The New York Times - Sunday, November 11th 2012

Late Edition Today, mostly sunny, milder, high 63. Tonight, mostly clear, mild, low 52. Tomorrow, morning fog, times of clouds and sun, very mild, high 67. Weather map is on Page 32.

VOL. CLXII . . No. 55,952

NEW YORK, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2012

© 2012 The New York Times

$6 beyond the greater New York metropolitan area.

AUTHOR’S E-MAILS TO A THIRD PARTY LED TO PETRAEUS

Boehner Tells House G.O.P. To Fall in Line Faces a Balancing Act As Tax Talks Begin

F.B.I. HARASSMENT CASE Inquiry Into Threats by Woman Reportedly Uncovered Affair

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — On a conference call with House Republicans a day after the party’s electoral battering last week, Speaker John A. Boehner dished out some bitter medicine, and for the first time in the 112th Congress, most members took their dose. Their party lost, badly, Mr. Boehner said, and while Republicans would still control the House and would continue to staunchly oppose tax rate increases as Congress grapples with the impending fiscal battle, they had to avoid the nasty showdowns that marked so much of the last two years. Members on the call, subdued and dark, murmured words of support — even a few who had been a thorn in the speaker’s side for much of this Congress. It was a striking contrast to a similar call last year, when Mr. Boehner tried to persuade members to compromise with Democrats on a deal to extend a temporary cut in payroll taxes, only to have them loudly revolt. With President Obama reelected and Democrats cementing control of the Senate, Mr. Boehner will need to capitalize on the chastened faction of the House G.O.P. that wants to cut a deal to avert sudden tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts in January that could send the economy back into recession. After spending two years marooned between the will of his loud and fractious members and the Democratic Senate majority, the speaker is trying to assert control, and many members seem to be offering support. “To have a voice at the bargaining table, John Boehner has Continued on Page 33

By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT

LONDON — After weeks of turmoil over the BBC’s coverage of a spreading pedophile scandal, the broadcaster’s director general, George Entwistle, resigned on Saturday night, bowing to a wave of condemnation by critics including a longtime BBC television anchor, who depicted him as having lost control of “a rudderless ship heading towards the rocks.” Mr. Entwistle’s sudden departure as the BBC’s chief executive was prompted by outrage over a report last week on “Newsnight,” one of the network’s flagship current affairs programs, that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in a pedophile scandal involving a children’s home in Wales. Mr. Entwistle said the report, broadcast on Nov. 2, reflected “unacceptable journalistic standards” and never should have been broadcast. That broadcast has only compounded the problems facing the network since the revelation last month that a longtime BBC television host, Jimmy Savile, was suspected of having sexually abused perhaps hundreds of young people over the course of Continued on Page 16

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. investigation that led to the sudden resignation of David H. Petraeus as C.I.A. director on Friday began with a complaint several months ago about “harassing” e-mails sent by Paula Broadwell, Mr. Petraeus’s biographer, to another woman who knows both of them, two government officials briefed on the case said Saturday. When F.B.I. agents following up on the complaint began to examine Ms. Broadwell’s e-mails, they discovered exchanges between her and Mr. Petraeus that revealed that they were having an affair, said several officials who spoke of the investigation on the condition of anonymity. They also discovered that Ms. Broadwell possessed certain classified information, one official said, but apparently concluded that it was probably not Mr. Petraeus who had given it to her and that there had been no major breach of security. No leak charges are expected to be filed as a result of the investigation. The identity of the woman who complained about the harassing messages from Ms. Broadwell has not been disclosed. She was not a family member or in the government, the officials said, and the nature of her relationship with Mr. Petraeus was not immediately known. But they said the two women seemed be competing for Mr. Petraeus’s loyalty, if not his affection. One Congressional official who was briefed on the matter said Continued on Page 20

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hugo Cuem mourning his brother-in-law Eugene Contrubis, who drowned in his Staten Island home, below.

How a Beach Community Became a Deathtrap Loss of 8 Lives on Staten Island Raises Questions About City’s Warnings By KIRK SEMPLE and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Eugene Contrubis heard the many warnings about Hurricane Sandy but decided to ride it out in his drafty, one-story bungalow at 162 Kiswick Street, near the beach on Staten Island. Soft-spoken and frail, he was a retired Police Department clerk who wrote poetry, enjoyed chess and adored his nieces. When they were children, he hung a swing from a tree in his yard for them to play on. Mr. Contrubis had lived alone since his mother’s death a few years ago. He had outlasted storms before. This one would be no different. As night fell on Monday, Oct. 29, Mr. Contrubis, 67, talked by phone with his brother-in-law. The wind had felled some branches, he reported, nothing more. But around 6:45 p.m., water from Lower New York Bay breached the beachfront road and poured into Mr. Contrubis’s neighborhood, knocking out power and eventually swallowing entire blocks.

BBC Director Quits in Furor Over Coverage By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA

$5.00

At some point, Mr. Contrubis left a message on the voice mail of his sister, Christina Contrubis. “The water’s coming in,” he said softly. His body was found in his house the next day. Mr. Contrubis was one of eight people who drowned during Hurricane Sandy in Midland Beach, a small, low-slung neighborhood of one-story bungalows and newer two- and three-story houses. The eight lived within about eight short blocks of

one another — apparently the highest concentration of deaths in the United States attributable to the storm, which killed more than 100 people in this country. One of the bodies was discovered only on Friday, nearly two weeks after the storm. The deaths have raised unsettling questions about why the victims were in their homes when the storm hit and whether the city bore some responsibility for their failure to evacuate. Relatives, friends and officials have replayed the events of that night, pondering whether they should have done something different — and whether the city needs to improve its evacuation procedures for future storms. Midland Beach is part of Zone A, a collection of neighborhoods in the city deemed most at risk of flooding. The city declared a mandatory evacuation of the zone before Hurricane Sandy. Last year, in the days before Tropical Storm Irene, city workers visited the Continued on Page 30

Invincible, Until He Wasn’t The self-inflicted damage to David H. Petraeus’s dazzling career shocked admirers. Page 20.

Party Digs In Amid Calls to Open China’s Politics In G.I. Hearing, Afghans Recall Night of Shots, Chaos and Gore By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — As the Communist Party’s 18th Congress approached, Li Weidong, a scholar of politics, made plans to observe a historic leadership battle in one of the world’s great nations. Instead of staying in Beijing to monitor China’s once-a-decade transfer of power, Mr. Li boarded a plane. “I’m going to the United States to study the elections,” Mr. Li said in a telephone interview during a stopover in Paris. After witnessing the American presidential election on Tuesday, Mr. Li went on the radio for another interview. “I still think China’s politics remain prehistoric,” he said. “I often joke that the Chinese civilization is the last prehistoric civilization left in the world.” With China at a critical juncture, there is a rising chorus within the elite expressing doubt that the 91-year-old Communist Party’s authoritarian system can deal with the stresses bearing down on the nation and its 1.3 billion people. Policies introduced after 1978 by Deng Xiaoping lifted

By KIRK JOHNSON

MARK RALSTON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Tourists in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing on Saturday. hundreds of millions out of poverty and transformed the country into the world’s second-largest economy. But the way party leaders have managed decades of growth has created towering problems that critics say can no longer be avoided.

Many of those critics have benefited from China’s stunning economic gains, and their ranks include billionaires, intellectuals and children of the party’s revolutionary founders. But they say the party’s agenda, as it stands Continued on Page 14

JOINT BASE LEWISMcCHORD, Wash. — Through a live video feed from half a world away in Afghanistan, in an extraordinary night court session, descriptions of chaos and horror poured into a military courtroom here as if from an open spigot. “Their brains were still on the pillows,” said Mullah Khamal Adin, 39, staring into the camera with his arms folded on the table, describing the 11 members of his cousin’s family he found dead in the family compound — most of the bodies burned in a pile in one room. Mr. Adin, in a hearing that started here late Friday, was asked about the smell. Was there an odor of gasoline or kerosene? Just bodies and burned plastic, he replied through a translator. The Army’s preliminary hearing in the case against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar Province this year, unfolded last

week mostly in the bustling daylight of a working military base an hour south of Seattle. But to accommodate witnesses in Afghanistan, and the 12-and-a-halfhour time difference, the schedule was shifted at week’s end, with testimony through cameras and uplinks in Afghanistan and here at Lewis-McChord starting at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time on Friday and running until shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday. The attacks, which occurred on March 11 in a deeply poor rural region while most of the victims were asleep, were the deadliest war crime attributed to a single American soldier in the decade of war that has followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and they further frayed the relationship between the American and Afghan governments. The military says Sergeant Bales, 39, was serving his fourth combat tour overseas when he Continued on Page 4

INTERNATIONAL 6-20

NATIONAL 22-31

SUNDAY BUSINESS

SPORTSSUNDAY

OPINION IN SUNDAY REVIEW

Mozambique Boom Skirts Poor

Review of Texas Chase Policy

Social Media Guru to the Stars

Football With a Message

Nicholas D. Kristof

In Mozambique, the rural poor are not sharing in brisk growth driven by a boom in coal and natural gas. Many, in fact, are worse off than before. PAGE 5

A longstanding policy of Texas state troopers’ firing at a vehicle’s tires to end a chase is coming under renewed scrutiny because of recent deaths. PAGE 20

Oliver Luckett and his start-up, theAudience, offer big celebrities a chance to build armies of fans across social media like Facebook and Twitter. PAGE 1

Liberty University has spent millions building a football program that it hopes can challenge the nation’s best and serve as a Christian beacon. PAGE 1

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2012

Inside The Times INTERNATIONAL

NATIONAL

SPORTS

SUNDAY BUSINESS

Long-Ago Abuse Complaint Is Heard in BBC Case

Living in America’s Atlantis (Population 14)

Defensive End’s Hands Swat Down Quarterbacks

Finding the Needed Cash To Clean Up After a Storm

At a Surrey reform school in the 1970s, abuse by one of Britain’s most powerful celebrities, television host Jimmy Savile, was widespread, but ignored by everyone in power, a former student says. PAGE 6

Kaskaskia, Ill., a former state capital settled in 1703 that preceded St. Louis as the West’s primary economic center, has shrunk after devastating floods to 14 full-time residents, who have to take a detour to Missouri to get there. PAGE 22

J.J. Watt, a defensive end for the Houston Texans, has launched himself into passing lanes and opponents’ psyches to become the N.F.L.’s most disruptive enemy of offense. PAGE 4

For homeowners, towns, hospitals and school districts, the recovery from Hurricane Sandy has been painfully slow. Everyone wants it to go faster. But that takes money — something many communities have precious little of. Gretchen Morgenson, Fair Game. PAGE 1

Warren Back to Washington

The Giants have scored a touchdown on just 44.7 percent of their trips into the red zone, a rate nearly 8 percent lower than the league average. PAGE 2

U.S. Military Focus on Asia The United States is strengthening its alliances and expanding its military exercises in Asia, but criticism is intensifying that the Obama administration’s “pivot” to the Pacific remains mostly verbal. PAGE 14

Syrian Rebels Resist Unity The largest opposition coalition, the Syrian National Council, resisted accepting an initiative that would incorporate it and all the regime opponents under one large umbrella. PAGE 12

Fire Traded on Gaza Border

Elizabeth Warren, the newly elected Democratic senator from Massachusetts, is returning to Washington as a member of the very club that sought to block her and dilute the power of her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. PAGE 33

METROPOLITAN

At River Café, a Loss Of the Finer Things

PAGE 12

Although the River Café, a landmark Brooklyn restaurant situated on a barge in the East River, was heavily damaged in Hurricane Sandy, its tradition and civility cannot be washed away, writes Ginia Bellafante. Big City. PAGE 1

An Afghan Artist Struggles

Occupy Moves to Relief

Paintings by Abdul Wasi Hamdard can be found in every corner of the world, but as foreigners leave Kabul, the market for his work has dried up. PAGE 10

In Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath, Occupy Wall Street has tapped into its own talents and an unfulfilled desire among city residents to assist in the recovery effort. PAGE 1

Palestinian militants fired an antitank missile at an Israeli military jeep patrolling Israel’s border with Gaza, and four Palestinians were killed when Israel returned fire.

Trouble Reaching End Zone

Nets Inspire Comic Books Brooklyn has served as a muse to a seemingly endless string of writers. The Nets, although new to the borough, have also inspired writing — in comic books. Benjamin Hoffman, Off the Dribble. PAGE 5

Lakers Look to Phil Jackson The Lakers, who showed Phil Jackson the door in 2004 and rehired him in 2005, are considering completing the cycle again after firing his latest successor. PAGE 5

OBITUARIES

Theodore T. Jones Jr., 68 Judge Jones came to wide public attention when he issued an injunction against a transit strike that was defied by workers. PAGE 34

The Same-Day Barrier Though they aren’t promising free delivery within an hour, some online merchants are trying out same-day service for a fee. Digital Domain. PAGE 3

Impasse Takes Center Stage With the election behind us, Wall Street is turning its attention to another cliffhanger: the Washington battle to head off automatic spending cuts and tax increases that could kick the economy into a recession next year. PAGE 4

AUTOMOBILES

The Toyota Prius Family Continues to Expand The Toyota Prius provokes strong reactions often bordering on love or hate. But there is now an entire line of Priuses designed to be less polarizing and more attuned to the needs of middle-of-the-road Americans. PAGE 1

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2012

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

‘‘

Before the storm I called him up and said, ‘Gene, the storm, it looks bad!’ And he said, ‘Everybody’s staying; nobody’s leaving.’ He just told me, ‘I’m not going to leave.’

’’

CHRISTINA CONTRUBIS, describing a conversation with her brother, who drowned on Staten Island during Hurricane Sandy. [30]

EDITORIAL

Election Deals Big Money A Landslide Loss MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Caribbean cocoa tourism takes chocolate-craving visitors island hopping from bean all the way to bonbon. Above, Pall Ramkalawan, harvests Trinitario cacao pods. TRAVEL, PAGE 6 BOOK REVIEW

MAGAZINE

ARTS & LEISURE

Thomas Jefferson The Grand Bargainer

The Thunder of Oklahoma Belong to the Land

The Rolling Stones Celebrate Fifty Years

Jon Meacham’s new biography “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power” guides us through Jefferson’s entire life, but without much color or drama. Review by Jill Abramson.

