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Mr. Chávez has not been seen and has not spoken in public since his Dec. 11 surgery in Havana, including after officials said he was flown back to Venezuela and installed in a military hospital here on Feb. 18. His long isolation has fueled speculation about the gravity of his illness.

The government has given only partial information about his condition, leaving Venezuelans playing a guessing game, trying to piece together a fuller picture from the scant details that are parceled out.

The new information adds to the recent description by the president's son-in-law, Science and Technology Minister Jorge Arreaza, of Mr. Chávez's treatment as "palliative," which could indicate that doctors consider his cancer incurable and they are concentrating their efforts on reducing pain or slowing the progress of the disease.

On Friday Vice President Nicolás Maduro said that Mr. Chávez was undergoing "complementary treatments," a phrase that officials had used previously without specifying what the treatments were.

But this time Mr. Maduro added, "You know what the complementary treatments are, don't you? Well, the chemotherapy that they apply to the patient after an operation, as he went through chemotherapy and radiation therapy after the operations in 2011 and 2012."

Speaking after a mass to inaugurate a small chapel erected near the military hospital where officials say Mr. Chávez is staying, he described the treatments as being hard and said that Mr. Chávez is in a "battle for his life" but in good spirits.

Mr. Arreaza, the son in law, did not say what he meant by the term palliative treatments. Medical experts not involved with Mr. Chávez's care said chemotherapy or radiation could be used as palliative treatments for cancer, such as to slow down the growth of a tumor that is causing a patient pain.

"The definition of palliative treatment is that the cancer can't be cured and one is treating only to make the person comfortable and relieve discomfort," said Dr. Julio Pow-Sang, an oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla.

Dr. Edward Greeno, an oncologist at the University of Minnesota said that palliative treatments can go on for an extended period, depending on the type of cancer.

"It doesn't always mean the end is close," Dr. Greeno said. "Sometimes you can keep things controlled for a long time. But it does mean that you're not trying to get rid of the cancer or control the cancer but you are providing symptom control and maybe provide increased survival time."

When President Obama secretly sent envoys last summer with a warning against new nuclear and rocket tests and an offer of a thaw in relations, they found themselves meeting only with functionaries, according to current and former government officials. And the few Western diplomats who live in Pyongyang are desperate enough for one-on-one meetings that a British envoy rode on a roller-coaster with Mr. Kim, who shocked the diplomatic corps with invitations to Rungna People's Pleasure Ground. The British foreign office reportedly later explained that any engagement was "vital."

Even Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor who has visited the North eight times, was locked out of a meet and greet with the third Kim in the family dynasty this year when he visited Pyongyang with Google's Eric E. Schmidt, whose Silicon Valley star power was supposed to prove irresistible to the young leader.

Enter Dennis Rodman, the tattooed, lip-studded former N.B.A. star, who not only got a meeting with Mr. Kim, but proclaimed him a "friend for life" while watching a basketball game during which the two conversed in English. (Mr. Kim's English was said to be limited.) In photos that have gone viral, the two men were seen laughing together.

Mr. Rodman made the trip to the North with Vice Media, which is producing an HBO series, but there was no guarantee that Mr. Kim would see him, even though the North Korean leader is known to be a die-hard basketball fan.

Mr. Rodman and his traveling companions are now the only Americans known to have met Mr. Kim, who took power more than a year ago and is facing the prospect of new sanctions from the West over his first, and the country's third, nuclear test. The only high-level officials Mr. Kim has met while in office, experts say, are from China, the nation that keeps North Korea alive with shipments of food and oil.

Why Mr. Rodman? The meeting fit with a longtime pattern of frequently unconventional and always well-choreographed encounters with the Kim family, usually accompanied by a blitz of cold war-style propaganda. "The Pyongyang basketball match was a great PR arena for Kim Jong-un," said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul, who said Mr. Kim could present himself as open-minded to his own people while signaling to the West that he was "not a bad boy" and not as isolated as the United States might wish.

And while the choice of Mr. Rodman might seem odd to some — he is known for cross-dressing and was visiting a conservative nation where long hair for men and short skirts for women are forbidden — Mr. Richardson said in an interview on Friday that it was not surprising given Mr. Kim's love of basketball. (Mr. Richardson said he was asked by North Korean officials in recent months to persuade Michael Jordan to visit.)

