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Ram Singh, who is accused of driving the bus on which the 23-year-old student was raped and fatally assaulted by a group of six men in December, hanged himself with his own clothes, said G. Sudhakar, the top police official at Tihar jail.

Singh, along with four other men on trial with him on rape, murder and abduction charges, had been under a suicide watch, another jail official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. He said the five were being held in separate cells in separate buildings at the jail.

If convicted, the men could face the death penalty. The sixth accused is being tried and jailed separately because he is a juvenile.

Singh's lawyer, A. P. Singh, confirmed his client's death, saying he died at 5:30 a.m. He alleged that police maleficence led to his client's death.

"What do you mean killed himself? He has been killed in prison," Singh said.

Lawyers for the men have previously accused police of beating confessions out of their clients.

Indian jails have a reputation for overcrowding, poor management and brutal treatment of inmates.

The woman and a male friend were attacked after boarding the bus Dec. 16 as they tried to return home after watching a movie, police say. The six men, the only occupants of the private bus, beat the man with a metal bar, raped the woman and used the bar to inflict massive internal injuries to her, police say. The victims were dumped naked on the roadside, and the woman died from her injuries two weeks later in a Singapore hospital.

The brutal attack set off nationwide protests about India's treatment of women and spurred the government to hurry through a new package of laws to protect them.

Singh's death comes as the trial was deep underway, with another hearing scheduled for Monday. There was no word if that would be affected.

But beneath the surface, the array of factions Mr. Maduro must contend with seems daunting, from radical armed cells in this city's slums to privileged bureaucrats with strong ties to Cuba, Venezuela's top ally, to what is arguably the most powerful pro-Chávez group of all: senior military figures whose sway across Venezuela was significantly bolstered by the deceased leader.

Of the 20 states in Venezuela controlled by governors from the United Socialist Party, which Mr. Chávez created to solidify his movement, 11 are led by former military officers. About a quarter of the ministers in Mr. Maduro's cabinet, which he inherits from Mr. Chávez, rose through the ranks of the armed forces. Powerful military figures remain at the helm of state companies like the Venezuelan Guayana Corporation, a sprawling conglomerate involved in mining gold and producing aluminum.

The influence of the armed forces, including a militia force believed to number more than 120,000, reflects the efforts of Mr. Chávez, a former soldier who led a failed coup attempt in 1992, to imbue society with military ideals. At the same time, he tolerated illicit enrichment schemes within the armed forces, even chafing at international censure of powerful generals accused of involvement in drug trafficking by appointing them to important posts.

"Not even Chávez could rule without constantly surveying the military landscape for signs of resistance, periodically punishing and purging some in the higher ranks while rewarding others," said Rocío San Miguel, a legal scholar who heads an organization that monitors Venezuelan security issues.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Maduro, now the interim president and a candidate in the special presidential election scheduled for next month, never served in the military. He was a union organizer and legislator before serving for years as Mr. Chávez's globe-trotting foreign minister. (He faces Henrique Capriles Radonski, a state governor and former presidential candidate, in the election. Mr. Capriles accepted the nomination of the opposition coalition on Sunday night.)

Security analysts here do not foresee a classic challenge to Mr. Maduro from the armed forces in the form of officers publicly not recognizing his authority, or plotting to remove him from office.

In fact, in a move that has elicited criticism from opposition leaders who say the Constitution bars the armed forces from taking sides in political campaigns, the top military official in the cabinet, Defense Minister Diego Molero Bellavia, has already explicitly backed Mr. Maduro by calling on voters to "give a good thrashing to all those fascists" of the opposition.

The head of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, a former military officer who took part in Mr. Chávez's 1992 coup attempt, has also pledged to support Mr. Maduro. Mr. Cabello, who is one of the most powerful figures in Mr. Chávez's political movement and has broad support in the army, is often viewed as a potential rival to Mr. Maduro.

