Monti Resigns in Italy, but May Seek to Regain Office

ROME — Prime Minister Mario Monti resigned on Friday evening following Parliament’s confidence vote on the 2013 budget, but he is still expected to play a major role in early elections, possibly as a candidate, analysts said.

At a news conference scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Monti is expected to present a political agenda — pro-Europe and pro-fiscal rigor — and call on all parties to endorse it, aides said Friday. Mr. Monti, an economist who has helped restore Italy’s international credibility but has suffered politically for championing a series of tax increases and budget cuts, has steadfastly refused to say whether he will run for prime minister or present an agenda that he hopes parties will endorse. Whether he does run or not, however, he has already radically shifted Italy’s political landscape.

With Italy facing economic uncertainty and sluggish growth, Mr. Monti has emerged as a centrist force in a field previously divided between the center-left Democratic Party of Pier Luigi Bersani, which opinion polls place first, and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has risen in polls since taking to the airwaves with a populist message critical of Mr. Monti’s tax increases.

“He’s de facto a candidate. He is the head politician of this coalition,” said Stefano Folli, a columnist for the business daily Il Sole 24 Ore, referring to a centrist grouping that has been courting Mr. Monti.

On Friday evening, Mr. Monti handed in his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano, who in a tough speech to lawmakers last week lamented the “brusque” end of the government and Parliament’s failure to carry out significant structural changes in Italy’s encrusted economy.

Mr. Napolitano is soon expected to dissolve Parliament, opening a hard-fought campaign amid rising unemployment, taxes and populism. Mr. Monti will stay on as caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed. In that time, he is expected to retain the power to pass emergency legislation.

“He’s already a senator for life, so he doesn’t have to become a candidate in the technical way,” Mr. Folli added.

After losing the support of Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party this month, Mr. Monti said that he would step down after the budget was passed. On Friday, lawmakers voted 373 in favor and 67 against with 15 abstentions in a confidence vote over the budget, which stipulates spending cuts of $4.8 billion through 2015.

Mr. Monti could run as a candidate or endorse a centrist alliance that includes a veteran political party, the Union of Christian Democrats, and Toward the Third Republic, a fledgling civic movement led by the chairman of Ferrari, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. If Mr. Monti lends his name to the centrists, he is expected to draw moderates from Mr. Berlusconi’s party. Mr. Monti also has the implicit support of the Catholic Church, which is crucial to the survival of any Italian government.

After weeks of wavering, Mr. Monti seems to have decided to stay involved in Italian politics after other European leaders, concerned about the prospect of an increasingly populist Mr. Berlusconi, urged him to stay in the picture.

Last week, members of the European People’s Party, a group of center-right parties across Europe, asked the unelected Mr. Monti to attend a summit in Brussels, which Mr. Berlusconi attended as the head of Italy’s largest center-right party. “I can say that there was massive support from E.P.P. members that Monti should remain at the helm of Italy,” said Kostas Sasmatzoglou, the group’s spokesman.

“It was Europe pushing him to continue,” Mr. Folli, the columnist, said. “Germany already has Hollande,” he said, referring to France’s Socialist prime minister, François Hollande. “It doesn’t want another country to go to the left, to go back on fiscal rigor.”

He added: “It can have Bersani, but Bersani ‘corrected’ and supported by Monti.”

Indeed, if he lends them his support, Mr. Monti and the centrist groupings are not expected to get more than 15 percent of the vote. Mr. Bersani’s Democratic Party is expected to place first, but without enough votes to govern in both houses even if it allies with the smaller Left Ecology and Freedom party. It remains to be seen if the center will take votes away from Mr. Berlusconi or Mr. Bersani.

On Thursday, Mr. Monti was widely perceived to have begun his campaign with a politically calculated speech at a Fiat automotive plant in southern Italy. With Fiat’s chairman, Sergio Marchionne, by his side, he said that Italy needed to stay the course on structural changes. The speech effectively challenged Mr. Bersani, a moderate who will most likely have to tack further left.

