Physicists returned to their future on Friday. About 10 p.m. outside Geneva, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, succeeded in sending beams of protons clockwise around the 17-mile underground magnetic racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment.

For physicists, the event was a milestone on the way back from disaster and the resumption of a 15-year, $9 billion quest to investigate laws and forces that prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

The collider was designed to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts apiece and smash them together in tiny fireballs in an effort to replicate and study the conditions of the Big Bang.

The first time protons circled the collider, on Sept. 10, 2008, the event was celebrated with Champagne and midnight pajama parties around the world. But the festivities were cut short a few days later when an electrical connection between a pair of the collider’s giant superconducting electromagnets vaporized.

Subsequent work revealed that the machine was riddled with thousands of connections unable to handle the high currents required to run the collider at its intended energy.

Physicists and engineers have spent the past year testing and making repairs. While they have not replaced all the faulty connections, they have patched things up enough to allow the collider to run at less than full speed.

Calling the past year’s work a “Herculean … effort,” CERN’s director for accelerators, Steve Myers, said the engineers had learned from painful experience and understood the collider far better than they had before.

CERN’s director, Rolf Heuer, said in a statement, “It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” but he and others cautioned that there was a long way to go before the collider started producing the physics it was designed for.

When the collider begins to do real physics next year, it will run at half its original design energy, with protons of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The energy will be increased gradually during the year, but it could be years, physicists say, before the machine reaches its full potential.

Thousands of the troublesome junctions will have to be rebuilt during a yearlong shutdown in 2011, and engineers have to figure out why several dozen of the superconducting magnets seem to have lost their ability to operate at high intensities.

The delay has given new life to the collider’s main rival, the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

If all goes well, CERN says, the protons will start colliding at low energies in about a week.

Those first collisions will occur at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts. The machine will then quickly step up to 1.1 trillion electron volts, which is just above the energy of the Tevatron.

CERN is hoping to achieve that landmark as a symbolic Christmas present before a short holiday shutdown.

After last summer’s disputed presidential election, Iran’s government relied largely on brute force — beatings, arrests and show trials — to stifle the country’s embattled opposition movement.

Now, stung by the force and persistence of the protests, the government appears to be starting a far more ambitious effort to discredit its opponents and re-educate Iran’s mostly young and restive population. In recent weeks, the government has announced a variety of new ideological offensives.

It is implanting 6,000 Basij militia centers in elementary schools across Iran to promote the ideals of the Islamic Revolution and it has created a new police unit to sweep the Internet for dissident voices. A company affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards acquired a majority share in the nation’s telecommunications monopoly this year, giving the Guards de facto control of Iran’s land-lines, Internet providers and two cell phone companies. And in the spring, the Revolutionary Guards plan to open a news agency with print, photo and television elements.

The government calls it “soft war,” and Iran’s leaders often seem to take it more seriously than a real military confrontation. It is rooted in an old accusation: that Iran’s domestic ills are the result of Western cultural subversion and call for an equally vigorous response. The extent of the new campaign underscores just how badly Iran’s clerical and military elite were shaken by the protests, which set off the worst internal dissent since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been using the phrase “soft war” regularly since September, when he warned a group of artists and teachers that they were living in an “atmosphere of sedition” in which all cultural phenomena must be seen in the context of a vast battle between Iran and the West. He and other officials have since invoked the phrase in describing new efforts to re-Islamize the educational system, purge secular influences and professors, and purify the media of subversive ideas.

The new emphasis on cultural warfare may also reflect the rising influence of the Revolutionary Guards, whose leader, Mohammad Ali Jafari, has long been one of the main proponents of a “soft war” strategy, analysts say.

Day after day, night after night, Francisco Hernandez Jr., 13 years old, rode the subway. He had an electronic fare card, $10 in his pocket and a bookbag on his lap. As the human tide flowed and ebbed around him, he sat impassively, a gangly boy in glasses and a red hoodie, speaking to no one.

After getting in trouble in class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and fearing another scolding at home, he had sought refuge in the subway system. He removed the battery from his cell phone. “I didn’t want anyone to scream at me,” he said.

Francisco disappeared for 11 days in October — a stretch he spent entirely in subway stations and on trains, he says, hurtling through four boroughs. And somehow he went undetected, despite a round-the-clock search by his panicked parents, relatives and family friends, the police and the Mexican Consulate.

