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Violence broke out after news of an inspection to confiscate weapons at the Centro Occidental jail, Prisons Minister Iris Varela said in a statement, without providing a death toll.

Local media reports say between 26 and 54 people were killed and dozens wounded.

A prisons ministry source told Reuters that "many" had been killed, including one national guard officer, but declined to offer more details. The source said the ministry would hold a news conference on Saturday with details.

The violence involved both a struggle between rival gangs for control of the jail and a confrontation between inmates and troops called in to calm the situation, Varela said.

Venezuelan prisons are controlled by armed gangs that have rioted repeatedly over the last several years due to disputes with jail authorities or prison leaders.

"Who is going to be blamed for this new massacre in one of our country's jails? Incompetent and irresponsible government," tweeted opposition leader Henrique Capriles.

The South American nation's 34 prisons were designed to hold around a third of the 50,000 inmates now in them, according to local prison advocacy groups. Many of the prisoners are armed and hundreds are killed each year in riots and gang fights.

A month-long siege occurred in 2011 at El Rodeo prison, just outside the capital of Caracas, when 22 died before some 5,000 soldiers restored order.

(Reporting by Deisy Buitrago and Pablo Garibian, writing by Brian Ellsworth; editing by Philip Barbara)

Apples are picked on crowded subways, in quiet parks, on busy street corners, in loud bars. Apples are picked while people are talking on the phone, the picker dashing past and doing the deed in midstride.

It has gotten so bad, the police have said, that if it weren't for Apple picking, crime would have been down last year, when there were almost 16,000 thefts, accounting for 14 percent of all crimes.

But even jaded police officers who have seen more than their fair share of iPhone and iPad thefts were shaking their heads over one stunning robbery that unfolded recently in Brooklyn.

This particular Apple was not just picked, it was picked twice, a white blur as it flew from hand to hand to hand on the same afternoon. And one of those hands seemingly belonged to that timeless character from countless police stories: the dumb criminal.

It was Nov. 23, a little before 4 p.m., and a 16-year-old girl was walking through Prospect Park near her home, holding her iPhone. It was an iPhone 4S — not even one of the newest ones. Her parents had warned her about the phone's distracting her in public. The ears through which those words had traveled, in one and out the other, were stuffed with white ear buds blasting the hip-hop song "Definition."

As she neared a pond, three boys about her age approached. One wore pink sneakers. A boy grabbed the iPhone, and the girl pulled it back, and the boy pulled harder. The brief tug of war ended with the boy winning. "I just kind of gave them a dirty look and they left," the girl said this week, asking that her name be withheld from this article.

iPhones are popular to steal because they can be easily reprogrammed and then sold on the black market. The victim of this particular iPhone crime turned and went back through the park the way she had come. She saw two police officers standing nearby and told them what had happened. The officers drove her around the park for a while, looking down paths and roads, but there was no sign of the boys.

They had split up. The one carrying the stolen phone took it to Flatbush. He showed it to a man on Bedford Avenue who seemed interested in buying it. But instead, the man simply snatched the phone from the boy and ran away.

The story would pretty much end right here, an uncorroborated, urban fable of caution and comeuppance, were it not for what the aggrieved boy decided to do next.

He flagged down a police car.

"He portrays himself as being a complainant," said Sgt. Arnoldo Martinez, who was working that day. "A victim."

The man suspected of taking the phone from the boy had not gotten far, and the officers arrested him in short order. They took him, and the boy, to the 70th Precinct station house.

Several blocks away, the girl was still driving with officers from the neighboring 78th Precinct, which covers Prospect Park. There was no sign of the boys, and after about an hour, one of the officers, Denisse Pacheco, suggested calling the girl's stolen phone. The girl gave her the number, and Officer Pacheco dialed.

In the 70th Precinct station house, the phone rang. One officer who had arrested the man in Flatbush answered and said, "Hello?"