Those foreign diplomats posted in Pyongyang rarely get to glimpse the supreme leader. They were invited to the annual New Year's Eve festivities at the palace this year a half-hour before they began, barely giving them enough time to don formal wear.

Even though Mr. Rodman is no diplomat, Mr. Richardson said the visit could be valuable given the lack of good intelligence about Mr. Kim, a man whose nuclear arsenal and visceral anti-Americanism makes him a threat.

"Any information about Kim Jong-un, his mannerisms, his ability to speak English, his personal assessment, is valuable," said Mr. Richardson. "He is their leader, and in our visit, he had lots of support."

The State Department was not nearly so sanguine. Despite questions about the trip and whether the government would debrief Mr. Rodman on his return, a department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, did not suggest a visit to Foggy Bottom was in the offing.

"We haven't been in touch with this party at all," he told reporters Thursday, leaving out Mr. Rodman's name. "If there are Americans who after traveling in North Korea want to get in touch with us or have something to share with us, we take the phone calls."

The Kim dynasty — Kim Jong-un, his father and grandfather, the country's founder — have used foreign visitors for specific goals. Kim Il-sung, the grandfather, entertained former President Jimmy Carter in 1994 when North Korea and the United States appeared at the brink of war over the country's nuclear program; after a boat cruise, the two men struck a deal that averted conflict.

 And in 2010, the North invited Dr. Sigfried S. Hecker, the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was shown a secret uranium enrichment plant that American intelligence agencies had missed. That sent two messages: that the North had another pathway to a bomb and that one of the most watched nations on earth could still keep some secrets.

One former visitor said the North was clear about what it wanted from him. Ric Flair, a professional wrestler who traveled to the country in 1995, recalled in an autobiography that his handlers asked him to make a speech at the airport on the way home. "They even had specific points that they expected me to articulate — things like North Korea being a worker's paradise," said Mr. Flair, who added that he decided to speak only in generalities.

In the end, his reticence hardly mattered: he says he was still quoted by the official state news agency as saying that Kim Il-sung, the dictator who had died a year earlier, "had devoted his life to the Korean people's happiness, prosperity and Korean unification."

Vice, a provocative culture magazine that has expanded into videos of dare devil travel, conceived of the basketball public relations stunt to help gain access to the country and in the hopes that Mr. Kim would show up. Having heard of Mr. Kim's basketball passion (said to have been nurtured during his time at a school in Switzerland), Vice asked Mr. Rodman and three Harlem Globetrotters to travel to Pyongyang and asked the Globetrotters to perform in an exhibition game.

For the record, Vice says the 110-to-110 tie between the American players and the North Korean team was the result of a fair battle. Also for the record: a Vice producer named Jason Mojica who was sending Twitter messages from the scene said the banquet that Mr. Kim invited the crew and ballplayers to was an alcohol-fueled affair. "Um... so Kim Jong Un just got the #VICEonHBO crew wasted... no really, that happened."

Vice has said part of the purpose of the trip was "basketball diplomacy," an allusion to the Ping-Pong diplomacy that helped open United States relations with China decades ago. But even when China and the United States were deeply estranged, the Chinese did not threaten a nuclear "holocaust" or release a video showing the American president bathed in flames. North Korea has done both.

But some media critics make the point that it is easier to talk about basketball than the gulags that imprison an estimated 1 in 120 of North Koreans.

"One hopes that — in between the lavish 10-course meals at Kim's palace and 'paying tribute' to the statues of late despots Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il — Rodman may have actually learned something about North Korea and the people he says he loves," Ishaan Tharoor, a Time writer, wrote on time.com.

And that was before Mr. Rodman, who was photographed hugging Mr. Kim, left the country on Friday, according to The Associated Press, with these words of affection for him: "Guess what, I love him. The guy's really awesome."

At a time when the Obama administration is struggling to persuade China to sign on to sanctions over the recent nuclear test, seeing an American star cozying up to Mr. Kim seems reminiscent of high-profile visitors years ago to Saddam Hussein's palace or Muammar el-Qaddafi's tent.

"The image that comes to mind is a guy who's playing with matches," said Victor Cha, the Korea chairman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of "Beyond the Final Score: The Politics of Sport in Asia." "He's sitting atop a renegade nuclear weapons state, and the thing that drives him is not the entreaties by China or the United States, it's meeting Dennis Rodman. Maybe we should have given Rodman the denuclearization brief."