Still, potential pitfalls abound for Mr. Maduro in his relations with a military establishment tarnished by scandals and criticism from other pro-Chávez factions. For instance, the United States Treasury has accused two senior military figures, Henry Rangel Silva, the former head of Venezuela's intelligence agency, and Hugo Carvajal, the former director of the Military Intelligence Directorate, of assisting the drug trafficking activities of Latin America's largest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Last year, Mr. Chávez appointed Mr. Rangel as defense minister, a post he held before successfully running for governor of Trujillo State, while Mr. Carvajal was appointed director of Venezuela's agency for combating organized crime. Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, another former officer accused of assisting the FARC in buying weapons with proceeds from narcotics, is now the governor of Guárico State.

Venezuela has become one of the largest transshipment points for smuggling cocaine into the United States, and a captured drug trafficker, Walid Makled García, has said that his smuggling network was made viable through the cooperation of several former generals, including Luis Felipe Acosta Carlez, a political figure in Carabobo State.

There is also festering tension between military leaders and pro-Chávez groups who view some in the armed forces as overstepping their authority, illicitly accumulating fortunes or simply as incompetent managers.

In February, indigenous groups in southern Venezuela demanded the resignation of a top general, Clíver Alcalá Cordones, accusing him of belonging to the "extreme far-right reactionary bourgeois" wing of the armed forces after soldiers under his command moved to limit gold mining in some areas.

And in Ciudad Guayana, the industrial city designed by planners from M.I.T. and Harvard in the 1960s, Rafael Gil Barrios, a former military official who is president of the huge state-owned industrial conglomerate based there, has been grappling with strikes this year, highlighting the inability of state-controlled enterprises to operate efficiently and resolve shortages of basic products.

"Chávez was a master at addressing very different interests and holding them together as the undisputed leader," said Jennifer McCoy, the Americas program director at the Carter Center in Atlanta. "Maduro has the temperament to talk to different people, and he can be quite reasonable and pragmatic. But he will need all his negotiating skills to manage the competing ideas and interests within the movement."

Mr. Chávez constantly monitored the armed forces for signs of dissent, culling hundreds of officers viewed as having questionable loyalty, cashiering defense ministers and jailing high-ranking officers suspected of conspiring to oust him.

One former army chief, Raúl Isaías Baduel, who helped return Mr. Chávez to power after a brief coup, broke with him in 2007. He was arrested in 2009 on corruption charges, accusations he contends are retaliation for his criticism of Mr. Chávez, and remains imprisoned to this day.

Deciphering such shifts in loyalty within the armed forces obsesses some here as they attempt to make sense of what comes next. "The military men choose the side that is best for them," said Carlos Diz, 51, an aviation technician. "They might say they support Maduro and maybe nothing will happen now, but they cannot be satisfied with a civilian in power after 14 years of Chávez."

"I was shocked and dismayed," said the law professor Charles J. Ogletree. "I hope that it means the faculty will now have something to say about the fact that these things like this can happen."

News of the e-mail searches prolonged the fallout from the cheating scandal, in which about 70 students were forced to take a leave from school for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam in a government class last year.

Harry R. Lewis, a professor and former dean of Harvard College, said, "People are just bewildered at this point, because it was so out of keeping with the way we've done things at Harvard."

"I think what the administration did was creepy," said Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor, adding that "this action violates the trust I once had that Harvard would never do such a thing."

Last fall, the administrators searched the e-mails of 16 resident deans, trying to determine who had leaked an internal memo about how the deans should advise students who stood accused of cheating. But most of those deans were not told that their accounts had been searched until the past few days, after The Boston Globe, which first reported the searches, began to inquire about them.

Rather than the searches being kept secret from the resident deans, "they should've been asked openly," said Richard Thomas, a professor of classics. "This is not a good outcome."

Though some professors were disinclined to speak to a reporter, they showed less restraint online, where sites were buzzing with the news, and several professors said the topic dominated the faculty's private conversations.

On his blog, which is closely followed by many people at Harvard, Dr. Lewis called the administration's handling of the search "dishonorable," and, like some of his colleagues, said the episode would prompt him to do less of his communication through his Harvard e-mail account, and more through a private account.