Officer Pacheco assumed she was speaking to the thief, and she pretended to be the victim, looking to make a deal. "I was like: 'Hey, you have my phone. Can I have it?' " she recalled this week. " 'Can we meet up?' "

Confused, the other officer identified himself.

"You're a cop?" Officer Pacheco asked, suspicious. "From where?"

"The seven-oh," the officer replied, reciting each digit of his precinct in the manner in which officers are trained.

"Oh," Officer Pacheco said, satisfied. "I'm from the seven-eight."

The officer from the 70th Precinct said, "I have a complainant."

So do I, Officer Pacheco said.

They came up with a plan.

The officers with the boy, who still believed he was being treated as a victim, asked him to step outside the station house. Officers chatted with him to keep him occupied. Officer Pacheco and the girl drove over and parked across the street.

The girl took one look at the boy's pink sneakers and said he was one of the boys who stole her phone. Her claims were further bolstered when she was able to unlock the phone with her PIN. The boy, asked to do the same, failed, and a second set of handcuffs was called into service that afternoon. The boy's name was not released because he is a juvenile. The older suspect was identified as Jean Louis Colsun.

Officers returned the iPhone to the girl, and its disproportionate contribution to a spike in crime came to an end. The girl said that as of Thursday morning, two months later, the phone had not been stolen again.

More than 60 Catholic priests, nuns, scholars and two former ambassadors to the Vatican sent a letter this week saying that if marchers and politicians truly want to defend life they should support "common-sense reforms to address the epidemic of gun violence in our nation."

They called in particular on Catholic lawmakers, naming the House speaker, John A. Boehner, and Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, both Republicans, as well as Senators Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, both Democrats, who they said have "A" ratings from the National Rifle Association, to stand up to the gun lobby. They urged support for legislation limiting the sale of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, like those used in the massacre last month at a school in Newtown, Conn.

"We're addressing life," said one of the signers, Thomas P. Melady, a Republican who served as ambassador to the Holy See under the first President George Bush. "I accept the Catholic teachings, which promote the sanctity of life from conception to natural death. And certainly the death of the 20 young kids and 6 adults in Newtown was not natural. Why can't we take some steps with regards to these killings? These sophisticated weapons should be controlled."

A theologian who signed the letter, Tobias Winright, an associate professor of theological ethics at St. Louis University, a Catholic institution, said that Pope John Paul II promoted the notion of a "culture of life" that encompassed opposition to abortion as well as euthanasia and the death penalty.

Professor Winright, a former law enforcement officer, said he was encouraged when the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, recently praised American religious leaders and the Obama administration for proposals to limit guns.

Jeanne Monahan, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, which organizes the march, said that as a Catholic in the anti-abortion movement, "We absolutely support the idea of being pro-life from conception to natural death."

"Really, the difference between the little ones in Connecticut, which is so heartbreaking, and the little ones in the womb is their size and their age."

But asked about the letter from the Catholic leaders, she said: "I definitely have nothing to say about gun control. That's so out of the parameter of what we're about."

Since the killings in Newtown, a broad spectrum of religious leaders have joined Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence to demand controls on guns, but leaders of evangelical churches have been conspicuously absent. The National Association of Evangelicals surveyed its board of more than 100 members in December and found that 73 percent of them said that government should increase gun regulations. However, the association has not taken a position publicly.

A poll released this week by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, found that among the roughly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants who say the term "pro-life" describes them very well, 64 percent are opposed to stricter gun control laws, while 33 percent favor them.

The picture among Catholics is the opposite. The poll found that of the 4 in 10 Catholics who say that "pro-life" describes them very well, 61 percent support stricter gun control laws and 33 percent oppose them. The survey was taken in January and included more than 1,000 respondents with a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

The nation's Catholic bishops supported the unsuccessful effort to renew the ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004 and recently reiterated a call to control the sale and use of firearms, said Kathy Saile, the director of the bishops' office of domestic social development.