Private Manning admitted in court on Thursday that he had provided about 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group, in the most extensive leak of confidential and classified material in American history. But he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges in what is known as a "naked plea" — one made without the usual agreement with prosecutors to cap the potential sentence in return.

After the plea, prosecutors and their boss, the commanding general of the Washington Military District, had the option of settling for the 10 charges to which he had admitted his guilt and proceeding directly to sentencing. Instead, they said they would continue with plans for a court-martial beginning June 3, with 141 prosecution witnesses scheduled to testify.

"Given the scope of the alleged misconduct, the seriousness of the charged offenses, and the evidence and testimony available, the United States intends to proceed with the court-martial to prove Manning committed the charged offenses beyond the lesser charges to which he has already pled guilty," said a statement from the military district.

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale, said the prosecutors' decision suggested that they believed that his admissions, as extensive as they were, did not capture the full seriousness of his crimes or guarantee an adequate sentence. Most important, he said, the government wants to deter others from taking advantage of the Internet and portable storage devices to follow his example and leak government secrets on a grand scale.

"They want to scare the daylights out of other people," Mr. Fidell said.

On Thursday, Private Manning, slight and bespectacled and dressed in a crisp Army uniform, was permitted to read a 35-page statement he had written to explain how he came to deliver to WikiLeaks voluminous archives of war reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, detainee assessments from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a quarter-million diplomatic cables and video showing helicopter gunships killing civilians in Iraq.

His statement allowed him to put on the record his political motives — he said he leaked the material in part "to spark a debate about foreign policy" — which have drawn support from a long list of critics of American policies and open-government advocates around the world. Private Manning may also have won some points with the judge, Col. Denise R. Lind, for not forcing the government to prove that he supplied the documents to WikiLeaks and for acknowledging that he broke the law.

But the confession, to the unauthorized possession and transmission of "protected information," appears to have done nothing to alter the government's determination to make an example of him or to limit the sentence he will ultimately serve. The military prosecutors' statement said they would seek to prove all the charges to which Private Manning pleaded not guilty: aiding the enemy, violating the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, larceny and the improper use of government information systems.

Perhaps the biggest battle in what is expected to be a 12-week trial will be over the prosecutors' attempt to prove the rare charge of aiding the enemy — in the words of the charging document, that Private Manning did "without proper authority, knowingly give intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means." That charge can carry the death penalty, but since prosecutors have ruled that punishment out, he would face a maximum sentence of life without parole if convicted.

The government has said that some of the documents that Private Manning gave to WikiLeaks ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden, and the prosecution and defense sparred on Friday over whether and how that evidence would be presented at trial. Prosecutors said they wanted a witness who participated in the 2011 raid that killed Bin Laden to testify in disguise at the trial.

In his testimony on Thursday, Private Manning went out of his way to suggest that while he corresponded online with someone from WikiLeaks who he assumed to be the group's founder, Julian Assange, no one from the organization directed his actions.

That could be significant for a continuing federal grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Va. Prosecutors are exploring whether Mr. Assange or his associates conspired with Private Manning to break any laws. Mr. Assange, now hiding out in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid being extradited to Sweden to face sexual offense charges, has maintained that he merely publishes documents that others provide to the group.

Reached by The Associated Press, Mr. Assange called Private Manning a political prisoner and accused the United States of trying to punish critics of its military and foreign policies.

In one corner is Ron Johnson, the chief executive of the embattled J. C. Penney. In the other is Terry Lundgren, the chief of Macy's. Both want the home diva's housewares, and this week some of their maneuvers were laid bare in a courtroom in Lower Manhattan.

Only days after J. C. Penney stunned Wall Street with news of a big loss, Mr. Johnson described how the hobbled chain was trying to win over Ms. Stewart. He was willing to offer lucrative inducements, worth a potential $500 million in all, to persuade her to sell her branded and designed products in Penney stores.

E-mails in court documents suggest Mr. Johnson was keenly anticipating the reaction of Mr. Lundgren, whose chain has an exclusive contract with Ms. Stewart's company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to sell certain housewares.

"Terry might have a headache tonight," Mr. Johnson wrote to top lieutenants on Dec. 7, 2011, the day the deal between Penney and Ms. Stewart was announced.

"We put Terry in a corner," he wrote to the Penney investor William Ackman the same day. To Penney's president, he wrote, "He now has to work again," of Mr. Lundgren.

