- The Front Page

- Obituaries

The Front Page

- Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt CrisisSun, 31 Jul
Progress in talks between top Congressional Republicans and President Obama stirred optimism that a last-minute deal could be reached to avert a potential federal default.

- Rightward Tilt Leaves Obama With Party RiftSun, 31 Jul
In differing with liberals, the president risks alienating a key constituency as the 2012 election nears.

- In the Flood Zone, but Astonished by High WaterSun, 31 Jul
Some are questioning whether safeguards in South Dakota encourage people to take unnecessary chances.

- The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah MovementSun, 31 Jul
David Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Islamic law.

- In Afghanistan, Rage at Young LoversSun, 31 Jul
A romance between two teenagers that flouted traditions of arranged marriages aroused anger and violence.

- Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It AgreesSun, 31 Jul
The mood in the nation’s capital was described variously as one of doom, disgust and disbelief.

Amid New Talks, Some Optimism on Debt Crisis

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Senator Harry Reid, center, the majority leader, walked off the Senate floor with Senator Mark Pryor after making his statement on debt-ceiling legislation Saturday night.

By CARL HULSE

Published: July 30, 2011

WASHINGTON — New budget talks between top Congressional Republicans and President Obama made progress late Saturday, suddenly stirring optimism that a last-minute deal could be reached to avert a potential federal default that threatened significant economic and political consequences.

After a tense day of Congressional floor fights and angry exchanges, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, called off a planned showdown vote set for after midnight, but said he would convene the Senate at noon on Sunday for a vote an hour later. He said he wanted to give the new negotiations a chance to produce a plan to raise the federal debt limit in exchange for spending cuts and the creation of a new Congressional committee that would try to assemble a long-range deficit-cutting proposal.

“There are many elements to be finalized and there is still a distance to go before an arrangement can be completed,” said Mr. Reid, who just a few hours earlier had played down talk of any agreement. “But I believe we should give everyone as much room as possible to do their work.”

Mr. Reid’s announcement set off an almost audible sigh of relief on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers and their aides had been bracing for an overnight clash over the debt following a day that had seen a heated House vote and lawmakers trudging from office to office in search of an answer to the impasse.

The first indication of a softening of the hard lines that have marked weeks of partisan wrangling over the debt limit came in the afternoon when the two leading Congressional Republicans announced that they had reopened fiscal talks with the White House and expected their last-ditch drive to produce a compromise.

Following the House’s sharp rejection of a proposal by Mr. Reid to raise the debt limit and cut spending, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a linchpin in efforts to reach a deal, said he and Speaker John A. Boehner were “now fully engaged” in efforts with the White House to find a resolution that would tie an increase in the debt limit to spending cuts and other conditions.

“I’m confident and optimistic that we’re going to get an agreement in the very near future and resolve this crisis in the best interests of the American people,” said Mr. McConnell, who noted he was personally talking to both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a favorite partner in past negotiations.

Mr. Boehner, who would have to steer a compromise through the House, said he based his confidence on the prospect of an agreement on the sense that “we’re dealing with reasonable, responsible people who want this crisis to end as quickly as possible.”

A Democratic official with knowledge of the talks said that Mr. McConnell called Mr. Biden early Saturday afternoon, the first conversation between the two men since Wednesday. The official said they talked at least four more times on Saturday as they tried to work out an agreement.

The deal they were discussing, this person said, resembled the bill that Mr. Boehner won approval for in the House on Friday more than it did the one that Mr. Reid had proposed.

It would immediately raise the debt ceiling by about $1 trillion, accompanied by a similar range of spending cuts, and set up a new bipartisan committee that would work to find deeper cuts in exchange for a second debt limit increase that would extend through the 2012 election.

A failure of the new committee to win enactment of its proposal could then set off automatic spending cuts across the board, including to entitlement programs. Other ideas were swirling around the Capitol as lawmakers searched for a way to avoid default. One of Mr. Reid’s top lieutenants said he saw at least a glimmer of hope.

“We are a long way from any sort of negotiated agreement,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, “but there is certainly a more positive feeling about reaching an agreement than I’ve felt in a long time.”

The flurry of activity came as anxiety built up in many corners, including among Wall Street investors worried about the effects on the markets and active-duty soldiers worried about their paychecks.

After Mr. McConnell sounded a hopeful note, Mr. Reid called members of the Senate to the floor to hear him dispute the claims by his Republican counterpart and accuse Republicans of failing to enter into serious negotiations even as the Treasury risked running out of money to pay all its bills after Tuesday.

“The speaker and Republican leader should know that merely saying you have an agreement in front of television cameras doesn’t make it so,” Mr. Reid said after returning from a visit to the White House with Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House.

Trying to build momentum for his own proposal, Mr. Reid and fellow Democrats were working to win over Republican senators to support his plan to raise the debt ceiling through 2012 and circumvent Mr. McConnell.

“Americans are watching us and demanding a result that is balanced,” Mr. Reid said.

The Senate Democrats’ efforts were set back Saturday when 43 of the 47 Republican senators signed a letter to Mr. Reid saying they would not back his proposal, which would allow a $2.4 trillion increase in the debt ceiling in two stages while establishing a new Congressional committee to explore deeper spending cuts. The numbers signaled that without changes in the plan, Mr. Reid would not be able to overcome a Republican filibuster, which requires 60 votes.

House Republicans signaled their disapproval of the Reid plan by holding a symbolic vote on Saturday, rejecting it by a 246 to 173 vote, in a move intended to show it had no chance of passing in that chamber. About a dozen Democrats joined Republicans in rejecting the Reid plan.

The pre-emptive vote could strengthen Mr. McConnell’s hand as he seeks to shape any final compromise.

At the White House and in talks in Congressional offices and corridors, most of the attention was focused on finding a way to define the precise conditions under which the president could get a second increase in the debt limit that would be needed early in 2012 under both Republican and Democratic proposals. Officials in both parties said another idea that had surfaced was to require a change in Social Security policy if the new committee deadlocked, providing an incentive for the new committee to act on its own.

Under the proposal that the Congressional Budget Office said could save more than $100 billion over 10 years, a different measure of inflation would be used to calculate the annual cost-of-living adjustment in Social Security benefits. Supporters say the alternative measure of inflation is more accurate because it reflects what happens when prices rise; advocates for the elderly say the proposal is a backdoor way of cutting benefits.

Members of both parties took the floor to push for compromise, noting that the two sides were not far apart on major elements of their deficit-reduction plans.

“Failure should not be an option for us in this case, and it’s time we started finding common ground,” said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia.

The unusual Saturday session came after a week of brinkmanship on Capitol Hill. On Friday, Mr. Boehner managed to pass his own House bill, along party lines, just a day after suspending the vote as the Republican leadership tried frantically to line up enough votes for passage. But the Senate swiftly rejected that plan late Friday.

While some of the back-and-forth between the House and Senate and the party leaders was typical of the late stages of a negotiation, the combative and unyielding tone in both chambers of Congress was creating more pessimism in the rank and file about the prospects that a final agreement could be struck and cleared before Tuesday.

Even if a measure is able to win significant bipartisan endorsement in the Senate, the reception in the House could be different with the Treasury Department’s Tuesday deadline for increasing the debt limit at hand. But how to push a plan by House conservatives remained a major question mark.

