Airlines Urged by U.S. to Give Notice to China

WASHINGTON — Even as China scrambled fighter jets to enforce its newly declared air defense zone, the Obama administration said on Friday that it was advising American commercial airlines to comply with China's demands to be notified in advance of flights through the area.

While the United States continued to defy China by sending military planes into the zone unannounced, administration officials said they had made the decision to urge civilian planes to adhere to Beijing's new rules in part because they worried about an unintended confrontation.

Although the officials made clear that the administration rejects China's unilateral declaration of control of the airspace over a large area of the East China Sea, the guidance to the airlines could be interpreted in the region as a concession in the battle of wills with China.

"The U.S. government generally expects that U.S. carriers operating internationally will operate consistent with" notice requirements "issued by foreign countries," the State Department said in a statement, adding that that "does not indicate U.S. government acceptance of China's requirements."

The decision contrasted with that of Japan's government this week, when it asked several Japanese airlines, which were voluntarily following China's rules, to stop, apparently out of fear that complying with the rules would add legitimacy to Chinese claims to islands that sit below the now contested airspace. China's newly declared zone, experts say, is intended mainly to whittle away at Japan's hold on the islands, which it has long administered.

On Saturday, a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said, "We will not comment on what other countries are doing with regard to filing flight plans." It was not immediately clear if the Obama administration had notified Japan, a close ally, of its decision.

An official at Japan's Transport Ministry said it had no immediate change to its advice to Japanese airlines.

The American decision drew criticism from some quarters. Stephen Yates, a former Asia adviser to Dick Cheney when he was vice president, said it was "a bad move" that would undercut allies in the region that take a different stance.

But Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state under Bill Clinton and now president of the Brookings Institution, said it was important to avoid an accident while drawing a firm line. "The principal option is to be extremely clear that disputes" over territory "must be resolved through diplomacy and not unilateral action," he said.

American officials said they began having talks with airlines on Wednesday and characterized the guidance Friday as simply following established international air protocols independent of any political deliberations. The American announcement came on the same day that Chinese state news media said that China sent jets aloft and that they identified two American surveillance planes and 10 Japanese aircraft in the air defense zone the country declared last weekend.

Although there was no indication that China's air force showed any hostile intent, the move raised tensions. The Chinese had also sent jets on patrol into the contested airspace the day before, but Xinhua, the state-run news agency, indicated that the planes on Friday were scrambled specifically to respond to foreign jets in the area.

Earlier in the week, the United States sent unarmed B-52s into the area, and they proceeded unimpeded. China then appeared to back down somewhat from its initial declaration that planes must file advance flight plans or face possible military action.

The administration's decision on Friday underscored the delicate position President Obama finds himself in, drawn into a geopolitical dispute that will test how far he is willing to go to contain China's rising regional ambitions.

China's move thrust the United States into the middle of the already prickly territorial clash between Beijing and Tokyo, a position the administration had avoided for months even while reiterating that the mutual defense treaty with Japan covers the islands. After the Chinese declaration last weekend, American officials feared that, if left unchallenged, the Chinese action would lead to ever greater claims elsewhere in the Pacific region.

Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Beijing. Martin Fackler and Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Japan, and Thom Shanker from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated which countries were pushing back against China's newly declared air defense zone. It was the United States and Japan, not the United States and China.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of Japan's defense minister. He is Itsunori Onodera, not Onodero.

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North Korea Says U.S. Citizen Is a Criminal

SEOUL — North Korea said on Saturday it had arrested U.S. citizen Merrill E. Newman for "hostile acts" against the state and accused him of being "a criminal" who was involved in the killing of civilians during the 1950-53 Korean War.

Newman "masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the DPRK and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People's Army and innocent civilians," the North's official KCNA news agency said.

DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea is technically still at war with the South and the United States as a truce, not a peace treaty, was signed to end the Korean conflict.

"He admitted all his crimes and made an apology for them," KCNA said.

In a separate dispatch, KCNA carried what it said was a statement of apology by Newman, made after being detained.

"During the Korean War, I have been guilty of a long list of indelible crimes against DPRK government and Korean people as advisor of the Kuwol Unit of the U.N. Korea 6th Partisan Regiment part of the Intelligence Bureau of the Far East Command," it said.

The unit appears to refer to one of the special operations units of partisan, or irregular, fighters acting against the North.

Newman, who had been visiting North Korea as a tourist, has been held in Pyongyang since officials took him off an Air Koryo plane that was scheduled to leave the country on October 26.

Newman is a retiree from Palo Alto in California, and the U.S. State Department has refused to provide any details of the detention.

North Korea has been holding another U.S. citizen and a Christian missionary of Korean decent, arrested last year and sentenced in May to 15 years of hard labor on charges of committing hostile acts against the state. (Reporting by Jack Kim, Ju-min Park and James Pearson; Editing by Ron Popeski)

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Peter Kaplan, Who Brought a Cutting Edge to The New York Observer, Dies at 59

The cause was cancer, his brother James said.

Founded in 1987 by the investment banker Arthur L. Carter, The Observer, in the words of its website, observer.com, seeks to report on "finance, media, real estate, politics, society, tech and culture with an insider's perspective, a keen sense of curiosity and a sharp wit." Published weekly on pinkish paper that in its smoked-salmon hue trumpets Gotham, it reaches a primarily high-income readership.

Though its circulation has long been small — about 50,000 in Mr. Kaplan's day and only slightly higher now — the newspaper became, under his stewardship, required reading for the very demographic it skewered.

Appointed in 1994, Mr. Kaplan served the longest term of any Observer editor. During his tenure the paper featured the work of journalists renowned for a cutting-edge sensibility, among them Joe Conason, now the editor in chief of the political website The National Memo; Nikki Finke, who went on to found the entertainment-industry site now known as Deadline.com; and Choire Sicha, who later helped found The Awl, the current-events site.

The vigorously reported, tart-tongued coverage of New York's power elites that Mr. Kaplan helped bring to The Observer prefigured the work of many websites devoted to politics, culture and the press.

"It's hard to find a major publication right now, in print or online, that's not in some way flavored by the old Observer," The New Republic wrote in a profile of Mr. Kaplan last year. "Subtract Kaplan from the media landscape of the past 20 years and you lose The Awl, much of Gawker and a good bit of Politico, too."

When The Observer began, it was intended to be a hyperlocal Manhattan affair. In light of what it later became, its early tone and purview — community board meetings loomed somewhat large in its coverage — seem almost bucolic.

Esteemed as a mentor to writers, Mr. Kaplan, by all accounts, helped usher in a delectable dose of snark. Writing about The Observer in The New York Times in 2006, David Carr called him "the man who turned it into a maypole of Manhattan gossip and intrigue."

Among Mr. Kaplan's greatest coups was hiring a little-known freelance writer named Candace Bushnell to write a column about the hunt for love, or something approximately like it, in the urban jungle. Ms. Bushnell's column, "Sex and the City," which appeared in The Observer from 1994 to 1996, became the basis for the hit HBO series starring Sarah Jessica Parker.

"The more cancellations we got for her column," Mr. Kaplan wrote in an essay in New York magazine in 2011, "the more the paper knew we had hit the jackpot."

Though he went on to help carry The Observer across the digital threshold, overseeing the creation of its website, Mr. Kaplan was regarded by those who knew him as a throwback to an earlier age — to the New York of the Stork Club, the Automat and the Algonquin. He revered the stuff of that era, from classic black-and-white films that portrayed the city at its noirish finest (he knew the credits of nearly all of them by heart) to newspapers as they were originally conceived: damp, sweet-smelling and black and white, or, in his case, black and pink.

Mr. Kaplan remained with The Observer after it passed into the hands of a new owner — Jared Kushner, then 25 — in 2006, and through its transformation from a broadsheet into a tabloid the next year. When he left the newspaper in 2009, amid a retrenchment that entailed staff cuts and shorter articles, his departure appeared to many in the industry to herald the last heady days of a certain brand of old-school print journalism.

Peter Wennik Kaplan was born in Manhattan on Feb. 10, 1954, and reared primarily in northern New Jersey. At Harvard, where he received a bachelor's degree in American studies, he was a stringer for Time magazine; he also ran a campus film society, named for the Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, that specialized in showing the most obscure movies possible.

Before joining The Observer, Mr. Kaplan was a reporter at The Times, for which he covered the television industry in the mid-1980s; the executive editor of the business magazine Manhattan,inc.; and the executive producer of Charlie Rose's PBS talk show.