The Oklahoma City Thunder has become one of the N.B.A.’s best and most popular teams, an international icon of brotherhood and good will that has helped to usher in golden ages in both Oklahoma City and the N.B.A. PAGE 40

With The Rolling Stones’ fiftieth anniversary year drawing to a close, the machinery of commemoration and promotion has swung into motion. PAGE 1

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Accepting One’s Self John Schwartz’s memoir, “Oddly Normal,” is a deeply affecting account of his son Joe learning to embrace his own homosexuality. Review by David Sheff. PAGE 16

Enter the Playwright The Signature Theater will devote a season to David Henry Hwang’s career, reviving two plays, and will support the world premiere of his Bruce Lee play, “Kung Fu.” PAGE 36

A Hollywood Free Spirit Jennifer Lawrence’s on-screen characters are often marked by their flinty resolution, not their volubility, but in person Ms. Lawrence is just the opposite, an unfiltered sass who looks like a 1970s California prom queen. PAGE 1

Voters ignored most of the outside ads, but the danger of unlimited campaign spending remains. PAGE 12

How to Cut Prison Costs The Second Chance Act has brought about important changes, but a lot more rethinking is needed. PAGE 12

OP-ED

Ross Douthat The Republican Party will have to shift on economics, not just on immigration reform. PAGE 13

Crossword 64 Obituaries 34-35 TV Listings METROPOLITAN, 12 Weather 32

Corrections INTERNATIONAL

Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about Romania’s resiliency in weathering the Europe Union’s financial crisis, despite being the union’s secondpoorest state, misstated the distance between the country’s capital of Bucharest and Timisoara, a Transylvania Silicon Valley where thousands of companies have invested. They are about 350 miles apart, not about 100 miles. SPORTS

Because of an editing error, an article in some editions last Sunday about the resumption of labor negotiations between the National Hockey League and its players union misidentified the party that had objected to returning to the bargaining table for two weeks. It was the league, not the union. An article in some editions last Sunday about the Nets’ season-

opening victory over the Toronto Raptors in Brooklyn referred incorrectly in some copies to Ralph Branca’s career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the last major sports franchise to call the borough home. While Branca spent parts of 11 years with the Dodgers, he retired after the 1956 season; he was not on the 1957 team. NEW YORK

A credit from The Associated Press last Sunday for a picture with the Big City column, about the perils of living near the waterfront, misidentified the photographer. The picture of Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park was taken by Brian Morrissey, not by Ana Andjelic. METROPOLITAN

A picture credit in some editions last Sunday with an article about an exhibition of modern and contemporary Indian art the College of New Jersey Art Gallery in Ewing, N.J., using infor-

mation from the gallery, misspelled the given name of one of the owners of the private collection from which the exhibition was assembled. She is Shelley Rubin, not Shelly. EDUCATION LIFE

An article last Sunday about massive open online courses, using information from the MOOC provider Coursera, included several errors. The source of a study of peer grading in a Princeton sociology MOOC was Mitchell Duneier, the teacher, not Coursera. The student work was regraded by Professor Duneier and his teaching assistants, not by

Princeton instructors. And it is not the case that the results have been released. The article also misspelled the surname of a cofounder of another MOOC provider, Udacity.  He is Michael Sokolsky, not Sokolosky.   Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about Arthur Levine’s new book, on today’s college students, misstated the surname of his co-author. She is Diane R. Dean, not Deane. MAGAZINE

The One-Page Magazine feature on Page 15 this weekend carries the incorrect date of Oct. 11.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2012

In Soldier’s Hearing, Afghans Tell of Night of Horror From Page 1 walked away from his remote outpost in southern Afghanistan and shot and stabbed members of several families in a nighttime ambush on two villages. At least nine of the people he is accused of killing were children, and others were women. After the victims were shot, some of the bodies were dragged into a pile and burned. “‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’” one witness, a farmer named Haji Naim, said he had shouted to the American soldier, whom he described as wearing a blindingly bright headlamp in a house that, without electricity, was pitch black. The gunman said nothing, Mr. Naim said, and simply kept firing. “He shot me right here, right here, and right here,” he said, indicating wounds from which he has apparently recovered. Most of the testimony, however graphic, was circumstantial, pointing to a lone American gunman but not directly implicating Sergeant Bales. The villagers testified on the fifth day of a military proceeding known as an Article 32 investigation, held to establish whether there is enough evidence to bring Sergeant Bales before a court-martial. If a courtmartial is ordered and the Army decides to continue the prosecution as a capital case, the sergeant could face the death penalty. Sergeant Bales, a decorated veteran of three tours in Iraq before being sent to Afghanistan last December, was deployed from Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He was held at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas before being brought here for the hearing. Witnesses earlier in the week talked about the blood-soaked clothes that Sergeant Bales was seen wearing when he returned to his base in Kandahar and his comments to fellow soldiers about having done “the right thing.” There was also testimony about the test for steroids in his system that came back positive three days after the killings. The hearing’s night sessions, which were scheduled to continue on Saturday, were all about the violence that unfolded the night of March 11. Mr. Adin, who was summoned to his cousin’s compound by a telephone call early the next morning, told of boot prints that were on some bodies, including the head of a child who had apparently been shot and stomped or kicked. Mr. Adin talked about a small child who he said appeared to have been “grabbed from her bed and thrown on the fire.” But Mr. Adin never saw the gunman, arriving after the fact. Another witness, a boy named Sadiquallah, who said he was “around 13 or 14,” ran with another boy and hid behind some curtains in a back room. Sadiquallah said he had seen a man with a gun and a light, but had been more intent on hiding than looking around. “In that room where I was hiding behind the curtains, a bullet hit me,” he said. The bullet struck one of his ears, but he said he had not heard the gunfire. The boy hiding with him was wounded as

Do not forget the Neediest!

LOIS SILVER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

A sketch depicting Staff Sgt. Robert Bales as he watched an Afghan man testify via live video.

REUTERS

Sergeant Bales, left, training at Fort Irwin in California half a year before 16 Afghans were killed. well, Sadiquallah said. A 14-year-old boy named Quadratullah said he had known the shooter was an American because of the pants he wore. He also said the man had worn a T-shirt, which matches what other witnesses said Sergeant Bales had been wearing when he returned to his base. Quadratullah said he had followed footprints back to the American base after the sun had come up. Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone but sometimes animatedly gesturing with a finger — creating the image of a pointed gun as a translator communicated his words to the courtroom — Quadratullah described “a grandmother” whose name he did not know. She came running to their house,

he said, her clothes having been “ripped off.” A few minutes later, he added, “she was shot and she was dead.” Both defense and prosecution lawyers apologized for their questions, probing for details about scenes of death or the actions of the victims. Mr. Adin, for instance, was asked whether he believed the clothing had been stripped off or burned off the pile of bodies from his cousin’s family. He answered with a practical, if horrific, observation. “Nobody was alive to ask whether they were naked before they were burned or killed,” he said. Sergeant Bales, who has been in custody since the morning of

the attack but has not entered a plea, has mostly sat to the right of his lawyers for the testimony, and has rarely shown emotion. When the witness accounts began on Friday, though, he moved close to the big flat-screen monitor mounted on a wall, peering up, a hand on his chin, and occasionally looking down. Two Afghan Army guards testified on Friday night that they had seen an American soldier leaving and returning to the base near the times that matched the attacks, but neither man could identify the soldier, cloaked as he was in darkness and distance. One remembered, though, that the soldier had laughed when they confronted him and asked what he was doing.

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2012

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2012

As Coal Boosts Mozambique, The Rural Poor Are Left Behind

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENEDICTE KURZEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

PRIVATION, NOT PROSPERITY Clockwise from top left: Workers building a coal mine in the Tete region. A man resettled by the Brazilian mining company tore down the house pro-

vided him by the company to sell the materials. Homes in Tete, from which more people will be resettled. A woman living in a tent after the floor of her resettlement house collapsed. A boy pushing water in barren Cateme, where many were resettled so that the coal mine could be built. The rural poor are not sharing in the prosperity brought by coal. By LYDIA POLGREEN

CATEME, Mozambique — When Augusto Conselho Chachoka and his neighbors heard that the world’s biggest coal mine was to be built on their land, a tantalizing new future floated before them. Instead of scraping by as subsistence farmers, they would earn wages as miners, they thought. The mining company would build them sturdy new houses, it seemed. Finally, a slice of the wealth that has propelled Mozambique from its war-addled past to its newfound status as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies would be theirs. Instead, they ended up being moved 25 miles away from the mine, living in crumbling, leaky houses, farming barren plots of land, far from any kind of jobs that the mine might create and farther than ever from Mo-

zambique’s growth miracle. “Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people,” Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children. Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, broken by a brutal colonial legacy, a 16-year civil war and failed experiments with Marxist economic policy. But it is also one of the so-called African Lions: countries that are growing at well above 6 percent annually, even amid the global downturn. Mozambique is poised for a long economic boom, driven by its vast deposits of coal and natural gas. Vale, the Brazilian mining company, is planning to invest $6 billion in its coal operation near here, and other coal giants like Rio Tinto will soon begin producing coal

in the Tete region of northern Mozambique. Gas projects could bring in far more, as much as $70 billion, according to World Bank estimates. Mozambique’s location on Africa’s southeastern coast means it is perfectly positioned to feed hungry markets in southern and eastern Asia. These investments mean that income from natural resources could easily outstrip the outsized contribution foreign aid makes to its $5 billion annual budget. The country has been growing at a rapid clip for the past two decades, in fact, since the end of its brutal civil war. Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa’s resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of

its people. “You get these rich countries with poor people,” said the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited Mozambique and has written on the struggle of resource-rich countries to develop. “You have all this money flowing in, but you don’t have real job creation and you don’t have sustained growth.” It is a problem in resource-rich countries across Africa. In a largely upbeat assessment of Africa’s growth prospects, the World Bank said in October that rapidly growing economies powered by oil, gas and minerals have seen poverty levels fall more slowly than countries without those resources. In some nations, like Gabon and Angola, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has even increased as growth has Continued on Page 8

Words and Deeds Show Focus Of the American Military on Asia By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — In November 2011, President Obama stood before the Australian Parliament and issued a veiled challenge to China’s ambitions in Asia: “As a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future.” A year later, the details of his pledge — along with a nascent American military buildup in the Pacific — are emerging. This summer, about 250 United States Marines, the first of 2,500 to be deployed to Australia, trained with the Australian Army near the port city of Darwin and with other militaries in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Next spring, the first of four American littoral combat ships, fast new vessels meant to keep a watch on the Chinese Navy, is to begin a 10month deployment in Singapore. The United States is strengthening its alliances and expanding its military exercises in the region. In an amphibious warfare drill on Guam in September, which did not go unnoticed in Beijing, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and American Marines

“retook” a remote island from an unnamed enemy. But as Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta heads off this weekend for his fourth trip to Asia in 17 months, criticism is intensifying among defense policy experts in Washington that the administra-

Turning to allies for a stronger role in a changing region. tion’s “pivot” to the Pacific remains mostly verbal — a modest expansion and repackaging of policies begun in previous administrations, although still enough to unnecessarily antagonize the Chinese. Pentagon officials counter that they are managing tensions with China while devoting crucial new resources and attention to a region that has been central to American defense policy since World War II. “Our policy is not to contain

China,” said George E. Little, the Pentagon press secretary. “It’s to continue to strengthen our defense relationships with our allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific.” Pentagon officials acknowledge that they are in the early stages of the policy and that much of the hardware — the new ships, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets and P-8 Poseidon maritime reconnaissance planes, to name a few — will not arrive in the region for years. They also say that if Congress does not agree to a fiscal deal this fall, the Pentagon will not be able to pay for much of the Asia strategy. For now, the Pentagon is shifting weapons like the B-1 and B-52 long-range bombers and Global Hawk drones to the Pacific from the Middle East and Southwest Asia as the war in Afghanistan winds down. China, which has spent the past year asserting territorial claims to disputed islands that would give it vast control over oil and gas rights in the East and South China Seas, remains suspicious about American intentions. “We hope the U.S. can respect the interests and concerns of oth-

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American and Australian troops listening to President Obama in Darwin, Australia, in 2011. er parties in the region, including China,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Gao Yuan, said last week in a written statement, responding to a question on the eve of Mr. Panetta’s trip to Asia about China’s reaction to the pivot.

Mr. Panetta, who will travel to Australia, Thailand and Cambodia ahead of a trip to the region by Mr. Obama later this month, will promote what the Pentagon prefers to a call a rebalancing in the region, with these main elements:

¶Troop increases: The United States has 320,000 troops in the Pacific region, and the Pentagon has promised there will be no reductions as troops are drawn down in Afghanistan and other parts of the world. The already Continued on Page 14

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As Coal Boosts Mozambique’s Economy, the Rural Poor Are Left Behind From Page 6 spiked. Most of Mozambique’s people live in rural areas, and almost all of them depend on farming. Since commercial farming scarcely exists — 99 percent of farmers are smallholders — this means small-scale, family-based agriculture is the main, and in many cases the only, source of income for the vast majority of Mozambicans. But the new gas and coal deals are wrapped up in multibilliondollar megaprojects that rarely create large numbers of jobs or foster local entrepreneurship, according to an analysis by the United States Agency for International Development. “The effects of megaprojects on living standards were found to be very modest,” the report said. “These projects, over all, have created few jobs. And linkages to the public budget via tax revenues have also been small because of tax exemptions.” The plight of the people of this tiny, new village helps illustrate why Mozambique’s rural poor have been left behind. Far from the centers of economic power, dependent on rain-fed agriculture and ignored by the government, the rural poor languish even as the country surges. The coal deposits in Moatize represent one of the biggest untapped reserves in the world, and the Brazilian mining company Vale has placed a big bet on it. But to get to the coal, hundreds of villagers living atop it had to be moved. The company held a series of meetings with community members and government officials, laying out its plans to build tidy new bungalows for each family and upgrade public services. As the prospect of huge new investments in their rural corner of the world beckoned, villagers anticipated a whole new life: jobs, houses, education, and even free food. Things didn’t work out that way. The houses were poorly built and leaked when it rained. The promised water taps and electricity never arrived. Cateme is too far from the mine for anyone here to get a job there. The new fields are dusty and barren — coaxing anything from them is hard. Before he moved, Mr. ChachoMegan Izen contributed reporting.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENEDICTE KURZEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Left, South African mine workers in a bar in the Tete region of northern Mozambique, which is rich in coal and is propelling brisk growth in the nation. Right, men drinking beer in Cateme, where people were resettled in shoddy houses on mostly barren land, their dreams of prosperity from coal mining unrealized.

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ka made a tidy living. He had a small vegetable patch, his wife made bricks from mud to sell in a nearby town, and he could pick up occasional work as a laborer. Mr. Chachoka’s move from peri-urban striver who salted away extra cash to struggling rural farmer who can barely feed his family is emblematic of a

problem facing Mozambique and many other resource-rich but still deeply poor nations. Strong economic growth almost completely bypasses the rural poor, and in some ways can leave them even worse off. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” Mr. Chachoka said. “That is what is happening here.” Some resource-rich countries in Africa have managed to turn mineral wealth into broad-based development. Ghana, which recently discovered oil, has won praise for its careful planning for poverty alleviation. Botswana’s diamonds have turned what was one of the world’s most impoverished nations into a middle-income country. Mozambique says it hopes to do the same, striking a balance between exploiting its mineral wealth and improving rural farming so that all Mozambicans benefit. “We are very optimistic,” said Abdul Razak, deputy minister of mines and the man in charge of bringing Mozambique into compliance with international standards for transparency. “The level

of poverty is going to be lower and the level of well-being is going to be higher.” The government has signed up to be part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a program set up by Britain and supported by the World Bank to ensure that governments and companies are honest about revenues. The government also says it plans to invest the proceeds of mining into antipoverty programs and to help rural farmers. But Mozambique’s experience also shows how hard it will be to get there. Even after two decades of strong growth, the country remains near dead last on the Human Development Index, just above Burundi, Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo. By some measures, median income has actually shrunk, not grown, since its boom began. The events that unfolded in Cateme explain why this is the case. Earlier this year, the people of Cateme sent a letter to local government officials and Vale demanding that their complaints about the resettlement process

be addressed, threatening to block the railway line that passes through their village carrying coal to the port. When they received no reply, they occupied the rail line. The police descended upon them, chasing them away and roughing up those who resisted removal. Eventually, contractors came to begin repairs and install electricity. The buzz of handsaws and

Doubting whether a resource boom can bring prosperity. hammers replaced the whir of cicadas, and new public buses made the markets of Moatize more accessible. “There were some problems after the relocation,” said Vale’s country manager, Ricardo Saad, adding that the company was trying to fix them. Local people, he

said, should not think that mining would bring instant prosperity. “One of the things that we have to manage very carefully are the expectations,” Mr. Saad said. Yet all the scaffolding and newly erected electricity poles aren’t enough for many residents of Cateme. The underlying lack of access to good land and water persist. Hopes that farmers would be able to sell their produce to feed the boom in this mining area have so far not been met: much of the food is flown in. The local chapter of the national farmers’ union is working with farmers to teach new methods that can improve their crops. But that will take time, said Charlene McKoin, an expert on farming who has been working on American-financed agribusiness projects in Mozambique for the past seven years. “Farmers are used to burning land, throwing down seeds and praying for rain,” Ms. McKoin said. “The length of time to take someone from subsistence to commercial farming can take up to a generation.”