Since Oct. 26, when a transit police officer found him in a Coney Island subway station, no one has been able to fully explain how a boy could vanish for so long in a busy train system dotted with surveillance cameras and fliers bearing his photograph.

But this was not a typical missing-person search. Francisco has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that often causes difficulty with social interaction, and can lead to seemingly eccentric behavior and isolation. His parents are Mexican immigrants, who say they felt the police were slow to make the case a priority.

“Maybe because you might not understand how to manage the situation, because you don’t speak English very well, because of your legal status, they don’t pay you a lot of attention,” said Francisco’s mother, Marisela Garcia, 38, a housecleaner who immigrated in 1994 and has struggled to find ways to help her son.

The police, however, say they took the case seriously from the start, interviewing school officials and classmates, canvassing neighborhoods and leafleting all over the city.

Francisco says his odyssey wound through three subway lines: the D, F and No. 1. He would ride a train until its last stop, then wait for the next one, wherever it was headed. He says he subsisted on the little he could afford at subway newsstands: potato chips, croissants, jelly rolls, neatly folding the wrappers and saving them in the backpack. He drank bottled water. He used the bathroom in the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.

Otherwise, he says, he slipped into a kind of stupor, sleeping much of the time, his head on his bookbag. “At some point, I just stopped feeling anything,” he recalled.

Though the boy’s recollections are incomplete, and neither the police nor his family can retrace his movements in detail, the authorities say that he was missing for 11 days and that they have no evidence he was anywhere but the subway.

For his parents, the memories of those 11 frantic days — the dubious sightings, the dashed hopes and no sleep — remain vivid.

What propelled Francisco to take flight on Oct. 15 is unclear.

Administrators at his school, Intermediate School 281, would not comment. But Francisco said he had failed to complete an assignment for an eighth-grade class, and was scolded for not concentrating.

Science has never given much credence to claims that you can learn Chinese or French by having the instruction CDs play while you sleep. If any learning happens that way, most scientists say, the language lesson is probably waking the sleeper up, not causing nouns and verbs to seep into a sound-asleep mind.

But a new study about a different kind of audio approach during sleep gives insight into how the sleeping brain works, and may eventually come in handy to people studying a language, cramming for a test or memorizing lines in a play.

Scientists at Northwestern University reported that playing specific sounds while people slept helped them remember more of what they had learned before they fell sleep, to the point where memories of individual facts were enhanced.

In a study published online Thursday by the journal Science, researchers taught people to move 50 pictures to their correct locations on a computer screen. Each picture was accompanied by a related sound, like a meow for a cat and whirring for a helicopter.

Then, 12 subjects took a nap, during which 25 of the sounds were played along with white noise. When they awoke, none realized that the sounds had been played or could guess which ones had been used. Yet almost all remembered more precisely the computer locations of the pictures associated with the 25 sounds that had been played while they slept, doing less well placing the other 25 pictures.

“We were able to cue people to specific information they had learned,” said Ken A. Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern and co-author of the study. “The thinking is that during sleep, memory consolidation is going on and that rehearsal is a good way to strengthen memories.

“We showed that you can get information in during sleep using the auditory system and that you can cue that rehearsal by providing sounds specific to each episode of learning.”

The study adds a dimension to a theory that sleep allows the brain to process and consolidate memories.

A 2007 study found that people who were given whiffs of rose scent as they learned a task remembered the task better when they also inhaled rose scent while sleeping. But the new research suggests that individual memories can be explicitly singled out for strengthening.

“We haven’t before been able to manipulate very specific memories,” said Matthew P. Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.

“If you can experimentally amplify the memory-reinforcing process by forcing those sounds back into the brain while we’re asleep,” Walker said, it “may actually give us some clues as to what that mechanism is.”

Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard also not involved in the study, noted that the researchers did not play literal phrases recapping the memory, like “the cat is in the lower left,” but instead sound cues associated with a picture and a spatial task. The sounds made sense, too — the meow did not accompany the picture of dynamite, for example.

Ali had Frazier. Coke has Pepsi. The Yankees have the Red Sox.

Now Wal-Mart, the mightiest retail giant in history, may have met its own worthy adversary: Amazon.com.