After leaving The Observer, Mr. Kaplan was the editorial creative director at Condé Nast Traveler. In 2010, he was named editorial director of the Fairchild Fashion Group (now Fairchild Fashion Media, a division of Condé Nast Publications), where his portfolio included Women's Wear Daily, WWD.com, Footwear News and Fairchild Books.

At Fairchild, Mr. Kaplan oversaw the relaunch last year of M magazine, a glossy quarterly aimed at affluent men.

Mr. Kaplan's marriage to Audrey Walker ended in divorce. Besides his brother James, a novelist and biographer, survivors include his second wife, Lisa Chase, whom he married last year; their son, David; three children from his marriage to Ms. Walker, Caroline Kaplan, Charles Kaplan and Peter Walker Kaplan; and another brother, Robert.

Though he had long made his home in suburban Larchmont, N.Y., Mr. Kaplan never stopped regarding New York City as a shimmering object of desire. Decades afterward, looking back on boyhood car trips into town, he recalled his father's words on seeing the Manhattan skyline rear up on the horizon:

"There's the Emerald City."

And for the son, so it was.

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North Korea Accuses Captive U.S. Veteran of War Crimes

HONG KONG — North Korea accused a captive American military veteran of war crimes, saying he was involved in the killing of innocent civilians during the Korean War, state news media reported on Saturday.

The veteran, Merrill E. Newman, 85, of Palo Alto, Calif., has been detained in North Korea since Oct. 26, when he was taken off a flight as he was about to leave the country. He had been visiting on a tourist visa.

The Korean Central News Agency said on Saturday that Mr. Newman had "admitted his crimes" and apologized for his actions during the war, which lasted from 1950 until 1953.

Mr. Newman, who is a retired technology executive, had served as an infantryman and had long wanted to revisit the country.

Mr. Newman's son, Jeff Newman, had said that the day before his father was to leave, he had a meeting with his tour guide during which the Korean War was discussed.

The news agency said Mr. Newman had "masterminded espionage and subversive activities against the D.P.R.K., and in this course he was involved in killings of service personnel of the Korean People's Army and innocent civilians." The D.P.R.K. stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Relatives had appealed to the North Korean government to release Mr. Newman, with Jeff Newman calling the situation a "misunderstanding." He said his father has a heart condition and a bad back and was on several medications.

Mr. Newman's relatives were not immediately available to comment on his arrest.

The detention of Mr. Newman led the United States to issue a travel warning about visiting North Korea, saying, "U.S. citizens crossing into North Korea, even accidentally, have been subject to arbitrary arrest and long-term detention."

North Korea continues to hold Kenneth Bae, 44, a Christian missionary who was sentenced in May to 15 years of hard labor for committing "hostile acts" against the North. Mr. Bae's mother was recently allowed to visit him in a hospital, where he was being treated after becoming ill after working at a labor camp.

Mr. Newman was detained at the end of a nine-day trip he made to North Korea with a companion from his California retirement village. The friend, Bob Hamrdla, said Mr. Newman's talk with the tour guide the day before his planned departure had not gone well and had left him upset.

His flight was about to take off from Pyongyang to Beijing when he was pulled off the plane.

The State Department had no immediate comment on the North Korean report.

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The Saturday Profile: A Forced Adoption, a Lifetime Quest and a Longing That Never Waned

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

"What we had done was seen as so shameful. Society did not want to know you." PHILOMENA LEE

LONDON — PHILOMENA LEE is 80 now, and she has made peace with many things. Yet her voice still catches when she describes her last glimpse of her firstborn child as he was being taken away to be adopted by an American family.

Ms. Lee desperately wanted to keep the boy, Anthony, who was then 3 years old. But it was 1955. Locked in a Roman Catholic home for unwed mothers on the grounds of a country convent in Roscrea, Ireland, she had signed her rights away at the nuns' insistence.

She never even got a chance to say goodbye. Racing to an upstairs window, she got there just in time to see Anthony's face looking out the back of a departing car. "I can see him like it was yesterday," Ms. Lee said recently. "I will carry that picture in my head always."

These days, Ms. Lee, who lives on the outskirts of London, is talking candidly about those difficult years when, barely out of a convent school and completely ignorant about sex, she became pregnant at 18 and entered the ranks of the thousands of young women in Ireland who were sent to live in church institutions for unwed mothers. Though the Mother and Baby homes were supported by the state, the women were forced to work long hours and had little choice but to give up their children.

Ms. Lee's ordeal and her lifetime of searching for her son are the subject of a new movie, "Philomena," directed by Stephen Frears, which opened in America last week to glowing reviews. Judi Dench plays Ms. Lee.

Tall, dignified and with her sense of humor intact, Ms. Lee put her cane aside recently and settled into a hotel armchair to answer questions. She said she was pleased with the movie, even if she did not recognize herself on the screen. Many of the film's comic bits, like her eagerness for free Champagne, never happened.

"They really make me look like a silly billy, don't you think?" she said. But Ms. Lee says she accepts the screenwriters' efforts to inject some lightness into the film because, "otherwise, it is a very sad story."

"It is hard to believe what it was like back then," she said. "What we had done was seen as so shameful. Society did not want to know you."

The film has set off something of a firestorm in Ireland, where many Catholics are still trying to come to terms with a series of revelations about the church's past abusive practices, in which orphans, runaways and others considered delinquent were subjected to systematic and sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse — in many cases with the government's help.

But "Philomena" focuses on yet another matter: the church's role in isolating unwed mothers like Ms. Lee and forcing them to put their babies up for adoption to families willing to make large contributions. Rights advocates charge that rather than prioritize the welfare of the mother or the children involved by finding suitable adoptees, the church was interested only in ensuring the couples were Catholic and, preferably, wealthy.

Church officials have denied that payment ever took place, and many of the documents from that period were lost in a fire. But researchers say that between 1945 and the mid-1960s, at least 2,200 infants and toddlers like Anthony, some of whom had stayed with their mothers for years, were sent to America.

Those were only a portion of the forced adoptions. Probably 50,000 babies were born in Mother and Baby homes throughout Ireland before they closed in the 1990s. Conditions in the homes were difficult for the young mothers. The church saw them as degenerates, not fit to keep their children. Among other humiliations, they were forced to recount their sexual encounters in detail to the nuns. The father of Ms. Lee's son was a young man she had met one evening at a carnival. They had planned to meet the following week, but her aunt would not allow it.

Over 50 years, Ms. Lee sent word to the convent in Roscrea every time she moved, just in case Anthony ever came looking for her, and she visited several times pressing for information about him.

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China Patrols Air Zone Over Disputed Islands

Japan Pool, via Jiji Press

A Japanese patrol plane, pictured in 2011, flying over the disputed islands in the East China Sea.

BEIJING — China sent fighter jets on the first patrols of its new air defense zone over disputed islands in the East China Sea on Thursday, the state news agency, Xinhua, said.

The patrols followed announcements by Japan and South Korea that their military planes had flown through the zone unhindered by China.

The tit-for-tat flights between China on one side and South Korea and Japan on the other heightened the tensions over the East China Sea where China and Japan are at loggerheads over islands they both claim.

The airspace in the new zone announced by China last week overlaps a similar zone declared by Japan more than 40 years ago. Both zones are over the islands known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan.

China has said that noncommercial aircraft entering the zone without prior notification would face "defensive emergency measures."

China would take "relevant measures according to different air threats" to defend the country's airspace, Xinhua reported.

In a direct challenge to earlier threats by China that it could take military action against foreign aircraft entering the zone, the United States sent two unarmed B-52 bombers to fly through the airspace for more than two hours overnight Monday. The Chinese military said it had monitored the flight path of the American planes, and China appeared to backpedal from its initial threats of action.

In an unusually strong editorial in English, Global Times, a newspaper that often strikes a nationalist tone, said in Friday's editions: "Maybe an imminent conflict will be waged between China and Japan. Our ultimate goal is to beat its willpower and ambition to institute strategic confrontation against China."

Elsewhere, the paper said that the United States was not the target of the new zone.

Responding to the situation, the State Department said, "We have urged the Chinese to exercise caution and restraint, and we are consulting with Japan and other affected parties throughout the region."

Analysts have said that China's declaration of the new zone is meant to whittle away at Japan's hold on the islands. But the unexpected move is also seen as another attempt by an increasingly assertive China to establish itself as the dominant regional power, displacing the United States.

