Your Money: How the Court’s Ruling Will Affect Same-Sex Spouses

Gay couples have long had second-tier status when it came to their finances — many things were more complicated, like filing tax returns, and often more costly, like health insurance.

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, some of these issues will be wiped away. The ruling makes clear that married gay couples living in states that recognize their unions will immediately gain access to more than 1,000 federal benefits, like Social Security and family leave rights. Less certain is how couples living in the remaining 37 states will fare.

The murkiness exists because federal agencies generally defer to the states to determine a couple's marital status. Some agencies look to the laws in the state in which a couple now live, for instance, while others look to those in the state in which the couple were married.

"Unless the administration changes its practices and rules — and in a couple of cases, unless the law changes — then couples residing in a nonmarriage-equality state may not be recognized for some federal programs," said Brian Moulton, legal director at the Human Rights Campaign. "Now that we have an opinion out, we will be anxiously awaiting what the administration will say about this and urging them to ensure that all married couples, regardless of where they live, are fully recognized."

White House officials said that they had already begun analyzing the hundreds of relevant laws and statutes at issue and were working with the Justice Department to make benefits available as swiftly as possible.

But even if the administration were to apply the ruling broadly, gay married couples would still not be on entirely even ground with their heterosexual peers. Until other states approve the unions, couples will still need to travel to one of 13 states or the District of Columbia to get married. And they will still need to deal with a patchwork of state laws that could make it difficult to get a divorce or establish legal ties to their children.

Of the estimated 650,000 same-sex couples living together nationally, about 114,100 are legally married, according to the Williams Institute. But those figures could increase, given the court's other ruling on Wednesday that effectively removes legal obstacles to same-sex couples marrying in California.

Here's how many of them will be affected:

Social Security

Gay married couples living in states where same-sex marriage is legal can apply for Social Security benefits on their spouses' earnings records, as well as survivor benefits. The Social Security Administration typically looks to the states to determine whether a person is married, which could create problems for couples that move to a state where it is not.

But it is possible that benefits would extend to couples in certain civil unions and registered domestic partnerships. The agency's rules also say that if a person is not married — but would inherit property from a spouse as a married person would without a will according to their state's law — that person is also entitled to benefits.

"Though still untested while DOMA has been in place, we presume that under this provision partners in a civil union or comprehensive domestic partnership (or even in a less comprehensive domestic partnership but one in which you can inherit under state law, as in Wisconsin) could claim spousal benefits," said Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, a gay rights advocacy group

Federal Income Taxes

Married couples living in states where gay marriage is legal will be able to file joint federal returns. That should save some couples money, especially when one person earns much less or does not work at all. High-income couples with two working spouses will probably pay more.

That said, filing jointly can cause even lower-income couples to become ineligible for certain tax savings like the earned-income tax credit. Ultimately, the tax consequences will be based on where couples live, their income and their particular circumstances.

Couples who would have saved significant sums by filing jointly might want to consider amending their recent tax returns. Such amendments have been permitted for the last three tax years, according to Patricia Cain, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and an expert on sexuality and federal tax law. More specifically, that means many taxpayers can refile for tax years 2010, 2011 and 2012. The three-year clock started on April 15 for people who filed on or before that date; those who received a filing extension have three years from the date they filed, she added.

What remains unclear is whether same-sex couples married in states where gay unions are legal could file joint federal returns if they moved to a state where they are not. "There has been a lot of discussion about whether the I.R.S. could recognize someone married in Massachusetts but living in Georgia," Professor Cain said. "I think they have the power to do that, but no one seems to think they will do that. I think they will wait for guidance from the White House."

The other big question is whether couples in civil unions and registered domestic partnerships can file joint returns. The I.R.S. typically looks to the taxpayer's state of residence to determine whether someone is married. But a letter from the office of the chief counsel of the I.R.S., written in 2011, states that an opposite-sex couple in a civil union in Illinois should be treated as married for federal tax purposes. "The I.R.S. would have the power to interpret the word spouse," Professor Cain said, adding that the Internal Revenue Code does not define the word.

Employee Benefits

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 26, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of states where gay marriage is permitted following the Supreme Court rulings on Wednesday. Gay couples marry in 13 states, not 12 states, and the District of Columbia.

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DealBook: New Standards Expected for Insurance Accounting Could Lead to Erratic Earnings

The Financial Accounting Standards Board on Thursday will propose new rules for insurance accounting that seem likely to increase volatility in reported profits for many insurers and lower reported revenue for rapidly growing companies.

Some of the largest protests might come from companies that until now have thought insurance accounting rules did not apply to them. The new rules would cover any company that issues contracts that are seen as insurance, or similar to insurance.

Insurance is defined as "accepting significant risk" from another party — the insured policyholder — by agreeing to pay compensation "if a specified uncertain future event adversely affects the policyholder." That could include product warranties issued by third parties, mortgage guarantees and residual value guarantees. Most banks would have at least some products subject to the insurance rules.

But not all products that seem like insurance would be covered. The accounting for credit-default swaps, which pay if a borrower like a company or country defaults, would not change. The logic behind that is that such swaps are sold to speculators, who are betting that a default will come, as well as to bondholders who would suffer from a default.

