Celebrate The Royal Wedding With Some Seriously Romantic Perfumes

The ladies at TheGloss are fragrance junkies. They are also, at this point in the day, extremely enthusiastic to cover a topic not specifically about the Royal Wedding. So, needing to curate a shopping guide but done with looking at lace dresses for a few weeks (/months), we rounded  up a handful of our favorite romantic designer perfumes. Here are the loveliest, freshest scents we’re currently into.

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Kate Middleton Vs. Grace Kelly

Kate Middleton’s Sarah Burton dress channeled Grace Kelly’s classic wedding dress. And there are a lot more comparisons to be made between the commoners turned princesses! For instance:
Looks
Grace Kelly: Said to be beautiful like an angel
Kate Middleton: Said to  be beautiful like a normal girl
Occupation
Grace Kelly: Model turned movie star
Kate Middleton: Worked for her parent’s party planning business
Engagement Ring:
 Grace Kelly: Grace got two engagement rings! Prince Rainier III of Monaco proposed with a Cartier eternity band full of rubies and diamonds—the colors of Monaco. He then asked Cartier in Paris to design a second engagement ring—this one a 12 carat emerald cut diamond flanked by two baguettes.
Kate Middleton: We’ve all seen the 18 carat sapphire that had previously belonged to Prince William’s mother, Diana.
Favorite Designers:
Grace Kelly: Edith Head, Helen Rose, Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent.
Kate Middleton: Issa, Sarah Burton
Education:
Grace Kelly: She was rejected from Bennington college, and went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
Kate Middleton: She attended St. Andrew’s where she met Prince William and studied Art History.
Favorite Charities:
Grace Kelly: She served as president of the Garden Club of Monaco, president of the Red Cross of Monaco, and president of the organizing committee of the International Arts Foundation. How
Kate Middleton: An anti-bullying charity – close to her heart as the new princess was bullied as a teen.
Now that you know a bit more about them, vote for your favorite:

Memories Lost to a Whirlwind Alight on Facebook to Be Claimed

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

The found photographs are on a Facebook page titled “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” 

Like hundreds of others finding keepsakes that fell from the sky and posting photographs of them on a Facebook lost and found, the woman included her e-mail address, and Ms. Washburn wrote immediately: “That man is my granddaddy. It would mean a lot to me to have that picture.”
Created by Patty Bullion, 37, of Lester, Ala., a page on the social networking site has so far reunited dozens of storm survivors with their prized — and in some cases, only — possessions: a high school diploma that landed in a Lester front yard was traced to its owner in Tupelo, Miss., for example. A woman who lost her home in the tiny town of Phil Campbell, Ala., claimed her homemade quilt found in Athens, Ala., nearly 50 miles away: “Phil Campbell Class of 2000,” it read.
But the page is also turning social networking software designed to help friends stay in touch into an unexpected meeting ground for strangers. Along with the photographs of found items are the comments of well-wishers and homespun detectives speculating as to the identities of their owners. For those spared by the storms that killed hundreds in the South, the page is a bridge to its victims, a way to offer solace and to share in their suffering.
“Is she okay?” wrote one commenter on a snapshot of a red-haired child at a swimming pool. “I see her face throughout the day, and wonder.”
The tornado did not touch down in Lester. But when Ms. Bullion ventured into her yard on Wednesday afternoon, she found it littered with other people’s memories that the storm had disgorged in passing. One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.
Ms. Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.
“I feel like I know these people,” Ms. Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”
The first of the images that Ms. Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Ms. Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.
By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.
One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.
Laura Mashburn saw some sign of providence in the fact that Hannah Wilson, the young woman whose photo she had found on her doorstep in Lester, turned out to work in a dentist’s office, just as she once had.
The woman’s co-workers saw the image of what looked to be her old prom picture on the page and supplied her name and address. Her mother, someone else volunteered, had a heart attack during the storm. “I saw Hannah yesterday,” wrote another friend, “and she is grateful to you for getting this back to her.”
Laura Monks, the director of a community college in Fayetteville, Tenn., who had found the picture of Ms. Washburn’s grandfather, Elvin Patterson, and his dog Yoyo, said she would return it right away.
“My great-grandfather’s name was Elvin also,” she wrote to Ms. Washburn in an e-mail. “Is there anything that I can do for your family or your community?”
Ms. Washburn, 31, whose maternal grandmother also died in the storm, said in an interview on Friday that she would frame the photograph. Then she said, her voice breaking, “I’ll probably give it to my mom.”