In what is emerging as one of the main story lines of the 2009 post-recession shopping season, the two heavyweight retailers are waging an online price war that is spreading through product areas like books, movies, toys and electronics.

The tussle began last month as a relatively trivial but highly public back-and-forth over which company had the lowest prices on the most anticipated new books and DVDs this fall. By last week, it had spread to select video game consoles, mobile phones, even to the humble Easy-Bake Oven, a 45-year-old toy from Hasbro that usually heats up small cakes, not tensions between billion-dollar corporations.

Last Wednesday, Wal-Mart dropped the price of the oven to $17, from $28, as part of its “Black Friday” deals. Later the same day, Amazon cut its price, which had also been $28, to $18.

“It’s not about the prices of books and movies anymore; there is a bigger battle being fought,” said Fiona Dias, executive vice president at GSI Commerce, which manages the Web sites of large retailers. “The price sniping by Wal-Mart is part of a greater strategic plan. They are just not going to cede their business to Amazon.”

Retailers are already fighting for every dollar consumers spend this holiday season. Sales are not expected to drop as much as they did last season, but the National Retail Federation, an industry group, predicts that they will decline 1 percent, to $437.6 billion.

Of course, Wal-Mart and Amazon are fundamentally different companies, and for now, at least, Amazon poses little immediate threat to the behemoth from Bentonville, Ark.

Wal-Mart, with $405 billion in sales last year, dominates by offering affordable prices to Middle America in its 4,000 stores. Amazon is a relative schooner to Wal-Mart’s ocean liner, with $20 billion in sales, mostly from affluent urbanites who would rather click with their mouse than push around a cart.

This fight, then, is all about the future. Rapid expansion by each company, as well as profound shifts in the high-tech landscape, now make direct confrontation inevitable. Though online shopping accounts for only around 4 percent of retail sales, that percentage is growing quickly. E-commerce did not suffer as deeply as regular retailing during the economic malaise, and it is recovering faster than in-store shopping. People are also shopping on smartphones and from their HDTVs.

Amazon, based in Seattle, has harnessed all of these trends, and is also behaving more like a traditional retailer. This fall it expanded its white-labeling program, slapping the Amazon brand onto audio and video cables and other products, and introduced same-day shipping in seven cities, trying to replicate the instant gratification of offline shopping.

The particles that ferry cholesterol through the bloodstream are known as “bad” or “good”: bad if they deposit cholesterol on vessel walls, potentially clogging them; good if they carry the cholesterol on to the liver for excretion.

Now scientists have created tiny particles in the laboratory that mimic those good carriers, scooping up the cholesterol before it can grow into dangerous deposits of plaque. The surfaces of these new particles are coated with fats and proteins so they can bind tightly with the sticky cholesterol to transport it through the bloodstream.

The particles may someday be important in treating cardiovascular disease, said Dr. Andre Nel, chief of the division of nanomedicine and director of the Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Researchers have endowed these artificial particles with the same properties as natural particles that circulate in the blood,” called high-density lipoproteins, or HDL, he said. The artificial carriers can clean up sites where plaques can otherwise rupture, leading to strokes and heart attacks.

The United States will propose a near-term target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions before the U.N climate change summit meeting in Copenhagen next month, a senior administration official said Monday. President Barack Obama, the official said, will announce the specific target “in coming days.”

The announcement of a target will take the current legislative stalemate over a climate bill into account, the senior official said, and thus might present a range of possible reductions rather than a single figure.

The lack of consensus in Congress puts Obama in a tricky domestic and diplomatic bind. He cannot promise more than Congress may eventually deliver when it takes up climate change legislation next year. But if he does not offer some concrete pledge, the United States will bear the brunt of the blame for the lack of an international agreement.

The official also said the president would decide soon whether and for how long he might attend the December climate meeting, which runs from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18. He repeated the president’s assertion that he would consider attending if his presence could be a useful impetus to a deal.

Chinese banking regulators are putting pressure on the country’s banks to raise more capital and temper their rapid growth in lending, in a clear sign of official concern about the sustainability of the nation’s credit boom, senior Chinese bankers said Monday.

U.S. and European officials have also pressed their banks to shore up their finances in recent months, but the reasons behind the Chinese regulators’ capital-raising push are very different. In some ways, the regulatory pressure reflects the robustness of the Chinese economy, in contrast with lingering economic weakness in the West.