China had seemed to be stepping back this week from its original harsh tone, when it said aircraft entering the airspace needed to file flight plans in advance or face the possibility of military action. On Wednesday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said China would decide on a case-by-case basis how strongly to respond to those who break its rules.

In a further clarification of its original stance, the People's Liberation Army said Thursday that the new air zone was "not a territorial airspace" and did not mean that China would take immediate military action against aircraft that entered the zone.

At a monthly briefing for Chinese reporters, a spokesman, Yang Yujun, said it was "incorrect" to suggest China would shoot down planes in the zone. On Thursday, Japan's top government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, said that the Chinese had not been notified of the Japanese flights, and reported that China had not scrambled its fighter jets to intercept them.

The South Korean government announced that it, too, had flown aircraft through the zone without alerting Beijing. Chinese officials said they had monitored the flight by what the South Koreans described as a surveillance aircraft. Like Japan, South Korea claims sovereignty over some territory in seas beneath the airspace, but Seoul enjoys warmer ties with Beijing than does Tokyo.

During a previously scheduled defense meeting on Thursday, South Korea asked China to change the boundaries of the new zone, according to the South Korean Yonhap news agency. But China rejected the request, said a spokesman for South Korea's Defense Ministry, Kim Min-seok, according to the Yonhap report.

Jane Perlez reported from Beijing, and Martin Fackler from Tokyo. Gerry Mullany contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Robert Pear from Washington.

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Lions 40, Packers 10: Drought and Then Deluge as Lions Win First Thanksgiving Game Since 2003

Leon Halip/Getty Images

Reggie Bush ran for 117 yards as the Lions won on Thanksgiving for the first time since 2003.

DETROIT — The Thanksgiving Day football game is always marked on the calendar long in advance by fans here, and with hope. But over the last 10 years, the Detroit Lions could not deliver a win, often losing in heartbreaking or spectacular fashion.

That came to an end Thursday.

For the first time since 2003, the Lions won on Thanksgiving, and they did it in a 40-10 blowout over the rival Green Bay Packers in a game with playoff implications. The Lions' win kept them in first place in the N.F.C. North.

Even Lions Coach Jim Schwartz was talking tradition after the game. "It's big," he said.

Early in Thursday's game, it seemed as if the Lions were doing everything they could to stick with their tradition of losing.

On the first drive of the game, running back Reggie Bush fumbled inside the Packers' 10-yard line after Detroit had easily gone 70 yards.

Two Lions possessions later, early in the second quarter, Detroit's Matthew Stafford was sacked by Nick Perry inside his own 20 and fumbled. Morgan Burnett picked up the ball at the 1-yard line and walked into the end zone to give the Packers a 10-3 lead.

In all, the Lions had three turnovers on their first four possessions. But then their offensive fortunes started to turn.

Stafford found the former Packer Jeremy Ross midway through the second quarter for the first touchdown of Ross's career, a 5-yard grab.

Ross was cut by the Packers on Sept. 23 after he had problems on several kickoff returns, including a crucial fumble in a 34-30 loss against the Bengals in Week 3. On Thursday, though, soon after his touchdown, he returned a punt 35 yards to give the Lions excellent field position, which led to a 1-yard rushing score by Bush.

The Lions then took control, finishing the game by scoring 37 straight points, 23 in the second half.

Bush bounced back from his fumble to play one of his better games this season, finishing with 117 rushing yards and 65 receiving yards.

"It was tough at first, but like I said, I leaned on my teammates," Bush said. "They kept believing in me.

"They gave me the ball the next drive, first play," after the fumble, he added, "so I think that spoke volumes about their belief and trust in me."

Stafford completed 22 of 35 passes for 330 yards and 3 touchdowns, and Calvin Johnson had six receptions for 101 yards and a touchdown.

The Packers' offense was downright awful.

Green Bay struggled to do much of anything in the first half, despite the Lions' turnovers. The Packers mustered only 43 first-half yards and finished the game with 126 net yards, compared with the Lions' 561.

Quarterback Matt Flynn was making his first start for the Packers since the last game of the 2011 season, when he threw for 480 yards and 6 touchdowns.

Last year, after signing with the Seattle Seahawks, he lost his starting spot to the rookie Russell Wilson in the preseason and appeared in just three regular-season games. He had stints with Oakland and Buffalo this season before the Packers signed him on Nov. 12.

On Thursday, Detroit kept up the pressure all game, recording seven sacks, and Flynn had difficulty finding any sort of rhythm in the pocket. He completed 3 of 8 passes for 45 yards in the first half, and the second half was not much better. Flynn finished the game 10-of-20 passing for 139 yards, with one interception.

Schwartz, the Lions' coach, said, "I thought whether we were blitzing or four-man pass rushing, we were putting pretty good pressure on the quarterback."

After a win over the Bears on Nov. 10, the Lions seemed to have momentum, with a 6-3 record and with both Green Bay and Chicago missing their starting quarterbacks because of injuries. But consecutive losses to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, teams that have a 6-14 record otherwise, allowed the Bears and the Packers to stick around in the hunt for the N.F.C. North title.

Green Bay could not capitalize Thursday, dropping to 5-6-1 and continuing its free-fall without the team's franchise player and star quarterback, Aaron Rodgers. The Packers began the season 5-2, but since Rodgers fractured his collarbone Nov. 4 against Chicago, they have gone 0-4-1 and started three different quarterbacks.

The Lions' victory improved their record to 7-5 and puts them back in control in their division.

"I think we are going to play with that same urgency that we played with today," center Dominic Raiola said. "We are not going to take that foot off the gas. There is no relaxing."

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Mixed Legacy for Departing Pakistani Army Chief

Faisal Mahmood/Reuters

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, with Chinese soldiers in Pakistan in 2011.

LONDON — When he leaves his post on Friday, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the inscrutable Pakistani Army chief and former spymaster, will end a nearly decade-long chapter as the focus of American fears and frustrations in Pakistan, the reluctant partner in a contentious and often ill-tempered strategic dance.

Suspicious American officials frequently accused him, and the 600,000-member army he led, of double-dealing and bad faith: supporting the Afghan Taliban, allying with militant groups who bombed embassies and bases, and sheltering Osama bin Laden.

Those accusations were made in private, usually, but exploded into the open in late 2011 when Adm. Mike Mullen, the American military chief who sought to befriend General Kayani over golf and dinners, issued an angry tirade to Congress about Pakistani duplicity.

The taciturn General Kayani weathered those accusations with a sang-froid that left both allies and enemies guessing about what, or whom, he knew. But few doubted that he nursed grievances, too — about C.I.A. covert operations, the humiliating raid that killed Bin Laden, and perceived American arrogance and inconstancy.

General Kayani, 61, steps down with those arguments still lingering. And reckoning with his legacy exposes a cold truth at the heart of the turbulent American-Pakistani relationship: that after years of diplomatic effort, and billions of dollars in aid, the countries' aims and methods remain fundamentally opposed — particularly when it comes to the endgame next door in Afghanistan.

"We have almost no strategic convergences with Pakistan, at any level," admitted a senior American defense official. "You'll never change that, and it's naïve to think we can do it with an appeal to the war on terror."

Seen through Pakistani eyes, however, General Kayani was a more tangible, even positive, force. Despite his personal antipathy for the country's civilian leadership, he restrained army meddling in politics and tolerated increased criticism in the news media. After the country's first successful completion of a democratic election cycle, Pakistanis can dare to imagine that a long era of military coups might be over.

Further, he was at least partly successful in refocusing the army's monomaniacal attention on India, the old enemy, toward a new threat posed by the militants lurking in the country's remote areas.

Still, in other respects, Pakistan's bullying military class has remained unchanged, particularly in its dismal record on rights abuses. General Kayani's soldiers and spies have prosecuted a dirty war against separatists in Baluchistan Province, cultivated contacts with sectarian militias, and intimidated and bloodied rights campaigners and journalists.

For all that, his authority was never seriously challenged. "He's one of the most powerful generals Pakistan has ever had," said Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Now, as he hands off to his successor, at a time of diminishing American engagement in the region, the largest question about the enigmatic general is how much of that legacy will endure.

In many ways, General Kayani was the antithesis of the swaggering general and junta leader he succeeded, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and his mandate after taking the top army post in 2007 was to repair the prestige that was tarnished under General Musharraf's watch. He has been quiet and philosophical where General Musharraf was loquacious and boastful. Foreigners complained that his reserve could be unnerving, and that he mumbled. In meetings, he sat like a perched eagle, occasionally darting out for a cigarette.

