Latest News

The cause was complications of diabetes, his daughter Leslie said. He and his family moved to Las Vegas in 1992.

With a reputation for staging high-quality shows, Mr. Snadowsky, a lawyer, and his partner, Allan Pepper, had been booking performances at clubs in the city for a decade when they opened the 400-seat Bottom Line on Feb. 12, 1974.

The opening-night concert became legendary, drawing a star-studded audience that included Mick Jagger, Carly Simon and Stevie Wonder, who took to the stage for a jam session with the night's featured headliner, the New Orleans R&B artist Dr. John.

The inauguration by pop music royalty set a tone that made the Bottom Line a favorite lookout post for music executives and a premier showcase for rising stars throughout the 1970s and '80s. One was Mr. Springsteen.

Mr. Snadowsky often recalled an exuberant five-night engagement by Mr. Springsteen in August 1975, shortly before he made the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week. Before each performance was over, Mr. Snadowsky said, the energetic Mr. Springsteen had "climbed on every possible thing."

Mr. Snadowsky and Mr. Pepper, who grew up together in Brooklyn and had been friends since third grade, had bandied about a number of names for the club, including Allan and Stanley's Place, before settling on the Bottom Line, Mr. Pepper said in an interview on Friday.

It was a term they used every day in navigating a business through the uncertainties of the music world, negotiating contracts for every show (Mr. Snadowsky's specialty), coping with the vagaries of stardom and mastering the shifting calculus of ticket sales and hamburger prices.

"The bottom line," Mr. Pepper said, "is the one expression you hear in this business more than any other."

They were forced to close in 2004 after reaching an impasse in negotiating a new lease with their landlord, New York University. Until then, a cavalcade of folk, jazz, rock and roll, and country performers had crossed the club's stage, among them Dolly Parton, Tito Puente, Joan Baez, Dizzy Gillespie, Lou Reed, Harry Chapin, the Roches, the Ramones, Prince, the Cars, the Police, Joan Armatrading, Janis Ian and Suzanne Vega.

Stanley Errol Snadowsky was born in Brooklyn on May 28, 1942, to Jacob and Florence Snadowsky. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, Hunter College and Brooklyn Law School.

He was still in law school in 1965 when he and Mr. Pepper began promoting jazz concerts at clubs like the Village Gate, Gerde's Folk City, Steve Paul's the Scene and the Electric Circus. When they learned that a Dixieland jazz club called the Red Garter was about to close, they took over the space and renamed it the Bottom Line. (The room is now used as an N.Y.U. lecture hall.)

Besides his daughter Leslie, Mr. Snadowsky's survivors include his wife, Michelle; another daughter, Daria; and a brother, Alvin.

After moving to Las Vegas, Mr. Snadowsky traveled often to New York for business. A master negotiator, he was invited in 1982 to address a workshop at New York Law School for students interested in the music business. The advice he gave them amounted to a prescription for life:

"If you get nothing else out of this," he said, "just remember one thing: There is nothing 'standard.' Everything is negotiable. If they tell you it's not, go find somebody else."

Yet evidence of the storm's devastation and the peninsula's painful struggles to recover and rebuild just over four months on were inescapable. Green-clad marchers shouted for new jetties to be built, packs of relief workers marched between step dancers and fire trucks, and all along the parade route were the scarred husks of local landmarks consumed by flames on the night of the hurricane.

"We go through problems, but human beings are able to cry and laugh at the same time," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said before the parade began. "We have to celebrate how far we've come and what the hope is for the future."

Mr. Bloomberg, wearing a sash that said "Thanks" in Gaelic, stood with many local politicians and community leaders in front of what was left of the Harbor Light Pub on Newport Avenue in Belle Harbor.

The bar, which became a de facto memorial to the several dozen people from the Rockaways, including a son of the owner, who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, burned to the ground during the hurricane. Ellen Mendonca noted that just blocks away was the place where American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in November 2001, killing 260 people on board and five on the ground.

"This community has gotten hit by everything," said Ms. Mendonca, 60, who was marching with placards calling for barriers to be built along the water, "but we're still walking."

Chugging along Newport Avenue was "Big Jack," the chunky fire truck of the Point Breeze Volunteer Fire Department in Breezy Point. The truck, which had been submerged in seawater as wind-fueled fires incinerated more than 120 homes, had been completely refurbished. Following the truck were members of the volunteer group Occupy Sandy and a squadron of Mormon volunteers in yellow shirts, who earned shouts of approval from the crowd.