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Afghan Artist, Admired Around the World, Yearns for Acceptance at Home ketplaces sans squalor; endless painted knockoffs of the Steve McCurry photograph of the green-eyed Afghan refugee girl. Mr. Hamdard’s most recent work looks painfully like that of so many paint-by-number Afghan artists. Then one day two years ago, Mr. Hamdard just put aside his paints and stopped entirely. For all his relative success, he says, he felt like a failure in his own country. “How would you feel if your own people don’t admire your work?” he said. “I know how van Gogh felt: nobody admired his painting when he was alive. Now it is like I am cutting off both of my ears.” Since Mr. Hamdard had sold mostly to foreigners, who were usually just passing through, he

By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — The past is a foreign country to Abdul Wasi Hamdard, one where they did things differently and he was an artist full of promise. On the face of it, that past was hardly to be envied: he fled the modern-art-hating Taliban in 1996 and joined a few million of his fellow Afghans as a refugee in Pakistan, separated from his family. He lived alone in a small room scarcely bigger than his bed, with a window and an easel. “I painted from 9 p.m. until dawn every day,” he says. “I was very happy then.” The result was a remarkable output: 10,000 canvases over the ensuing years, mostly oils but also watercolors, establishing himself as one of Afghanistan’s most successful young artists. When the Taliban fell in late 2001, Mr. Hamdard, then in his late 30s, returned, and Kabul’s galleries snapped up his paintings. By then, few Afghans could afford them, but the capital was full of foreigners passing through for whom prices as low as $100 a canvas (ranging into the low thousands for larger pieces) were a steal for fine art. “You can find one or two of my paintings in every corner of the world,” he says. The Norwegian and Indian Embassies were among those that held showings; for a time, the American Embassy even had a small gallery inside its compound, with Hamdards as a staple offering. There is a photograph of him from the early part of the decade, vital and cheery in front of his work. He was often invited to art events, nearly always at embassies. His friend Karim Khosravi, a businessman and art lover, started the Bamiyan Gallery on Chicken Street and did well from his 30 percent commission on Mr. Hamdard’s paintings. A Swedish woman helped start a Web site featuring his work. The money poured in steadily — not riches (his most expensive painting to date, “Wedding,” sold for $6,500), but in the Afghan economy, it was plenty, at least at first. He moved into a large house with his seven brothers; none of them artists or professionals, they were taxi drivers and restaurant workers, government workers, shop clerks — people

As foreigners leave, a market and a drive to create dry up.

MAURICIO LIMA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Abdul Wasi Hamdard, at the Bamiyan Gallery, supports his seven brothers and their families — under one roof — with his art. whose monthly salaries were often less than even an inexpensive Hamdard. He supported the entire family, and though he did not marry, his brothers did, until soon the house had 30 people including all the wives and children. Mr. Hamdard stopped painting at home; it was just too crowded, he says. Yet he was honor- and culture-bound to remain with his brothers. According to friends, two of his family members suffered from mental illness; his mother had a stroke and was paralyzed. Their house collapsed one day, and he had to rebuild it, the expense devastating his savings. He won’t talk much about it, other than to say: “If I had a studio and peace, I could do happy paintings. But I have a lot of problems.” More recent photographs would show a man who has aged suddenly, pale and tired-looking, his dark hair receding rapidly. He had long been a painter

who worked in many genres, though chiefly expressionist oils with a strong sense of Afghan place, often done with a palette knife instead of brush. Later, his output became more abstract expressionist, twisted and dark. “I first met Hamdard in Islamabad,” said Hedayat Amin Arsala, the senior minister in President Hamid Karzai’s government and his former vice president. “I sensed some vulnerability in him, very tormented somehow.” Mr. Arsala was a patron for several Afghan artists, including Mr. Hamdard, and has followed his career since; he is one of the few Afghans who own the artist’s work. “He reminds me a lot of the painter in ‘La Bohème,’” Mr. Arsala said. Like Marcello, Mr. Hamdard has never married, though he will not say why exactly. For years, his brothers tried to arrange a match, but he spurned all offers. “I could never find a woman who understood

me,” he says. Many of what Mr. Hamdard considers his best paintings currently reside in the closet of a guesthouse run by a friend. They include “Brothers” and “The Fundamentalist,” and what Mr. Hamdard says he calls his best work, a painting he originally called “Twenty Years of War.” The war went on, the painting never sold, and he renamed it “Thirty Years of War.” And as the war went on, things changed in Kabul. A number of high-profile Taliban attacks, including against embassies and other installations housing foreigners, led to greater security restrictions. Westerners no longer went so freely to places like Chicken Street. The Swedish woman left town, and the Web site stagnated. The American Embassy closed its in-house gallery. Aggravating that trend, the numbers of foreigners began to decline with the approach of the

deadline for a NATO withdrawal in 2014. “This was a perfect opportunity for foreigners to be exposed to Afghan artists, an opportunity for both sides,” Mr. Arsala said. “But now they’re totally apart.” The art business, which depended so heavily on the foreign community, declined markedly. At the gallery, Mr. Khosravi tried to persuade Mr. Hamdard to lower his prices because months were going by without a sale; he refused. He did not care, he says: “We have seen many bad days in this war, so it won’t bother me if we don’t sell.” Every sale occasioned regret, anyway. “It’s like you say goodbye to a friend forever,” he says. For a while, he responded to the sagging market by cranking out the sort of clichéd Afghan painting that has long been a staple of the tourist trade here — the buzkashi matches, Afghan horsemen chasing a goat carcass as a polo puck; tritely colorful mar-

was little known and recognized in his own country, said Mr. Khosravi, who now manages to keep his Bamiyan Gallery open only by subsidizing it with a travel agency business. “His work has gone to the four winds, that’s the problem,” he said. “In Afghanistan, people don’t care about art.” Mr. Hamdard’s brothers pleaded with him to go back to it, but he took a job at Kabul University, teaching drawing to undergraduates. It pays $140 a month. “That’s the problem with my brothers: I know why they encourage me to paint — they want the money,” he says. “I want them to admire my art. If they ever once talked to me about art the way you have, I might change my mind.” Abdul Wasi Hamdard is no longer a young artist. He does not want his precise age published, but says he is older than he looks. Perhaps not. About his decision not to paint, he answers like this: “Say you have a soldier, and you ask him, ‘Do you know how to fight?’ And he says yes. Then you ask, ‘So do you mind it when you don’t?’”

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Youths in Ras al-Ain, across the border from Turkey, tried to pull down a Syrian flag Saturday.

Syrian Activists Resist Unification Largest Opposition Coalition in Talks on Forming Umbrella Group By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

DOHA, Qatar — The Syrian National Council, the largest antigovernment coalition, resisted an initiative on Saturday that would place all opponents of the government under one umbrella — a streamlining sought by foreign backers who fear that the bickering exile movements are being eclipsed by events on the battlegrounds in Syria. “Nobody should be subsumed under anybody,” said George Sabra, the newly elected president of the council, opening his inaugural news conference here in a combative mood before heading into negotiations over the unification proposal. “The S.N.C. is older than this initiative or any other initiative, and it has a deep political and regional structure,” said Mr. Sabra, 65, a Christian and a veteran leftist dissident. But a group of more than 50 activists of various stripes — backed by the United States, Qatar and other foreign supporters of the uprising — have proposed creating a larger body that would include the council. It would effectively end the S.N.C.’s failed efforts of more than a year to be recognized as the government in exile for all Syrians. Called the Syrian National Initiative, the new group is aimed at incorporating virtually all opposition parties, internal councils and notable figures. Perhaps its two most important aims are creating both a unified military command and a group of technocrats who could guide aid and other support from outside Syria to those actually fighting against President Bashar al-Assad. Foreign governments have sought this unification so that they too can better coordinate their aid efforts, rather than having every country picking its own favorites inside Syria, and allowing the overall effort to remain confused and diffuse. Hala Droubi contributed reporting from Doha, and Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon.

Some diplomats and other analysts suggested that the reorganization effort had been too hastily prepared, leaving the outcome dependent on endless bartering among the Syrians. Ultimately, all the talks could well come down to haggling over the number of seats the council would receive on the new body. It would most likely get about 20 out of 60, but its members have suggested that they would not settle for less than 40 percent. The S.N.C. negotiators’ opening gambit was to offer a series of counterproposals that would basically keep the council as a first among equals while also moving

The Syrian National Council balks at a U.S.-backed proposal. toward greater unity. The council envisions a kind of “coordinating committee” underneath it that other groups would join to supervise the military, as well as a special fund that all foreign donors would finance to help distribute aid inside Syria. “Let us not create a new body that will take time to be established — ours is already there,” said Louay Safi, a member of the S.N.C.’s 41-member General Secretariat, an elected body that advises the executive committee. The main criticism of the S.N.C. has been that it is riven by internal bickering and has failed to attract a wide variety of groups. It lacks a significant presence of Alawites, the minority sect of Mr. Assad that controls Syria, as well as other minorities, tribal and religious elders and business leaders. Mr. Safi rejected that criticism, saying people like businessmen should join some of the political groups within the council, not be incorporated as separate blocs. The council has put up various smoke screens in trying to avoid

the formation of the new umbrella group. It has proposed that a grand conference of opposition activists should be held inside opposition-held territory in Syria to create an interim government, for example, even though current security fears make that unlikely. Only then, council members said, should the S.N.C. be dissolved. In promoting the idea, Radwan Zeyada, another council member, said there was no guarantee that a larger group would not be plagued by the same problems that had dogged the S.N.C. Many activists backing unity are disaffected council members. “If they met inside Syria, they will feel the heat, the urgency to do something quick for the Syrian people,” Mr. Zeyada said. “They won’t be sitting around in a five-star hotel.” S.N.C. leaders said that foreign powers should focus more on the daily death toll in Syria rather than meddle with the politics of the opposition. But a big reason foreign supporters want a more streamlined opposition, better connected to rebels in Syria, is that they fear the emergence of separate warlords and jihadi fiefs if the opposition staggers on with only limited coordination. On Saturday, double suicide bombings aimed at government outposts in the southern Syrian city of Dara’a killed at least 20 soldiers, according to an activist group. After the explosions rocked the city, new clashes broke out between government and rebel forces, said the group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the fighting from Britain with the help of contacts in Syria. The official news agency, SANA, which for months has avoided reporting specific death tolls for soldiers, said the blasts caused numerous casualties. In recent weeks, a number of suicide attacks have hit military targets or neighborhoods where soldiers live. The uprising started in Dara’a in March 2011 after several children were arrested and tortured for writing antigovernment graffiti on walls in the town.

Violence Surges on Israeli-Gaza Border By FARES AKRAM and ISABEL KERSHNER

GAZA — Palestinian militants fired an antitank missile on Saturday at an Israeli military jeep patrolling Israel’s border with Gaza, and five Palestinians, including four civilians, were killed when Israel returned fire with tank or artillery shells, officials said. The Israeli military said four of its soldiers were wounded, one seriously, in the antitank missile attack. The Gaza Health Ministry said about 26 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli fire. Gaza militants then fired a barrage of rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel; one of the militants was killed by a return airstrike. The deadly surge of violence reflected the growing volatility along the border between Israel Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

and Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave that is controlled by the militant Islamic group Hamas. An atmosphere of confrontation has been simmering for months, and has peaked in several rounds of clashes between militant groups firing rockets from Gaza into southern Israel and Israeli forces carrying out airstrikes against the militant groups. The leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack on the military jeep. Soon after the antitank missile was fired, Israeli forces aimed shells at a hill on the Gaza side of the border where a group of militants was monitoring the Israeli forces, according to a Palestinian witness, Mohanned Abu Alatta, 20, who was wounded. Mr. Abu Alatta, interviewed at Al Shifa hospital in Gaza, said civilians who were gathered in a mourning tent nearby, including several teenage boys, ran to the scene to help the wounded mil-

itants and were themselves hit by subsequent shells. The four civilians killed were identified as Ahmed Mustafa Harara and his cousin Muhammad Osama Harara, who were both 17; Mattar Abu Alatta, 19, a distant relative of Mr. Abu Alatta; and Ahmed Kamil Dardasawi, 20. The Gaza Health Ministry reported that at around the same time, Israeli machine-gun fire wounded six Palestinians, two of them children, in a residential neighborhood east of Khan Younis, further south along the border. A Palestinian boy was fatally shot on Thursday during clashes between Israeli forces and militants in the same area. In recent years, Hamas has largely adhered to an informal cease-fire with Israel, but in recent months it has joined more radical groups, including Islamic Jihad and several militants inspired by Al Qaeda, in attacking Israel and avenging the deaths of its militants in Israeli raids.

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Amid New Calls to Open Up Politics in China, Communist Party Digs In glomerate. He was handed a suspended three-year prison sentence in 2003 for trying to raise capital from local residents. Mr. Sun stayed quiet after his trial, but is now openly critical again. “The finance system is very corrupt,” he said in a telephone interview. “The country should allow private banks to do financing, especially for peasants and the rural population.” China’s systemic problems are most evident in the countryside. Land seizures by officials looking to sell property to developers are the most common cause of the growing number of protests. “Land, finances, medical care and education resources are too concentrated,” Mr. Sun said. “The majority of the nation’s resources are concentrated on wel-

From Page 1 today, is not visionary enough to set China on the path to stability. What is needed, they say, is a comprehensive strategy to gradually extricate the Communist Party, which has more than 80 million members, from its heavyhanded control of the economy, the courts, the news media, the military, educational institutions, civic life and just the plain day-today affairs of citizens. Only then, the critics argue, can the government start to address the array of issues facing China, including rampant corruption, environmental degradation, and an aging population whose demographics have been skewed because of the one-child policy. “In order to build a real market CHANGING OF THE GUARD A Loss of Confidence

economy, we have to have real political reform,” said Yang Jisheng, a veteran journalist and a leading historian of the Mao era. “In the next years, we should have a constitutional democracy plus a market economy.” For now, however, party leaders have given no indication that they intend to curb their role in government in a meaningful way. “We will never copy a Western political system,” Hu Jintao, the departing party chief, said in a speech on Thursday opening the weeklong congress. The party’s public agenda, which Mr. Hu described in detail in his 100-minute address, was laid out in a 64-page report that is in part intended to highlight priorities for the new leaders, who will be announced later this month. Much of the document had retrograde language that emphasized ideology stretching back to Mao and had little in the way of bold or creative thinking, said Qian Gang, the director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. Most telling, there was no lanArticles in this series are examining the implications for China and the rest of the world of the coming changes in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. ONLINE: Previous articles in this series: nytimes.com/world

Doubt that an authoritarian system can deal with current problems.

