Senator John McCain, right, sharply questioned his former colleague Chuck Hagel, the nominee for defense secretary, on Thursday. Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, is at left.
WASHINGTON — If Senator John McCain had an inkling of curiosity how his old buddy Chuck Hagel felt as the senator raked him over the confirmation coals on Thursday, Mr. McCain would get a slight taste an hour later during his own rendezvous with rudeness.
Senator Rand Paul, left, called a policy position of his colleague John McCain "spurious and really, frankly, absurd" on the Senate floor this week.
That is when Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky took to the Senate floor to deride Mr. McCain's opposition to his measure that would punish Egypt as "spurious and really, frankly, absurd," not the first time Mr. Paul has wielded verbal scythes toward his colleagues.
The willingness of Republicans to skewer one of their own became increasingly apparent on Friday as more and more members of the party peeled away from Mr. Hagel, President Obama's nominee for secretary of defense, saying they would not vote to confirm him after Mr. Hagel melted like chocolate on a dashboard under combative questioning from Republicans.
Still, Republican senators and aides said that despite a halting performance, Mr. Hagel would probably be confirmed with Democratic votes. A filibuster of his nomination is still possible, a likely first for a cabinet nominee. Aides to Senators John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican, and Ted Cruz, a Texas newcomer, said Friday that they had not ruled out procedural roadblocks to stop Mr. Hagel's nomination.
But Republican Senate aides say Democrats would probably be able to muster 60 votes to move to a final, up-or-down tally.
"For a cabinet office, I think 51 votes is generally considered the right standard for the Senate to set, and at that level, I think he makes it," Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said Friday on Fox News, even as he announced his opposition to Mr. Hagel.
The White House shared that view.
"I would be stunned if, in the end, Republican senators chose to try to block the nomination of a decorated war veteran who was once among their colleagues in the Senate as a Republican," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
Privately, White House officials agreed that Mr. Hagel came across poorly. "No one would argue that he had a good performance," said one official, who declined to be named to be more candid.
Mr. Hagel has long been on the outs with some party mates because of policy disagreements with them over the years, which sometimes made him seem more like a Democrat. But stemming from their Senate ranks as he did, the intensity of their grilling was striking and illustrative of how the old ways of the Senate are disappearing.
With the current era of hyperpartisanship in Washington, the intra-Senate discord has reached new levels in the usually approbatory chamber in recent months, a place where a certain level of respect for fellow and retired members of the same party is generally more or less a given.
The easy, celebratory hearing afforded Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts on his way to confirmation as secretary of state was much more in keeping with Senate tradition than the smackdown delivered to Mr. Hagel, though his own search for answers did him no favors. The clubbiness of the Senate was what made the 1989 rejection of former Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas, for secretary of defense astonishing even with multiple tales of personal problems.
But Senate Republicans, in particular, who have added more conservative members to their ranks in the last two years, and who fear the constant and imminent threat of primary challengers from the right, have loosened their grip of late on the bonds that distinguish the Senate from any other legislative body.
In December, Bob Dole, the former majority leader, went to the Senate floor in a wheelchair to advocate for a disability treaty, and many of his Republican colleagues, including some who had praised the measure previously, waited for him to be wheeled away before turning the measure down. That would have been almost unthinkable in the past.
"Part of the shift in the Republican Party," said Don Ritchie, the Senate historian, "means that old-time senators like Dole who were to the right of their party when they came here are to the left of their party now because the party has shifted so much beneath them. This all reflects that a bit."
There were other moments as well. Earlier in the week, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, took to talk radio to refer to a Republican colleague, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, as "amazingly naïve" for his proposals to overhaul the nation's immigration system. Mr. Rubio did not choose to respond or question the judgment of Mr. Vitter, whose phone number once appeared in a client list of a Washington madam.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 2, 2013, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: In Hidebound Senate, Decorum Languishes in New Discord .