"The proposed standard is intended to bring greater consistency and relevance to the accounting for contracts that transfer significant risk between parties," said Leslie F. Seidman, the FASB chairwoman. "Current U.S. standards on insurance have evolved over the years as new products have been introduced, leading to some inconsistencies" in insurance accounting.

One important change for some life insurance companies would be the timing on recognizing revenue. Instead of recognizing premiums when they are received, premiums would be recognized over time, when the insurance is being provided. Expenses would also be delayed, so the effect on net income might not be large, but revenue growth might seem much slower for some companies.

Life insurance companies now set up reserves when a policy is sold, based on estimates of factors like life expectancy and the chance the policy will lapse before the policyholder dies. Under the new rules, those assumptions would have to be revised every three months, leading to changes in the book value of the policies. But many of those changes would go into a category called "other comprehensive income" and thus not affect the net income figures.

For property and casualty insurers, an important change would come in how reserves are calculated. Currently, most companies estimate the most likely result. Under the new rules, they would have to average out the possible results, based on probability. So for a company that thought there was a 60 percent chance that it would have to pay $1,000 on a claim, and a 40 percent chance it would have to pay $2,000, its required reserve would rise from $1,000, the most probable number, to $1,400 — the average of the probabilities.

That calculation would have to be updated frequently, leading to changes in earnings in one quarter that could be reversed in the next.

A significant change would be that reserves would now be subject to discounting based on time and interest rates. In the example above, the figure now would be $1,000 whether the company expected to pay the claim next year or 10 years from now. Under the proposal, the reserve for the claim that is not expected to be paid for 10 years would be discounted and would then rise every year as the expected payment date neared.

The new rules would affect only companies that issue insurance. Purchasers of insurance — basically every company — would not have to change their current accounting.

The proposal is similar to one issued by the International Accounting Standards Board last week, although there are some differences. The boards are seeking public comment through Oct. 25 and will then decide whether to change their proposals before issuing final rules.

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Taliban’s Divided Tactics Raise Doubts Over Talks

Mohammed Dabbous/Reuters

The opening of the Taliban's political office in Qatar last week. Members of the group have been speaking about a peace agreement in Afghanistan, but Western diplomats say they remain wary.

DOHA, Qatar — When the Taliban opened their political office in Qatar last week, stepping into the halogen glare of TV cameras, it was the first time in a dozen years that the world had gotten to see members of the insurgents' inner circle — and they seemed different. Urbane and educated, they conducted interviews in English, Arabic, French and German with easy fluency; passed out and received phone numbers; and, most strikingly, talked about peace.

Back in Afghanistan, though, they have been the same old Taliban: fighters have waged suicide attacks that have taken an increasing toll on civilians, and on Tuesday the militants staged a deadly strike right at the heart of the heavily secured government district in Kabul.

For officials watching the talks, those contradictions offer a picture of a top Taliban leadership taking advantage of two different tracks — orchestrating the fighting element even while setting up a new international diplomatic foothold in Doha. This complicates efforts to pin down the insurgents' true goals.

At the Taliban office, it quickly became clear that the contingent's members had all been carefully vetted for their diplomatic credentials. Though many were officials in the old Taliban government, often sent abroad, none are known as fighters. And they all are considered loyalists to the Taliban's reclusive leader in exile, Mullah Muhammad Omar.

Further, while the delegates claimed to be there to talk peace with the Afghan government and American officials, on closer examination, what they did — essentially setting up a virtual embassy to the world — sent what many saw as the reverse message, raising serious questions about the insurgent movement's real motives in going to Qatar in the first place.

"From minute one, the Taliban didn't play this by the book," said a Western official who has tracked the Taliban for a number of years. "They overstepped pretty well agreed upon guidelines."

The identities and backgrounds of the delegation's key members — and thus some of the Taliban leadership's aims in choosing them — can now be detailed based on interviews with four disparate officials and on public appearances by the group in Qatar. The sources include a member of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban's leadership council in Pakistan; a Taliban military commander from eastern Afghanistan; a former Taliban official; and a Western official in Kabul who is close to the Doha talks and spoke about the delegation's general approach. All included the same nine key names, though their lists differed slightly in other ways.

"Every single member of the delegation has been picked by the leadership council after a long series of lengthy discussions and sometimes tense talks," said the eastern Taliban military commander. "There were certain criteria they should meet. First was loyalty to Mullah Muhammad Omar. Second was having experience in diplomacy. Third was speaking at least one foreign language, either English or Arabic."

Among the delegation are six former diplomats, five ex-ministers or deputy ministers, and four preachers — one of them so admired for his oratory that the Qatari defense minister is said to be in the congregation when he makes guest appearances at his mosque.

They are all seen as close adherents of Mullah Omar. One, Tayeb Agha, the apparent leader of the delegation, was his secretary and chief of staff. Another, Hafiz Aziz Rahman Ahadi, is the son of Mullah Omar's teacher at his madrassa in Quetta, Pakistan.

"All of the representatives that we selected and sent to Qatar for peace talks belong to the political wing," said the Quetta Shura member. "None have a military background. We don't need to send commanders: we are not fighting in Qatar. We are fighting in Afghanistan."

While there are some two dozen Taliban officials here — along with their families, they number a couple of hundred people in all — most are administrative and support staff.

The emissaries are by Taliban leadership standards relatively young, mostly in their 40s. Tayeb Agha is apparently the youngest, at age 37 or 38.