SIM CHI YIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A portrait of Mao in a Beijing studio. The Communist Party’s new report emphasized the longtime Chinese leader’s ideology. guage signaling that the incoming Politburo Standing Committee, the group that rules China by consensus, would support major changes in the political system, whose perversions many now say are driving the nation toward crisis. While Chinese who are critical of the current system generally do not expect a wholesale adoption of a Western model, they do favor at least an openness to bolder experimentation. “To break one-party rule right now is probably not realistic, but we can have factions within the party made public and legalized, so they can campaign against each other,” said Mr. Yang, who added that there was no other way at the moment to ensure political accountability. Only in the last few years has the idea of liberalizing the politiMia Li contributed research.

cal system gained currency, and urgency, among a broad crosssection of elites. Before that, as the West foundered at the onset of the global financial crisis, many here pointed to the triumph of a “China model” or “Beijing consensus” — a mix of authoritarian politics, a command economy and quasi-market policies. But the way in which China weathered the crisis — with the injection of $588 billion of stimulus money into the economy and an explosion of lending from state banks — led to a spate of large infrastructure projects that may never justify their cost. As a result, many economists now say that China’s investment-driven, export-oriented economic model is unsustainable and needs to shift toward greater reliance on Chinese consumers. Constant lip-service is paid to that goal, and on Saturday, Zhang Ping, a senior official, re-

iterated that stance. But it will not be easy for the new leaders to carry it out. At the root of the current economic model is the political system, in which party officials and state-owned enterprises work closely together, reaping enormous profits from the party’s control of the economy. Under Mr. Hu’s decade-long tenure, these relationships and the dominance of state enterprises have only strengthened. “What happens in this kind of economy is that wealth concentrates where power is,” said Mr. Yang, the journalist. The 400 or so incoming members of the party’s Central Committee, Politburo and Politburo Standing Committee, as well as their friends and families, have close ties to the most powerful of China’s 145,000 state-owned enterprises. The growing presence of princelings — the children of notable Communist officials — in

the party, the government and corporations could mean an even more closely meshed web of nepotism. It is a system that Xi Jinping, anointed to be the next party chief and president and himself a member of the “red nobility,” would find hard to unravel, even if he wanted to. “There are people who run state-owned enterprises who are Xi Jinping’s friends, relatives and old classmates,” said Zhang Lifan, a historian. “This group is part of his political energy and support base. If Xi Jinping is willing to reform, he must sacrifice the interests of these people for the long-term good.” The rules have become so unbalanced against private entrepreneurs that even some who have benefited handsomely from China’s growth are denouncing the system. One is Sun Dawu, a party member and the millionaire founder of a rural food con-

fare for party members and government workers.” The growth-at-all-costs development model has also led to widespread environmental destruction and a surge of protests against industrial projects from middle-class urban residents. At a news conference on Thursday, the opening day of the party congress, Yi Gang, deputy governor of China’s central bank, acknowledged the problem: “After 30 years of development, there is no big difference from developed countries in what we eat and wear,” he said. “Where we lag behind is in the air and the water.” But the only way to really address endemic problems like these, critics say, is to create a political system, with checks and balances, that is designed to benefit ordinary Chinese rather than officials and their cronies, and is able to meet the demands of a rapidly changing society. “It is still possible for China to get on the right track while staying stable,” said Mr. Li, the scholar who observed the American vote. “It is also possible, however, for the party to miss the opportunity and devolve into chaos.”

Words and Deeds Show U.S. Focus on Asia From Page 6 large military presence is one reason there has been skepticism that an additional 2,500 Marines in Australia, a move Mr. Obama announced last fall, amounts to more than show. It did, however, provoke a sharp response from Beijing. “The Marine issue is really a blip in the larger pivot to Asia,” said David J. Berteau of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a co-author of a report last summer that criticized the Pentagon for not sufficiently explaining how it would carry out and pay for the pivot. “If you have a fly on your glasses it looks really big and you can’t see past the fly. But it’s still just a fly.” Pentagon officials nonetheless say that the Marines are an important symbol of America’s long-term commitment to the Pacific. Under an agreement with Australia, the Pentagon anticipates that the company of 250 Marines that arrived in Darwin in April for a six-month rotation will grow to a battalion of 1,000

Marines in 2013. By 2016, assuming more housing is built, the Marines are expected to number 2,500. ¶More military exercises: Unlike building new ships and fighter jets, having joint training with other countries in Asia is relatively inexpensive and can be done fairly quickly. The United States has not only increased the

Keeping an eye on China, but denying it must be contained. number of exercises but also opened them up to more countries: a powerful message to China that America is working to improve the capabilities of the militaries in its strategic backyard. This summer, India and Russia participated for the first time in Hawaii in the world’s largest international maritime exercise, Rim of the Pacific, but the United

States excluded China, drawing a protest from Beijing. China is invited to the next Rim of the Pacific, in 2014. In another acknowledgment of Chinese sensitivities, the Japanese government canceled a joint amphibious landing on a remote island near Okinawa that was to have been part of an enormous annual exercise of the American and Japanese militaries last week. The cancellation was an effort not to provoke China, which is locked in a dispute with Japan over the control of uninhabited islands near Okinawa in the East China Sea. ¶More ships: Mr. Panetta has said that by 2020, the United States will have 60 percent of its ships in the Pacific and 40 percent in the Atlantic, compared with the current 50-50 split. The Pentagon has not specified what kinds of ships or how many would make up the 60 percent, although Mr. Panetta has said they would include six aircraft carriers and a majority of the Navy’s cruisers, destroyers, submarines and littoral combat ships. Doubts persist among lawmakers and naval experts about the maneuverable and relatively small littoral combat ship, which is not designed to operate in a combat environment. ¶Strengthened military ties: The Pentagon’s efforts to shore up alliances and increase military cooperation with allies in Asia has already prompted negative reactions from China. In September, Japan and the United States reached a major agreement to deploy a second American advanced missile-defense radar on Japanese territory, which was also immediately criticized by the Chinese. Over the past year, the Obama administration has stepped up talks with the Philippines about expanding the American military presence there, including more frequent visits by American warships. ¶More attention to Asia: One measure of the region’s growing importance is that Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now hold a secure one-hour video conference every other week with the top commander for Asia and the Pacific, Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III. Pentagon officials say the frequency is similar to that of video conferences with American commanders in war zones.

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Complaint Is Heard at Last in BBC Abuse Case By SARAH LYALL and LARK TURNER

LONDON — No one listened to Deborah Cogger’s story. Not her teachers, who dismissed it as no big deal. Not her social worker, who accused her of making it up. Not the newspapers she called decades later, which said it was too explosive to publish. It was not until this fall, nearly 40 years after she left a reform school in Surrey, England, that Ms. Cogger finally got anyone to believe her account of how she and other girls there were routinely molested by one of Britain’s most powerful celebrities, the eccentric, cigar-chomping television host Jimmy Savile. “If you moaned about it, you were told not to say those awful things about Jimmy — ‘Oh, that’s just Jimmy, that’s his way; he loves you girls,’” said Ms. Cogger, 52. If you said he had touched your breasts, she added, “they’d say, ‘Don’t be wicked, he would never do that.’” The revelation last month that Mr. Savile, who died last year, was most likely a child sex abuser with perhaps hundreds of victims has profoundly shocked a country that now acknowledges that all the signs were there, if anyone had cared to see them. The disclosures have spurred a broad criminal inquiry involving numerous police departments and caused institutions, including schools, hospitals and the BBC, to investigate their ties to Mr. Savile. The disclosures have also provoked a crisis of management and responsibility inside the BBC and forced Prime Minister David Cameron to order two new inquiries into the handling of a sexual abuse scandal in Wales several years ago. Hundreds of people have reported their own experiences to abuse hot lines. In addition, profound senses of discomfort and guilt were felt among those who knew, hired, admired, watched,

welcomed, solicited charity from or cheerfully put young people in the path of Mr. Savile. And on Saturday, the chief executive of the BBC, George Entwistle, became the latest casualty, resigning after an uproar over a BBC program on the Wales scandal that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician. The disclosures have also highlighted how much Britain’s attitude toward sexual abuse has changed since Mr. Savile’s heyday, in the 1970s and ’80s, a time when it was not uncommon for women to be groped and harassed at work, and when show business celebrities openly leered at, if not preyed on, the teenage girls who idolized them. “There was a massive cultural

Accounts about a television celebrity shock a nation. difference then,” said Donald Findlater, director of Stop It Now, which works to prevent child sex abuse. “We hadn’t really properly discovered child abuse yet.” But, along with increasingly strict legislation, attitudes have swung drastically in the other direction — to a fault, some believe. In Britain, police background checks are now required of anyone working with children, including parents who volunteer in schools. Teachers are advised not to be alone with students and to be wary of touching them. Some playgrounds refuse admission to adults without children. Some schools forbid parents to photograph sports events or plays, lest the pictures end up in the wrong places. In 2000, a tabloid antipedophile campaign led to vigilante attacks in which,

at one point, a crowd confused the words pedophile and pediatrician and vandalized the home of an innocent doctor. Given the current climate, it is hard to believe that Mr. Savile could have gotten away with so much for so long, even in a society burdened by collective, willful blindness. But the account of Ms. Cogger shows how for victims, the abuse was compounded by the realization that anyone who complained would be ignored, scoffed at or punished. Ms. Cogger is not the only one from the reform school, the Duncroft Approved School for Girls, to have come forward with a tale of what Mr. Savile did and how he got away with it. At least six former students have told the British news media that Mr. Savile assaulted them in places that included his Rolls-Royce and the school’s dormitories, and in London on school-approved “treats.” “Jimmy treated Duncroft like a pedophile sweet shop,” one former student, Toni Townsend, told The Daily Mirror. In 2007, the Surrey police investigated Mr. Savile’s conduct at Duncroft, even detaining and questioning him. But he was never charged. Duncroft, which closed in the 1980s — it is now a luxury apartment complex — was a privately run boarding school, operating under state control, for academically promising but unruly girls. Ms. Cogger was sent there in 1974, when she was 14. Her childhood was chaotic. When she was 12, she explained in several telephone interviews, she overheard a shocking family secret: the woman she thought was her mother was actually her aunt. Ms. Cogger’s real mother, one of 13 children at home, had given birth at 15 and relinquished the baby to her older sister. The disclosure sent her into a dark period. “I just kept running away,” Ms. Cogger said. “They

put me in Duncroft because no one wanted me.” She said the institution was in thrall to Mr. Savile, a wealthy benefactor whose money it depended on and whose picture was prominently displayed on its walls. The girls were encouraged to call him “Uncle Jimmy”; behind his back, they called him a perv. When she arrived, she related, “they told me: ‘If he gets the chance, he’ll touch you up. He’ll put his hand up your skirt, his hand up your shirt, he’ll pinch your bum, he’ll stick his tongue down your throat.’” Carrying armloads of records, cigarettes and candy to hand out, Mr. Savile would pull up in a huge car, greeted by a “little posse of the older girls,” Ms. Cogger said. He would have cocktails with the staff before being left free to roam the school — dormitories, recreation rooms, wherever. He seemed to have carte blanche. He molested her twice, she said, once when he grabbed her around the waist with a surprisingly tough grip and pulled her backward onto his lap. “I was off balance, and then he just pressed really heavily on me and shoved his tongue down my throat,” she related. “I couldn’t get away from him. He was very strong and very forceful.” The next time, he cornered her alone in the hall when she was on work duty, mopping the floor. “He waved his hands at me and made this horrible noise, like ‘Woo, woo, woo,’ and he said, ‘My, you’ve grown.’” He then grabbed her breasts. “I backed away from him” and told him to get away, Ms. Cogger said. “He just turned around and walked away. Nothing fazed him.” His behavior was an open secret. “We all discussed it: ‘What did he do to you this time?’” Ms. Cogger recalled. But the school did not seem to care, and girls

THE SUN

Deborah Cogger, 52, was a teenager in reform school where, she says, Jimmy Savile molested her and others. who complained were stripped of privileges. If they became hysterical, they were shut into a padded isolation room, sometimes for days, Ms. Cogger said, until they “calmed down and changed their mind.” This month, The Daily Mail tracked down Duncroft’s longtime headmistress, Margaret Jones, 91, who said her students included “well-known delinquents” making “wild allegations.” A spokeswoman for the Home Office, which was responsible for supervising and inspecting Duncroft, said Friday that the agency would make no comment “while there’s an ongoing police investigation.” Ms. Cogger did not tell any teachers. She did not tell her parents. When she told the social worker assigned to her case, she said, “he laughed at me and said, ‘Oh, come on, Deborah.’ He thought it was a tactic to try to get out.” The experience preyed on her,

she said, and several times over the years she called various newspapers and tried to talk about what happened. “They just didn’t want to know,” she said. This summer, though, a friend spotted an item in a newspaper mentioning Duncroft in connection with Mr. Savile. “I spoke to myself and said, ‘This time it’s going to come out,’” she said. In August, Ms. Cogger offered her story to The Sun, and this time the newspaper listened. “But they said, ‘It’s too controversial — we can’t touch it,’” she said. Finally, the day before ITV, a British television network, broadcast the documentary that exposed the allegations against Mr. Savile, The Sun went ahead with an article about Ms. Cogger. But she is still haunted by what happened, and by the years of having to bear it alone. “They pimped us out,” she said of the teachers at Duncroft. “He was a big, powerful man with a big voice, and we had no voices.”

BBC Director Resigns Amid Furor Over Pedophile Scandal and Coverage of It From Page 1 decades, sometimes on the BBC premises. The network has been accused of covering up the accusations by canceling a Newsnight report on Mr. Savile last year, when Mr. Entwistle was a senior executive at the network.

Mr. Entwistle, was barely two months into the director’s job, heading one of the world’s largest media organizations. His departure followed the suspension in the past month of a number of senior producers as the BBC has struggled to find a path through what many commentators have

described as its greatest crisis in decades. A 50-year-old career broadcaster who rose through the ranks of BBC producers, Mr. Entwistle made his announcement on the steps of the BBC’s new billion-dollar headquarters in central London. With the BBC’s

chairman, Chris Patten, standing gloomily beside him, Mr. Entwistle said that resigning was “the honorable thing to do.” “The wholly exceptional events of the past few weeks have led me to conclude that the BBC should appoint a new leader,” he said. He added that the intense public scrutiny of the BBC that has resulted from the pedophile scandal should not lead people “to lose sight of the fact that the BBC is full of people of the greatest talent and the highest integrity.” His statement that he was “responsible for all content” came after weeks of what the BBC’s harshest critics have described as obfuscation and evasion by the broadcaster’s management in the face of demands for explanations of how the fiascoes over the two “Newsnight” programs had been allowed to happen. As of late as Saturday morning, Mr. Entwistle was holding to the position he had taken for weeks, that he had not known about the Nov. 2 “Newsnight” broadcast ahead of time because of the BBC’s longstanding tradition that the director general not interfere with details of how programs are made. “I found out about this film after it had gone out,” he said. “In the light of what has happened here, I wish that this was referred to me, but it wasn’t.” His resignation, barely 12 hours later, suggested that the BBC’s trustees had concluded that the argument that the network’s top brass was insulated from responsibility for programming decisions by a lack of prior knowledge was not sustainable. That argument was similar to

the one advanced by Mr. Entwistle’s predecessor, Mark Thompson, who was the BBC’s director general when the “Newsnight” expose on Mr. Savile was canceled. Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in September and will become the president and chief executive of The New York Times Company on Monday, said he had not been aware of the report until after it was canceled. Mr. Patten, the BBC chairman, said that Tim Davie, 45, the BBC’s director of audio and music, would become the network’s

A report implicating a politician compounds a network’s problems. acting director general. Mr. Patten, whose own position may now be imperiled, did not attempt to disguise the gravity of the situation, alluding to the “unacceptable mistakes, the unacceptably shoddy journalism” that had culminated in the Nov. 2 “Newsnight” program. That program focused on allegations of abuses by a senior politician in the 1970s and 1980s at a children’s home in north Wales. The “Newsnight” broadcast did not name the politician but said that it was being widely circulated on the Internet. On Thursday, The Guardian identified the politician as Alistair McAlpine, a former Conservative Party treasurer, and

said that he was the victim of mistaken identity. Mr. McAlpine, now 70 and in poor health, said Friday that the allegations against him were “wholly false and defamatory” and warned that he planned to sue. Then the man who had made the abuse allegation, Steve Messham, said he had now seen a photo of Mr. McAlpine and was sure that he was not the man who had abused him when he was a child. In an extensive apology broadcast Friday night, “Newsnight” acknowledged that it had not shown a photograph of Mr. McAlpine to Mr. Messham before interviewing him for the program, and that its investigators had not contacted Mr. McAlpine to give him an opportunity to respond to the allegations. Mr. Entwistle’s announcement set off a new round of recriminations, including many from wellknown journalists at the BBC. The lead anchor of “Newsnight,” Jeremy Paxman, appeared to lay the blame for the fiasco outside “Newsnight.” In a statement on Twitter, he said Mr. Entwistle had been “brought low by cowards and incompetents” and by a management that enforced deep cuts on program budgets while “bloating” management ranks. “That is how you arrive at the current mess on ‘Newsnight,’” he said.  Another well known BBC presenter, Jonathan Dimbleby, spoke of the BBC having become “a rudderless ship.” Will Wyatt, a former managing director of BBC TV, demanded that the BBC management “sort this out quickly, get to the bottom of who said what, and be swift and tough.”

