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National celebrations of "Learn From Lei Feng Day," which was observed last Tuesday, turned into something of a public relations debacle after the party icon's celluloid resurrection in not one but three films about his life was thwarted by a distinctly capitalist weapon: the box office bomb.

In cities across the country, many theaters were unable to sell even a single ticket, an embarrassment for the Communist Party, which has been seeking to burnish its moral luster during the annual legislative sessions of China's rubber-stamp Parliament taking place in the capital, where Lei Feng was venerated as an inspiration for all.

Also last Tuesday, the octogenarian photographer famous for taking 200 photos of Lei Feng suffered a fatal heart attack after giving his last of over 1,260 speeches honoring Lei Feng to a roomful of military personnel in China's northeast. Chinese media widely reported his dramatic death, featuring footage of the photographer slumped in his chair and receiving CPR, and finally a photograph of his corpse reverently draped with a Communist Party flag.

The unwelcome developments in the Lei Feng narrative subverted the carefully scripted celebration of the Communist role model. By the time Lei Feng died at 21 — in 1962, slain by a falling telephone pole — a slew of government paparazzi had captured him fixing military trucks, darning his fellow soldiers' socks or diligently studying the works of Chairman Mao by flashlight. After his death, a diary detailing his many selfless acts was supposedly discovered and then swiftly disseminated among the masses to be studied and, it was hoped, emulated.

As the Communist Party formally orchestrates a transfer of power to a new generation of leaders, the nation has been fixated on what many say is society's declining morality, highlighted by a seemingly incessant flood of government corruption scandals replete with bribes and mistresses.

Last month, a Beijing woman was caught using a silicone prosthesis to pretend she was pregnant and fool subway riders into giving her their seats. Last week, a fresh round of outrage erupted after news spread that a carjacker in the northeastern city of Changchun had strangled a baby boy he had found in a stolen vehicle and then buried him in the snow. After thousands took to the streets for a candlelight vigil honoring the infant, the authorities banned further media coverage of the episode.

The evolving cult of Lei Feng — from the man to the myth — opens a window into how the Communist Party has sought to adapt ideologically while remaining firmly in control of a rapidly changing society. While Mao used him as a tool for inspiring absolute political obedience, propaganda officials have been struggling to rebrand Lei Feng and make him relevant to a nation where smartphones vastly outnumber copies of Mao's Little Red Book.

Today, social media apps include Micro Lei Feng, meant to inspire good deeds among the technologically adept. The state media has been championing him as "a role model for Chinese society today as the government is trying to improve the social moral environment."

But experts agree that the relentless portrayal of Lei Feng as a panacea for China's social ills has rung hollow for those who have doubts about the party's moral authority.

"The Chinese government no longer enjoys high credibility among people," said Zhang Ming, a professor of political science at Renmin University in Beijing. "It begs the question: the government keeps bringing up the Lei Feng spirit and calling on people to be more helping to others, but what has the government done to follow the Lei Feng spirit?"

At a time when China's incoming president, Xi Jinping, has begun a highly publicized campaign against corruption that cynics say is largely cosmetic, many wonder whether Lei Feng the saint should be buried once and for all. For them, the box office disaster of the Lei Feng-themed films is the nail in the coffin.

In the central Chinese city of Taiyuan, in Shanxi Province, an employee of a cinema confessed that it had pulled the films — "Young Lei Feng," "Lei Feng's Smile" and "Lei Feng 1959" — after the theaters remained empty on opening day.

The films suffered a similar fate in coastal Nanjing. Reached by telephone, a Nanjing International Cinema employee said the cinema had not sold a single ticket for "Young Lei Feng" and had canceled further screenings. An employee at another theater, the Nanjing Xingfu Lanhai Cinema, said, " 'Young Lei Feng' has been on the screen for four days but no tickets have been sold so far."

Even in Beijing, where thousands of delegates to the National People's Congress were gathering, the films were doing poorly. One local cinema reported it had sold only 43 tickets for "Young Lei Feng" in four days — compared with over 450 for "Les Misérables."

When Chinese media reports revealed that the public was largely ignoring the films, the studio behind "Young Lei Feng" denied it was a dud, saying an article in The Yangtse Evening Post about dismal ticket sales in Nanjing was incorrect. "This story has imposed irreparable negative impacts on this movie and has misled people into believing it's lousy," the Xiaoxiang Film Group said in a statement.