Timothy McCarthy, a lecturer and program director at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, posted about the e-mail search on Facebook. "This is disgraceful," he said, "even more so than the original cheating scandal, because it involves adults who should know better — really smart, powerful adults, with complete job security."

Harvard's spokesmen did not respond to calls on Sunday about the criticism. On Saturday, the university declined to confirm or deny that the e-mail searches had taken place. It was unclear whether the issue would blow over or if it might escalate into a major confrontation between the faculty and the administration.

The resident deans are employees who live in Harvard's residential houses, alongside undergraduates, and counsel them on a range of matters. They also have appointments as lecturers — people who teach classes but are not on the tenure track for professors — and serve on various faculty bodies, like the Faculty Council and the Administrative Board, which hears disciplinary cases.

Several Harvard faculty members speculated that the administration had felt free to search the e-mail accounts because it regarded the resident deans as regular employees, not faculty members; Harvard's policies on electronic privacy give more protection to faculty members. The prevailing view from professors seemed to be that the resident deans are faculty members.

"If their role as administrative deans means that they can be treated like staff," Dr. Waters said, "then I do think that the e-mails of the president, provost and dean of the faculty should be turned over to the Faculty Council to investigate who ordered this witch hunt. "If the resident deans don't have protection as faculty, neither should any other faculty serving in an administrative capacity."

The faculty policy states that while the administration can search a Harvard faculty e-mail account as part of an internal investigation, it must notify the faculty member beforehand or soon after. In this case, the notification followed after about six months.

"So it would seem that the administration violated its own policy," Michael Mitzenmacher, a professor and area dean of computer science in the school of applied sciences, wrote on his blog. As for the resident deans, he said, "as far as I can tell right now, they're faculty under any reasonable definition the university gives."

The affair "is the kind of thing that make faculty think they need to push back or even rein in the administrative side of the university," he said.

Some of the resident deans said they considered the lack of notice — and even the searches, themselves — a violation of trust, but they refused to speak for the record because they lack job protection.

On a cold, gray Sunday, the campus was relatively quiet; students interviewed said they knew little about the e-mail searches or had no particular view on them. It was not clear that the initial wave of ire from faculty members was representative of professors' views, and there were a few dissenting voices.

"If you really want to keep things confidential, then you have to stop leaks; to do that, you have to stop those that are making the leaks," said Harvey Mansfield, a government professor who has taught at Harvard for more than 50 years. "I think the resident deans are essentially functionaries. They're part of the administration."

Strong reactions extended beyond the campus.

"This is, I think, one of the lowest points in Harvard's recent history — maybe Harvard's history, period," Richard Bradley, a Harvard alumnus and author of the book "Harvard Rules," a look at the tenure of a former university president, Lawrence H. Summers, wrote on his blog. "It's an invasion of privacy, a betrayal of trust, and a violation of the academic values for which the university should be advocating."

Last August, Harvard revealed that "nearly half" the students in a large class were suspected of having cheated on a final exam. The university would not name the class, but it was quickly identified by students as Government 1310, Introduction to Congress, which had 279 students last spring.

Days later, news organizations reported on an e-mail sent to resident deans. Among other things, the e-mail said they might suggest to students accused of cheating who were varsity athletes that they withdraw voluntarily, rather than face being forced out and losing a year of athletic eligibility.

It was the leak of that e-mail that prompted the searches of the e-mail accounts; several faculty members said they were perplexed by the response, because the leak seemed like such a minor matter.

Harvard administrators called the cheating episode the largest in memory. In recent years, the school had averaged 17 students per year forced to withdraw for academic dishonesty.

McDowell's mettle was moving, albeit misplaced. McDowell, who opened with a birdie, could be forgiven for believing that pluck could pull him through in a final-round duel against Woods. At the 2010 World Challenge, McDowell came from four strokes back, the same deficit he faced at Sunday's start, to tie Woods, whom he then dispatched in a playoff.

But the Woods he beat then was not the same player who grabbed a share of the lead in the first round of the Cadillac Championship and held onto it like a guard dog to a pant leg. After four years of rehabilitating injuries and then his swing, Woods is playing — and especially putting — like the player who averaged six tour titles a season in the three years before McDowell turned professional in 2002.