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ogy, taking an interest in the agency’s high-tech incubator, InQ-Tel. He deliberately lowered his profile, rarely saying anything publicly about his new work. But he showed up at embassy parties and attended private Georgetown dinners, where he would sometimes talk about the cultural differences between the C.I.A. and the military he had grown up in. “His was a short tenure,” said Mr. Riedel, the C.I.A. veteran, now at the Brookings Institution. “But he was beginning the transformation of the C.I.A. from counterterrorism only to counterterrorism plus China, plus the euro zone, plus what the world will look like in 15 years.” Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army and a mentor to Mr. Petraeus, said he believed Mr. Petraeus would eventually be rehabilitated: “We have not heard the last of Dave Petraeus, possibly even in a public service role.”

A Brilliant Career With a Meteoric Rise And an Abrupt Fall This article is by Scott Shane, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Peter

BakerWASHINGTON — David H. Petraeus’s “Rules for Living” appeared on The Daily Beast’s Web site on Monday, posted by his biographer, a fellow West Point graduate 20 years his junior named Paula Broadwell. The fifth rule, beneath his familiar portrait in full military regalia, began: “We all make mistakes. The key is to recognize them and admit them.” Mr. Petraeus took his own advice on Friday and resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency after admitting to an extramarital affair; officials identified the woman in question as Ms. Broadwell. The full back story is not yet clear, though his affair came to light after F.B.I. agents conducting a criminal investigation into possible security breaches examined his computer e-mails. The decision to step down was his. Few imagined that such a dazzling career would have so tawdry and so sudden a collapse. Mr. Petraeus, a slender fitness fanatic, is known as a brainy ascetic. He and his wife, Holly, whose father was the superintendent at West Point when Mr. Petraeus graduated in 1974, and their two grown children had long been viewed by military families as an inspiration, a model for making a marriage work despite the separation and hardship of long deployments overseas. After he began the C.I.A. job in September 2011, the couple settled into a house in the Virginia suburbs and began the closest thing to a normal life together that they had had in years, even if the basement he had designated for a home gym was commandeered for secure C.I.A. communications gear. After years in war zones, Mr. Petraeus told friends, he was amazed to eat dinner most nights with his wife and to discover weekends again. He told friends that on the day his daughter was married last month, he went for a 34-mile bike ride. “It’s a personal tragedy, of course, but it’s also a tragedy for the country,” said Bruce Riedel, a C.I.A. veteran and a presidential adviser. Like many others in jaundiced Washington, Mr. Riedel wondered whether the affair really required Mr. Petraeus, who turned 60 on Wednesday, to step down and leave the agency leaderless. But under the military law that governed his 37-year Army career, adultery is a crime when it may “bring discredit upon the armed forces.” And a secret affair can make an intelligence officer vulnerable to blackmail. The C.I.A. director, Mr. Riedel said, probably felt he had no choice. “I think Dave Petraeus grew up with a code that’s very demanding about duty and honor,” he said. “He violated the code.”

Ambition and Ability He was the pre-eminent military officer of his generation, a soldier-scholar blazing with ambition and intellect, completing his meteoric rise as a commander in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Worshipful Congressional committees lauded him as a miracle worker for helping turn Reporting was contributed by Thom Shanker, Michael R. Gordon and David E. Sanger from Washington, and Viv Bernstein from Charlotte, N.C.

around the war in Iraq, applying a counterinsurgency strategy he had helped devise and that was widely viewed for a time as the future of warfare. Then, dispatched to Afghanistan to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who had been fired by President Obama, he sought to apply the doctrine he had championed, while also applying an aggressive counterterrorism strategy.  He was fiercely competitive and carefully protective of his reputation. Asked to throw out the first pitch at the 2008 World Series, he brought his security detail to Washington’s stadium to practice getting the ball over the plate. Mr. Petraeus had seemed all but indestructible. He had been shot in a training accident, had broken his pelvis in a sky diving mishap and survived prostate cancer. Criticized by the advocacy group MoveOn.org in 2007 as “General Betray Us,” he shrugged off the attack and rallied his indignant supporters. Until Friday, fans speculated that post-C.I.A. he might become president of Princeton University, where he had earned his Ph.D. in international relations in 1987, or conceivably even president of the United States. (He has told friends he will never run for president; to show his impartiality, he did not vote when he was in the military.) But as the news sent astonished Petraeus watchers to the Web on Friday night, many people discovered a January episode of “The Daily Show,” where Ms. Broadwell, who served on active duty in the Army for a decade and is a reserve lieutenant colonel, made an appearance to promote her book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.” She recounted how she had first e-mailed Mr. Petraeus about her doctoral dissertation and then showed up in Afghanistan, where he helped her in what she called a mentoring relationship, as he had many young officers. She said she and Mr. Petraeus shared an interest in fitness and that he took her running. “That was the foundation of our relationship,” she said. From time to time, they would go running in Kabul. “For him, I think it was a good distraction from the war.” From her many profiles and interviews, Ms. Broadwell, who was born while Mr. Petraeus was a West Point cadet and turned 40 on Friday, emerges as a younger, female version of him: travel to 60 countries; service in intelligence, special operations and with an F.B.I. counterterrorism task force; Harvard degree; wife of a physician; mother of two boys. In her Charlotte, N.C., neighborhood on Friday night, television trucks converged on her house as curious neighbors stopped by to ask what was happening. One thought it was a crew filming “Homeland,” which is shot in that city. A woman on a bicycle rode by, calling out to the crowd of reporters: “Go home. Go home.” Written in the family’s driveway in gold-colored chalk was a child’s inscription: “Dad Hs Mom.” Ms. Broadwell’s book, which reportedly earned her an advance in the mid-six figures, paints a glowing portrait of her mentor. But inside the military, where Mr. Petraeus compiled such a stunning record, views of him were more complex.

The Military Wife

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

David H. Petraeus in 2007, when he was commander in Iraq. A soldier-scholar, he was the pre-eminent officer of his generation, widely admired for his intellect and achievements. His circle of advisers included iconoclasts from the Army’s ranks as well as freethinking civilian analysts, unusual for a military service in which senior officers often surrounded themselves with yes men. Mr. Petraeus was well known for sending e-mails to lower-ranking officers to get a sense of what was happening on the ground instead of relying on reports that filtered up the chain of command. “P4,” as he was called for the four stars he earned, was viewed with respect — but often grudging respect. His celebrity brought positive attention to an all-volunteer force that at times struggled to meet recruitment numbers over a decade of grinding ground conflict. But that same publicity, and the fiercely ambitious man who pursued it, drew private criticism from some officers, who nicknamed him King David.

Biblical Echoes As word of his resignation resounded across the Pentagon on Friday, more than one officer

cited the biblical adultery of King David and Bathsheba. Yet even officers who criticized the high-profile general acknowledged that he renewed a sense of intellectualism across a muddyboots Army. And while the military’s new field manual on counterinsurgency — published in 2006 and tested on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan — was written by a number of staff officers and officially had a senior Marine Corps general as a coauthor, the document was universally known as Mr. Petraeus’s doctrine. Mr. Petraeus grew close to President George W. Bush, with whom he spoke frequently, and clashed with then-Senator Obama about the troop surge in Iraq. When Mr. Obama traveled to Iraq in the summer of 2008 as his party’s presumptive nominee, the two men had a spirited argument in private over the future president’s plan to withdraw combat forces from Iraq. Once Mr. Obama took office, he did not speak regularly with Mr.

T. ORTEGA GAINES/CHARLOTTE OBSERVER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Paula Broadwell, with whom Mr. Petraeus is said to have had an extramarital affair, wrote a biography of him.

Petraeus, preferring to restore what he considered the normal chain of command. Mr. Petraeus was effectively barred by the administration from Sunday talk shows but maintained private communications with journalists and lawmakers. A key moment in the turnaround of the tense relationship between the president and the general came when Mr. Petraeus met with Rahm Emanuel, then Mr. Obama’s chief of staff and his lookout for possible rivals. In roundabout ways, not quite explicit but understood by both men, Mr. Petraeus assured Mr. Emanuel that he had no intention of running for president, according to people informed about the conversation. Mr. Petraeus aspired to the top job in the military, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the White House feared he would resist Mr. Obama’s schedule for winding down the war in Afghanistan. When Robert M. Gates, then the defense secretary, told him he would not get that post, Mr. Petraeus floated the idea of becoming C.I.A. director. Mr. Obama liked the idea but, recognizing the C.I.A.’s institutional suspicion of the military, insisted that Mr. Petraeus retire from the Army. He reluctantly agreed to the condition, sailed through Senate confirmation and, as he had promised, showed up at the agency in Langley, Va., without a single aide from his large military retinue. His office at the C.I.A., however, was decorated with military memorabilia from his multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, including photographs, coins and Iraqi weapons. He moved swiftly to take over C.I.A. counterterrorism operations, helping smooth conflict over drone strikes between agency Counterterrorism Center officials and State Department diplomats. He pushed the C.I.A. to stay on the frontiers of technol-

But amid the media storm, many friends and admirers of the family thought of Holly Petraeus, his wife of 38 years, herself descended from a distinguished line of military officers. In a March 2012 profile, USA Today referred to her as “Army royalty,” noting that her great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War and the Indian Wars, and that her greatgrandfather and grandfather had also served. Mrs. Petraeus has carved out a prominent role for herself as an advocate for the financial education of military families. In 2010, after six years running the Military Line, a program of the Better Business Bureau, she joined the Obama administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There, she runs a branch dedicated to monitoring military families’ consumer complaints. “She is a role model for many of us because she found a way to develop a career for herself outside of her husband’s very prestigious career,” said Bianca Strzalkowski, who is married to a Marine and visited a military base with Mrs. Petraeus last year. “That is something we all aspire to, not just to be the Marine’s wife or the soldier’s wife, but to attain our own goals.” But the long separations from her husband seemed to weigh on Mrs. Petraeus. During a 2011 visit to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, she spoke of her dedication to her job. “I really can’t think of anything better to be doing while my husband is deployed,” she said with a pause, adding, “forever.” As news of Mr. Petraeus’s affair spread, people who know Mrs. Petraeus reacted with shock and sadness. Amy Bushatz, who writes on military spouse issues (including for the At War blog of The New York Times) said that while the Petraeuses were stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mrs. Petraeus became a beloved figure there. “When you are a general’s spouse, it is easy to be kind of untouchable,” Ms. Bushatz said. “You live in the big house, nobody ever sees you, you appear at events and give speeches. The feeling here is that she is not untouchable. She spent a lot of time being one of the people.” Jacey Eckhart, the spouse editor for the Web site military.com, said the fact that the Petraeuses had been married for so long, and survived so many separations, was a source of inspiration to younger military couples. “The sense was they had a strong marriage, that this was a functioning relationship, that they had good kids. It’s one of those relationships that you look up to: if they can do it, we can do it. This is what success looks like. So this is shocking. This is what it looks like when a hero falls.”

Author’s E-Mails to a Third Party Led to Petraeus in F.B.I. Inquiry of Threats From Page 1 senior intelligence officials explained that the F.B.I. investigation “started with two women” — evidently Ms. Broadwell and the woman who complained about her e-mails. “It didn’t start with Petraeus, but in the course of the investigation they stumbled across him,” said the Congressional official. “We were stunned.” Ms. Broadwell has made no statement since the affair became public on Friday, and attempts to reach her for comment have been unsuccessful. The circumstances surrounding the collapse of Mr. Petraeus’s career remain murky. It is not clear when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. or Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., became aware that the F.B.I.’s investigation into Ms. Broadwell’s e-mails had brought to light compromising information about Mr. Petraeus. Tracy Schmaler, a spokeswoman for Michael D. Shear, Charlie Savage and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

Mr. Holder, declined to comment Saturday. Neither the Congressional Intelligence Committees nor the White House learned of the investigation or the link to Mr. Petraeus until last week, officials said. Neither did Mr. Petraeus’s boss, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. A senior intelligence official said Saturday that Mr. Clapper had learned of Mr. Petraeus’s situation only when the F.B.I. notified him, about 5 p.m. on Tuesday, election night. That evening and the next day, the official said, the two men discussed the situation, and Mr. Clapper told Mr. Petraeus “that he thought the right thing to do would be to resign,” the intelligence official said. Mr. Clapper notified the president’s senior national security staff late Wednesday that Mr. Petraeus was considering resigning because of an extramarital affair, the official said. The decisions on when to notify various administration officials, including Mr. Clapper on Tuesday, were “a judgment call consistent with policies and procedures,” according to one of the

government officials who had been briefed. If the investigation had uncovered serious security breaches or other grave problems, he said, the notifications would have been immediate. As it was, however, the matter seemed to involve private relationships with little implication for national security. Some Congressional staff members said they believed that the bureau should have informed at least the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees about the unfolding inquiry. A spokesman for Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said the lawmaker had summoned Sean Joyce, the F.B.I.’s deputy director, and Michael J. Morrell, the deputy C.I.A. director, for closed briefings on Wednesday about the investigation. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, said Saturday an F.B.I. employee whom his staff described as a whistle-blower told him about Mr. Petraeus’s affair and a possible security breach in late October, which was after the

investigation had begun. “I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee concerned that sensitive, classified information may have been compromised and made certain Director Mueller was aware of these serious allegations and the potential risk to our national security,” Mr. Cantor

Over a week’s time, word makes its way around Washington. said in a statement. Mr. Cantor talked to the person after being told by Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington, that a whistle-blower wanted to speak to someone in the Congressional leadership about a national security concern. On Oct. 31, his chief of staff, Steve Stombres, called the F.B.I. to tell them about the call. “They took the information,” said Doug Heye, Mr. Cantor’s deputy chief of staff, “and gave the standard answer: they were

not able to confirm or deny any investigation, but said that all necessary steps were being taken to make sure no confidential information was at risk.” White House officials said they were informed on Wednesday night that Mr. Petraeus was considering resigning because of an extramarital affair. On Thursday morning, just before a staff meeting at the White House, President Obama was told. That afternoon, Mr. Petraeus went to see him and informed him that he strongly believed he had to resign. Mr. Obama did not accept his resignation right away, but on Friday, he called Mr. Petraeus and accepted it. Mr. Petraeus, 60, said in a statement that he was resigning after 14 months as head of the Central Intelligence Agency because he had shown “extremely poor judgment” in engaging in the affair. He has been married for 38 years. Ms. Broadwell, 40, is also married. She and her husband have two children and live in Charlotte, N.C. On Saturday, the two government officials who had been

briefed on the case dismissed a range of media speculation that the F.B.I. inquiry might have focused on leaks of classified information to the news media or even foreign spying. “People think that because it’s the C.I.A. director, it must involve bigger issues,” one official said. “Think of a small circle of people who know each other.” The F.B.I. investigators were not pursuing evidence of Mr. Petraeus’s marital infidelity, which would not be a criminal matter, the official said. But their examination of his e-mails, most or all of them sent from a personal account and not from his C.I.A. account, raised the possibility of security breaches that needed to be addressed directly with him. “Alarms went off on larger security issues,” the official said. As a result, F.B.I. agents spoke with the C.I.A. director about two weeks ago, and Mr. Petraeus learned in the discussion, if he was not already aware, that they knew of his affair with Ms. Broadwell, the official said.

