Mr. Obama declared at a news conference that he would not sign a “stopgap” measure to avert a federal default, and he challenged Republicans to “eat your peas” by supporting a large deficit-reduction deal. Speaker John A. Boehner countered that Republicans would not back a package with any tax increases, and said that even agreeing to an increase in the debt limit was a big concession.

Once the private meeting actually started, the fireworks subsided, Democratic and Republican officials briefed on the talks said, though if anything, the debate over specific policy choices served only to reinforce the chasm between the two sides. The officials described a cordial, though intense, debate in which Mr. Obama and the eight leaders from both parties delved deeply into the nitty-gritty.

Mr. Obama, after restating his pitch for a far-reaching deal that could produce savings of $4 trillion or so over a decade, turned the floor over to the House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia. Mr. Cantor, Democratic officials said, presented a Republican proposal for a more modest agreement that drew heavily on earlier negotiations steered by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Those talks had led to proposals for nearly $1.2 trillion in federal agency cuts, with $300 billion more coming from programs like agriculture subsidies and federal pension programs. More than $350 billion would also come from the federal Medicare and Medicaid health programs.

Much of that would come from Medicare, where Republicans proposed to squeeze $246 billion in savings by reductions in payments for home health care, as well as increasing co-payments for laboratory services. Democrats at the session rejected the Medicare proposal, saying they would not back reductions in benefits to obtain merely a mid-range budget agreement.

Based on the most aggressive estimates of cuts that might find bipartisan support, a senior Democratic official said, this Republican plan would produce savings of somewhat more than $1.5 trillion, well short of the $2.4 trillion that Republicans say is needed to justify an increase in the debt ceiling until February 2013.

And lacking any tax-related measures, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House minority whip, told the group he was not certain he could corral a single Democratic vote for the plan, officials said.

Mr. Hoyer’s pessimism was telling, Democratic officials said, because he had played a key role in rounding up Democratic support for previous budget deals. It suggested that Democrats, too, were retrenching on their willingness to compromise on entitlements to produce a big agreement.

The president, officials said, argued that the Republican proposal did not add up arithmetically or politically. He told the leaders of both parties to return to their members and see if they could revive support for a larger deal, where the sacrifices would be even harder but the payoff, he contended, would be a historic remedy to the nation’s perilous finances.

As these talks head into a critical phase, Mr. Obama has steadily increased the pressure on Congress, saying that Republicans and Democrats must both accept painful compromises to get a deal done. At his news conference, he said, “If the basic proposition is ‘it’s my way or the highway,’ we’re probably not going to get something done because we’ve got divided government.”

In one sign of the high stakes, the president had a sharp exchange with Mr. Boehner over entitlement cuts. The speaker, seeking to show that Republicans are sharing in the sacrifice, told Mr. Obama that voting to cut these programs was not easy for Republicans, either.

“You guys already voted for them,” the president said, referring to the Republican endorsement of a budget plan drafted by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, which contains deep cuts in Medicare.

“Excuse us for trying to lead,” Mr. Boehner replied, according to a Republican account that was confirmed by Democrats.

Such exchanges are becoming more common in the negotiations, as they move from broad generalities to the fine details of budget items. In a meeting on Sunday night, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, raised his voice in rejecting added tax revenues, though officials said he immediately apologized.

Indeed, the tone of the meetings has generally remained polite, officials in both parties said, and Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner have gone out of their way to praise each other publicly in an effort to preserve good will. Until last weekend, when Mr. Boehner pulled back from a $4 billion deal because of resistance from his rank-and-file members, he and the president were discussing some radical ideas.

Mr. Boehner signaled he was open to $1 trillion in new revenues, though he insisted on reforming the tax code to offset the impact of allowing Bush-era tax cuts for high-income people to expire in 2013.

Mr. Obama agreed to consider a change in Medicare, which would have pushed up the eligibility requirement for recipients from the age of 65 to 67 by 2036 — a concession that officials said was possible because of the greater availability of health insurance provided by the administration’s health reform.

He also agreed to consider changing the cost-of-living index for calculating Social Security benefits, in a way that economists say could whittle down the payments over time, but put the program on firmer footing. A Democratic official insisted that any changes to Social Security would not threaten the system, which Mr. Obama viewed as the “crown jewel of progressive government.”

The lawmakers appeared united on only one point, officials said: they agreed to act to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debt, which the Treasury Department said could happen as soon as Aug. 2, when the government’s borrowing authority expires. To draft and pass legislation before that deadline, officials said, these meetings need to produce an agreement within two weeks.

With the participants agreeing to resume talks on Tuesday at 3:45 p.m., and every day after that until they reach a deal, it was not clear how long the deliberations could go without tempers flaring. Mr. Obama alluded to the “Groundhog Day” quality of the proceedings, when he joked to photographers at the beginning of the session, “this is the same shot you had yesterday, except we’re wearing ties today.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who was not wearing a tie on either day, supplied one of the rare moments of levity when she said that she had sent flowers to former President George W. Bush for his birthday.

At a news conference preceding the latest round of debt-reduction talks with Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders, Mr. Obama said he would not accept a temporary agreement to kick the problem down the road a few weeks or months.

He said that he was willing to take the heat from his own party to move beyond entrenched ideological positions and that Republicans should do the same. And he continued to insist on “the biggest deal possible,” saying that now is the best opportunity for the nation to address its long-term fiscal challenges.

Republicans dismissed his performance as political theater. But Mr. Obama’s remarks appeared to be aimed at independent voters as well as at Congressional leaders, and stood in contrast to the Republican focus on the party’s conservative base, both in the budget showdown and in presidential politics.

Mr. Obama’s remarks were among the clearest expressions yet of a repositioning effort that has been under way since the midterm elections last November, when Republicans captured the House and made inroads in the Senate.

Seeking to shed the image of big-government liberal that Republicans used effectively against him last year, he has made or offered policy compromises on an array of issues and cast himself in the role of the adult referee for both parties’ gamesmanship, or the parent of stubborn children.

“If we think it’s hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season where they’re all up,” he said.  “It’s not going to get easier.  It’s going to get harder.  So we might as well do it now — pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas.”

He added, “We keep on talking about this stuff, and we have these high-minded pronouncements about how we’ve got to get control of the deficit and how we owe it to our children and our grandchildren. Well, let’s step up.  Let’s do it.  I’m prepared to do it.  I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done.  And I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing.”

Mr. Obama did not shake Republicans’ resolve to oppose any increases in taxes for wealthy Americans and businesses, as he proposes. “Eat our peas?” asked a mocking news release from the office of Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, placing the blaming for the impasse on Mr. Obama for demanding “job crushing tax hikes.”

Mr. Obama used his news conference to counter Republicans’ attacks suggesting that he wanted immediate tax increases. With the economy still weak and unemployment high, he said, tax increases should not take effect before 2013 and even then should affect only corporate jet owners, oil companies, millionaires — including himself — and billionaires. (Mr. Obama has long pressed for higher taxes on income starting at $250,000.)

Denying he had “some grand ambition to create a bigger government,” Mr. Obama said that in trying to solve the debt problem, “if you don’t have revenues, it means you are putting more of a burden on the people who can least afford it. And that’s not fair. And I think the American people agree with me on that.”

Mr. Obama also called on resistant Democrats to compromise on “trimming benefits” for the entitlement programs, including Social Security, to ensure its solvency for future generations.

“I think the American people want to see something done,” Mr. Obama said, echoing the stance of many independent and moderate voters reflected in polls and focus groups. “They feel a sense of urgency, both about the breakdown in our political process and also about the situation in our economy.”

Wichita, Kan., does not have it much better: 105, 104, 99, 102 and 103.

Wichita Falls, Tex.? Monday was expected to be its 20th consecutive day of 100-plus degrees. Before a 98-degree day on June 21, the first day of summer, there had been a stretch of 19 straight days of 100-degree heat.

The central part of the country, accustomed to hot summers, is seeing higher than normal temperatures this year.

Guthrie, Okla., hit 111 degrees on Sunday, a day after the thermometer reached 113 in Ashland, Kan. The coolest day in Fort Smith, Ark., this week is expected to be Friday, when the high is forecast to be 101 degrees.

“We’re definitely hotter than normal,” said Robb Lawson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wichita. “It’s not uncommon to get above 100 for a few days in a row, but this is different.”

Meteorologists said the reasons for the scorching temperatures include a high-pressure pattern that has stubbornly stayed over much of the country’s midsection, making it difficult for cooler air from the north to break through. A continuing drought is also to blame.

“The reason temperatures are spiking so high is we haven’t had rain here for a few months,” Mr. Lawson said.

Monday will most likely be Wichita’s 19th day this year with temperatures above 100 degrees. The city usually has 10 ½ such days in an average year, and what has traditionally been its warmest time of the year is still ahead.

Air and drinking water along the Yellowstone River in Montana have so far met safety standards in government tests after an oil spill, the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday. The agency said that while floodwaters had prevented tests since the rupture of an Exxon Mobil pipeline on July 1, the waters had receded and the E.P.A. was able to begin testing and cleanup. Findings so far have shown that the water is safe to drink, the agency said.  

Opinion »

Out of a Job, Out of a House

In Room for Debate, what’s a fair way to help people who can’t pay their mortgages?

The vaccination program was set up as the C.I.A. was struggling to learn whether Bin Laden was hiding in the compound, and adds a new twist to the months of spy games that preceded the nighttime raid in early May that killed the Qaeda chief.

It has also aggravated already strained tensions between the United States and Pakistan. The operation was run by a Pakistan doctor, Shakil Afridi, whom Pakistani spies have since arrested for his suspected collaboration with the Americans. Dr. Afridi remains in Pakistani custody, the American official said.

Getting DNA evidence from the people hiding in the Abbottabad compound would have been a significant coup, because it would have allowed the C.I.A. to match the samples with DNA from other members of the Bin Laden family that are on file at the C.I.A. — providing the first hard evidence in years of his whereabouts.

The American official said that the doctor managed to temporarily gain access to the compound, but that he never saw Bin Laden and was not successful in getting DNA samples from any Bin Laden family members. Obama administration officials have said publicly they were not sure whether Bin Laden was in Abbottabad when dozens of Navy Seals commandos stormed the house in May.

The existence of the vaccination program was first reported by a British newspaper, The Guardian. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

It is unclear how the C.I.A. first recruited Dr. Afridi to work for the United States. The Guardian reported that he used a team of nurses and other health workers to administer Hepatitis B vaccinations throughout Abbottabad, even starting the program on poor fringes of the town to maintain a low profile.

Pakistani military and intelligence operatives were furious about the American raid that killed Bin Laden, and relations between the United States and Pakistan have only plummeted since. Pakistani officials have suggested that they might use troops to repel another incursion into Pakistan, and many American officials believe that Pakistan seems more concerned with hunting C.I.A. informants than with finding Qaeda operatives.

American officials said they planned to suspend as much as $800 million worth of military aid to Pakistan — a move partly designed to chasten Islamabad for expelling American military trainers — and several influential American lawmakers have suggested attaching more strings to the billions of dollars sent each year to Pakistan.

Also at stake is the C.I.A.’s armed drone program, which has carried out hundreds of strikes in Pakistan in recent years and has killed several senior operatives from Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan has threatened to expel C.I.A. operatives working on the drone program from a base in southern Pakistan, and the C.I.A. has set up contingency plans to run more flights from a base in eastern Afghanistan.

American officials said that they have seen no hard evidence that Pakistani officials knew that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. However, American intelligence officials said that Bin Laden appeared to have been supported for years by militant groups with longstanding ties to Pakistan’s military spy agency.

That agency arrested several suspected C.I.A. collaborators shortly after the Bin Laden raid, but according to the American official only the doctor who ran the vaccination program is still in custody.

Not anymore. Fields are now planted with genetically modified corn and soybeans resistant to the herbicide Roundup, allowing farmers to spray the chemical to eradicate weeds, including milkweed.

And while that sounds like good news for the farmers, a growing number of scientists fear it is imperiling the monarch butterfly, whose spectacular migrations make it one of the most beloved of insects — “the Bambi of the insect world,” as an entomologist once put it.

Monarchs lay their eggs on milkweed, and their larvae eat it. While the evidence is still preliminary and disputed, experts like Chip Taylor say the growing use of genetically modified crops is threatening the orange-and-black butterfly by depriving it of habitat.

“This milkweed has disappeared from at least 100 million acres of these row crops,” said Dr. Taylor, an insect ecologist at the University of Kansas and director of the research and conservation program Monarch Watch. “Your milkweed is virtually gone.”

The primary evidence that monarch populations are in decline comes from a new study showing a drop over the last 17 years of the area occupied by monarchs in central Mexico, where many of them spend the winter. The amount of land occupied by the monarchs is thought to be a proxy for their population size.

“This is the first time we have the data that we can analyze statistically that shows there’s a downward trend,” said Ernest H. Williams, a professor of biology at Hamilton College and an author of the study along with Dr. Taylor and others.

The paper, published online by the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity, attributes the decrease partly to the loss of milkweed from use of “Roundup Ready” crops. Other causes, it says, are the loss of milkweed to land development, illegal logging at the wintering sites in Mexico, and severe weather.

The study does not suggest the monarch will become extinct. But it questions whether the annual migration, the impetus for butterfly festivals around the United States and waves of tourism to Mexico, is sustainable.

Still, the paper does not present any data backing its contention that genetically engineered crops are reducing monarch populations. Some experts dispute that the monarch populations are declining at all, and say it is unclear whether the biotech crops are having an effect.

Andrew K. Davis, an assistant research scientist at the University of Georgia, said censuses of adult monarchs taken each fall at Cape May, N.J., and Peninsula Point, Mich., did not show any decline.

It could be that “even though the overwintering population is getting smaller and smaller, once they come northward in the spring they are able to recoup the numbers,” Dr. Davis said. His paper disputing that there has been a decline in the monarch population was published online by the same journal.

Leslie Ries, a research professor at the University of Maryland, said other butterfly counts she had examined also did not show a decline, but rather year-to-year fluctuations. Since milkweed populations are not likely to fluctuate as much, the milkweed is probably not the major determinant of butterfly populations, she said.

But two other researchers, Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota and John M. Pleasants of Iowa State, cite other evidence for a decline: the number of monarch eggs in the fields of the Midwest.

“Monarch production has decreased significantly” Dr. Pleasants said. “The reduction is caused by loss of milkweed resources available to them.”

The two scientists have submitted a paper to a scientific journal and said they did not want to discuss their data before publication.

Roundup Ready crops contain a bacterial gene that allows them to withstand Roundup or its generic equivalent, glyphosate, allowing farmers to kill the weeds without harming the crop.

Because they make weed control much easier, the crops have been widely adopted by farmers. This year, 94 percent of the soybeans and 72 percent of the corn being grown in the United States are herbicide-tolerant, according to the Department of Agriculture.

That in turn had led to an explosion in the use of glyphosate, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. About five times as much of the weed killer was used on farmland in 2007 as in 1997, a year after the Roundup Ready crops were introduced, and roughly 10 times as much as in 1993.

A plane carrying seven members of a family, five of them children, crashed in the woods in western Alabama on Saturday evening, killing everyone aboard.

The plane, a Cessna C421, had been flying from Creve Coeur Airport in St. Louis to Destin-Fort Walton Beach Airport in Florida when the pilot reported engine trouble, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said. The plane was diverted to a small airport outside of Demopolis, Ala., but it crashed in the woods about two miles from the airport around 6:30 p.m.