Ardent Lei Feng supporters are eager to portray the films' poor performance as a problem with form, not content. "Lots of people think the 'Lei Feng spirit' is a 50-year-old cliché," said Wang Wei, director of the Lei Feng Spirit Research Institute in China's northeastern Liaoning Province. "Once they hear about those movies, they instantly decided that they are not worth seeing. These films should have adopted new propaganda angles to attract audiences."

The government is instead resorting to old-school tactics to fill theaters. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ordered film studios and cinemas to better promote the films and has exhorted party cadres to organize group viewings, particularly by rural audiences.

But the tattered hagiography has lost more than just its cinematic appeal. At the "Forever Lei Feng" exhibition in Beijing on Friday, almost all visitors were government workers or schoolchildren, even though municipal officials had sent a text message to millions of cellphone subscribers announcing the show.

Strolling past large propaganda posters of a uniformed Lei Feng grinning at the camera while polishing cars, and display cases filled with Lei Feng's image on lighters, backpacks and T-shirts, the crowd of sailors and city maintenance workers — all of them had been dispatched by their government employers — posed for photos before heading quickly for the exits.

Zhen Lifu, a professor at Peking University who was volunteering as a docent on Friday, spent the day lecturing about Lei Feng's generosity toward his comrades. But away from the crowds, Mr. Zhen admitted that he thought Lei Feng himself would have been depressed by the moral decay that plagues modern Chinese society.

"Frankly, Lei Feng wouldn't be the only one," he said. "These days, we're all pretty dissatisfied, which is why we need Lei Feng."

Argentina claims sovereignty over the clutch of tiny islands 310 miles from its shores, which President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner contends have been illegally occupied by "colonial implants" since the 1830s. A 74-day war that Argentina lost to Britain over the islands in 1982 cost the lives of 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as 3 civilians.

Both chambers of Argentina's Congress are expected to pass resolutions this week rejecting the result of the referendum, in which 1,672 people were eligible to vote.

Education Ministry documents say that Argentina inherited the islands when it won independence from Spain in 1816, while Falklanders say Britain has maintained a claim on the islands since the English sea captain John Davis charted them in 1592.

Britain granted the islanders the right to citizenship in 1983, although some 40 nationalities are represented in the territory.

The referendum, financed and organized by the Falklands Legislative Assembly, was intended to demonstrate the islanders' will to remain a part of Britain, according to Dick Sawle, an Assembly member.

 "Our job now is to get the message out to the rest of the world," he said.

In the Senate, Democrats were putting the finishing touches on a budget they plan to introduce on Wednesday, their first in four years, while House Republicans were preparing to introduce a spending plan of their own on Tuesday morning.

The two proposals, which would set spending targets for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, will be miles apart ideologically and difficult to merge. Democrats plan to rely heavily on closing tax loopholes that benefit corporations and the wealthy to produce new revenue, while Republicans will focus on slashing spending to balance the budget in 10 years.

But the fact that both houses of Congress are working on their budgets simultaneously after years of impasse raised some measure of hope — albeit slight — that Democrats and Republicans might be able to work out some sort of compromise.

Compromise between the two parties, however, is only half of a more complicated bargain. Democrats also have to bridge the divide among a politically diverse group of Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.

The committee chairwoman, Senator Patty Murray of Washington, said Monday that she expected all 12 members of her majority to vote in favor of the Democrats' budget, even if some members so far remain uncommitted.

"I have a really diverse committee," Mrs. Murray said, adding, "They all recognize that we have some really common goals, and we have worked it out."

That diversity is one of the major reasons Senate Democrats have not written a spending plan of their own since 2009, given the challenge of bringing together senators from Oregon to Virginia to Vermont who do not always agree on issues like whether cuts should fall more heavily on military or nonmilitary programs, and which tax loopholes to eliminate.

"Dealing with the difference of opinion is tough," said Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an independent who has tried to ensure that the Democrats' budget does not include an adjustment to the inflation rate that would calculate it in a way that would decrease federal benefits. Mr. Sanders said he was confident the inflation rate calculation would be untouched, but he was not prepared to sign on to Mrs. Murray's plan until he sees the final document.