At the Treasury Department, Secretary Timothy F. Geithner met with top advisers on Saturday on contingency plans for managing the financial consequences of Congressional inaction. “No one will be pleased,” said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Treasury Department calculates that the government will exhaust its ability to borrow money at the end of Tuesday, forcing the government to pay its bills from a dwindling pile of cash. Independent analysts estimate the government has enough money on hand to pay all of its bills for another week, more or less, before it starts missing payments.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly called on Congress to raise the borrowing limit, known as the debt ceiling, by Tuesday to avoid any uncertainty about the government’s ability to meet its obligations. Financial markets are particularly concerned about the payment of interest on the federal debt. A default on those obligations could precipitate a global financial crisis.

The painful negotiations to resolve the crisis have caught the attention of troops in Afghanistan, where Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quizzed repeatedly on Saturday by soldiers and Marines worried about their paychecks.

In Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, Admiral Mullen said it remained uncertain where money would be found if the government defaulted. Regardless of budget talks in Washington, the mission for American troops in Afghanistan would not halt, he said.

“We’re going to continue to come to work,” he said.

Reporting was contributed by Jackie Calmes, Helene Cooper, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Pear from Washington, and Thom Shanker from Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Rightward Tilt Leaves Obama With Party Rift

By JACKIE CALMES

Published: July 30, 2011

WASHINGTON — However the debt limit showdown ends, one thing is clear: under pressure from Congressional Republicans, President Obama has moved rightward on budget policy, deepening a rift within his party heading into the next election.

Entering a campaign that is shaping up as an epic clash over the parties’ divergent views on the size and role of the federal government, Republicans have changed the terms of the national debate. Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

“The activist liberal base will support Obama because they’re terrified of the right wing,” said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

But he said, “I believe that the voting base of the Democratic Party — young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos — are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.”

While Mr. Obama and Republicans have been unable to agree on a debt reduction plan for spending cuts and revenue increases to cut $4 trillion in the first decade, on Saturday they were negotiating a deal with fewer spending cuts that would ensure the government’s debt ceiling would be increased into 2013 to avoid another deadlock in the heat of campaign season.

No matter how the immediate issue is resolved, Mr. Obama, in his failed effort for greater deficit reduction, has put on the table far more in reductions for future years’ spending, including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, than he did in new revenue from the wealthy and corporations. He proposed fewer cuts in military spending and more in health care than a bipartisan Senate group that includes one of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans.

To win approval of the essential increase in the nation’s $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling, Mr. Obama sought more in deficit reduction than Republicans did, and with fewer changes to the entitlement programs, because he was willing to raise additional revenue starting in 2013 and they were not. And despite unemployment lingering at its highest level in decades, Mr. Obama has not fought this year for a big jobs program with billions of dollars for public-works projects, which liberals in his party have clamored for. Instead, he wants to extend a temporary payroll tax cut for everyone, since Republicans will support tax cuts, despite studies showing that spending programs are generally the more effective stimulus.

Even before last November’s election gave the Republicans control of the House, Mr. Obama had said he would pivot to deficit reduction after two years of stimulus measures intended first to rescue the economy and then to spur a recovery from the near collapse of the financial system. With Republicans’ gains in the midterm elections, that pivot became a lurch. Yet Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama seeks a debt limit increase as “a blank check” to keep spending.

“The Republicans won, and they don’t know how to accept victory,” said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

In his budget proposal in January, Mr. Obama declined to suggest a plan along the lines proposed by a majority of his bipartisan fiscal commission, which in December recommended $4 trillion in savings over 10 years through cuts in military and domestic programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and a tax code overhaul to lower rates while also raising more revenue.

Even though Mr. Obama was widely criticized, administration officials said at the time that to have embraced that approach then would have put him too far to the right — where he ultimately wanted to end up in any compromise with Republicans, not where he wanted to start.

But by this month, in ultimately unsuccessful talks with Speaker John A. Boehner, Mr. Obama tentatively agreed to a plan that was farther to the right than that of the majority of the fiscal commission and a bipartisan group of senators, the so-called Gang of Six. It also included a slow rise in the Medicare eligibility age to 67 from 65, and, after 2015, a change in the formula for Social Security cost-of-living adjustments long sought by economists.

“He’s accommodated himself to the new reality in Washington,” said Tom Davis, a former House Republican leader from Virginia. “That’s what leaders do.”

But Congressional Democrats and liberal groups objected.

“The president’s proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare has the potential to sap the energy of the Democratic base — among older voters because of Medicare and Medicaid and younger voters because of the lack of jobs,” said Damon A. Silvers, policy director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “And second, all these fiscal austerity proposals on the table will make the economy worse.”

Mr. Obama’s situation has parallels with the mid-1990s, when President Bill Clinton shifted to the center after Republicans took Congress and battled them on deficit reduction and a welfare overhaul. Many Democrats were angered by his concessions, by a sense of being left out of negotiations and by a fear of alienating Democratic voters. Mr. Clinton was re-elected in 1996.

But Mr. Obama is likely to face the voters with a weaker economy and higher unemployment than during Mr. Clinton’s era. Still, his advisers express confidence that voters will reward Mr. Obama either for winning a bipartisan deal, if that were to happen, or for at least having a more balanced approach that does not remake Medicare and Medicaid and asks for more revenue from the wealthy. And they suggest another potential parallel with the Clinton years of divided government: that Republicans risk a voter backlash with their uncompromising stands.

“Democrats created Social Security and Medicare, and we have fought for decades against Republican attempts to end these programs,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s communications director. “And President Obama believes that now is the time for Democrats to be the ones to step up and save Social Security and Medicare.”

Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, said polling data showed that at this point in his term, Mr. Obama, compared with past Democratic presidents, was doing as well or better with Democratic voters. “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of — they’re going to hate these Republican candidates,” Mr. Mellman said. “So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.”

Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting.

In the Flood Zone, but Astonished by High Water

Brian Lehmann for The New York Times

Pat Murphy pulling his neighbor Rob Anderson to their homes along the flooded Missouri River in South Dakota last week.

By A. G. SULZBERGER

Published: July 30, 2011

DAKOTA DUNES, S.D. — Some skeptical locals offered a warning when developers transformed this mostly barren peninsula at the intersection of two rivers into an exclusive planned community, complete with million-dollar homes and a private golf course designed by Arnold Palmer.

They call it “the Dunes” for a reason, the warning went — the rivers put the sand there, and the rivers could sweep it away. But, much like the developers, the new residents were not worried. A few even paid a premium to be closest to the flowing water of the Missouri and the Big Sioux.

Now, a little more than two decades later, the stately homes on Spyglass Circle and Pebble Beach Drive have been evacuated and the 18th hole is under six feet of water, as miles of newly built levees strain to keep this community from surrendering to a historic flood.

Many residents here at the southeastern tip of the state, where it borders Nebraska and Iowa, say they never imagined this chain of events. Scott Mackie, like most of his neighbors, did not take out flood insurance on his newly built house — not because he could not afford it, he said, but because he believed the Missouri had been tamed by a system of dams and reservoirs.

“This community has been here over 20 years and never had a problem,” he said. “I didn’t think it was an issue.”

A river makes an unpredictable neighbor, as the last few months have reminded.

And now, some people are using the high waters from North Dakota to New Orleans to revisit longstanding questions about whether the very government programs designed to safeguard people from floods, including protective measures like dams and levees and recovery programs like flood insurance and disaster assistance, actually encourage them to take unnecessary chances.

“Most people don’t understand what flood risk is,” said Gerry Galloway, a civil engineering professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about his concerns. “They assume that if there is some level of protection like a levee or an upstream dam, they’re safe. As a general rule, public officials don’t like to dissuade them of that fact.”

Even those public officials can sometimes fall victim themselves.