Western regulators have put pressure on the banks they oversee to raise money, often through the sale of overseas units and other assets, to rebuild capital bases depleted by losses on mortgage-backed securities and other investments. Western banks have moved to raise the money even as they have slowed their issuance of new loans, which has helped hold up their capital as a percentage of assets.

Bernard Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme ended on Dec. 11, 2008, when he was arrested at his Manhattan penthouse. But for some early victims, the date his crime started could matter much more than when it stopped.

A motion pending in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan contends that Madoff’s long-term investors cannot accurately calculate their losses until they know whether any of their original profits were legitimate. And to determine that, the motion continues, they must know when the Ponzi scheme began.

The Madoff bankruptcy trustee is calculating investor losses as the difference between the cash paid into an account and the cash taken out.

But if some of an investor’s early profits were in fact legitimate, those earnings should count as part of the cash paid into the Ponzi scheme, the motion argues.

Federal health officials are trying to shift supplies of the seasonal flu vaccine away from chain pharmacies and supermarkets to nursing homes, hoping to counter a shortage that threatens to cause a wave of deaths among the nation’s most vulnerable population.

The extent of the shortage is still unclear, but Janice Zalen, director of special programs for the American Health Care Association, which represents 11,000 nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, called it “a very big problem.” She said that of 1,000 nursing home managers who responded to a survey, 800 reported they could not get enough vaccine.

A nationwide shortage of the seasonal flu vaccine has been reported for several weeks, but nursing homes and their suppliers have grown more alarmed in recent days. Of the 36,000 Americans who die of seasonal flu in the average year, more than 90 percent are 65 or older. By contrast, swine flu has been most deadly among younger people.

A few weeks into the holiday shopping season, American consumers are still not reaching for their wallets.

After a fairly robust October, retail sales slowed in November as the nation’s stores entered their critical time of year. Major sectors like apparel, luxury goods and jewelry experienced slight sales declines.

That might seem like an ominous sign about how the chains will fare this Christmas. But retailing analysts said the declines were minor and that many consumers were saving their powder for the day after Thanksgiving, the blowout shopping day known as Black Friday.

Retailing veterans expect stores to be bustling on Friday as frugal consumers hunt for bargains with newfound purpose. Retailing professionals are also cheered that stores have less inventory today than they did this time last year.

“Last year, we were in emergency nuclear discounting mode,” said Michael McNamara, vice president for research and analysis at SpendingPulse, an information service by MasterCard Advisors. “This year, it’s more strategic in nature.”

For Nov. 1 to 14, sales of women’s clothing declined 3.3 percent and sales of men’s clothing fell 1 percent compared with last year, according to SpendingPulse, which estimates sales for all forms of payment, including cash, checks and credit cards. Luxury goods posted the biggest year-over-year decline, falling 9.2 percent.

Those declines were not as bad, though, as the double-digit losses that stores experienced last year and into early 2009.

Last year, sales over Thanksgiving weekend declined 1.01 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to SpendingPulse. That was a departure from previous years, when sales rose briskly — up 4.5 percent in 2007, up 6.1 percent in 2006 and up 5.7 percent in 2005.

There is no single replacement for Oprah Winfrey.

That’s not necessarily a statement about the dominance of her 24-year-old television institution, “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Rather, it is the reality of television syndication.

When Winfrey leaves the broadcast airwaves in two years, a stable of talk shows will vie to fill her former time slot on more than 200 stations across the country. Individual stations are bound to place differing bets, drastically reshaping the daytime TV landscape.

As with NBC and Jay Leno earlier this year, the television chess board is being rearranged by a talk show host. Winfrey’s departure could even affect the ratings for the network evening newscasts. “All of a sudden, there are so many moving pieces,” said Bill Carroll, who recommends syndicated shows to stations for the Katz Television Group, on Friday.

Even before Winfrey announced last Friday that 2011 would be, as she put it, the “exact right time” to step off her broadcast stage, TV executives were jostling on behalf of Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Dr. Phil McGraw and other hosts who aim to benefit from the syndication shake-up.

Analysts say that DeGeneres and Dr. Oz, in particular, stand to gain, because their deals with stations will come up for renewal at the same time that Winfrey intends to depart. Aspiring hosts could emerge as well.

“I’m sure there are a number of people calling their agents today and saying, ‘I think I could be the next Oprah,’” Carroll said.