“It hit some large oak trees and knocked the wing and one of the engines off,” said Stuart Eatmon, the coroner for Marengo County, Ala. “It landed upside down.”

Mr. Eatmon identified the victims as Fred Teutenberg, 42; his wife, Terresa, 38; and five of their children, three sons and two daughters ranging in age from 2 to 10.

They lived in Niceville, Fla., where Mr. Teutenberg ran a company called Advanced Integrated Technology Solutions, a software design and consulting firm, and Ms. Teutenberg ran Discovery Learning Academy, a preschool day care program.

A teenage daughter of Ms. Teutenberg’s was not on the plane.

Mr. Eatmon said officials reached the plane around 3 a.m. Sunday. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board have arrived at the scene.

“Flying is an inherent risk, but Fred was a good pilot,” Joe Fagundes III, a family friend, told The Destin Log newspaper. “He had just been at a family reunion and was trying to get home so he could play bass in the church band Sunday morning.”

“If you didn’t have something like that,” said Judge Ferrill D. McRae, who spent 40 years on the bench in Mobile before he retired in 2006, “a jury with no experience in other cases would be making the ultimate decision, based on nothing. The judge has seen many, many cases, not just one.”

Judge McRae, chatting on the phone the other day, recalled having breakfast with Justice Thurgood Marshall at an American Bar Association meeting not long after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Justice Marshall was a fierce opponent of the death penalty. But, according to Judge McRae, the justice also saw the wisdom of the override system. “He thought it was better that someone who had seen more than one case was making the decision,” Judge McRae said.

What Justice Marshall probably did not anticipate, though, was that judges in Alabama would not use their power for mercy — that they would, in fact, be even tougher than juries. Since 1976, according to a new report, Alabama judges have rejected sentencing recommendations from capital juries 107 times. In 98 of those cases, or 92 percent of them, judges imposed the death penalty after juries had called for a life sentence.

More than 20 percent of the people on death row in Alabama are there because of such overrides, according to the report, from the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm that represents poor people and prisoners. The overrides in Alabama contributed to the highest per capita death sentencing rate in the nation, far outstripping Texas.

Judge McRae himself ordered six defendants executed notwithstanding jury verdicts calling for life sentences, more than any other judge in Alabama in the modern history of capital punishment. But he never rejected a jury’s recommendation of death.

Judge McRae said he had tried to determine, in the words of an Alabama law, whether the crime in question was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.” Having seen a lot of cases helped him make that decision, he said. “Juries don’t know,” he said, “what is ‘especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.’ ”

Alabama judges have justified their decisions to override in favor of death on other grounds as well. Judge Dale Segrest, who retired in 2001, said he had rejected one jury’s recommendation that a white defendant’s life be spared on the ground of racial equality. “If I had not imposed the death sentence, I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people,” he said at a sentencing hearing in 2000.

Judge Charles C. Partin, who sat in Bay Minette, said the defendant before him was probably not mentally disabled, a factor that may have figured in the jury’s life verdict. “The sociological literature suggests that Gypsies intentionally test low on standard I.Q. tests,” he wrote in a 1990 sentencing order.

Florida and Delaware also allow overrides, but they are subject to strict standards. No one has been sentenced to death in Florida as a result of a judicial override since 1999, and no one is on death row in Delaware as a consequence of an override. The most recent override in favor of death in Alabama was in March.

Judges in Delaware are appointed and generally use their authority to reject death sentences. Alabama judges are elected, often running on tough-on-crime platforms. Overrides are more common in election years.

“Not surprisingly, given the political pressures they face, judges are far more likely than juries to impose the death penalty,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 1995 dissent from a decision that upheld Alabama’s capital sentencing system. Much has changed in sentencing law since then, and it is not clear that the system would survive a new look from the Supreme Court.

One thing that is clear is that Justice Marshall, whatever he said at breakfast, was appalled by how things turned out in Alabama. “It approaches the most literal sense of the word ‘arbitrary,’ ” he wrote in a 1988 dissent, “to put one to death in the face of a contrary jury determination where it is accepted that the jury had indeed responsibly carried out its task.”

Alabama jurors are not notably squeamish about the death penalty, and those opposed to it are automatically excluded from service. Deliberations can be agonizing, former jurors say, adding that they would expect their recommendations to count.

William Davis, who served on a capital jury that voted for a life sentence, said he did not see the point of the exercise after a judge dismissed the jury’s unanimous recommendation as “not helpful.”

“If the judge is going to overrule the jury,” he said in a court hearing in Montgomery last year, “then you don’t need a jury. The jury don’t serve a purpose.”

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the insurance exchanges, the centerpiece of the new law, “will offer Americans competition, choice and clout.”

In theory, the exchanges will pool insurance risks and premiums so that individuals and small businesses will have “the same purchasing power as big businesses,” Ms. Sebelius said.

Issuance of the proposed rules shows how President Obama is moving inexorably to carry out his health care overhaul, despite attacks on the new law in Congress and the courts, where more than two dozen states are challenging the constitutionality of a requirement for most Americans to carry insurance.

In principle, liberals and conservatives support the exchanges, which they see as a way to increase the purchasing power of individuals and small businesses, but they disagree on how the exchanges should be configured. The regulations issued Monday, which provide a fair amount of latitude to states, were welcomed by consumer groups, patient advocates and some business lobbyists.

     But they may not satisfy liberals who argue that the exchanges should tightly regulate insurance and contract with selected health plans that offer the best deals. And they may not satisfy conservatives who want the exchanges to be wide open to any insurers that want to participate and meet minimum federal standards.

Every state will have an exchange by Jan. 1, 2014. Federal officials will assess states’ “operational readiness” as of Jan. 1, 2013, and will run the exchange in any state that is unable or unwilling to do so.

Many states have been pondering how to proceed, and the regulations will provide guidance. The National Conference of State Legislatures says 12 states have enacted laws to establish exchanges. Bills failed in nine states and are pending in 11 others, the organization said.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that by 2019, about 24 million people will have insurance through exchanges, with four-fifths of them getting federal subsidies that average $6,400 a year per person. People with incomes up to four times the poverty level (about $89,000 a year for a family of four) will be eligible for subsidies to make insurance more affordable.

Each state exchange will certify “qualified health plans,” provide the public with “standardized comparative information” on costs and benefits, and rate each plan based on the quality and price of care. In addition, the exchange will help people determine if they are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or for federal tax credits to subsidize the purchase of private insurance.

Federal officials said they would issue a separate rule later this year specifying the “essential health benefits” that must be offered by all health plans.

Trumpeting the advent of the exchanges, the administration said Monday that they would “give Americans the same insurance choices as members of Congress.” However, in response to questions after a news conference on Monday, health officials acknowledged that this claim was not necessarily correct.

A small employer will be able to pick “a level of coverage” for its employees. A higher level will pay more of the consumer’s medical costs. Under the law, members of Congress must generally get their coverage through an exchange. But a small business could legally choose a level of coverage lower than those offered to federal employees, including members of Congress.

Under the rules, an employer may allow employees to choose any health plan at a given level of coverage. But an exchange may also allow an employer to limit its workers to one or two health plans — far fewer than the number available to members of Congress and other federal workers.

With some states like Florida balking at the new law, federal officials went out of their way Monday to strike a conciliatory note, promising to be flexible. If a state is not ready by January 2013, Ms. Sebelius said, it still might qualify for “conditional approval” if it was on track to operate an exchange by January 2014. In addition, federal officials said, a state could set up and operate its own exchange in 2015 or later years if it is not ready in 2104.

“Let’s refuse to be defined by people who are happy to lecture us about the state of public education — but wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a classroom,” Ms. Weingarten told a crowd of about 2,000 here in kicking off the national conference held every two years by the union, which has 1.5 million members.

In the past year, particularly in Wisconsin and New Jersey, governors and some state lawmakers have castigated teachers’ unions and schools’ performance while slashing budgets and pushing newer education strategies like charter schools and more rigorous teacher evaluation.

Ms. Weingarten, who has long opposed the cuts — both budgetary and rhetorical — made to teachers, told her audience that the current debate on education “has been hijacked by a group of self-styled reformers” from “on high” who want to blame educators’ benefits and job security for states’ notorious budget problems. Calling the union gathering “an affirmation,” she countered that change to the education system should instead come through greater community support for teachers themselves and recognition for the commitment to children they already demonstrate.

The speech, preceded by a youth chorus singing “Money (That’s What I Want)” and ending with Dionne Warwick’s “Say a Little Prayer,” was a formalization of the points Ms. Weingarten has made in editorials and on television as states’ budget crises have landed at the schoolhouse door. It played well with union members like Dan Fray, an eighth-grade social studies teacher in Toledo, Ohio, where State Senate Bill 5 limited the collective-bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers earlier this year.

“We didn’t become teachers for the pay or the benefits or the schedule, and no one’s looking for a pat on the back for staying late to help kids,” Mr. Fray said. “But what’s happened in Ohio and Indiana and Wisconsin and elsewhere is the vilification of the schoolteacher.”

Ms. Weingarten’s speech followed impassioned comments from Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Democrat of the District of Columbia, who said, “There is no way to be for our children and against teachers.”

Ms. Weingarten did offer conciliatory remarks, acknowledging the success of some charter schools while still expressing fear that they siphon talent and money from established school systems. She implored her members to avoid a “circle the wagons” approach to public skepticism of their value, saying that could cut teachers off from the communities with which they should connect more intimately.

The area in which teachers’ economic and ideological concerns appeared to converge was longevity in the classroom. Ms. Weingarten criticized an environment that discourages people from making education a life’s calling, noting that one-third of teachers leave after three years, and one-half leave after five. That is before they have a chance to reach their potential, she said — and, some detractors would counter, the comfort of tenure that can breed complacency and underperformance.

“I’m not saying that teaching needs to be the only job someone holds in a society where people have multiple careers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “But unless we move teaching from a service project to a sustainable profession, it will exact a huge cost on our schools, our children’s achievement and our progress as a nation.”

Ms. Weingarten did not address two notable subjects: the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, and recent revelations of cheating among teachers in Atlanta and elsewhere to improve students’ test scores, which are often tied to funding.

In an interview afterward, Ms. Weingarten condemned the Atlanta situation but pointed to the role of the local teachers’ unions in helping uncover it. The cheating itself, she said, was a byproduct of when “targets become more important than learning” and of a teaching climate that in many areas has become “intimidating, fearful and retaliatory.”

“A new reality is what we’re fighting for,” she had told her audience an hour earlier. “One in which we improve the profession of teaching for teachers and outcomes for students.”

But instead, the race has turned into a surprisingly close, bitterly partisan contest, with a Los Angeles city councilwoman, Janice Hahn, a Democrat, fighting off a challenge from a Republican businessman, Craig Huey, in a runoff election on Tuesday.

The contest is the first test here of a nonpartisan election system passed by voters last year in which the top two vote-getters in a primary face each other in a runoff, regardless of party, if no candidate wins a majority. Many had expected that both runoff candidates would be Democrats in a district that snakes down the city’s western edge from Venice Beach to San Pedro.

But Ms. Hahn, once the heavy favorite, now appears to be in a tight race with Mr. Huey, according to polling done by both parties, as he continues the heavy spending that helped propel him into the runoff. Accordingly, in recent days, her campaign has employed help from big political guns: Bill Clinton recorded several automated calls for her, and the Obama for America organization has put together phone banks to help turn out Democratic voters.

“That Obama for America is organizing for them shows they’re running scared,” said Tyler Q. Houlton, a spokesman for the Republican National Congressional Committee.

Ms. Hahn began the campaign with a number of advantages: in addition to the 12 percentage-point Democratic edge in voter registration in the district, she hails from a Los Angeles political dynasty — her brother is a former mayor; her father was a longtime county supervisor — and she has managed to raise more than $1.3 million. President Obama won the district by 31 points in 2008.

But Mr. Huey has mined his own deep pockets to help make the race competitive. He has lent and contributed almost $900,000 to his campaign, which he has used to attack Ms. Hahn and the Democrats on economic issues.

“We’ve really stayed focused on the economy,” Mr. Huey said. “And voters see businesses closing up and down the street, and they’re responding to that message.”

Ms. Hahn, whose mother died on Monday, was not available for comment.

The unease Democrats are feeling now reflects the unpredictability of special elections like these in which turnout is usually low. In May, Kathy Hochul won a special election in New York to capture a Congressional seat that had been in Republican hands for four decades. And in January 2010, Scott Brown, a Republican, won the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been held by Edward M. Kennedy since he was elected to succeed his brother, John, in 1962.

David Wasserman, an editor at Cook Political Report, said special elections often come down to turning out a party’s base, which can give outsiders an advantage over establishment candidates.

“Independent voters these days are willing to do anything to send a message to Washington that they’re upset about the established order,” Mr. Wasserman said. “That’s why this race is closer than it ought to be.”

Democrats said they still expected Ms. Hahn to win Tuesday’s vote.

“In the end, it will still be a Democrat winning a Democratic seat,” said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

On Tuesday, residents in some parts of the state will vote in primary elections that are part of the broadest recall effort in state history. The outcome, to be determined in votes this month and next, will decide whether Republicans, who last fall took control of the governor’s seat and of both chambers of the Legislature, maintain their hold on the State Senate.

Leaders of both parties voiced confidence about the outcomes, but the divide in the Senate is 19 Republicans to 14 Democrats. The flipping of three Republican seats would upend their domination in Madison. The flurry of political ads now playing — included some financed by outside national groups — makes clear the size of the stakes.

“There’s a tremendous amount of intensity to this,” said Mike Tate, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

In one sign of that intensity, among those competing on the Democratic side are Republican-leaning candidates posing as Democrats, running against the real Democrats.

Mr. Tate predicted that Democrats would win back control of the Senate, even with what he called “the fake Democrats” (the Republicans, who encouraged those bids, prefer the term “protest candidates”) running in Tuesday’s races.

“That’s just a delay tactic to hold off the inevitable,” he said.

But Republicans said the protest candidates — whose entry forced primary elections rather than an immediate general election to decide the fate of the Republican senators — merely gave the senators a fair chance to campaign for their jobs.

Lawmakers had little time outside of legislative meetings until now to make their case to voters, said Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, who said the elections would come down to a question of whether people wanted to move the state forward.

“They don’t want to go back to the politics of the past,” Mr. Thompson said.

If recall elections are usually reserved for circumstances involving personal or official scandal, the recalls here are mostly a matter of the state’s mounting philosophical split.

On both sides, those picked for recall mainly matched two criteria: they had served at least a year, as the state’s recall rules require, and their districts were viewed by some to be vulnerable.

Those who have gathered thousands of signatures to remove six Republicans object to the lawmakers’ support of a law that strips away collective bargaining rights for public workers and say these senators have, more broadly, supported a series of conservative, budget-cutting policies pushed through by Gov. Scott Walker.

Those who have gathered thousands of signatures to remove three Democrats say that those senators violated their responsibilities by fleeing the state this year in an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to block the collective bargaining bill and that they are slowing the state’s progress by opposing much of Mr. Walker’s agenda.

Democrats complain that the Republicans have, with the threat of recall elections ahead, rushed through legislation in case they lose control of the Senate; even this week, some Democrats complained that the Republicans appeared to be hurrying to pass a redistricting bill — the remaking of political maps that comes every 10 years.