With a closing one-under-par 71, Woods claimed his 76th PGA Tour title, and his first World Golf Championships event since 2009. At 19-under 269, Woods's margin of victory was two strokes over Steve Stricker, who posted a 68. Five strokes back, in a four-way tie for third, were Sergio García (69), Phil Mickelson (71), McDowell (72) and Adam Scott, whose final-round 64 was the low score of the week.

Rory McIlroy, the world No. 1, who opened the tournament feeling lost because of a faulty swing, finished with a 65, the second-lowest round of the day, which catapulted him into a four-way tie for eighth at 281.

While McIlroy marveled at what a difference a week can make, Woods, the world No. 2, reflected on how his fortunes have turned around in the last year. In the final round of this tournament last year, he withdrew on the 12th hole because of a recurring Achilles' heel injury.

"It's nice to be healthy," Woods said. "I was struggling there for a while."

Woods has won 5 of his last 19 official tour starts dating to the Arnold Palmer Invitational, his next start after his withdrawal from this event. This year, he has won two of his three stroke-play appearances on tour, but he laughed when it was suggested his four-stroke victory at the Farmers Insurance Open and Sunday's victory were stress-free.

"Stress-free?" Woods said, laughing. "Did you not see 18?"

On the 18th, a par 4 with teeth as sharp as ever, Woods drove into the rough, flirted with the water on his approach and settled for a bogey after a chip and two putts. Mickelson also bogeyed the hole, while McDowell carded a 6.

In pulling away from a field that featured 19 of the top 20 players in the world, Woods drew closer to Sam Snead, the career leader in tour titles with 82. Snead was six days past his 45th birthday when he won his 76th event. Woods reached that victory total at 37 years 2 months 10 days.

A few of the golfers Woods left in his rearview mirror have had their best years during his fallow period. Since 2010, Stricker has five victories, a total Woods matched Sunday. McDowell, Mickelson and McIlroy have combined for four major titles since Woods won his 14th, at the 2008 United States Open.

Stricker, who was playing with Mickelson in the group directly ahead of Woods, has been a witness over the years to Woods's playing at close to his best, his better and his most excellent, so he harbored no illusions about Woods faltering in the final round.

"You don't have a lot of — what's the right word? — belief that he's going to come back to the field, I guess," Stricker said. "He's been so solid with 54-hole leads over his career that you just don't think he's going to come back. And he didn't, again."

Woods has won 41 of 43 times when holding the 54-hole lead outright. He is golf's answer to Mariano Rivera, so it was fitting that his latest front-running victory came on the same weekend in which Rivera, the Yankees' closer, announced that this baseball season will be his last.

"I enjoy being there," Woods said. "That's why I work my tail off and lift all those weights, hit all those balls and spend those countless hours out there — to be in that position."

Woods's first and only true putting guru was his father, Earl. Since Earl's death in 2006, Woods has gotten by on the greens with a little help from his friends. On Wednesday, he received an impromptu putting tutorial from Stricker, who happened to be on the practice green when Woods showed up.

After Stricker adjusted Woods's alignment, Woods went out and had 100 putts in four rounds, five fewer than Ben Crenshaw took when he won here in 1988. Woods joked that now he knows why Stricker always seems so happy.

"I made my share of putts this week," Woods said, "and it felt good."

Of the 19-footer on the second hole, Woods said: "It was important to make that. Graeme hits it stiff there, I need to answer."

McDowell said: "The way Tiger was playing, I guess I was always in chase mode. I was trying to make it happen instead of letting it flow."

In other words, Sunday was like yesterday once more on the PGA Tour.

After several seasons in decline, "The Bachelor" has had a resurgence rare among network reality shows. The glossy dating show, which pairs one hunky (often shirtless) man with dozens of spray-tanned (often bikini-clad) women until he proposes to the ultimate survivor, has also become the unlikely exception in a television season when almost every other show on ABC and its competing networks has declined.