"It wasn't a tough call," Ms. Saile said. "All of our policy work is rooted in our consistent ethic for life, and our belief in the sacredness of all life."

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Catholic News Service this month that he had told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is managing the White House response to the recent shootings, that the bishops would assist in "the fight for greater gun control in the country."

But John Gehring, the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, a liberal advocacy group in Washington, said that bishops who had demanded that Catholic legislators vote against abortion rights should do the same on gun control.

He said, "Catholic lawmakers who call themselves pro-life and are pretty cozy with the N.R.A. shouldn't be getting a free pass."

Over that time, officials said Friday, 17 men, including 15 employees of the Long Island Rail Road, played a role in what has become a common and lucrative crime: stealing copper, a metal whose value has risen significantly. In this case, the men were accused of taking wire from a rail yard, while on duty; using agency trucks to transport the material to personal vehicles; and selling the wire, for cash, to a local scrap metal company — a routine that netted the group more than $250,000.

"These employees stole from everyone who uses the M.T.A.," Kathleen M. Rice, the district attorney for Nassau County, said at a news conference.

The 17 defendants were arrested on Friday, in the culmination of an investigation, called Operation Heavy Metal, led by the authority's inspector general, Barry L. Kluger, who received a tip about the theft last year.

This was not the first illicit scheme at the railroad. Several retired workers have been charged in recent years with federal crimes for falsely claiming to be disabled to collect federal disability pensions — a plot that could have cost the Railroad Retirement Board, which awards disability pensions, more than $1 billion if all of the money had been disbursed.

At the news conference, Helena Williams, the railroad's president, turned to Mr. Kluger during her remarks. "Barry," she said, "unfortunately, I speak to you more often than I want to."

The latest scheme, while smaller in scale, was uncovered at a moment when riders might already have diminishing patience for the transportation authority. The agency remains a long way from repairing all damage sustained during the hurricane, and higher fares and tolls will take effect in March.

"At a time when riders are weeks away from yet another fare increase and budgets are balanced with the narrowest of margins, these thefts are particularly reprehensible," said Mark Epstein, the chairman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council.

The workers arrested on Friday came from the railroads communication department, officials said, and included two assistant foremen whose annual base salaries were around $80,000. (The remaining workers earned about $65,000 to $70,000 annually, as well as overtime, Mr. Kluger said.)

Investigators said the stolen wire included new spools, severed sections of spools and discarded copper wire that the railroad was gathering to sell for scrap. The price the defendants were paid, Ms. Williams said, depended on whether the wire was new, if it contained lead and if the surrounding plastic coating was stripped away.

The workers have been suspended without pay. Ms. Williams said that if they were convicted, the railroad would fire them and move to terminate their pensions.

She added that the railroad would immediately alter security guidelines to prevent future thefts — increasing video surveillance of yards and shops and providing more secure storage bins on agency grounds.

"There were bins," Ms. Williams said of the agency's previous storage accommodations. "Unfortunately, they were open bins."

Lawyers for some of the workers sought to play down the allegations, arguing that many of the materials in question were of little use to the authority anyway.

Anthony La Pinta, whose client Craig Borsetti is accused of lending his license to the railroad workers to facilitate sales, said he was flabbergasted by the resources expended to investigate "what many would consider to be the theft and sale of garbage."

The guidance concerns Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a law that deals with the rights of disabled people who participate in activities that receive federal dollars.

A school district "is required to provide a qualified student with a disability an opportunity to benefit from the school district's program equal to that of students without disabilities," according to the Education Department.

Advocates for disabled athletes, some of whom have pressed legal claims against state athletic associations in recent years, praised the clarification of rules and said that as a result, participation for disabled athletes could rise.

"This is a landmark moment for students with disabilities," Terri Lakowski, chief executive of Active Policy Solutions, a Washington-based advocacy group, said. "It will do for kids with disabilities what Title IX did for women. This level of clarity has been missing for years."