WASHINGTON — In the five months since the Federal Reserve started a campaign to increase growth and reduce unemployment, the economy has slowed and unemployment has increased.
Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The Labor Department said on Friday that the jobless rate rose to 7.9 percent last month, up from 7.8 percent in December, in the latest evidence that the economy still is not growing fast enough to repair the damage of a recession that ended in 2009.
Some economists found the disappointing data an indication the Fed had reached the limit of its powers, or at least of prudent action. But there is evidence that the Fed is not trying as hard as it could to stimulate growth: it is allowing inflation to fall well below the 2 percent pace it considers most healthy.
Inflation, unlike job creation, is something the Fed can control with some precision. Higher inflation could accelerate economic growth and job creation by encouraging people to spend more and make riskier investments.
Yet annualized inflation fell to 1.3 percent in December, and asset prices reflect an expectation that the pace will remain well below 2 percent in the next decade.
"By their own framework, they're not doing enough," said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. "They said that they were going to expand the economy and keep inflation around 2 percent, and they just haven't done it."
The rest of the government is making that task more difficult. Federal spending cuts, tax increases and the prospect of further cuts March 1 are hurting growth. The Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, has warned repeatedly that monetary policy cannot offset such fiscal austerity.
And it is likely that the latest economic data does not reflect the full impact of the Fed's efforts. Despite the rise in unemployment, job creation has increased in recent months, consumer spending has strengthened and the housing market is healing. Partly because monetary policy is slow-acting, most forecasters expect modest growth this year.
But the Fed also is acting with a clear measure of restraint. Mr. Bernanke and other officials have made clear that they believe the central bank could do more to increase the pace of inflation and bolster growth and job creation. They simply are not persuaded that the benefits outweigh the potential costs — in particular, the risk that their efforts will distort asset prices and seed future financial crises.
The Fed is constrained in part because it already has done so much. The central bank has held short-term interest rates near zero since December 2008, and it has accumulated almost $3 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities to push down long-term rates and encourage riskier investments.
Under its newest effort, announced in September and extended in December, it will increase its holdings of Treasuries and mortgage bonds by $85 billion a month until the job market improves. The Fed also said that it planned to hold short-term rates near zero even longer, at least until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent.
In normal times, the Fed would respond to flagging inflation and growth by cutting interest rates. At present, it could still increase the scale of its asset purchases. The two policies work in a similar way, stimulating economic activity by reducing borrowing costs and encouraging risk-taking. But asset purchases are a less direct method to reduce rates, and the available evidence suggests that the effect is less powerful.
The Fed's holdings of mortgage bonds and Treasuries also are growing so large that it could begin to distort pricing in those markets, and some transactions could be disrupted by a dearth of safe assets. Some Fed officials are concerned that asset prices for farmland, junk bonds and other risky assets are being pushed to unsustainable levels. As a result, Mr. Bernanke has said, the Fed is doing less than it otherwise would.
"We have to pay very close attention to the costs and the risks and the efficacy of these nonstandard policies as well as the potential economic benefits," Mr. Bernanke said last month, in response to a question about the low pace of inflation. "Economics tells you when something is more costly, you do a little bit less of it."
The Fed to some extent may be a prisoner of its own success in persuading investors over the last three decades that it was determined to keep inflation below 2 percent. It said in December that it would let expected inflation in the next two to three years rise as high as 2.5 percent. But expectations have not budged.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland calculated in a January report that average expected inflation over the next decade was just 1.48 percent per year.
Fed officials themselves generally expect somewhat higher inflation, but their most recent predictions, published in January, still show that none of the 19 policy makers expected inflation to exceed 2 percent over the next two years.
A version of this news analysis appeared in print on February 2, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Growth Lags, Some Press Fed To Do Still More .
Twitter announced late Friday that it had been breached and that data for 250,000 Twitter users was vulnerable.
The company said in a blog post that it detected unusual access patterns earlier this week and found that user information — usernames, e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords — for 250,000 users may have been accessed in what it described as a "sophisticated attack."