The results of the recall elections may also help seal something else: whether more recalls are sought here in the coming months. Already, some are demanding the recall of Governor Walker, though any such effort must wait until winter, when he will have completed the required year in office.

The family is the focus of a reality TV show, “Sister Wives,” that first appeared in 2010. Law enforcement officials in the Browns’ home state, Utah, announced soon after the show began that the family was under investigation for violating the state law prohibiting polygamy.

On Wednesday, the Browns are expected to file a lawsuit to challenge the polygamy law.

The lawsuit is not demanding that states recognize polygamous marriage. Instead, the lawsuit builds on a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the “intimate conduct” of consenting adults. It will ask the federal courts to tell states that they cannot punish polygamists for their own “intimate conduct” so long as they are not breaking other laws, like those regarding child abuse, incest or seeking multiple marriage licenses.

Mr. Brown has a civil marriage with only one of his wives; the rest are “sister wives,” not formally wedded. The Browns are members of the Apostolic United Brethren Church, a fundamentalist offshoot of the Mormon Church, which gave up polygamy around 1890 as Utah was seeking statehood.

Making polygamous unions illegal, they argue, violates the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, as well as the free exercise, establishment, free speech and freedom of association clauses of the First Amendment.

“We only wish to live our private lives according to our beliefs,” Mr. Brown said in a statement provided by his lead attorney, Jonathan Turley, who is a law professor at George Washington University.

The connection with Lawrence v. Texas, a case that broadened legal rights for gay people, is sensitive for those who have sought the right of same-sex marriage. Opponents of such unions often refer to polygamy as one of the all-but-inevitable outcomes of allowing same-sex marriage. In his dissenting opinion in the Lawrence case, Justice Antonin Scalia cited a threat to state laws “based on moral choices” against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity.”

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in New York, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, made a similar comparison on his blog on Thursday in an essay criticizing the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage and the possible “next step,” which could be “another redefinition to justify multiple partners and infidelity.”

Such arguments, often referred to as the “parade of horribles,” are logically flawed, said Jennifer C. Pizer, a professor at the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and legal director for the school’s Williams Institute, which focuses on sexual orientation law.

The questions surrounding whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry are significantly different from those involved in criminal prosecution of multiple marriages, Ms. Pizer noted. Same-sex couples are seeking merely to participate in the existing system of family law for married couples, she said, while “you’d have to restructure the family law system in a pretty fundamental way” to recognize polygamy.

Professor Turley called the one-thing-leads-to-another arguments “a bit of a constitutional canard,” and argued that removing criminal penalties for polygamy “will take society nowhere in particular.”

The Supreme Court supported the power of states to restrict polygamy in an 1879 case, Reynolds v. United States. Professor Turley suggests that the fundamental reasoning of Reynolds, which said polygamy “fetters the people in stationary despotism,” is outdated and has been swept away by cases like Lawrence.

Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University, said today’s courts might not agree with the sweeping societal conclusions of the 19th-century courts, but noted that more attention has been paid in recent decades to the importance of internal family issues as part of the public policy sphere. Questions of child abuse and spousal domination, he said, could figure into a judicial examination of polygamy.

“We’re more sensitive to the fact that a household can be quite repressive,” he said, and so reservations about polygamy “might be even more profound.”

Professor Turley disagreed, noting that “there are many religious practices in monogamous families that many believe as obnoxious and patriarchal,” and added, “The criminal code is not a license for social engineering.”

Who paid for that advertisement? The State of Montana, naturally, out of money it designated for tourism marketing this year.

“They’ve done a great job, and they’re incredibly visible,” said Tom Norwalk, the president and chief executive of Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’re not doing that. We’re going to be fortunate in the next six months to be able to maintain a Web site.”

Washington State has plenty of beauty of its own, of course, but it will not be paying for billboards featuring Puget Sound or Mount Rainier or the Space Needle anytime soon. This month, as a result of wide-ranging budget cuts passed this year by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, Washington became the only state in the nation with no statewide tourism office and no state money to promote itself to travelers.

The cut has been attributed purely to having to make tough choices between financing programs like public education and paying for glossy marketing campaigns. But at a time when some struggling states are aggressively branding and rebranding themselves to expand tourism — Michigan, hoping to offset images of manufacturing declines and Detroit’s urban decay, increased funds for its “Pure Michigan” campaign to $25 million this year from $17 million in 2010 — many tourism experts across the country believe Washington will soon regret what it is saving in the short term.

“Our lesson to Washington is that it’s been 18 years since we went dark in 1993, and we still haven’t gotten back to the national market share we had,” said Al White, head of the Colorado Tourism Office, which lost all financing in 1993 and did not regain a steady revenue stream until 2000. “It’s really difficult to affect market share positively, but it’s really easy to affect it negatively if you’re not out there.”

The Washington State Tourism Office employed six people in its office in Olympia, the capital, and had a budget of $1.8 million before it closed on June 30. The budget had been $7 million the previous year and more than $10 million several years before that. The state has transferred much of the office’s tangible property, including trade show booths, brochures and digital photo archives, to members of a tourism alliance formed this year with the goal of taking over statewide marketing coordination.

Tourism is the fourth-largest industry in Washington, and it has been on an upswing. Last year, visitor spending increased 7.4 percent over 2009, accounting for the second-best year on record, tourism experts say. The number of international visitors grew more than 30 percent, one of the fastest rates in the country.

But for all its natural beauty and Seattle’s urban appeal, Washington also has inherent challenges. Many people, particularly international tourists, have a limited grasp of the geography of the Northwest. And then there is the state’s name.

The name Washington was assigned by Congress in 1853, when the area was still a territory. Settlers seeking territorial status had requested that their new home be called Columbia, after the great river on its southern boundary. But some members of Congress were concerned that this would confuse the new territory with where they worked, the District of Columbia. Somehow, calling it Washington was seen as a better solution.

But a century and a half later, even though this Washington is on a different coast, has 10 times the population of the other one and is not known for political shenanigans, the name is still an issue. It can be hard just to know when to capitalize the word “state” if it appears after the word Washington. (Answer: it depends.)

These are just the kinds of things state tourism offices try to address. The current branding effort, put in place before the office shut down, features an abstract mountain and an evergreen tree and the phrase “Washington, the State,” wording that is intended to optimize Internet searches so they direct browsers to the state’s tourism Web site.

Aside from identity issues, Washington also faces competition from ambitious tourism efforts surrounding it. Montana’s campaign focuses on specific urban areas, Seattle, Minneapolis and Chicago among them, and has won awards for its creativity, including the wrapping of city buses with pastoral images of Big Sky Country.

British Columbia, next door in Canada (yes, the province was named for the river, which stretches from the Pacific Ocean through Washington across the Canadian border), will spend about $50 million on tourism this year. California will spend the same, relying mostly on fees paid by businesses in the travel and tourism industry.

“It’s a shortsighted way of thinking,” Cathy Keefe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Travel Association, said of the cuts in Washington. “You have to be constantly reinforcing the message. If you don’t, people will forget about you. There’s always going to be someone who’s stepping in there to take over your market share.”

Ms. Keefe pointed to data showing that 27 of 47 states her group surveyed had either maintained or increased their tourism spending in the past year — despite the lingering effects of the recession — and that 12 had increased it by at least 10 percent.

In Washington, a range of tourism businesses quickly created the Washington Tourism Alliance in an effort to compensate for losing the state office. The nonprofit group includes big agencies like Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and smaller operations like Indian-owned casinos and ski resorts. The alliance has just formed a board and is about to hire an interim director. Next year, it is to take control of the state tourism Web site, and its leaders say they hope eventually to create a revenue stream for the group similar to California’s.

In the meantime, Montana hopes its marketing campaign, will keep the state, as those in tourism say, “top of mind.”

“If you live in the greater Puget Sound area and you don’t want to go to Montana by now, you haven’t been paying attention,” said Marsha Massey, executive director of the Washington State Tourism Office — until it closed. “Even I want to go to Montana.”

Who paid for that advertisement? The State of Montana, naturally, out of money it designated for tourism marketing this year.

“They’ve done a great job, and they’re incredibly visible,” said Tom Norwalk, the president and chief executive of Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’re not doing that. We’re going to be fortunate in the next six months to be able to maintain a Web site.”

Washington State has plenty of beauty of its own, of course, but it will not be paying for billboards featuring Puget Sound or Mount Rainier or the Space Needle anytime soon. This month, as a result of wide-ranging budget cuts passed this year by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, Washington became the only state in the nation with no statewide tourism office and no state money to promote itself to travelers.

The cut has been attributed purely to having to make tough choices between financing programs like public education and paying for glossy marketing campaigns. But at a time when some struggling states are aggressively branding and rebranding themselves to expand tourism — Michigan, hoping to offset images of manufacturing declines and Detroit’s urban decay, increased funds for its “Pure Michigan” campaign to $25 million this year from $17 million in 2010 — many tourism experts across the country believe Washington will soon regret what it is saving in the short term.

“Our lesson to Washington is that it’s been 18 years since we went dark in 1993, and we still haven’t gotten back to the national market share we had,” said Al White, head of the Colorado Tourism Office, which lost all financing in 1993 and did not regain a steady revenue stream until 2000. “It’s really difficult to affect market share positively, but it’s really easy to affect it negatively if you’re not out there.”

The Washington State Tourism Office employed six people in its office in Olympia, the capital, and had a budget of $1.8 million before it closed on June 30. The budget had been $7 million the previous year and more than $10 million several years before that. The state has transferred much of the office’s tangible property, including trade show booths, brochures and digital photo archives, to members of a tourism alliance formed this year with the goal of taking over statewide marketing coordination.

Tourism is the fourth-largest industry in Washington, and it has been on an upswing. Last year, visitor spending increased 7.4 percent over 2009, accounting for the second-best year on record, tourism experts say. The number of international visitors grew more than 30 percent, one of the fastest rates in the country.

But for all its natural beauty and Seattle’s urban appeal, Washington also has inherent challenges. Many people, particularly international tourists, have a limited grasp of the geography of the Northwest. And then there is the state’s name.

The name Washington was assigned by Congress in 1853, when the area was still a territory. Settlers seeking territorial status had requested that their new home be called Columbia, after the great river on its southern boundary. But some members of Congress were concerned that this would confuse the new territory with where they worked, the District of Columbia. Somehow, calling it Washington was seen as a better solution.

But a century and a half later, even though this Washington is on a different coast, has 10 times the population of the other one and is not known for political shenanigans, the name is still an issue. It can be hard just to know when to capitalize the word “state” if it appears after the word Washington. (Answer: it depends.)

These are just the kinds of things state tourism offices try to address. The current branding effort, put in place before the office shut down, features an abstract mountain and an evergreen tree and the phrase “Washington, the State,” wording that is intended to optimize Internet searches so they direct browsers to the state’s tourism Web site.

Aside from identity issues, Washington also faces competition from ambitious tourism efforts surrounding it. Montana’s campaign focuses on specific urban areas, Seattle, Minneapolis and Chicago among them, and has won awards for its creativity, including the wrapping of city buses with pastoral images of Big Sky Country.

British Columbia, next door in Canada (yes, the province was named for the river, which stretches from the Pacific Ocean through Washington across the Canadian border), will spend about $50 million on tourism this year. California will spend the same, relying mostly on fees paid by businesses in the travel and tourism industry.

“It’s a shortsighted way of thinking,” Cathy Keefe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Travel Association, said of the cuts in Washington. “You have to be constantly reinforcing the message. If you don’t, people will forget about you. There’s always going to be someone who’s stepping in there to take over your market share.”

Ms. Keefe pointed to data showing that 27 of 47 states her group surveyed had either maintained or increased their tourism spending in the past year — despite the lingering effects of the recession — and that 12 had increased it by at least 10 percent.

In Washington, a range of tourism businesses quickly created the Washington Tourism Alliance in an effort to compensate for losing the state office. The nonprofit group includes big agencies like Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and smaller operations like Indian-owned casinos and ski resorts. The alliance has just formed a board and is about to hire an interim director. Next year, it is to take control of the state tourism Web site, and its leaders say they hope eventually to create a revenue stream for the group similar to California’s.

In the meantime, Montana hopes its marketing campaign, will keep the state, as those in tourism say, “top of mind.”

“If you live in the greater Puget Sound area and you don’t want to go to Montana by now, you haven’t been paying attention,” said Marsha Massey, executive director of the Washington State Tourism Office — until it closed. “Even I want to go to Montana.”

Who paid for that advertisement? The State of Montana, naturally, out of money it designated for tourism marketing this year.

“They’ve done a great job, and they’re incredibly visible,” said Tom Norwalk, the president and chief executive of Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’re not doing that. We’re going to be fortunate in the next six months to be able to maintain a Web site.”

Washington State has plenty of beauty of its own, of course, but it will not be paying for billboards featuring Puget Sound or Mount Rainier or the Space Needle anytime soon. This month, as a result of wide-ranging budget cuts passed this year by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, Washington became the only state in the nation with no statewide tourism office and no state money to promote itself to travelers.

The cut has been attributed purely to having to make tough choices between financing programs like public education and paying for glossy marketing campaigns. But at a time when some struggling states are aggressively branding and rebranding themselves to expand tourism — Michigan, hoping to offset images of manufacturing declines and Detroit’s urban decay, increased funds for its “Pure Michigan” campaign to $25 million this year from $17 million in 2010 — many tourism experts across the country believe Washington will soon regret what it is saving in the short term.

“Our lesson to Washington is that it’s been 18 years since we went dark in 1993, and we still haven’t gotten back to the national market share we had,” said Al White, head of the Colorado Tourism Office, which lost all financing in 1993 and did not regain a steady revenue stream until 2000. “It’s really difficult to affect market share positively, but it’s really easy to affect it negatively if you’re not out there.”

The Washington State Tourism Office employed six people in its office in Olympia, the capital, and had a budget of $1.8 million before it closed on June 30. The budget had been $7 million the previous year and more than $10 million several years before that. The state has transferred much of the office’s tangible property, including trade show booths, brochures and digital photo archives, to members of a tourism alliance formed this year with the goal of taking over statewide marketing coordination.

Tourism is the fourth-largest industry in Washington, and it has been on an upswing. Last year, visitor spending increased 7.4 percent over 2009, accounting for the second-best year on record, tourism experts say. The number of international visitors grew more than 30 percent, one of the fastest rates in the country.

But for all its natural beauty and Seattle’s urban appeal, Washington also has inherent challenges. Many people, particularly international tourists, have a limited grasp of the geography of the Northwest. And then there is the state’s name.

The name Washington was assigned by Congress in 1853, when the area was still a territory. Settlers seeking territorial status had requested that their new home be called Columbia, after the great river on its southern boundary. But some members of Congress were concerned that this would confuse the new territory with where they worked, the District of Columbia. Somehow, calling it Washington was seen as a better solution.

But a century and a half later, even though this Washington is on a different coast, has 10 times the population of the other one and is not known for political shenanigans, the name is still an issue. It can be hard just to know when to capitalize the word “state” if it appears after the word Washington. (Answer: it depends.)

These are just the kinds of things state tourism offices try to address. The current branding effort, put in place before the office shut down, features an abstract mountain and an evergreen tree and the phrase “Washington, the State,” wording that is intended to optimize Internet searches so they direct browsers to the state’s tourism Web site.

Aside from identity issues, Washington also faces competition from ambitious tourism efforts surrounding it. Montana’s campaign focuses on specific urban areas, Seattle, Minneapolis and Chicago among them, and has won awards for its creativity, including the wrapping of city buses with pastoral images of Big Sky Country.