Beyond the drama, which is expected to continue with Ms. Stewart's testimony next week, the trial underscores how competitive the middle-market home goods category is and how much one brand like Martha Stewart can matter.

Home is not the sexiest of categories. It is things like sheets, towels, pots and toasters that are broadly available, low-margin and slow selling. Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Lundgren said home goods rang up remarkably few sales per square foot. Mr. Johnson said that the category made $185 per square foot in 2007, but now made less than $80. And Mr. Lundgren said that at Macy's, home was "generally the least profitable part of the store."

Macy's, which has been selling Ms. Stewart's housewares for six years, filed suits last year against both Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and Penney's to stop the deal to bring her housewares into that retailer.

The fight over the dud home category might seem counterintuitive. But analysts say it is crucial to a department store's offerings, and is particularly important now.

"The housing market is rebounding," said Michael Brown, a partner in the consumer and retail practice at A. T. Kearney, "therefore the home products category is going to be in demand over the next 18- to 24-month period."

Home departments bring in traffic, particularly from consumers who don't want to make a separate trip to big-box competitors that are dedicated to home products only, Debra Mednick, home industry analyst for the NPD Group, said in an e-mail. Plus, she said, it brings in a wide range of demographics and ages. Most people need a pan at some point in their lives. Because high-end stores like Saks and Neiman Marcus sell few housewares, it is also a chance for the midrange stores to snag wealthier shoppers, Mr. Lundgren testified Monday.

Home-goods sales have been struggling as they tend to rise or fall in concert with the housing market, and new competition has been introduced from online-only vendors like One Kings Lane.

Exclusive products, like the Martha Stewart lines that Macy's and Penney's are fighting over, are particularly important in the home category. "The competitive advantage really lies with private label brands," Mr. Brown said. "What drives consumers to a physical store is, is there something different?"

Ms. Stewart is the biggest vendor to Macy's home department, and Mr. Lundgren said that Macy's had nothing lined up to replace her line.

In a deposition, Mr. Johnson said that there was no other supplier to Penney's that he expected to have the sales that Ms. Stewart would.

Sales are desperately needed at J. C. Penney, which has been in business for 111 years. Penney's this week announced a $552 million loss and steep sales declines in the fourth quarter, as well for the year.

And Mr. Johnson, the former retail chief at Apple who took over the chain in 2011, is under increasing pressure to turn the retailer around. Ms. Stewart's brand is a centerpiece of that strategy.

Penney is renovating an average of 19,000 square feet in each store to feature its new store-within-a-store home emporiums. It has signed up housewares designers like Michael Graves and Jonathan Adler. And Mr. Johnson told investors that when the home departments are unveiled in May, the company should see improved customer traffic.

On the stand on Friday, he said that Ms. Stewart was popular with middle-class shoppers, which fit Penney's demographic, and that the Martha Stewart stores-within-a-store would serve as a showpiece for other vendors. "What a perfect example to show other vendors what these shops could be," he said.

Before Mr. Johnson can pursue his full Martha strategy, though, Judge Jeffrey K. Oing will rule on the two lawsuits, which he consolidated into a single bench trial in New York State Supreme Court.

Macy's has sold Martha Stewart-branded products like bedding, bath and cookware since 2007, and has been the only retailer to sell such branded products since the end of 2009, when Ms. Stewart's deal with Kmart expired. Macy's contends that Ms. Stewart's products in these categories cannot be sold by competitors under the contract.

The legal case against Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia centers on a few questions. One has to do with the stores-within-a-store, where the Penney stores are divided into small boutiques. Fixtures and signs are designed by the brands, like Levi's, though Penney employees staff the stores, and Penney owns the merchandise and gets credit for the sales.

There is an exclusion in the Martha-Macy's contract for Martha Stewart's own stores, letting her make products even in Macy's exclusive categories for, as Macy's saw it, a stand-alone store in Times Square or something similar. Martha Stewart argues that the Penney stores-within-a-store count as a distinct Martha store.

Therefore, Martha Stewart argues, the company is allowed to make products for Penney's with her brand on them even in the Macy's exclusive categories if they are sold in these stores-within-stores.

Aside from that dispute, Macy's argues that Martha Stewart cannot, under its contract, design any products for Penney — even products that do not carry Ms. Stewart's name — in the categories that Macy's has exclusive agreements in. (Those are, broadly, kitchen, bedding and bath — things like candles and décor, cookware, towels and sheets and kitchen linens.)