"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident," Bob Lord, Twitter's director of information security, said in a blog post. "The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked."
Jim Prosser, a spokesman for Twitter, would not say how hackers were able to infiltrate Twitter's systems, but Twitter's blog post alluded that hackers had broken in through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle's Java software.
Java, a widely used programming language, is installed on more than three billion devices and has long been dogged by security problems. Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, the Department of Homeland Security issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. The vulnerability was particularly disconcerting because it let attackers download a malicious program onto its victims' machines without any prompting. Users did not even have to click on a malicious link for their computers to be infected. The program simply downloaded itself.
Oracle patched the security hole, but Homeland Security said that the fix was not sufficient.
"Unless it is absolutely necessary to run Java in Web browsers, disable it," the agency said in an updated alert. "This will help mitigate other Java vulnerabilities that may be discovered in the future."
"We also echo the advisory from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers," Mr. Lord said in the blog post.
Apple no longer ships its machines with Java enabled by default and disabled the software remotely on Macs machines where it had already been installed. Those who do not own Macs can disable the software using detailed instructions on Oracle's Java Web site.
Mr. Prosser said Twitter was working with government and federal law enforcement to track down the source of the attacks. For now, he said the company had reset passwords for, and notified, every compromised user. The company encouraged users to practice good password hygiene, which typically means coming up with different passwords for different sites, and using long passwords that cannot be found in the dictionary.
Twitter did say it "hashed" passwords — which involves mashing up users' passwords with a mathematical algorithm — and "salted" them, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack.
Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auctionlike black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.
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"My grandmother, she's not a normal person. She's like a character when she speaks. Every day she's playing like she's an actress."
These are words of love, and they come from Sacha Goldberger, a French photographer who has turned his grandmother, 93-year-old Frederika Goldberger, into a minor European celebrity.
In the photos, you can see the qualities grandson and grandmother have in common: a wicked sense of humor, an utter lack of pretension and a keen taste for theatricality and the absurd.
This isn't an ordinary caregiving relationship, not by a long shot. But Sacha, 44 years old and unmarried, is deeply devoted to this spirited older relation who has played the role of Mamika ("my little grandmother," translated from her native Hungarian) in two of his books and a photography exhibition currently under way in Paris.
As for Frederika, "I like everything that my grandson does," she said in a recent Skype conversation from her apartment, which also serves as Sacha's office. "I hate not to do anything. Here, with my grandson, I have the feeling I am doing something."
Their unusual collaboration began after Frederika retired from her career as a textile consultant at age 80 and fell into a funk.
"I was very depressed because I lived for working," she told me in our Skype conversation.
Sacha had long dreamed of creating what he calls a "Woody Allen-like Web site with a French Jewish humor," and he had an inspiration. What if he took one of the pillars of that type of humor, a French man's relationship with his mother and grandmother, and asked Frederika to play along with some oddball ideas?
This Budapest-born baroness, whose family had owned the largest textile factory in Hungary before World War II, was a natural in front of the camera, assuming a straight-faced, imperturbable comic attitude whether donning a motorcycle helmet and goggles, polishing her fingernails with a gherkin, wearing giant flippers on the beach, lighting up a banana, or dressed up as a Christmas tree with a golden star on her head. (All these photos and more appear in "Mamika: My Mighty Little Grandmother," published in the United States last year.)
"It was like a game for us, deciding what crazy thing we were going to do next, how we were going to keep people from being bored," said Sacha, who traces his close relationship with his grandmother to age 14, when she taught him how to drive and often picked him up at school. "Making pictures was a very good excuse to spend time together."
"He thought it was very funny to put a costume on me," said Frederika. "And I liked it."
People responded enthusiastically, and before long Sacha had cooked up what ended up becoming the most popular character role for Frederika: Super Mamika, outfitted in a body-hugging costume, tights, a motorcycle helmet and a flowing cape.