Mr. Monti came to power in November 2011, replacing Mr. Berlusconi amid global financial panic. He helped burnish Italy’s image abroad, but effectively raised taxes, worsening Italy’s recession. Although populists have depicted Mr. Monti and his government as a puppet of Europe and the banks, many Italians support him as a needed change from politics as usual.

“I prefer Monti to Berlusconi or any other politician, even if he left us in our underwear,” said Annalisa di Piero, 50, a costume designer and stylist, referring to the tax increases that have left Italians with less in their pockets in the holiday shopping season. “I just paid my property tax, but I still prefer him to these other clowns.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

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Putin Evasive on Banning Adoptions by Americans

James Hill for The New York Times

Journalists attended a news conference held by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow on Thursday.

MOSCOW — He seemed to wince a bit as he sauntered on stage — a twinge no doubt from a lingering back injury — but as he took his seat before scores of cameras in a hall packed with more than 1,000 journalists on Thursday, President Vladimir V. Putin was clearly in his element: under the bright lights, jaunty and confident, arriving to theme music befitting an action hero.

But this virtuoso performance was nearly upstaged by an issue that emerged only in the last few days: a proposed ban on adoptions of Russian children by American citizens, as part of a measure retaliating against the United States for a new law that will punish Russian citizens accused of violating human rights. Mr. Putin was pressed repeatedly for his view — eight times in all — and each time he skirted the question.

When it first came up, he gave an exaggerated shrug, palms turned upward, as if to say, “Bring it on.” By the last one, he was snapping back, short of patience, visibly annoyed.

Over and over, Mr. Putin said he needed time to read the text of the legislation before making a decision. But the text of the ban is just two simple sentences, and it was clear that Mr. Putin was buying time to contemplate what would be the most potent, anti-American action yet in his new term. This year, there have already been several setbacks in bilateral relations, including his ousting of the United States Agency for International Development.

“The talk here is not about the ban on adoption to all foreigners. The talk is about Americans who want to adopt children,” he said, adding, “I am simply not ready to answer you now.”

In other respects, this was the cocksure Mr. Putin of 10 years ago. As his mostly adoring audience settled in, Mr. Putin, who has seemed subdued at times since beginning a third term as president in May, appeared eager to joust. And he did — for four and a half hours — on virtually any subject: crop subsidies for sugar beet farmers and housing for miners, political relations with Georgia, economic ties with China, fishing restrictions in the Volga River delta.

After months of aggressive steps to squash political dissent and curtail what he views as undue political influence by outsiders, he seemed to relish every chance to take jabs at the United States, especially over its policies in the Middle East and on human rights.

He fielded dozens of questions, on topics like a continuing national debate over adopting daylight saving time, taxes, pensions and Russia’s position on the war in Syria. After each reply, journalists clamored for a chance to ask a question, waving signs and flags, scarves, even a red balloon to get noticed.

At one point, discussing the French actor Gérard Depardieu’s decision to renounce his French citizenship, Mr. Putin warmly invited him to live in Russia. “If Gérard really wants to have a residency permit for Russia or a Russian passport,” Mr. Putin said, “we can consider this issue resolved.”

Throughout the day, Mr. Putin basked in the fawning adulation of journalists visiting the capital from virtually every provincial corner of Russia. Near the end of the news conference, he paused to write a personal note extending birthday wishes to a reporter’s daughter.

But in a series of unusually sharp challenges, he was repeatedly forced back to the issue of the proposed adoption ban and pressed to say if he would support it.

Mr. Putin repeatedly criticized the new American law — the Magnitsky Act — as a provocation, and said Russia had no choice but to retaliate. “This is very bad and it poisons our relations,” he said.

Mr. Putin said the United States was failing to live up to an agreement ratified earlier this year, by not allowing Russian officials to get involved in abuse cases involving adopted Russian children, even as observers. And he lashed out at one reporter who challenged him.

“This is unacceptable,” he said. “Do you find it normal? Do you like it? Are you a sadomasochist?” At other times, Mr. Putin acknowledged that most adoptive parents from America are “kind and decent people.”