Macy's also contends that Martha breached the confidentiality clause in the contract by sharing elements of the contract with Penney's and that Penney engaged in unfair competition by violating the contract.

As much as he was eager to have Ms. Stewart's products, Mr. Johnson testified, it was Martha Stewart's company and not Penney's that came up with the idea that the store-within-a-store setup would let Penney's carry products in the categories exclusive to Macy's.

"A big breakthrough," he e-mailed Penney's executives in September 2011. "Martha's lawyers have determined that they can do Martha Stewart Stores which include 'Stores within a Store.' "

"We have a path should Terry not be amenable" to letting Martha produce for Penney's, he wrote.

The quarterback, Jordan Johnson, 21, a native of Eugene, Ore., maintained that the sex with another student on Feb. 4, 2012, was consensual.

The woman claimed that after they kissed and took their shirts off, she said no to sex. Then, she said, the athlete took off her leggings and underwear, pinned her to the bed and forced her to have sex. "He just changed — changed into a totally different person," she said on the stand.

The following day, she went to the university's Student Assault Resource Center and had a medical exam.

The prosecution alleged that she suffered injuries to her head, clavicle, chest and genitals, and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which the defense refuted. The woman said she did not scream to friends in the house for help, because she was "terrified and in shock."

The 6-foot-1, 200-pound Mr. Johnson took the stand to assert his innocence. "I would never do that to anyone," he said. "If somebody says no, you stop. You respect that."

One of his defense lawyers, Kirsten Pabst, said that the woman wanted to be with the "star quarterback," and when she realized that a relationship was not part of the deal, she turned on him. "The fact that he didn't give her a relationship does not make what happened that night a crime," Ms. Pabst said.

After three weeks of testimony, the seven-woman, five-man jury deliberated for two and a half hours. Mr. Johnson faced up to 100 years in prison for one count of sexual intercourse without consent.

The verdict comes seven weeks after the team's former running back, Beau Donaldson, was sentenced to 30 years for raping a childhood friend as she slept in his apartment.

The Johnson trial was held against the backdrop of a federal investigation into how officials at the University of Montana, as well the city and county of Missoula, handled sexual assault allegations, several of which involved members of the football team.

When LVMH was searching for a designer for its Dior brand, Raf Simons looked as if he might be the last boy at the dance. Other names were always mentioned first. But within a year he has transformed Dior and, in a way, fashion.

His boss, Sidney Toledano, the president of Dior, perhaps described the Raf effect best. Standing in a room filled with giant Mylar capsules, which reflected the designer's interest in all things modern, Mr. Toledano said that Mr. Simons has brought depth and a sense of curiosity to the company. "We discover new things with him," the executive said. "This is good. I am young again."

To that encomium, Mr. Simons might add a sense of fun.

This collection showed him in an incredibly free state of mind as he reinterpreted a houndstooth pattern that first looked modern when Christian Dior used it in 1948. He added graphic elements in the form of striking knit dresses or early Warhol shoe illustrations (on bags and embroideries), and sought other connections with the couturier, like Dior's love of Surrealism.

For Mr. Simons, who favors midcentury art, the process was one of juxtaposing ideas rather than seeking perfect matches. "In the end, it's all personal feelings," he said.

Personal or not, it was abundantly clear what Mr. Simons was up to with this show, even if it at times the pieces seemed to hover as an impression. He was trying to recreate the realities of having strong sensitivities — in the crashing of a black skirt through the opening of an elegant red coat, in the amount of asymmetry and in the varied silhouettes. A recording by Laurie Anderson of a visit to a West Village vet to see why her dog was so fat played for much of the show. That neurotic patter, against the self-reflecting clouds of Mylar, said it all.

That Mr. Simons is able to pierce the strange membrane of time and memory, and make clothes of exceptional beauty and calm for today, is why he has the fashion industry's attention. In a very real way, these clothes also appeal to many types of women.

Alber Elbaz also expressed that ideal in a dynamic Lanvin show. For Mr. Simons, moving between Dior's tailoring and the fluid shapes is important, but an older woman, who isn't really into fashion, might see herself in a black draped jacket and matching skirt. (And it doesn't say, "I'm old.") A very different woman might go for a cream shift with Surrealist embroideries, another for a bias-cut gray flannel dress with a deep black taffeta hem. But all these styles spring from the same brain. Recently, Mr. Simons admitted he is becoming a more patient man.