Rod Nordland reported from Doha, and Alissa J. Rubin from Kabul, Afghanistan. Reporting was contributed by Matthew Rosenberg from Washington; Taimoor Shah from Kandahar, Afghanistan; Habib Zahori and Sharifullah Sahak from Kabul; and an employee of The New York Times from Kunar, Afghanistan.

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Democrat Wins Special Election for Kerry’s Senate Seat

BOSTON — Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat who has toiled for almost 40 years in the House in both the majority and minority, won a promotion to the Senate on Tuesday in a victory over Gabriel Gomez, a Republican who has never served in elective office.

Mr. Markey, 66, succeeds John Kerry, who stepped down this year to become secretary of state, and he will provide a reliable vote for President Obama's agenda, which seemed to be just what voters wanted.

"The Senate needs to be controlled by Democrats," said Pam Wechsler, 52, a prosecutor, as she voted Tuesday morning in the West End of Boston.

With almost all precincts reporting, Mr. Markey had won 55 percent of the vote to Mr. Gomez's 45 percent.

"Like you, I'm tired of gridlock," Mr. Markey told a jubilant crowd packed into the ballroom of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, "but I will never compromise on our principles." He said he would lead a "green revolution" and put steelworkers and ironworkers to work in a new economy.

Mr. Markey's election does not change the balance of power in the Senate, where Democrats have 54 votes and Republicans have 46. But Democratic control had already slipped by one this month after Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey died and was succeeded by an interim Republican.

Mr. Markey's win came as a surprise to no one. Every poll in the state showed him leading Mr. Gomez, though by varying margins, since the primaries ended two months ago.

Mr. Markey's biggest advantage was that his views were in line with those of most voters in deep blue Massachusetts. With a much bigger war chest, which he used to flood the airwaves with ads, he campaigned consistently on his support for abortion rights and a ban on assault weapons and reminded voters constantly that Mr. Gomez opposed both.

As the campaign went on, Mr. Markey added arguments that Democrats had used successfully in previous Senate races — that his opponent wanted to cut Medicare benefits, raise the eligibility age for Social Security and give special tax breaks to corporations.

For his part, Mr. Gomez repeatedly cast Mr. Markey, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, as a relic who had little to show for his decades in Washington. He cast himself as a "new kind of Republican" who supported same-sex marriage, expanded background checks for gun purchases and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But he could not convince enough Massachusetts voters that he would vote independently of the national Republican Party.

While the Markey campaign feared that Mr. Gomez would attract millions of dollars in outside money from special interests, that backing did not materialize in a serious way.

Mr. Markey himself did not exactly set the electorate on fire. He was the consensus choice of the Democratic establishment, which wanted to focus on one candidate early in hopes of avoiding a repeat of 2010, when a Republican, Scott P. Brown, won the special Senate election to fill the seat of Edward M. Kennedy, who died in 2009.

Mr. Markey ran a cautious campaign that relied heavily on big Democratic stars, including President Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

"Democrats are getting the outcome they were supposed to get, but they had to put a lot of firepower into it," said Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at The Cook Political Report. She characterized the Democratic juggernaut, including an extensive field operation that made contact with three million voters over the last five days, as backup insurance that the loss of 2010 would not be repeated. On Tuesday alone, the party organized 7,200 volunteers to get out the vote.

"This victory has less to do with Ed Markey and more with the fact that he's the Democrat," she said. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee took considerable credit for the victory Tuesday night.

"We recruited Ed Markey into the race, worked with him to build a campaign team with the best Senate talent from Massachusetts and around the country, and secured commitments early on from top Democratic leaders that they would actively support the Democratic nominee," Guy Cecil, the committee's executive director, said in a statement.

Looking ahead to other Senate races next year, he said that winning in Massachusetts "was an important first step in our efforts to preserve the Democratic majority."

Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was upbeat, declaring that Mr. Gomez had forced the Democrats to spend millions to drag Mr. Markey "across the finish line in the most liberal state in the country."

And he all but announced that Mr. Gomez would challenge Mr. Markey in November 2014, when Mr. Markey will have to defend the seat for a full six-year term. "Today marks the end of the first mile in the marathon to permanently fill the Massachusetts Senate seat," Mr. Moran said. "Gabriel Gomez is well prepared to win that marathon over the next 16 months."

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With Snowden in Middle, U.S. and Russia Joust, and Cool Off

By Ben Solomon

Snowden Stays Safe in Moscow Airport: The Times's Ellen Barry reports from Moscow, where the Russian government decided not to accede to demands from the United States that it capture Edward J. Snowden.

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday appeared to rule out sending Edward J. Snowden back to the United States to face espionage charges, leaving him in limbo even as Moscow and Washington seemed to be making an effort to prevent a cold-war-style standoff from escalating.

In his first public comments on the case, Mr. Putin said that Mr. Snowden — the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked documents about American surveillance programs — had committed no crime on Russian soil and was "a free man" who could choose his own destination. "We can only extradite some foreign nationals to the countries with which we have the relevant international agreements on extradition," he added. "With the United States, we have no such agreement."

But while American officials remained angry at China for letting Mr. Snowden fly to Moscow, they and their Russian counterparts toned down the red-hot language that threatened a deeper rupture in relations. Mr. Putin said he saw little to gain in the conflict. "It's like shearing a piglet," he said. "There's a lot of squealing and very little wool." Some American officials interpreted the comment as a positive signal and speculated that Mr. Snowden would be sent to another country that could turn him over.

