in 1967, it was given to one pitcher in each league.)

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Exxon Mobil Pipeline Ruptures in Central Arkansas

Emergency crews worked Saturday to contain several thousand gallons of crude oil that spilled from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline in central Arkansas.

Crews from Exxon Mobil were still investigating the cause of the rupture, which occurred on Friday afternoon in a section of the Pegasus pipeline near the town of Mayflower, which has about 1,700 people and is 25 miles north of Little Rock.

The local authorities said in a statement on Saturday that 22 homes in the vicinity of the spill had been evacuated.

As soon as the spill was detected, the pipeline was shut down and isolation valves were closed to prevent further leakage, Exxon Mobil said in a statement.

About 2,000 feet of boom was set up to contain the oil, and 15 vacuum trucks were deployed to clean it up, Exxon Mobil said. About 4,500 barrels of oil and water had been removed by Saturday evening, the company said.

Crews were working to make sure no oil entered nearby Lake Conway.

The Environmental Protection Agency classified the leak as a "major spill," Exxon Mobil said.  

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Software Engineering School Was Teacher’s Idea, but It’s Been Done City’s Way

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Michael Zamansky, center, a teacher at Stuyvesant High School, who has been trying to revitalize computer science education in New York City schools, at a mixer for present and former students over pizza at the offices of Foursquare in Manhattan.

At last year's State of the City speech, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of a public high school called the Academy for Software Engineering. The school would be part of an ambitious expansion of computer science education in the city, and Mr. Bloomberg called it the "brainchild" of a local teacher named Michael Zamansky.

Mr. Zamansky was seated on the stage, a few steps from the mayor. But by that point, he said recently, the project was his in name only: he said he had been effectively cut out of the school's planning process, and his vision of an elite program had given way to one that was more focused on practical job skills.

"I don't know if they think my plans are too grandiose, or too unrealistic or if I'm an elitist snob," he said.

The mayor spoke about other efforts to train the city's future engineers and entrepreneurs. But Mr. Zamansky worried that the new school would be too small: not enough students, not enough ambition.

Mr. Zamansky, 45, had spent two decades developing the computer science program at Stuyvesant High School. Former students now working at Google and Facebook call him a mentor, a role model, a man who showed them their future.

He liked to say he "hacked the school" to get what he wanted at Stuyvesant. But hacking the city's education bureaucracy was proving more difficult.

When Mr. Zamansky first came to Stuyvesant's math department in 1993, technology education there included wood shop and telescope-building along with basic courses in Cisco Systems networking and robotics. He introduced the first advanced computer science electives, and started advocating for the subject to be a universal requirement, like math or biology.

Now, more than 300 juniors and seniors routinely vie for the 150 seats available in his advanced classes, which emphasize putting programming to real-world use. And last year, after nearly two decades of arguments, Mr. Zamansky persuaded the school to add a yearlong computer science requirement for the school's approximately 800 sophomores.

His students have built a movie-recommendation Web site, an app that searches for language patterns in celebrity Twitter posts and Pixar-style animations. Mr. Zamansky says his best students graduate "Google-ready."

But even with six full-time staff members, he feels Stuyvesant takes his program less seriously than subjects with their own departments. "We're just considered math teachers by the school and city," he said. "All of this could go away at the whim of the principal."

So in 2010, he decided that if he could not have his own department, he would have his own school.

He envisioned an elite institution with roughly 300 students per grade, all of whom would be admitted after demonstrating math proficiency. Computer science would be a standard part of the curriculum. Initially, he received encouraging feedback from the Board of Education, he said, but his proposal was rejected after the first application round.

Everything changed, however, after Fred Wilson came calling.

Mr. Wilson, 51, is a founder of Union Square Ventures, one of the bigger players in New York's growing technology start-up scene, and had invested in some of the companies where Mr. Zamansky's graduates now work. He learned about Mr. Zamansky's proposal after his own son experienced frustration trying to learn to write computer code in middle school.

The two agreed that the public schools needed to become incubators for tech talent. "I was really impressed by what Mike was doing," Mr. Wilson remembered. "He had lots of alums who'd gone onto Carnegie Mellon and M.I.T. and Stanford, and had come back to the city because they were born and raised here. And I thought: that's amazing, that's what we want to happen."

Mr. Wilson went back to the Department of Education with Mr. Zamansky's proposal, but this time with a significant sweetener: he promised to cover the one-time costs of starting a new school. Space was available in Washington Irving High School in Gramercy, near the city's tech corridor. But the budget for hiring staff, a principal and designing a new curriculum was considerable.

This time, the project was approved.

A flurry of meetings followed. The city advocated for a small school of about 100 students per class whose electives would focus almost solely on computer science. They also wanted the school to be unscreened — meaning no entrance examinations.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Washington Irving High School in Manhattan had closed.

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DealBook: Insider Inquiry at SAC Reaches Into Higher Ranks

8:55 p.m. | Updated

Friends of Michael S. Steinberg had always marveled at his good fortune.

In his mid-20s, he landed a job a SAC Capital Advisors, then a small hedge fund owned by Steven A. Cohen, who was fast developing a reputation on Wall Street as a stock trading wizard. As SAC posted stupendous returns year-after-year and became one of the world's largest hedge funds, Mr. Steinberg earned tens of millions of dollars trading as a close associate of Mr. Cohen, and rose within the firm.

When Mr. Steinberg married at the Plaza Hotel a few years after joining SAC, his boss attended the black-tie affair. Mr. Steinberg and his family moved into an $8 million Park Avenue co-op and summered in the Hamptons. He also gave back, helping found Natan, a philanthropy that promotes Israel and Jewish culture.

Then, his charmed life came undone.

On Friday, Mr. Steinberg became the most senior SAC employee to be ensnared in the government's multiyear insider trading investigation. F.B.I. agents showed up at his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and arrested him in the pre-dawn hours. Just the day before, Mr. Steinberg had returned from a vacation in Florida, where he and his family visited relatives and took a trip to Disney World.

Later on Friday, Mr. Steinberg, 40, in a black V-neck sweater and charcoal-gray slacks, appeared in Federal District Court in Manhattan and pleaded not guilty. Judge Richard J. Sullivan freed him on $3 million bail.

"Michael Steinberg did absolutely nothing wrong," Barry H. Berke, a lawyer for Mr. Steinberg, said in a statement. "Caught in the cross-fire of aggressive investigations of others, there is no basis for even the slightest blemish on his spotless reputation."

The arrest was the latest in a whirlwind of activity related to the government's investigation of SAC. For years, federal agents have been building a case against the fund. This month, SAC agreed to pay $616 million to settle two civil insider trading actions brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Thursday, a federal judge refused to approve the larger settlement of $602 million, raising concerns over a provision that lets SAC avoid an admission of wrongdoing.

Hedge Fund Inquiry

Including Mr. Steinberg, nine current or former SAC employees have been linked to insider trading while at the company; four have pleaded guilty. Some of the former employees who have been implicated hardly knew Mr. Cohen, who operates a sprawling $15 billion fund with more than 1,000 employees across the globe.

