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Late Edition Today, sun and clouds, a cool and gusty wind, high 54. Tonight, patchy clouds, brisk and chilly, low 40. Tomorrow, partly sunny, breezy, high 54. Weather map, Page B16.
VOL. CLXIII . . . No. 56,299
© 2013 The New York Times
$2.50
NEW YORK, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2013
HEALTH LAW FAILS TO LOWER PRICES FOR RURAL AREAS
Anger Growing Among Allies On U.S. Spying Merkel Calls Obama in Fallout Over N.S.A.
POOR OFTEN PAY MORE Analysis Finds Lack of Competition in Many of the Exchanges
By ALISON SMALE
BERLIN — The diplomatic fallout from the documents harvested by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden intensified on Wednesday, with one of the United States’ closest allies, Germany, announcing that its leader had angrily called President Obama seeking reassurance that her cellphone was not the target of an American intelligence tap. Washington hastily pledged that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, leader of Europe’s most powerful economy, was not the target of current surveillance and would not be in the future, while conspicuously saying nothing about the past. After a similar furor with France, the call was the second time in 48 hours that the president found himself on the phone with a close European ally to argue that the unceasing revelations of invasive American intelligence gathering should not undermine decades of hard-won trans-Atlantic trust. Both episodes illustrated the diplomatic challenge to the United States posed by the cache of documents that Mr. Snowden handed to the journalist Glenn Greenwald. Last week, Mr. Greenwald concluded a deal with the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to build a new media platform that aims in part to publicize other revelations from the data Mr. Greenwald now possesses. The damage to core American relationships continues to mount. Last month, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil postponed a state visit to the United States after Brazilian news media reports — fed by material from Mr. Greenwald — that the N.S.A. had intercepted messages from Ms. Continued on Page A3
This article is by Reed Abelson, Katie Thomas and Jo Craven McGinty.
MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Children born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, whose citizenship is affected after a ruling of the nation’s top court.
Dominicans of Haitian Descent Cast Into Legal Limbo by Court By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — For generations, people of Haitian descent have been an inextricable part of life here, often looked at with suspicion and dismay, but largely relied on all the same to clean rooms, build things cheaply and provide the backbreaking labor needed on the country’s vast sugar plantations. Now, intensifying a long and furious debate over their place in this society, the nation’s top court has declared that the children of undocumented Haitian migrants — even those born on Dominican soil decades ago — are no longer entitled to citizenship, throwing into doubt the status of tens of
thousands of people here who have never known any other national identity. “I am Dominican,” said Ana María Belique, 27, who was born in the Dominican Republic and has never lived anywhere else, but has been unable to register for college or renew her passport because her birth certificate was no longer accepted. “I don’t know Haiti. I don’t have family or friends there. This is my home.” In a broad order that has reverberated across the hemisphere, the court has instructed the authorities here to audit all of the nation’s birth records back to June 1929 to determine who no longer qualifies for citizenship, setting off international alarm. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees warned
Thousands Are No Longer Entitled to Citizenship that the decision “may deprive tens of thousands of people of nationality,” while the regional alliance of Caribbean nations, which the Dominican Republic has sought to join, condemned how masses of people are “being plunged into a constitutional, legal and administrative vacuum.” “It is remarkably sweeping in terms of numbers: over 200,000 made stateless — a staggering figure,” said Laura Bingham, who tracks citizenship issues for the
Open Society Justice Initiative. She and other legal experts called it one of the more sweeping rulings denying nationality in recent years. To some extent, the ruling, issued Sept. 23, and the intensity of emotions around it carry echoes of the immigration debate in the United States and other countries, with wide disagreement on how to treat migrant workers and their children. But given the history of the Dominican Republic and Haiti — a sometimes cooperative, often tense and occasionally violent relationship between two nations sharing one island — the decision has brought to the surface a unique set of racial tensions and Continued on Page A6
JPMorgan Faces Case Explores Possible Penalty Rights of Fetus
In Madoff Case By BEN PROTESS and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
Federal authorities are preparing to take action in a criminal investigation of JPMorgan Chase, suspecting that the bank turned a blind eye to Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The Madoff case, coming on the heels of a tentative $13 billion settlement over JPMorgan’s mortgage practices, poses another major threat to the reputation of the nation’s largest bank. Reflecting the magnitude of the investigation, prosecutors and JPMorgan have held preliminary discussions about a socalled deferred prosecution agreement, people briefed on the inquiry said. Such an arrangement would suspend criminal charges against JPMorgan in exchange for a fine, certain other concessions and an acknowledgment that the bank will face charges if it fails to behave. Prosecutors may also require JPMorgan, which has repeatedly said that “all personnel acted in good faith” in the Madoff matter, to hire an independent monitor. While deferred-prosecution agreements are the Justice Department’s preferred tool for punishing corporate giants — they allow prosecutors to appear tough without imperiling a company’s health — they are typically deployed only when misconduct is severe. For a large Continued on Page B3
Versus Mother By ERIK ECKHOLM