Yet the Russian president's remarks during an official visit to Finland also underscored what may be the lasting damage the case has caused for American relations with both Moscow and Beijing. In noting that Mr. Snowden viewed himself as a "human rights activist" who "struggles for freedom of information," Mr. Putin made clear that it would be harder for President Obama to claim the moral high ground when he presses foreign leaders to stop repressing dissenters and halt cyberattacks.

In the days since Mr. Snowden fled Hong Kong for Moscow, the Russians and the Chinese have seized both on his revelations about surveillance and the fact that the United States is seeking his arrest to make the case for a you-do-it-too argument. Igor Morozov, a Russian lawmaker, wrote that the case exposed an American "policy of double standards." Xinhua, the state-owned Chinese news agency, editorialized that "the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyberattacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age."

American officials said such arguments were false equivalences, saying that there was no comparison between Congressionally sanctioned and court-monitored surveillance programs, or the prosecution of Mr. Snowden, and the actions taken by the governments in Moscow and Beijing. But it is an argument that Washington may find difficult to sell in some parts of the world, even among some American allies, and it is fueling criticism inside the United States.

"The Russians for the better part of a decade have always tried to argue that the U.S. has double standards," said Andrew Weiss, a former Russia adviser to President Bill Clinton and now vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "In the Russian domestic context and international context they never get tired of looking for those kinds of axes."

The arguments could complicate American initiatives with both countries. Chinese officials are now ramping up the critique ahead of the United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which starts in Washington in early July with the arrival of an array of Chinese leaders. On the top of the agenda, at Mr. Obama's insistence, is talk about how to work out rules of the road for behavior involving computers and online.

Until lately, the United States seemed to have Beijing on the defensive, with evidence that Chinese military units were behind recent computer attacks. Then Mr. Snowden told a Hong Kong newspaper that the United States had been engaged in a vigorous hacking campaign in China.

Mr. Obama has insisted that there is a difference between common espionage and China's behavior. "Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering," he told Charlie Rose in an interview on PBS. But intelligence gathering is different from "a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple's software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product," he said.

"That's theft," the president added, "and we can't tolerate that."

David M. Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry reported from Moscow, and Peter Baker from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Andrew Roth from Moscow; David E. Sanger, Steven Lee Myers and Charlie Savage from Washington; and Michael R. Gordon from Jidda, Saudi Arabia.

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This Land: A Baseball Lifer Adds Chapters, a Game at a Time

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Doc Edwards, now in his 57th year in professional baseball, signs an autograph for a fan. More Photos »

SAN ANGELO, Tex. — In the clubhouse for the San Angelo Colts baseball team, a squat shed of concrete and corrugated metal planted in dust just beyond the left-field fence, a white-haired lifer named Doc Edwards is telling another story when — bam! — a sound like a gunshot goes off. He keeps talking.

Now in his 57th year in professional baseball, Mr. Edwards, 76, has a deep bench of — bam! — stories that feature a cast of thousands, from Mickey Mantle to the kid playing second base tonight whose name isn't readily coming to mind at the — bam! — moment.

Finally, he is asked about — bam! — these unsettling bams. Just batting-practice home runs pounding the metal roof, he explains, and picks up where he left off, the interruption a brief rain delay in his spinning of another baseball-story beauty.

"I had one home run in Boston, barely scraped the top part of the fence," he is saying. "Then Mantle hit one to center field. One-handed. More than 420 feet."

It's true: This heavyset man eating chips and drinking a Pepsi spent nearly a decade playing and managing in the major leagues, and a spare few of us can say the same. But most of his career has been one long minor-league bus ride, managing the Wichita Aeros, or the Charleston Charlies, or the Sioux Falls Canaries.

Now here he is, still, starting his eighth summer as the manager of the Colts in the United League Baseball, an independent collective of faint hope that operates in Texas well outside the major-league farm system. Waiting for another game. Telling another story to the reassuring pitter-patter of raining baseballs.

"The next year I got traded from Cleveland to Kansas City for Joe Azcue and Dick Howser," he is saying. "Me and money for those two players. I just pray it was for more than 10 bucks."

The evening droops in the dry heat. Batting practice has ended, and the grounds crew tends to an infield so dusty that one worker is wearing the head covering of a desert nomad. General admission tonight is $2, and somewhere around here the mascot, Casey the Colt, is champing at the bit.

Meanwhile, in the compressed clubhouse, Mr. Edwards talks his way toward filling out another lineup. The pitching coach has stored a bicycle in the small bathroom to his right, and in the cramped locker room to his left, athletes in the pregame state of anticipation watch a television whose channels are monitored by their skipper. ("Just baseball," he says. "No smut.")

His tight office has a fly swatter on the table, three weathered Colts caps on hooks and, on the wall, a half-century-old photograph of a young New York Yankee taking a home-run swing, the 38 on his uniform made small by his broad back. In the baseball outpost of San Angelo, this portrait of Doc Edwards hangs as a reminder of what once was and what might, might be.

Howard Rodney Edwards grew up in West Virginia, where his father vowed to break his legs if he followed him down into the mines. He developed into a promising catcher, served as a Navy medic with the Marines — hence the handle — and eventually joined the Cleveland Indians' organization.