But Mr. Cohen and Mr. Steinberg were close. Mr. Steinberg is one of SAC's most veteran employees, though he was recently placed on leave soon after being tied to an earlier case. He joined SAC shortly after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. When he began at SAC, it was just Mr. Cohen and several dozen traders. For years, he sat near Mr. Cohen on the trading floor in the fund's headquarters in Stamford, Conn., and he was part of a team of tech-stock traders that posted outsize returns during the dot-com boom and bust. Later, he helped start Sigma Capital, an SAC unit in Midtown Manhattan.

While years apart, the two share the same hometown — Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island, where both attended Great Neck North High School. They also share a love of art; Mr. Steinberg introduced Mr. Cohen to his childhood friend Sandy Heller, who became Mr. Cohen's longtime art adviser.

In the past, SAC has distanced itself from former employees charged with insider trading, but on Friday, it issued a statement in support of Mr. Steinberg: "Mike has conducted himself professionally and ethically during his long tenure at the firm. We believe him to be a man of integrity."

Federal investigators have tried to press lower-level SAC employees for information in helping them build a case against Mr. Cohen. In one instance, F.B.I. agents showed a former trader a sheet of paper with headshots of his former colleagues, with Mr. Cohen at the center. The agents compared the SAC founder to an organized-crime boss who sat atop a corrupt organization.

The pressure on Mr. Cohen, 56, escalated in November, when prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former SAC portfolio manager, with trading in the drug stocks Elan and Wyeth based on confidential drug trial data that a doctor had leaked to him. Mr. Cohen was involved in drug stock trades, but the government has not claimed that he possessed any secret information. Those trades were the subject of the S.E.C. civil action that SAC settled for $602 million. Mr. Martoma has pleaded not guilty and has refused to cooperate with investigators.

Mr. Cohen has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has told his investors that he believes he has acted appropriately at all times.

Amid his legal woes, Mr. Cohen, whose net worth is estimated at about $10 billion, has gone on a shopping binge in recent days, paying $155 million for the Picasso painting "Le Rêve" and $60 million for an oceanfront estate in East Hampton on Long Island.

Mr. Steinberg's name surfaced last fall, when a former SAC analyst pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading ring that illegally traded the technology stocks Dell and Nvidia. As part of his guilty plea, the analyst, Jon Horvath, implicated Mr. Steinberg, saying that he gave the confidential information to Mr. Steinberg and that they traded based on that data. On Friday, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Steinberg with conspiracy and securities fraud, accusing him of participating in the illegal Dell and Nvidia trades. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil lawsuit against Mr. Steinberg.

Last year, a jury convicted two hedge fund managers at other firms related to the Dell and Nvidia trades. E-mails from Mr. Steinberg that emerged in that trial were included in the indictment on Friday.

In one e-mail from August 2008, sent a few days before Dell's quarterly earnings announcement, Mr. Horvath disclosed secret details about Dell's financial data to Mr. Steinberg.

Mr. Horvath wrote that he had "a 2nd hand read from someone at the company." He added, "Please keep to yourself as obviously not well known."

Mr. Steinberg replied: "Yes normally we would never divulge data like this, so please be discreet."

In another e-mail from the trial, Mr. Steinberg told Mr. Horvath and another portfolio manager, Gabe Plotkin, about a conversation he had with Mr. Cohen about conflicting views of Dell inside SAC. Mr. Plotkin owned a large Dell position, while Mr. Steinberg was short, meaning that he thought shares of Dell would drop in value.

"Guys, I was talking to Steve about Dell earlier today and he asked me to get the two of you to compare notes before the print" — meaning ahead of the company's earnings release — "as we are on opposite sides of this one," Mr. Steinberg wrote.

Since his name surfaced in the investigation, Mr. Steinberg has occasionally spent evenings in New York hotels to avoid being handcuffed at home in front of his two children. Federal agents refused to let Mr. Steinberg surrender of his own volition at F.B.I. headquarters downtown, expressing the view that white-collar defendants should not be given special treatment.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 29, 2013

Because of incorrect information supplied by prosecutors, an earlier version of this article gave the wrong age for Michael Steinberg, the SAC Capital Advisors portfolio manager who was arrested on Friday. He is 40, not 41.

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Some Savers in Cyprus May Lose 60 Percent

LONDON — Big-ticket savers at the Bank of Cyprus may be forced to accept losses on their deposits that exceed 60 percent in order to keep the stricken bank afloat, bankers briefed on the negotiations said on Friday.

The more sizable haircut, coming soon after the imposition of tough capital controls, is the latest and perhaps most profound reminder of the financial punishment being visited upon this small island economy as it struggles to comply with the conditions that Europe is demanding of it before it gets a desperately needed 10 billion euro loan.

Europe has demanded that large depositors in the country's two largest banks — Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank — accept across-the-board losses in order to pay for the 17 billion bailout.

Over the past week, government officials have been saying that depositor losses would not exceed 40 percent — even though bankers and lawyers involved in the negotiations have been warning for some time that the final figure would need to be higher if the bank was to re emerge as a viable entity.

Under the terms of the transaction, large depositors would have 77.5 percent of their savings turned into different forms of equity, with the rest remaining as a frozen, non-interest-bearing deposit that they would be able to access in the future.

If the bank does well, depositors would be able to sell their stock. But even in the best case, in which the bank thrives on the back of a quickly recovering economy — a long shot most economists believe — the loss is likely to exceed 60 percent and could well be much more than that.

Lawyers and bankers who have analyzed the transaction believe the ultimate loss to the depositor could be anywhere between 60 and 77.5 percent.

There has been no official announcement of the deal and, given the political sensitivities involved, there could be further changes in the coming days. But news of the terms is already rocketing through Cyprus.

How much of a loss uninsured depositors with accounts of more than 100,000 euros at the bank would have to bear has become a hotly disputed topic in the past two weeks, pitting Cyprus's creditors — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and in particular the International Monetary Fund, known widely as the troika — against the Cyprus government.

In the past week, as it has become evident that the country's 18-billion-euro economy was going to enter a tailspin after the controversial move to impose capital controls and freeze bank deposits equal to one half the size of the country's economic output, it has become increasingly clear that the bank would need a much larger capital cushion if it is to survive the next year.

Projections of an economic slump of 3 percent that were once seen as a worst case now seem wildly optimistic, with most economists expecting the economy to plunge between 5 and 10 percent this year.

While many of the Bank of Cyprus' largest depositors are wealthy Russians, numerous Cypriot businesses and wealthy individuals also had significant amounts of capital in the bank. Economists believe that wiping out such a large amount of savings will be devastating — not just on the economy but on Cyprus's future as a center for financial services.

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Judge Rejects Much of Libor Lawsuit Against Banks

The world's biggest banks won a major victory on Friday when a judge dismissed a "substantial portion" of the claims in private lawsuits accusing them of rigging global benchmark interest rates.

Sixteen banks had faced claims totaling billions of dollars in the case, which had been considered their biggest legal threat aside from investigations being pursued by regulators in the United States and Europe into manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor. The list of banks includes Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase.