At least 12 states have passed laws in recent years requiring schools to include disabled students in sports and other extracurricular programs, and the Education Department's guidance is considered to be a complement to those laws.

"Taking them together with the state laws means more opportunities for disabled athletes," Lakowski said. "With Title IX, we learned that if you build it, they will come."

According to the department, a district's legal obligation to comply "supersedes any rule of any association, organization, club or league that would render a student ineligible to participate, or limit the eligibility of a student to participate" based on disability.

A 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office found that students with disabilities participated in athletics at consistently lower rates than students without disabilities. Administrators at districts surveyed by the office said they "lacked information and clarity regarding their responsibilities to provide opportunities" under the law.

Every student with a disability is not guaranteed a spot on an athletic team for which other students must try out, according to the Education Department. But districts must "afford qualified students with disabilities an equal opportunity for participation in extracurricular athletics in an integrated manner to the maximum extent appropriate to the needs of the student."

The department offered specific examples of what would be a violation of Section 504 with a focus on integrating disabled athletes onto teams alongside their able-bodied peers.

Kareem Dale, a special assistant to President Obama for disability policy, said in a call with reporters that athletic activity can help students gain character, confidence and interpersonal skills, and learn how to function in a team environment.

"Once you come face to face, at that very moment, you don't think twice," the soldier, who can be identified under military rules only as S., told the Israeli news site Ynet when she received a citation for her performance in the skirmish. "There is no room for hesitation, and there is no room for mistakes."

The Israeli news media heralded S. as proof that integrating women into combat roles had been a success. But the next day, the story shifted: Another woman in the unit, the one who radioed in the attack, had cowered behind a bush for an hour and a half, as her comrades feared she had been kidnapped or killed.

As the United States moves to integrate more women into combat roles, some have looked to Israel, which on paper has one of the most gender-neutral militaries in the world, starting with a universal draft (although, since many do civilian service instead, only half of women enlist, compared with 70 percent of the nation's men). But the episode near Mount Harif in September highlighted some of the complex realities behind the policies of the Israel Defense Forces, where it remains rare for women to kill or be killed, and questions persist about their fitness.

While more than 92 percent of I.D.F. jobs are now open to women — they are fighter pilots, infantry officers, naval captains and Humvee drivers — just 3 percent serve in combat roles.

"It's not really open," said Yehuda Segev, a retired businessman and a general in the Army reserves who in 2007 headed a committee on women in the military. "They don't make the right path for women that they can volunteer and join the combat units."

Mr. Segev said the military's chief of staff rejected his committee's recommendation that all jobs — including paratrooper and other elite units like Golani and Nahal — be integrated, adding: "The Army has a lot of excuses."

Still, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich said "the military really did a revolution" since she joined up more than 20 years ago, when the vast majority of female soldiers served in human resources or educational posts. Today, about half the I.D.F.'s lieutenants are women, as are 13 percent of those at or above the rank of lieutenant colonel. "You see more and more women in the battalions and the brigades," said Colonel Leibovich, an I.D.F. spokeswoman.

Women served alongside men in ground forces in the paramilitary groups that predated Israel's foundation as a state in 1948. For the next 25 years, they were mostly relegated to roles as administrators, medical assistants or trainers, but after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, they began serving as combat instructors and officers.

A major turning point came in 1995, when a woman named Alice Miller petitioned the Supreme Court for access to pilot training school. The first woman graduated from the school in 1998.

During war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, a female air force mechanic was killed in a chopper crash. In 2011, in a widely noted episode, a medic used her bra as a tourniquet after a terrorist attack on a bus near the Egyptian border.

The main combat unit for women is Caracal, named for a desert cat that looks similar whether male or female. Since its founding in 2000, the unit, which has been up to two-thirds female, has guarded the borders with Jordan and Egypt, and was the one involved in the Mount Harif episode. While most female soldiers serve two years, women in Caracal are required to serve three, like the unit's men.