After a few years in places like North Platte, Neb., and Burlington, N.C., he became a peripatetic backup catcher for the Indians, the A's, the Yankees and the Phillies. His was a rarefied but precarious existence, the threat of being sent back down as ever-present as his catcher's mitt.

Mr. Edwards collected a duffel bag of stories along the way. Here's another one: He admired Mantle, his teammate in 1965, so much that he wanted to name his first son Mickey Mantle Edwards. His wife at the time said no way, so the boy was christened Howard Michael Edwards. But he goes by Mick.

The home-plate umpire appears at the door to collect a few dozen fresh baseballs, and Mr. Edwards greets him as Mr. Smith.

"It's Shults," says Johnny Shults, smiling in his acceptance of Doc being Doc.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 25, 2013

An earlier version of a summary for this article misidentified the city of the Colts. They are the San Angelo Colts, not San Antonio Colts.

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News Analysis: Clean Air Act, Reinterpreted, Would Focus on Flexibility and State-Level Efforts

With no chance of Congressional support, President Obama is staking part of his legacy on a big risk: that he can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by stretching the intent of a law decades old and not written with climate change in mind.

His plan, unveiled Tuesday at Georgetown University in Washington, will set off legal and political battles that will last years.

But experts say that if all goes well for the president, the plan could potentially meet his stated goal of an overall emissions reduction of 17 percent by 2020, compared with the level in 2005.

"If the question is, 'Will this solve our emissions problem?' the answer is no," said Michael A. Levi, an energy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "If the question is, 'Could this move us along the path we want to be on?' the answer is yes, it could."

In his speech, Mr. Obama said he would use executive powers to limit the carbon dioxide that power plants could emit. He also called for government spending to promote the development of energy alternatives, and committed to helping cities and states protect themselves from rising seas and other effects of climate change.

But formally, the main thing he did on Tuesday was order the Environmental Protection Agency to devise an emissions control plan, with the first draft due in a year. Experts say he will be lucky to get a final plan in place by the time he leaves office in early 2017.

Mr. Obama is trying to ensure continuation of a trend already under way: emissions in the United States have been falling for several years. But at the global scale, they are rising fast, and as the president acknowledged, it will take much stronger international action to turn that around and head off the worst effects of climate change.

"For the world at large, the United States is just one piece of the puzzle," Mr. Levi said.

Already, glaciers are melting, heat waves and heavy rains are increasing, the food system is under stress and the sea is rising. The best that can be hoped for, scientists say, is to limit the damage, or slow it enough to provide society more time to adjust.

The president recognized that in his plan, calling for more steps to help the country prepare, from strengthening sea walls to hardening the electrical grid.

The heart of Mr. Obama's plan, however, is lowering the country's emissions using administrative remedies, an effort to sidestep a recalcitrant Congress. The success of that goal will depend on how far the administration is able to stretch the boundaries of the Clean Air Act, signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that it can be used to regulate greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide emissions, but figuring out how to do that within the technical requirements of the law will be a major challenge.

The administration's thinking appears to have been influenced by a proposal from an environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The group urged a creative approach, calling on the federal government to set a target level of greenhouse gases for each state, taking account of historical patterns. A state generating a lot of power from coal, then exporting it to other states, would not be unduly penalized, for instance.

As the environmental group envisions it, states would meet their goals by tweaking the overall electrical system, not just by cracking down on individual power plants. States might urge companies to produce more renewable power, for instance, but they could also retrofit homes and businesses to reduce energy waste, or encourage the use of clean-burning natural gas instead of coal.

States would presumably be allowed to use market signals, like a price on greenhouse emissions, to achieve their goals, as California and nine Northeastern states are already doing.

It is unclear how much all this might cost at the retail level. The Natural Resources Defense Council argues that even if prices go up, electric bills for many consumers could actually decline as their homes were retrofitted to use less energy.

The fossil-fuel industry and its allies in Congress are certain to argue that the president's plan will be ruinously expensive and require the shutdown of numerous coal-burning power plants. Republican leaders immediately condemned the plan as a job-killer and framed it as an attack on coal.

The political attraction of a state-led approach is that it would move a lot of the nitty-gritty decision making out of Washington. But, for that very reason, it would entail legal risk. The Clean Air Act, written in the heyday of environmentalism, basically envisions commandments from Washington ordering utilities to clean up the air, not flexible approaches.

While carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached a historic level of 400 parts per million last month, emissions from the United States have been falling, partly because of the weak economy but also because of the newfound abundance of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing. Gas has displaced a lot of coal in power generation; such switching cuts greenhouse emissions nearly in half for a given amount of electricity produced.

Other factors, like tougher building codes, are contributing to the decline. And transport emissions are falling in part because of one of Mr. Obama's policies: tough fuel-efficiency measures for new cars.

But modest reductions already achieved in the United States and other Western countries are being swamped by rising emissions from the East. So the real question is whether technologies can be developed, and then deployed worldwide, that allow for continued economic growth and rising energy use with minimal greenhouse emissions.

In his speech, Mr. Obama sought to reclaim global leadership on climate change for the United States. His plan includes ideas and money for making global progress.

Daniel P. Schrag, head of Harvard's Center for the Environment, said the president's plan would succeed only if it created market conditions unleashing the creative power of American capitalism, calling forth greater innovation in the energy industry.