Do not forget the Neediest!

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Texas Chase And Shooting By Officers Under Inquiry Fatal Error Puts Scrutiny On a Long-Used Method By MANNY FERNANDEZ

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY RASINSKI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Dorothy and Manny Brown have seen Kaskaskia, Ill., through decades of thriving vibrancy, floods and decline. Another flood would force her out, she says. KASKASKIA JOURNAL

Living in the American Atlantis (Population 14) By ALAN SCHWARZ Kaskaskia River

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KASKASKIA, Ill. — When Manny and Dorothy Brown stand atop the stairs rising to their screen door, they look at the overgrown field across Grand Avenue and still see Kaskaskia’s buzzing general store. Fathers are planning turkey shoots; mothers, bake sales. Schwinns clatter past rows of homes while little cowboys and Indians shriek down by the church. That Kaskaskia is all almost gone now, washed away over the years by two huge Mississippi River floods and then residents’ growing suspicion that their quirky and once vibrant town — the first capital of Illinois — was vanishing into American history, like wild buffalo or penny postcards. If this country has an Atlantis, it is Kaskaskia, Ill. “I’m not coming back if there’s another flood,” said Dorothy Brown, 80, one of only 14 full-time residents left in the three-by-five-block area that makes up Kaskaskia proper. “I’m too old to clean up that kind of a mess again.” Fifty other stalwarts still live on the wider expanse of Kaskaskia Island, about 60 miles south of St. Louis and originally not an island at all. French missionaries settled in 1703 on what was then a peninsula in southwestern Illinois territory, with the Mississippi River (and what is now Missouri) on one side and the Kaskaskia River on the other. The outpost preceded St. Louis as the West’s primary economic center. It was given a mammoth bronze church bell from King Louis XV — 11 years before a different one, in Philadelphia, became the Liberty Bell — and went from French to British to American rule before 1818, when it became the bustling 8,000-resident capital of the new state of Illinois. The capital later moved north to Vandalia and ultimately to Springfield. Floods came and went, but the Mississippi really meant business around the Civil War after upstream steamboats had sheared its shores for firewood, weakening its banks. The river began to creep east across the peninsula’s width until, on the night of April 18, 1881, it finally met and slowly overtook the channel on the other side. Kaskaskians moved their church, their cherished bell and a few other buildings brick by brick two miles inland before the original town began slipping slowly under the relocated river. Suddenly an island cut off from mainland Illinois, the new Kaskaskia has asked residents ever since to put up with some weirdness. No connection was ever built across the new Mississippi, leaving its only access a bridge from Missouri. So getting to this Illinois town

HOUSTON — For years in Texas, state troopers have been safely bringing vehicle chases to an end by using their weapons. Suspects wanted for burglaries and other crimes who have led the police on chases through multiple counties have been apprehended after state troopers pulled up close enough to shoot the tires. In one case here, a state trooper waved his pistol at a kidnapping suspect as a warning to pull over, and then shot the pickup truck’s two left tires. But the practice has also led to fatal errors. In August 1984, Zachary Eugene Hilliard, 17, was a passenger in a car that fled the police near Austin. A state trooper fired three rounds to shoot out the tires, but one of the shots struck Mr. Hilliard in the head, killing him. His relatives sued the agency that oversees state troopers, the Department of Public Safety, and the state later paid the family nearly $51,000. According to The Austin American-Statesman, James Adams, the director of the agency at the time, said in court documents that the trooper was in compliance with policies governing the use of deadly force. Last month, it happened again, after a Department of Public Safety helicopter began pursuing a red pickup truck suspected of carrying drugs near the border in South Texas. A tactical flight officer on board the helicopter fired mul-

Kaskaskia

Chester

A longstanding practice of firing at a vehicle’s tires sometimes leads to death.

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MISSOURI 5 MILES THE NEW YORK TIMES

Clockwise from left, a mural of Kaskaskia around 1800, now an isolated and floodprone village, a photo of the 1973 flood and a sign on the edge of Kaskaskia, reachable only through Missouri.

requires a 20-minute detour through the neighboring state. Still very much Illinois residents, Kaskaskians eventually lost postal service and now must receive mail at addresses in St. Mary, Mo., causing tax problems galore and more than a few tiffs at the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles. “Other people think it’s strange, but those of us who have spent our lives here have never had it any other way,” said Emily Lyons, a lifelong resident and the town’s de facto historian. Losing residents with every passing decade, Kaskaskia had remained large enough to house three schools and about 600 residents when a 1973 flood drowned homes in 13 feet of Mississippi muck. The 200 people who returned and rebuilt were hit with an even more devastating flood in 1993, when 20 feet of water destroyed most homes and the resolve of all but the staunchest loyalists. Today the church that was moved in

the late 19th century is still in use, with bricks on the second floor showing some discoloration where floodwaters rose in 1993. (Mass is on Saturdays because no priest can get there on Sundays.) Louis XV’s old bell — cracked, just like Philadelphia’s — still hangs in a nearby shrine, metaphorically ringing out Kaskaskia’s three centuries of history and fortitude. “People say nothing’s down there. But a lot’s been here; you just can’t see it anymore,” said Mary Brown, who along with Ms. Lyons has spent countless hours restoring historic buildings on the island. “We’ve been handed this baton. Hopefully, the younger ones will have the dedication.” There are not many younger ones left, alas. With the closest school 20 miles away in Chester, Ill., requiring clunky trips down and through Missouri just to get there, the island has only a few children to inherit their parents’ and grandparents’ strong ties. Even the

mayor is trying to move his family but has not been able to sell his house. Herbert Klein, a lifelong resident who still farms 330 acres of soybeans on the northern end of the island, where parts of the original town once stood, chuckled and said that floods in 1973 and 1993 did not bode so well for 2013. One family rebuilt a small home on Third Street just this year — this time, perching it on steel stilts 16 feet above ground level — but Mr. Klein said that many folks now preferred mobile homes that could be whisked off the island quickly. “If we have another flood,” he said of Kaskaskia, “it’s done for.” Dorothy and Manny Brown, residents since the Depression, figure that floods are more part of their past than their future. Standing on that top step, their eyes below the level of the 1993 flood, they remember what the Mississippi can and probably will someday do. Yet while outsiders look at Kaskaskia and see only water, all they see is home.

tiple times into the vehicle in an attempt to shoot the tires. He shot one of the tires, but his other shots struck a group of illegal immigrants from Guatemala who had been hiding in the bed of the truck under a dark blanket, the authorities said. Two men in the back of truck were killed, and a third was injured. No drugs were found in the truck, and no shots were fired from the vehicle. The Texas Rangers are investigating the shooting, and officials with the Department of Public Safety, the state’s top law enforcement agency, have requested that the F.B.I. and the civil rights division of the Department of Justice conduct their own investigation. The request for a federal inquiry pleased the A.C.L.U. of Texas, which called the shooting unconstitutional and had asked for an independent investigation. State troopers and officers with the Department of Public Safety are allowed to fire on vehicles during pursuits. They can shoot to disable a vehicle, to defend themselves or others from death or serious injury, or to apprehend those suspected of using or trying to use deadly force, according to the agency’s general manual. Officials with the Department of Public Safety said in a statement that they were reviewing all related policies, but they defended the actions of the officer in the helicopter, identified as Miguel Avila, saying that the truck was traveling fast near two elementary schools and a middle school and posed “an immediate threat to the schoolchildren and motoring public.” In addition to Mr. Hilliard and the two men from Guatemala fatally shot last month, at least one other man has been shot and killed since 1984 by state troopers trying to disable vehicles in chases. That man was Israel Leija Jr., 24, who led the authorities on a chase outside Amarillo one night in March 2010 after they had tried to arrest him on an outstanding warrant. A state trooper took up position on an Interstate 27 overpass with an M-4 rifle and fired multiple times into the vehicle. Mr. Leija was Continued on Page 24

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CHESS

Former World Champion Wins Namesake Event By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN

BAUER/BLACK

There are memorial tournaments for former world champions. There are also tournaments named after other great players. Last week, there were two such events. One was in St. Petersburg, Russia, in honor of Mikhail Chigorin, the first great Russian chess player, who was among the world’s best in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The other tournament, the Anatoly Karpov Trophy, was in the resort town of Cap d’Agde, France. The event is named after Karpov, the 12th world champion, who is still very much alive and active on the chess circuit. So active that he actually won his namesake tournament.  Karpov, 61, of Russia, became world champion in 1975, succeeding Bobby Fischer, who was feuding with the World Chess Federation and refused to defend the title. Karpov quickly proved that he was a worthy champion, and he successfully defended the title in 1978 and 1981 in matches against Viktor Korchnoi, a Russian who defected from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It was a period in which Karpov dominated the chess world.  What made Karpov so good was his exceptional technical ability. He would gain the smallest strategic advantages and

t R RPt XMt t X X tSt X t X L t tGtSLGt LGtQC LE t J t t F t t tI

QUEEN’S PAWN OPENING White

Black

White

Black

Karpov

Bauer

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Bauer

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

d4 c4 Bd2 e4 Bb4 Qd2 Nd2 f4 dc5 e5 Bd3 h3 Be4 hg4 Ke2 Nh3 a3 Ke3 g3 b3 Ne4 Nd6

e6 Bb4 Qe7 Nf6 Qb4 Qd2 d6 c5 dc5 Ng4 Nc6 Nb4 f5 fe4 0-0 b6 Nd3 Bb7 h6 Rad8 Rd4 Bh1

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Rh1 Nb2 Nf2 g5 Nde4 gf4 gf4 Rfd8 Nd6 b5 Nb5 Rd3 Nd3 Rd3 Ke4 Rb3 Nd6 Nd3 Rh2 Ra3 f5 ef5 gf5 Nb4 f6 Ra1 f7 Kf8 Rh6 Re1 Kf5 Rf1 Ke6 Kg7 Rh4 Nc6 Nf5 Kf8 Rh8 mate

6 5 4 3 2

a

b

c

d

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KARPOV/WHITE

Position after 20 ... Rad8

nurse them until he could convert them into a decisive material edge. Long before computers could rival or play better than humans, Karpov was so precise in his game play that he was often compared to a machine.  Though he is no longer as consistent, or patient, as a player — and he has fallen to No. 178 in the world — he still, at times, exhibits exceptional technique. He demonstrated his skill last week in one of his games against Christian Bauer, one of the reigning cochampions in France.  Bauer’s 2 ... Bb4 was a rare and somewhat dubious move, and Karpov was able to seize control of the center with 4 e4.  Karpov initiated a trade of queens because he is comfortable in endgames when he has a clear advantage.  Karpov’s 21 Ne4 and 22 Nd6 was a nice maneuver. In exchange for a small sacrifice of material — his rook for a bishop and a pawn — Karpov gained an outpost for his knight on d6 that made it at least as powerful as a rook.  Bauer’s best chance would have been to play 23 ... g5, to strike at Karpov’s pawns. Instead, he blundered with 23 ... Nb2. Bauer gave back a rook for a knight (28 ... Rd3) hoping that it would give him some counterplay. But that did not happen, and Karpov methodically advanced his pawns down the board.  Bauer’s king was soon caught in a mating net, and Karpov applied the finishing touch with 42 Rh8, mate.

GABE HERNANDEZ/THE MONITOR, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

A news conference and vigil on Nov. 1 near La Joya, Tex., for two illegal immigrants who died in a pickup fired on by officers.

Texas Officers’ Deadly Shooting in Chase Is Under Inquiry From Page 22 shot, his vehicle rolled over several times and he was pronounced dead at the scene. His relatives filed a lawsuit in federal court in Amarillo, claiming civil rights violations and wrongful death. “There’s a tremendous amount of room for error,” said Rob Hogan, a lawyer representing Mr. Leija’s relatives. “Essentially what they’re doing is, they’re allowing D.P.S. troopers to become snipers. That may be something appropriate for Afghanistan or Iraq in a military operation, but it’s not appropriate for a community law enforcement function.” Lawyers in the state attorney general’s office, which is representing the state trooper in that case, said in court documents that Mr. Leija was evading arrest and had threatened multiple times during the pursuit to shoot police officers. They said the trooper, Chadrin Lee Mullenix, fired his weapon at the vehicle to protect the public and other po-

A helicopter fires on a truck, striking people hiding in its bed.

CHRIS SHERMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A law enforcement policy of using weapons to end a chase ended in deaths in October along this road in La Joya, Tex. lice officers, including those who were out of their vehicles placing spikes on the roadway. Trooper Mullenix asked his commanding officer for permission to fire on the vehicle. The family’s lawsuit asserted that he

received an order from his superior to “stand down,” because the vehicle would soon reach the spikes that had been deployed. The state’s lawyers said in court documents that the trooper did not hear any response to his re-

quest. A grand jury declined to indict Trooper Mullenix. A spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, Tom Vinger, said in a statement that officers, in evaluating the circumstances confronting them, may “attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the life of innocent bystanders.” He said that the department had limited information about the shooting of Mr. Hilliard, and that any settlement of the case did not constitute an admission of liability. Of the shooting of Mr. Leija, Mr. Vinger said, “The Texas attorney general is vigorously defending that litigation on behalf of the department and the officer involved.”

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HOW TO HELP Donations will be disbursed to agencies participating in the Neediest Cases campaign. To make a donation, make a check payable to The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, and send it to 4 Chase Metrotech Center, 7th Floor East, Lockbox 5193, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11245. If you wish to direct your gift to storm victims, please include a note indicating it is for Hurricane Sandy relief and designate “Hurricane Sandy Relief” on all checks. The participating agencies are: ATLANTIC CITY RESCUE MISSION BROOKLYN COMMUNITY SERVICES CATHOLIC CHARITIES ARCHDIOCESE OF NEW YORK CATHOLIC CHARITIES BROOKLYN AND QUEENS CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY CITY HARVEST COMMUNITY FOOD BANK OF NEW JERSEY COMMUNITY SERVICE SOCIETY OF NEW YORK FEDERATION OF PROTESTANT WELFARE AGENCIES UJA-FEDERATION OF NEW YORK SUZANNE D eCHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Donations may be made with a credit card by phone at (800) 381-0075 or at nytneediestcases.com. For instructions on how to donate stock, call (212) 556-1137 or fax (212) 556-1979. No agents or solicitors are authorized to seek contributions for The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. The New York Times Company pays all administrative costs of the fund, so every dollar donated to the fund goes directly to serve those in need. The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has been recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a not-for-profit public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to the fund are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Federal Identification Number: 13-6066063. A copy of the Neediest Cases Fund’s latest annual financial report may be obtained, upon request, from the fund or from the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, Attn: FOIL Officer, 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271.

To delay may mean to forget.

Josmery Batista, 34, with her children: Analisse, 4, left; Erika, 10; and Jeremy, 1. Ms. Batista is receiving chemotherapy treatment.