As governor of South Dakota, Mike Rounds visited many flooded communities over his two terms. But when he left office this year, he moved into a house in Pierre, the state capital, right on the Missouri River. He was forced to evacuate just months later.

Like many residents in the state, he believes the flood is largely the result of mismanagement by the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the dams. (The corps said the releases were forced by unprecedented snow and rains.)

“If I had to do it all over, I’d still purchase the same lot,” Mr. Rounds said. “I really do think it’s an aberration.”

Most of the major cities of the region — including Sioux City, just across the way in Iowa, a few miles east of Dakota Dunes — were settled on riverbanks. But even as many experts warn that climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of flooding and other natural disasters, developers continue to build homes in flood-prone areas.

“Older communities, when they were being settled, learned through trial and error where to build — that’s why Sioux City is established on higher ground,” said Paul Eckert, the city manager. “It’s only in recent decades that you’ve seen development in the lower areas like the Dunes.”

Some of that development reflects either a calculated gamble or general confusion over federal estimates of areas with higher flood risk, based on maps produced by the corps that are in the process of being revised.

Many people in these higher-risk areas mistakenly believed that a flood could not happen more than once a century — the areas are called hundred-year flood zones, based on the calculation of an annual 1 percent chance of flood. Those outside often falsely believe that they are not at risk, even though they account for about a quarter of all flood insurance claims.

But as the trailers, hot tubs and decks that have bobbed down waterways in recent weeks suggest, there is also an element of willful disbelief behind the decision to move close to rivers.

The Dakota Dunes used the twin attractions of river views and low taxes to attract wealthy professionals from the three-state Sioux City metro area.

The plot of land that had been home to about 10 people is now home to 2,600 people and 1,100 houses, which start at $175,000 — luxurious by the standards of this agricultural and industrial area.

Though developers initially urged residents to get insurance, they noted that the Missouri had been successfully controlled since the dam system was built.

After about a decade, concerns about the less predictable Big Sioux prompted the construction of a levee, which led the government to reduce the flood risk for another 160 lots — removing the flood insurance requirement and making them easier to sell.

As the years passed, those who dismissed a flood as unlikely started talking about it almost as an impossibility. Most residents dropped their flood insurance; only 172 homes in the entire county now carry it, backing studies that found that homeowners typically dropped the insurance after several dry years.

Even when the Corps of Engineers began saying record snow and rain would force unprecedented water releases from reservoirs for most of the summer, some residents considered the warnings overstated. A few homeowners refused at first to allow construction of levees on their property this spring — and were later forced to pay to have their own barriers built.

The community has spent $10 million to $15 million so far on the flood fight, most of which came from a no-interest loan from the state. It is also trying to get the federal government pay for 75 percent of the costs and the state government pay for 10 percent.

Down the road at Riv-R-Land Estates, Tom Koob looked at the rows of houses protruding from the widened river. Upset that more money and effort was focused on protecting the much larger and wealthier Dakota Dunes, Mr. Koob said he hoped for federal support to rebuild.

“I don’t want it to seem like we’re looking for a handout,” he said. “Since we didn’t get the support that some of the other communities got on the front end, it would be nice to get some support on the back end.”

Even as the evacuation extends into a third month, many residents say they have no concerns about returning to their homes. State officials say that may happen as soon as next month, when water releases are expected to be scaled back.

“Absolutely we’re going to stay,” Tim Boyle said as he stood in his emptied house.

He detailed some of the charms of river life: the bald eagles nesting on the cottonwood trees, the boat rides searching for catfish and walleye, and the summer parties on the dunes out front. And no, he was not worried about another flood.

His wife, Debbie, cut in. “There’s risk everywhere,” she said. “There’s risk in Arizona for fires, in Florida for hurricanes, in California for earthquakes.”

The Man Behind the Anti-Shariah Movement

By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Published: July 30, 2011

NASHVILLE — Tennessee’s latest woes include high unemployment, continuing foreclosures and a battle over collective-bargaining rights for teachers. But when a Republican representative took the Statehouse floor during a recent hearing, he warned of a new threat to his constituents’ way of life: Islamic law.

The representative, a former fighter pilot named Rick Womick, said he had been studying the Koran. He declared that Shariah, the Islamic code that guides Muslim beliefs and actions, is not just an expression of faith but a political and legal system that seeks world domination. “Folks,” Mr. Womick, 53, said with a sudden pause, “this is not what I call ‘Do unto others what you’d have them do unto you.’ ”

Similar warnings are being issued across the country as Republican presidential candidates, elected officials and activists mobilize against what they describe as the menace of Islamic law in the United States.

Since last year, more than two dozen states have considered measures to restrict judges from consulting Shariah, or foreign and religious laws more generally. The statutes have been enacted in three states so far.

Voters in Oklahoma overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment last November that bans the use of Islamic law in court. And in June, Tennessee passed an antiterrorism law that, in its original iteration, would have empowered the attorney general to designate Islamic groups suspected of terror activity as “Shariah organizations.”

A confluence of factors has fueled the anti-Shariah movement, most notably the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in New York, concerns about homegrown terrorism and the rise of the Tea Party. But the campaign’s air of grass-roots spontaneity, which has been carefully promoted by advocates, shrouds its more deliberate origins.

In fact, it is the product of an orchestrated drive that began five years ago in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the office of a little-known lawyer, David Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old Hasidic Jew with a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam. Despite his lack of formal training in Islamic law, Mr. Yerushalmi has come to exercise a striking influence over American public discourse about Shariah.

Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, Mr. Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.

The message has caught on. Among those now echoing Mr. Yerushalmi’s views are prominent Washington figures like R. James Woolsey, a former director of the C.I.A., and the Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, who this month signed a pledge to reject Islamic law, likening it to “totalitarian control.”

Yet, for all its fervor, the movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real. Even its leaders concede that American Muslims are not coalescing en masse to advance Islamic law. Instead, they say, Muslims could eventually gain the kind of foothold seen in Europe, where multicultural policies have allowed for what critics contend is an overaccommodation of Islamic law.

“Before the train gets too far down the tracks, it’s time to put up the block,” said Guy Rodgers, the executive director of ACT for America, one of the leading organizations promoting the legislation drafted by Mr. Yerushalmi.

The more tangible effect of the movement, opponents say, is the spread of an alarmist message about Islam — the same kind of rhetoric that appears to have influenced Anders Behring Breivik, the suspect in the deadly dual attacks in Norway on July 22. The anti-Shariah campaign, they say, appears to be an end in itself, aimed at keeping Muslims on the margins of American life.

“The fact is there is no Shariah takeover in America,” said Salam Al-Marayati, the president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, one of several Muslim organizations that have begun a counteroffensive. “It’s purely a political wedge to create fear and hysteria.”

Anti-Shariah organizers are pressing ahead with plans to introduce versions of Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation in half a dozen new states, while reviving measures that were tabled in others.

The legal impact of the movement is unclear. A federal judge blocked the Oklahoma amendment after a representative of the Council on American- Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, sued the state, claiming the law was an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom.

The establishment clause of the Constitution forbids the government from favoring one religion over another or improperly entangling itself in religious matters. But many of the statutes are worded neutrally enough that they might withstand constitutional scrutiny while still limiting the way courts handle cases involving Muslims, other religious communities or foreign and international laws.

For Mr. Yerushalmi, the statutes themselves are a secondary concern. “If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose,” he said in one of several extensive interviews. “The purpose was heuristic — to get people asking this question, ‘What is Shariah?’ ”

The Road Map

Shariah means “the way to the watering hole.” It is Islam’s road map for living morally and achieving salvation. Drawing on the Koran and the sunnah — the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad — Islamic law reflects what scholars describe as the attempt, over centuries, to translate God’s will into a system of required beliefs and actions.

