Ahmadinejad, at Columbia, Parries and Puzzles

The story of the day yesterday.

His speech at Columbia, in advance of his planned speech today at the United Nations, produced a day of intense protests and counterprotests around the campus. It was a performance at once both defiant — he said Iran could not recognize Israel “because it is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation and it consistently threatens its neighbors” — and conciliatory — he said he wanted to visit ground zero to “show my respect” for what he called “a tragic event.”

And he said that even if the Holocaust did occur, the Palestinians should not pay the price for it.

He began the afternoon on the defensive.

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia, under intense attack for the invitation — one protester outside the campus auditorium where Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke passed out fliers that said, “Bollinger, too bad bin Laden is not available” — opened the event with a 10-minute verbal assault.

He said, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” adding, “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

Sarkozy, a Frenchman in a Hurry, Maps His Path

“I can’t be criticized for wanting first place for France,” Mr. Sarkozy said in an interview with The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, his first with English-language news organizations since becoming president in May. He added, “If France doesn’t take the lead, who will?”

This projection of French power is like that of de Gaulle, in the 1950s and 60s, and every French leader since. But Mr. Sarkozy departs from classic Gaullist doctrine by suggesting that the path to that goal sometimes lies in aligning France — and Europe — alongside Washington rather than as a counterpoint to it.

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The Tiara Was Nice, Now Where’s the Scholarship?

Ashley Wood, Miss South Carolina 2004, attends the Wharton School. She has not been able to collect her pageant scholarships.

Interviews with contestants across the country describe a Miss America system in which local pageant directors do not return telephone calls and e-mail messages for months, local competitions close down before scholarships are distributed, and the fine print in contracts creates hurdles. Local winners across the country have threatened legal action, and some have taken it.

Pageant organizers at each level of the Miss America system say that such problems are the exception and that they occur because contestants miss deadlines or do not dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s to get paid.

In a statement, the Miss America Organization, based in Linwood, N.J., said: “While it is unimaginable that scholarships, which are the heart and soul of Miss America, could or would be wrongly withheld from pageant participants, we are looking into these allegations. We have definitive procedures in place to vet disputes and guarantee state organizations stand behind their scholarship agreements with the Miss America Organization and those to whom scholarships are promised.”

The statement added, “The Miss America Organization is absolutely unaware of any young lady that has ever been denied payment of scholarships after properly following the application process.”

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More Profit and Less Nursing at Many Homes

When health care goes private.

Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.

The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes.

Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens and a resident using a leg brace that was broken.

“They’ve created a hellhole,” said Vivian Hewitt, who sued Habana in 2004 when her mother died after a large bedsore became infected by feces.

Habana is one of thousands of nursing homes across the nation that large Wall Street investment companies have bought or agreed to acquire in recent years.

Those investors include prominent private equity firms like Warburg Pincus and the Carlyle Group, better known for buying companies like Dunkin’ Donuts.

Happiness for $10 or Less

Finding wines for $10 or less.

Leave it to the Dining section’s wine panel to try to fill this vacuum. In a tasting of 25 red wines all $10 or under, we tried to pick out not only the best bottles but also the best regions to explore for good values.

Let’s face it, you can find hundreds if not thousands of bottles in this price range, down to the lowest of the low. We cannot try them all and say, “Here are the 10 best.” But we can give you some suggestions as to where to look, while offering up some good examples.

For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Jill Roberts, a portfolio manager for Valckenberg, an importer of German wines, and Chris Goodhart, the wine director of Balthazar in SoHo.

Frankly, the $10-and-under price range may represent the cheapest wines, but I feel the best values are in the $10-to-$20 range, where you can find sensational wines made by small producers using traditional techniques. These sorts of wines are much harder to find at $10 and under.

But this is September, that time of the year when the reality of summer vacation bills dims the hope of Christmas splurges, so right now every dollar helps. Here’s what we know:

In today’s winemaking world, there’s no excuse for bad wines. Technology and knowledge have reached the point where any wine ought to be purchased without fear of a spoiled or tainted bottle. Even Two-Buck Chuck is palatable, though I wouldn’t insult you by telling you it’s good. The exception is corked wines. Regardless of cost, bad corks can elude even the most meticulous examination.

While consumers can expect all wines to be palatable, finding interesting ones is another matter. Mass-producing inexpensive wine is a lot easier than creating wines with personality. In this price range, the great divide is between wines you can drink and wines you want to drink.

A Minister’s Public Lesson on Domestic Violence

The attack in a hotel parking lot here last month was remarkable not only because the victim, Juanita Bynum, is the most prominent black female television evangelist in the country, who is pals with Oprah, admired by Aretha, and who recently signed on to campaign for Obama.

It was shocking, especially to legions of women who had latched onto her message that only chastity and self-respect would bring true love, because the attacker who choked, stomped and kicked her, Ms. Bynum said, was her husband.

The episode has led to debate about domestic violence and how churches, particularly black churches, respond to it.