"I feel like part of this community now; these are my families," James Killoran, the executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Westchester, said. "To see what they've gone through, to be there with them, it's an honor." He added that he had been working on rebuilding efforts in the Rockaways for 111 days. Whoops went up as he marched. "It's not easy to suffer with people," he said.

A block from the parade, away from the T-shirts with cheeky Irish slogans and shamrock-painted cheeks, was evidence of the rebuilding efforts. On nearly every block workers toiled away on storm-wrecked homes, the whine of buzz saws competing with the bagpipes keening in the distance.

"When I came back, I cried. I cried," said Grace McGovern, 79, who had fled before the storm and vividly recalled the devastation when she returned. "It hurts, but yet the people, they're so good," she added, watching the parade from a beach chair near a burned-out ruin. "It will come back, it will. And stronger."

The casino company said in a filing Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission asked two years ago for records relating to compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Las Vegas Sands said that after it got the S.E.C. subpoena on Feb. 9, 2011, the audit committee of the board of directors opened an investigation.

In its annual report, filed Friday, the company said its audit committee had "reached certain preliminary findings, including that there were likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions" of the antibribery law.

Las Vegas Sands said that based on information from the audit committee and its lawyers, it expected that the findings would not have a material financial impact or force restatement of past financial results.

The company said that it had improved its record-keeping and internal controls practices in recent years, and added that its investigation was continuing.

The Wall Street Journal, citing an anonymous source, reported Saturday that the findings were related to business deals in China led by executives no longer with the company.

The company said in the annual report that it believed the S.E.C. investigation stemmed from a lawsuit filed in 2010 in Nevada by Steven C. Jacobs, the former chief executive of its Chinese subsidiary, who is seeking unspecified damages. Las Vegas Sands said in the filing that it could not predict the outcome of the still-pending case but would defend itself vigorously.

The Journal reported that Nevada gambling regulators are also investigating the matter, citing people familiar with the case.

In recent years, Las Vegas Sands has expanded aggressively in Asia, building a business in the Chinese district of Macao.

The company reported in January that fourth-quarter net income jumped more than 35 percent, helped greatly by booming business in Macao, the only place in China with legal gambling and a haven for high rollers. Revenue in the company's Chinese subsidiary soared 48 percent higher than a year earlier.

Mr. Adelson became the biggest single donor in political history during the 2012 presidential election, supporting eight Republican candidates through "super PACs." By some estimates worth as much as $22 billion, he presides over a global empire of casinos, hotels and convention centers whose centerpiece is the Venetian in Las Vegas.

But lost in the talk of Washington's dysfunction is this fact: on paper at least, President Obama and Congress have reduced projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over a decade — the widely embraced goal for stabilizing the national debt.

The spending cuts that began to take effect Friday, known as sequestration and totaling about $1 trillion through 2023, come on top of $1.5 trillion in reductions that Mr. Obama and Congress committed to in 2011, mainly from the accord that averted the nation's first debt default.

Nearly $700 billion more will come from tax increases on wealthy Americans, the product of the brawl in December over Bush-era tax cuts, and another $700 billion is expected to be saved in projected interest on the reduced debt.

If the latest cuts stick, the two parties will have achieved nearly the full amount of deficit reduction over the next decade that economists and market analysts have promoted. Yet the mix comes with substantial downsides.

It does not add up to the "grand bargain" that the two parties had been seeking, because it leaves virtually untouched the entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that are responsible for projections of an unsustainably rising federal debt in coming decades.

"This is not a result that deals with our long-term debt problem," said Vin Weber, a Republican former congressman. "The fact we've gotten to a $4 trillion deficit-reduction deal without tackling entitlements is almost a bad thing," he added, if it lulls the public and the politicians into thinking the problem is solved.

The progress on deficit reduction over the past two years will also probably hamper job creation and the economic recovery. Private and government forecasters project that sequestration alone will cost about 700,000 jobs this year and will shave at least a half percentage point from economic growth. The Congressional Budget Office now forecasts a falling deficit but stubbornly high unemployment in coming years.

For Democrats, at least, the mix of spending cuts and tax increases in the package is another reason for disappointment. The deficit deals to date would yield $4 in spending cuts for every dollar of new revenue. Mr. Obama, as well as several bipartisan groups, including the commission led by Erskine B. Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, call for one dollar of tax increases for every $2 to $3 in spending cuts.