Mr. Elbaz has long expressed frustration with the hamster wheel of fashion — the sameness and repetition of everything. But he's a smart guy. He thinks about all this stuff and he cares, if only for the sake of his own sanity, and those who work with him.

So he did something about it. He created a collection that reflects a diversity of personalities. And he just threw them at you: the tough, the snooty, the flowery, the sedate, the overdone.

The opening looks included a silk tunic splashed with ditsy chiffon flowers and a severe coat dress worthy of a board meeting. The show got better and better. One second you were questioning the taste of a bouncy print dress piled with chains, including one that said "hot," and the next, a beautiful dress in pale rose silk appeared, draped to one side as if someone blew on the fabric.

Hussein Chalayan's collection was smaller in scope, but sharp in its bite. Especially strong were denim trousers with deep cuffs, sculptural wool and leather jackets, and dresses that converted with a flick of a cord into a new look.

The accusations against Jordan Johnson, 20, have drawn much attention in Montana, where UM football is the top sports attraction. Jurors deliberated for less than two hours.

Johnson led the University of Montana to a successful 2011 season as starting quarterback before being accused of assaulting a woman as they watched a movie together at her home last February.

His case has played out against a backdrop of NCAA and federal investigations of the university's athletic department and the manner in which rape allegations are handled on campus, investigated by police and prosecuted by the Missoula County attorney's office.

The situation left some worried that the highly successful football team was out of control off the field.

Early in Johnson's trial, the woman testified that she and Johnson were kissing when his demeanor changed and he held her down and raped her, despite her protests. Johnson told jurors the sex was consensual and that the woman never said "no," or he would have stopped.

He was briefly suspended from the football team when the allegations surfaced, then kicked off after charges were filed in July.

His trial began with jury selection Feb. 8. District Judge Karen Townsend initially called 400 potential jurors for the high-profile case, eventually seating 12 with five alternates.

Both the woman and Johnson testified that they had agreed to watch a movie at her house on Feb. 4, 2012, and that they were kissing and had taken off some of their clothes.

The woman told jurors that despite her protests, Johnson held her down and forced her to have sex with him.

She texted her roommate: "Omg ... I think I might have just gotten raped ... he kept pushing and pushing and I said no but he wouldn't listen ... I just wanna cry ... Omg what do I do!"

Johnson testified the sex was consensual and that the woman was enjoying. He said she asked if he had a condom and said it was OK that he didn't.

Concerns about the handling of sexual assault cases peaked in December 2011, when UM President Royce Engstrom ordered an outside investigation after two students reported being drugged and raped.

Former Supreme Court Justice Diane Barz later said her investigation found nine alleged rapes or sexual assaults involving students had occurred between September 2010 and December 2011, including at least two that hadn't been reported. One led to former Montana football player Beau Donaldson pleading guilty to rape and being sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Engstrom said in January the investigation "indicated an association with patterns of behavior from a small number of student-athletes."

"We will not tolerate the tarnishing of the proud tradition of Grizzly athletics," he said at the time.

Barz suggested training faculty and staff on how to handle and report sexual assault allegations and rewriting student and student-athlete conduct codes.

Just weeks later, the university came under more criticism after the dean of students notified a Saudi national about sexual assault and rape allegations made against him. The student fled the country before the alleged victims could file a police report.

Johnson's case surfaced March 9, when the female student obtained a temporary restraining order against him. He was briefly suspended from the football team then reinstated when a civil no-contact order replaced the restraining order.

Three days after coach Robin Pflugrad welcomed Johnson back, and touted his "character and tremendous moral fiber," Engstrom announced he was not renewing the contracts of the coach and athletic director Jim O'Day. Both were immediately relieved of their duties, without an explanation from Engstrom.

The move came after a season when Montana advanced to the Football Championship Subdivision semifinal game. The Grizzlies have advanced to the national title game seven times since 1995, winning twice. The team's success came even as players and former players were arrested for drunken driving, assault and other charges.

Last April, the federal Department of Education announced it was investigating a complaint alleging the university discriminated against female students, faculty and staff by failing to address a sexually hostile environmental caused by its failure to appropriately respond to reports of sexual assault.

Soon after, the U.S. Justice Department announced its investigation into the handling of rape investigations and prosecutions, and the school announced in May the NCAA had been investigating its athletic programs since January 2012 for undisclosed reasons. That investigation continues.