At several points, he said legal experts would have to review the proposed ban to see if it could be enacted given the agreement with the United States on adoptions. He also repeatedly rejected assertions that the ban would most hurt Russian orphans because he said it would apply only to the United States.

According to the Russian government, there were 956 Russian children adopted by families from the United States in 2011 — the most of any country. Italy was next with 798 followed by Spain with 685.

Mr. Putin did not cite those statistics, but he began his news conference rattling off an array of others to illustrate Russia’s recent successes. Economic output is growing stronger than in the United States or Europe, he said. Unemployment is lower. Average salaries are up. Reserve funds are flush. The birthrate is climbing.

One reporter asked him about the jailed former billionaire, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, whose imprisonment has been condemned as politically motivated. A court on Thursday reduced Mr. Khodorkovsky’s sentence so he may be released two years early, in 2014. Mr. Putin said the issue should not be politicized. Then, archly, he noted that at some point Mr. Khodorkovsky would be free. “May God give him health,” he said.

Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth contributed reporting.

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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French Court Refuses to Dismiss Strauss-Kahn Sex Investigation

PARIS — A French appeals court on Wednesday rejected a demand from Dominique Strauss-Kahn to dismiss an investigation of him in connection with a ring that recruited prostitutes for sex parties from Paris to Washington.

His appeal was an effort to end the last of the legal problems that forced him to resign as head managing director of the International Monetary Fund and ruined his ambition to seek the French presidency. Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 63, and his lawyers vowed to challenge the ruling from the court of appeal of Douai in northern France, which announced the decision without an explanation.

In the case, nine people in the northern city of Lille are under investigation for procurement of prostitutes, and in some cases, fraud. Mr. Strauss-Kahn has insisted that he was unaware that prostitutes were involved in the parties.

“This is not a victory for rights,” Frédérique Baulieu, a lawyer for Mr. Strauss-Kahn, said outside the courthouse in Douai. Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers had questioned the impartiality of judges, citing the leak of transcripts of his testimony when he was questioned by investigators and offered an explanation for his libertine lifestyle.

In October, the prosecutor’s office in Lille dropped sexual assault charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn after an “escort girl” withdrew her complaint about an incident that took place in Washington in December 2010, saying it was simply sex play.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn and his lawyers in the United States negotiated a confidential settlement earlier this month with Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel housekeeper who in 2011 accused him of sexual assault in a New York hotel room, charges that were dropped by the prosecutor because of doubts about Ms. Diallo’s credibility.

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F.T.C. Opens an Inquiry Into Data Brokers

It’s getting tougher to be a data broker.

Companies that collect, analyze and sell billions of details about the activities of consumers for marketing purposes have increasingly found themselves under government scrutiny this year.

The latest salvo comes from the Federal Trade Commission, which said on Tuesday that it had opened an inquiry into the practices of nine companies that collect and resell or analyze consumer data.

The agency issued 15-page administrative subpoenas to the information resellers. The orders require each company to provide extensive details about how it collects consumer data and how it uses, stores, analyzes and shares that data. The agency also asked for information about whether the company allows consumers to see and correct the records held about them.

After it reviews this information, the agency plans to issue a report to advise lawmakers on whether more regulation is needed; data brokers are currently largely unregulated.

The F.T.C.’s inquiry seeks far more comprehensive details than similar investigations this year in Congress. And executives at the companies may be more forthcoming about their practices with regulators because, unlike Congressional inquiries that often make their results public, the F.T.C. keeps the specifics it gathers confidential.

The subpoenas went to, among other companies, Acxiom of Little Rock, Ark., one of the world’s largest information resellers, which manages customer databases for major banks, automakers and retailers; eBureau, a company in St. Cloud, Minn., which, on behalf of clients like credit card companies, lenders, insurers and educational institutions, evaluates and scores online consumers in the market for those companies’ products; Intelius, a company in Bellevue, Wash., which offers people-search look-up services and background checks; and Peek-You, a company that analyzes social media sentiment.

“We are going to get a huge amount of data,” David C. Vladeck, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the F.T.C., said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “We are going to get answers.”