"We've had long talks; we'll see what happens," he said.

The committee is closely divided between 12 Democratic votes and 10 Republican votes.

In another sign that both parties continue to look for ways to meet in the middle, President Obama is to visit Capitol Hill for four separate meetings this week with the Democratic and Republican conferences of both houses. The president and his aides have said that this rare display of bipartisan outreach, coming a week after Mr. Obama dined with a dozen Republican senators, is intended to help foster cooperation between the parties.

Against this backdrop, the Senate Appropriations Committee was preparing to lay out a separate stopgap spending plan to keep the government financed through September. The House passed its plan last week.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, who framed the Senate's action as a first step in a longer process, said, "This week will offer another opportunity for the Senate to return to regular order, an opportunity for this body to legislate through cooperation, through compromise, as we used to do."

"This legislation," Mr. Reid continued, "will be a test of the Senate's good will. America's economy is poised to grow and expand. The last thing it needs is another manufactured crisis such as a government shutdown to derail its progress."

The movement expected in Congress this week will draw attention to one of the more unusual aspects of business in Washington. When it comes to writing budget resolutions, the House and the Senate have worked on entirely separate paths. Senate Democrats, unable to always agree and not eager to take votes that could prove politically unpopular, have avoided drawing up large-scale a budget.

House Republicans, meanwhile, have made the budget the focus of their efforts. And they have seized on the issue as a way of portraying Democrats as inept and unfocused.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee snidely commented on Monday that Democrats had claimed "for more than 1,400 days that the dog ate their homework." And Republican senators have churned out news releases noting what could have been accomplished since the Democrats last passed a budget, like 179 round-trip missions to the moon and 292 expeditions to the summit of Mount Everest.

But even if Democrats do pass a budget in the Senate, it will mean little unless it can be merged with the House Republican budget and pass both houses of Congress.

"I think because of all the attention on the failure to pass a budget in regular order, Democrats are at least obligated to," said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, who was until recently a member of the Budget Committee.

"But I don't think there's much optimism that we're going to reconcile a budget with this House quickly," he added.

And on Monday, the rats of the New York City subway system received another shot across the bow from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

"I want to warn you," Mark Lebow, chairman of the authority's transit and bus committee, said at a public meeting at the agency's Midtown Manhattan headquarters. "We're going to discuss rat sterilization."

The authority detailed its plans on Monday for a pilot program intended to curb the fertility of female rats, pledging to test a product — administered to rats orally — that accelerates natural egg loss and sterilizes the animals permanently.

"This technology, if successful, could complement our current strategies of poisoning and exclusion for rodent management," Thomas Lamb, the chief of innovation and technology for New York City Transit, told the committee.

The authority's partner in the endeavor, SenesTech, a company based in Flagstaff, Ariz., has conducted research in Laos, India and the Philippines, often in agricultural communities where rats pose a threat to rice farmers.

But Loretta Mayer, SenesTech's co-founder, said the work had been largely untested within transportation networks. "The only transportation, to my knowledge, that has ever been impacted has been the rickshaws of Indonesia," she said.

She added that researchers would draw explicitly on their "knowledge base of the ecology of the New York City rat." Sterilization products will be placed in bait boxes inside the authority's trash rooms.

The authority said that the typical city rat, known as the Norway rat, reaches sexual maturity at 8 to 12 weeks and can have as many as 12 pups a litter and as many as seven litters a year, "depending on refuse and track litter access." The rats' typical life span is 5 to 12 months. There is no reliable estimate of the subway rat population, transit officials said.

The authority's chosen remedy, called ContraPest, is not a contraceptive but irreversibly sterilizes female rodents by targeting the ovarian follicles that lead to births.

Dr. Mayer said the product posed no danger to humans. "I've been studying this compound for over 22 years," she said, "and I probably have the highest incidence of pregnant graduate students of anybody in academia."

A committee member asked what would happen if a person ingested the bait. "Well, it's quite sweet, quite salty and there's a lot of fat," Dr. Mayer said. "She would probably gain weight from the fat."

One challenge, the authority said, was offering the rats a bait that they might prefer to the subway system's daily treasures — half-eaten gyros and chicken fried rice, stale pizza and discarded churros.