British Columbia, next door in Canada (yes, the province was named for the river, which stretches from the Pacific Ocean through Washington across the Canadian border), will spend about $50 million on tourism this year. California will spend the same, relying mostly on fees paid by businesses in the travel and tourism industry.

“It’s a shortsighted way of thinking,” Cathy Keefe, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Travel Association, said of the cuts in Washington. “You have to be constantly reinforcing the message. If you don’t, people will forget about you. There’s always going to be someone who’s stepping in there to take over your market share.”

Ms. Keefe pointed to data showing that 27 of 47 states her group surveyed had either maintained or increased their tourism spending in the past year — despite the lingering effects of the recession — and that 12 had increased it by at least 10 percent.

In Washington, a range of tourism businesses quickly created the Washington Tourism Alliance in an effort to compensate for losing the state office. The nonprofit group includes big agencies like Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau and smaller operations like Indian-owned casinos and ski resorts. The alliance has just formed a board and is about to hire an interim director. Next year, it is to take control of the state tourism Web site, and its leaders say they hope eventually to create a revenue stream for the group similar to California’s.

In the meantime, Montana hopes its marketing campaign, will keep the state, as those in tourism say, “top of mind.”

“If you live in the greater Puget Sound area and you don’t want to go to Montana by now, you haven’t been paying attention,” said Marsha Massey, executive director of the Washington State Tourism Office — until it closed. “Even I want to go to Montana.”

Under the rule, dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas will be required to inform the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives if someone buys — within a five-day period — more than one semiautomatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine and uses ammunition greater than .22 caliber. Such weapons include AK-47s.

Dealers nationwide are already required to report bulk sales of handguns, and the A.T.F. applied to impose such a regulation late last year to help detect bulk “straw buyers” — people who say they are buying weapons for themselves but then transfer them to criminals.

In a statement, the deputy attorney general, James Cole, said the regulation was justified by the need to help the A.T.F. “detect and disrupt the illegal weapons trafficking networks responsible for diverting firearms from lawful commerce to criminals” and in particular to “help confront the problem of illegal gun trafficking into Mexico.”

“The international expansion and increased violence of transnational criminal networks pose a significant threat to the United States,” Mr. Cole said, adding that rifles covered by the new regulation “are highly sought after by dangerous drug-trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest border.”

The proposal has been hotly contested by gun-control advocates, and Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president for the National Rifle Association, said his organization was preparing to sue the government once it tried to begin enforcing the regulation.

Mr. LaPierre contended that it should take an act of Congress to impose such a requirement, not a regulation developed by the executive branch alone. He noted that the similar rule requiring dealers to report multiple handgun sales was part of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

“We view it as a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to pursue their gun-control agenda through backdoor rule making, and the N.R.A. will fight them every step of the way,” he said. “There are three branches of government and separation of powers, and we believe they do not have the authority to do this.”

An A.T.F. spokesman cited a federal statute governing the licensing of firearms dealers as the source of the agency’s legal authority to enact a regulation allowing it to collect the information about bulk sales of semiautomatic rifles.

The A.T.F. unveiled its proposal for the new rule in December, and originally sought permission to impose it more quickly under emergency procedures. But in February, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget rejected that request, saying that gunrunning to Mexico was a continuing problem — not the kind of fast-moving situation that justifies making an exception to the normal process for reviewing new regulations.

The approval for the regulation comes at a time when the A.T.F.’s efforts to combat straw purchasing and gunrunning along the border is under intense Congressional scrutiny because of a botched investigation called Operation Fast and Furious.

In that operation, federal agents, wanting to trace the flow of guns from straw buyers to drug cartels, monitored the purchase of several thousand guns but did not intervene before some were smuggled into Mexico. The bureau then lost track of many of them, and two later turned up at the scene of a shootout in Arizona where an American Border Patrol agent was killed.

“If you didn’t have something like that,” said Judge Ferrill D. McRae, who spent 40 years on the bench in Mobile before he retired in 2006, “a jury with no experience in other cases would be making the ultimate decision, based on nothing. The judge has seen many, many cases, not just one.”

Judge McRae, chatting on the phone the other day, recalled having breakfast with Justice Thurgood Marshall at an American Bar Association meeting not long after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Justice Marshall was a fierce opponent of the death penalty. But, according to Judge McRae, the justice also saw the wisdom of the override system. “He thought it was better that someone who had seen more than one case was making the decision,” Judge McRae said.

What Justice Marshall probably did not anticipate, though, was that judges in Alabama would not use their power for mercy — that they would, in fact, be even tougher than juries. Since 1976, according to a new report, Alabama judges have rejected sentencing recommendations from capital juries 107 times. In 98 of those cases, or 92 percent of them, judges imposed the death penalty after juries had called for a life sentence.

More than 20 percent of the people on death row in Alabama are there because of such overrides, according to the report, from the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law firm that represents poor people and prisoners. The overrides in Alabama contributed to the highest per capita death sentencing rate in the nation, far outstripping Texas.

Judge McRae himself ordered six defendants executed notwithstanding jury verdicts calling for life sentences, more than any other judge in Alabama in the modern history of capital punishment. But he never rejected a jury’s recommendation of death.

Judge McRae said he had tried to determine, in the words of an Alabama law, whether the crime in question was “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.” Having seen a lot of cases helped him make that decision, he said. “Juries don’t know,” he said, “what is ‘especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.’ ”

Alabama judges have justified their decisions to override in favor of death on other grounds as well. Judge Dale Segrest, who retired in 2001, said he had rejected one jury’s recommendation that a white defendant’s life be spared on the ground of racial equality. “If I had not imposed the death sentence, I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people,” he said at a sentencing hearing in 2000.

Judge Charles C. Partin, who sat in Bay Minette, said the defendant before him was probably not mentally disabled, a factor that may have figured in the jury’s life verdict. “The sociological literature suggests that Gypsies intentionally test low on standard I.Q. tests,” he wrote in a 1990 sentencing order.

Florida and Delaware also allow overrides, but they are subject to strict standards. No one has been sentenced to death in Florida as a result of a judicial override since 1999, and no one is on death row in Delaware as a consequence of an override. The most recent override in favor of death in Alabama was in March.

Judges in Delaware are appointed and generally use their authority to reject death sentences. Alabama judges are elected, often running on tough-on-crime platforms. Overrides are more common in election years.

“Not surprisingly, given the political pressures they face, judges are far more likely than juries to impose the death penalty,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 1995 dissent from a decision that upheld Alabama’s capital sentencing system. Much has changed in sentencing law since then, and it is not clear that the system would survive a new look from the Supreme Court.

One thing that is clear is that Justice Marshall, whatever he said at breakfast, was appalled by how things turned out in Alabama. “It approaches the most literal sense of the word ‘arbitrary,’ ” he wrote in a 1988 dissent, “to put one to death in the face of a contrary jury determination where it is accepted that the jury had indeed responsibly carried out its task.”

Alabama jurors are not notably squeamish about the death penalty, and those opposed to it are automatically excluded from service. Deliberations can be agonizing, former jurors say, adding that they would expect their recommendations to count.

William Davis, who served on a capital jury that voted for a life sentence, said he did not see the point of the exercise after a judge dismissed the jury’s unanimous recommendation as “not helpful.”

“If the judge is going to overrule the jury,” he said in a court hearing in Montgomery last year, “then you don’t need a jury. The jury don’t serve a purpose.”

Many of the papers, dealing with Cuba, Vietnam and civil rights, are classified as secret or top secret. There are also an additional 2,300 boxes covering every stage of Robert Kennedy’s life, including his years as a United States senator and attorney general, most of which have already been opened for research.

But for decades, his family has refused to sign over title to the papers to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and is now talking openly about the possibility of finding a permanent home for them elsewhere. The family is also having Sotheby’s appraise the papers.

“There is a very large building, and there is a remembrance of President Kennedy and there’s one for Senator Edward Kennedy,” said former Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, a son of Robert Kennedy, describing the presidential library that opened in 1979 and an adjacent construction site for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. “But there is nothing out there for Robert Kennedy.”

The presidential library — where many members of the Kennedy family, including Edward, believed the papers should remain — did offer last year to name a new 30,000-square-foot wing for Robert Kennedy if the family would donate the papers. The almost-finished wing has a classroom, a staging area for exhibits and storage for artifacts like Jacqueline Kennedy’s gowns and additional papers.

The family refused. Joseph Kennedy scoffed at the proposal, saying in a recent interview, “They offered to put the name on a hallway.”

The decision to open the 63 boxes, held in secret for nearly four decades, was reached on March 1 after years of efforts by library officials and others to persuade Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, to give control of his papers to the library.

Though some historians are eager to see the new documents, Thomas J. Putnam, the library director, sought to dim speculation that they contained historical bombshells. “I think they are going to be of high interest to researchers,” Mr. Putnam said, “but I don’t think that there is going to be anything that will completely change the stories that have been written by other historians.”

Archivists are now organizing and declassifying the papers, which have sat unseen in a climate-controlled vault while Mrs. Kennedy had talked of expecting to get millions of dollars from selling some of them, said two longtime family friends who discussed the family’s affairs on the condition of anonymity.

In 2004, Mrs. Kennedy initiated discussions about donating the papers to George Washington University if it would establish a center honoring her husband’s memory and causes, several people involved in the discussions said.

No money would have gone to her. But that effort foundered after the university’s president at the time, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, asked Senator Edward M. Kennedy to finance it through a budget earmark for “a few million dollars,” Mr. Trachtenberg recalled. The senator, who wanted the papers to remain at the presidential library, refused the request, Mr. Trachtenberg said.

Robert Kennedy’s papers are now being appraised by Sotheby’s, which has long ties to the Kennedy family, two people with direct knowledge of the confidential arrangements said. But an appraisal is not necessarily an indication of a planned sale; an appraisal is also required to establish their value for tax purposes if they are to be claimed as a charitable donation or passed on through an inheritance.

Joseph Kennedy, who served in the House from 1987 to 1999, said in a recent interview, “There is certainly no plan to sell anything from this collection at this time.” He called seeing the papers permanently housed at the Kennedy Library “the ultimate hope and desire of my family.”

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s first child, said her brother was speaking “for the family.”

Joseph Kennedy, the eldest son, also said: “Could there be a situation where we decide to sell a document or two? Sure, I suppose.” But he said there was “no need” to sell any of the papers now. “My mother is fine,” Mr. Kennedy said. “She may not run a hedge fund, but most Americans would not mind being in her shoes.”

Ethel Kennedy, 83, received $8.25 million in December 2009 when she sold Hickory Hill, the family estate in McLean, Va.

Adam Clymer reported from Washington, and Don Van Natta Jr. from Miami.

Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days.

“It’s horrible so far,” said Mike Newberry, a Georgia farmer who is trying grow cotton, corn and peanuts on a thousand acres. “There is no description for what we’ve been through since we started planting corn in March.”

The pain has spread across 14 states, from Florida, where severe water restrictions are in place, to Arizona, where ranchers could be forced to sell off entire herds of cattle because they simply cannot feed them.

In Texas, where the drought is the worst, virtually no part of the state has been untouched. City dwellers and ranchers have been tormented by excessive heat and high winds. In the Southwest, wildfires are chewing through millions of acres.

Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture designated all 254 counties in Texas natural disaster areas, qualifying them for varying levels of federal relief. More than 30 percent of the state’s wheat fields might be lost, adding pressure to a crop in short supply globally.

Even if weather patterns shift and relief-giving rain comes, losses will surely head past $3 billion in Texas alone, state agricultural officials said.

Most troubling is that the drought, which could go down as one of the nation’s worst, has come on extra hot and extra early. It has its roots in 2010 and continued through the winter. The five months from this February to June, for example, were so dry that they shattered a Texas record set in 1917, said Don Conlee, the acting state climatologist.

Oklahoma has had only 28 percent of its normal summer rainfall, and the heat has blasted past 90 degrees for a month.

“We’ve had a two- or three-week start on what is likely to be a disastrous summer,” said Kevin Kloesel, director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

The question, of course, becomes why. In a spring and summer in which weather news has been dominated by epic floods and tornadoes, it is hard to imagine that more than a quarter of the country is facing an equally daunting but very different kind of natural disaster.

From a meteorological standpoint, the answer is fairly simple. “A strong La Niña shut off the southern pipeline of moisture,” said David Miskus, who monitors drought for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The weather pattern called La Niña is an abnormal cooling of Pacific waters. It usually follows El Niño, which is an abnormal warming of those same waters.

Although a new forecast from the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center suggests that this dangerous weather pattern could revive in the fall, many in the parched regions find themselves in the unlikely position of hoping for a season of heavy tropical storms in the Southeast and drenching monsoons in the Southwest.

Climatologists say the great drought of 2011 is starting to look a lot like the one that hit the nation in the early to mid-1950s. That, too, dried a broad part of the southern tier of states into leather and remains a record breaker.

But this time, things are different in the drought belt. With states and towns short on cash and unemployment still high, the stress on the land and the people who rely on it for a living is being amplified by political and economic forces, state and local officials say. As a result, this drought is likely to have the cultural impact of the great 1930s drought, which hammered an already weakened nation.

“In the ’30s, you had the Depression and everything that happened with that, and drought on top,” said Donald A. Wilhite, director of the school of natural resources at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and former director of the National Drought Mitigation Center. “The combination of those two things was devastating.”

Although today’s economy is not as bad, many Americans ground down by prolonged economic insecurity have little wiggle room to handle the effects of a prolonged drought. Government agencies are in the same boat.

“Because we overspent, the Legislature overspent, we’ve been cut back and then the drought comes along and we don’t have the resources and federal government doesn’t, and so we just tighten our belt and go on,” said Donald Butler, the director of the Arizona Department of Agriculture.

The drought is having some odd effects, economically and otherwise.

Kim Severson reported from Colquitt, Ga., and Kirk Johnson from Denver. Dan Frosch contributed reporting from Denver.

Mr. Obama, meeting with leaders from both parties at the White House, bluntly challenged Republicans a day after Speaker John A. Boehner pulled back from a far-reaching agreement aimed at saving as much as $4 trillion over 10 years, officials briefed on the negotiations said. The meeting ended after an hour and 15 minutes with little progress, but the two sides agreed to resume talking Monday, and every day after that, until a deal is done.

White House officials said Mr. Obama was still determined to pursue the boldest package possible — one that would require new tax revenue as well as cuts in Medicare and other entitlement programs — but he faces steadfast opposition from Republicans and growing qualms among Democrats.

“Congress has to act,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” “If they don’t act, then we face catastrophic damage to the American economy, and the leadership, to their credit, and I mean Republicans and Democrats, fully understand that.”

Mr. Geithner, noting that the Treasury issues 80 million checks a month, including Social Security payments to 55 million Americans, warned that failure to reach an agreement within the next two weeks could be calamitous. Delivering a version of the lecture he gave to the lawmakers at the White House last week, Mr. Geithner said a default would unhinge financial markets, drive up interest rates, and derail the economic recovery.

Mr. Obama, who arrived from Camp David shortly before the Sunday evening session, appeared to have made headway in at least one regard: lawmakers from both parties pledged not to let the United States default on its debt. That is what the Treasury said would happen after Aug. 2, when the government would lose its authority to borrow.

“Nobody is talking about not raising the debt ceiling; I haven’t heard that discussed by anybody,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding that he had an unspecified “contingency plan” to raise the ceiling if the talks fell apart.