No matter what, it seems, Winfrey comes out a winner in syndication. Already, she has groomed another decade’s worth of new talk show hosts. She ordained McGraw in 2002, and his talk show, “Dr. Phil,” now ranks second behind her own hour. She followed up with “Rachael Ray” in 2006 and “The Dr. Oz Show” this fall. “Dr. Oz” is already a hit.

Thanksgiving is just a few days away, which means that winter is on the horizon. Thanks to El Niño, the National Weather Service is predicting a warmer-than-average winter across much of the western and central US, but a cooler-than-average winter across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic.

Also predicted is above-average precipitation across the Gulf Coast and California, but below-average precipitation in the Pacific Northwest and the Ohio River valley. Unfortunately for us here in Boston, a winter outlook is hazier because our winter climate is not as affected by El Niño. Therefore, the Climate Prediction Center is predicting an equal chance of above, near, or below normal temperature and precipitation in our region in the winter months.

Staying closer to the present, today looks to be cloudy with morning rain tapering off as the day goes on. Tomorrow will be sunnier, but cloudy conditions with a chance of rain return on Thursday with temperatures in the low to mid 50s°F. Enjoy Thanksgiving break!

New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.

The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group’s previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.”

She called the timing crazy, uncanny and “an unfortunate perfect storm,” adding, “There’s no political agenda with regard to these recommendations.”

Iglesia said the argument for changing Pap screening was more compelling than that for cutting back on mammography – which the obstetricians’ group has — opposed — because there is more potential for harm from the overuse of Pap tests.

The reason is that young women are especially prone to develop abnormalities in the cervix that appear to be precancerous, but that will go away if left alone. But when Pap tests find the growths, doctors often remove them, with procedures that can injure the cervix and lead to problems later when a woman becomes pregnant, including premature birth and an increased risk of needing a Caesarean.

Still, the new recommendations for Pap tests are likely to feed a political debate in Washington over health care overhaul proposals. The mammogram advice led some Republicans to predict that such recommendations would lead to rationing.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who is a physician, said in an interview that he would continue to offer Pap smears to sexually active young women. Democratic proposals to involve the government more deeply in the nation’s health care system, he said, would lead the new mammography, Pap smear and other guidelines to be adopted without regard to patient differences, hurting many people. “These are going to be set in stone,” Coburn said.

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., a longtime advocate for cancer screening, said in an interview: “And this Pap smear guideline is yet another cut back in screening? That is curious.” He said Congress was committed to increasing cancer screenings, not limiting them.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said the new guidelines would have no effect on federal policy and that “Republicans are using these new recommendations as a distraction.”

“Making such arguments, especially at this critical point in the debate, merely clouds the very simple issue that our health reform bill would increase access to care for millions of women across the country,” she said.

This week, the science of medicine bumped up against the foundations of American medical consumerism: that more is better, that saving a life is worth any sacrifice, that health care is a birthright.

Two new recommendations, calling for delaying the start and reducing the frequency of screening for breast and cervical cancer, have been met with anger and confusion from some corners, not to mention a measure of political posturing.

The backers of science-driven medicine, with its dual focus on risks and benefits, have cheered the elevation of data in the setting of standards. But many patients – and organizations of doctors and disease specialists – find themselves unready to accept the counterintuitive notion that more testing can be bad for your health.

“People are being asked to think differently about risk,” said Sheila M. Rothman, a professor of public health at Columbia University. “The public state of mind right now is that they’re frightened that evidence-based medicine is going to be equated with rationing. They don’t see it in a scientific perspective.”

For decades, the medical establishment, the government and the news media have preached the mantra of early detection, spending untold millions of dollars to spread the word. Now, the hypothesis that screening is vital to health and longevity is being turned on its head, with researchers asserting that mammograms and Pap smears can cause more harm than good for women of certain ages.

On Monday, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federally appointed advisory panel, recommended that most women delay the start of routine mammograms until they are 50, rather than 40, as the group suggested in 2002. It also recommended that women receive the test every two years rather than annually, and that physicians not train women to perform breast self-examination.

The task force, whose recommendations are not binding on insurers or physicians, concluded after surveying the latest research that the risks caused by over-diagnosis, anxiety, false-positive test results and excess biopsies outweighed the benefits of screening for women in their 40s. It found that one cancer death is prevented for every 1,904 women ages 40 to 49 who are screened for 10 years, compared with one death for every 1,339 women from 50 to 74, and one death for every 377 women from 60 to 69.