In the United States, Shariah, like Jewish law, most commonly surfaces in court through divorce and custody proceedings or in commercial litigation. Often these cases involve contracts that failed to be resolved in a religious setting. Shariah can also figure in cases involving foreign laws, for example in tort claims against businesses in Muslim countries. It then falls to the American judge to examine the religious issues at hand before making a ruling based on federal or state law.

The frequency of such cases is unknown. A recent report by the Center for Security Policy, a research institute based in Washington for which Mr. Yerushalmi is general counsel, identified 50 state appellate cases, mostly over the last three decades. The report offers these cases as proof that the United States is vulnerable to the encroachment of Islamic law. But, as many of the cases demonstrate, judges tend to follow guidelines that give primacy to constitutional rights over foreign or religious laws.

The exceptions stand out. Critics most typically cite a New Jersey case last year in which a Moroccan woman sought a restraining order against her husband after he repeatedly assaulted and raped her. The judge denied the request, finding that the defendant lacked criminal intent because he believed that his wife must comply, under Islamic law, with his demand for sex.

The decision was reversed on appeal.

“It’s wrong to just accept that the courts generally get it right, but sometimes get it wrong,” said Stephen M. Gelé, a Louisiana lawyer who represents a nonprofit organization that has promoted Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation. “There is no reason to make a woman play a legal game of Russian roulette.”

While proponents of the legislation have seized on aspects of Shariah that are unfavorable to women, Mr. Yerushalmi’s focus is broader. His interest in Islamic law began with the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, when he was living in Ma’ale Adumim, a large Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

At the time, Mr. Yerushalmi, a native of South Florida, divided his energies between a commercial litigation practice in the United States and a conservative research institute based in Jerusalem, where he worked to promote free-market reform in Israel.

After moving to Brooklyn the following year, Mr. Yerushalmi said he began studying Arabic and Shariah under two Islamic scholars, whom he declined to name. He said his research made clear that militants had not “perverted” Islamic law, but were following an authoritative doctrine that sought global hegemony — a mission, he says, that is shared by Muslims around the world. To illustrate that point, Mr. Yerushalmi cites studies in which large percentages of Muslims overseas say they support Islamic rule.

In interviews, Islamic scholars disputed Mr. Yerushalmi’s claims. Although Islam, like some other faiths, aspires to be the world’s reigning religion, they said, the method for carrying out that goal, or even its relevance in everyday life, remains a far more complex subject than Mr. Yerushalmi suggests.

“Even in Muslim-majority countries, there is a huge debate about what it means to apply Islamic law in the modern world,” said Andrew F. March, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at Yale University. The deeper flaw in Mr. Yerushalmi’s argument, Mr. March said, is that he characterizes the majority of Muslims who practice some version of Shariah — whether through prayer, charitable giving or other common rituals — as automatic adherents to Islam’s medieval rules of war and political domination.

It is not the first time Mr. Yerushalmi has engaged in polemics. In a 2006 essay, he wrote that “most of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic,” and asked why “people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem-solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?” He has also railed against what he sees as a politically correct culture that avoids open discussion of why “the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”

On its Web site, the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish civil rights organization, describes Mr. Yerushalmi as having a record of “anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry.” His legal clients have also drawn notoriety, among them Pamela Geller, an incendiary blogger who helped drive the fight against the Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.

A stout man who wears antique wire-rimmed glasses and a thick, white-streaked beard, Mr. Yerushalmi has a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the arguments his work provokes. “It’s an absurdity to claim that I have ever uttered or taken a position on the side of racism or bigotry or misogyny,” he said.

When pressed for evidence that American Muslims endorse the fundamentalist view of Shariah he warns against, Mr. Yerushalmi argues that the problem lies with America’s Muslim institutions and their link to Islamist groups overseas. As a primary example, he and others cite a memorandum that surfaced in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Muslim charity based in Texas whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of sending funds to Hamas.

The 1991 document outlined a strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States that involved “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Critics emphasize a page listing 29 Muslim American groups as “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” Skeptics point out that on the same page, the author wrote, imagine if “they all march according to one plan,” which suggests they were not working in tandem.

Nevertheless, a study by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center to be released next week found that only a minority of American Muslims say that domestic Islamic groups represent them. It also concludes that American Muslims have as much confidence in the judicial system as members of other faiths and are more likely than the other groups to say that elections in the United States are “honest.”

“There’s a conflation between the idea of Islam being a universalist, proselytizing religion and reducing it to a totalitarian movement,” said Mohammad Fadel, an associate professor specializing in Islamic law at the University of Toronto. “All good propaganda is based on half-truths.”

Reaching Out

The movement took root in January 2006 when Mr. Yerushalmi started the Society of Americans for National Existence, a nonprofit organization that became his vehicle for opposing Shariah. On the group’s Web site, he proposed a law that would make observing Islamic law, which he likened to sedition, a felony punishable by 20 years in prison. He also began raising money to study whether there is a link between “Shariah-adherent behavior” in American mosques and support for violent jihad.

The project, Mapping Shariah, led Mr. Yerushalmi to Frank Gaffney, a hawkish policy analyst and commentator who is the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. Well connected in neoconservative circles, Mr. Gaffney has been known to take polarizing positions (he once argued that President Obama might secretly be Muslim). Mr. Gaffney would emerge as Mr. Yerushalmi’s primary link to a network of former and current government officials, security analysts and grass-roots political organizations.

Together, they set out to “engender a national debate about the nature of Shariah and the need to protect our Constitution and country from it,” Mr. Gaffney wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times. The center contributed an unspecified amount to Mr. Yerushalmi’s study, which cost roughly $400,000 and involved surreptitiously sending researchers into 100 mosques. The study, which said that 82 percent of the mosques’ imams recommended texts that promote violence, has drawn sharp rebuke from Muslim leaders, who question its premise and findings.

Mr. Yerushalmi also took aim at the industry of Islamic finance — specifically American banks offering funds that invest only in companies deemed permissible under Shariah, which would exclude, for example, those that deal in alcohol, pork or gambling.

In the spring of 2008, Mr. Gaffney arranged meetings with officials at the Treasury Department, including Robert M. Kimmitt, then the deputy secretary, and Stuart A. Levey, then the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Mr. Yerushalmi warned them about what he characterized as the lack of transparency and other dangers of Shariah-compliant finance.

In an interview, Mr. Levey said he found Mr. Yerushalmi’s presentation of Shariah “sweeping and, ultimately, unconvincing.”

For Mr. Yerushalmi, the meetings led to a shift in strategy. “If you can’t move policy at the federal level, well, where do you go?” he said. “You go to the states.”

With the advent of the Tea Party, Mr. Yerushalmi saw an opening. In 2009, he and Mr. Gaffney laid the groundwork for a project aimed at state legislatures — the same year that Mr. Yerushalmi received more than $153,000 in consulting fees from Mr. Gaffney’s center, according to a tax form filed by the group.

That summer, Mr. Yerushalmi began writing “American Laws for American Courts,” a model statute that would prevent state judges from considering foreign laws or rulings that violate constitutional rights in the United States. The law was intended to appeal not just to the growing anti-Shariah movement, but also to a broader constituency that had long opposed the influence of foreign laws in the United States.