Just as Mr. Obama was sitting down with Mr. McConnell and other leaders shortly after 6 p.m. on Sunday, with the men wearing open-collar shirts and blazers, he was asked whether he could get a deal done in 10 days, leaving enough time to draft and pass legislation before Aug. 2.

“We need to,” he replied.

The problem for Mr. Obama is that Republicans are not budging on their demand that any deal include no tax increases. The administration also needs Democratic lawmakers, but for many of them, it will be impossible to vote for a package composed entirely of spending cuts, especially to popular programs.

In a statement after the meeting, Mr. McConnell’s spokesman, Don Stewart, said, “It’s baffling that the president and his party continue to insist on massive tax hikes in the middle of a jobs crisis.”

The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said she favored a large deal but that it “must do no harm to the middle class or to economic growth. It must also protect Medicare and Social Security beneficiaries.”

It was not clear that the president would be able to reconcile these positions, especially after Mr. Boehner set a lower bar for a deal that both parties might find more palatable. In a statement issued after the meeting, Mr. Boehner said the leaders should aim for a midrange deal that would build on spending cuts identified in talks led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Such a deal might produce savings of $2 trillion to $3 trillion over a decade.

Mr. Boehner appeared subdued at the meeting, officials said, letting the House majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, do most of the talking. Mr. Cantor reiterated his opposition to a bigger deal.

Privately, some in Congress expressed regret at Mr. Boehner’s decision on Saturday to walk away from an agreement that they said would have been a rare opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to radically restructure the government’s finances, rewrite the tax code and fix longstanding problems with Medicare and Medicaid.

In the end, officials briefed on the talks said, ideological differences over a tax overhaul bogged down the bigger agreement. Mr. Boehner, they said, was open to letting Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy people expire, while maintaining the cuts for middle-income wage-earners. But Democrats briefed on the talks said he made that contingent on rewriting the tax code by the end of this year, so that the loss of the cuts would be offset by lower overall tax rates.

The White House, officials said, was willing to put a deadline on a tax overhaul. But it rejected Mr. Boehner’s formula, arguing that it would place too much of a burden on the middle class while protecting the rich.

Carl Hulse and Gardiner Harris contributed reporting.

He is not begging to come home. He is begging to stay.

“We try to put them at ease, to say it is not time to pack up,” said Mr. Chandler, who oversees the company’s operations in this border city, where the military arrived last week to help purge drug cartel members from the police department.

Not that his employer, Spellman High Voltage, needs much assurance. Like a crop of other manufacturers at the border, including six companies in this city alone, Spellman is expanding its operations, with a new plant under construction after making a calculation that offers one of the starker paradoxes of these violent days in Mexico.

Despite the bleak outlook the drug war summons, the Mexican economy is humming along, not without warning signs, but growing considerably faster than that of the United States.

Even as drug organizations battle for turf around them, more TV sets are being assembled, car parts boxed up and electronic widgets soldered together in the large manufacturing plants here known as maquiladoras. The result is a boomlet in jobs in some of Mexico’s hardest-hit cities, a bright spot in an otherwise bleak stream of shootouts, departing small businesses and fear of random death.

Over all, jobs in Mexico’s manufacturing sector increased 8.2 percent to 1.8 million as of January, the most recent figures available, driven mostly by what Mexican officials called regaining health in the auto and electronics industries, the engine of the economy along the border. Even Ciudad Juárez, which has both the highest level of violence and the largest number of maquiladoras, added 1.3 percent more jobs, to 176,824.

Mostly American-owned and in border states, the plants import raw materials duty free and export assembled products, lowering the cost of goods in the United States and providing jobs that pay more than the Mexican average (typically $8 to $16 per day on the assembly line) but a lot less than American wages.

Some of the new or expanding plants come at the expense of plant closings in the United States. Electrolux, which makes washers, dryers and other home products, closed a plant in 2009 in Iowa but opened one in Juárez last month that is expected to employ 400 people.

Others are from investors farther afield. Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm that makes iPhones, Dell computers and other electronics, is one of several Asian companies taking root. It opened a plant in Juárez last summer. Down the coast from here, Posco, a Korean steel manufacturer, has announced plans to expand its operations with a second plant that will employ 300 people by 2013. Several other companies plan to built or expand in other states as well.

The gains have not made up for losses during the global recession; many plants closed or have shed jobs for good, focusing on making their operations more efficient through automation and other measures, analysts said.

Still, border towns are showing some of their biggest signs of economic life in months. Over all, the Mexican economy, the second largest in Latin America after Brazil, grew 5.5 percent last year, its fastest pace in a decade, and is expected to grow 4.5 percent this year, driven largely by manufacturing as well as internal growth from an expanding middle class. The American economy, by contrast, is expected to grow between 2.7 percent and 2.9 percent in 2011, the Federal Reserve projected late last month.

Economists say Mexico’s growth would be even stronger without the cartel violence, which in the last five years has left more than 40,000 people dead, according to the count by national newspapers.

And given how central the American economy is to its welfare, Mexico could suffer if the recovery in the United States does not pick up speed. While trade with the United States hit a record last year of nearly $395 billion, foreign investment has lagged, suggesting that much of the job and economic growth is depending on existing businesses expanding or restarting production lines that had been waylaid by the recession.

The Bank of Mexico reports foreign investment was $17.7 billion last year, far off pre-recession levels of $25 billion and fed in good measure by a single transaction, the purchase of a one of the country’s largest beer companies by Heineken.

Monterrey, the country’s business and industrial hub, has exploded with violence in the past year, though even there, in the suburbs, some plants have expanded or announced plans to open. For better or worse, the plants are at once part of and apart from the communities that surround them, protected by tall fences, armed guards and cameras galore.

“As this is my last opportunity before we leave this afternoon, I would just say, on behalf of us both, how grateful we are to be welcomed so warmly in the Golden State and City of Angels,” Prince William told a screaming crowd that gathered on Sunday at Sony Studios for a job fair for veterans.

Still, this was hardly a trip for hordes of commoners — only a few caught even a glimpse of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in the flesh.

At the couple’s arrival here on Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife, Anne Gust, presented them with a red, white and blue bouquet and an iPad2 loaded with Golden State images and songs, including “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and Tom Petty’s “California.”

A few minutes and thousands of photographs later, they were whisked away in a black Range Rover. By the time they arrived at the Beverly Hilton for an event focusing on technology in the United Kingdom, the lobby crowd had grown to a couple of hundred. But they missed any chance to properly stare at the guests of honor, who were escorted in through a different entrance.

Security throughout the weekend was carefully choreographed — with street and sidewalk closings blocking the perimeter for each event. Even the public restrooms at the Beverly Hills appearance were cleared a half-hour before the couple arrived. On Saturday morning, the pair took in sweeping views of Southern California as they traveled by helicopter north to Carpinteria for a charity polo match.

Fans paid $400 for a chance to watch Prince William play polo — $4,000 to join the couple for lunch.

Erica Stanislawski, 16, who said her father was a longtime member of the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club, said that her interest was strictly about polo. “Polo is a great game,” she began.

Her friend Lauren Lantry, 16, interrupted. “I’m excited to see famous people!” she said. “The prince is really cute. And she’s the real deal and super-pretty.”

The crowd dressed for the occasion: men in Nantucket red pants and seersucker and women in elaborate hats.

The Duchess of Cambridge was more understated in a floral print sundress, no hat and a pair of light brown heels.

The prince drew cheers every time he got near the ball, but squandered several early chances to score. But he scored four of his winning team’s last five goals.

Onlookers rushed onto the field in excitement, but they eventually obeyed calls to return to the stands. And they screamed as the prince kissed his wife on both cheeks after the match.

The royal couple mingled with celebrities at an event for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts on Saturday night. Sunday was reserved for less fancy events, starting with a visit to a Skid Row arts center for children.

Their last stop before heading home was the job fair in Culver City, where Prince William delivered a two-minute speech, his most extensive public remarks of the visit.

“Catherine and I both have friends back in Britain who could benefit from a brilliant initiative like this,” he said to the crowd of veterans, who held up hundreds of cellphones to snap pictures.

The couple spent a few minutes speaking to the Fraijos, a three-generation military family.

“They weren’t what I’d expect from television, just so warm and cordial,” said Steve Fraijo, who served in the Marines for more than 20 years.

When his mother, Sandra Ann Fraijo, mentioned she was from Kirkcaldy, in Scotland, Prince William responded eagerly: “They have the best fish and chips there!” And when her 13-year-old granddaughter showed off her British accent, she said the Duchess told her, “You do that even better than me!”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 11, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a man who spoke to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. He is Steve Fraijo, not Steven. Also, Sandra Ann Fraijo’s granddaughter is 13, not 11.

At Virginia Tech Carilion, the nation’s newest medical school, administrators decided against relying solely on grades, test scores and hourlong interviews to determine who got in. Instead, the school invited candidates to the admissions equivalent of speed-dating: nine brief interviews that forced candidates to show they had the social skills to navigate a health care system in which good communication has become critical.

The new process has enormous consequences not only for the lives of the applicants but, its backers hope, also for the entire health care system. It is called the multiple mini interview, or M.M.I., and its use is spreading. At least eight medical schools in the United States — including those at Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Cincinnati — and 13 in Canada are using it.

At Virginia Tech Carilion, 26 candidates showed up on a Saturday in March and stood with their backs to the doors of 26 small rooms. When a bell sounded, the applicants spun around and read a sheet of paper taped to the door that described an ethical conundrum. Two minutes later, the bell sounded again and the applicants charged into the small rooms and found an interviewer waiting. A chorus of cheerful greetings rang out, and the doors shut. The candidates had eight minutes to discuss that room’s situation. Then they moved to the next room, the next surprise conundrum and the next interviewer, who scored each applicant with a number and sometimes a brief note.

The school asked that the actual questions be kept secret, but some sample questions include whether giving patients unproven alternative remedies is ethical, whether pediatricians should support parents who want to circumcise their baby boys and whether insurance co-pays for medical visits are appropriate.

Virginia Tech Carilion administrators said they created questions that assessed how well candidates think on their feet and how willing they are to work in teams. The most important part of the interviews are often not candidates’ initial responses — there are no right or wrong answers — but how well they respond when someone disagrees with them, something that happens when working in teams.

Candidates who jump to improper conclusions, fail to listen or are overly opinionated fare poorly because such behavior undermines teams. Those who respond appropriately to the emotional tenor of the interviewer or ask for more information do well in the new admissions process because such tendencies are helpful not only with colleagues but also with patients.

“We are trying to weed out the students who look great on paper but haven’t developed the people or communication skills we think are important,” said Dr. Stephen Workman, associate dean for admissions and administration at Virginia Tech Carilion.

Dr. Charles Prober, senior associate dean at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said Stanford always valued social skills in students — particularly the ability to work collaboratively with colleagues and establish trust with patients — but did not have a reliable way of ferreting these skills out until adopting mini interviews.

The system grew out of research that found that interviewers rarely change their scores after the first five minutes, that using multiple interviewers removes random bias and that situational interviews rather than personal ones are more likely to reveal character flaws, said Dr. Harold Reiter, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who developed the system.

In fact, candidate scores on multiple mini interviews have proved highly predictive of scores on medical licensing exams three to five years later that test doctors’ decision-making, patient interactions and cultural competency, Dr. Reiter said.

A pleasant bedside manner and an attentive ear have always been desirable traits in doctors, of course, but two trends have led school administrators to make the hunt for these qualities a priority. The first is a growing catalog of studies that pin the blame for an appalling share of preventable deaths on poor communication among doctors, patients and nurses that often results because some doctors, while technically competent, are socially inept.

“We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Mr. Panetta said before arriving here on an unannounced trip, his first to the Iraqi capital as defense secretary.

Mr. Panetta is the third top American official to raise an alarm about Iranian influence in Iraq in recent days. The American ambassador to Iraq, James F. Jeffrey, said last week that the United States had “forensic” evidence that weapons and weapons parts from Iran were being used by Shiite militias against American troops. His remarks were echoed two days later in Washington by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Panetta did not elaborate on what the forensic evidence entailed.

Mr. Panetta’s comments, made a day before he is to meet with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, were aimed at urging the Iraqi military to take stronger action against Shiite militias and to see Iran as the Obama administration does — not just as a threat to American troops, but as a potential cancer in the country.

“The key right now is to make sure that we do everything possible to ensure that the Iraqis within their own country are doing what they can to stop the flow of those weapons and to stop the Shia from using them,” Mr. Panetta said. Iraq did begin a crackdown on Shiite militias in the south in recent days, but the American military would like the Iraqis to do more.

The Shiite-led government has traditionally been more comfortable taking on Sunni militants.

American officials say that Iran supplies the militias with high-powered rockets and parts for powerful bombs that can pierce armor. In June, 15 American service members were killed in Iraq, 9 of them in rocket attacks, American officials said.

Iran’s motive, American officials say, is to claim credit for driving American forces out of Iraq at a time when those forces are more than halfway out the door in a withdrawal planned long ago. All 46,000 remaining United States troops in Iraq are to leave by the end of this year under an agreement between the two countries, but both Iraqi and American military commanders believe that some American forces should stay beyond 2011.

Few Iraqi politicians are willing to admit publicly that they need American help, and Obama administration officials say they will consider staying only if the Iraqis ask. The subject is particularly sensitive because the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr helped the current government come to power and has said many times that the United States should leave immediately.

In April, Robert M. Gates, Mr. Panetta’s predecessor as defense secretary, all but begged the Iraqis to ask for troops to stay and said time was running out. Three months later, the situation is largely unchanged, although the Iraqis appear to be inching toward a decision. On Sunday, Mr. Panetta echoed Mr. Gates. “If they are to make a proposal with regards to a continuing U.S. presence there, they have to make a formal request — that we would obviously consider,” he said.

Mr. Panetta arrived in Baghdad from Helmand Province, in Afghanistan, where he met with American Marines and Afghan Army soldiers at Camp Dwyer, a sprawling military base and the site of a busy medevac hospital in the southern desert. Mr. Panetta said he was encouraged by what he saw. “I think the bottom line is we are on the right path here,” he said.

In Washington, Obama administration officials frequently cite military gains in the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar as evidence that the Taliban have largely been driven from the south. But Marine commanders offered a more complex assessment.

“The war is certainly not over here,” said Brig. Gen. Lew Craparotta, a senior commander of the 20,000 Marines in Helmand Province. General Craparotta said that although the Taliban had not come back with the same strength in this summer’s fighting season as they had last year, Marines were still taking direct fire and under threat from homemade bombs every day, particularly in areas like Sangin and north toward the Kajaki Dam.

Col. David Furness, a commander of a Marine regimental combat team in central Helmand, said that Afghan Army soldiers were taking far heavier casualties than the Americans and yet were getting up each morning and returning to battle. “In the final analysis, it’s their fight,” he said, adding that the Afghans, with American training, were now good to beat the Taliban on their own. But once the Americans leave, he said, the Afghans “have to maintain the will to do so, and I don’t know how that will go.”

The meeting ended after about an hour and 15 minutes with no breakthroughs, according to a Democratic official, but the two sides agreed to resume the negotiations on Monday. Mr. Obama has scheduled a news conference for Monday morning before the resumption of the talks.

White House officials said Mr. Obama was still determined to pursue the boldest package possible — one that would require new tax revenue as well as cuts in Medicare and other entitlement programs — but he faced unrelenting opposition from Republicans and growing qualms among Democrats.