According to a fact sheet distributed by the authority, rats would need to consume roughly 10 percent of their body weight in ContraPest for 5 to 10 days to become sterile. If they do, litter sizes will shrink within four weeks, the sheet said, before fertility is lost entirely. If a rat ingests ContraPest while pregnant, her offspring are likely to be born without complications but female pups are often sterile, the authority said.

The authority has long explored ways to chase its rats away, including a recent push to remove trash cans from a small number of stations in an effort to reduce garbage in the system. But a report released last week by the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group, found that riders had a roughly 1 in 10 chance of seeing a rat while waiting for a train.

Mindful of the rats' resiliency through the years, the authority's team cautioned that expectations must be managed accordingly.

"In the words of Albert Einstein," Dr. Mayer said, "if we knew what we were doing, they wouldn't call it research."

Mr. Hagel's decision to intervene comes amid mounting criticism from Congress as well as outside advocacy groups of the Pentagon's handling of a series of high-profile sexual assault cases in the military. In particular, critics have complained about the power of commanders to unilaterally dismiss criminal charges or convictions without explanation, which they say makes it less likely that women in the military will report sexual assaults for fear of retaliation.

Mr. Hagel said he would review the decision by Lt. Gen. Craig A. Franklin, the commander of the Third Air Force, to dismiss the sexual assault conviction of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, a pilot who was also the inspector general of the 31st Fighter Wing at Aviano Air Base in Italy. Colonel Wilkerson was found guilty in November of aggravated sexual assault and was sentenced to one year in military prison. General Franklin's decision to overturn the findings of the court-martial freed Colonel Wilkerson, and allowed him to be reinstated in the Air Force.

In a March 7 letter to Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, Mr. Hagel said that while General Franklin's decision could not be overturned, he had asked Pentagon lawyers and the secretary of the Air Force to review the way in which General Franklin decided the case. He also said he wanted a review of whether the military should change the way it handles sexual assault cases.

The furor over Colonel Wilkerson's case comes as the issue of sexual assaults in the military has been gaining prominence because of a recent string of scandals. The most wide-ranging case involves the Air Force's basic training program at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where 62 trainees were the victims of assault or other inappropriate actions by their instructors between 2009 and 2012. So far, 32 training instructors at Lackland have been charged, convicted or investigated in connection with the scandal.

On Wednesday, a Senate Armed Services subcommittee plans to hold a hearing on sexual assaults in the military, the first Senate hearing on the issue in nearly a decade, and Colonel Wilkerson's case is expected to be one of the focuses of the hearing.

The Wilkerson case has gained attention because it highlights what critics say is one of the biggest problems in how the military justice system handles sexual assault cases. In the system, senior commanders decide whether criminal charges are brought against military personnel, and even after charges are brought, the commanders also have the ability to veto the findings of a court-martial. That means the military justice system lacks the independence of the civilian law enforcement and judicial systems. For women who have been sexually assaulted, it means that their bosses decide whether charges are brought against their assailants, and that information about their assaults is shared in their workplaces.

Several women in the military have complained about the commanders' control of the legal process. Last year, the secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, said that while there were 3,191 reported cases of sexual assault in the military in 2011, the actual number of incidents was believed to be as high as 19,000, because most women do not report the assaults.

General Franklin's decision to overturn Colonel Wilkerson's conviction by a jury came after Colonel Wilkerson had failed a polygraph examination concerning the offenses, according to several people close to the case. General Franklin did not check with the victim before making his decision to dismiss the case, for which he has not given a detailed public explanation, and instead tried to promote Colonel Wilkerson and give him a new command, according to people familiar with the case.

General Franklin "was looking for a way to show the pilot community he had their backs," said one person familiar with the case.

Documents obtained in connection with Colonel Wilkerson's case also provide a glimpse into the fighter pilot culture of the Air Force that some women say encourages misogynistic behavior. In a personal e-mail he wrote while he was at Aviano in November 2011, Colonel Wilkerson, who had recently been named the inspector general of the Air Force's 31st Fighter Wing, describes his own behavior in a confrontation with military police. The e-mail, filled with bravado, expletives and fighter pilot jargon, describes an incident in which Colonel Wilkerson and other fighter pilots burned a couch in the middle of the base and then barked at the police and pulled rank to get them to back down when they came to investigate.