In an e-mail, Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, the chief privacy officer of Acxiom, said the company had not yet received the F.T.C.’s letter, but was looking forward to cooperating with the inquiry. “We consider this request as an avenue to promote a better understanding of why what we do is vital for the American economy as it creates enormous value for people and businesses while respecting and protecting consumers’ interests,” she wrote.

Gordon Meyer, the chief executive of eBureau, wrote in an e-mail that the consumer scoring company “welcomes the opportunity to describe, to the F.T.C., its practices and the benefits we provide to businesses as well as consumers.”

Representatives of other companies did not return e-mails seeking comment.

Companies and organizations in the United States spend more than $2 billion a year on third-party data about individuals, according to a report last year on personal identity management from Forrester Research, a market research firm. That figure does not include spending on market research and customer data analytics, the report said.

Industry representatives argue that their practices benefit consumers. Data brokers, they say, collect information about individuals’ purchasing histories, estimated salaries, property ownership, family size, leisure pursuits — and sometimes also their race or ethnicity, age, gender, health concerns, online browsing history and social networks — to help marketers tailor pitches to a person’s demonstrated tastes. When these bespoke ad systems work properly, the companies argue, marketers can identify male Southern Californians who surf and show them ads for board shorts even as they avoid sending coupons for ski vacations to people who prefer Alaskan cruises.

But, as consumers conduct more of their personal and commercial lives online, that type of data collection has been steadily increasing, fueled by new online surveillance techniques and more sophisticated analytics. Some companies, for example, have compiled several thousand different pieces of information on a majority of adults in the United States. Regulators say they are concerned that such comprehensive data collection could be used to profile, score or segment consumers, with the potential to unfairly limit the kinds of financial, insurance, health, education or other marketing offers certain consumers receive.

Mr. Vladeck of the F.T.C. offered one possibility he worried about: a hypothetical consumer who buys a deep-fat fryer online may get typecast by data broker systems as a health risk, and then is passed over for marketing pitches for insurance or other services.

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Female Vaccination Workers, Essential in Pakistan, Become Prey

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis. A ninth victim died on Thursday, a day after being shot in the northwestern city of Peshawar, The Associated Press reported.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here are easy targets. They wear no uniforms but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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Female Vaccination Workers, Essential in Pakistan, Become Prey

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis. A ninth victim died on Thursday, a day after being shot in the northwestern city of Peshawar, The Associated Press reported.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here are easy targets. They wear no uniforms but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal

The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that prompted the BBC to cancel a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a BBC fixture who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.

While the scandal led to the resignation and reassignment of several top executives — including George Entwistle, just two months into his tenure in the BBC’s top job as director general — Mr. Pollard absolved top management of applying “undue pressure” in the decision to stop the broadcast.

The report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation and was unaware of the sexual abuse accusations until he left the BBC this September. Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.

The report traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Its central conclusion was that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile segment on “Newsnight,” an investigative program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the segment was scheduled to run.

“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after a rival channel, ITV, broadcast its own exposé in October 2012.

That segment presented the accounts of five women who said they had been sexually abused as teenagers by Mr. Savile, the report said. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”

Mr. Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, dismissed a widely circulated theory that BBC News executives or their superiors pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment to avoid embarrassing the BBC. Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, said that he canceled the report because he thought the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile were inadequately substantiated.

“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he does not believe that they went beyond journalistic considerations.

After publication of the report, Tim Davie, the BBC’s acting director general, said that Stephen Mitchell, the deputy director of news, would be taking early retirement and that Mr. Rippon would be moved to another job. Helen Boaden, director of the news division, who along with Mr. Rippon and Mr. Mitchell was suspended while the nine-week Pollard inquiry was in progress, will return to her job, overseeing new editorial leadership at “Newsnight.”

In a statement, the BBC Trust, which oversees the broadcaster, said the report made clear the need for major changes in the BBC’s operation. It said top executives must take initiative and responsibility, share information and embrace criticism, and persuade employees to rid the company of the “insularity and distrust” revealed in the report.