The banks had been accused by a diverse body of plaintiffs, as varied as bondholders and the City of Baltimore, of conspiring to manipulate Libor, a benchmark at the heart of more than $550 trillion in financial products.

But in the ruling on Friday, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of United States District Court in Manhattan, while acknowledging that her decision "might be unexpected," granted the banks' motion to dismiss federal antitrust claims and partly dismissed the plaintiffs' claims of commodities manipulation. She also dismissed racketeering and state-law claims.

Judge Buchwald allowed a portion of the lawsuit to continue: the claims that banks' purported manipulation of Libor had harmed traders who bet on interest rates. Small shifts in rates can mean sizable gains or losses.

The decision may also make it more likely that banks will have an advantage in potential settlement talks.

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Music Review: Gustavo Dudamel at Avery Fisher Hall

Richard Termine

The Los Angeles Philharmonic performing John Adams's "Gospel According to the Other Mary."

During the "Infernal Dance" of Stravinsky's "Firebird," which depicts the subjects of the ogre Kastchei spinning with such savagery that they drop in exhaustion, the music builds to vehement, searing chords. In his performance of the complete "Firebird" on Thursday night with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall, the second of two programs, Gustavo Dudamel drew such blazing colors, slashing attacks and sheer terror from the orchestra that at the climax of the dance some people in the hall broke into applause and shouted "Bravo." This temporarily drowned out the transition that immediately follows: the powerful chords disperse to reveal mysterious, hushed sonorities.

The formal protocols of classical music concerts that can make audiences feel uptight should be tossed out. And to his immense credit, Mr. Dudamel is drawing newcomers into concert halls. So if some listeners on Thursday could not help expressing their excitement, why not?

For me, though, it was also a revealing moment. Like most ballet scores, "The Firebird," based on a Russian folk legend, is episodic. Still, this 45-minute piece has an overall structure and should unfold inexorably. For all the intensity, imagination and excitement Mr. Dudamel, conducting from memory, brought to bear, the performance lacked some cohesion and depth.

I liked that the dynamic 32-year-old Mr. Dudamel did not go for the obvious and simply pump up the piece with youthful energy. Quite the contrary, during long stretches he drew out the music, often taking slow tempos so as to convey the strangeness embedded in the score. But there were some oddly languid passages. "The Firebird" has seldom seemed so long.

It is exciting to hear this charismatic conductor taking risks and following a vision. Now in his fourth season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he has galvanized the city and become for all conductors a model of community outreach and education. Not bad.

He has also fostered working relationships with living composers. This visit by the orchestra to New York will be remembered especially for Wednesday night's performance of John Adams's ambitious and powerful oratorio "The Gospel According to the Other Mary," which tells the story of the Crucifixion from the perspective of Mary Magdalene, with a libretto compiled by the director Peter Sellars, drawn from the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament sources, with poems and texts by Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Primo Levi and others woven in.

Mr. Dudamel and the Philharmonic gave the premiere of this work in a concert performance last spring at Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Early this month the piece was performed there in a semi-staged version directed by Mr. Sellars. That staging was presented on Wednesday for the work's New York premiere.

"The Gospel According to the Other Mary" depicts the events of the Crucifixion by showing three siblings — Mary Magdalene, Martha and Lazarus — as both biblical and contemporary characters. This Mary Magdalene is a social activist who runs a center for unemployed women with Martha. When we meet them, they have been jailed for protesting on behalf of the poor. Martha is responsible and somber; Mary is searching and troubled.

In a video interview online Mr. Adams describes the challenge of writing this work, comparable in length to his operas. Since the premiere last year, he has made some trims. It remains a long piece: Act I lasts some 70 minutes; Act II about an hour. As a structure, the oratorio sometimes seems overextended, and the narrative thrust loses momentum.

Still, this is an extraordinary work, containing some of Mr. Adams's richest, most daring music. At this point in his career he has a masterly ability to write multi-textured scores where layers of music swirl and spin simultaneously, yet everything is audible. Though his language draws from recognizable inspirations, like big-band jazz, Bach, Copland, Ives, Ravel and more, his voice could not be more personal and fresh. I will not soon forget the entrancing sound of the three countertenors, who both relate, and participate in, the story. Their music hovers on a border between the celestial and the eerie.

Mr. Sellars's production blends the cast of three singers, three dancers and the countertenors into a fluid choreography of gestures that mingle singing, acting and movement. Though Jesus does not appear, the singers and dancers voice his words and become him.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 30, 2013

An earlier version of this review misstated the timing of one of two Gustavo Dudamel's programs at Avery Fisher Hall. As mentioned elsewhere in the article, the works by Vivier and Debussy were performed on Thursday, not Wednesday.

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South: Michigan 87, Kansas 85: Michigan Stuns No. 1 Seed Kansas

Mike Stone/Reuters

Michigan guard Trey Burke's 3-pointer over Kansas' Kevin Young tied the score in the second half.

ARLINGTON, Tex. — The shot was not a pedestrian 3-pointer, a casual 3 from 20 feet 9 inches. This was a heave. When Trey Burke stepped back, he was at least nine feet beyond the regulation 3-point line. He was drifting and Kansas' 6-foot-8 Kevin Young was jumping toward him. The chances of the ball going in were about the same odds many gave Burke and Michigan when they trailed by 14 with less than seven minutes remaining.

"It didn't matter how far that shot was," Burke said. "It was all or nothing. I had a lot of faith in that shot, and it went in."

Burke's faith was justified as his prayer found the bottom of the net with 4.8 seconds left in regulation to tie top-seeded Kansas, 76-76. Burke, the Big Ten player of the year, then scored 5 quick points in overtime as the fourth-seeded Wolverines beat the Jayhawks, 87-85, on Friday night in the Round of 16 in front of a crowd of 42,639 in Cowboys Stadium.

Burke, a sophomore, was shut out in the first half, but finished with 23 points to lead Michigan (29-7) back after it trailed, 68-54, with 6 minutes 50 seconds to play.

It was a stunning collapse for the Jayhawks (31-6), who controlled the game for 37 minutes in front of a large throng of K.U. fans that dominated the grandstands.

While Burke was providing the heroics, the Jayhawks went away from the two things that had carried them through most of the season: defense and the freshman star Ben McLemore. Just as troublesome was ignoring McLemore when the game was on the line. The 6-foot-5 guard broke out of his slump to score 20 points, but he did not score in the last 11:11 of the game.

It was not McLemore who took the 3-point shot with a chance to win the game with two seconds left; it was the reserve point guard Naadir Tharpe. With Kansas trailing by 2 points, the senior point guard Elijah Johnson drove down the right side of the lane, but found his path blocked by Jordan Morgan. Johnson passed to Tharpe, whose shot missed just before the final buzzer.

The Michigan players were delirious as they celebrated around Burke. The Kansas players were stunned, particularly the senior Johnson, who missed a free throw with 12 seconds left in regulation that would have put the Jayhawks up by 4. Johnson stayed on the floor with his hands on his knees, as responsible for the loss as any player because of two late turnovers and a failure to get McLemore more involved in the offense.