He wrote to another pilot that he deserved an award for helping ensure "the ability for the bros to either continue their merriment or skip away without notice." He added that he cared "about bros and traditions," and that he wanted to be remembered by his fellow pilots as someone who is "willing to stand up to the man, flip him the most wary of middle fingers, and then daring him to touch it."

The couch-burning incident was a small matter, but Colonel Wilkerson's belligerent treatment of the military security personnel who responded to the fire was considered more serious. The day after the incident, Colonel Wilkerson was dressed down by his commander, and the incident came back to haunt him during his trial, according to a person close to the case. After he attempted to provide evidence about his good military character, prosecutors were able to enter evidence about other incidents, including the couch-burning matter. Colonel Wilkerson's attorney, Frank Spinner, did not respond to a request for comment.

The 11-month-old infant was the son of a BBC journalist in Gaza, Jihad al-Masharawi, and photographs of the distraught father carrying the body of his son, Omar, wrapped in a white shroud were printed in newspapers worldwide and widely distributed on social media.

At the time, Mr. Masharawi and human rights organizations attributed the deaths of Omar and two relatives on Nov. 14 to Israeli airstrikes as the military launched its attacks on Gaza.

A day after the deaths, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, based in Gaza, said the Masharawi home had been hit by a missile fired by an Israeli warplane. Human Rights Watch also said that the house had been hit by an Israeli strike, citing news reports and witnesses who spoke to the group.  

Paul Danahar, the BBC Middle East bureau chief, wrote on his Twitter account that an Israeli shell had come through the roof of the small Gaza home. Mr. Danahar visited his grieving colleague there on Nov. 15 and posted a photograph of a roundish hole in the roof of a burned-out room.

But a March 6 report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the eight-day conflict, which ended with a cease-fire, stated that three people in the home — Omar, a woman and an 18-year-old youth — were most likely the victims of "what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel."

The circumstances of those deaths are likely to remain in dispute. Israel's military has not determined whether it hit the house or not, saying it does not have clear information about what happened. The BBC has reported that privately, military officials told journalists at the time that Israel had aimed at a militant who was hiding in the building.

On Monday, the BBC News Web site said Mr. Masharawi, the journalist, called the United Nations findings "rubbish."

A United Nations official, Matthias Behnke, told The Associated Press that he could not "unequivocally conclude" that a Palestinian rocket was responsible for the deaths.  He said information gathered from witnesses led his investigators to report that "it appeared to be attributable to a Palestinian rocket."

But the select Senate panel debating the expansion proposed a compromise: to accept the federal money but use it to put low-income people into private insurance plans. Accepting the money would please the governor and a number of Floridians, while steering people away from Medicaid, which many lawmakers and residents view as troubled.

The committee vote to reject a Medicaid expansion under President Obama's health care overhaul was 7 to 4, with Democrats voting for the expansion.

Last week, a Florida House committee voted to reject Medicaid expansion altogether, saying that the system was broken and that adding people to the rolls would cost taxpayers too much money in the long run. The House speaker, Will Weatherford, a Republican, said it was the wrong approach, calling it a "dangerous path."

From the start, Mr. Scott knew it would be difficult for the Florida Legislature to embrace Medicaid expansion, even for only three years, which is what he proposed. The governor had staked his political career on derailing what he calls "Obamacare," and his abrupt reversal did not endear him to conservatives in Florida or in the Legislature.

Mr. Scott had a measured but optimistic reaction to Monday's Senate committee vote, expressing confidence that the Senate would ultimately craft a bill that would use federal money. The federal government would provide 100 percent coverage for new enrollees for three years.

"I am confident that the Legislature will do the right thing and find a way to protect taxpayers and the uninsured in our state while the new health care law provides 100 percent funding," Mr. Scott said in a statement after the vote.

A Senate committee will convene to craft a plan that would use federal dollars under the law to expand Florida Healthy Kids, a well-established, well-liked health care exchange for low-income children. The proposal would allow the one million uninsured adults who qualify under the health care law to join the exchange and choose among various insurance plans. They would pay on a sliding scale, depending on income.