Those who knew him well said his public reserve was simply a tactic: In private, with small groups he trusted or needed, he could be blunt and forceful.

"He was the anti-Musharraf," said Shuja Nawaz, the author of "Crossed Swords," a history of the Pakistani Army.

But the rise of the Pakistani Taliban posed an immediate challenge. The Taliban's drive to destroy the security forces and central government shook the Pakistani military's jihadist sympathies, through unprecedented violence: the beheading of soldiers, the assassination of senior generals, and even suicide bombings against the feared military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

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Cowboys 31, Raiders 24: True to Form, Cowboys Tantalize Fans With Late-Season Signs of Life

Matthew Emmons/USA TODAY Sports, via Reuters

Cowboys cornerback Brandon Carr beat Raiders receiver Jacoby Ford to a pass for an end-zone interception in the fourth quarter.

ARLINGTON, Tex. — The Dallas Cowboys should know better than to take success for granted. Mired in mediocrity for several seasons, they have teased and tortured fans while manufacturing playoff runs late into December.

It has all proved a mirage, glossed over by the glamour of the America's Team brand and the flashiness of AT&T Stadium and its gigantic video board. The Cowboys again find themselves at that critical juncture after beating the Oakland Raiders, 31-24, a Thanksgiving Day launch point that puts them in firm control of their playoff chances.

The victory means Dallas is alone in first place in the N.F.C. East, a half-game ahead of the Philadelphia Eagles. Behind three touchdown runs by DeMarco Murray, the Cowboys (7-5) inched two games above .500 for the third time in three years. Dallas was 8-6 each of the past two seasons and was poised to reach the postseason. But both times, they finished with consecutive losses, a failure to close that will loom over expectations for their last four games.

"Yeah, but you have to be careful about taking a global point of view," Cowboys Coach Jason Garrett said when asked if he liked how his team was positioned.

After a lackluster first half, the Cowboys looked more like the team that ended the Giants' four-game winning streak on Sunday. Tony Romo engineered two balanced and efficient drives and finished 23 of 32 for 225 yards and a touchdown. The Cowboys' running attack suddenly became a two-pronged effort, with Murray gaining 63 yards on 17 carries and Lance Dunbar providing 82 yards on 12 attempts.

"More than anything you've just got to keep stacking wins together and see where you're at at the end," said Romo, who was playing with an illness that hit him Wednesday night. "I think we're playing some of our better football right now."

Defensively, the Cowboys came up with a signature stop, stifling a fourth-quarter Raiders scoring chance on Brandon Carr's interception in the end zone. Matt McGloin completed 18 of 30 passes for 255 yards for the Raiders (4-8), but he was mostly grounded in the second half as the Cowboys tightened their coverages.

"We had the mentality that we can't lose this game," DeMarcus Ware said. "If we lose this game, it's back to being the old team, up and down. We're in a good position. But we can't get comfortable at all. We lose one game, we're back to Square 1 again."

Dallas took control with its first two possessions of the second half. Trailing by 21-14, the Cowboys went 87 yards in 10 plays, scoring on Romo's 4-yard pass to Dez Bryant. They followed that with a 65-yard, 9-play drive and took a 28-21 lead on Murray's 7-yard run early in the fourth quarter.

The Raiders ground out a 21-14 halftime lead largely by converting 7 of 9 third-down chances and holding a possession edge of 7 minutes 22 seconds. Rashad Jennings scored on a pair of 1-yard runs, the second putting Oakland ahead, 21-7, with two minutes left in the second quarter.

The Raiders' game plan also included keeping the rookie quarterback McGloin in a comfort zone of safe play calls, and he responded with 146 yards on 11-of-15 passing in the first half for a rating of 103.8.

Romo was 11 of 20 for 124 yards but could not manufacture a big play or complete a pass to Bryant or Jason Witten until midway through the second quarter.

The Cowboys showed up for their annual Thanksgiving game four days after an emotional victory over the Giants, and with an opportunity to nudge ahead in the N.F.C. East heading into a 10-day break before their next game at Chicago.

But Dallas stumbled around offensively, managing only 53 total yards, until it put together a 73-yard drive on its last possession of the first half. Murray scored on a 4-yard run with 10 seconds remaining to gain some traction against an Oakland defense that held the Cowboys to 12 yards rushing and 8 first downs in the opening half.

The Raiders were energized from the start, taking a 7-0 lead after Greg Jenkins returned Terrance Williams's fumble on the opening kickoff 23 yards for a touchdown. Kaelin Burnett had ripped the ball free just as Williams's knee appeared to hit the turf, causing a chorus of boos from the announced crowd of 87,572 as the replay was shown from several angles on the stadium's video board.

Jenkins helped squander Oakland's momentum late in the first quarter. He pinned the Raiders against their end zone by fair-catching a punt at the 5-yard line, and on first down McGloin fumbled the snap. Kyle Wilbur recovered the ball at the 2-yard line, and Murray scored on the next play to tie the game at 7-7.

The Cowboys sit, once again, at two games above mediocrity and with a schedule that seems in their favor. They will face the struggling Bears and the fading Green Bay Packers, followed by division games against the Washington Redskins and the Eagles in a Dec. 29 season finale in which a playoff berth might be at stake.

Also at stake: whether or not the Cowboys will tease or torture their fans once again.

"We did start slow," Carr said, "but this team, it's starting to get to the point where there is no panic anymore."

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Shop First, and Eat Later

Julio Cortez/Associated Press

A young girl tries on shoes at Kmart on Thursday. Every year, more stores are opening on Thanksgiving and keeping their doors open for longer hours.

Before most Thanksgiving turkeys even approached the oven on Thursday, a small line of tents had formed in front of a Best Buy in Falls Church, Va., their inhabitants waiting for the holiday deals to begin. First in line was William Ignacio, who pitched his tent at 2 p.m. on Wednesday.

Traditionally, the holiday shopping season kicks off on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. But every year, more stores are opening on the holiday itself and keeping their doors open longer, beginning in the predawn hours, and shoppers are taking advantage, whether before dinner or after.

"Thanksgiving dinner is over," said Becky Solari, 18, standing in the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Ill. "And there's nothing else to do."

In Annandale, Va., rock salt had been sprinkled on the parking lot in front of the Kmart that opened at 6 a.m. Though the temperature was just below freezing, a handful of shoppers were lured out of bed for discounted electronics or to browse in advance of Friday's sales.

Under a "Mas Navidad" sign near the customer service desk, Cindy Kennedy, 39, said she did not see why people would object to Thanksgiving store hours and people working the holiday. Northern Virginia is home to many immigrants, like her husband, who is from El Salvador, she said.

"Not everybody celebrates Thanksgiving," Mrs. Kennedy said. "It's not a world holiday."

More than 400 people were lined up in 28-degree weather outside a Target in Schaumburg, just before the store opened Thursday night at 8.

"My TV from last year is in beautiful, perfect condition, but this one is bigger and better," said Ruben Calderon, an annual Black Friday shopper who planned to buy a 50-inch LED TV and some Xbox games at Target on Thursday. "In all my years of doing this, I have never seen a deal on a TV that's this good."

This is a critical time of year for retailers, given that holiday season shopping generally accounts for about 20 percent of the retail industry's annual sales, according to the National Retail Federation. Last year, nearly 140 million people shopped through the Thanksgiving weekend, the federation said.

But with many Americans still struggling with stagnant wages, retail executives have warned of a lackluster holiday season. Anxiety about low traffic — in-store and online — coupled with tight budgets has spurred strenuous competition for the lowest possible price.

In a hurry to get to customers first, retailers introduced promotions not just a few hours early this year, but days and even weeks ahead. Walmart.com kicked off its holiday season on Nov. 1, for example.

According to the retail federation, 53.8 percent of shoppers surveyed during the first week of November said they had already started their holiday shopping.

"The early push is definitely noteworthy," said Traci Gregorski, a vice president for marketing at Market Track, a retail promotion and pricing analysis firm. "There has been a lot of messaging around 'Don't wait until Black Friday.' "

And those who stayed home could easily browse the web. "Black Friday 2013 is here!" Amazon declared on Thursday. "Black Friday starts now online!" Walmart.com's home page advertised. As of 9 p.m., online sales were up more than 11 percent over Thanksgiving Day last year, according to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. Mobile traffic increased even more sharply, up more than 31 percent. Smartphones accounted for 24 percent of all online traffic, IBM found.