His grandmother was a super hero of sorts, because she had helped save 10 people from the Nazis during World War II, said Sacha. He also traced inspiration to Stan Lee, a Jewish artist who created the X-Men, The Hulk and the Fantastic Four for Marvel comics. "I wanted to ask what happens to these super heroes when they get old in these photographs with my grandmother."
Lest this seem a bit trivial to readers of this blog, consider this passage from Sacha's introduction to "Mamika: My Might Little Grandmother":
In a society where youth is the supreme value; where wrinkles have to be camouflaged; where old people are hidden as soon as they become cumbersome, where, for lack of time or desire, it is easier to put our elders in hospices rather than take care of them, I wanted to show that happiness in aging was also possible.
In our Skype conversation, Sacha confessed to anxiety about losing his grandmother, and said: "I always was very worried about what would happen if my grandmother disappeared. Because she is exceptional."
"I am not normal," Frederika piped up at his side, her face deeply wrinkled, her short hair beautifully coiffed, seemingly very satisfied with herself.
"So, making these pictures to me is the best thing that could happen," Sacha continued, "because now my grandma is immortal and it seems everyone knows her. I am giving to everybody in the world a bit of my grandma."
This wonderful expression of caring and creativity has expanded my view of intergenerational relations in this new old age. What about you?
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Protesters threw fireworks over the walls of the presidential palace in Cairo on Friday.
CAIRO — During an anti-government demonstration on Friday, protesters threw fire bombs over the wall of Egypt's presidential palace, setting fire to a guardhouse at one of the gates. The police responded by firing tear gas and birdshot at demonstrators, and at one point, stripping and brutally beating a man in an episode captured on live television.
The Egyptian Health Ministry reported that one protester was killed in the violence, which quickly dashed hopes of reconciliation between Egypt's quarreling political parties. On Thursday, Islamist and secular-leaning groups had been coaxed to sit down together on Thursday to issue a joint declaration condemning the violence after more than a week of unrest that left more than 50 people dead.
But on Friday, as clashes raged on a broad avenue outside the presidential palace, the warring parties reverted to the recriminations that Egypt's defense minister recently warned had brought the country to the brink of collapse. The parties' feuds have fed an atmosphere of growing polarization that many Egyptians blame for a rising tide of violence. The actions by some protesters on Friday — and the officers' response — seemed to confirm another fear: neither the opposition parties nor the government exercises firm control over the confrontations in the streets.
In a statement, President Mohamed Morsi blamed unnamed "political forces" for inciting what he said was an attempt to "storm the gates of the palace."
"We stress that such violent practices have nothing to do with the principles of the revolution or legitimate means of expression," the statement said. It called on "patriotic forces" to denounce the violence and "urge their supporters to immediately withdraw from the palace area."
The National Salvation Front, the largest coalition of secular-leaning opposition groups, said it had no connection to the violence and blamed "Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood group that he belongs to" for the "state of congestions and tension prevailing in the Egyptian society for the last two months."
It remained to be seen whether the fighting at the palace would turn into a deeper conflagration, like the deadly clashes outside the presidential palace in December between Mr. Morsi's supporters and anti-government protesters. The Brotherhood said on Friday that its members were staying away from the clashes and did not wish to be "dragged into the violence."
The clashes started after a peaceful sit-in that lasted several hours outside the palace walls, where protesters chanted against the rule of Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement he once led. As night fell, a small group of protesters threw fire bombs over a palace gate, and launched fireworks toward buildings on the palace grounds. Officers inside fired a water cannon back, to disperse demonstrators but also to douse small fires, including one that started in a guardhouse by the gate.
Within an hour, the fighting had intensified, with armored personnel carriers advancing and firing tear gas into the crowd, which was forced back several blocks from the palace. Security officers set fire to tents set up by protesters across the street from the palace and threw flags and banners on bonfires that had been lit in the street. As the police started firing birdshot at the protesters, a small fire started in a cafe near the fighting, sending patrons running for the door.