"You score 76 points you should win the game, period, especially a team that leads the country in field-goal percentage defense," said Kansas Coach Bill Self, whose team had limited opponents to 35.7 percent shooting for the season.

Kansas built its double-digit lead because it dominated on the inside. The Jayhawks scored a season-high 60 points in the paint and shot 54.5 percent from the field.

But the Michigan freshman Mitch McGary was more crafty and successful than anticipated against Kansas' 7-foot center Jeff Withey, who had blocked 12 shots in his team's first two wins of the tournament.

McGary, who is 6-10, made 12 of 17 shots and scored 25 points to go with 14 rebounds.

"I am about 6-10 and he thought I was shorter than that, I heard. I showed all of 6-10," McGary said. "He did a pretty good job, got some buckets, but that's basketball."

Kansas led by 72-62 with 2:58 to play following a dunk by Withey, and the Jayhawks seemed to expect Michigan to just go away.

"We definitely didn't see fear," said Michigan guard Tim Hardaway Jr. when asked what he saw in his team when it trailed by 14. But Johnson committed a turnover and the Michigan freshman Glen Robinson III scored to make it 72-64. Johnson was then stuck in the backcourt and committed a 10-second violation, and McGary scored with 1:54 to play and it was 72-66 and suddenly a two-possession game.

Kansas led, 76-71, after Johnson made two free throws, but Burke drove for any easy 2 and it was 76-73 with 14 seconds left. Johnson was fouled and missed a free throw with 12 seconds to play and Michigan had the ball.

And Burke.

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Texas Death Row Inmate’s Bid for Resentencing Has Support of Victim, Prosecutor and Ex-Governor

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Phyllis Taylor has forgiven her stepbrother, Duane E. Buck, for a 1995 shooting that killed two and left a scar on her chest. "This is not an easy thing," she said. "But I know that I'm doing the right thing."

HOUSTON — One morning in July 1995, Phyllis Taylor stood inside her best friend's house here, face to face with her stepbrother. He was holding a .22-caliber rifle, his eyes bloodshot red. Then he pulled the trigger.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice, via Associated Press

Mr. Buck was convicted of killing a former girlfriend and her friend on the same morning in 1995 when he shot Ms. Taylor.

Ms. Taylor survived — the bullet came within one inch of her heart and lodged in her right shoulder. More than 17 years later, a scar the size of a nickel remains on her chest, but her anger has faded: She has forgiven her stepbrother, Duane E. Buck, 49, and has been trying to secure his release from Texas' death row.

"This is not an easy thing," said Ms. Taylor, 46, who visited him last month at the prison that houses death row in Livingston, Tex. "It's very hard. I still have moments. But I know that I'm doing the right thing. The Bible says that I have to forgive, and that's just my key to my everyday living."

Ms. Taylor is part of an unusual network of supporters who have been trying to halt Mr. Buck's execution. His advocates include leaders of the N.A.A.C.P., one of the lawyers who prosecuted him and a former governor of Texas. While many contested death-row cases center on guilt or innocence, Mr. Buck's case is different — his guilt has never been disputed, but the testimony of a psychologist has raised questions about the role that race played in the jury's decision to sentence him to die by lethal injection.

Mr. Buck, who is black, was convicted of killing his former girlfriend Debra Gardner and her friend Kenneth Butler at Ms. Gardner's house the same morning in 1995 when he shot Ms. Taylor. Mr. Buck and Ms. Gardner had ended their relationship a week earlier, and he stormed into the house with a rifle and a shotgun. He shot Mr. Butler and then shot Ms. Gardner as she tried to flee outside, her two children looking on in horror, according to court documents.

At a sentencing hearing in May 1997, Walter Quijano, a former chief psychologist for the state prison system who had evaluated Mr. Buck, testified that race was one of several factors that could be used to predict whether a person would be a future danger to society. "It's a sad commentary that minorities, Hispanics and black people, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system," Dr. Quijano said in the courtroom.

Dr. Quijano had been called to the stand by the defense, and ultimately found that the probability that Mr. Buck would commit future acts of violence was low. But under cross-examination, the prosecutor for the Harris County district attorney's office asked him about the various factors. "You have determined that the sex factor, that a male is more violent than a female because that's just the way it is, and that the race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons," the prosecutor asked Dr. Quijano. "Is that correct?"

"Yes," he replied.

In her closing argument, the prosecutor reminded the jury of the psychologist's testimony. "You heard from Dr. Quijano, who had a lot of experience in the Texas Department of Corrections, who told you that there was a probability that the man would commit future acts of violence," she said.

Last week, a statement calling for a new sentencing hearing for Mr. Buck that was signed by Ms. Taylor and dozens of others — including another of the prosecutors who had helped convict him, Linda Geffin — was delivered to the Harris County district attorney, Mike Anderson. It was handed to him by Mark W. White Jr., a governor of Texas in the 1980s.

Mr. White and Mr. Buck's lawyers said that they believed his death sentence was a product of racial discrimination, and that Dr. Quijano's testimony — and the prosecutor's emphasis on that testimony — made the color of Mr. Buck's skin a factor in the jury's deliberations, violating his constitutional rights. In addition to their claims of racial bias, they said Texas was failing to follow through on a promise it had made to Mr. Buck.

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South: Florida Gulf Coast vs. Florida: N.C.A.A. Tournament — Florida Gulf Coast Isn’t Ready to Cede Spotlight

David J. Phillip/Associated Press

Florida Gulf Coast after practice Thursday. "We did make history," an Eagles guard said. "No 15 seed has done this."

ARLINGTON, Tex. — The team from so-called Dunk City had yet to rattle a rim or shake a backboard, and about 2,000 fans at Cowboys Stadium appeared bored as they watched a practice filled with drills of floating jumpers, entry passes and — gasp! — free throws.

Finally, the Florida Gulf Coast Eagles gathered around Coach Andy Enfield at midcourt and then quickly reorganized into two lines facing the same basket. Five minutes later, they reminded everyone how they had become the pledges crashing this South Region party of storied basketball fraternities.

Lob passes led to tomahawk jams. Ricochets off the glass were finished off as windmill dunks. Even the Eagles' botched attempts were spectacular, eliciting oohs and aahs. By the time that Chase Fieler tossed a bounce pass toward the hoop, grabbed the ball as he gained momentum, threaded it between his legs and threw down a jarring dunk, Florida Gulf Coast had recaptured the crowd's imagination.

"Dunk City in the house!" someone shouted.

The Eagles still embraced the underdog role Thursday, but they looked and sounded as if they had shaken off the stardust from victories over Georgetown and San Diego State as they prepared for Friday night's game against third-seeded Florida.

"We did make history," guard Brett Comer said. "No 15 seed has done this. We feel like we shocked the world. We're going to prepare for Florida the same way. We didn't come just to play one game or two games. We're coming out to compete and go as far as we can."

After a week in the spotlight, Enfield said the Eagles were refocused and taking a businesslike approach to their improbable appearance in the Round of 16, as if sharing a stage with elite programs like Kansas, Michigan and Florida were familiar turf.