Friday's accompanying discounts, however, are still likely to draw out plenty of shoppers. According to a recent CBS News poll, Black Friday remains the most popular day to shop. A third of those surveyed said they planned to do some holiday shopping over Thanksgiving weekend.

"I'm about to get myself a MacBook," Tony Portillo, 15, said, standing in front of the Best Buy overnight campsite in Falls Church, Va.

"You can't afford one!" came a voice from inside the tent, which was intended to sleep five people but on this below-freezing night was home to eight teenagers.

"Next time we need a bigger tent," said Mr. Portillo, who planned to wait until 6 p.m. for Best Buy to open.

"We didn't sleep at all," said Alex Ramos, 14. "It's kind of fun."

Ken Maguire contributed reporting from Falls Church, Va.; Kimiya Shokoohi from Los Angeles; Alan Blinder from Alpharetta, Ga.; Idalmya Carrera from Chicago; and Jada F. Smith from Hyattsville, Md.

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After Football Player’s Death, California School Team Wavers, but Carries On

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — When DeAndre Thornton stretched every bit of his angular 6-foot-5 frame to catch a pass over the middle of the field, he could not immediately pull the ball down to protect himself. And so, when the hit arrived, with all the fury a 205-pound opponent with a running start could muster, the crunch of shoulder pads and helmets reverberated beyond the sidelines.

Hits like these, despite attempts to bar them from the game, occur at all levels of football. But they resonate loudly at places like Arlington High School here, where the increasingly common questions about the consequences of playing football are more than academic exercises.

Just before the season, one of Thornton's teammates, Tyler Lewellen, a popular, outgoing junior defensive back, died from severe head trauma five days after collapsing on the sideline during a scrimmage with another team. He was one of more than a dozen high school players in the United States who died this year as a direct result of playing football.

Three days after Lewellen's death, Arlington played its first game. Eight days after that, his teammates were among the 800 people who turned out for Lewellen's funeral. In the time since, the Lions, along with their coaches and parents, have been working through their grief with hugs, tears and laughter, while clinging uncertainly to football.

Some players struggled with newfound fears in a sport that demands fearlessness. Others considered quitting — or simply cried because they missed their friend. Many felt a burden of honoring Lewellen with their play on the field, the sting of losing games numbed by the experience of real loss.

"I understand the kids who want to quit," said Ryan McCarthy, a 26-year-old assistant coach to his father, Coach Pat McCarthy. "I'm faking it every day, trying to be the energy guy. The chance to connect with the kids — I don't know what bigger impact I can have on my community than that. But for the first time in my life, I'm questioning my own plan in life. I'm in it for the connection, but I don't want to get close again. It's been a nightmare."

When Thornton lay on the field, emotions that lingered just below the surface rose up. They were visible in the somber faces on the sideline and also up in the stands, where Thornton's sister, Sabria, 20, burst into tears and teammates' mothers rushed over to reassure Thornton's mother, Jacinta Ramirez. She was busy talking to herself: Come on, DeAndre, get up.

On the field, Jim Clover, the trainer, scolded Pat McCarthy when he tried to remove Thornton's helmet. Clover was concerned there could be a spinal injury, but McCarthy was sure Thornton had the wind knocked out of him and needed his helmet off to help breathe.

After a few minutes, Thornton sat up, was helped to his feet and slowly walked to the bench.

He sat there, slightly dazed and uncomfortable, but answered Clover's questions and took a few tests, like standing on one foot with his eyes closed for 20 seconds. Clover typed the results into an application on his phone and asked Thornton if he wanted to keep playing.

"Yes," Thornton said, the most alert he had been.

'I Was Mad at Football'

That incident, which occurred this month, in the Lions' final game, laid bare their vulnerabilities. More often, there have been questions.

The most prominent one had rarely been asked in this diverse working-class community, which has a strong bond with football: Why were they playing? .

"I was mad at football," said Remmy Nerio, a junior who missed two days of practice, certain that he would switch to water polo. "The first week, I wasn't going hard and it freaked me out. I wasn't scared, but Tyler was my best friend. We had classes together. We ate together. I didn't know if I really wanted to play anymore."

One day at lunch, Ryan McCarthy joined Trevor Fedoruk, a senior captain who was sitting on the lunch benches by himself, his head down. Fedoruk, who is doing a physics project on how helmets compress, was staring at his phone, which had Lewellen's number on it, and looking down to hide his tears. Fedoruk saw everyone sitting with friends and realized he missed one of his.

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A Part of Utah Built on Coal Wonders What Comes Next

PRICE, Utah — For generations, coal has been the lifeblood of this mineral-rich stretch of eastern Utah. Mining families proudly recall all the years they toiled underground. Supply companies line the town streets. Above the road that winds toward the mines, a soot-smudged miner peers out from a billboard with the slogan "Coal = Jobs."

But recently, fear has settled in. The state's oldest coal-fired power plant, tucked among the canyons near town, is set to close, a result of new, stricter federal pollution regulations.

As energy companies tack away from coal, toward cleaner, cheaper natural gas, people here have grown increasingly afraid that their community may soon slip away. Dozens of workers at the facility here, the Carbon Power Plant, have learned that they must retire early or seek other jobs. Local trucking and equipment outfits are preparing to take business elsewhere.

"There are a lot of people worried," said Kyle Davis, who has been employed at the plant since he was 18.

Mr. Davis, 56, worked his way up from sweeping floors to managing operations at the plant, whose furnaces have been burning since 1954.

"I would have liked to be here for another five years," he said. "I'm too young to retire."

But Rocky Mountain Power, the utility that operates the plant, has determined that it would be too expensive to retrofit the aging plant to meet new federal standards on mercury emissions. The plant is scheduled to be shut by April 2015.

"We had been working for the better part of three years, testing compliance strategies," said David Eskelsen, a spokesman for the utility. "None of the ones we investigated really would produce the results that would meet the requirements."

For the last several years, coal plants have been shutting down across the country, driven by tougher environmental regulations, flattening electricity demand and a move by utilities toward natural gas.

This month, the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the country's largest public power utility, voted to shut eight coal-powered plants in Alabama and Kentucky and partly replace them with gas-fired power. Since 2010, more than 150 coal plants have been closed or scheduled for retirement.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the stricter emissions regulations for the plants will result in billions of dollars in related health savings, and will have a sweeping impact on air quality.

In recent weeks, the agency held 11 "listening sessions" around the country in advance of proposing additional rules for carbon dioxide emissions.

"Coal plants are the single largest source of dangerous carbon pollution in the United States, and we have ready alternatives like wind and solar to replace them," said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, which wants to shut all of the nation's coal plants.

"We have a choice," he said, "which in most cases is cheaper and doesn't have any of the pollution."

Coal's downward turn has hit Appalachia hardest, but the effects of the transition toward other energy sources has started to ripple westward.

Mr. Eskelsen said Rocky Mountain Power would place some of the 70 Carbon facility employees at its two other Utah coal plants. Other workers will take early retirement or look for different jobs.

Still, the notion that this pocket of Utah, where Greek, Italian and Mexican immigrants came to mine coal more than a century ago, could survive without it, is hard for people here to comprehend.

"The attack on coal is so broad-reaching in our little community," said Casey Hopes, a Carbon County commissioner, whose grandfather was a coal miner. "The power plants, the mines — they support so many smaller businesses. We don't have another industry."

Like others in Price, Mr. Hopes voiced frustration with the Obama administration, saying it should be investing more in clean coal technology rather than discarding coal altogether.

Annual Utah coal production, though, has been slowly declining for a decade according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

Last year, mines here produced about 17 million tons of coal, the lowest level since 1987, though production has crept up this year.

"This is the worst we've seen it," said David Palacios, who works for a trucking company that hauls coal to the power plants, and whose business will slow once the Carbon plant closes.

Mr. Palacios, president of the Southeastern Utah Energy Producers Association, noted that the demand for coal has always ebbed and flowed here.

"But this has been two to three years we're struggling through," he said.

Compounding the problem, according to some mining experts, is that until now, most of the state's coal has been sold and used within the region, rather than being exported overseas. That has left the industry here more vulnerable to local plant closings.

Cindy Crane, chairwoman of the Utah Mining Association, said demand for Utah coal could eventually drop as much as 50 percent. "For most players in Utah coal, this a tough time," said Ms. Crane, vice president of PacifiCorp, a Western utility and mining company that owns the Carbon plant.