It remains unclear how long sequestration will last: it was designed to be onerous to force a compromise on an alternative. But Mr. Obama and Republicans indicated on Friday that the cuts would probably remain in place at least until the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30.

Democrats, led by the president, express confidence that in coming months public pressure will force Republicans to relent on revenue, especially as cuts to the military begin to be felt. But Republican leaders have said they will stand firm against tax increases, suggesting that they have won at least a temporary victory on reducing the size of the government.

In his weekly address on Saturday, Mr. Obama said the Republicans had "decided that protecting special-interest tax breaks for the well off and well connected is more important than protecting our military and middle-class families from these cuts."

"I still believe we can and must replace these cuts with a balanced approach — one that combines smart spending cuts with entitlement reform and changes to our tax code that make it more fair for families and businesses without raising anyone's tax rates," Mr. Obama said.

In the Republican response, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State, said: "The problem here isn't a lack of taxes. This year alone, the federal government will take in more revenue than ever before. Spending is the problem, which means cutting spending is the solution. It's that simple."

According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, total government spending is falling compared with the size of the economy but will rise again in the next decade. That growth will be driven by the entitlement programs as more baby boomers retire, not by discretionary spending.

And revenues, while reaching a high in dollar terms, remain below the average of the past 40 years as measured against gross domestic product.

The Republicans' decision to accept sequestration raises the question of whether Democrats miscalculated in the negotiations in December over the Bush tax cuts. At the time, Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders accepted $680 billion in higher taxes on top incomes, which is just half of the minimum revenue increase the president wants.

Democrats had assumed that Republicans might agree to more tax increases, primarily through ending or reducing deductions, in exchange for Democrats' support for canceling sequestration of military accounts. But Republicans shifted gears, to the surprise of the White House, and instead opted to accept the cuts, at least for now.

The grand bargain that has eluded Mr. Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner was supposed to mainly curb entitlement spending and raise revenues. Lesser savings would come from the discretionary programs that cover almost everything else the government does for defense and domestic purposes.

But Mr. Boehner's speakership is on the line, given Republicans' unhappiness with the December tax deal, and he vows that he will no longer negotiate with Mr. Obama on overhauling the tax code to raise revenue for deficit reduction. To date the revenue raised falls short of the amount Mr. Boehner proposed in previous talks. Nor will the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who faces re-election next year in a state with a strong Tea Party faction. He said on Friday, "I will not be part of any back-room deal, and I will absolutely not agree to increase taxes."

The president and Congressional Democrats will not agree to reductions in Medicare or Social Security spending except in return for at least $600 billion more in higher revenue over 10 years, from shaving tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.

That standoff has left the discretionary programs to bear the brunt of deficit reduction measures. Those domestic and military programs are so named because Congress has discretion to set spending levels annually in appropriations bills; entitlement benefits, in contrast, grow automatically unless changed by law.

Even without counting sequestration, the budget office, in its annual 10-year outlook last month, appeared skeptical that political leaders would maintain the discretionary spending cuts mandated in 2011 given their scale.

Robert Greenstein, the head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the decline in such spending came even as some discretionary programs, like health care for returning war veterans, would have to rise. "That will squeeze core functions — from education, research and infrastructure to protecting the food and water supply to services for poor children and frail seniors," he said.

J. Keith Kennedy, a Republican former staff director of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said: "The annual discretionary money is where you make your investments. And you decide every year where do you want to put your money to invest in the future — whether it's education, or health care or infrastructure or national parks, or sending another rover to Mars."

For two decades through the 1990s, G. William Hoagland, then the Republican staff director at the Senate Budget Committee, fought with Mr. Kennedy to get the Appropriations Committee to cut discretionary spending. But now, Mr. Hoagland said, "We have squeezed that turnip as far as we're going to go, and that's before sequestration. That is the component of the budget which, for all practical purposes, is the seed corn of the future."

The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to search for Jeff Bush, 37. Crews were testing the unstable ground surrounding the home and evacuated two neighboring homes as a precaution.

Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said heavy equipment would be brought in to begin the demolition Sunday morning.

"At this point it's really not possible to recover the body," Merrill said, later adding "we're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole."

Jessica Damico, spokeswoman for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, said the demolition equipment would be placed on what they believe is solid ground and reach onto the property to pull apart the house. The crew will try pulling part of the house away from the sinkhole intact so some heirlooms and mementoes can be retrieved.