Mr. Gaffney swiftly drummed up interest in the law, holding conference calls with activists and tapping a network of Tea Party and Christian groups as well as ACT for America, which has 170,000 members and describes itself as “opposed to the authoritarian values of radical Islam.” The group emerged as a “force multiplier,” Mr. Gaffney said, fanning out across the country to promote the law. The American Public Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed that year by a political consultant based in Michigan, began recruiting dozens of lawyers to act as legislative sponsors.

Early versions of the law, which passed in Tennessee and then Louisiana, made no mention of Shariah, which was necessary to pass constitutional muster, Mr. Yerushalmi said. But as the movement spread, state lawmakers began tweaking the legislation to refer to Shariah and other religious laws or systems — including, in one ill-fated proposal in Arizona, “karma.”

By last fall, the anti-Shariah movement had gained new prominence. ACT for America spent $60,000 promoting the Oklahoma initiative, a campaign that included 600,000 robocalls featuring Mr. Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director. Mr. Gingrich called for a federal law banning courts from using Shariah in place of American law, and Sarah Palin warned that if Shariah law “were to be adopted, allowed to govern in our country, it will be the downfall of America.”

Also last fall, Mr. Gaffney’s organization released “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a 172-page report whose lead author was Mr. Yerushalmi and whose signatories included Mr. Woolsey and other former intelligence officials.

Mr. Yerushalmi’s legislation has drawn opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union as well as from Catholic bishops and Jewish groups. Mr. Yerushalmi said he did not believe that court cases involving Jewish or canon law would be affected by the statutes because they are unlikely to involve violations of constitutional rights.

Business lobbyists have also expressed concern about the possible effect of the statutes, as corporations often favor foreign laws in contracts or tort disputes. This is perhaps the only constituency that has had an influence. The three state statutes that have passed — most recently in Arizona — make corporations exempt.

“It is not preferable,” Mr. Yerushalmi said. “Is it an acceptable political compromise? Of course it is.”

In Afghanistan, Rage at Young Lovers

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Rafi Mohammed, 17, is held in a juvenile prison in Herat for trying to run off with his girlfriend, Halima Mohammedi.

By JACK HEALY

Published: July 30, 2011

HERAT, Afghanistan — The two teenagers met inside an ice cream factory through darting glances before roll call, murmured hellos as supervisors looked away and, finally, a phone number folded up and tossed discreetly onto the workroom floor.

It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison. Officially, their fates lie in the hands of an unsteady legal system. But they face harsher judgments of family and community.

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

The teenagers, embarrassed to talk about love, said plainly that they were ready for death. But they were baffled by why they should have to be killed.

Mr. Mohammed, who is 17, said: “I feel so bad. I just pray that God gives this girl back to me. I’m ready to lose my life. I just want her safe release.”

Ms. Mohammedi, who believes she is 17, said: “We are all human. God created us from one dirt. Why can we not marry each other, or love each other?”

The case has resonated in Herat, in part because it stirred memories of a brutal stoning ordered by the Taliban last summer in northern Afghanistan.

A young couple in Kunduz was stoned to death by scores of people — including family members — after they eloped. The stoning marked a brutal application of Shariah law, captured on a video recording released online months later. Afghan officials promised to investigate after an international outcry, but no one has faced criminal charges.

The immediate response to the violence in Herat was heartening by comparison. Top clerics declined to condemn the couple. Police officers risked their lives to pull the two teenagers to safety and deposit them into the legal system, rather than the hands of angry relatives. And the police reported that five or six girls had fled the city with their boyfriends and fiancés in the weeks after the riot.

After discussing the case, the provincial council decided that Mr. Mohammed and Ms. Mohammedi deserved the government’s protection because neither was engaged, and because each said they wanted to get married.

“They are not criminals, even if they have committed sexual activities,” said Abdul Zahir, the council’s leader.

But so far, their words have not freed either of the teenagers or lent them any long-term security.

Ms. Mohammedi was initially taken to the only women’s shelter in this province of more than 1.5 million people, but the police transferred her quickly to the city’s juvenile detention center, a sun-washed building where about 40 girls and 40 boys sleep in separate dormitories. The police said they had referred the teenagers’ cases to prosecutors.

“From their point of view, she committed a crime,” said Suraya Pakzad, director of Voices of Women Organization, a rights group that provided Ms. Mohammedi with a bed for one night.

Ms. Pakzad said most of the women and girls in the shelters of western Afghanistan had fled forced or abusive marriages, or had been ostracized from their communities for dating young men without their families’ approval. Male relatives often punish such transgressions with beatings or death.

But in separate interviews at the juvenile jail, Ms. Mohammedi and Mr. Mohammed said they had not worried about such things.

He did not think about the rage that would erupt if a young Tajik man picked up a Hazara girl in a neighborhood dominated by conservative Hazaras, members of one of Afghanistan’s many ethnic minorities. “It’s the heart,” Mr. Mohammed said. “When you love somebody, you don’t ask who she is or what she is. You just go for it.”

They had much in common. His father was dead, as was her mother. They described each other as quiet and polite, both a little shy. They liked the same sappy songs that float over from Iran.

After six years of primary school, Ms. Mohammedi had wanted to study English and take computer classes, but she said her family told her it was a waste of time, and sent her to work at the ice cream factory, for $95 a month.

There, at least, they found each other. Mr. Mohammed spent a month stealing hellos before Ms. Mohammedi tossed her phone number at his feet.

The couple talked on the phone most nights, even though her stepmother disapproved. After a year, they decided they were fed up with hiding their relationship. They would meet, go to the courthouse and get married. Mr. Mohammed persuaded an older cousin to take him to the village of Jabrail, where she was waiting in the town square.

They had not driven 30 feet when a yellow Toyota Corolla blocked their path and angry men jumped out. Ms. Mohammedi was not hurt in the melee that followed, but the crowd beat up the cousin and pummeled Mr. Mohammed until he collapsed.

“We knew they would kill us,” she said.

They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other’s sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes.

Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.

Sharifullah Sahak and Lynsey Addario contributed reporting.

Nation Calls Capital Mad, and It Agrees

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: July 30, 2011

WASHINGTON — Ground zero of the debt crisis in Washington just might be Speaker John A. Boehner’s call center, hidden away in a corner of the Capitol, where five besieged staff members have as many as 300 people on hold at a time. “Diane from Oregon” managed to get through on Thursday to tell the center’s director, Thomas A. Andrews, that Mr. Boehner should “cut spending now.”

Mr. Andrews, 24, thanked her for her thoughts, then checked to see how long her wait time had been. “Oh, it’s actually down to 30 minutes,” he said, cheered that it was not an hour and a half. Quickly, he returned to work, where the rest of an astonishing deluge — 15,000 voice mail messages and 30,000 e-mails a day — cried out for his attention.

If the rest of the country thinks Washington has gone mad this summer, that is pretty much the view in this bewildered capital, too, even in Mr. Boehner’s overwhelmed call center.

Among the bar patrons at the Old Ebbitt Grill worried about stock portfolios, the tourists anxious about disability checks and the current and former policy makers stunned by Washington paralysis, the mood was described variously as one of doom, disgust and disbelief.

Washington is talking of little else.

“I never saw anything like this, and I never thought I would see anything like this,” said Laurence H. Meyer, a former Federal Reserve governor who has been fielding calls to his Washington research firm, Macroeconomic Advisers, from worried hedge fund clients. “I never appreciated how dysfunctional our political system is.”

Tourists who have come from around the world to see messy American democracy in action are watching far more mess than they ever expected.

“You guys are nuts,” said Joseph Eastwood, 44, a Toronto accountant who was waiting in the Capitol Visitor Center for a tour last week. “Instead of building the country, you’re destroying it.”