Memories Lost to a Whirlwind Alight on Facebook to Be Claimed

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

The found photographs are on a Facebook page titled “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” 

Like hundreds of others finding keepsakes that fell from the sky and posting photographs of them on a Facebook lost and found, the woman included her e-mail address, and Ms. Washburn wrote immediately: “That man is my granddaddy. It would mean a lot to me to have that picture.”
Created by Patty Bullion, 37, of Lester, Ala., a page on the social networking site has so far reunited dozens of storm survivors with their prized — and in some cases, only — possessions: a high school diploma that landed in a Lester front yard was traced to its owner in Tupelo, Miss., for example. A woman who lost her home in the tiny town of Phil Campbell, Ala., claimed her homemade quilt found in Athens, Ala., nearly 50 miles away: “Phil Campbell Class of 2000,” it read.
But the page is also turning social networking software designed to help friends stay in touch into an unexpected meeting ground for strangers. Along with the photographs of found items are the comments of well-wishers and homespun detectives speculating as to the identities of their owners. For those spared by the storms that killed hundreds in the South, the page is a bridge to its victims, a way to offer solace and to share in their suffering.
“Is she okay?” wrote one commenter on a snapshot of a red-haired child at a swimming pool. “I see her face throughout the day, and wonder.”
The tornado did not touch down in Lester. But when Ms. Bullion ventured into her yard on Wednesday afternoon, she found it littered with other people’s memories that the storm had disgorged in passing. One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.
Ms. Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.
“I feel like I know these people,” Ms. Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”
The first of the images that Ms. Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Ms. Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.
By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.
One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.
Laura Mashburn saw some sign of providence in the fact that Hannah Wilson, the young woman whose photo she had found on her doorstep in Lester, turned out to work in a dentist’s office, just as she once had.
The woman’s co-workers saw the image of what looked to be her old prom picture on the page and supplied her name and address. Her mother, someone else volunteered, had a heart attack during the storm. “I saw Hannah yesterday,” wrote another friend, “and she is grateful to you for getting this back to her.”
Laura Monks, the director of a community college in Fayetteville, Tenn., who had found the picture of Ms. Washburn’s grandfather, Elvin Patterson, and his dog Yoyo, said she would return it right away.
“My great-grandfather’s name was Elvin also,” she wrote to Ms. Washburn in an e-mail. “Is there anything that I can do for your family or your community?”
Ms. Washburn, 31, whose maternal grandmother also died in the storm, said in an interview on Friday that she would frame the photograph. Then she said, her voice breaking, “I’ll probably give it to my mom.”

As the Careless Order a Latte, Thieves Grab Something to Go

Distraction and extraction. These are the skills, timeless, of thousands of thieves who work in New York, without a weapon and without attracting notice.

Enlarge This Image

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Where in the city can such a thief visit dozens of happy hunting spots on an afternoon’s walk, finding rooms crowded with people staring at laptops or iPads, or texting or talking on phones, and ignoring their purses? A place so comfortable and familiar, with its jazz, leather chairs and Wi-Fi, that customers, otherwise savvy to the city’s dangers, do not think twice about saving a round blond-wood table with a bag or a laptop while they stand in line?
You may be there now, with a grande caffè mocha.
Starbucks shops are ubiquitous in New York, a respite for tourists and professionals young and old, and while the city’s criminal trends come and go and ebb and flow, there remains a steady march of handbags from those shops in someone else’s hands.
From Times Square to the Village to Brooklyn Heights, Starbucks pops up again and again on police blotters. Officers have set up stings in the chain’s stores. A commander even asked one branch to put up a sign warning customers; the manager demurred, saying such a sign required corporate approval.
No doubt such a sign would dampen the mood.
“You can let your guard down — people are sitting down and talking and using their laptops,” said Capt. Mark DiPaolo of the 84th Precinct in Brooklyn Heights, home to a Court Street Starbucks that has been the scene of four bag thefts this year. “It is a comfort zone that people have.”
Another commanding officer said people who left laptops behind to use the restroom should not be surprised to return to an empty table.
Not to pick on the chain, based in Seattle. No one has tallied the number of Starbucks thefts, and purses and bags walk out of any number of restaurants and bars day and night. Grand larcenies — the theft of anything over $1,000, which is almost every purse with a credit card inside — remain the Police Department’s most vexing crime, as preventable as it is commonplace.
“I think it’s great people are so comfortable with New York City,” said Lt. Dan Hollywood, who is on the Grand Larceny Task Force in the Manhattan South precincts. “But we’ve turned it around enough; maybe they’re not quite as raised up as they used to be.”
The phenomenon, like the chain , is familiar outside of New York. There have been reports in the news media of thefts in Starbucks in places like Hoboken, N.J.; Birmingham, Mich.; Berkeley, Calif.; and Toronto. The wife of the chairman of the Federal Reserve had her purse stolen from a Starbucks in the District of Columbia and became a victim of an identity-theft scheme.
Lieutenant Hollywood and other officers say one reason Starbucks is frequently the scene of thefts is because there are so many of the shops in the city: 298 and counting.
A sampling: A woman sat down around 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Feb. 12 on a bench in the Starbucks on Spring and Crosby Streets in SoHo, setting her purse beside her while she used her laptop. She turned around — no more purse. She described to the police a man who had been sitting nearby, but security video was no help. She has yet to recover a Marc Jacobs wallet and its contents, including a ring and necklace together worth $1,200.
At the same Starbucks a month later, a woman sat with her father, looking at a map, her purse on another chair with a coat on top. The police officer who took her complaint later sheepishly admitted, “I do that all the time.” Someone took the purse with the wallet, credit cards and BlackBerry inside. To add insult to injury, a man approached later and said he had seen the whole thing. Then a woman walked up and said the same. Neither had spoken up during the theft.
Another month passed, and a woman hung her pocketbook on a hook on the wall and went to order what turned out to be a most expensive cup of coffee.
Starbucks replied to questions about thefts with an e-mail from corporate headquarters: “Customers should always be aware of their surroundings when in public places, whether at one of our stores or elsewhere.”
Lieutenant Hollywood, anonymous in plain clothes, walked into a Starbucks in Times Square this week and pointed. “See that bag by the newspapers?” he asked, rolling his eyes. At another Starbucks on West 41st Street, he was surprised to recognize a woman he had arrested for shoplifting a few years ago, so he took a seat and watched her. She left empty-handed.
His task force arrested about 200 suspects in grand larcenies witnessed by officers last year. One of the arrestees, a 50-year-old man, sat near a woman in a Starbucks on Union Square West and took her purse in July, the police said.
In February last year, the team arrested a 53-year-old parolee when officers saw him grab a police “decoy bag” in a Starbucks on Fifth Avenue. Two blocks away, in 2009, the police said, a 46-year-old man snatched an unattended laptop off a table.
A good thief can sit back-to-back to a mark and empty a purse hanging on the chair between them.
Lieutenant Hollywood stood in the center of a Starbucks on West 47th Street, glancing about the room, when a man approached and said, “You in line?”
No. “I’m not a coffee guy.”