Mr. Nilles of the Sierra Club acknowledged that the shift from coal would not be easy on communities like Carbon County. But employees could be retrained or compensated for lost jobs, he said, and new industries could be drawn to the region.

Washington State, for example, has worked with municipalities and utilities to ease the transition from coal plants while ensuring that workers are transferred to other energy jobs or paid, if nearing retirement, Mr. Nilles said.

"Coal has been good to Utah," Mr. Nilles said, "but markets for coal are drying up. You need to get ahead of this and make sure the jobs don't all leave."

For many here, coal jobs are all they know. The industry united the area during hard times, too, especially during the dark days after nine men died in a 2007 mining accident some 35 miles down the highway. Virtually everyone around Price knew the men, six of whom remain entombed in the mountainside.

But there is quiet acknowledgment that Carbon County will have to change — if not now, soon.

David Palacios's father, Pete, who worked in the mines for 43 years, has seen coal roar and fade here. Now 86, his eyes grew cloudy as he recalled his first mining job. He was 12, and earned $1 a day.

"I'm retired, so I'll be fine. But these young guys?" Pete Palacios said, his voice trailing off.

Clifford Krauss contributed reporting from Houston.

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Online Health Law Sign-Up Is Delayed for Small Business

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Wednesday announced a one-year delay in a major element of the new health care law that would allow small businesses to buy insurance online for their employees through the new federal marketplace.

It was yet another setback for the rollout of the health care law and resulted, in part, from the well-documented problems of the insurance marketplace website. Administration officials said they had to focus on the basic functions of the website, so that individuals could shop for insurance, before offering online enrollment for small businesses. In the meantime, businesses and their employees can apply through brokers.

Many employees of small businesses are uninsured, and the businesses themselves are much less likely than big companies to provide coverage to workers and their families.

The latest delay, coming just as the White House was boasting of major improvements in the health insurance website, HealthCare.gov, opens the door to more complaints about the health care law and could increase pressure to delay other provisions.

"The president bit off more than he can chew with this health care law, and small businesses are now forced to bear the consequences," said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio. "Business owners across the country are already having health care plans for their employees canceled by this law, and now they're told they won't have access to the system the president promised them to find different coverage. Instead, they'll have to resort to a system you'd expect to see in the 1950s."

It was not the first delay for small businesses. The administration had previously delayed online enrollment for them to the end of this month from Oct. 1.

The date has now been pushed back to November 2014 for coverage that takes effect in January 2015, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

The announcement, just before Thanksgiving, was reminiscent of the way the White House announced, just before the Fourth of July weekend, a one-year delay in the requirement for larger employers to offer health insurance to employees.

The marketplace for small businesses — the Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP exchange — was one of the few provisions of the 2010 law with some Republican support, and it was originally championed by Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine.

John C. Arensmeyer, the chief executive of Small Business Majority, an advocacy group that supports the health care law, said, "It's disappointing that the online portion of the federal small business marketplace through Healthcare.gov will be delayed, and it's important it get up and running as soon as possible."

The marketplace, he said, "is still the most important provision in the Affordable Care Act for small businesses."

For years, small businesses have had difficulty getting affordable insurance. Many owners cite the rising cost of health insurance as their top concern.

The administration said that small businesses and their employees seeking coverage in the federal exchange could still apply and enroll through an agent or broker, as many do now. "Agents and brokers are essential to making this happen," an administration official said.

However, the high-tech capability once promised by the White House will not be available until late next year.

"The agent, broker or insurer will help the employer fill out a paper application for SHOP eligibility and send it in to the SHOP marketplace," the administration said. The insurer can also tell employers what premiums they would have to pay and can enroll employees.

Some small businesses may qualify for tax credits worth up to 50 percent of their premium costs. The tax credits will be available only for plans purchased through the small business exchange.

Amanda L. Austin, a lobbyist at the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group, said she had heard rumors that the online small business exchange might be delayed, but was surprised that it had been put off for a year. "That's pretty significant," Ms. Austin said. "The online exchange is a key component of the Affordable Care Act, and administration officials have hailed it as the answer to small businesses' health care concerns."

While the online exchange is being delayed, she said, "many small businesses face higher premiums in 2014 because of new taxes, including a new federal tax on the health insurance they purchase."

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said that the website was "vastly improved each and every day," with hardware upgrades and software fixes that produced lower error rates and faster response times for users.

An employer using the SHOP exchange must offer coverage to all full-time employees — generally those working at least 30 hours a week, on average.

In April, the Obama administration delayed a requirement that SHOP exchanges offer a variety of competing insurance plans to employees. The administration cited "operational challenges" as a reason for that delay.

Congress had wanted to provide small business employees with a range of health plan options. While some state-run exchanges will allow employers to offer such choices to employees, the federal exchange will not do so until 2015.

E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation, said, "If the law is so burdensome for the administration to implement, just think how hard it is for small businesses."

In a separate announcement, officials at the Health and Human Services Department said Wednesday that they would replace the contractor that manages computer servers handling the enormous load of data collected by HealthCare.gov.

Terremark, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that now provides the service, will be replaced in March by Hewlett-Packard, officials said. A spokeswoman at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the change had been planned at least since July. Issues related to the raw computing capacity of the servers provided by Terremark have been cited as a factor in the website problems. A spokesman for Verizon declined to comment.

The problems engulfing President Obama's health care law are remarkable because administration officials had repeatedly brushed aside doubts about whether they would be ready.

Testifying before a congressional panel on Oct. 29, Marilyn B. Tavenner, the administrator of the Medicare agency, said, in response to a question, that the website for the small business exchange would be in operation by the end of this month.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

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Lakers 99, Nets 94: Nets Fight Their Way Back From a Big Deficit, but Fall in the End

The Brooklyn crowd was pulsating, primed for a cathartic burst. But it never came.

The Nets crept to the brink of an unlikely win over the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday night after having trailed by 27 points. With each point the Nets shaved off the deficit, the fans seemed to grow louder and more engaged. It was with a groan, then, that the sellout crowd at Barclays Center watched the Nets slump to a 99-94 defeat.

It was yet another disappointing loss, and it dropped the Nets' record to 4-11.

During the first half, the fans chatted away as if they were watching an unknown opening act at a concert, seemingly oblivious or unconcerned that a game was going on. But Mirza Teletovic, a little-used reserve forward, became an unlikely catalyst, and he seemed to unload months of pent-up energy while scoring a career-high 17 points and leading the Nets' comeback.

Teletovic opened the fourth quarter with a 3-pointer that brought the Nets within 6 points. He powered on, blocking Wesley Johnson's layup attempt with 4 minutes 52 seconds remaining, sending a jolt through the building. Seconds later, he slipped out beyond the 3-point line, caught a sharp pass from Paul Pierce and sank a jumper that cut the Lakers' lead to 92-91.

Seconds after that, Teletovic raced down the court on a fast break, caught an arcing pass and was wrapped in a bearhug by Nick Young. The crowd went wild when he hit his first free throw, which tied the score at 92-92 with 3:57 remaining. The other one dribbled off the rim, but the noise from the stands lingered.

The teams traded fouls and misses until 1:33 was left in the game. Pierce threw a bad crosscourt pass that was intercepted by Johnson, who sprinted down the court and pounded in a two-handed dunk that gave the Lakers a 94-92 lead.

Steve Blake made one of two free-throw attempts with 17.2 seconds remaining, leaving the game at 95-92 and handing the Nets life. Alan Anderson dunked for the Nets on the ensuing play, cutting the deficit to 1 with 9.8 seconds remaining. But Jodie Meeks made two free throws on the other end, dashing the Nets' hopes.

The Nets outscored the Lakers, 28-23, during the third quarter, which augured well for the home team. Entering Wednesday, the Nets had won all four games in which they had outscored their opponents during the third quarter, and lost all 10 times they were outscored. But the trend did not hold up Wednesday.

The Lakers entered with a 10-game winning streak against the Nets, but they were without Kobe Bryant, who has not played a game since rupturing his Achilles' tendon last April. Bryant, 35, resumed practicing this month — and also signed a two-year contract extension — and is expected to make his return soon. Steve Nash, another aging Lakers star, has been out, too, nursing various sore body parts.

The understaffed Lakers have survived this season on 3-point shooting, and it seemed an ominous sign for the Nets when they opened the game by hitting their first three attempts from beyond the arc. The Nets fell to an 11-2 deficit within 2:04 and were compelled to take a quick timeout.