Mr. Obama nodded to that point in his speech, noting that "countries like China and Germany are going all in" on the clean energy race. "I believe Americans build things better than anybody else," he said. "I want America to win that race, but we can't win it if we're not in it."

John M. Broder contributed reporting.

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Clash of Styles in Court Opens Trial in Trayvon Martin’s Death

A Sampling From Opening Statements: Clips from opening arguments by the prosecution and defense teams in the George Zimmerman murder trial in Sanford, Fla.

SANFORD, Fla. — Using George Zimmerman's own words, prosecutors on Monday opened the case against him by portraying Mr. Zimmerman as a gun-toting vigilante who "profiled" Trayvon Martin as someone who was "up to no good" and, with a gun in his waistband, set out to stop him.

"Punks," a prosecutor, John Guy, quoted Mr. Zimmerman as saying, adding the expletives that Mr. Zimmerman used as he spoke to a police dispatcher on the phone. "They always get away. "

"The truth about the murder of Trayvon Martin is going to come directly from his mouth," Mr. Guy told the six-woman jury. "From those hate-filled words that he used to describe a perfect stranger and from the lies that he told to the police to try to justify his actions."

But the defense, choosing evidence over passion in its opening statement, chipped away at the prosecution's narrative. After a halting start, Don West, one of Mr. Zimmerman's lawyers, plunged into a chronological account, heavy on maps and audio recordings, that sought to paint his client as a level-headed man who shot Mr. Martin, not out of malice, but out of fear for his life.

"Trayvon Martin armed himself with the concrete sidewalk and used it to smash George Zimmerman's head; it's no different than if he picked up a brick or bashed it against a wall," Mr. West said, "and the law is very specific as to when you can defend yourself if the other person has a deadly weapon."

Mr. Zimmerman, 29, who was the coordinator for his Sanford neighborhood watch association, is charged with second-degree murder in the death of Mr. Martin, 17, an unarmed black high school student from Miami. Mr. Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, told the police that he shot Mr. Martin in self-defense after the teenager attacked him. The shooting, and the fact that Mr. Zimmerman was not charged for six weeks — and only after Gov. Rick Scott appointed a special prosecutor — revived calls for racial justice and prompted protest marches here and around the country.

In an opening statement that was heavy on emotion, Mr. Guy portrayed Mr. Zimmerman as a man overly eager to play the role of police officer and too ready to nab a suspect. Rather than stay in his car, Mr. Zimmerman, who was on the phone with a police dispatcher, chose to pursue Mr. Martin, his gun at the ready, said Mr. Guy, who spoke to the Seminole County Court jury for a little over 30 minutes.

The night of the encounter — Feb. 26, 2012 — was dark and rainy, and Mr. Martin, he said, was doing nothing more than ambling home from a 7-Eleven store "armed" with a soft drink and Skittles. He chatted with a young woman from Miami on his cellphone. The woman heard Mr. Martin say, "What are you following me for?" Mr. Guy said. "Then Trayvon Martin's phone went dead. And then Trayvon Martin was dead."

As Mr. Guy described the teenager's death, Mr. Martin's parents dabbed at their eyes. Mr. Zimmerman looked on stone-faced. His parents were not allowed in the courtroom because they are on the defense team's witness list. The parents of a victim are exempt from the witness rule.

Mr. Guy dismissed Mr. Zimmerman's injuries as negligible and picked apart his numerous statements to the police, pointing out a number of inconsistencies. Mr. Zimmerman voluntarily spoke to the police in the hours and days after the shooting, and "that is when he began to spin that tangled web of lies," Mr. Guy said.

Mr. Martin, he said, did not punch Mr. Zimmerman after the defendant hung up with the dispatch officer, did not circle Mr. Zimmerman's car, did not reach for Mr. Zimmerman's gun and did not cover Mr. Zimmerman's nose and mouth with his hand. Mr. Martin's hands had no bruises or blood, he said. In fact, none of Mr. Zimmerman's DNA was found on Mr. Martin, Mr. Guy said.

"The only blood of George Zimmerman's was on the waistband of one of Trayvon Martin's shirts," Mr. Guy said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article misquoted a prosecutor, John Guy. He said: "We are confident that at the end of this trial you will know in your head, in your heart and your stomach that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to. He shot him for the worst of all reasons: because he wanted to.'' He did not say, "We are confident that at the end of this trial you will know in your head, heart and stomach that George Zimmerman did not shoot Trayvon Martin because he had to be shot. He shot him for the words, for all these reasons, because he wanted to.''

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DealBook: Exit From the Bond Market Is Turning Into a Stampede

Wall Street never thought it would be this bad.

Over the last two months, and particularly over the last two weeks, investors have been exiting their bond investments with unexpected ferocity, moves that continued through Monday.

A bond sell-off has been anticipated for years, given the long run of popularity that corporate and government bonds have enjoyed. But most strategists expected that investors would slowly transfer out of bonds, allowing interest rates to slowly drift up.

Instead, since the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, recently suggested that the strength of the economic recovery might allow the Fed to slow down its bond-buying program, waves of selling have convulsed the markets.

The recent pain has spilled over into stock markets, pushing the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index down an additional 1.2 percent on Monday. But the real pressure has been felt in the bigger and more closely watched bond market. The value of outstanding United States government 10-year notes has fallen 10 percent since a high in early May.