The audience for "The Bachelor" has increased by 3 percent this season to 8.8 million in total viewers and by 7 percent to 3.3 million viewers 18 to 49 years old, the group that attracts the most advertisers. The average audience for that group among ABC's regularly scheduled shows is only 2.4 million viewers.

"It just takes the right gal or guy to all of a sudden regalvanize the audience," said Mike Fleiss, the creator and an executive producer of the show.

But the show's recent success has also been a result of a push by the producers to attract younger viewers, to use social media to promote "live" viewing and, by tinkering with the casting and format, to encourage viewers to return for subsequent seasons after the bloom is off the previous season's rose.

So after 11 years on television and 17 separate rose-covered editions, "The Bachelor" is on the upswing. The show posts the best results in network television on Monday nights with younger women — those 18 to 34. The viewers' median age is 51.1, young in broadcast television terms. ABC's other hit reality series, "Dancing With the Stars," which has featured former bachelors and bachelorettes, has an average viewer age of 61.6.

ABC emphasizes that the show, far from having the economically downscale profile of some reality shows, is especially strong with women of financial means. In homes with more than $100,000 in income, it scores 34 percent above the television average.

"It really plays right into that sweet spot of upscale women," said John Saade, the executive vice president for alternative programs at ABC.

"The Bachelor" did not always look so promising. The series took an inevitable dive in ratings around its 12th season. Its abysmal record in relationships did not help. None of the final "rose ceremonies," in which the bachelor gives his future fiancée a rose and a Neil Lane diamond engagement ring, had ended in marital bliss. ("The Bachelorette," a spinoff, has resulted in two marriages.)

"The show was fading," said Mr. Saade, who has worked in ABC's reality department since before the premiere of "The Bachelor" in 2002.

The turning point, the producers say, came in the form of Jason Mesnick, the earnest divorced father who starred in season 13. He proposed in the finale only to change his mind and dump the ostensible female "winner" (on air) and end up married to Molly Malaney, the runner-up. Mr. Mesnick and Ms. Malaney are expecting their first child together any day now.

"I remember the moment when I let Molly go, and I was uncontrollably crying," Mr. Mesnick said from his home in Seattle. "A producer said, 'Are you sure you made the right call?' " (In "Bachelor" lingo crying over a balcony became known as "a Mesnick.")

Mr. Mesnick, who had competed on "The Bachelorette," represented a turning point for the franchise. Mr. Fleiss decided that rather than tapping a mystery man as the bachelor each season, the show should feature the fan favorites whose hearts had been broken on "The Bachelorette." The continuing characters make the series — and the drama among the heavily made-up women who share a 7,590-square foot house in Agoura Hills, Calif., as they compete for Mr. Lowe's attention — more like the traditional soap operas once on ABC's daytime schedule.

The shift allowed two audiences for the show to coexist: the traditional fans who still get carried away by the romantic promise every season and the viewers who typically get together to watch, whether in person or online, to enjoy the comedy and follow favorite characters.

Mr. Lowe seems to have struck a chord with the first category, possibly because he describes himself as a devoted Christian. The series features plenty of necking in exotic locales, but Mr. Lowe, who calls himself a "born-again virgin" (which probably deserves its own show), kept this season PG-rated.

But "The Bachelor" is also watched by groups of young women, over wine and Twitter in sororities on college campuses and in other meeting places. Tabloid magazines, which once had cooled on "Bachelor" gossip, are back to stoking the furor, luring female readers by putting a shirtless Mr. Lowe on their covers.

Cameron Ross, a 29-year-old client services manager for an Internet radio company, summed up the appeal as: "hunky guy, pretty girls, lots of tears and drama." She said she usually watched with some friends, tweeting with others. "It's not the same to watch it alone," she said.

Mr. Saade, who said the show was both "extremely primal" and "goofy," likens "The Bachelor" to a kind of National Football League for women in that it is a collective live television event — and a sport of sorts.

To encourage live viewing, ABC began embedding viewers' (74 percent of whom are women) commentary on Twitter into the series, encouraging them to forgo the DVR. Last Monday, there were 248,782 tweets about "The Bachelor," making it the biggest show on social media that night, the network said.