Soon, the Lakers were venturing into the paint, where they encountered little resistance. Young went on a personal 9-point run to close a lopsided first quarter, which ended with the Lakers up, 34-18.

The Lakers' dominance bled seamlessly into the second quarter. Jordan Farmar went on his own 9-point run — hitting three consecutive 3-pointers and forcing the Nets into another early timeout 1:11 into the quarter. After trailing by as many as 27 points during the second quarter, though, the Nets went on a 15-0 run — built on suddenly stout defense — that cut the deficit to a manageable size and awakened the crowd. The Lakers led, 54-40, at halftime.

The Nets' immediate future remains murky. They are playing short-handed, missing four key players, and there has been little indication about when they might return.

"They're day to day," Coach Jason Kidd said, words he has repeated often this season. "These are injuries that, they can come back anytime. So we just take it day by day, and we'll see how they feel tomorrow."

Brook Lopez missed his seventh consecutive game and Deron Williams his fourth; both players are battling sprained left ankles.

The Nets were also without the backups Jason Terry, who missed his fourth straight game with a sore left knee, and Andrei Kirilenko, who skipped his ninth consecutive game with a sore back.

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Knicks Owner Is Singing the Blues, and So Is His Team

ORLANDO, Fla. — "Hello everybody!" James L. Dolan shouted into the microphone in front of about 100 people who had arrived early at the Amway Center for an Eagles concert.

Most of the crowd had never heard of the opening band, J D & The Straight Shot, so Dolan introduced the group. "We're a band from New York City," he said.

That much was true. But what Dolan did not mention was that, in addition to being the band's rumble-voiced lead singer, he is the president and chief executive of Cablevision, and the owner of the Knicks.

As Dolan's band performed here on Saturday, a night after performing at the American Airlines Arena in Miami, his basketball team, the second-most expensive in the league, was in the midst of another dispiriting loss. The Knicks are a shambling, desultory group these days, stumbling through an opening month that has been worse than even pessimistic fans feared.

But as the Knicks fell to the Wizards in Washington and their fans burned, Dolan and his band fiddled through covers of '70s songs like "Let It Roll" and "White Bird."

"This is someone wealthy who is having a good time," Randy Sturdevant, a retired electrical contractor, said to his wife during the show. "This is some rich guy's hobby."

The band plays a mixture of blues and rock. In 2011, The New York Times' pop music critic, Jon Pareles, described Dolan as a "karaoke-grade singer." Dolan's son, Aidan, plays guitar in the band. But the other band members are seasoned musicians who have played with Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Bon Jovi, among others.

Dolan's moonlighting gigs are hardly a secret in the basketball world, although the fact he was playing in N.B.A. arenas this past weekend, and not some small New York club, would probably catch any number of people by surprise, including a lot of people who root for the Knicks. One of those fans, apparently, has hijacked the Wikipedia page for Dolan's band, renaming songs with titles like "Can't Make the Knicks Win," "Wasting Knicks Fans Time," "Reunion with Isiah in Hell" and "Try Selling the Knicks."

Dolan has, in fact, recorded a song called "Fix the Knicks," which appeared on the band's 2011 album. It begins with the line: "Everywhere I go, I hear everybody say, What you gonna do to make that team play?"

J D & The Straight Shot did not play "Fix the Knicks" on Saturday — perhaps because it would be hard to know where to start.

A team that played harmoniously for much of last season in going 54-28 is completely out of sync this time around. The extra pass is not being made, the defense is too often lax. Home-court advantage has been abandoned, with the Knicks having lost their last six games at Madison Square Garden.

And the individual headaches are many. Amar'e Stoudemire is owed $45 million through this season and next, but has turned into something of an afterthought because of his damaged knees.

Iman Shumpert, a young player who was seen to have a big upside because he can both defend and score, has instead turned into an underperforming mystery and the subject of trade rumors. In Monday's loss to Portland, he failed to register a point, rebound or assist in 23 minutes of action.

Tyson Chandler, a rock in the middle for the Knicks, is out indefinitely with a leg injury. Carmelo Anthony, the team's one bona-fide star, will opt out of his contract at the end of the season and could sign elsewhere.

All of this has resulted in a disorienting 3-10 record going into Wednesday's game in Los Angeles against the Clippers. The notion that the Knicks might be able to contend for a championship this season already seems far-fetched.

In Dolan's long run as the man in charge of the Knicks, the team has never won a title, and has often been inept. But if he has proved hapless at turning the Knicks into a consistently competitive team, he has shown some success in promoting J D & the Straight Shot. He has also appeared willing to flex his corporate muscle to boost the band.

One of the band's songs, "Can't Make Tears," has been used in the show "Hell on Wheels," which airs on AMC — a channel controlled by Cablevision. Joe Gayton, one of the show's creators, said Dolan is a huge fan of the show and let it be known he wanted one of his songs featured on it. Gayton and the producers complied. "Can't Make Tears" was also made into a music video, using various scenes from "Hell on Wheels."

The band has also opened for Willie Nelson and at other venues for the Eagles. Indeed, the Eagles played a three-night stand at the Garden earlier this month, although J D & The Straight Shot did not perform at those shows.

And on Saturday night, Dolan announced from the stage that one of the band's songs would be featured in an upcoming Meryl Streep movie, "August: Osage County."

Asked whether Dolan was using his corporate position to promote his band, and whether it was disconcerting for him to be on the road performing while his team was struggling, Barry Watkins, the Garden's executive vice president of communications, responded that The Times was pursuing a "line of unfair questioning."

"Everyone has time off of their jobs and spends free time in ways they choose," he said. "We see no reason to comment further."

Meanwhile, those in attendance Saturday night, whether they realized who Dolan was or not, seemed to more or less enjoy his band's performance.

"It was excellent music, and he seems to have a great personality," said Sturdevant, the retired contractor. "Even though you might be able to buy your way onto that stage, the Eagles would still only allow someone good to open for them."

As the set wound down, Dolan even told the audience — which by then had grown to several thousand — that they could receive a free CD in return for their email address.

"We want to thank the Eagles for letting us open up for them," Dolan said. "They're truly gracious and we're truly grateful."

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Pope Sets Down Goals for an Inclusive Church, Reaching Out ‘on the Streets’

In his first nine months as leader of one billion Roman Catholics, Pope Francis has parceled out glimpses of his vision for remaking the church — in homilies and news conferences, interviews and offhand remarks to visitors.

On Tuesday, he announced his agenda in his own unfiltered words, reaffirming the impression that he intends to jolt the church out of complacency and enlist all Catholics in his ambitious project of renewing the church by confronting the real needs of people in need.

In a challenge to the Vatican hierarchy, Francis called for decentralizing power in the church, saying the Vatican and even the pope must collaborate with bishops, laypeople and in particular women.

"I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," Francis said in the first teaching document of his papacy that he alone composed.

"I do not want a church concerned with being at the center and then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures," he wrote.

The document, called "Evangelii Gaudium" (the Joy of the Gospel), is an apostolic exhortation — less authoritative than an encyclical, but an important pronouncement. He drafted it in August in Spanish, said a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, as a reflection on a synod of bishops last year that took up the "new evangelization."

Francis' prescription for the church is inextricably tied up with his analysis of what is wrong with the world. He devotes many pages to denouncing the "dictatorship" of a global economic system and a free market that perpetuates inequality and "devours" what is fragile, including human beings and the environment.

"How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?" he wrote, in the folksy language that has already marked his as a memorable papacy.

Vincent J. Miller, a theologian who writes on economic globalization at the University of Dayton, a Catholic university, said that while other popes have critiqued the economy, Francis has perspective on economic injustice as the first pope from Latin America, and is putting forward the church as the counterpoint.

"He talks about an economy of exclusion, while he's been modeling and practicing inclusion publicly through his whole papacy," Mr. Miller said.

After months in which many have parsed his comments for hints of change, the pope used the document to reiterate church teachings on abortion, homosexuality and the ordination of women. On abortion, he said, "It is not 'progressive' to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life. On the other hand, it is also true that we have done little to adequately accompany women in very difficult situations," who may seek abortions because of rape or extreme poverty.

Nowhere in the document did Francis speak explicitly of homosexuality or same-sex marriage. However, he said the church should not give in to "moral relativism," and cited with approval a document written by the bishops of the United States on ministering to people with "homosexual inclination." The pope said the American bishops are right that the church must insist on "objective moral norms which are valid for everyone" — even when the church is perceived by supporters of gay rights as promoting prejudice and interfering with individual freedom.