The riot police officers, who serve under the command of the Interior Ministry, also captured and beat several protesters, witnesses said. In one of the beatings, which was captured on live television, officers could be seen dragging a naked, middle-aged man, covered in soot, across the asphalt toward an armored personnel carrier. The officers appeared to drag him by his arms and then his legs. One officer appeared to beat the man, and then another took a turn, appearing to hit the man in the face before finally placing him in the vehicle.
For many, the image served as a reminder that more than two years after Egypt's uprising, the Interior Ministry remains one of the country's many recalcitrant institutions, saddled with poorly trained officers who resort quickly to abuse. It also threatened to deepen hostility after a week of deadly clashes in several Egyptian cities.
In recent days, signs emerged that Egypt's political elite, unnerved by the sudden erosion of the state's authority, were working to settle some of their differences. Earlier this week, opposition parties reached across ideological lines for the first time, as a hard-line Islamist party joined with the National Salvation Front to put pressure on Mr. Morsi to form a new government.
Then on Thursday, a group of young revolutionaries managed to organize a meeting between opposition leaders and representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood. The meeting did not result in any breakthroughs, but the simple act of putting the antagonists in the same room was seen as a step forward.
Those efforts a[[reared to come undone in Friday's protests, with the quick descent into violence outside the presidential palace.
Shady el-Ghazali-Harb, one of the young organizers who helped guide the revolt against Hosni Mubarak two years ago, was on the scene, with a gas mask draped around his neck. "This will not stop. As long as the demands of the people are not met, people will stay in the street, and no one can control this violence," he said, arguing that the underlying issue was the failure of the Islamist-backed constitution to address the goals of the revolution — bread, freedom and social justice, as the familiar chant goes.
Christopher Gregory/The New York TimesChuck Hagel responded to questions during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday in Washington.
Dealing with Iran is complicated, but President Obama's policy on the question of whether a nuclear-armed Iran could be successfully "contained'' – the way the Soviet Union was during the cold war – is simple.
His answer is no.
But in the weeks of preparation for his Senate confirmation hearing to be defense secretary on Thursday, either no one explained that to Chuck Hagel, Mr. Obama's nominee for secretary of defense, or he forgot it. And so on his first outing, Mr. Hagel fell immediately into the trap that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and several other administration officials have complained about in recent years. He became the latest official to send what many inside the administration fear has been an inconsistent and confusing message to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, about whether the Obama administration would, if there was no other option, take military measures to prevent Iran from possessing a weapon.
"It's somewhere between baffling and incomprehensible," a member of Mr. Obama's own team of advisers on Iran said on Thursday night when asked about Mr. Hagel's stumbling performance on the question during the all-day hearing. The worry was evident in the voice of the official, who would not speak on the record while criticizing the performance of the president's nominee. For those who question whether the no-containment cornerstone of the Obama approach to Tehran is for real, or just diplomatic rhetoric, Mr. Hagel clearly muddled the message, he said.
Mr. Hagel's flubbing of the answer was even more remarkable because in his prepared remarks to the committee, which were carefully vetted by the White House and then e-mailed to reporters before the hearing, he got the president's position exactly right. "As I said in the past many times, all options must be on the table,'' Mr. Hagel said, in a statement meant to clean up past comments by the former Nebraska senator suggesting that an attack on Iran's nuclear sites would be so disastrous that it was not a feasible alternative. "My policy has always been the same as the president's, one of prevention, not of containment. And the president has made clear that is the policy of our government.''
So far, so good.
But then, Mr. Hagel went down a different road. "I support the president's strong position on containment," he said, appearing, perhaps by imprecision, to suggest that the president's view was that a nuclear Iran could be contained. (Mr. Obama has gone on to explain that containment would fail because other players in the neighborhood – probably led by Saudi Arabia – would race for the bomb as soon as Iran had one.)