The show has made small steps to be more inclusive by casting several African-American contestants and Catherine, the first Asian-American finalist, but it still faces persistent criticism for its heavily white casts. In October, a United States District Judge dismissed a class-action lawsuit against "The Bachelor" producers for not casting minorities in lead roles.

When the suit was filed, Warner Horizon, the division of Warner Brothers Television that produces "The Bachelor," said the accusations were "baseless and without merit" and that the show's producers "have been consistently — and publicly — vocal about seeking diverse candidates for both programs."

For all the guilty-pleasure viewers, there is also a clear subset of fans who find themselves hate-watching "The Bachelor" — not because they hate the show as much as they hate themselves for getting sucked in to it and its silliness time and again.

"There are those who watch it ironically and those who watch it as the most romanticized wish fulfillment imaginable," said Peter Roth, president of Warner Brothers Television. "All of those brokenhearted cynics are really rooting for this to work."

Corey Ann Haydu, an author from Brooklyn, is one of the cynics. A fan almost from the beginning of the show's run, she finds herself exasperated by its corniness, even as she will not miss a week. "I can't stop myself," Ms. Haydu, 30, said. "It's a classic love-hate thing."

She wrote on Twitter with a friend while watching the show recently, using the hashtag #IHateMyself. "When it blows up? That's my favorite part," Ms. Haydu said of the typically failed engagements.

But Mr. Fleiss defended "The Bachelor" for its romantic batting average, saying, "There's never been a 'Bachelor' divorce."

He also argues that, despite the decline of ratings for reality programming on networks, some viewers still want the spectacle of unscripted drama.

"The show is a magnifying glass," he said. "If you're a solid person, it will make you seem that much more so. But if you're a little crazy, you'll seem completely insane."

He cited one of the most-discussed moments this season — when Tierra LiCausi, a leasing consultant from Las Vegas, was sent home after multiple blowups with the other contestants. As she left, sobbing, Ms. LiCausi, 25, told the camera that she had a "sparkle" that intimidates others.

"Nobody wrote that or told her to talk about her dad saying 'You have a sparkle, baby,' " Mr. Fleiss said. Then referring to the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Social Network," he added, "Aaron Sorkin couldn't come up with that, and he's a genius."

Researchers performed CT scans on 137 mummies, including Egyptians, Peruvians, Aleutian Islanders and ancestors of the Pueblo people of the American Southwest.

The scans were read by seven imaging experts who judged atherosclerosis by the presence of calcification in the walls of clearly discernible arteries or along the expected route of an artery no longer visible.

Previous research has found evidence of atherosclerosis in Egyptian mummies, but mummification in Egypt was practiced among the elite, whose diet and lifestyle probably differed substantially from that of the rest of the population. Indeed, this study, published online Sunday in The Lancet, found atherosclerosis in 29 of the 76 Egyptian mummies examined.

But the researchers also found the disease in 13 of 51 Peruvian remains dated between A.D. 200 and 1500, two of five ancestral Pueblans who lived between 1500 B.C. and A.D. 500, and three of five Aleutian Islanders who lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Over all, 38 percent of the Egyptians and 29 percent of the other mummies had definite or probable evidence of atherosclerosis, the scientists concluded.

The senior author, Dr. Gregory S. Thomas, a cardiologist and medical director at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif., said that among the mummies of people age 40 and older, 50 percent had atherosclerosis.

Diet and climate varied among these four groups. The Egyptians may have eaten a diet high in saturated fat. The Peruvians farmed corn, potatoes and beans, and they kept domestic animals. Ancestral Pueblans grew corn and hunted rabbits, deer and sheep, while the Aleutian Islanders subsisted on a diet of fish, shellfish, seals, sea otters and whale.

"Patients with vascular disease feel guilty for having it, but you shouldn't feel guilty," Dr. Thomas said. "It's part of the aging process. If people had it 4,000 years ago and in four different cultures, why wouldn't we get it now?"