Echoing his predecessors, Francis said that ordaining women to the priesthood "is not a question open to discussion." He acknowledged that "many women share pastoral responsibilities with priests," and said, "We need to create still broader opportunities for a more incisive female presence in the church." But he offered no specifics on doing so.

Laurie Goodstein reported from New York, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

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Book Published in 1640 Sets a Record at Auction

The little volume of psalms, one of only 11 known to exist out of roughly 1,700 printed by 17th-century Puritans in Massachusetts, went for $14,165,000 at auction on Tuesday.

The buyer of the Bay Psalm Book, as it is known, was David M. Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, an investment firm in Washington. Mr. Rubenstein has bought a number of historical documents in recent years, including a copy of Magna Carta for $21 million in 2007 (or $23.7 million today, adjusted for inflation).

He placed his bid by telephone from Australia and told the auctioneer, David N. Redden of Sotheby's, that he planned to lend it to libraries across the country to display, eventually arranging a long-term loan to one of them.

"His intention is not to take these kinds of objects home," Mr. Redden said.

The price, which included the auction house's premium, set a record for a book sold at auction, beating the $11.54 million paid in 2010 for a copy of John James Audubon's "Birds of America" (equivalent to $12.39 million today).

The Bay Psalm Book was published in 1640, more than a century and a half after the first Gutenberg Bibles and 20 years after the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth. It was the first book turned out by a printing press that had been shipped over from England. The press operator was a locksmith who was apparently learning as he went along: some of the pages were bound in the wrong order. At the bottom of one, someone wrote, "Turn back a leaf."

"It's one of those things where there are 11 known copies, so it's one of the holy grails for book collectors," Michael Inman, the curator of rare books at the New York Public Library, said this month. (The library owns one of the 10 other copies. It sold at Sotheby's in London in 1855 for 19 shillings, which Mr. Inman estimated was 1,900 British pounds or about $3,075.)

The Puritans, who disdained the King James Version of the Bible, retranslated the psalms from Hebrew. They meant their translations to be sung a cappella — at church or at home.

The copy that was sold on Tuesday had belonged to Boston's Old South Church. Over the years, its congregation has included Samuel Adams, the colonial patriot who was a cousin of President John Adams, and Elizabeth Vergoose, a printer's wife who is thought to be the Mother Goose of the nursery rhymes. Its ministers included Thomas Prince, the grandson of the last governor of Plymouth Colony.

Prince was also a book collector who stashed his collection in the nooks and crannies of the church. His New-England-Library, as he called it, apparently included two copies of the Bay Psalm Book, according to Sotheby's (whose curators question whether he managed to acquire five, as some accounts say). The church sent both copies to the Boston Public Library for safekeeping in 1866; the other copy is not being sold.

The congregation voted last year to sell one copy to pay for ministries and repairs to the church's 1875 building. The church's historian, a longtime member of the congregation, resigned his post to protest the sale, and a successor was named.

Although the volume of psalms did not draw the pre-sale estimate of $15 million to $30 million, the church's senior minister, the Rev. Dr. Nancy S. Taylor, said she was "thrilled with that price."

"We couldn't be happier with the buyer, we couldn't be happier with the amount," she said. "This is amazing. A year ago, we were wondering if we could get $5 million for it. We didn't know."

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New Rules Would Rein In Nonprofits’ Political Role

The Obama administration on Tuesday moved to curb political activity by tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, with potentially major ramifications for some of the biggest and most secretive spenders in American politics.

New rules proposed by the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service would clarify both how the I.R.S. defines political activity and how much nonprofits are allowed to spend on it. The proposal covers not just television advertising, but bread-and-butter political work like candidate forums and get-out-the-vote drives.

Long demanded by government watchdogs and Democrats who say the flow of money through tax-exempt groups is corrupting the political system, the changes would be the first wholesale shift in a generation in the regulations governing political activity by nonprofits.

The move follows years of legal and regulatory shifts, including the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010, that have steadily loosened the rules governing political spending, particularly by those with the biggest bank accounts: corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

But the proposal also thrusts the I.R.S. into what is sure to be a polarizing regulatory battle, with some Republicans immediately criticizing the proposal on Tuesday as an attack on free speech and a ploy to undermine congressional investigations into the agency's handling of applications from Tea Party groups.

"Before rushing forward with new rules, especially ones that appear to make it harder to engage in public debate, I would hope Treasury would let all the facts come out first," said Representative David Camp of Michigan, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Political spending by tax-exempt groups — from Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, co-founded by the Republican strategist Karl Rove, to the League of Conservation Voters — skyrocketed to more than $300 million in 2012 from less than $5.2 million in 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Much of the money has been funneled through chains of interlinked nonprofit groups, making it even harder to determine the original source.

And unlike political parties and "super PACs," political nonprofits are permitted to keep the names of donors confidential, making them the vehicle of choice for deep-pocketed donors seeking to influence campaigns in secret.

The new rules would not prohibit political activity by nonprofits.

But by seeking to establish clearer limits for campaign-related spending by groups claiming tax exemption, the I.R.S. proposal could have an enormous impact on some of the biggest groups, forcing them to either limit their election spending or register as openly political organizations, such as super PACs.

A spokesman for Crossroads declined to comment, as did officials at other political nonprofits.

Nick Ryan, the founder of the American Future Fund, which spent at least $25 million on political advertising last year, said, "Unfortunately, it appears that the same bureaucrats that attempted to suppress the speech of conservative groups in recent years has now put together new rules that apply to (c)4 groups but do not apply to liberal groups like labor unions."

"I wish I could say I am surprised," Mr. Ryan added, "but I am not." The final rules are unlikely to be issued until after the 2014 election, after a public comment period.

The administration's proposal would apply to nonprofits organized under Section 501(c)4 of the tax code, which are granted tax exemption in exchange for devoting themselves to the promotion of "social welfare."

Under current rules, promoting social welfare can include some political activity, along with unlimited amounts of lobbying. Some of the largest political nonprofits — like Americans for Prosperity, backed by the conservative philanthropists Charles and David Koch — have used that provision to justify significant expenditures on political ads.

But under the new proposal, a broad swath of political work would be classified as "candidate-related political activity" and explicitly excluded from the agency's definition of social welfare. Those activities include advertisements that mention a candidate within 60 days of an election as well as grants to other organizations making candidate-related expenditures.

"Depending on the details, this could be dramatic," said Marcus S. Owens, a former chief of the I.R.S.'s exempt organizations division.

The rules could also affect more traditional conservative and liberal advocacy organizations, including Tea Party groups whose complaints of harassment by I.R.S. employees prompted the resignation of several high-ranking I.R.S. officials last spring. Distributing voter guides, for example, would automatically count as political activity.

Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group, praised the proposal as "an important step forward." He added, "Enormous abuses have taken place under the current rules, which have allowed groups largely devoted to campaign activities to operate as nonprofit groups in order to keep secret the donors funding their campaign activities."

Administration officials described the new proposal as a response to complaints — including objections from the Treasury's own inspector general after the Tea Party controversy — that the existing regulations were too vague, leading to inconsistent or arbitrary enforcement. The I.R.S. would be better equipped to enforce the rules, the officials said, if they were clearer, while nonprofit groups would be better able to comply.

"This proposed guidance is a first critical step toward creating clear-cut definitions of political activity by tax-exempt social welfare organizations," said Mark J. Mazur, the assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy.

The final guidance could also include a more precise definition of how much political activity a 501(c)4 group is permitted to engage in while still maintaining its tax exemption.

Many election lawyers and their clients use an unofficial rule of thumb: If a tax-exempt group spends less than 50 percent of its budget on political activity, then its primary purpose is not winning campaigns.

Some activists have argued that a rule requiring 501(c)4s to spend no more than 15 percent of their budgets on political activities would be closer to the letter and spirit of existing law.

Some lawyers said they worried that the new rules, particularly those that could apply to grass-roots organizing, could unfairly burden bona fide social welfare groups. Others suggested that tighter restrictions on social welfare groups would only hasten the migration of political money into other kinds of entities whose campaign spending is not subject to I.R.S. jurisdiction.

Mr. Owens, now a tax lawyer in Washington, said the I.R.S. proposal would have one certain consequence: more business.

"I'm looking forward to a very profitable new year," he said.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

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