But it has also raised questions about the trajectory of Ms. Bynum’s career as a woman who called herself a prophetess, and while condemning promiscuity spoke openly about her lust and longing, in what has been called one of the most significant contemporary American sermons. Her struggle struck a chord in many black communities, where marriage rates are notoriously low, and it seemed to culminate in the form of an earthly reward: a televised, million-dollar 2003 wedding to a fellow Pentecostal preacher, Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, followed by what seemed to be a model marriage.

Since the attack, Ms. Bynum, 48, has tried to reinvent herself once more, announcing that she is “the new face of domestic violence.” But Tom Joyner, the syndicated radio talk show host, did not let her off the hook so easily: “If you’re a prophet,” Mr. Joyner asked, “didn’t you see this coming?”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Bynum said the public had overly romanticized the union. “What happened to me was reality,” she said. “I made a right decision that went bad. If you choose a Cadillac, if two years later someone runs into you and tears it up, it wasn’t a bad decision to buy the car.”

Mr. Weeks, who according to the police report was pulled off his wife by a hotel bellhop, pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated assault and making terroristic threats. Ms. Bynum has filed for divorce.

Conservative critics among the evangelical clergy have accused her of exploiting the attack for publicity, calling her “loud,” “angry,” “aggressive” and “out of control,” while a group of black and Hispanic churches has demanded Mr. Weeks’s resignation. Fans responded with shock.

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Migration Reshapes Iraq’s Sectarian Landscape

A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families.

The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of their own sect is just one of those considerations.

Over all, the patterns suggest that despite the ethnic and sectarian animosity that has gripped the country, at least some Iraqis would rather continue to live in mixed communities.

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Support Grows for Teacher Bonuses

A movement gaining momentum in Congress and some school systems in the Washington region and beyond would boost pay for exceptional teachers in high-poverty schools, a departure from salary schedules based on seniority and professional degrees that have kept pay in lockstep for decades.

Lawmakers are debating this month whether to authorize federal grants through a revision of the No Child Left Behind law for bonuses of as much as $12,500 a year for outstanding teachers in schools that serve low-income areas.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that the teaching workforce is leaking talent and that his proposal would help rejuvenate it. Young teachers watch their friends "go off and get paid for their time and ingenuity" in other fields, Miller said. "In teaching, you go as fast as the slowest person."

Miller's proposal, building on recent federal steps to encourage incentive pay, would provide grants to school systems that choose to pay bonuses to teachers who excel in high-poverty schools, worth up to $10,000 in most cases and $12,500 for specialists in math, science and other hard-to-staff subjects. Decisions on who gets extra pay would be based on student test gains and professional evaluations. Miller's aides said they had no cost estimate for the measure.

Advocates of performance pay have seen similar initiatives fail, and many take pains to avoid the term "merit pay" and its association with past mistakes. But with fresh support from foundations and new tools that enable student achievement data to be linked to individual teachers, many experts said the idea is gaining favor. Performance pay efforts are underway in school systems in Denver and Minnesota, and some local administrators are planning to establish fast tracks for financial rewards for top teachers.

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Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved?

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University Fences In a Berkeley Protest, and a New One Arises

Life at Berkeley

On one side are the protesting tree lovers who have been living Tarzan-like since December in a stand of coastal oaks and other trees. On the other is the university, which wants to cut down the trees to build a $125 million athletic center, part of a larger plan to upgrade its aging, seismically challenged football stadium.

The two sides disagreed. They bickered. Lawyers were called. Then came The Fence.

Iraqis have mixed feelings on U.S. progress report

"The Americans are and will remain occupiers and hated," said Abu Jabir, a receptionist at a Baghdad hospital. Jabir, expressing a thought heard frequently among Iraqis from all backgrounds, said the U.S. invasion in March 2003 had done a good thing in overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. But he said the occupation had planted the seeds of sectarianism and it was time U.S. troops became less visible so Iraqis could begin taking charge.

"A quick American pullout is not good, as civil war may flare," he said. "I think they should stay, but avoid the streets. Yes, we want them, but only as a backup and cover for our security."

"It didn't show the negative things on the ground, but it showed the positive things only. We are rejecting it completely," said Abdul Mehdi Muttari, a spokesman for the Sadr bloc in Najaf, a Shiite city south of Baghdad.

"There is nothing new that it was going to tell us," said Allawi, whose Iraq National Accord holds 22 seats in the parliament. "What's going on here is not that good: sectarianism, violence, no institutions, services almost totally halted."

A few minutes earlier, a loud bomb had gone off at a busy intersection about half a mile from his Baghdad office. Police said the blast killed one civilian and injured five.

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U.S. seeks pact with Shiite militia

U.S. diplomats and military officers have been in talks with members of the armed movement loyal to Muqtada Sadr, a sharp reversal of policy and a grudging recognition that the radical Shiite cleric holds a dominant position in much of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.

The secret dialogue has been going on since at least early 2006, but appeared to yield a tangible result only in the last week -- with relative calm in an area of west Baghdad that has been among the capital's most dangerous sections.

The discussions have been complicated by divisions within Sadr's movement as well as the cleric's public vow never to meet with Iraq's occupiers. Underlying the issue's sensitivity, Sadrists publicly deny any contact with the Americans or British -- fully aware the price of acknowledging such meetings would be banishment from the movement or worse.

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