"This is not fluff," Enfield said. "They are really enjoying themselves; they enjoy being here; they enjoy themselves as teammates. We've become more successful, and our players have developed quicker on their skills and confidence because of that culture in the program."

Loose and fun-loving, Florida Gulf Coast was clearly soaking in the atmosphere. Players held mock interviews with one another on the court and turned their smartphone cameras toward the crowd as practice ended, savoring the moment for their scrapbooks.

The gigantic video board at Cowboys Stadium caught their attention. The Eagles were already envisioning how they might look on replays and highlights Friday night.

"We talked about it already," Fieler said. "Even if you make the big plays, it's hard to get a good angle on that TV. You have to stand right on the edge. We'll have to run more towards the sideline to see it."

No. 1 seed Kansas faces fourth-seeded Michigan in Friday night's first game, and win or lose, fans of those two teams are expected to jump on the Eagles' bandwagon.

"We want to see the hype," said LeRoy Aikens, a Michigan fan who stayed after the Wolverines practiced to watch Florida Gulf Coast. "Those guys are like rock stars. A 15 seed in the Sweet 16, that's history."

The Michigan fan Kevin Morris said of the matchup between Florida and Florida Gulf Coast, "It's big brother and little brother," before changing his mind and calling the Eagles a nephew. Still, he said he would root for Florida Gulf Coast if his team did not advance.

The Gators have been cast as spoilers, a role they have relished before. In 2006, they ended George Mason's storybook run to the Final Four en route to winning the national championship. Last year, Florida ousted 15th-seeded Norfolk State, which had upset No. 2 seed Missouri.

"I don't view it that way," Florida Coach Billy Donovan said. "Florida Gulf Coast would like to advance in the tournament as much as we would. The name of the game right now is to try to survive and move on."

Yet the Gators have been overshadowed to an extent as they make their third consecutive appearance in the Round of 16. They face the pressure of not having broken through to the Final Four in both previous trips.

The Eagles, too, have added motivation, having been overlooked as recruits by Florida.

"They're the well-known school, the well-known players and team," Comer said. "I feel like honestly deep down they might not be taking us seriously, just like other teams, because we weren't the high recruited guys."

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For Obama, a Tricky Balancing Act in Enforcing Defense of Marriage Act

WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided that his administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, he was presented with an obvious question with a less obvious answer: Would he keep enforcing a law he now deemed unconstitutional?

A debate in the White House broke out. Some of his political advisers thought it made no sense to apply an invalid law. But his lawyers told Mr. Obama he had a constitutional duty to comply until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise. Providing federal benefits to same-sex couples in defiance of the law, they argued, would provoke a furor in the Republican House and theoretically even risk articles of impeachment.

Two years later, that decision has taken on new prominence after Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. accused Mr. Obama from the bench on Wednesday of not having "the courage of his convictions" for continuing to enforce the marriage law even after concluding that it violated constitutional equal protection guarantees. The chief justice's needling touched a raw nerve at the White House. "Continuing to enforce was a difficult political decision," said an aide who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations, "but the president felt like it was the right legal choice."

Other presidents have enforced laws that they no longer defended in court, including the first George Bush, whose acting solicitor general, a man named John Roberts, once asked the Supreme Court to overturn an affirmative action program at the Federal Communications Commission.

But the fuss this week underscored the awkward balancing act for Mr. Obama, whose administration refused to refund federal estate taxes to an 83-year-old lesbian even though he thought it was wrong not to.

"I'm sure there are people in our community who would agree with the chief justice that the president should go farther and not enforce" it, said one leader in the fight for same-sex marriage, who declined to be named while the case was pending. But leaders in the fight came to accept the decision "because without enforcement, there's no means to challenge the law" in court.

The decision to repudiate the Defense of Marriage Act came two years into Mr. Obama's term. Although the Justice Department had defended it in the past, the courts were being asked to examine the law for discrimination under a tougher standard.

Some at the Justice Department argued that the administration should continue to defend the law. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. decided the law did not meet the higher standard. He talked the issue through with Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and the president agreed. They would no longer defend the law against court challenges.

But administration lawyers researched the matter and concluded that the president should still enforce it while the courts deliberated. Even then, not every lawyer agreed. One Justice Department lawyer thought the administration should refuse to enforce the law as well.

The question comes down to the president's obligation under Article II of the Constitution to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." The meaning of that phrase has been debated at least since 1860, when the attorney general at the time concluded that the president could disregard a law purporting to appoint a government officer because it was unconstitutional.

The debate played out into the next century. After President Woodrow Wilson refused to comply with a law preventing him from removing postmasters without Senate approval, the Supreme Court struck down the statute in 1926 as an encroachment on executive power in a case that was seen as implicitly agreeing that a president is not required to execute unconstitutional laws.

A 1977 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under President Jimmy Carter concluded that a president could ignore a statute he considered unconstitutional, depending on the circumstances. A memorandum by the same office in 1994 said the president could do so when the law tried to improperly limit executive power or when it was "probable that the Court would agree with him."

But when a reasonable argument could be made on the other side, lawyers said, the president should still comply until the courts rendered a definitive verdict. That was what President Bill Clinton did in refusing to defend in court a 1996 law expelling all H.I.V.-positive soldiers from the military even as he said he would enforce it. Congress ultimately repealed the law.

Mr. Obama's lawyers leaned on that precedent in 2011 as they made their determination on the Defense of Marriage Act.

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Taliban Extending Reach Across Pakistan

Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Shahi Syed of the Awami National Party in Pakistan said, "We are the Taliban's first enemy."

KARACHI, Pakistan — This seaside metropolis is no stranger to gangland violence, driven for years by a motley collection of armed groups who battle over money, turf and votes.

But there is a new gang in town. Hundreds of miles from their homeland in the mountainous northwest, Pakistani Taliban fighters have started to flex their muscles more forcefully in parts of this vast city, and they are openly taking ground.

Taliban gunmen have mounted guerrilla assaults on police stations, killing scores of officers. They have stepped up extortion rackets that target rich businessmen and traders, and shot dead public health workers engaged in polio vaccination efforts. In some neighborhoods, Taliban clerics have started to mediate disputes through a parallel judicial system.

The grab for influence and power in Karachi shows that the Taliban have been able to extend their reach across Pakistan, even here in the country's most populous city, with about 20 million inhabitants. No longer can they be written off as endemic only to the country's frontier regions.

In joining Karachi's street wars, the Taliban are upending a long-established network of competing criminal, ethnic and political armed groups in this combustible city. The difference is that the Taliban's agenda is more expansive — it seeks to overthrow the Pakistani state — and their operations are run by remote control from the tribal belt along the Afghan border.

Already, the militants have reshaped the city's political balance by squeezing one of the most prominent political machines, the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party, off its home turf. They have scared Awami operatives out of town and destroyed offices, gravely undercutting the party's chances in national elections scheduled for May.

"We are the Taliban's first enemy," said Shahi Syed, the party's provincial head, at his newly fortified office. "They burn my offices, they tear down my flags and they kill our people."