Arielle Werner, 21, who grew up in Minnesota and immigrated to Israel in order to join the combat unit, said female recruits underwent the same training regimen as the men, except for occasionally shorter runs or treks with full regalia. "Once in a while we can guilt the guys into doing the heavy lifting" of huge water bottles or stretchers, she said, "but girls do the same as guys; it's pretty equal."

Still, Ms. Werner said she found herself running faster when in a coed group. "There's a lot of pressure on the women to be just as good as the men because we have a lot to prove," she explained. "There's always a question of could they shut down the unit if we don't do as well. You don't see them threatening to shut down the paratroopers."

On a gray morning when the temperature was well below freezing, the crowd pressed in close against the stage to hear more than a dozen speakers, who included Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council; Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee, who recently introduced legislation to withhold financing from Planned Parenthood, and Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky; Cardinal Seán Patrick O'Malley of Boston; and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania and Republican presidential candidate.

Mr. Santorum spoke of his wife's decision not to have an abortion after they learned that their child — their daughter Bella, now 4 — had a rare genetic disorder called Trisomy 18.

"We all know that death is never better, never better," Mr. Santorum said. "Bella is better for us, and we are better because of Bella."

Jeanne Monahan, the president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, said that the march was both somber and hopeful.

"We've lost 55 million Americans to abortion," she said. "At the same time, I think we're starting to win. We're winning in the court of public opinion, we're winning in the states with legislation."

Though the main event officially started at noon, the day began much earlier for the participants, with groups in matching scarves engaged in excited chatter on the subway and gaggles of schoolchildren wearing name tags around their necks. Arriving on the Mall, attendees were greeted with free signs ("Defund Planned Parenthood" and "Personhood for Everyone") and a man barking into a megaphone, "Ireland is on the brink of legalizing abortion, which is not good."

The march came two months after the 2012 campaign season, in which social issues like abortion largely took a back seat to the focus on the economy. But the issue did come up in Congressional races in which Republican candidates made controversial statements about rape or abortion. In Indiana, Richard Mourdock, a Republican candidate for the Senate, said in a debate that he believed that pregnancies resulting from rape were something that "God intended," and in Illinois, Representative Joe Walsh said in a debate that abortion was never necessary to save the life of the mother because of "advances in science and technology." Both men lost, hurt by a backlash from female voters.

Recent polls show that while a majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned entirely, many favor some restrictions. In a Gallup poll released this week, 52 percent of those surveyed said that abortions should be legal only under certain circumstances, while 28 percent said they should be legal under all circumstances, and 18 percent said they should be illegal under all circumstances. In a Pew poll this month, 63 percent of respondents said they did not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned completely, and 29 percent said they did — views largely consistent with surveys taken over the past two decades.

"Most Americans want some restrictions on abortion," Ms. Monahan said. "We see abortion as the human rights abuse of today."

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, who spoke via a recorded video, called on the protest group, particularly the young people, to make abortion "a relic of the past."

"Human life is not an economic or political commodity, and no government on earth has the right to treat it that way," he said.

The crowd was dotted with large banners, many bearing the names of the attendees' home states and churches and colleges. Gary Storey, 36, stood holding a handmade sign that read "I was adopted. Thanks Mom for my life." Next to him stood his adoptive mother, Ellen Storey, 66, who held her own handmade sign with a picture of her six children and the words "To the mothers of our four adopted children, 'Thank You' for their lives."

Mr. Storey said he was grateful for the decision by his biological mother to carry through with her pregnancy. "Beats the alternative," he joked.

Last week, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America started a new Web site, and on Tuesday, its president, Cecile Richards, released a statement supporting abortion rights.

"Planned Parenthood understands that abortion is a deeply personal and often complex decision for a woman to consider, if and when she needs it," she said. "A woman should have accurate information about all of her options around her pregnancy. To protect her health and the health of her family, a woman must have access to safe, legal abortion without interference from politicians, as protected by the Supreme Court for the last 40 years."