A German tourist standing nearby was more tactful but was perplexed as he tried to teach his two teenage children about the scale of United States debt. “They are not quite understanding the sum of money borrowed,” said Peter Radewahn, 54, the director of a Bonn lobbying group. (The United States has about $14 trillion in debt, which is 99.5 percent of its yearly economic output. Germany has $2.85 trillion in debt, or 80 percent of its output.)

Mr. Radewahn said he did not want to say more because he was a guest in America and wished to be diplomatic.

At the Washington National Zoo on Saturday, Dean Thompson, 53, a Republican and a mechanical engineer visiting from Augusta, Ga., was filled with disdain for lawmakers of both parties on Capitol Hill. “They’re playing with people’s savings is what they’re doing,” he said. “It’s like a game to them.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, fumed on Friday that although Mr. Boehner was throwing “piece after piece of red meat to his right-wing lions” — that is, Tea Party-allied Republicans who are steadfastly opposed to raising the debt limit — they were never sated.

Of course, few could match the scorn last week of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who, quoting an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, derided the “Tea Party Hobbits.” (Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party-allied Republican, later retorted, “I’d rather be a hobbit than a troll.”)

Beyond the sniping of opposing lawmakers, this legislative crisis has reached deeper into the layers of Washington, perhaps even more than the protracted debate over health care did.

Much of what is occurring in Congress may be incomprehensible, but the basic issue — that the United States needs to increase the limit on its credit card or not be able to pay its bills — is understood.

“I get people stopping me around the Capitol more, asking what’s going to happen,” said Kelly O’Donnell, the Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC, who said she was averaging about four hours of sleep a night. “A lot of kids ask, which is interesting.”

One such visitor, Luke Stancil, 13, the chairman of the Teenage Republicans of Johnston County, N.C., had many questions and thoughts about the debt crisis during a trip to Washington last week.

While waiting to see Mr. Paul with a group of other teenage Republicans in the Cannon House Office Building on Thursday, Luke said that although he liked conservatives affiliated with the Tea Party, he felt that in the interest of the country they should support Mr. Boehner’s bill to raise the debt ceiling.

“That’s all they have now,” he said soberly. (Mr. Boehner ended up postponing the vote because of a lack of conservative support, but a modified bill was passed on Friday before it was killed later that day in the Senate.)

Meanwhile, weighing in from Chicago was its newly elected mayor, Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s incendiary former White House chief of staff, who, had he been in his old job, would have been engaged in hand-to-hand combat on Capitol Hill.

“I just passed four bills today, so I’m very happy,” Mr. Emanuel reported. Well, what did he make of what was going on in Washington? “My basic point is, look, your country requires you to take responsibility and understand what an honest compromise is,” he said. He declined to answer a question about whether he missed the capital.

At the Old Ebbitt Grill, across the street from the Treasury Department, Cory Carlson, a 27-year-old account executive for the EMC Corporation, a technology giant, was at the bar on Thursday with friends. Asked about the chaos on Capitol Hill, Mr. Carlson said that the health of the economy depended on Congress raising the debt limit and that he was worried about his investments. “Don’t get me started,” he said.

In front of the Treasury building on Friday, Margaret McCoy, a 64-year-old Democrat visiting from Pembroke, N.C., said she was worried, too — about her government disability checks.

“I’m fed up with it, just fed up with it,” she said, referring to the battle in Congress. “If their checks were cut like they said ours might be cut, I wonder how they would feel.”

She looked toward the White House and saw a knot of demonstrators. Were they protesting the debt crisis, she wondered, a note of hope in her voice.

Actually, no. The demonstrators were celebrating a White House visit by President Alpha Condé, considered Guinea’s first democratically elected leader. (A separate Guinean group was also protesting the visit. The street outside the White House is a busy place.)

The Guineans in the pro-Condé group said they were astonished by the debt crisis and the chaos on Capitol Hill. “It’s crazy, it’s just crazy,” said Noumouke Cisse, 57, a taxi driver from New Haven. “They are the world leaders, you know? We are very surprised they continue to fight each other.”

Obituaries

- Frank Bender, ‘Recomposer’ of Faces of the Dead, Dies at 70Sun, 31 Jul
haunting, three-dimensional faces in clay — helped identify the forgotten dead and apprehend the fugitive living, died on Thursday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 70.

- Joe Arroyo, Star of Salsa and Colombian Music Giant, Dies at 55Sun, 31 Jul
Joe Arroyo, a Colombian songwriter, singer and bandleader whose pan-Caribbean salsa hybrids and historically conscious lyrics made him one of his country’s most respected musicians, died on Tuesday in Baranquilla, his adopted home city in Colombia. He was 55.

- Polly Platt, Producer and Production Designer, Dies at 72Sun, 31 Jul
Polly Platt, a Hollywood producer, designer and screenwriter who was responsible for the aesthetic of several of Peter Bogdanovich’s early films, died on Wednesday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 72.

- Howard Stein, Who Helped Teach Public to Invest, Dies at 84Sun, 31 Jul
Howard Stein, a former chief of the Dreyfus Corporation who as one of the fathers of the mutual fund industry introduced innovations like the first money market fund with no initial fee, died on Tuesday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 84.

Frank Bender, ‘Recomposer’ of Faces of the Dead, Dies at 70

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: July 30, 2011

Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor whose work — haunting, three-dimensional faces in clay — helped identify the forgotten dead and apprehend the fugitive living, died on Thursday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 70.

The cause was pleural mesothelioma, a rare cancer that attacks the outer lining of the lungs, his daughter Vanessa said.

An elfin man whose bald head, fierce gaze and Vandyke made him look like a pocket Mephistopheles, Mr. Bender was among the best known of the country’s handful of forensic sculptors — an unusual craft that stands at the nexus of art, crime, science and intuition.

Mr. Bender was almost entirely self-taught, for he never anticipated a career in forensic sculpture. Who, after all, envisions a life in which skulls, sent by hopeful law enforcement agencies, arrive periodically in the mail? (Usually the skulls had been denuded and cleaned, though not always, and luncheon visitors to Mr. Bender’s home-cum-studio occasionally arrived to find one bubbling away in a pot on the stove.)

A former professional photographer, Mr. Bender found his calling by chance in the late 1970s, on a trip to the Philadelphia morgue. After that he was consulted by police departments across the country and abroad, and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Of the 40 or so heads he sculptured over the years, most were designed to identify murder victims for whom DNA, dental records and fingerprints had come up empty.

In these cases, Mr. Bender endeavored to turn back time, using victims’ skulls to render their faces as they might have looked in life. A “recomposer of the decomposed” is what he called himself — quite cheerily — on his answering machine.

For fugitives, Mr. Bender coaxed time forward, using photographs and other information to sculpture malefactors as they might look 10 or 20 years on. It was in one such case that he scored his most spectacular success: a role in capturing one of the most notorious murderers in America.

A conjurer in clay, Mr. Bender was, he often said, as much psychologist as sculptor, divining — or so it seemed — features that skulls alone could not tell him: hair color, characteristic expressions or precise skin color, which he painted onto the finished sculpture.

His methods could yield striking likenesses. In the 1980s, for instance, the Philadelphia police asked him to help identify the remains of a woman found murdered in a down-at-the-heels area.

“She was wearing a Ship ’n Shore blouse — a nicely pleated blouse, not a blouse someone her age would wear in that neighborhood,” Mr. Bender told The Toronto Star in 2001. “To me, it told me she was looking for a way out, she was looking for a better life, so I had her looking up for hope.”