Battling Breast Cancer, Single Mother Takes Strength From Her Children By JOHN OTIS

She had not expected her fingernails to feel as if they had been hollowed out. Josmery Batista, 34, had braced herself for many of the side effects that would result from her palliative chemotherapy treatment. She The Neediest knew about the spells, the Cases dizzy head pain and the body aches, just as she knew about the fatigue, which weakens her so much at times that she is unable to bathe her infant son or even to hold him. But when her nails became so brittle that she could not properly wash dishes, a development as alarming as it was discouraging, she sought comfort and reassurance from one of her new friends walking the same path. Ms. Batista, a single mother of three, knows that she is blessed to have found a support group of

others, like her, who are undergoing cancer treatment, and she gains additional courage from the memory of friends who did not survive. She also knows how blessed she is to have sisters to lean on for help. But friends and siblings alone are not what fortify her will to survive. “My children give me the strength to fight this illness, this disease,” Ms. Batista said. “My support system has been a great help. But what keeps me going is my kids.” Five months into her pregnancy with her son, Jeremy Tavarez, now 1, Ms. Batista began to experience excruciating pain from her neck to her midsection. She had no idea what was wrong. When she sought help, examinations ruled out ailments like arthritis or liver problems. Tests for cancer would have involved radiation and, thus, potential harm to the baby, so Ms. Batista waited until after the birth to be tested

STORM RELIEF CAMPAIGN The New York Times Company is beginning a special campaign to raise money to assist victims of Hurricane Sandy in the New York metropolitan area. This campaign will run with the 101st annual Neediest Cases Fund campaign, which began last Sunday. The fund’s endowment is adding $1.5 million to the special campaign. To make donations: nytneediestcases.com

further. Last November, one month after her son’s birth, Ms. Batista was told she had Stage 4 breast cancer. The disease has since spread to her liver and her bones. She receives chemotherapy treatment every 21 days at Elmhurst Hospital Center, near her home in Flushing, Queens, and is

then required to take pills for the next 14 days. The side effects of that medication are the cause of much of her discomfort. Petite yet resilient, Ms. Batista is driven to take Tylenol instead of a nap. She will weather the lethargy and endure the pain to ensure that her son and her other two children, Erika, 10, and Analisse Tavarez, 4, can have as normal a life as possible. Whenever she is able to, she plays with her children, accompanies them to school or helps them with homework. “Even though she’s battling every day, going to the hospital and stuff like that, she doesn’t let her kids fully know, and they’re happy,” said Ms. Batista’s sister Dalisa Batista, who assists with child care. Josmery Batista, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1998, had been employed for 13 years as a jewelry sample maker in Manhattan. She has been unable to

work since her treatment began and is living month to month as a result. She receives $450 a month in food stamps and collects $868 monthly in workers’ compensation, a payment that is set to expire in January. Ms. Batista says her children’s father also provides $400 a month in child support. Her rent is $1,100 a month. With her finances tight, Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens, one of the agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, granted Ms. Batista $500 from the fund in September to cover five weeks of child care when she is at treatment and her relatives are unavailable. The agency also supplies the family with food from the Queens North Community Center pantry, which is affiliated with Catholic Charities. “She stays very strong,” said Dalisa, who describes her sister as an inspiration. “I never really see her crying at home. She does-

n’t cry in front of the kids.” Dalisa added that her niece Erika, who is still too young to fully grasp the severity of her mother’s situation, boosted morale with a child’s innocent honesty. “Her daughter always gives her strength because she always tells her, ‘You’re beautiful with no hair,’” Dalisa said. “She tells her stuff like ‘I don’t want you to wear wigs. You’re beautiful to me.’” The future holds many questions, but estimates are that Josmery Batista will be receiving treatments for at least the next six months. She says she will continue to do what she has been doing all along, basking in the love of those around her. “I live my life as normal as possible, and I push myself to do the things I need to do,” Ms. Batista said. “I’m not going to allow the illness to dictate how I’m going to carry my life and what I need to do as a mother.”

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IMPACT OF A STORM

Neighborhood That Emergency Workers Call Home Is Still Reeling From Storm By JOSEPH BERGER

If any neighborhood could have been expected to cope smoothly with Hurricane Sandy, it should have been Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, which is rich with police officers, firefighters and emergency medics accustomed to dealing with other people’s disasters. Yet, more than a week later, Gerritsen Beach is worse off than all but a few city neighborhoods. Just one block in this seaside enclave of 1,700 homes, nearly a New York City fishing village, has electric power and heat. Shivering residents living in darkened bedrooms and still mourning the loss of treasured possessions are scrambling to feed and clothe themselves and find more tolerable roofs over their heads. “When its your own, it’s more difficult to deal with because your emotions get involved,” said Doreen Greenwood, chief of the neighborhood’s volunteer Fire Department, as she took a break from organizing relief efforts. The reason that the enclave is so badly crippled is precisely because Gerritsen Beach, which borders Sheepshead Bay, lives off the water, with residents in the alphabetized rows of winterized bungalows docking cruisers, skiffs and sailboats in the neighborhood’s canals. On the night the hurricane hit, the neighborhood experienced a surge of water that Ms. Greenwood described as a “mini-tsunami.” “It was at least 10 feet,” she

said. “I grew up here, and I’ve never seen anything like this.” Despite its vulnerable position, the neighborhood was not included among the low-lying coastal patches where evacuation was urged — Zone A. As a result, many residents who would have sought safety before the storm were forced to abandon their homes in the middle of the flooding and 70-mile-per-hour winds. A spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, Christopher R. Miller, defended the evacuation designations, saying, “The city used well-established models” provided in 2003 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The wave of salt water, mixed with sewage and petroleum from overwhelmed automobiles, flooded almost every basement and many first floors, destroying furniture, appliances and irreplaceable mementos. Some homes have been condemned by city officials as unlivable. Neighborhood detritus — soggy sofas, kitchen chairs, bedroom lamps, stereo sets — could be seen piled on sidewalks and in alleys, waiting for garbage trucks to haul them away. “Everybody’s lives have been thrown out on the street,” said Laura Golding, who has lived in the neighborhood for eight years. Also destroyed in many homes were basement circuit breakers. Consolidated Edison and National Grid have told residents that power cannot be restored to defective circuit breakers because of the danger of another inferno

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A woman cleaning out flood-damaged items from her house in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn. like the one that consumed much of Breezy Point, Queens, across the Rockaway Inlet. But circuit breakers are harder to find in the region’s hardware emporiums than a tank of gasoline in shuttered gas stations. And electricians have to be found to install them and sign the paperwork that will allow Department of Buildings officials to permit a return of power. State Senator Martin J. Golden

matter of two minutes and just kept on coming,” eventually reaching eight feet. Destroyed were a pool table, jukebox and his cherished collection of Dean Martin record albums, autographs, clippings and memorabilia. He blamed the city for not giving him time to relocate his possessions. “So much for Zone B — I think they got it wrong,” he said. “This is something you see on the

showed up in the neighborhood and said afterward that the city needed to call in a major contractor who could coordinate the necessary electrical work because “the way it’s going now, it will take to Christmas.” Anthony D’Agosta, 55, an unemployed private sanitation worker, lost the contents of his basement recreation room to a rush of water that he said went from ankle-deep “to four feet in a

news; I never expected to be in it.” A low-slung building that the “vollies,” as the volunteer Fire Department is known, use for training has become the neighborhood’s de facto civic center, overflowing with donations of clothes, canned food, toilet paper and thousands of objects given by generous outsiders. Parked outside was a Gorilla Cheese truck that usually caters to the bustling Manhattan lunchtime crowd but is among a number of mobile food vans financed by a City Hall fund to offer residents food — in this case, free grilled American cheese sandwiches and tater tots. The neighborhood had the usual complaints about the lack of help from the federal government, but was getting other help. Police cruisers prowled the storm-littered streets and, on every block, a garbage truck seemed to be loading up. There are some advantages to having a neighborhood with so many city workers. Ms. Golding, wearing a black winter parka against the cold, stepped inside the basement apartment where her widowed mother, Ann Mollo, 84, lives. Lost in the thigh-high deluge were two floral sofas, a breakfront containing her mother’s china and porcelain knickknacks, and wedding albums — hers and her mother’s. She repeated a phrase that for her has become almost a mantra. “Her whole life is out on the street and in the garbage,” she said.

Storm Recovery: Keeping Track LONG ISLAND

WESTCHESTER COAST

POWER

The Fire Island Problem

Light at End of Tunnel? Consolidated Edison reported Saturday afternoon that about 6,250 of its 348,000 customers in the county were still without power. That included more than 500 customers each in the municipalities of Cortlandt, Greenburgh, Mamaroneck, New Castle, New Rochelle, Rye, Yonkers and White Plains. The utility predicted all customers would have power by the end of Sunday. Only three customers of New York State Electric and Gas remained without power on Saturday. “The end of the nightmare is near,” Paul Feiner, the Greenburgh supervisor, told constituents in an e-mail. TRANSPORTATION

Gasoline Flows

ROBERT STOLARIK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The National Guard and volunteers helped residents clean damaged homes on Beach 101st Street in the Rockaways, where more than 31,000 customers remained without power.

QUEENS

NEW YORK CITY

NEW JERSEY

POWER

POWER

Customers Still Uncounted

‘Localized Issues’

Consolidated Edison said it had restored power to all but 7,800 customers in New York City, but that number did not include the 35,000 still in the dark in low-lying neighborhoods like Howard Beach, Queens, and Red Hook and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn who must wait until an electrician certifies their homes as safe. Con Edison said just over 300 customers remained offline on Staten Island on Saturday and 47 in Manhattan. (Its customer count is based on meters, not people. A singlefamily house, an apartment building or an office building could each be counted as one customer.) On the Rockaway Peninsula, where electricity is provided by the Long Island Power Authority, frustration was rising. The authority’s Web site showed that more than 31,000 customers remained in the dark at 4 p.m. Saturday, about as many as on Friday afternoon. The authority said it was working to reconnect underground cables to its Far Rockaway substation.

Public Service Electric and Gas said that about 21,000 customers had no power on Saturday, either because of Hurricane Sandy or the northeaster last week. It said most of them had “localized issues” like damaged electrical lines running to their homes or businesses. Nearly 4,000 linemen, many from outside New Jersey, were to stay on the job through the weekend. Jersey Central Power and Light said it expected to restore electricity by Saturday night to most of its 60,000 customers away from the shore who remained in the dark. Some 30,000 customers on the shore were still without power, and the utility said it was working with state and local officials to develop “a full restoration plan and timeline.”

SHELTER

A Border of Dark and Light Brooklyn’s largest housing project was unevenly divided and uneasy about it. In the Red Hook Houses, the power was on in some apartments, mostly on one side of Columbia Street, but remained off in others, mostly on the other side. Denise Aziz, who lives in Red Hook Houses West, on the side where the electricity was largely out, said updates had been scant from the New York City Housing Authority, the agency that serves as the landlord. “I get all my information by talking to Con Ed and electricians,” she said. But sometimes their accounts conflicted. Con Edison workers had told her the power would be restored on Saturday. Electricians had said it would take two or three more days. At another housing complex devastated by the storm, the Hammel Houses on the Rockaway Peninsula, generators were installed during the week, but residents said they still had no heat or hot water on Saturday because damaged boilers were not functioning. At Redfern Houses, at the eastern end of the peninsula, the power was still out in at least two buildings on Saturday, residents said. “I feel they always leave us to last for everything,” Betty Bailey said. “We’re the project that gets the crumbs of the crumbs.” SCHOOLS

The Absentees By the end of last week, about 42 schools remained closed because of storm damage or power problems. Ten schools were expected to reopen on Tuesday. JAMES BARRON

INFRASTRUCTURE

Thinking Long Term As last week ended, Gov. Chris Christie’s message seemed to be that rebuilding would take time — probably a long time. He told a group of local officials in Seaside Heights that utility officials had said the gas pipeline from Bay Head to Seaside Heights would probably have to be replaced, potentially a six- to eight-month project. Micah Rasmussen, a spokesman for New Jersey Natural Gas, said the existing pipeline would be inspected “literally foot by foot” where it crossed a bridge from Bay Head. As for timetables, Mr. Christie said in Sea Bright on Friday that one part of the rebuilding would be to “set people’s expectations realistically, that it’s not going to be all fixed by Memorial Day. I know New Jerseyans. I know what they’re going to think: ‘They’ll get it all fixed by Memorial Day.’ We’ll try like hell, but we’ve got to make sure that they don’t assume that’s what’s going to happen, because it’s going to take some time for us to do it the right way and for you to decide how you want it to look.” The mayor of Sea Bright, Dina Long, said, “Our smile might be toothless the first year.” The governor said, “Exactly right. That’s exactly right. But it will still be there.”

Access to gasoline appears close to normal, county officials said. A Saturday morning drive along Palmer and Mamaroneck Avenues in Mamaroneck revealed that the Mobil, Sunoco and Hess stations were all open and pumping and had no lines, though drivers at the Hess station reported that the pumps were painfully slow, requiring five minutes to pump a single gallon. Donna Greene, a spokeswoman for the county executive, Robert P. Astorino, said that panic buying had been reduced because most Westchester gas stations have power and supplies. All three MetroNorth Railroad lines were operating on a standard weekend schedule in Westchester, though the New Canaan branch of the New Haven line in Connecticut had been replaced by buses as a result of extensive wire damage in the hurricane.

One headache that government officials will have to grapple with at some point is the devastation that the hurricane wreaked on Fire Island, to the south of Long Island. The island is mostly a summer community and has only about 200 yearround residents. But those who have inspected the damage, including the Suffolk County executive, Steve Bellone, said that water from the ocean sliced the island in two, leaving it and the southern communities of Long Island vulnerable to new storms. “It is without question a big issue for everybody,” Mr. Bellone said, “because the barrier islands are what offer protection to the tens of thousands of homes on the South Shore of Long Island.” POWER

Hempstead Still Suffering More than 100,000 Long Island customers remained without power as of early Saturday afternoon, according to the Long Island Power Authority’s Web site. Hempstead continues to be the most affected and accounts for nearly one-third of the 106,801 customers listed on the site. Late Friday, National Grid, the private company that oversees utility operations for the authority, said it expected 95 percent of those customers not affected by flooding to have power by Tuesday night. But at least 400 customers expressed their anger by picketing on Saturday outside the power authority’s offices in Hicksville. RECREATION

SHELTER

Hunting, Hiking and Biking Resume

Folding Up the Cots All but four temporary shelters — in Yonkers, Chappaqua, Mount Pleasant and Cortlandt Manor — have been closed, but the county did not provide a census on Saturday of how many people were accommodated overnight. Larchmont joined Scarsdale and the city of Rye in ending their states of emergency. The county’s emergency operations center was open Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and will be closed on Sunday and Monday. The county urged residents who need assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to visit that agency’s disaster recovery center at the County Center in White Plains. Some county parks remain closed, and the county-run Rye Playland suffered severe damage to its Boardwalk and ice-skating casino, the county said.

One indicator, albeit an odd one, that a semblance of normalcy was returning to Long Island was an alert issued by the State Department of Environmental Conservation on Saturday that said state lands, as of Friday, were “now open to all activities, including hunting, hiking and biking.”

CONNECTICUT AID

Comparing Two Storms

Cablevision’s Web site said on Saturday that 2,500 customers who have electricity have no telephone, television or Internet service, and an additional 15,000 who have not had power restored also lack the three services provided through its Optimum package. Verizon said FiOS customers without power also have no telephone, Internet and television, but it provided no specific figures.

Connecticut’s governor, Dannel P. Malloy, informed business executives on Friday that he expected to see “quite a bit” more homeowners and businesses seeking federal disaster assistance this year after Hurricane Sandy than the number who filed after Tropical Storm Irene last year. Addressing representatives of local chambers of commerce in a conference call, the governor reported that 948 businesses and 3,832 homeowners had already filed for assistance this time round. Last year, 1,321 businesses and 5,654 homeowners filed after Tropical Storm Irene. The Small Business Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are operating centers in Bridgeport, New Haven, Greenwich, Old Saybrook, Guilford, Groton, Milford and Pawcatuck.

JOSEPH BERGER

ALISON LEIGH COWAN

TELEPHONE, CABLE AND INTERNET

Restoration Continues

NEW CASTLE

Randy Hill, a teacher, who has been without power since Hurricane Sandy hit Westchester County, on Saturday cut up a maple tree that had fallen in his yard. His family stayed in the house with help from a propane gas stove.

EDUCATION

Loan Payment Relief New Jersey and New York announced extensions on student-loan payments. New Jersey college students have an additional month to make loan payments to the state’s Higher Education Student Assistance Authority. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered a 90-day grace period on payments made through the State Higher Education Services Corporation. JAMES BARRON and DIANTHA PARKER

SUZANNE D eCHILLO/THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Kris Elvine, a resident of Midland Beach on Staten Island, reaching for a cord from his father, Peter, after they borrowed power from a neighbor’s generator.