The selling has been most visible among retail investors, who have sold a record $48 billion worth of shares in bond mutual funds so far in June, according to the data company TrimTabs. But hedge funds and other big institutional investors have also been closing out positions or stepping back from the bond market.

"The feeling you are getting out there is that people are selling first and asking questions later," said Hans Humes, chief executive of the hedge fund Greylock Capital.

The anxiety has been heightened by recent instability in the Chinese banking sector, where lending has shown signs of freezing up. That led Chinese stocks down particularly sharply, with the Shanghai composite index ending Monday down 5.3 percent.

But Mr. Humes and many others in the market say they think that the recent swings are driven more by fear than by a rational assessment of what bonds are worth. This could lead to crises for some big investors who took speculative bets, but it makes many analysts skeptical that the panic will lead to any broader instability in the financial system.

"The fundamental story is not so bad — you are not talking about the system teetering on the edge of anything," Mr. Humes said.

It was the strength of the underlying economy that Mr. Bernanke emphasized last Wednesday at a news conference where he explained the central bank's impulse to pull back on its $85 billion a month bond-buying program.

The money the Fed spends on bonds is supposed to bolster the economy, but the cheap money coming from the Fed has also made it less expensive and easier for investors to make large, increasingly speculative bets on bond prices.

The Fed's unusual bond purchases have given it far more influence over the market than at past turning points for interest rates. But Fed officials are clearly unhappy with the extent of the reaction to Mr. Bernanke's statements. On Monday, some top Fed officials made public comments that appeared to be aimed at calming some of the market's wild selling. Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the regional Fed branch in Minnesota, said in a statement on the bank's Web site that the Fed's recent communications had left the "public with large amounts of residual uncertainty."

Mr. Kocherlakota emphasized that the Fed still planned to support the economy until it grew significantly stronger.

The recent rout follows several years of generally falling interest rates and comfortable bond returns. The belief that the Fed was likely to maintain its stimulus into the foreseeable future caused many investors to continue piling into bonds, even through the first few months of this year. TrimTabs estimates that $1.2 trillion flowed into bond funds over the last four years.

But those good times bred complacency, and Mr. Bernanke's recent comments have caused an abrupt change in perceptions.

The S.& P. 500 recovered from large losses early in the day to finish down 19.34 points, to 1,573.09, on Monday. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 0.9 percent, or 139.84 points, to 14,659.56. The Nasdaq composite index dropped 1.1 percent, or 36.49 points, to 3,320.76.

In the current fear-soaked atmosphere, market participants are looking over their shoulders, seeking to identify which firms or funds are sitting on big losses and might be forced to sell large lots of bonds. The most obvious contenders are those that bought bonds with borrowed money. In Wall Street parlance, that is called leverage. It can magnify returns when rates are low and prices are rising, but unwinding leveraged trades can deepen losses.

"The fact that we're seeing these violent moves is a reflection that there was leverage there," George Goncalves, a fixed-income strategist at Nomura, said. "This is definitely more than a hissy fit. Some people are being forced to sell."

Usually the preserve of banks and hedge funds, leverage even spread into retail-focused bond funds in recent years when rates were at very low levels. Since 2008, about one-fifth of the exchange-traded funds that invest in longer-term bonds were leveraged, according to Savita Subramanian, an equity strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The signs of stress have also been evident in the more ordinary exchange-traded funds, or E.T.F.'s, that hold bonds. These E.T.F.'s are very easy to sell at moments of panic, but the operators of the E.T.F.'s have found it harder to sell off the actual bonds. This has caused the value of the E.T.F.'s to sink further than the value of the underlying bonds.

On Friday, a municipal bond E.T.F. that is popular with retail investors fell 3.7 percent below the value of the bonds it was supposed to be holding, the so-called net asset value, according to ETF Global. On average over the last two months, the E.T.F., which trades under the ticker symbol MUB, was only 0.6 percent below the value of its net asset value.

"It's a self-fulfilling cycle until everyone gets exhausted," said Peter Tchir, the founder of TF Market Advisors. "We don't think we've seen the capitulation we need to hit bottom yet."

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DealBook: U.S. Civil Charges Against Corzine Are Seen as Near

Federal regulators are poised to sue Jon S. Corzine over the collapse of MF Global and the brokerage firm's misuse of customer money during its final days, a blowup that rattled Wall Street and cast a spotlight on Mr. Corzine, the former New Jersey governor who ran the firm until its bankruptcy in 2011.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulated MF Global, plans to approve the lawsuit as soon as this week, according to law enforcement officials with knowledge of the case. In a rare move against a Wall Street executive, the agency has informed Mr. Corzine's lawyers that it aims to file the civil case without offering him the opportunity to settle, setting up a legal battle that could drag on for years.

Without directly linking Mr. Corzine to the disappearance of more than $1 billion in customer money, the trading commission will probably blame the chief executive for failing to prevent the breach at a lower rung of the firm, the law enforcement officials said. If found liable, he could face millions of dollars in fines and possibly a ban from trading commodities, jeopardizing his future on Wall Street.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Corzine denounced the trading commission for planning to file what he called an "unprecedented and meritless civil enforcement action."