The Senate version of health reform legislation would cover 5 million fewer people than a companion bill passed by the House, but it would cost less, in part because Senate Democratic leaders said they believed they had to win support from fiscally conservative members of their party.

The Senate is expected to vote Saturday on whether to take up the legislation. The majority leader, Harry Reid, D-Nev., refused to say Thursday whether he had the 60 votes needed to clear that procedural hurdle.

While the guts of the Senate and House bills are similar, Reid devised a new method of financing coverage, not found in any other major health bill. His proposal would significantly increase the Medicare payroll tax for high-income people.

The Senate and House bills would provide coverage to millions of the uninsured by expanding Medicaid and subsidizing private insurance for people with moderate incomes.

The Senate bill would spend $821 billion over 10 years on Medicaid and subsidies. The House bill would spend 25 percent more: $1.03 trillion over 10 years.

A gulf separates the House and the Senate on the emotional issue of abortion.

Over the objection of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the House adopted much stricter limits. Under the House bill, federal money could not be used “to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion,” except in case of rape or incest or if the life of a pregnant woman was in danger. Thus, a plan that received federal subsidies for low- and moderate-income people could not offer abortion coverage.

Under the Senate bill, insurers would not be required or forbidden to cover abortion. But, the measure says, in every part of the country, the government would have to ensure that there is at least one plan that covers abortion and at least one that does not.

The secretary of health and human services would decide whether a proposed new government insurance plan would cover abortion. If an insurer covers abortion, it could not use federal money to pay for the procedure. It could use only premiums paid by subscribers and would have to keep the money separate from subsidies received from the federal government.

Opponents of abortion describe this bookkeeping arrangement as a sham.

“It’s a shell game,” said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb.

But Johanns said he doubted that the Senate would accept the stringent restriction adopted by the House.

“I don’t see it in the final bill,” Johanns said. “I don’t believe there are enough pro-life senators to break a filibuster to make this a part of the final bill.”

Supporters of abortion rights were pleased with the treatment of abortion in Reid’s bill. “It maintains the decades-long compromise of no federal funds for abortion, while allowing a woman to use her own private funds for her reproductive health care,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

The commander of military forces protecting North America has ordered a review of the costly air defenses intended to prevent another Sept. 11-style terrorism attack, an assessment aimed at determining whether the commitment of jet fighters, other aircraft and crews remains justified.

Senior officers involved in the effort say the assessment is to gauge the likelihood that terrorists may succeed in hijacking an airliner or flying their own smaller craft into the United States or Canada. The study is focused on circumstances in which the attack would be aimed not at a public building or landmark but instead at a power plant or a critical link in the nation’s financial network, like a major electrical grid or a computer network hub.

The review, to be completed next spring, is expected to be the military’s most thorough reassessment of the threat of a terrorism attack by air since al-Qaida’s strikes on Sept. 11, 2001, transformed a Defense Department focused on fighting other militaries and led to the Bush administration’s “global war on terror.”

The assessment is partly a reflection of how a military straining to fight two wars is questioning whether it makes sense to keep in place the costly system of protections established after those attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Though combat patrols above American cities were discontinued in 2007, the military keeps dozens of warplanes and hundreds of air crew members on alert to respond to potential threats.

“The fighter force is extremely expensive, so you always have to ask yourself the question ‘How much is enough?’” said Maj. Gen. Pierre J. Forgues of Canada, director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, which carries out the air defense mission within the United States military’s Northern Command.

Northern Command, based here in Colorado Springs, will try to determine in its review whether the United States is safer today. Military strategists and operations officers have been asked to address whether the security measures put in place since 2001 have diminished the threat of terrorist attack by aircraft to such an extent that a smaller commitment of combat jets and personnel is now warranted.

Officers conducting the review said that a number of security steps adopted in the last eight years should be factored into whether to sustain the air defense mission at current levels.

Among those steps are screening measures at airports; the addition of armored, locked cockpit doors on commercial planes; much tighter restrictions on airspace around Washington; and a host of law enforcement and intelligence operations to identify and track potential terrorists and prevent them from boarding airliners.