“Congress has to act,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “If they don’t act, then we face catastrophic damage to the American economy, and the leadership, to their credit, and I mean Republicans and Democrats, fully understand that.”

Mr. Geithner, noting that the Treasury issues 80 million checks a month, including Social Security payments to 55 million Americans, warned that failure to reach an agreement within the next two weeks could be calamitous. Delivering a version of the lecture he gave to the lawmakers at the White House last week, Mr. Geithner said a default would unhinge markets, drive up interest rates and derail the economic recovery.

As Mr. Obama arrived from Camp David for the Sunday evening session, he appeared to have made headway in at least one regard: lawmakers from both parties pledged not to let the United States default on its debt. That is something the Treasury said would happen after Aug. 2, when the government would lose its authority to borrow, and could send shockwaves through the markets and the economy.

“Nobody is talking about not raising the debt ceiling; I haven’t heard that discussed by anybody,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding that he had an unspecified “contingency plan” to raise the ceiling if the talks fell apart.

Just as Mr. Obama was sitting down with Mr. McConnell and other leaders shortly after 6 p.m. on Sunday, with the men wearing open-collar shirts and blazers, he was asked whether he could get a deal done in 10 days. “We need to,” he replied.

The problem for Mr. Obama is that Republicans are not budging on their demand that any deal include no tax increases. The administration also needs Democratic lawmakers, but for many of them, it will be impossible to vote for a package composed entirely of spending cuts, especially on popular programs.

It was not clear that the president would be able to overcome those obstacles, especially after Mr. Boehner set a lower bar for a deal that both parties might find more acceptable. He said they should aim for a $2 trillion to $3 trillion deal that would build on spending cuts identified in talks led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The anemic employment report last week added another wrinkle, with Republicans arguing that new taxes would cripple the recovery and Democrats saying that cutting Medicare or Social Security would hit the poor and the elderly and reduce whatever support the government is providing to kick-start the economy.

Privately, officials at the White House and even some in Congress expressed regret at Mr. Boehner’s decision on Saturday to walk away from a big deal, which they said closed a rare window of opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to radically restructure the government’s fiscal position, rewrite the tax code and fix longstanding problems with the financing of Medicare and Medicaid.

In the end, several officials briefed on the talks said, ideological differences over a tax overhaul bogged down the bigger deal. Mr. Boehner, they said, signaled a willingness to raise $1 trillion in revenue — much of which would have come from the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy people.

Although Mr. Boehner was open to letting those cuts expire while maintaining the cuts for middle-income wage-earners, Democrats briefed on the talks said he made that contingent on rewriting the tax code by the end of this year, so that the loss of the cuts would be offset by lower overall tax rates.

The White House, these officials said, was willing to put a deadline on a tax overhaul. But it rejected Mr. Boehner’s formula, arguing that it would place too much of a burden on the middle class while protecting the rich.

A Republican official familiar with the negotiations said Mr. Boehner “would only discuss new revenues if they came from economic growth and tax reform instead of tax increases.” And he insisted on a “trigger” that would set off deep spending cuts and other measures if the tax overhaul was not implemented before the end of 2011.

Gardiner Harris contributed reporting.

Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. In states hit hard by the downturn, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, residents derived even more of their income from the government.

By the end of this year, however, many of those dollars are going to disappear, with the expiration of extended benefits intended to help people cope with the lingering effects of the recession. Moody’s Analytics estimates $37 billion will be drained from the nation’s pocketbooks this year.

In terms of economic impact, that is slightly less than the spending cuts Congress enacted to keep the government financed through September, averting a shutdown.

Unless hiring picks up sharply to compensate, economists fear that the lost income will further crimp consumer spending and act as a drag on a recovery that is still quite fragile. Among the other supports that are slipping away are federal aid to the states, the Federal Reserve’s program to pump money into the economy and the payroll tax cut, scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

“If we don’t get more job growth and gains in wages and salaries, then consumers just aren’t going to have the firepower to spend, and the economy is going to weaken,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, a macroeconomic consulting firm.

Job growth has remained elusive. There are 4.6 unemployed workers for every opening, according to the Labor Department, and Friday’s unemployment report showed that employers added an anemic 18,000 jobs in June.

In Arizona, where there are 10 job seekers for every opening, 45,000 people could lose benefits by the end of the year, according to estimates from the state Department of Economic Security. Yet employers in the state have added just 4,000 jobs over the last 12 months.

Some other states will also feel a disproportionate loss of income unless hiring revives. In Florida, where nearly 476,000 people are collecting unemployment benefits, employers have added only 11,200 jobs in the last year. In Michigan, employers have added about 40,000 jobs since May 2010, but about 267,000 people are claiming jobless benefits.

Throughout the recession and its aftermath, government benefits have helped keep money in people’s wallets and, in turn, circulating among businesses. Total government payments rose to $2.3 trillion in 2010, from $1.7 trillion in 2007, an increase of about 35 percent.

While some of that growth was in Social Security and disability benefits as the population aged, the majority resulted from payments to people continuing to suffer from the recession, said Mr. Zandi. Unemployment benefits, including emergency and extended benefits, are more than three times their prerecession level, he said. The nearly 20 percent of personal income now provided by the government is close to a record high.

Approved by Congress last December, the final extension of jobless benefits — for a maximum of 99 weeks for each unemployed person — is scheduled to conclude at the end of this year. A handful of states, like Wisconsin and Arizona, have already cut off weeks 80 through 99 for their residents. Meanwhile, more of the long-term unemployed are bumping up against the 99-week limit.

Consumers account for an estimated 60 to 70 percent of the country’s economic activity, but two years into the official recovery, businesses are still complaining that people simply are not spending enough.

“Regardless of why people have less money to spend, it affects all retailers in all industries,” said Michael Siemienas, spokesman for SuperValu, which operates grocery chains including Cub Foods, Shop ’n Save and Save-A-Lot. Mr. Siemienas said that the number of SuperValu’s customers using electronic benefit transfers to pay bills had grown over the last year.

“As this is my last opportunity before we leave this afternoon, I would just say, on behalf of us both, how grateful we are to be welcomed so warmly in the Golden State and City of Angels,” Prince William told a screaming crowd that gathered on Sunday at Sony Studios for a job fair for veterans.

Still, this was hardly a trip for hordes of commoners — only a few caught even a glimpse of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in the flesh.

At the couple’s arrival here on Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown and his wife, Anne Gust, presented them with a red, white and blue bouquet and an iPad2 loaded with Golden State images and songs, including “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and Tom Petty’s “California.”

A few minutes and thousands of photographs later, they were whisked away in a black Range Rover. By the time they arrived at the Beverly Hilton for an event focusing on technology in the United Kingdom, the lobby crowd had grown to a couple of hundred. But they missed any chance to properly stare at the guests of honor, who were escorted in through a different entrance.

Security throughout the weekend was carefully choreographed — with street and sidewalk closings blocking the perimeter for each event. Even the public restrooms at the Beverly Hills appearance were cleared a half-hour before the couple arrived. On Saturday morning, the pair took in sweeping views of Southern California as they traveled by helicopter north to Carpinteria for a charity polo match.

Fans paid $400 for a chance to watch Prince William play polo — $4,000 to join the couple for lunch.

Erica Stanislawski, 16, who said her father was a longtime member of the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club, said that her interest was strictly about polo. “Polo is a great game,” she began.

Her friend Lauren Lantry, 16, interrupted. “I’m excited to see famous people!” she said. “The prince is really cute. And she’s the real deal and super-pretty.”

The crowd dressed for the occasion: men in Nantucket red pants and seersucker and women in elaborate hats.

The Duchess of Cambridge was more understated in a floral print sundress, no hat and a pair of light brown heels.

The prince drew cheers every time he got near the ball, but squandered several early chances to score. But he scored four of his winning team’s last five goals.

Onlookers rushed onto the field in excitement, but they eventually obeyed calls to return to the stands. And they screamed as the prince kissed his wife on both cheeks after the match.

The royal couple mingled with celebrities at an event for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts on Saturday night. Sunday was reserved for less fancy events, starting with a visit to a Skid Row arts center for children.

Their last stop before heading home was the job fair in Culver City, where Prince William delivered a two-minute speech, his most extensive public remarks of the visit.

“Catherine and I both have friends back in Britain who could benefit from a brilliant initiative like this,” he said to the crowd of veterans, who held up hundreds of cellphones to snap pictures.

The couple spent a few minutes speaking to the Fraijos, a three-generation military family.

“They weren’t what I’d expect from television, just so warm and cordial,” said Steven Fraijo, who served in the Marines for more than 20 years.

When his mother, Sandra Ann Fraijo, mentioned she was from Kirkcaldy, in Scotland, Prince William responded eagerly: “They have the best fish and chips there!” And when her 11-year-old granddaughter showed off her British accent, she said the Duchess told her, “You do that even better than me!”

Suddenly, his thoughts flashed to his own days as an altar boy in nearby Holbrook, Ariz., and the town’s charismatic priest, the Rev. Clement A. Hageman. “And then I started remembering,” he would later recount, according to court documents.

Over the past few years, a growing number of predominantly Hispanic men from the string of dusty towns along Route 66 in Arizona have stepped forward, alleging that Father Hageman sexually abused them as boys when he worked in local parishes from the early 1940s until his death in 1975.

A recent study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops found the rise of sexual abuse in the church coincided with the social and sexual tumult of the 1960s and ’70s. But the story of Father Hageman, as told through recently released church documents chronicling his troubles, begins much earlier.

Indeed, the priest has long haunted the deeply Catholic Hispanic communities around Holbrook, Winslow and Kingman, Ariz. His accusers said that he was “dumped” in impoverished, nonwhite communities by church officials to avoid scandal, an assertion that has emerged in other recent abuse cases.

“The premise we’ve been hearing is that the evidence is dead, the people are dead and that this was a problem of the ’60s and ’70s,” said Patrick Wall, a former priest and canon lawyer who investigated abuse cases for the church and now helps victims. “This case cracks open a door that has been closed for 60 years.”

Mr. Moya, 70, is believed to be the first to file a lawsuit against the Catholic Church over the priest’s alleged abuse, which dates to a time when the poor pockets of Mexican-Americans who lived here dared not question the local priest. His lawyer, Robert E. Pastor, said he expected to file a second suit next month on behalf of at least two more local men who say they, too, were abused by the priest. And Mr. Pastor said nine others settled with the Diocese of Gallup, N.M., over claims involving Father Hageman.

“This priest was so proficient, he abused everywhere he went,” Mr. Pastor said.

Filed in Coconino County Superior Court last August, Mr. Moya’s lawsuit names the Diocese of Gallup, which oversaw the churches where Father Hageman spent much of his career, as a defendant. It also names the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Tex., and the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, N.M., which the lawsuit contends were involved in the priest’s placements.

The suit alleges that Father Hageman started sexually abusing Mr. Moya when he was 12 and that church officials in all three dioceses covered up the priest’s behavior.

The Corpus Christi and Santa Fe dioceses have sought to have the lawsuit dismissed, arguing they were not responsible for supervising Father Hageman after he was transferred to Arizona. In a statement, the Corpus Christi Diocese said that the accusations did not involve any current member of the clergy or church worker associated with them.

The Gallup Diocese, meanwhile, responded in court filings that it lacked “sufficient knowledge or information” to know if Mr. Moya’s accusations were true. Moreover, the diocese argued that Mr. Moya’s claims against it should be barred because Father Hageman’s alleged abuse was “completely outside the scope of his employment as a Roman Catholic priest.”

Robert P. Warburton, a lawyer for both the Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the Gallup Diocese, declined to discuss the case, stating in a letter last week that further files on the priest, requested by Mr. Pastor, do not exist.

Father Clem, as parishioners called him, was born in Glandorf, Ohio, and ordained at age 25. He spent much of his life working at six rural parishes in New Mexico and Arizona, and church records recall him as popular.

But there are other memories.

“We’d all be playing on the playground, and he’d come walking, point at one of us, and move his finger to come with him inside the rectory,” recalled Joseph Baca, a Winslow man who says he was raped and molested repeatedly by Father Hageman and whose claims were detailed in an affidavit taken during settlement negotiations with the Gallup Diocese. “At first, I thought I was the only one.”

May local officials dredge so barges can get through here along the Mississippi River even though laid-off state officials are not around to watch? Might 41 State Patrol officers not quite done with field training be deemed essential and sent back to work like others in the patrol?

Could state workers sign the adoption forms for a Minnesota couple who had been sitting in a Texas motel room with their new baby for the last week, unable to cross state lines without the paperwork? (“So our petition would be, um, could we please come home?” the woman asked the ad hoc court on Friday in the latest such hearing, conducted, in her case, by speakerphone.)

If the outlines of a government shutdown are simple — politicians cannot agree on how to spend money, so everything stops — the details are not. Since Minnesota officially closed its doors on July 1, the deadline by which the state’s political leaders were required to settle on a budget for the fiscal year, officials here have found themselves wandering a new labyrinth.

With the broadest shutdown in state history entering its second full week and no sign of a compromise on the horizon, political leaders in Washington, facing their own standoff and looming deadline, may want to ponder Minnesota — one cautionary reminder, if on a smaller scale, from the nation’s middle.

In many ways, of course, the situations are distinct, but Minnesota’s essential impasse sounds familiar: Republican lawmakers who control St. Paul want to rein in state spending and have rejected calls from Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor, to raise income taxes on the wealthiest Minnesotans.

Leaders in Washington disagree on what passing an August deadline without raising the debt ceiling would really mean (it has never happened), but some experts say it could result, along with devastation to the nation’s ability to borrow and to the broader economy, in a confusing, partial halt to some programs as the government has to pick and choose what it has enough cash to cover.

In Minnesota, carrying out a shutdown — and a relatively ordinary one, as these things go — has turned out to be a whole new, time-consuming government function, including convening the special hearings to weigh exceptions to the shutdown rules. The costs of closing (who knew it cost money to halt spending?) are themselves swiftly rising. And, puzzlingly enough, the shock of a shuttered Capitol, of 22,000 laid-off state workers and of barricaded state parks in the heart of Minnesota’s camping season seems, so far, not to have introduced urgency to the political negotiation.

No one knows exactly what the shutdown is costing Minnesota. For one thing, a final tally will depend on how long it lasts; for another, some of the people who might be estimating the extra costs and lost revenue in various state departments right now are laid off.

“There’s nobody there to answer the phone call,” said John Pollard, a spokesman for Minnesota Management and Budget.

But whatever the precise numbers, the counterintuitive truth is that freezing nonessential state services costs money. For instance, the state had to pay the postage to send layoff warnings to 36,000 people as the new budget deadline grew close. The 22,000 workers who were ultimately sent home are expected to receive unemployment benefits, which will cost the state.

And Minnesota is losing revenue it would otherwise be collecting, including $1.25 million a day in lottery sales (the lottery is closed), an unknown amount in parking and licensing fees the Departments of Health, Education and Administration are not getting, and about $52 million a month that the Department of Revenue would ordinarily be bringing in if its compliance officers (now laid off) were scrutinizing tax payments.

By the end of last week, there were other hints of financial repercussions for the state. Fitch Ratings lowered the state’s bond rating, noting the budget impasse, meaning that it will be more expensive for the state to borrow money.