JACKSON, Wis. — Alicia Beltran cried with fear and disbelief when county sheriffs surrounded her home on July 18 and took her in handcuffs to a holding cell. She was 14 weeks pregnant and thought she had done the right thing when, at a prenatal checkup, she described a pill addiction the previous year and said she had ended it on her own — something later verified by a urine test. But now an apparently skeptical doctor and a social worker accused her of endangering her unborn child because she had refused to accept their order to start on an anti-addiction drug. Ms. Beltran, 28, was taken in shackles before a family court commissioner who, she says, brushed aside her pleas for a lawyer. To her astonishment, the court had already appointed a legal guardian for the fetus. “I didn’t know unborn children had lawyers,” recalled Ms. Beltran, now six months pregnant, after returning to her home north of Milwaukee from a court-ordered 78-day stay at a drug treatment center. “I said, ‘Where’s my lawyer?’” Under a Wisconsin law known as the “cocaine mom” act when it was adopted in 1998, child-welfare authorities can forcibly confine a pregnant woman who uses illegal drugs or alcohol “to a severe degree,” and who refuses to Continued on Page A16
INTERNATIONAL A3-10
German Bishop Suspended
As technical failures bedevil the rollout of President Obama’s health care law, evidence is emerging that one of the program’s loftiest goals — to encourage competition among insurers in an effort to keep costs low — is falling short for many rural Americans. While competition is intense in many populous regions, rural areas and small towns have far fewer carriers offering plans in the law’s online exchanges. Those places, many of them poor, are being asked to choose from some of the highest-priced plans in the 34 states where the federal government is running the health insurance marketplaces, a review by The New York Times has found. Of the roughly 2,500 counties served by the federal exchanges, more than half, or 58 percent, have plans offered by just one or two insurance carriers, according to an analysis by The Times of county-level data provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. In about 530 counties, only a single insurer is participating. The analysis suggests that the ambitions of the Affordable Care Act to increase competition have unfolded unevenly, at least in the early going, and have not addressed many of the factors that contribute to high prices. Insurance companies are reluctant to enter challenging new markets, experts say, because medical costs are high, dominant insurers are difficult to unseat, and powerful hospital systems resist efforts to lower rates. “There’s nothing in the structure of the Affordable Care Act which really deals with that problem,” said John Holahan, a fellow at the Urban Institute, who noted that many factors determine costs in a given market. “I think that all else being equal, premiums will clearly be higher when there’s not that competition.” The Obama administration has said 95 percent of Americans live in areas where there are at least two insurers in the exchanges. But many experts say two might not be enough to create competition that would help lower prices. For example, in Wyoming, two insurers are offering plans at prices that are higher than in neighboring Montana, where a third carrier is seen as a factor in Continued on Page A20
Change in Tactics ÁNGEL FRANCO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Preserved in Sugar Filtering vessels inside the refinery building are among the artifacts at the long-shuttered Domino Sugar plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the site of a planned development. Page A24.
Republicans in Congress are refocusing their efforts from denying funds for the health care law to investigating problems with its rollout. Page A21.
Year Later, Storm Victims Challenge Christie’s Status as a Savior By KATE ZERNIKE
Hurricane Sandy turned Chris Christie into something akin to America’s governor, as the nation watched him express his state’s pain on the devastated shoreline the morning after the storm, then triumphantly cut the ribbons on reopened boardwalks on Memorial Day. “We’re stronger than the storm,” he proclaimed in television commercials that ran in
other states all summer. But in the affected parts of New Jersey, Governor Christie’s storm campaign has not sold as well. With at least 26,000 people still out of their homes a year later, he has become the focus of ire for many storm survivors who say that the recovery does not look as impressive to them as it does to the rest of the country. Homeowners promised money from Mr. Christie’s rebuilding program say they have yet to see
it; those who have been denied aid vent about the bureaucracy. Some criticize him for encouraging residents to build to new flood zone standards to speed recovery; homeowners now say they are being penalized, because anyone who started rebuilding is ineligible for a grant. Storm victims argue that the governor, who pushed fellow Republicans in Congress to pass a federal aid package, should be exerting similar pressure on in-
NATIONAL A12-21
SPORTSTHURSDAY B12-18
Vegetarian and Red-Meat Duo
Red Sox Romp in Opener
Heidi Nelson Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs and wife of Senator Ted Cruz, is a complex study in conPAGE A12 trasts to her husband.
David Ortiz hit a homer and drove in three runs, and the Boston Red Sox trounced the St. Louis Cardinals, 8-1, in PAGE B12 Game 1 of the World Series.
Chapter 1 in a Chapter 9 Case
ARTS C1-8
The trial over Detroit’s eligibility for bankruptcy began with disagreement over what led to its condition. PAGE A15
Pope Francis suspended a German bishop over lavish spending. PAGE A4
BUSINESS DAY B1-11
U.S. Mideast Policy Challenged
Bank Loses Mortgage Case
Secretary of State John Kerry seeks to defuse criticism from two allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. PAGE A8
A jury found Bank of America liable for selling defective mortgages, in a case involving Countrywide. PAGE B1
surers and banks to settle claims and prevent harm to the credit ratings of victims. And they accuse him of using the storm for his own aggrandizement, particularly after he spent $4.7 million in federal money to hire a politically connected firm to produce the television ads, choosing it over an agency that bid less but did not plan to show the governor in its commercials. At a legislative hearing on Continued on Page A24
NEW YORK A22-25
A Novel’s Demands
HOME D1-8
Retrial for Skakel in ’75 Killing
Eleanor Catton’s “Luminaries,” winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a complex period piece set in 19th-century New Zealand. Janet Maslin reviews. PAGE C1
The Stuff of Nightmares
A Connecticut judge ruled that the lawyer for Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, did not provide adequate representation in his 2002 murder trial. Mr. Skakel, 53, was convicted in the 1975 killing of Martha Moxley, a neighbor, in PAGE A22 Greenwich.
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A26-27
Nicholas D. Kristof
PAGE A27
For haunted houses, like Rob Zombie’s, above, this is high season. PAGE D1
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