“The ability of terrorists to do what they did on 9/11 has been greatly curtailed,” Forgues said in an interview at his headquarters here. “But, as has been said, we would be concerned by the lack of imagination. And so we do not want to view the defense posture strictly in terms of threat. We want to view the defense posture in terms of vulnerability as well.”

Flights over much of the eastern United States were delayed Thursday by a predawn failure in a fairly new communications system, which led to the shutdown of a computer that accepts flight plans from the airlines and feeds them to air traffic controllers.

It was the fourth major disruption attributed to the communications system, which the Federal Aviation Administration began putting into service earlier in this decade as a way to cut costs and assure reliability. But the FAA said late Thursday that it had not yet determined the cause of the failure, that the failure might not be related to the relative newness of the system, and that it did not see a pattern.

But when it failed, at about 5 a.m. Eastern time, the airlines had to send flight plans – which describe a plane’s route, including intermediate points and altitudes – by fax, and the controllers typed them into their computers, not quite hunt-and-peck but cumbersome enough that many planes were delayed for over an hour.

But there was no risk to planes in flight, the FAA said.

By midmorning the system was working again, but the backlog caused many flights to be held on the ground at airports around the country.

The West was mostly spared, though, because the problem was fixed before much of the flight day there got started there.

The crucial computer that was knocked out, the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, situated in Atlanta and with a backup in Salt Lake City, also failed in August 2008, with a similar result, but for a different reason.

Flight plans typically consist of hundreds of alpha-numeric characters giving the flight number, type of equipment, takeoff location and various intermediate points, with altitudes.

When the first failure happened — of a router, the FAA said — it knocked out not only the computer that handles flight plans, but one that sorts through “notices to airmen,” or FAA alerts about short-lived problems like runway closings, and delivers them to pilots.

By early afternoon, the FAA’s online status board was showing the problem limited to the Northeast.

The computer that handles the flight plans was repaired by around 9 a.m., but by then a huge backlog had developed.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the controllers’ union, said in a statement that “airport efficiency is being cut by at least half in places like New York-JFK.”

Airlines reported problems in other areas as well. Around the country, planeloads of passengers heard pilots blame the air traffic system as they sat on the tarmac. AirTran Airways, based in Orlando, Fla., quickly announced that passengers with tickets for Thursday could rebook without charge, as is commonly done in storms.

The aviation agency’s data processing system has a variety of problems. While it was hailed as a marvel when it was introduced decades ago, much of it is written in obsolete computer language and the agency has been slow to provide updates.

Emily Keller, a Watervliet, N.Y., high school senior, has read the four “Twilight” books 28 times.

Olivia Jaquith, a Niskayuna, N.Y., ninth-grader, flew with her mom across country last year to attend the “Twilight” premiere and has since watched the film about 50 times.

Pamela Townsend, a senior, is joining other “Twilight” fanatics to see the first showing of the second movie in the series, “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”

The film started at 12:01 a.m. Friday in this region of upstate New York. One multiplex is showing it on 12 screens.

Welcome to the “Twilight” phenomenon — and not, presumably, for the first time. As Liz Gialanella, a school psychologist, says, “You’d have to be on another planet not to know about ‘Twilight.”’

It’s a four-book series by Stephenie Meyer being made into a four-movie series about a girl who falls in love with a vampire while being courted by a werewolf. Young, beautiful actors portray the characters — the vampires and werewolves are particularly gorgeous — and the hype is intense. “Twilight” merchandise is everywhere, and teenage girls, especially, swoon over it all.

Oprah Winfrey is giving network television one of her trademark aha moments.

Winfrey, the billionaire queen of daytime television, is planning to announce Friday that she will step down from her daily pulpit, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in two years in order to concentrate on the forthcoming cable channel that will bear her name.

“The sun will set on the Oprah show as its 25th season draws to a close on Sept. 9, 2011,” Tim Bennett, the president of Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, said in a letter to her 214 local TV stations Thursday evening. She will appear on her cable channel, called OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network, in some form. But “The Oprah Winfrey Show” will no longer be.

The list of repercussions of her decision is long. For CBS, owner of the syndication rights to her show, it means the loss of its signature program and millions of dollars every year in revenue. For ABC, where her show was largely shown, it means the loss of daytime’s most popular show, a generator of a massive audience leading into its evening news programs.