The Taliban drift into Karachi actually began years ago, though much more quietly. Many fled here after a concerted Pakistani military operation in the Swat Valley in 2009. The influx has gradually continued, officials here say, with Taliban fighters able to easily melt into the city's population of fellow ethnic Pashtuns, estimated to number at least five million people.

Until recently, the militants saw Karachi as a kind of rear base, using the city to lie low or seek medical treatment, and limiting their armed activities to criminal fund-raising, like kidnapping and bank robberies.

But for at least six months now, there have been signs that their timidity is disappearing. The Taliban have become a force on the street, aggressively exerting their influence in the ethnic Pashtun quarters of the city.

Taliban tactics are most evident in Manghopir, an impoverished neighborhood of rough, cinder-block houses clustered around marble quarries on the northern edge of the city, where illegal housing settlements spill into the surrounding desert.

In recent months, Taliban militants have attacked the Manghopir police station three times, killing eight officers, said Muhammad Aadil Khan, a local member of Parliament.

In interviews, residents describe Taliban militants who roam on motorbikes or in jeeps with tinted windows, delivering extortion demands in the shape of two bullets wrapped in a piece of paper.

A factory owner in Manghopir, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, said that several Pashtun businessmen had received demands for $10,000 to $50,000. The figure was negotiable, he said, but payment was not: resistance could result in an assault on the victim's house or, in the worst case, a bullet to the head.

Mr. Khan said he had not dared to visit his constituency in months. "There is a personal threat against me," he said, speaking at the headquarters of his party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which represents ethnic Mohajirs, in the city center.

The militant drive has even distressed Manghopir's most revered residents: the dozens of crocodiles who inhabit a pool near a Sufi shrine here.

The Muslim pilgrims who come here to pay homage to the shrine's saint have long also brought scraps of meat for his reptile charges.

But lately, as visitor numbers have dwindled from hundreds per day to barely a few dozen, the roughly 120 crocodiles here have grown hungry, according to the animals' elderly caretaker.

Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from North Waziristan, Pakistan. 

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Mets’ Johan Santana Probably Out for the Season

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Johan Santana will be making $25.5 million in the sixth and final year of his enormous contract with the Mets. But it is highly unlikely that he will throw a pitch for the club this season and it is unclear if he will pitch again in the major leagues.

Instead, the 34-year-old Santana, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, will probably spend the season rehabilitating a new tear in his pitching shoulder, which Mets General Manager Sandy Alderson disclosed in a conference call Thursday evening.

The injury, a recurrence of the issue that led him to miss all of the 2011 season, adds an unhappy final chapter to his time with the Mets. The team acquired him in a trade with the Minnesota Twins in the winter of 2008, signed him to a $137.5 million contract — the remainder of which Alderson said was not insured — and then watched as physical ailments began to cut into his effectiveness after a strong first season in Queens.

To some degree, the announcement was not a big surprise because Santana had reported weakness in his pitching shoulder since arriving at spring training. He had not pitched in a single exhibition game and, under the best-case picture, was not expected to pitch in the regular season until late April or late May. Now it appears he will not pitch at all.

"I'm not a doctor nor am I a medical historian," Alderson said in the conference call, "but these injuries are very difficult to recover from after one surgery, and I don't know the history of recovering from a second."

Alderson said Santana had flown to New York on Wednesday to consult with Dr. David Altchek, the Mets' team physician, who performed a magnetic resonance imaging exam on Santana's left shoulder and concluded that he had retorn the anterior capsule. Alderson said that Altchek, at the request of Santana's agent, Peter Greenberg, then reviewed the M.R.I. with two prominent sports orthopedists — Dr. James Andrews and Dr. Lewis Yocum — and that both had agreed with Altchek's assessment.

Alderson said Santana would remain in New York over the weekend as he decided his next step. "A second surgery is a strong possibility," Alderson said.

Santana had hoped to represent Venezuela in March in the World Baseball Classic but encountered a succession of negative developments once he reported to camp. At one point, in early March, Alderson even questioned if Santana had reported to camp in proper shape. The comment did not sit well with Santana, who, perhaps unwisely, threw a bullpen session to try to prove a point.

Alderson spent part of Thursday's conference call trying to clarify how everything had deteriorated so quickly.

"We don't know when it happened or how it happened," he said, "but we do know that at some point the symptoms worsened."

Asked if the bullpen session might have contributed to the new diagnosis, Alderson said, "We just don't have facts."

The disclosure is more of a blow to Santana, who had been thought of as a potential Hall of Famer, than it is to the Mets, who did not have great ambitions for the 2013 season and were not counting on Santana to propel them into the postseason. The Mets are looking to turn things around in 2014, with a core of young players that was clearly not going to include Santana.

If he does not pitch again for the Mets, Santana will be remembered for two games. The most recent came last June, when he pitched the first no-hitter in the team's history. But it was a bittersweet accomplishment because he was forced to throw 134 pitches to get through nine innings, substantially more than the Mets wanted him to throw at that point in the wake of his first shoulder surgery.

After that game, Manager Terry Collins expressed misgivings about what harm might have been done, and his instincts might have been correct. In the 10 games he started after the no-hitter, Santana had an earned run average of 8.28, and he was eventually shut down for the season.

Santana's other standout effort came in the next-to-last game of the 2008 season, his first in New York, when the Mets were in the process of collapsing for the second September in a row. Against the Marlins, with his team reeling, Santana pitched a three-hit, 2-0 shutout. The victory temporarily drew the Mets even in the wild-card standings, although they proceeded to lose the next day, finishing out of the postseason.

It turned out that Santana pitched the game against the Marlins with a torn meniscus in his left knee. That injury was easily repaired. His damaged shoulder, however, is a different story.

The Mets have one more vacancy to address in a starting rotation that now leans heavily on two young pitchers: Jon Niese and Matt Harvey.

Dillon Gee still has to prove he is capable after having surgery last season for a blood clot in his pitching shoulder, and Shaun Marcum, acquired in the off-season, is sidelined with a neck ailment.

"We'll just have to see," said Alderson, which is about all he could say at the end of one more sobering day for his team.

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Bloomberg Expresses Rage Over Failed Plan for Speed-Tracking Cameras

As it became clear that a proposal to place speed-tracking cameras on New York City's streets would fail in Albany, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg let fly a charged and unusually personal attack against state lawmakers on Wednesday, blaming state senators, by name, for the future deaths of children killed by speeding cars.

The next time that word of such a tragedy emerges, Mr. Bloomberg suggested at a news conference near Union Square, "why don't you pick up the phone and call your state senator and ask why they allowed that child to be killed?"

He said his office would even provide contact information for certain senators: Dean G. Skelos, the Republican majority leader; Simcha Felder, who was elected as a Democrat but chose to caucus as a Republican; and Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who has often been a crucial ally to the Bloomberg administration.

"Maybe you want to give those phone numbers to the parents of the child when a child is killed," Mr. Bloomberg said. "It would be useful so that the parents can know exactly who's to blame."

Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Republicans, declined to address the mayor's remarks directly, saying only that "no one has fought harder or longer than Senate Republicans" to promote safety in New York City.

But late Wednesday night, Mr. Felder, who had not seen the mayor's comments initially because of the Passover holiday, condemned them as "inflammatory, reckless and out of touch, as usual."