Bush was in his bedroom Thursday night in Seffner — a suburb of 8,000 people 15 miles east of downtown Tampa — when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five others in the house escape unharmed.

On Saturday, the normally quiet neighborhood of concrete block homes painted in Florida pastels was jammed with cars as engineers, reporters, and curious onlookers came to the scene.

At the home next door to the Bushes, a family cried and organized boxes. Testing determined that their house and another was compromised by the sinkhole. The families were allowed to go inside for about a half-hour to gather belongings.

Sisters Soliris and Elbairis Gonzalez, who live on the same street as Bushes, said neighbors were worried for their safety.

"I've had nightmares," Soliris Gonzalez, 31, said. "In my dreams, I keep checking for cracks in the house."

They said the family has discussed where to go if forced to evacuate, and they've taken their important documents to a storage unit.

"The rest of it, this is material stuff, as long as our family is fine," Soliris Gonzalez said.

"You never know underneath the ground what's happening," added Elbairis Gonzalez, 30.

Experts say thousands of sinkholes form yearly in Florida because of the state's unique geography, though most are small and deaths rarely occur.

"There's hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes," said Sandy Nettles, who owns a geology consulting company in the Tampa area. "There's no way of ever predicting where a sinkhole is going to occur."

Most sinkholes are small, like one found Saturday morning in Largo, 35 miles away from Seffner. The Largo sinkhole, about 10 feet long and several feet wide, is in a mall parking lot.

The state sits on limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, with a layer of clay on top. The clay is thicker in some locations — including the area where Bush became a victim — making them even more prone to sinkholes.

Jonathan Arthur, the state geologist and director of the Florida Geological Survey, said other states sit atop limestone in a similar way, but Florida has additional factors like extreme weather, development, aquifer pumping and construction. "The conditions under which a sinkhole will form can be very rapid, or they can form slowly over time," he said.

But it remained unclear Saturday what, if anything, caused the Seffner sinkhole.

"The condition that caused that sinkhole could have started a million years ago," Nettles said.

Jeremy Bush, who tried to rescue his brother, lay flowers and a stuffed lamb near the house Saturday morning and wept.

He said someone came to his home a couple of months ago to check for sinkholes and other issues, apparently for insurance purposes, but found nothing wrong. State law requires home insurers to provide coverage against sinkholes.

"And a couple of months later, my brother dies. In a sinkhole," Bush said Friday.

___

___

Online:

http://www.dep.state.fl.us/geology/feedback/faq.htm(hash)17

www.firefighter-relief.com

Mr. Belmokhtar's death was announced on state television in Chad, but has not been confirmed elsewhere.

"On Saturday, March 2, at noon, Chadian armed forces operating in northern Mali completely destroyed a terrorist base," Chad's armed forces spokesman, Gen. Zakaria Ngobongue, said in a statement on national television. "The toll included several dead terrorists, including their leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar."

Soldiers from Chad are fighting Islamist militants in Mali as part of an international force led by France that is seeking to oust the militants from northern Mali.

The French Defense Ministry spokesman, Col. Thierry Burkhard, said the ministry had no information on the claim by Chad and could not confirm it.

The January raid in Algeria was carried out in reprisal for the French intervention in Mali and for Algeria's support for the French war against Islamist militants in the region, Mr. Belmokhtar's spokesmen said at the time.

Mr. Belmokhtar, 40, was born in the Algerian desert city of Ghardaïa, 350 miles south of Algiers. Western officials say he had been active in smuggling, kidnapping and fighting for decades in the Sahel, which includes Mali, Mauritania and Niger. But with the attack on the Algerian gas plant, he suddenly became one of the best-known figures associated with the Islamist militancy sweeping the region and agitating capitals around the world.

The attack led to a four-day hostage crisis that was ended by an Algerian military raid. At least 37 foreign hostages were killed, including three Americans, and about 30 militants.

The United States envoy in Algiers, Henry S. Ensher, urged the Obama administration last week to make the pursuit of Mr. Belmokhtar a priority, administration officials said. He recommended that the Obama administration tell the Algerians that if they allowed the United States to fly unarmed drones over the border area of Algeria as well as over Mali, the Americans would share the information with the Algerian government.

There was broad agreement among policy makers and intelligence officials at a meeting of President Obama's top national security deputies at the White House last week that Mr. Belmokhtar and members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb should be aggressively pursued, according to one senior American official who insisted on anonymity so he could discuss internal deliberations. But no decision appeared to have been reached on whether to make a formal proposal to the Algerians.