Leaders of the 27 countries of the European Union on Thursday night chose Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian prime minister, as the European Union’s first president, and Catherine Ashton of Britain, currently the EU trade commissioner, as its high representative for foreign policy. The vote was unanimous.

Both officials are highly respected but little known outside their own countries. After the European Union’s eight-year battle to rewrite its internal rules and to pass the Lisbon Treaty that created these two new jobs, the choice of such low-profile figures seemed to highlight Europe’s problems instead of its readiness to take a more united and forceful place in world affairs.

First the reviled Yankees won the World Series; now Shake Shack, the New York burger joint, might stake a claim in one of Boston’s most sacred spaces.

Danny Meyer, the restaurant operator who owns Shake Shack and other Manhattan hotspots, wants to open a branch on Boston Common, a bold foray into a city that famously loathes New York and its icons. But Meyer will be bidding against at least one other proposal, for a New England-style seafood stand called The Common House.

“I love Shake Shack,” said Jeffrey Mills, a Boston College graduate who is pitching the seafood restaurant. “I was in New York last weekend and went there. But the Common needs something that markets Boston and Boston cuisine.”

Mills, who co-owned the now-closed Biltmore Room restaurant in New York, said he also planned to sell a Common House line of products named for Boston landmarks — “Freedom Trail ketchup, something like that” — in grocery stores.

Meyer was not available for comment, but David Swinghamer, president of the growth division at his Union Square Hospitality Group, confirmed his interest in opening a Shake Shack here. The Common is one of the nation’s “most beautiful” parks, he said in a statement.

Tainted by a flawed election and allegations of festering corruption in his government, President Hamid Karzai was inaugurated Thursday for a second term, promising to remedy the country’s problems and to have the Afghan army assume full control of security within five years.

Speaking in Dari and Pashto, Karzai reached out to the country’s two largest ethnic groups as well as to his defeated political rivals in a speech at a midday ceremony at the presidential palace.

Above all, his address seemed aimed at the United States and other Western allies, whose representatives, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, were among an audience of about 800 that also included government officials, military officers and tribal leaders.

Seeking to placate his international backers, Karzai touched on almost every major point that the Americans and other Western countries have pressed him to address in recent months.

He received applause three times: when he pledged to create a transparent and accountable government; when he promised to fight corruption; and when he thanked the United States and other allies for their help.

But those who heard the speech said it was hard to tell if he was truly comfortable with the many promises he made.

“The role of the international troops will be gradually reduced,” Karzai said. “We are determined that in the next five years, the Afghan forces are capable of taking the lead in ensuring security and stability across the country.”

U. of Nebraska Weighs Tighter Limits On Embryonic Stem Cell Research

In an unusual pushback against President Barack Obama’s expansion of federal financing of human embryonic stem cell research, the University of Nebraska is considering restricting its stem cell experiments to cell lines approved by President George W. Bush.

The university’s board of regents is scheduled to take up the matter on Friday, and if it approves the restrictions – some opponents of the research say they have the votes, though others remain doubtful – the University of Nebraska would become the first such state institution in the country to impose limits on stem cell research that go beyond what state and federal laws allow, university officials say.

For weeks, the Nebraska board of regents has been the focus of a fierce campaign by opponents of embryonic stem cell research, most recently by a flood of e-mail and telephone calls, a petition drive and radio advertisements.

The effort, which is being met with an equally heated push by supporters, is a new front in the battle over the politically contentious research: It is being fought before a public university’s governing board, not a state legislature or on a ballot measure.

“This could be another possible tool,” said David Prentice, senior fellow for life sciences at the Family Research Council.

In a new report, a secretive federal panel has concluded that programs to extend the life of the nation’s aging nuclear arms are sufficient to guarantee their destructiveness for decades to come, obviating a need for a costly new generation of more reliable warheads.

The finding, by the Jason panel, an independent group of scientists that advises the federal government on issues of science and technology, bears on the growing debate over whether the United States should ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or, instead, prepare for the design of new nuclear arms.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona and other Republicans have argued that concerns are growing over the reliability of the United States’ aging nuclear stockpile and that the possible need for new designs means that the nation should retain the right to conduct underground tests of new nuclear weapons.

The testing issue is expected to flare in the months ahead when the Obama administration submits the test ban treaty for ratification by the Senate, where it faces a tough fight.