“The BBC portrayed by the Pollard review is not fundamentally flawed, but has been chaotic,” it said. “That now needs to change.”

The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile program, including Mr. Rippon and the top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Ms. Boaden and Mr. Mitchell, saying they had reached a “flawed” conclusion in canceling the “Newsnight” segment that overrode the “cogent evidence” against Mr. Savile that the “Newsnight” team had gathered.

But it paid scant attention to the role of the former director general, Mr. Thompson, and did not fault him for missing opportunities to learn the details of the allegations against Mr. Savile.

After Mr. Thompson was told about the scuttled segment by a BBC reporter at a reception in late December 2011, he said, he asked his news executives about it. According to his testimony to the Pollard inquiry, he “received reassurances” that it had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons” and “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”

Matthew Purdy contributed reporting from New York.

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Aleppo Residents, Battered by War, Struggle to Survive

The Fight for Aleppo:
In Syria’s largest city, a sustained and pitched battle between rebels and the Syrian army has left the city in ruins.

ALEPPO, Syria — Inside the classrooms where they once studied, the boys darted like a pack. Their banging and clanking could be heard for a city block.

The playground outside had been hit by a Syrian Air Force airstrike, which fractured the school’s walls. Now the children were smashing the furniture, prying off wooden desktops and bench seats, rushing away with what they could.

The Isam al-Nadri School for Boys was being dismantled for the firewood it contained. One sixth grader, Ahmed, clutching the kindling he had made by ransacking a room, offered an irreducible argument for looting his own school. “I want heat,” he said.

Winter is descending on Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and the bloodied stage for an urban battle, now running into its sixth month, between rebels and the military of President Bashar al-Assad.

As temperatures drop and the weakened government’s artillery thunders on, Aleppo is administered by no one and slipping into disaster. Front-line neighborhoods are rubble. Most of the city’s districts have had no electricity and little water for weeks. All of Aleppo suffers from shortages of oil, food, medicine, doctors and gas.

Diseases are spreading. Parks and courtyards are being defoliated for firewood, turning streets once lined with trees into avenues bordered by stumps. Months’ worth of trash is piled high, often beside bread lines where hundreds of people wait for a meager stack of loaves.

One of the Middle East’s beautiful and historic cities is being forced by scarcity and violence into a bitter new shape. Overlaying it all is a mix of fatigue and distrust, the sentiments of a population divided in multiple ways.

Aleppo’s citizens scavenge and seethe. And along with the sectarian passions of civil war, some residents express yearnings for starkly opposite visions of the future: either for a return of the relative stability of the Assad government or for the promises of Islamic rule.

Others see a grim hope, calling the tearing apart of their society a period that one day will be remembered as this ancient city’s ultimate test.

“We left high salaries, we left our jobs, we left our rank in society,” said Dr. Ammar Diar Bakerly, who directs medical care in the city’s rebel-held east. “We left everything to get our dignity. This is the price we have to pay, and it is a cheap price to get our freedom from the tyrant.”

Not everyone shares these revolutionary views. “We come every morning to the clinic asking for medicine, but they don’t offer any,” said Johair Iman Mustafa, a house painter and taxi driver with no work, who spotted a visitor and approached in a rage. “We go to the bakery for hours, but there is no bread and they kick us.”

“Before the revolution,” said Mr. Mustafa, a Sunni who had been no supporter of Mr. Assad’s Alawite-led government, “it was much better.”

Supplies Dwindle, Prices Rise

For most of Syria’s 21-month uprising, Aleppo, a commercial and government center built around its historic Old City, was spared the battles engulfing the country.

That changed in July when the Free Syrian Army, or F.S.A., as many rebels call themselves, entered Aleppo and opened urban fronts.

The government rushed in much-needed army units from elsewhere, turning to heavier weapons in a bid to retain control of a city that, if lost, would change Mr. Assad’s self-assured narrative. The war’s largest battle yet was joined.

Five months on, the government’s gambit has failed. Even with air support and artillery batteries firing relentlessly, Mr. Assad’s military has yielded ground. In roughly half the city, rebels move about openly.