Chad said Friday that its forces had killed Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, the most important commander in Al Qaeda's regional franchise, in combat in Mali.

The Algerian newspaper El Khabar reported that DNA  samples from the body presumed to be that of Mr. Abu Zeid had been sent to Algeria, where he was born and where some of his relatives live. Neither French nor Algerian officials have confirmed his death.

If the deaths of Mr. Belmokhtar and Mr. Abu Zeid are confirmed it would be a significant blow to the organization.

The death of the boy, Max Shatto, was quickly held up by supporters of the ban as the latest example of abuse of an adopted Russian child in the United States and provoked a huge outcry here — including accusations of murder against his adoptive mother, Laura Shatto, and demands for the return of a younger brother, Kristopher, age 2. The boys were adopted together in November.

On Friday, law enforcement officials in Ector County, Tex., announced that after an autopsy, a medical examiner had ruled that Max's death was "accidental" — the result of blunt trauma to his abdomen and laceration of a major artery. Texas officials said the boy "had previously been seen for a behavioral disorder that manifested itself in self-injury."

Russia's federal child rights commissioner, Pavel A. Astakhov, suspected a cover-up.

"His bruises disappeared, medications dissolved, the adoptive parents were acquitted, the authorities renounced any claims," Mr. Astakhov posted on Twitter. "The 3-year-old boy was the victim of big politics."

Others said they found it highly dubious that such a small boy, no matter how troubled, could have caused an injury severe enough to cause his own death. They echoed Mr. Astakhov's demand that American officials provide the Russian authorities copies of all of the documents in the case.

"How could a 3-year-old child kill himself, with such a strong hit as to rupture his internal organs?" said Sergei Zheleznyak, a member of Parliament and a leading proponent of the ban. "It all looks very unclear."

The news conference announcing the autopsy findings in Texas came just hours before a previously planned rally in Moscow by supporters of the adoption ban, which President Vladimir V. Putin signed in December as retribution against the United States for an American law seeking to punish Russians accused of violating human rights.

At the rally on Saturday, some demonstrators held a huge banner with photographs of Max and Kristopher. "Look into their eyes," the banner said. "What have you done for Russia's orphans today?"

The debate here over the adoption ban began with the question of how best to respond to the American human rights law but has transformed into national hand-wringing over Russia's huge child welfare problems.

More than 600,000 Russian children live outside the custody of their biological parents, and a raft of measures have been proposed to improve care and services for them. Most live in foster homes, but more than 130,000, many with physical and mental health problems, are housed in the country's often-troubled orphanage system.

Russians are now demanding that their government do more to help such children. Yelena Mizulina, a member of Parliament who leads a committee on children and family issues, has said that about 300 adopted Russian children have died annually in recent years and that no efforts have been made to monitor what happens to adoptees.

After a 3-month-old baby was found dead in the last week, buried under snow near railroad tracks, Mr. Astakhov issued a scathing statement attributing such child abuse cases to a decline in Russian society.

"Mothers who kill their children are the result of the total decomposition of society that began at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s," Mr. Astakhov said. "These women grew up among people who did not pay attention to them. They were degraded, and began to drink, and became antisocial."

Russian officials have said that Max and his half-brother, born Maksim and Kirill Kuzmin, were taken from their mother, Yulia V. Kuzmina, by the authorities because she was an alcoholic and unable to care for them. They lived in a Russian orphanage until they were adopted by Laura and Alan Shatto in November.

On Jan. 21, Max died at a Texas hospital after his mother said she found him lying unconscious outside their house where the two boys had been playing.

At the news conference Friday, Texas officials said that while his death had been ruled "accidental," their investigation was continuing, and that charges, perhaps related to negligence, were still possible. They said the cause of death was laceration to the mesenteric artery, which supplies blood to the small intestine.

"Based on all medical reasonable probability, the manner of death is accidental," officials said in a statement. Medical studies suggest that direct trauma to the abdomen is necessary for such an injury, as can occur from a seat belt during a car accident. It was unclear that a backyard fall could cause such damage.

At the rally in Moscow on Saturday, some participants offered a bleak view of how children are treated in the United States and insisted that Russian orphans would be better off in Russia.

"Russian children should grow up in Russian families — that's it," said Margarita Pentalyeva, a retired teacher from outside Moscow.