Then an aide slipped a piece of paper to Mr. Hagel. He glanced at it, then said: "By the way, I've just been handed a note that I misspoke and said I supported the president's position on containment. If I said that, it meant to say that obviously — on his position on containment — we don't have a position on containment."
That made it worse. So the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, tried to rescue Mr. Hagel. "Just to make sure your correction is clear, we do have a position on containment: which is we do not favor containment.''
Why might any of this matter? Perhaps it won't; it could just be another in the litany of Iran slips, like the time in December 2011 when Leon E. Panetta, the man Mr. Hagel hopes to replace at the Pentagon, described how any attack on Iran would strengthen the country's position in the region and help it shed its pariah status. (He was probably right, but it made it sound as if the defense secretary really thought there were no military options on the table.)
But Mr. Hagel's stumbling caused heartburn inside the administration because it made him appear unfamiliar with his brief. And even before he spoke, American credibility on the question of whether it would allow nations to get the bomb has been less than impressive.
The United States warned Pakistan against pursuing the development of a nuclear weapon during the Clinton administration. It conducted a nuclear test in 1998, responding to an Indian test, and both countries briefly suffered American economic sanctions. Then, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the sanctions were lifted, Pakistan became a "major non-NATO ally'' and India signed a commercial nuclear agreement with the United States.
Then there is North Korea. President George W. Bush said he would never "tolerate'' a North Korea with nuclear weapons. North Korea set off its first nuclear test in 2006, and its second a few months after Mr. Obama became president. Satellite photographs suggest that a third may be only days or weeks away.
That record, many believe, could prompt Iran's leaders to conclude that once countries get a weapon, or the capability to build one, America shrugs its shoulders and declares that containment will work fine. Mr. Hagel raised that possibility in a 2007 speech – though he stopped short of endorsing it – which is why the administration wanted to make sure he got on the same page with the president. He didn't, and there is little doubt that the Iranians noticed.
The sense that Chuck Hagel performed poorly in his confirmation hearing has buoyed the outside groups that have been working to defeat his nomination, many of them financed by donors who refuse to identify themselves (and are not legally compelled to do so).
"It certainly has breathed new life into the effort,'' said Stuart Roy, a strategist with the American Future Fund, an anonymously financed group that has been running ads against him.
Mr. Roy said that he had fielded excited calls from donors on Thursday but he did not know whether that would translate into significant new donations.
But, like other groups involved in the effort, American Future Fund is already planning to run commercials until there is a vote. Mr. Roy said the back and forth of the hearings has provided potential new fodder for the next round of ads. "It's sort of like that first Obama debate today,'' he said, referring to Mr. Obama's lackluster first debate with Mitt Romney last year, which galvanized Mr. Romney's campaign.
Mr. Hagel's opponents said they were hopeful the hearing would embolden Republicans to threaten to block his nomination from coming to a vote, dissuade potential Republican supporters from defecting to his side, and push a handful of Democrats facing re-election to come out against him.
Most of the efforts so far have focused on Democrats, with ads, phone calls and mailings urging their constituents to call and write their offices urging no votes.
Some new developments in the campaign against Mr. Hagel have surfaced surrounding the hearing and its aftermath.
Richard Silverstein, the author of the liberal blog Tikun Olam, reported receiving an anti-Hagel robotic phone call from the Republican Jewish Coalition – financed in part by the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson – at his home in Washington State, of all places. The state's United States senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, are not expected to defect.
And the Sunlight Foundation, a research organization that seeks to make government and politics more transparent, reports that another anonymously financed new group has entered the anti-Hagel realm, Secure America Now, which, it reports, was founded by Allen Roth, a political aide to Ron Lauder, the cosmetics heir and former ambassador to Austria who is active in Jewish causes.
The group is running an online petition drive to thwart Mr. Hagel and offers visitors to its Web site a pamphlet making their case against him.
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