Increasingly, the medical establishment is putting its weight behind the physical diagnosis. In the latest evidence, 10 medical institutions have just introduced the first accredited residency programs in addiction medicine, where doctors who have completed medical school and a primary residency will be able to spend a year studying the relationship between addiction and brain chemistry.

“This is a first step toward bringing recognition, respectability and rigor to addiction medicine,” said David Withers, who oversees the new residency program at the Marworth Alcohol and Chemical Dependency Treatment Center in Waverly, Pa.

The goal of the residency programs, which started July 1 with 20 students at the various institutions, is to establish addiction medicine as a standard specialty along the lines of pediatrics, oncology or dermatology. The residents will treat patients with a range of addictions — to alcohol, drugs, prescription medicines, nicotine and more — and study the brain chemistry involved, as well as the role of heredity.

“In the past, the specialty was very much targeted toward psychiatrists,” said Nora D. Volkow, the neuroscientist in charge of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “It’s a gap in our training program.” She called the lack of substance-abuse education among general practitioners “a very serious problem.”

Institutions offering the one-year residency are St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, the University of Maryland Medical System, the University at Buffalo School of Medicine, the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, the University of Minnesota Medical School, the University of Florida College of Medicine, the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii, the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Marworth and Boston University Medical Center. Some, like Marworth, have been offering programs in addiction medicine for years, simply without accreditation.

The new accreditation comes courtesy of the American Board of Addiction Medicine, or ABAM, which was founded in 2007 to help promote the medical treatment of addiction.

The board aims to also get the program accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, a step that requires, among other things, establishing the program at a minimum of 20 institutions. The recognition would mean that the addictions specialty would qualify as a “primary” residency, one that a newly minted doctor could enter right out of school.

Richard Blondell, the chairman of the training committee at ABAM, said the group expected to accredit an additional 10 to 15 institutions this year.

The rethinking of addiction as a medical disease rather than a strictly psychological one began about 15 years ago, when researchers discovered through high-resonance imaging that drug addiction resulted in actual physical changes to the brain.

Armed with that understanding, “the management of folks with addiction becomes very much like the management of other chronic diseases, such as asthma, hypertension or diabetes,” said Dr. Daniel Alford, who oversees the program at Boston University Medical Center. “It’s hard necessarily to cure people, but you can certainly manage the problem to the point where they are able to function” through a combination of pharmaceuticals and therapy.

Central to the understanding of addiction as a physical ailment is the belief that treatment must be continuing in order to avoid relapse. Just as no one expects a diabetes patient to be cured after six weeks of diet and insulin management, Dr. Alford said, it is unrealistic to expect most drug addicts to be cured after 28 days in a detoxification facility.

“It’s not surprising to us now that when you stop the treatment, people relapse,” Dr. Alford said. “It doesn’t mean that the treatment doesn’t work, it just means that you need to continue treatment.” Those physical changes in the brain could also explain why some smokers will still crave a cigarette 30 years after quitting, Dr. Alford said.

If the idea of addiction as a chronic disease has been slow to take hold in medical circles, it could be because doctors sometime struggle to grasp brain function, Dr. Volkow said. “While it is very simple to understand a disease of the heart — the heart is very simple, it’s just a muscle — it’s much more complex to understand the brain,” she said.

Increasing interest in addiction medicine is a handful of promising new pharmaceuticals, most notably buprenorphine (sold under names like Suboxone), which has proved to ease withdrawal symptoms in heroin addicts and subsequently block cravings, though it causes side effects of its own. Other drugs for treating opioid or alcohol dependence have shown promise as well.

Few addiction medicine specialists advocate a path to recovery that depends solely on pharmacology, however. “The more we learn about the treatment of addiction, the more we realize that one size does not fit all,” said Petros Levounis, who is in charge of the residency at the Addiction Institute of New York at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.

Equally maligned is the idea that psychiatry or 12-step programs are adequate for curing a disease with physical roots. Many people who abuse substances do not have psychiatric problems, Dr. Alford noted, adding, “I think there’s absolutely a role for addiction psychiatrists.”

While each institution has developed its own curriculum, the basic competencies each seeks to impart are the same. Residents will learn to recognize and diagnose substance abuse, conduct brief interventions that spell out the treatment options and prescribe the proper medications. The doctors will also be expected to understand the legal and practical implications of substance abuse.

Christine Pace, a 31-year-old graduate of Harvard Medical School, is the first addiction resident at Boston University Medical Center. She got interested in the subject as a teenager, when she volunteered at an AIDS organization and overheard heroin addicts complaining about doctors who could not — or would not — help them.

This year, when she became the in-house doctor at a methadone clinic in Boston, she was dismayed to find that the complaints had not changed. “I saw physicians over and over again pushing it aside, just calling a social-work consult to deal with a patient who is struggling with addiction,” Dr. Pace said.

One of her patients is Derek Anderson, 53, who credits Suboxone — as well as a general practitioner who six years ago recognized his signs of addiction — with helping him kick his 35-year heroin habit.  

“I used to go to detoxes and go back and forth and back and forth,” he said. But the Suboxone “got me to where I don’t have the dependency every day, consuming you, swallowing you like a fish in water. I’m able to work now, I’m able to take care of my daughter, I’m able to pay rent — all the things I couldn’t do when I was using.”

Thanks to a new Web site made available today by the Department of Education, families can compare the various costs of particular colleges and universities, as well as the trends in that pricing, according to an article in The Times by my colleague Tamar Lewin.

As Ms. Lewin writes:

The new lists, required by the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, show the institutions with the highest and lowest tuitions, the highest and lowest percentage tuition increases over the last two years, and the highest and lowest net price — that is, the actual price full-time students pay, including room and board, after financial aid like grants and scholarships are taken into account.

In each of several categories — public and private, for-profit and nonprofit, four-year and two-year — the most expensive institutions and those whose costs are rising most rapidly will be required to report to the Education Department why their costs are so high and what they plan to do about it.

Readers of The Choice who have already traveled down this road know that it can be perilous, and at times maddening, to try to weigh the tuition, board and other fees of one institution against those of another.

So in that respect, it seems fair to ask how helpful this information — and there is quite a bit of it — will be for families.

In an e-mail exchange this morning, not long after the lists went live online, Ms. Lewin explained to me:

The lists are an attempt to embarrass colleges into keeping their prices down. Even though there are no penalties for having unusually high tuition — beyond having to report why it’s so high, and how it’s going to be addressed — no institution wants to be singled out for high tuition.

Ms. Lewin went on to provide some examples that should give users pause, at least in terms of reading too much into the various rankings:

The colleges that top the list — the ones like Bates that use a comprehensive fee instead of breaking it down by tuition and room and board — may want to change their approach, so they won’t show up as the highest-priced, when there are plenty of other schools, like Sarah Lawrence, whose tuition is actually higher.

A lot of art schools, with their expensive facilities and low teacher/student ratios, show up among the most expensive — and a lot of religious colleges are among the lower-priced.

Even though these lists are being provided by the government — and not a publication like U.S. News and World Report — they would still seem ripe for manipulation by the colleges themselves. Ms. Lewin has already identified some areas for potential abuse:

Colleges may try to game the net-price rankings. Because they include only first-time full-time freshmen who get some aid, colleges will look better if they give a lot of aid to a few students than if they spread it more widely. And if they target their aid to freshmen, and taper it off in the later years, that will help them rise in the rankings, too.

Ms. Lewin ended her e-mail to me with a final “caution to users.” She wrote:

The numbers on the lists are a few years behind, and, with the economic downturn, the 2009 tuition reported may be quite different from next year’s tuition. And the comparisons of 2006 tuition to 2008 tuition, which were used to figure how fast the price is going up, are even more out of date.

Coupled with a statement from the top American military officer last week linking Pakistan’s military spy agency to the recent murder of a Pakistani journalist, the halting or withdrawal of military equipment and other aid to Pakistan illustrates the depth of the debate inside the Obama administration over how to change the behavior of one of its key counterterrorism partners. 

Altogether, about $800 million in military aid and equipment, or over one-third of the more than $2 billion in annual American security assistance to Pakistan, could be affected, three senior United States officials said.

This aid includes about $300 million to reimburse Pakistan for some of the costs of deploying more than 100,000 soldiers along the Afghan border to combat terrorism, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in training assistance and military hardware, according to half a dozen Congressional, Pentagon and other administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss the politically delicate matter.

Some of the curtailed aid is equipment that the United States wants to send but Pakistan now refuses to accept, like rifles, ammunition, body armor and bomb-disposal gear that were withdrawn or held up after Pakistan ordered more than 100 Army Special Forces trainers to leave the country in recent weeks.

Some is equipment, such as radios, night-vision goggles and helicopter spare parts, which cannot be set up, certified or used for training because Pakistan has denied visas to the American personnel needed to operate the equipment, two senior Pentagon officials said.

And some is assistance like the reimbursements for troop costs, which is being reviewed in light of questions about Pakistan’s commitment to carry out counterterrorism operations. For example, the United States recently provided Pakistan with information about suspected bomb-making factories, only to have the insurgents vanish before Pakistani security forces arrived a few days later.

“When it comes to our military aid,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a Senate committee last month “we are not prepared to continue providing that at the pace we were providing it unless and until we see certain steps taken.”

American officials say they would probably resume equipment deliveries and aid if relations improve and Pakistan pursues terrorists more aggressively. The cutoffs do not affect any immediate deliveries of military sales to Pakistan, like F-16 fighter jets, or nonmilitary aid, the officials said.

Pakistan’s precise military budget is not known, and while the American aid cutoff would probably have a small impact on the overall military budget, it would most directly affect the counterinsurgency campaign. The Pakistani Army spends nearly one-quarter of the nation’s annual expenditures, according to K. Alan Kronstadt of the Congressional Research Service.

While some senior administration officials have concluded that Pakistan will never be the kind of partner the administration hoped for when President Obama entered office, others emphasize that the United States cannot risk a full break in relations or a complete cutoff of aid akin to what happened in the 1990s, when Pakistan was caught developing nuclear weapons.

But many of the recent aid curtailments are clearly intended to force the Pakistani military to make a difficult choice between backing the country that finances much of its operations and equipment, or continuing to provide secret support for the Taliban and other militants fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan.

“We have to continue to emphasize with the Pakistanis that in the end it’s in their interest to be able to go after these targets as well,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters on Friday en route to Afghanistan.

Some American officials say Pakistan has only itself to blame, citing the Pakistani military’s decision to distance itself from American assistance in response to the humiliation suffered from the American commando raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as rising anger from midlevel Pakistani officers and the Pakistani public that senior military leaders, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the powerful army chief of staff, are too accommodating to the Americans.

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

On the eve of a second round of high-level bipartisan talks set for Sunday, Mr. Boehner issued a statement saying he would now urge negotiators to instead focus on crafting a smaller package more in line with the $2 trillion to $3 trillion in spending cuts and revenue increases negotiated earlier by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes,” Mr. Boehner said. “I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”

The decision was a major reversal for Mr. Boehner, a veteran Congressional deal-maker who along with Mr. Obama had been the major advocate for seeking a far-reaching deal that would have combined a debt limit increase with substantial spending cuts, significant changes in social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and perhaps Social Security, and as much as $1 trillion in new revenues. Following a secret meeting between the two last weekend, Mr. Obama went public with his own call for a broad package.

The White House, in its own statement, followed Mr. Boehner’s announcement with the suggestion that the president would try to change Mr. Boehner’s mind in their Sunday session.

“Both parties have made real progress thus far, and to back off now will not only fail to solve our fiscal challenge, it will confirm the cynicism people have about politics in Washington,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said. “The president believes that now is the moment to rise above that cynicism and show the American people that we can still do big things. And so tomorrow, he will make the case to Congressional leaders that we must reject the politics of least resistance and take on this critical challenge.”

But the prospect of getting the bulk of his own Republican majority behind a $4 trillion, 10-year agreement was looming as a very heavy political and policy lift for the speaker who is still in his first year in the position.

As potential elements of the plan became public, Mr. Boehner was encountering stiff resistance from fellow Republicans determined to oppose any package containing proposals that could be construed as a tax increase, worried such a deal could cost the party dearly in the 2012 elections. In the initial White House talks last Thursday, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, broke with the speaker and pushed for a mid-range agreement.

Even if the two sides can reach a compromise to increase the $14.3 trillion debt limit, the extension would probably only carry the government through November 2012, setting the stage for the presidential and Congressional elections to be waged over what should be done about tax and spending policy.

The decision by Mr. Boehner will probably stiffen Democratic resistance to significant cuts in entitlement spending on programs like Medicare. While Democrats were rattled by Mr. Obama’s push for a deficit-reduction plan that would trade cuts in social spending for new revenues, party leaders seemed willing to entertain the idea as part of an agreement that would resolve spending disputes for years to come. But many Democrats saw agreeing to Medicare cuts as undermining their political case against the House Republican plan to turn over the program to private insurers and provide subsidies for older Americans.

As late as in his Saturday radio and Internet address, Mr. Obama was urging lawmakers to take advantage of an “extraordinarily rare opportunity” to agree on a major budget plan and he urged them to “rise to the moment, and seize this opportunity, on behalf of all Americans, and the future we hold in common.”

Mr. Boehner was not specific about what particular tax issues led to the impasse, but a Republican familiar with the negotiations said an exchange of proposals between the speaker and the White House in recent days was unable to resolve disagreements over the “core elements” of the Republican proposal on tax reform.. The Republican said differences also remained over the extent of changes in the social programs.

Democrats have made clear that they will not back a budget deal built solely on spending cuts and are demanding a “balanced approach” that extracts some new revenues from corporate American and affluent taxpayers.

In his talks with the White House, Mr. Boehner indicated willingness to consider $1 trillion in new revenue, with most of the new money to be generated through an overhaul of the tax code that would be pushed through Congress next year. Both Republicans and Democrats expressed unease that a deal cut now could guarantee that lawmakers would follow through on tax reform.

In addition, there were hints that the budget deal could be tied to the Bush-era tax cuts due to expire next year, a prospect that made House Republicans nervous since many of them had campaigned and been elected on the promise that allowing those tax cuts to run out would amount to raising taxes.

Republicans said that Mr. Boehner decided to disclose his new position Saturday night to give the White House and Congressional leaders who are to meet Sunday evening sufficient time to make adjustments in their thinking.

The narrower package negotiated by Mr. Biden in a series of meetings with House and Senate Democrats was still considered large enough to allow for a debt hike through most of 2012. It combined a series of spending cuts that both Republicans and Democrats had identified in a range of federal agencies and programs, with some new revenue generated through options such as requiring federal employees to contribute more to their pensions, cuts in agriculture subsidies and the sale of federal assets.

There was reason for concern: the last doctor to provide abortions here was shot to death because of his work. But rather than lower her profile, Dr. Means raised it by buying a car that nobody could miss: a bright-yellow Mini Cooper, emblazoned, appropriately enough, with lightning bolts.

“It’s partly an in-your-face response,” she explained. “You’re looking for me. I’m here.”

Two years have passed since this city, for decades the volatile epicenter of the national fight over abortion, was shaken by the murder of Dr. George R. Tiller — a controversial figure because of his willingness to perform later-term abortions — by a man who said he wanted to stop the killing of babies.

Since then, abortion rights advocates have hoped that someone would take Dr. Tiller’s place to show that violence is not an effective way to stop abortions. Despite their vows to redouble their commitment, the murder of Dr. Tiller actually scared people away. Opponents, even those who criticized the killing, have noted with some satisfaction that no abortions have been provided here since.