Though speed cameras, long trumpeted by city officials as an important street safety tool, were initially included in a budget package in the State Assembly, they do not appear in the budget that is expected to be approved by the Legislature this week.

Some opponents of the cameras have called them a warrantless attempt to raise revenue for the city and have expressed doubts as to whether they reduce speeding.

Mr. Golden said on Wednesday that other areas with speed cameras around the country had found them "unreliable."

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner, said on Wednesday that over 100 cities and states were already using cameras "and study after study has proved that they work." The Transportation Department cited the example of Washington, D.C., where the police said last year that speeding at camera locations had fallen significantly since 2001, when the devices were first installed.

Last week, when New York City announced its final 2012 traffic fatality statistics — 274 deaths, the highest since 2008 — officials sought to tie the figures to a need for speed cameras, particularly near schools.

Amid consistent calls from advocates, who are often critical of New York City's traffic enforcement, it appeared that momentum had begun to build in support of the policy, particularly after a spate of high-profile fatal crashes this year.

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a top Democratic candidate for mayor, pledged her support for speed cameras this month, as did Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner.

But the plan has faced opposition from the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, which, like Mr. Golden, has said that the more effective way to reduce speeding would be to hire more officers.

Mr. Golden suggested that the state revisit the use of cameras "if we can prove that the technology is sound, and document unequivocally that it will reduce speeding and fatalities."

On Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg appeared in no mood to wait.

"We literally are having kids that are getting killed around our schools because people are speeding," he said. "And they don't want to let us use cameras to stop people from doing that."

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Dairy Finds Way to Let Cows Power Trucks

Peter Hoffman for The New York Times

Fair Oaks Farms in Fair Oaks, Ind., has long used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to fully power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a gift shop and more. More Photos »

FAIR OAKS, Ind. — Here at one of the largest dairy farms in the country, electricity generated using an endless supply of manure runs the equipment to milk around 30,000 cows three times a day.

For years, the farm has used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a cafe, a gift shop and a maze of child-friendly exhibits about the world of dairy, including a 4D movie theater.

All that, and Fair Oaks Farms was still using only about half of the five million pounds of cow manure it vacuumed up from its barn floors on a daily basis. It burned off the excess methane, wasted energy sacrificed to the sky.

But not anymore.

The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials from the federal Department of Energy called the endeavor a "pacesetter" for the dairy industry, and said it was the largest natural gas fleet using agricultural waste to drive this nation's roads.

"As long as we keep milking cows, we never run out of gas," said Gary Corbett, chief executive of Fair Oaks, which held a ribbon-cutting event for the project this month and opened two fueling stations to the public.

"We are one user, and we're taking two million gallons of diesel off the highway each year," he said. "That's a big deal."

The switch comes at a time of nascent growth for vehicles that run on compressed natural gas in the United States, as some industries — particularly those that require long-haul trucking or repetitive routes — have started considering the advantages of cheap natural gas, close to half the price of a gallon of diesel fuel for the same amount of power.

The American Gas Association estimates there are about 1,200 natural gas fueling stations operating across the country, the vast majority of which are supplied by the same pipelines that heat houses.

But the growing market is also drawing interest from livestock farmers, landfill management companies and other industries handling methane-rich material that, if harnessed, could create a nearly endless supply of cleaner, safer, sustainable "biogas," while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

To be sure, no one is pretending that waste-to-energy projects will become a major part of the larger natural gas vehicle market. But supporters say it could provide additional incentive to make biogas systems, which have lagged behind other sustainable energy solutions, more commercially viable.

"You're essentially harvesting manure," said Erin Fitzgerald, a senior vice president at the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, who says that farmers across the country are starting to think about whether the model tried at Fair Oaks will work for them. "It's not glamorous. It doesn't really catch your eye like wind and solar."

Mike McCloskey, a co-owner of Fair Oaks, said he first started looking into renewable energy options for the farm more than a decade ago, when the smell of manure, used as fertilizer on his fields, started drawing complaints from some neighbors.

Today, the farm is running sophisticated $12 million "digester" facilities that process its overabundance of manure, capturing natural gas that runs electric generators or is pumped underground to a fueling station. The leftover byproduct is still spread on the fields as fertilizer.

While Mr. Corbett would not divulge how much money the farm saves by its switch to biogas fuel, he said the gas stations had already brought in new revenue from other trucking fleets.

Dennis Smith, director of the Clean Cities program for the federal Department of Energy, said about 8,000 large-scale dairy and swine farms across the country could potentially support similar biogas recovery projects. When coupled with landfills and wastewater treatment plants, he said, there is potential to someday replace as much as 10 billion gallons of gasoline annually with renewable fuel.

Still, not everyone is convinced that the time is ripe for more manure-powered vehicles, particularly when regular natural gas remains abundant and cheap.

"The market is just not firm yet," said Michael Boccadoro, a bioenergy consultant from California who is finishing a study of the possibility of neighboring dairies in the San Joaquin Valley sharing a single digester. "It's all a tiny bit premature."

That has not stopped AMP Americas, a Chicago company that partnered with Fair Oaks on the fuel project. The company plans to build 15 more natural gas stations this year, with some in Texas and the rest along two major Interstates in the Midwest.

For now, each station will be supplied primarily by traditional pipeline gas, but the company plans to partner with more dairy companies along the way, getting help from Mr. McCloskey and the Fair Oaks story.

"I think the whole country is ready for this," Mr. McCloskey said. "I think you're going to look around in five years and be very surprised at what you see."

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Doctor for N.F.L. Says Study Overstates Effects of C.T.E.

When a government agency prepared a workplace safety fact sheet based on a study of degenerative brain disease in retired N.F.L. players, the organization invited several people to comment on a draft.

According to a memorandum obtained by The New York Times, most of the reviewers suggested simplifying the fact sheet so that players without a scientific background could better understand the findings. But one response stood out: a doctor on the N.F.L.'s head, neck and spine committee asked that a mention of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., be removed.

C.T.E. is a degenerative brain disease that is closely related to Alzheimer's disease and is believed to be caused by repeated head trauma. It has been found posthumously in dozens of football players, provoking widespread concern about the sport's potential long-term cognitive effects.

Against this backdrop of public awareness, the N.F.L. has drastically shifted its position on head injuries in recent years, introducing rule changes and promoting education. But the league has expressed skepticism about the possibility of a link between on-field head injuries and C.T.E., a sentiment captured in the league doctor's request to the federal safety agency.

The doctor, who was not named in the internal memo, said references to C.T.E. should be removed because it was "not fully understood" and because it was not listed on the death certificates of the retired players in the study and thus lacked "epidemiological validity." He suggested that traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., be used instead because it "may accomplish what you want to say in more established medical terms."

Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which wrote the fact sheet, rejected the league doctor's proposed change. Independent medical experts said such a request was inappropriate and not in line with prevailing research.

"That's what bugged me the most," said Jeffrey Kutcher, a neurologist and the director of Michigan NeuroSport at the University of Michigan, referring to the request to use traumatic brain injury instead of C.T.E. "It's a huge jump and it goes completely away from what the Niosh study showed."