From the outset, Aleppo’s population, its loyalties split, was stuck between forces. Disorganized rebel groups had started a battle they had little prospect to win swiftly. The army fought back in part with a collective-punishment model. Foreign fighters began to trickle in, stalking the front and talking of jihad.

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Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion

Lorna Tilley

DISABLED Almost all the other skeletons at the Man Bac site, south of Hanoi, are straight. But the man now called Burial 9 was laid to rest curled in a fetal position that suggests lifelong paralysis.

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

Almost all the other skeletons at the site, south of Hanoi and about 15 miles from the coast, lie straight. Burial 9, as both the remains and the once living person are known, was laid to rest curled in the fetal position. When Ms. Tilley, a graduate student in archaeology, and Dr. Oxenham, a professor, excavated and examined the skeleton in 2007 it became clear why. His fused vertebrae, weak bones and other evidence suggested that he lies in death as he did in life, bent and crippled by disease.

They gathered that he became paralyzed from the waist down before adolescence, the result of a congenital disease known as Klippel-Feil syndrome. He had little, if any, use of his arms and could not have fed himself or kept himself clean. But he lived another 10 years or so.

They concluded that the people around him who had no metal and lived by fishing, hunting and raising barely domesticated pigs, took the time and care to tend to his every need.

“There’s an emotional experience in excavating any human being, a feeling of awe,” Ms. Tilley said, and a responsibility “to tell the story with as much accuracy and humanity as we can.”

This case, and other similar, if less extreme examples of illness and disability, have prompted Ms. Tilley and Dr. Oxenham to ask what the dimensions of such a story are, what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it.

The archaeologists described the extent of Burial 9’s disability in a paper in Anthropological Science in 2009. Two years later, they returned to the case to address the issue of health care head on. “The provision and receipt of health care may therefore reflect some of the most fundamental aspects of a culture,” the two archaeologists wrote in The International Journal of Paleopathology.

And earlier this year, in proposing what she calls a “bioarchaeology of care,” Ms. Tilley wrote that this field of study “has the potential to provide important — and possibly unique — insights into the lives of those under study.” In the case of Burial 9, she says, not only does his care indicate tolerance and cooperation in his culture, but suggests that he himself had a sense of his own worth and a strong will to live. Without that, she says, he could not have stayed alive.

“I’m obviously not the first archaeologist” to notice evidence of people who needed help to survive in stone age or other early cultures, she said. Nor does her method “come out of the blue.” It is based on and extends previous work.

Among archaeological finds, she said, she knows “about 30 cases in which the disease or pathology was so severe, they must have had care in order to survive.” And she said there are certainly more such cases to be described. “I am totally confident that there are almost any number of case studies where direct support or accommodation was necessary.”

Such cases include at least one Neanderthal, Shanidar 1, from a site in Iraq, dating to 45,000 years ago, who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other injuries. Another is Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago, found in Florida, who had a severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around age 15. D. N. Dickel and G. H. Doran, from Florida State University wrote the original paper on the case in 1989, and they concluded that contrary to popular stereotypes of prehistoric people, “under some conditions life 7,500 years ago included an ability and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped.”

In another well-known case, the skeleton of a teenage boy, Romito 2, found at a site in Italy in the 1980s, and dating to 10,000 years ago, showed a form of severe dwarfism that left the boy with very short arms. His people were nomadic and they lived by hunting and gathering. He didn’t need nursing care, but the group would have had to accept that he couldn’t run at the same pace or participate in hunting in the same way others did.

Ms. Tilley gained her undergraduate degree in psychology in 1982 and worked in the health care industry studying treatment outcomes before coming to the study of archaeology. She said her experience influenced her interest in ancient health care.

What she proposes, in papers with Dr. Oxenham and in a dissertation in progress, is a standard four-stage method for studying ancient remains of disabled or ill individuals with an eye to understanding their societies. She sets up several stages of investigation: first, establishing what was wrong with a person; second, describing the impact of the illness or disability given the way of life followed in that culture; and third, concluding what level of care would have needed.

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