A few years later, a local woman identified the bust as her niece, Rosella Marie Atkinson, 18, who had disappeared in 1987. Rosella, she said, held her head up in just that way. In 2005, the killer confessed and was sent to prison.

It was not the money that spurred Mr. Bender: he charged about $1,700 for a sculptured head, and typically made only a few a year. Between assignments, he worked as a fine-art painter and sculptor and held various jobs, including working on a tugboat.

What drove him, those who knew him say, was a constitutional pugnacity.

“He’s a fighter for justice,” Ted Botha, the author of a book about Mr. Bender, said in an interview shortly before Mr. Bender’s death. “He’s almost like a little Captain America or something.”

Mr. Botha’s book, “The Girl With the Crooked Nose,” chronicles Mr. Bender’s work in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where he was asked to reconstruct the faces of women killed in a series of murders. Of the eight heads he made there, three led to identifications, Mr. Botha said.

It is impossible to gauge precisely Mr. Bender’s career success rate, where “success” means identifying a victim or catching a fugitive. Mr. Bender — who, as associates attest, was a larger-than-life character with no small awareness of his own news value — sometimes put the figure at 85 percent.

The correct figure, his associates say, is probably closer to 40 percent. “Not even he knows, because nobody actually tells him,” Mr. Botha said. “The police departments don’t always come back to him afterwards; that’s one of the kind of bittersweet things about what he does.”

Francis Augustus Bender Jr. was born in Philadelphia on June 16, 1941, and grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. After serving in the Navy, he embarked on a photography career.

In the 1970s, Mr. Bender took night classes in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The academy offered no anatomy classes at night, so in 1977 he took it upon himself to visit the morgue.

There, he saw the body of a woman, shot in the head and unrecognizable.

“I know what she looks like,” Mr. Bender was surprised to hear himself say.

“Do you know anything about forensics?” a medical examiner asked him.

“I don’t even know what the word means,” he said.

Galvanized, Mr. Bender set to work, producing a bust of a woman with a long nose and cleft chin. After a photograph of it appeared in newspapers, she was identified as Anna Duval, a Phoenix woman who had flown East to recoup money from a swindler and wound up dead. Her killer was later identified as a mob hit man, already imprisoned for other crimes.

Mr. Bender’s gift for waking the dead impressed the authorities, and more cases followed. At first he layered clay onto the skulls, consulting tissue-thickness charts to determine its depth at crucial points on the face.

Later on — for prosecutors were loath to see potential evidence trapped for eternity inside a sculpture — he used the skulls to make molds, from which he cast plaster heads.

His greatest triumph came in 1989, in the case of John Emil List. In 1971, Mr. List, a seemingly mild-mannered accountant, murdered his mother, wife and three children in their Westfield, N.J., home. Then he vanished.

Eighteen years later, the television show “America’s Most Wanted” commissioned a bust from Mr. Bender for a segment on Mr. List. Working from an old photograph, he created a balding, jowly figure.

In a stroke of inspiration — or perhaps luck — Mr. Bender added glasses with thick black rims, the kind he felt a strait-laced man like Mr. List would wear.

On May 21, 1989, a woman in Virginia watching the broadcast thought she recognized her neighbor, a balding, jowly accountant with thick black glasses named Robert Clark. On June 1, Mr. Clark was arrested. Fingerprints confirmed his identity as John List. Convicted and sentenced to five life terms, he died in 2008.

Mr. Bender’s wife, the former Janice Lynn Proctor, died of cancer last year. Besides his daughter Vanessa, he is survived by another daughter, Lisa Brawner; a sister, Sara Thurston; and three grandchildren.

With William Fleisher and Richard Walter, Mr. Bender founded the Vidocq Society in 1990. Based in Philadelphia, the group comprises forensic scientists, law enforcement officers and other professionals who convene to investigate unsolved murders.

Mr. Bender was also a subject of “The Murder Room,” a book about the society by Michael Capuzzo. A documentary film about Mr. Bender, “The Recomposer of the Decomposed,” is scheduled to be released next year.

Interviewers often asked Mr. Bender whether his life among the dead gave him nightmares. Yes, he replied, but not in the way you think. For years, he explained, his dreams had been peopled by the dead, and by sinister men.

The sinister men invariably attacked him, Mr. Bender said, and whenever they did, the unnamed dead rose up in his defense.

Joe Arroyo, Star of Salsa and Colombian Music Giant, Dies at 55

By JON PARELES

Published: July 30, 2011

Joe Arroyo, a Colombian songwriter, singer and bandleader whose pan-Caribbean salsa hybrids and historically conscious lyrics made him one of his country’s most respected musicians, died on Tuesday in Baranquilla, his adopted home city in Colombia. He was 55.

The cause was hypertension and fluid in the lungs, his manager, Luis Ojeda, said.

His death drew tributes from Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia; the Colombian pop singer Shakira, who appeared in concert with Mr. Arroyo; and the Colombian rocker Juanes, who often performed the Arroyo hit “La Noche” in concert.

And it was mourned throughout Colombia. Fans thronged his funeral at a cathedral in Baranquilla on Wednesday in an outpouring of grief, and Cartagena, the Caribbean coastal city where Mr. Arroyo was born, declared two days of official mourning, with flags flown at half staff and Mr. Arroyo’s music played in the historic city center. The Latin Recording Academy said it would award Mr. Arroyo a posthumous Prize of Musical Excellence in November.

Mr. Arroyo claimed his own genre in Caribbean music: Joesón. His songs drew their danceable rhythms from traditions within Colombia, including cumbia and porro, and from all around the Caribbean, with elements of Dominican merengue, Jamaican reggae, Martinican zouk, Trinidadian soca, Cuban son montuno and more.

He had a high, fervent tenor voice, and the songs and arrangements he wrote were driven by supercharged horns and percussion. Although there were many love songs and party songs among his dozens of Latin American hits, Mr. Arroyo’s signature song was “Rebelión,” about a 17th-century slave uprising in Cartagena, with its chorus, “No le pegue a la negra” (“Don’t hit the black woman”). He named his band La Verdad — the Truth.

Alvaro José Arroyo González was born in Cartagena on Nov. 1, 1955, and began singing publicly when he was 8. At 12, he was performing with the bands Sarmiento and La Heróica at the brothels of Cartagena’s red-light district. He moved to Barranquilla in his teens, where he formed the band La Protesta de Colombia.

He was soon invited to join a leading Colombian band, Fruko y Sus Tesos, and with them he toured the Americas through the 1970s, often performing on the New York City salsa circuit. He also sang with another salsa group, the Latin Brothers.

Mr. Arroyo started La Verdad in 1981. He wrote hundreds of songs and recorded dozens of albums with La Verdad until 2007, when he released “El Super Joe.”

Throughout his career his health was unsteady. In 1983 he spent a week in a coma, near death, from a thyroid ailment. He had diabetes and kidney disease and was widely reported to have drug problems.

He was often an authoritative performer, though also at times a shaky one. But his songs were widely admired. At the annual carnival in Barranquilla, Mr. Arroyo won the highest award, the Conga de Oro, so often that a new category was created for him: Super Conga de Oro.

He is survived by his wife, Jacqueline Ramos, and eight children.

Polly Platt, Producer and Production Designer, Dies at 72

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: July 29, 2011

Polly Platt, a Hollywood producer, designer and screenwriter who was responsible for the aesthetic of several of Peter Bogdanovich’s early films, died on Wednesday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 72.

The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, her family said.

Mr. Bogdanovich was Ms. Platt’s second husband. They were married from 1962 until their divorce in 1971, and their collaboration continued afterward.