How a Staten Island Community Became a Deathtrap From Page 1 neighborhood, broadcasting evacuation warnings by loudspeaker, residents recalled. This time, officials said, city workers were sent once again to Staten Island’s evacuation zones to issue warnings, some using loudspeakers. But many residents of Midland Beach said they did not hear them. Still, it is not at all certain that such a measure, or even the police’s going door to door, would have made a difference. Like most of the neighborhood’s residents, the victims ignored numerous orders to evacuate, a decision that underscores an independent streak that runs deep on Staten Island. “I tried very hard,” Ms. Contrubis said through sobs at her brother’s funeral on Monday. “Before the storm I called him up and said, ‘Gene, the storm, it looks bad!’ And he said, ‘Everybody’s staying; nobody’s leaving.’ He just told me: ‘I’m not going to leave. I’m not going to leave.’” The eight victims were mostly elderly — the youngest was 59. Most lived alone, and one was legally blind, paraplegic and had cerebral palsy. On that night, the neighborhood turned into a lake that was more than nine feet deep in some places — nearly enough to fill the victims’ homes. Councilman James Oddo, a Republican who represents the area, said he was distressed that a cluster of such deaths could occur. “It weighs heavily on me,” Mr. Oddo said. “It means to a certain degree that we in government failed.”

Lulled Into Complacency Mr. Contrubis’s parents bought the bungalow at 162 Kiswick Street in the 1960s as a summer cottage. At the time, they lived in Manhattan, but Mr. Contrubis’s mother loved the beach and she eventually moved to Staten Island full time. When Mr. Contrubis returned home from the military after serving in the Vietnam War, he moved in. People have long been drawn to Midland Beach for the quietude, affordable real estate and proximity to the water. The neighborhood had once been largely Irish-American, but in the past few decades, it has grown more diverse, as Italian-Americans arrived, followed by Latinos and, most recently, an influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, some of whom had been priced out of Eastern European enclaves in southern Brooklyn. For all its attractions, Midland Beach suffers a chronic problem: flooding. Alain Delaquérière search.

contributed

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Debbie Piergiovanni with George Tormo, who evacuated Ms. Piergiovanni the day after the storm with a small boat, which he paddled using a snow shovel. Keri Mullen, whose family has lived for six generations in a house on Moreland Street, said she remembered when water reached her porch during a storm in the 1970s. Her parents and grandparents told her about flooding in the ’50s and ’60s. In the late ’70s, the city built a storm sewer system down Greeley Avenue, on the western side of the neighborhood, which helped relieve flooding during heavy rains. More recently, the city began work on a system of wetlands on the north side of the neighborhood to help address the problem. But few residents had any memory of water rising high enough to threaten homes, let alone lives. Councilman Oddo said the last time bay water crossed the neighborhood’s beachfront roadway, Father Capodanno Boulevard, was in 1992. But even then it caused relatively little damage. As Hurricane Sandy approached, residents’ thoughts turned to Tropical Storm Irene. In August 2011, many, including Mr. Contrubis, had been alarmed enough by the authorities’ warnings to evacuate in advance of that storm, only to find afterward that their homes were unscathed. As a result, many viewed evacuation as a waste of time. “They’ve warned us so many times before and nothing happened,” said Graceanna Paterno, 45, a lifelong resident. John Prisinzano, 64, who has lived on

Grimsby Street for 32 years, recalled the brief conversations he had with neighbors before Hurricane Sandy. “‘Hey, how are you doing? Are you going to stay?’” someone would say. “‘Yeah, we’re going to stay,’” came the reply. “I’m here 32 years, never had a flood,” he explained. And so as the wind picked up on the afternoon of Oct. 29, and a light rain began to fall, many residents went inside their homes, turned on computers and television sets, fired up video games and opened books, and waited for the storm to come and go.

Panic in the Dark It was already dark when Laurajean Sammarco, 48, ventured to the doorstep of her house on Father Capodanno Boulevard. She was startled to see a surge of bay water tumbling over a barrier near the beach and rushing toward her house. “I said, ‘That can’t be water!’” she remembered. “It wasn’t like ‘Hawaii Five-0.’ It was like ‘The Blob.’” She started calling relatives. “I’m screaming: ‘Get out! Get out!’” She jumped in her car with her husband, daughter and dog and raced through the neighborhood trying to pick up relatives and friends. Panic began to seize household after household in Midland Beach as water pushed relentlessly into the neighbor-

hood, slowly in some places, more quickly in others. “Calls were coming in: somebody’s calling somebody, who’s calling somebody,” said Bill Owens, a retired police officer, whose family has lived in Midland Beach since 1928. Residents reported water coming not just from the direction of the bay but, in some areas, from Hylan Boulevard to the west, or pushing south from the wetlands or north from Miller Field. As water arrived on his street, Mr. Owens stepped outside to move his truck from a space on the corner. But he never got there. Within minutes, he was swimming frantically to get to the high stoop of a neighbor’s house. Some residents who lived in two- and three-story houses grabbed children and pets and ran to upper floors. But for those in bungalows, higher ground was harder to reach. “All these poor old-timers,” Mr. Owens said. “They must’ve been sleeping in their beds or watching TV.” Two blocks east of Mr. Contrubis’s bungalow, water began seeping into the one-story bungalow on Grimsby Street where Lucy Spagnuolo and her mother, Beatrice, 79, lived. The elder Ms. Spagnuolo, a widow with a heart ailment, had moved to the neighborhood more than 40 years ago with her husband, a truck driver. She had raised four sons and two daughters in their small home.

The younger Ms. Spagnuolo went outside to start the car, but the water had risen so fast that the engine would not work. She got out and was in waistdeep, fast-rising water. She waded up the block, desperately yelling for help in the darkness. “I panicked,” she recalled. Mr. Prisinzano and his wife, who live across the street, were fleeing in their sedan and saw Ms. Spagnuolo shouting. But they kept going. They had no choice, they said. “I just got to the corner and I couldn’t make out what she was saying and the water was up to the windows,” Mr. Prisinzano said. “We couldn’t get back anyway. We just got out.” Within minutes, the water had topped the white fence in front of the Spagnuolos’ home, and the younger Ms. Spagnuolo was unable to return to her mother. Throughout the pitch-black neighborhood, people were fighting for their lives. Once Ms. Sammarco warned her relatives of rising waters, two of her brothers, Angelo and Frankie Paterno, raced in their vehicles to rescue a cousin who lived alone in a bungalow on Nugent Avenue, a block west of Grimsby Street. The cousin, John Paterno, 65, had cerebral palsy and, paralyzed from the waist down and legally blind, was largely bedridden. He received regular visits from a home health aide, and for more than two decades, his cousins had been feeding him, washing him and, at various times, living with him. But as floodwaters climbed, he was alone with his pet cockatoo and a pit bull named Bear. Frankie Paterno said he was able to drive within a block of his cousin’s house and dived into the water, ignoring the danger from a downed power line nearby. But the surging waves kept knocking him back, and he finally had to give up. “He was our responsibility, and we couldn’t get him,” said Ms. Paterno, another cousin. “We tried. We really did. He died a horrible death. And we didn’t get the help for him.” A block farther west, on Kiswick Street, a boat loaded with evacuees passed in front of the house of Mr. Contrubis, the 67-year-old former Police Department clerk. He signaled to them, a neighbor later told his relatives, but the boat’s pilot told him there was no room and they would come back to get him. They never did.

In left photo, John Prisinzano, center in hat, whose father fled the floodwaters, waited with relatives for federal officials to arrive at his father’s house. Center, flowers outside the home of Beatrice Spagnuolo, 79, who lived across the street from the elder John Prisinzano and died during the storm. Right, residents have been returning to sort through the mess.

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IMPACT OF A STORM Huddled on the Rooftops

had cerebral palsy and was legally blind and paralyzed from the waist down.

Yolanda Concepcion with her husband, Willie, at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church. The couple live opposite the home of Beatrice Spagnuolo, who died during the storm. Right, Frankie Paterno outside the house where his cousin died. More photos: nytimes.com/nyregion. in an interview. Before Hurricane Sandy’s arrival, Mr. Bloomberg held news conferences and the city sent alerts via text message, e-mail and social media to residents in flood-prone areas. The city also deployed police officers, as well as groups of volunteers known as Community Emergency Response Teams, to inform people about the evacuation. One of these groups passed through Midland Beach, officials said, with the mission of knocking on doors and warning people in the streets. But the campaigns in residential neighborhoods appear to have been more modest than those in the city’s public housing projects in Zone A, where Housing Authority workers knocked on every apartment door and made repeat visits to the homes of the most infirm, city officials said. Linda Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said the city works with nonprofit groups to coordinate the evacuation of homebound older residents. But if people are not in facilities like hospitals, she said, getting them to evacuate can be challenging.

“If a person does not want to leave their own home, we cannot force them,” she said. In the end, only about half of the residents in Zone A around the city evacuated, officials estimated. In Midland Beach, residents said they believed that an even smaller percentage left their neighborhood. Refusal to obey a mandatory evacuation order is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail. Yet the authorities rarely make arrests in such cases. Officials now say they plan to conduct a thorough review of the Hurricane Sandy evacuation. “We are going to look at people who left and people who didn’t, and we’re going to talk to them about why,” Mr. Holloway said. Asked if the deaths in Midland Beach reflected a failure of the city’s evacuation efforts, he responded that the term “failure” might apply “if the city didn’t have a plan and this came upon us and we were going on the fly.” But he added: “A hurricane is a foreseeable thing.” “We have a plan for that,” he said, “and we’ve done it.”

neighborhood entirely. “For the first time in my life, it crossed my mind,” she said. “Am I going to be all right? With every rainstorm, are we going to panic?” The trauma has only deepened as more discoveries have been made. Nearly four days after the storm, police officers emerged from a bungalow on Olympia Boulevard carrying two corpses in body bags. Officials were trying to confirm the victims’ full names, but their landlord said they were siblings. The brother, David, was 65, and the sister, Charlotte, was in her mid-70s. They had died with their dogs, cats, birds, a rabbit and a hamster. If they were unable to evacuate their entire menagerie, they had told the landlord, they were going to stay home. On Friday, long after the floodwaters had drained, police officers on patrol were flagged down and asked to check on a bungalow on Mapleton Avenue. Building inspectors had already come by, but they had apparently not gone inside. When the officers did, they found the body of a 64-year-old man.

Decisions to Be Made Since the storm passed, residents have re-entered their homes and sorted through their mud-caked belongings. They have hauled sodden possessions — furniture, appliances, clothes, heirlooms, photo albums — to the curb for the sanitation trucks to cart away. Many are vowing to rebuild. Others, even those whose families have lived in Midland Beach for generations, are considering moving. “This is the first time water has ever come into the house, ” Mr. Owens, the retired police officer, said. He was standing in front of the two homes his great-grandfather, an immigrant from France, built on Olympia Boulevard. He and family members were tearing down the walls and gutting the first floor of the two structures. “Eighty-four years we’ve been here,” he said. He shook his head: “Now, I’ve got to stop and think about it.” Ms. Sammarco, who sounded the early warning on Father Capodanno Boulevard, said she might abandon not only the waterfront blocks, but also the

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Could the eight dead in Midland Beach have been saved? Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered a mandatory evacuation of Zone A — which includes neighborhoods in all five boroughs — at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 28, the day before the storm hit. About 375,000 people are believed to live in Zone A around the city, officials said. In interviews, Bloomberg aides said the city had clearly succeeded in alerting the city’s residents to the storm’s dangers and offering safe passage to the most vulnerable. For several years, the authorities have conducted a campaign to inform people in the most flood-prone areas about preparing for hurricanes. The effort included making presentations at community boards and senior centers, holding news conferences and distributing millions of pamphlets. After Tropical Storm Irene, the city stepped up this program, according to Caswell F. Holloway, deputy mayor for operations. “For the entire 14 months leading up to Hurricane Sandy, we were engaged in a continuous effort aimed at people who live in Zone A,” Mr. Holloway said

GRACEANNA PATERNO, whose cousin John Paterno, 65, died in his bungalow, above, in the Midland Beach neighborhood of Staten Island. Mr. Paterno

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“He was our responsibility, and we couldn’t get him. We tried. We really did. He died a horrible death. And we didn’t get the help for him.”

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After the storm surge, only a few small boats plied the flooded neighborhood. The most substantial was an inflatable rescue boat with three firefighters. Other firefighters were in a rowboat commandeered in the neighborhood. Anthony Guida, one of the firefighters, said there were also civilians in boats, including two men in a canoe. Another man, he recalled, was piloting a bright yellow-and-blue craft that resembled “an inflatable pool toy.” He was using a plastic shovel as an oar. “That’s all that was out there,” Firefighter Guida said. He described a landscape of floating debris and families huddled on rooftops, the arcing beams of their flashlights slicing the dark. “There was nothing between us and Portugal, which was kind of daunting,” he said. The firefighters heard cries for help from rooftops, though many of the stranded summoned help silently by waving flashlights. “From nowhere, Beatrice Spawe’d get a beam of gnuolo and light and we’d have John Paterno to track where that light was coming from,” Firefighter Guida, 52, said. “Covering the entire Midland Beach area was impossible for one boat, or three,” he said. “It would have been impossible for 10 boats.” On Kiswick Street, where Mr. Contrubis drowned, Firefighter Guida came across four members of a stranded family and their large dog. “We couldn’t get them in the boat with the dog,” he said. “They made a heart-wrenching decision to stay with the dog, and they gave us their children.” (The parents survived.) Firefighter Guida’s unit worked in Midland Beach for five hours, making about 20 trips and rescuing scores of people. At 3 a.m., the unit had to relocate to the south for another emergency. Across the borough, the Fire Department rescued about 200 people over the course of the night, officials said. Though the waters in Midland Beach began to recede in the early morning, they remained several feet high in parts of the neighborhood for much of Tuesday, the day after the storm. Most residents were able to return to their homes by Wednesday, but even as late as Thursday, some roads remained impassable for cars. As water retreated, a pattern of deaths emerged. The bodies of Mr. Contrubis and the elder Ms. Spagnuolo were pulled from their bungalows on Tuesday. So was the body of Ms. Spagnuolo’s next-door neighbor and friend, Anastasia Rispoli, 73. One of John Paterno’s nephews, using a small boat, reached his uncle’s bungalow Tuesday morning and discovered Mr. Paterno’s pit bull alive, on top of the cockatoo’s bird cage. The bird died. When the nephew emerged with the dog, neighbors still trapped in their homes — but watching the rescue from high stoops and upper-story windows — applauded. The nephew saw no trace of Mr. Paterno inside, and the family assumed he had been evacuated. In the afternoon, however, divers in scuba gear returned to the bungalow and found Mr. Paterno’s submerged body beneath his overturned bed. Daniel Walsh lives across the street, and spent the storm on the upper floors of his three-story house. “We never heard anything, no cry for help,” Mr. Walsh said. “The dog didn’t bark at all.” On Wednesday, rescuers discovered the body of Patricia Bevan, 59, in her bungalow on Hunter Avenue. The storm surge had turned the interior into a jumble of furniture, kitchenware and mud. Her next-door neighbor, Abner Santiago, 64, said Ms. Bevan moved onto the block last spring and would walk her Pekingese every day. He had last seen her about 4 p.m. on the day of the storm, standing in front of her home. She was not planning to evacuate. “She said: ‘I have no place to go. I have no place to go,’” Mr. Santiago said. The authorities are still searching for the next of kin of Ms. Bevan and Ms. Rispoli.

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Officials said half the residents in Zone A around the city evacuated. In Midland Beach, residents said they believed that a smaller percentage did so.

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