September 4, 2005

First Rival Campaigning For Leader Ends in Egypt Egypt's first multicandidate campaign for the presidency ends today, the first in which opposition forces could publicly challenge the ruling party's monopoly on power. There was never any real prospect of ousting President Hosni Mubarak. But the 19-day campaign season was an end in itself. PAGE 14 19 Are Killed in Iraq Violence Gunmen opened fire on Iraqi policemen and troops north of Baghdad in attacks on checkpoints and other targets, killing 19 and wounding at least 6. PAGE 4 Democrats Work to Be Heard The four Democratic candidates for New York mayor began the final stretch before the primary by struggling to get voters' attention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. PAGE 33 Blake Upsets Nadal at Open James Blake upset second-seeded Rafael Nadal at the United States Open, but it was mostly a good day for favorites as Andre Agassi, Elena Dementieva and Justine Henin-Hardenne advanced. SPORTSSUNDAY SPECIAL TODAY N.F.L. Season Preview John Madden is the face of the game, while the Patriots and the Eagles aim to return to the Super Bowl and three second-year quarterbacks define their roles. With team capsules and schedules. SPORTSSUNDAY

The Yankees are not designed for players like Aaron Small. In the world of the principal owner George Steinbrenner, Yankees players have lavish contracts, proven track records and supreme confidence. If a player like Small gets a chance, something must be wrong. The crisis of the moment is Mike Mussina's creaky elbow, which thrust Small back into the rotation Saturday. It was a long way from Class AAA Columbus, where Small spent the first half of the season earning $13,000 a month and contemplating retirement at age 33.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday night of the thyroid cancer he had battled for nearly a year, opening a second Supreme Court vacancy just days before Senate confirmation hearings were to begin to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Kathleen Arburg, the court's public information officer, said Chief Justice Rehnquist, 80, had died at his home in Arlington, Va., surrounded by his three children. She said he had been working at the court during the summer recess until his health declined a ''precipitous decline'' in the last few days. [Obituary, Page 38.]

IT is not a place you would normally expect to find a curator preparing for a major photography show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But a few summers ago, Pierre Apraxine was camped out on the third floor of a rambling town house on West 73rd Street near Central Park, the headquarters of the American Society for Psychical Research, a 120-year-old repository of the paranormal whose founders included the philosopher William James. In the world of photo collecting and scholarship, Mr. Apraxine is nothing less than an institution. For almost two decades, he served as the eyes, ears and auction proxy for the philanthropist Howard Gilman, who built a collection -- recently acquired by the Met -- that is widely considered to be one of the most important in the world, thanks largely to Mr. Apraxine's expertise and globe-trotting tenacity.

TO many investors, the collapse of the Bayou Group -- a hedge fund company and brokerage firm run by Samuel Israel III -- may seem like just another financial mishap, and a calamity only for those who had the bad luck to invest with Mr. Israel or to be steered his way by advisers they were wrong to trust. But actually, the mess at Bayou, which federal prosecutors are now calling a $300 million fraud, should be a clarion call for caution among the many investors who have been throwing money at hedge funds recently. This is especially true for institutions -- endowments and public pension plans -- that have flocked to hedge funds with the hope of increasing their returns. Because many of these institutions are having financial difficulties -- low interest rates are cutting deeply into their returns -- they are too often captivated by investments that seem to promise outsized gains with little risk.

THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time. What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment.

Faced with one of the worst political crises of his administration, President Bush abruptly overhauled his September schedule on Saturday as the White House scrambled to gain control of a situation that Republicans said threatened to undermine Mr. Bush's second-term agenda and the party's long-term ambitions. In a sign of the mounting anxiety at the White House, Mr. Bush made a rare Saturday appearance in the Rose Garden before live television cameras to announce that he was dispatching additional active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast. He struck a more somber tone than he had at times on Friday during a daylong tour of the disaster region, when he had joked at the airport in New Orleans about the fun he had had in his younger days in Houston. His demeanor on Saturday was similar to that of his most somber speeches after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

For most of us, the summer solstice occurs in late June, but for John Madden, it begins the second he steps on training-camp grass. This is what his body clock is set for, what his biorhythms tell him is right. Early last month, that initial landing was at Soldier Field in Chicago, where the Bears were practicing. ''Perfect place to start,'' he said in the restaurant-style booth of his bus as it rode along Interstate 80 to Canton, Ohio, where he would be calling the Hall of Fame Game between the Bears and the Miami Dolphins for ABC. ''I know this comes off sounding phony, but there's no better smell than that grass -- and the smell of a baby's head. It's a great feeling that football's back. You're off for six months. Then my body senses something.''

St. Bernard Parish, just to the east of New Orleans and surrounded by water -- more island than peninsula since Hurricane Katrina -- is nearly empty now, the vast majority of its 68,000 residents scattered to who knows where. Chalmette, the parish seat, was best known as the site of the Battle of New Orleans, one of the last skirmishes in the War of 1812. But in the last few days, Chalmette -- a mostly white, working-class community where two oil refineries, a natural-gas processing plant and some fisheries make up most of the local economy -- has been the scene of a fight for survival.

Tenants in rent-stabilized apartments are seeing disappearance of 'insider deals,' deep cuts in purchase price of apartments granted them as buildings convert to condominiums; as percentage of rent-stabilized apartments in buildings drops, tenants have far less leverage in negotiating prices; photos (M)

MATTHEW S. LEVATICH hovers intently over the shiny red-and-chrome Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked near his office. He is annoyed. A reporter has questioned the American purity of Harley cycles and Mr. Levatich, as the vice president in charge of procurement, is defending the faith. He is slowly circling an employee's bike, identifying the source of each visible part. True, the silvery, cylindrical shock absorbers, which rise like a ''V'' from the front-wheel axle, are from abroad. So are the aluminum wheels and spokes. That is because such things are not manufactured in the United States, or not as well here as they are in other countries. Various dashboard gauges are also imported. Once made in the United States, they are not anymore -- feeding the perception that American manufacturing is in decline.

The pace of evacuations in New Orleans picked up markedly yesterday, and President Bush said that he had ordered 7,000 additional troops to the city and the Gulf Coast states to crack down on lawlessness and to evacuate thousands of refugees. Most of the hurricane survivors have been cleared from the New Orleans Superdome and the convention center, where they huddled in squalor and chaos for days. At least 19,000 have been reported evacuated from the area, with thousands bused to Texas.