The aggressive action would stand in contrast to the government's investigations so far into the 2008 financial crisis, many of which produced symbolic fines. In the case of Lehman Brothers, which imploded at the height of the crisis, no employee has ever been charged with civil or criminal wrongdoing.

An MF Global case, expected to be filed in federal court, could become something of an experiment for federal regulators under pressure to adopt a harder line against Wall Street. It would also thrust the trading commission — the financial industry's smallest regulator — onto a bigger stage.

A case would darken the cloud over the legacy of Mr. Corzine, 66, who as a onetime Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey and a former chief of Goldman Sachs has long been a confidant of leaders in Washington and on Wall Street.

But it would also suggest that authorities have all but removed a greater threat: criminal charges. After nearly two years of stitching together evidence, criminal investigators have concluded that porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the customer money to disappear, according to the law enforcement officials with knowledge of the case.

Still, the spokesman for Mr. Corzine, Steven Goldberg, said that the trading commission's anticipated lawsuit "is not surprising considering the political pressure to hold someone liable for the failure of MF Global," the largest Wall Street bankruptcy since the 2008 financial crisis. Lawmakers and even some agency officials, he noted, have publicly condemned the firm.

"If the C.F.T.C. brings this enforcement action, Mr. Corzine would welcome the opportunity to litigate this matter in an impartial venue, free from politically influenced prejudice and unfounded assertions, which have been frequently repeated despite the lack of a factual basis," Mr. Goldberg said.

The trading commission has not told other top executives that they will be sued, according to lawyers briefed on the case. The regulator appears more likely to take aim at lower-level employees tasked with protecting customer accounts.

The agency faces a lower threshold for proving its charges than criminal authorities do. Prosecutors must prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, but the agency would only have to show a preponderance of the evidence.

Yet the trading commission is not expected to accuse Mr. Corzine of authorizing the breach of customer money, the officials with knowledge of the case said. Instead, the agency is likely to say that he failed to sufficiently supervise the firm and is subject to so-called control person liability, a legal provision that allows for the punishment of executives for the bad acts of lower-level employees.

As MF Global teetered on the brink of collapse, employees in Chicago transferred customer money to plug holes in the firm's own accounts, causing a shortfall for clients like hedge funds and farmers whose funds vanished into banks and clearinghouses. The money might have never disappeared if the banks had not pocketed the customers' money.

"During the difficult final week, Mr. Corzine was never informed, nor was he ever given reason to believe, that customer funds were at risk or were being used improperly," Mr. Goldberg said. "Justice would not be served if Mr. Corzine were to be blamed for alleged mistakes that were made without his knowledge."

Some internal e-mails lend support to Mr. Corzine's defense. An e-mail reviewed by The New York Times indicates that an employee in the firm's Chicago office, Edith O'Brien, explicitly stated to Mr. Corzine that money was a "house wire," meaning that it came from the firm's own accounts, not from customers. Ms. O'Brien, who oversaw the transfer of customer money during the firm's final week, has been a focus of the investigation since its onset.

For months, she declined to cooperate with authorities without receiving immunity from criminal prosecution. Federal authorities hesitated to grant her request, according to the officials close to the case, but started to reverse course this spring when they invited her to an interview.

For now, Ms. O'Brien is likely to receive immunity from criminal prosecution, but she or her direct bosses could still face a civil action from the trading commission, the officials said. Ms. O'Brien has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. in Manhattan declined to comment. The trading commission also declined to comment.

MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Halloween 2011. Months later, the trading commission's investigation escalated even as criminal scrutiny petered out. Early this year, people involved in the case said, the regulator deposed Mr. Corzine.

The investigation presented a test for the agency's enforcement division, which has adopted a more aggressive stance under David Meister, a former federal prosecutor who joined the agency in 2010.

Ultimately, Mr. Meister's team warned Mr. Corzine's lawyers that it planned to recommend an enforcement action against him. The division, according to people with knowledge of the case, planned to accuse the executive of a "failure to exercise adequate supervision," stemming from a breakdown in the firm's internal controls.

Mr. Goldberg said the allegation would be "nothing more than another example of Monday morning quarterbacking," a defense first raised when MF Global's bankruptcy trustee sued Mr. Corzine and his aides in April.

According to the lawsuit, an October 2010 internal report warned Mr. Corzine about certain "high risk" areas stemming from the lack of controls.

While such warning signs could support the trading commission's case, it plans to level a second charge that could be more difficult to prove. In claiming "control person liability," the agency must show that Mr. Corzine had control over Ms. O'Brien or any other employee who may have transferred customer money. It also must prove that he either "did not act in good faith" or knowingly "induced" an employee to break the law. While Mr. Corzine is thought to have received e-mails with estimates of customer money, authorities appear to lack a smoking gun.

The agency has successfully relied on the statutes that cover failure to supervise and control person liability in previous cases, but it has never used them in such a prominent action.

Mr. Goldberg said that regulators "regularly reviewed MF Global and had never found fault with its systems and procedures for maintaining customer funds."

Since the collapse of the firm, Mr. Corzine has kept a low public profile. Lately, however, he has ventured out a bit. He recently visited Central America for a humanitarian project involving children, for example. And last week, he was seen at an old haunt in Lower Manhattan, Esquires of Wall Street, an 81-year-old barbershop that Mr. Corzine has frequented since his days at Goldman.

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