Now a little-known physician has stepped into this tinderbox environment to take the mantle — indeed, the very instruments — of the man many abortion rights advocates regard as a martyr.

But Dr. Means is certainly not the ideological warrior many expected to fill his void. She said her decision to start performing abortions was as much about making money for her struggling practice as about restoring access to a constitutional right.

A second effort to establish an abortion clinic is under way, led by a group of prominent abortion rights advocates. The group has raised money but is still searching for a doctor willing to provide abortions in a city where doing so has in recent years required a bulletproof vest and an armored car.

“It’s about restoring access and standing our ground,” said Julie Burkhart, a former political director for Dr. Tiller who now runs the group Trust Women.

Troy Newman, the president of Operation Rescue, based in Wichita, said that abortion opponents were committed to blocking another clinic here, and that the level of protest facing anyone who participated in such an efforts would be “beyond anything anyone could imagine.” He spoke with particular disdain for Dr. Means.

“We will ensure that this community remains abortion free,” he said.

Indeed, the efforts to open new clinics face considerable obstacles. After enacting numerous pieces of anti-abortion legislation this year, the state recently denied licenses to two of the three remaining clinics in the state, down from 15 two decades ago. (A court has allowed the clinics to continue operating pending the outcome of a legal challenge to the new regulations.)

“It would have been difficult for Dr. Means to provide abortion care in Wichita, period,” said Peter B. Brownlie, the president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, which dropped plans to open an abortion clinic here after failing to find a local doctor willing to endure the expected harassment. “Now it’s doubly difficult.”

But Dr. Means decided last summer that she had little choice but to try.

She looked at the finances of her solo family practice and figured she might be the poorest doctor in the state. Though she lives modestly, she has had continuing problems managing money: her credit card companies have taken her to court, and her checks occasionally bounce. Determined to work alone, she did not have enough patients to cover the bills.

Offering abortions seemed the easiest way to keep the doors to her small office open, she said. The need was also there, she felt. The nearest provider was more than three hours away, and for the first time patients had been asking her where to go to end a pregnancy. (Statistics kept by the State of Kansas show that the number of women from the Wichita area who received abortions in the state dropped by nearly half.)

Having lived in Wichita since she was a young girl, including the “Summer of Mercy” two decades ago when thousands of protesters blockaded clinics, Dr. Means was aware that Dr. Tiller had endured several attacks as well as decades of protest and legal challenges before his death, efforts that also succeeded in closing the other clinics in the city. But she hoped — naïvely, she now says — that she would receive less attention by doing abortions part time and only early in the pregnancy.

Summer is typically a slow season on the admissions news (and news-you-can-use) front. But several articles over the holiday weekend caught our eye, and we wanted to bring them to the attention of those readers — especially future applicants and their families — who may have missed them.

On Friday, a federal appeals court “struck down Michigan’s 2006 ban on the consideration of race and gender in public-university admissions,” which my colleague Tamar Lewin described in an article as “the latest round of the decade-long fight over the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies.” The Michigan attorney general promised to appeal the decision. Meanwhile, Ms. Lewin quoted Kelly Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, as saying that it was too early to know what impact the ruling would have on admissions officers and applicants alike.

You can read a related article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, here.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Ron Lieber, The Times’s Your Money columnist, took the measure of the news that “in recent weeks that U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo are now offering fixed-rate student loans in addition to the variable rate kind that had been standard.” Mr. Lieber synthesized the two main responses, thus far, as follows:

The first is to cheer. Borrowers now have a choice similar to people buying homes. Those who want certainty can pay extra for it, while those who wish to roll the dice and hope interest rates don’t rise too much can do that, too.

The second response is to rail against the fact that these loans are even necessary. After all, the federal government will lend most undergraduates up to $31,000. That this is not nearly enough for many families to cover the bills at all sorts of colleges is some kind of national disgrace, right?

Both reactions, it turns out, are valid. So let’s consider them one at a time.

You can read the full column here.

Finally, my colleague Michael Cieply writes in an article in today’s Times about the seeming disconnect between applications to film programs, and the more traditional job prospects for graduates. As he puts it:

As home-entertainment revenue declined in the last five years, studios reduced spending on scripts from new writers, cut junior staff positions and severely curtailed deals with producers who once provided entry-level positions for film school graduates. Yet applications to university film, television and digital media programs surged in the last few years as students sought refuge from the weak economy in graduate schools and some colleges opened new programs.

In an effort to capture the fierce competition for such programs, Mr. Cieply adds:

At U.S.C. about 4,800 would-be students applied for fewer than 300 slots next fall, up from about 2,800 applicants the year before. Educators at established film and television programs like those at New York University, the University of Texas, Loyola Marymount University and the University of California, Los Angeles, said they had seen a similarly sharp step-up in the number of students seeking what used to be called film education but now typically embraces the production of video games and Webisodes and virtually any medium in which the pictures move.

Kirk Condyles for The New York TimesA cashier prepared a cone at a Friendly’s in Long Island as part of a summer job in August 2007.

While some high-end college counselors may recommend that their clients embark on expensive and exotic community-service endeavors in third-world countries in pursuit of an elite college acceptance, other applicants find themselves working in their hometown to save money for school. These students may, understandably, worry that their part-time job will be a blemish on their application.

(Just last week on this blog, two authors of a book on college preparation wrote that students consider spending “a few weeks touring Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia” in the summer before freshman year, a potentially expensive excursion that provoked a backlash in the comments stream.)

However, students who forgo a pricey summer activity or an unpaid internship in order to earn for college have not necessarily hurt their chances of admission at all — and could well have helped them, to say nothing of easing the financial burden on themselves and their parents. The answers, though, like so much in admissions, are mixed and not necessarily formulaic.

In an interview, Southern Methodist University’s director of admissions, Stephanie Dupaul, provided the reassuring words that some of the best personal essays she’d read were the result of a summer working in fast food.

“It demonstrates that students are working hard,” she said. “We look for students who haven’t turned off over the summer.”

Similarly, Ann McDermott, the director of admissions for the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, said that she looked favorably on any summer job, especially when there was a financial need.

“I applaud any student who is either helping themselves or helping their family,” she said. “You do still need to pay attention to the bottom line, and that is a dollar amount.”

And yet, the director of admissions for Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Bruce Bunnick, said that he did not like it when students used the supplemental portion of their application to justify their summer activities. Providing that rationale, he said, is simply not necessary; financial need is understandable.

“There are certainly students who feel they need to collect a salary, and they’ll earn that salary any way they see fit,” he said. “But I think students are very quick to offer why they took that path. A student is a bit more prone to offer rationale as to why they took a more menial job. I don’t think there should be an absolute need to justify it.”

A key word that admissions directors use when referring to summer activities is “engagement.” Admissions officers say they may be more inclined to accept students who are doing something with their summer other than wasting away on a couch.

The director of admissions at American University in Washington, D.C., Greg Grauman, said that he particularly liked to see students who “follow their professions.” A student who wants to be pre-law, for example, will take a receptionist job at a law firm, or an aspiring doctor will do administrative work at a hospital.

In New York City, the Department of Youth and Development annually pairs students with jobs that have to do with what they’re passionate about, and provides them with a stipend. Other big cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago have similar programs. In one of these programs, a student interested in finance might be placed at a Wall Street firm.

Others schools don’t put a lot of weight on how a student spends the summer.

“We’re going to be looking primarily at their academic profile, G.P.A., standardized test scores,” said Mary Anderson, the director of admissions at Indiana University at Bloomington. “Where things like activities and interest résumés come into play is if a student is invited to apply for a scholar program or scholarship programs.”

How are school-age readers of The Choice spending the summer? Do they, or their adult counterparts, have any words of wisdom for students still looking for summer employment? And do admissions officers have any coda to add to the advice provided above?

Please use the comment box below to let us know.

Coupled with a statement from the top American military officer last week linking Pakistan’s military spy agency to the recent murder of a Pakistani journalist, the halting or withdrawal of military equipment and other aid to Pakistan illustrates the depth of the debate inside the Obama administration over how to change the behavior of one of its key counterterrorism partners. 

 Altogether, about $800 million in military aid and equipment, or over one-third of the more than $2 billion in annual American security assistance to Pakistan, could be affected, three senior United States officials said.

This aid includes about $300 million to reimburse Pakistan for some of the costs of deploying more than 100,000 soldiers along the Afghan border to combat terrorism, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in training assistance and military hardware, according to half a dozen Congressional, Pentagon and other administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss the politically delicate matter.

Some of the curtailed aid is equipment that the United States wants to send but Pakistan now refuses to accept, like rifles, body armor and night-vision goggles that were withdrawn or held up after Pakistan ordered more than 100 trainers in the United States Special Forces to leave the country in recent weeks.

Some is equipment that cannot be set up, certified or used for training because Pakistan has denied visas to the American personnel needed to operate the equipment, including some surveillance gear, a senior Pentagon official said.

And some is assistance like the reimbursements for troop costs, which is being reviewed in light of questions about Pakistan’s commitment to carry out counterterrorism operations. For example, the United States recently provided Pakistan with information about suspected bomb-making factories, only to have the insurgents vanish before Pakistani security forces arrived a few days later.

“When it comes to our military aid,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a Senate committee last month “we are not prepared to continue providing that at the pace we were providing it unless and until we see certain steps taken.”

American officials say they would probably resume equipment deliveries and aid if relations improve and Pakistan pursues terrorists more aggressively. The cutoffs do not affect any immediate deliveries of military sales to Pakistan, like F-16 fighter jets, or nonmilitary aid, the officials said.

Pakistan’s precise military budget is not known, and while the American aid cutoff would probably have a small impact on the overall military budget, it would most directly affect the counterinsurgency campaign. The Pakistani Army spends nearly one-quarter of the nation’s annual expenditures, according to K. Alan Kronstadt of the Congressional Research Service.

While some senior administration officials have concluded that Pakistan will never be the kind of partner the administration hoped for when President Obama entered office, others emphasize that the United States cannot risk a full break in relations or a complete cutoff of aid akin to what happened in the 1990s, when Pakistan was caught developing nuclear weapons.

But many of the recent aid curtailments are clearly intended to force the Pakistani military to make a difficult choice between backing the country that finances much of its operations and equipment, or continuing to provide secret support for the Taliban and other militants fighting American soldiers in Afghanistan.

“We have to continue to emphasize with the Pakistanis that in the end it’s in their interest to be able to go after these targets as well,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told reporters on Friday en route to Afghanistan.

Some American officials say Pakistan has only itself to blame, citing the Pakistani military’s decision to distance itself from American assistance in response to the humiliation suffered from the American commando raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as rising anger from midlevel Pakistani officers and the Pakistani public that senior military leaders, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the powerful army chief of staff, are too accommodating to the Americans.

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota seized on the issue and used the first television commercial of her presidential campaign to highlight her opposition to the debt ceiling. She drew enthusiastic applause on Saturday as she amplified her position.

“It’s time for tough love,” Mrs. Bachmann told supporters at a rally. “Don’t let them scare you by telling you that the country’s going to fall apart.”

The former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, who was critical of the deal brokered this year between Mr. Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner that averted a government shutdown, said he was not convinced of the dire consequences predicted by Democrats if no deal was reached and the government lost its authority to borrow on Aug. 2.

“I hope and pray and believe they should not raise the debt ceiling,” Mr. Pawlenty told voters here last week. “These historic, dramatic moments where you can draw a line in the sand and force politicians to actually do something bold and courageous are important moments.”

The sharp stances mean that even if Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican; Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader; and Mr. Obama all reach agreement in negotiations that will continue at the White House on Sunday evening, the Republican leaders could find their party’s presidential field campaigning against them. At the very least, that could complicate the leaders’ efforts to find the votes they would need.

With their own campaigns only a year away, many Republicans in Congress are turning to the party’s presidential candidates for an early sign of how the budget issue is playing on the trail.

The grass-roots conservative opposition to a deal that includes any kind of tax increase or fails to cut government spending substantially is frequently aired at town-hall-style meetings with the candidates and in calls to talk radio programs, and it overshadows discussions of the potential economic fallout should the government actually default.

Fellow Republicans say Mrs. Bachmann’s position would influence House colleagues who see her as a reliable measure of the Tea Party zeitgeist.

“Michele is a good barometer,” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia. “The Tea Party really likes her.”

Despite the effort that Mr. Boehner is putting into structuring a deal that Republicans can support without breaking any no-tax-increase promises, it is clear that many Republicans in both houses will oppose any increase in the debt ceiling no matter what concessions they might win.

On the presidential campaign trail, Representative Ron Paul of Texas said Republicans should not accept any deal that includes a tax increase, calling it a “ploy.” While Mrs. Bachmann has suggested that virtually no bipartisan deal would be acceptable, Mr. Pawlenty told voters last week that “if it comes to a point where they feel that they must,” he said a balanced-budget amendment was an essential trade-off.

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has said he would agree to increasing the debt limit only if a deal was “accompanied by a major effort to restructure and reduce the size of government.” Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah, has said spending cuts must be equal or greater than the value of any debt ceiling increase but told reporters Saturday in Florida: “I have every confidence that cooler heads are going to prevail.”

Nearly three dozen House Republicans and another dozen in the Senate have joined most of the Republican presidential candidates in signing a pledge that they will not vote to support the debt limit increase unless Congress approves a balanced budget-amendment to the Constitution, which is unlikely. (Mrs. Bachmann declined to sign the pledge, because she wanted to include a repeal of the Obama health care plan.)

Much of the freshman class that provided the party with its majority in the House has been skeptical of warnings about economic upheaval that would follow a government default, as well as of the Treasury Department’s insistence that there will be nothing more it can do to keep the government solvent after Aug. 2.

Republicans could face harsh consequences if they oppose a debt ceiling increase, the government defaults on some of its obligations and there are calamitous financial repercussions.

But many Republicans see supporting any agreement as carrying more political risk. Put into power in part by the Tea Party movement, Republicans who agree to vote to raise the debt limit could suddenly find themselves looking at challenges from within.

The relative newcomers to Congress say they are weighing the issue extremely carefully and are awaiting the specifics of any deal. They know the hazards and are comparing it to the vote in 2008 to approve the bank bailout, a vote that has come to haunt some Republicans.

“This, I think, will be one of the toughest votes that any member of Congress is going to have to take,” Representative Aaron Schock, Republican of Illinois, said in a recent speech.

“We have to be able to go home,” Mr. Schock said, “and sell it to our constituents.”

The situation in the Senate is markedly different from the House, where Republicans are in control and are under pressure to deal with the debt vote. Senate Republicans are in the minority, which is something of a luxury because Democrats will be called upon to produce most of the support for any debt deal.

Seeing themselves within reach of winning the Senate majority in 2012, Republicans are eager to watch threatened Democratic incumbents forced to vote for a package that could represent a politically unappetizing trifecta: a debt ceiling increase, reductions in popular social programs like Medicare and possible tax increases.

The importance and the intensity of the budget debate was clear in interviews with Republican voters last week who came to see some of the presidential contenders speak in Iowa. Whenever a candidate spoke about the debt limit, crowds expressed dismay at the idea of raising it.

At a rally on Saturday afternoon, the crowd cheered when Mrs. Bachmann declared her intention to vote against any compromise. She referred to Congress as “a dysfunctional family” that must change course and not follow a long-running pattern of raising the nation’s debt limit.

“We need a new day in Washington,” she said. “We need a new sheriff.”