Her films for him as a production designer include “The Last Picture Show” (1971), in which she conjured a dust-bitten Texas town in the 1950s; “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal; and “Paper Moon” (1973), starring Mr. O’Neal and his daughter, Tatum, in which Ms. Platt brought the Depression-era Midwest to life.

She also collaborated with Mr. Bogdanovich on “Targets” (1968), the first film he directed under his own name. (His directorial credit, as Derek Thomas, came on “Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women” in 1968.)

Besides serving as the production designer of “Targets,” Ms. Platt conceived, with Mr. Bogdanovich, the original story on which his screenplay was based. The film, about a Vietnam veteran-turned-sniper, stars Tim O’Kelly and Boris Karloff.

Reviewing “Targets” in The New York Times, Howard Thompson called it an “original and brilliant melodrama.”

Ms. Platt was nominated for an Academy Award for art direction for her work on “Terms of Endearment” (1983), directed by James L. Brooks. She wrote the screenplay for “Pretty Baby” (1978), directed by Louis Malle and starring Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in World War I-era New Orleans.

With that film, Ms. Platt also began her producing career, serving as an associate producer.

Ms. Platt was known for her ability to spot things that would translate well to the screen. It was she who alerted Mr. Bogdanovich to Larry McMurtry’s novel “The Last Picture Show,” which became the basis of the acclaimed movie. (Ms. Platt undoubtedly came to regret the decision: Mr. Bogdanovich’s relationship with one of the film’s stars, Cybill Shepherd, brought about the end of their marriage.)

She was also known for her long professional association with Mr. Brooks. She was executive vice president of his production company, Gracie Films, from 1985 to 1995. The company’s pictures on which she was a producer or executive producer include “Broadcast News” (1987), “The War of the Roses” (1989) and “Bottle Rocket” (1996).

Mary Marr Platt, known as Polly, was born on Jan. 29, 1939, in Fort Sheridan, Ill. She studied art at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began her career as a costume designer for the stage.

Ms. Platt’s first husband, Philip Klein, died in an automobile accident in the early 1960s, eight months into their marriage. Her third husband, Tony Wade, died in 1985. She is survived by a brother, Jack Platt; two daughters, Antonia Bogdanovich and Alexandra Bogdanovich, known as Sashy; a stepdaughter, Kelly Wade; a stepson, Jon Wade; three grandchildren; and four step-grandchildren.

Her other films include “A Star Is Born” (1976), for which she was the production designer.

Ms. Platt’s incisive eye for the filmable printed page extended beyond fiction. In the early 1980s, she gave Mr. Brooks an original piece of art from the comic strip “Life in Hell,” by a young underground artist named Matt Groening. Mr. Brooks was so enchanted with it that he engaged Mr. Groening to create animated segments for “The Tracey Ullman Show,” of which Gracie Films was a producer.

On his way to meet with Mr. Brooks, Mr. Groening dreamed up a new set of characters, a yellow family known as the Simpsons. They began life on Ms. Ullman’s show in 1987 before being accorded, in 1989, a prime-time show of their own, soon to begin its 23rd season.

Howard Stein, Who Helped Teach Public to Invest, Dies at 84

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: July 30, 2011

Howard Stein, a former chief of the Dreyfus Corporation who as one of the fathers of the mutual fund industry introduced innovations like the first money market fund with no initial fee, died on Tuesday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 84.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his son-in-law Jamie Stokien said.

Mr. Stein was a powerful force in bringing stock and bond investment to the general public. He broadened the mutual fund market by flooding potential investors with direct mail, rather than using salesmen. He helped devise the famous Dreyfus television commercials in which a lion stalks out of a subway. He not only invented the first “no load” money market fund — meaning no upfront fee — but also created the first tax-free municipal bond fund. He was the first to sell an American mutual fund in Japan.

Mr. Stein was adept at picking investments, notably Polaroid in the company’s early days. His instinct to go for what he called “unloved” stocks and against market trends was legendary.

“People now realize that Howard is always a step ahead of the market,” Barton Biggs, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asset Management, told Crain’s New York Business in 1990.

When Mr. Stein joined Dreyfus as a young analyst in 1955, it had around $2 million in assets. At the time of its sale to the Mellon Bank Corporation in 1994, it had assets of $80 billion.

During the 1970s, Mr. Stein set up a fund to invest in companies that had shown unusual concern for the environment and for consumers. He recruited people from outside the conventional business world, like the journalist Bill Moyers, to join Dreyfus’s board. He invited provocative public figures like the feminist writer and editor Gloria Steinem to speak to directors and top executives and offer them new points of view: the Steinem session kept the mostly male group arguing until 1:30 a.m.

Mr. Stein himself was an early critic of the Vietnam War. In 1968 he took a six-month leave of absence to be chief fund-raiser for Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign. He was on President Richard M. Nixon’s so-called enemies list. He worked with John Gardner in planning Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby group.

In 1988, Mr. Stein served on the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms, known as the Brady Commission, which investigated the market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, or Black Monday.

Howard Mathew Stein was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 6, 1926, to immigrants from Poland. His family moved around New York, finally settling in an apartment over the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. His parents, a brother and a sister worked in the garment industry. At 5, he began to play the violin. He was soon practicing for as many as 10 hours a day and planned to be a musician.

By his own account he pursued his formal education between encounters with truant officers. He attended the Straubenmuller Textile High School on Manhattan’s West Side and the Juilliard School, which gave him a scholarship. He gave up on a music career when he realized he was not destined to be a great violinist.

At 23, he got a job loading steel onto trucks for 75 cents an hour. “It was invigorating for three or four hours,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1982.

He looked for work on Wall Street and became a trainee at Bache & Company, where he noticed that responses to sales brochures piled up unanswered while salesmen concentrated on person-to-person contacts. He contacted the writers of those responses and built up a rich commission business. He left Bache in 1955 because he didn’t believe he was rising fast enough, Time magazine said in a cover article about him in 1970.

He joined Dreyfus and soon became an assistant to Jack J. Dreyfus Jr., the firm’s founder, chief executive and chairman. He became president in 1965, and chairman and chief executive in 1970.

Mr. Stein’s record of sharp investing included buying New York City real estate at cheap prices during the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s. But he was roundly criticized in the ’80s and ’90s for holding back on buying stocks when the markets were surging. When Fortune magazine asked him about this in 1996, he replied, perhaps jocularly: “I was stupid! I wasn’t paying attention.”

In fact, his conviction that stocks were overvalued saved him from the devastation many of his competitors experienced in the 1987 crash.

In 1994, the Mellon Bank Corporation of Pittsburgh acquired Dreyfus in a stock swap valued at $1.85 billion. Mr. Stein continued as Dreyfus’s chairman and chief executive, joined Mellon’s board and was reported to have made around $90 million personally from the deal. He resigned in 1996.

Mr. Stein is survived by his wife, the former Janet Gelder; his daughters, Julia Stokien, Jocelyn Hayes, Jessica Levine, Joanna Stein and Jennifer Seay; and six grandchildren.

A former employee of Mr. Stein’s gave Fortune an example of how Mr. Stein’s thinking strayed from the beaten path. Years earlier, Dreyfus was heavily invested in enterprises owned by the reclusive tycoon J. Paul Getty, some of which were looking shaky. When Mr. Stein suggested that this employee speak with Mr. Getty, the employee replied that “nobody” talks to Mr. Getty.

“Well, have you tried?” Mr. Stein asked. A week later, the employee was in Rome, where Mr. Getty answered all of Mr. Stein’s questions.