Richard Ellenbogen, the chairman of the University of Washington's neurological surgery department and a co-chairman of the N.F.L.'s head, neck and spine committee, said he did not know which doctor suggested changing the text of the fact sheet.

But he said the doctor was correct in wanting to include a reference to traumatic brain injury. T.B.I. is a clinical diagnosis that can be identified in living patients, Ellenbogen said, while C.T.E. is a pathological diagnosis that so far can be found only through autopsies.

"Whoever said that is right," Ellenbogen said. "We've got to be careful because C.T.E. is a pathological diagnosis. We know that exists. That's been proven forever. What's important about this study is, if I played sports and had concussions, what's my chance of getting these?"

Ellenbogen said there was not enough research to answer that question. "Right now, people are on the razor's edge cutting the words," he said. "The problem is, the science isn't there yet. But we have to be clear. I'm agreeing with the Niosh study, but we just have to be more careful to make clear that C.T.E. is a pathological diagnosis and T.B.I. is a clinical diagnosis."

Like Ellenbogen, independent medical experts said they agreed with the agency when it wrote that there was no known "cause-effect relationship between football-related concussions and death from these neurodegenerative disorders," as well as the agency's statement that "professional football players are at increased risk of death" from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

The medical experts also expressed dismay that an N.F.L. doctor would point to the death certificates of former players in the study. C.T.E. is often diagnosed months after death, when brain samples are examined.

"This is an epidemiological entity, and at this point it definitely garners this title because of the number of players we have diagnosed with it," said Alexander K. Powers, an assistant professor of neurosurgery who specializes in sports-related brain and spine injuries at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "There's plenty of research that is active. It's a robust field. It's not some orphan ambition."

The fact sheet, sent to retired N.F.L. players in January, summarized research published in September in the journal Neurology that found that players "may be at a higher risk of death associated with Alzheimer's and other impairments of the brain and nervous system than the general U.S. population."

Before publishing its fact sheet, Niosh asked three former players, a representative from the N.F.L. Players Association and a representative from the N.F.L. Player Care Foundation, an independent organization that assists retired players, to review and comment on a draft. The foundation asked for advice from the doctor on the head, neck and spine committee.

Niosh researchers rejected the proposed change because C.T.E. "resonated with the players who reviewed the draft and provided feedback" and was widely acknowledged. Using T.B.I. was also inappropriate because it described an injury that might result in a disorder like C.T.E. and was therefore not equivalent, said Ann Mobley, the health communications specialist at Niosh who wrote the fact sheet.

The debate over the long-term effects of head injuries in football has engaged neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuropsychologists and other researchers and clinicians. It has also led to lawsuits. Several thousand retired players have accused the N.F.L. of deliberating playing down the dangers of head injuries.

Everett Lehman, an epidemiologist at Niosh and the principal author of the original mortality study of more than 3,400 retired players, said his department must balance accuracy and clarity in its research. He said the N.F.L. doctor's request was misguided.

"I just think they are different things, and we didn't think it was important to include T.B.I.," he said. "Maybe whoever looked at it didn't carefully look at our paper."

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Bulls 101, Heat 97: Heat’s Streak Stopped by Bulls at 27

Tannen Maury/European Pressphoto Agency

Chicago's Taj Gibson (22) and Jimmy Butler defending LeBron James, who finished with 32 points and 7 rebounds in Miami's first defeat since Feb. 1.

CHICAGO — Before Wednesday's tip-off at United Center, LeBron James lay on a towel in the Miami locker room as a team assistant helped him stretch. James rapped along to a song on his iPod as his thighs were kneaded and his long limbs were pushed and pulled. Nearly 20 reporters and cameramen watched his every movement.

 After the Chicago Bulls stunned the Heat, 101-97, to end their 27-game winning streak — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history and six games short of the record set by the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers — James had another moment in the locker room, this one much more private.

 "I had everyone come in and put a hand on each other," Heat Coach Erik Spoelstra said. "It was the first time I talked about the streak."

 James said: "We haven't had a moment to really know what we just did. We had a moment, just very fortunate and very humble and blessed to be a part of this team and be a part of a streak like this."

 The Bulls sprinted to an early lead, as many teams had done recently against the Heat. They led by double digits for much of the first half and held a 9-point edge at halftime. But a 13-3 third-quarter spurt gave the Heat their first lead of the game, 59-58, with 4 minutes 30 seconds left in the quarter.

 Rather than fold, the Bulls stiffened, something no other team had done during Miami's run. Boston led the Heat by 17 in the second quarter on March 18, and Cleveland held a 27-point second-half advantage two nights later. Neither cushion was enough.

 With the game tied at 69-69 early in the fourth quarter, Miami appeared poised to go on another run, and remind the league that they were good enough to spot opponents large leads and come back at will.

 Instead, it was Chicago that found an extra gear. As the minutes ticked away, the wait for the Heat to turn into that familiar squad of steel nerves and ruthless efficiency became cheer after cheer as the Bulls hit big shot after big shot.

 Luol Deng sank a 3-pointer to make the score 78-73 and another to make it 83-75. Jimmy Butler drilled a third long-range basket to put the Bulls ahead, 86-78.

 Suddenly, the crowd was chanting, "Beat the Heat." And with belief.

 The Heat never threatened again. Deng led the Bulls with 28 points, Carlos Boozer had 21 and Butler added 17.

The last time the Heat had lost was Feb. 1 to Indiana. The streak spanned 53 days, beginning in Toronto on Super Bowl Sunday, and captivated the N.B.A., as James raised his already electric game to another level. He was terrific again Wednesday, scoring 32 points on 11-for-17 shooting from the field. Dwyane Wade returned after missing two games with a knee bruise and scored 18.

 It was not enough.

 Despite an 86-67 Miami victory over Chicago in late February, the gritty, defensive-minded Bulls posed a test for the Heat. Before Wednesday's game, Spoelstra spoke of the challenge rather starkly.

 "We're preparing for an absolute cage-fight mentality game," he said.

Chicago obliged. Indicative of Spoelstra's assessment was a first-quarter play in which James went one-on-one against Kirk Hinrich on a fast break. James lowered his shoulder and Hinrich took it in the chest, while also giving James a bear hug. Both players tumbled to the floor, Hinrich was whistled for a foul and the home crowd erupted.

Chicago was short-handed, playing without Derrick Rose, who has yet to return after tearing an anterior cruciate ligament during last year's playoffs, and the All-Star center Joakim Noah, out with plantar fasciitis. It did not matter.

 A thunderous round of boos greeted James when he was announced, but it was nothing compared with the raucous scene as the fourth-quarter clock ticked down. Fans stood, and the arena seemed to shake.

 Despite the heightened media attention, and presence, as the Heat inched closer to history, James said the weight of the streak was not an issue.

"We weren't pressing every game saying we have to win so we can get the streak," he said.

Soon, the Heat will turn their attention to a larger prize, in the playoffs.

 "It has never been about the streak," Spoelstra said. "We have had a bigger goal in mind."

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