As the Careless Order a Latte, Thieves Grab Something to Go

Distraction and extraction. These are the skills, timeless, of thousands of thieves who work in New York, without a weapon and without attracting notice.

Enlarge This Image

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Where in the city can such a thief visit dozens of happy hunting spots on an afternoon’s walk, finding rooms crowded with people staring at laptops or iPads, or texting or talking on phones, and ignoring their purses? A place so comfortable and familiar, with its jazz, leather chairs and Wi-Fi, that customers, otherwise savvy to the city’s dangers, do not think twice about saving a round blond-wood table with a bag or a laptop while they stand in line?
You may be there now, with a grande caffè mocha.
Starbucks shops are ubiquitous in New York, a respite for tourists and professionals young and old, and while the city’s criminal trends come and go and ebb and flow, there remains a steady march of handbags from those shops in someone else’s hands.
From Times Square to the Village to Brooklyn Heights, Starbucks pops up again and again on police blotters. Officers have set up stings in the chain’s stores. A commander even asked one branch to put up a sign warning customers; the manager demurred, saying such a sign required corporate approval.
No doubt such a sign would dampen the mood.
“You can let your guard down — people are sitting down and talking and using their laptops,” said Capt. Mark DiPaolo of the 84th Precinct in Brooklyn Heights, home to a Court Street Starbucks that has been the scene of four bag thefts this year. “It is a comfort zone that people have.”
Another commanding officer said people who left laptops behind to use the restroom should not be surprised to return to an empty table.
Not to pick on the chain, based in Seattle. No one has tallied the number of Starbucks thefts, and purses and bags walk out of any number of restaurants and bars day and night. Grand larcenies — the theft of anything over $1,000, which is almost every purse with a credit card inside — remain the Police Department’s most vexing crime, as preventable as it is commonplace.
“I think it’s great people are so comfortable with New York City,” said Lt. Dan Hollywood, who is on the Grand Larceny Task Force in the Manhattan South precincts. “But we’ve turned it around enough; maybe they’re not quite as raised up as they used to be.”
The phenomenon, like the chain , is familiar outside of New York. There have been reports in the news media of thefts in Starbucks in places like Hoboken, N.J.; Birmingham, Mich.; Berkeley, Calif.; and Toronto. The wife of the chairman of the Federal Reserve had her purse stolen from a Starbucks in the District of Columbia and became a victim of an identity-theft scheme.
Lieutenant Hollywood and other officers say one reason Starbucks is frequently the scene of thefts is because there are so many of the shops in the city: 298 and counting.
A sampling: A woman sat down around 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Feb. 12 on a bench in the Starbucks on Spring and Crosby Streets in SoHo, setting her purse beside her while she used her laptop. She turned around — no more purse. She described to the police a man who had been sitting nearby, but security video was no help. She has yet to recover a Marc Jacobs wallet and its contents, including a ring and necklace together worth $1,200.
At the same Starbucks a month later, a woman sat with her father, looking at a map, her purse on another chair with a coat on top. The police officer who took her complaint later sheepishly admitted, “I do that all the time.” Someone took the purse with the wallet, credit cards and BlackBerry inside. To add insult to injury, a man approached later and said he had seen the whole thing. Then a woman walked up and said the same. Neither had spoken up during the theft.
Another month passed, and a woman hung her pocketbook on a hook on the wall and went to order what turned out to be a most expensive cup of coffee.
Starbucks replied to questions about thefts with an e-mail from corporate headquarters: “Customers should always be aware of their surroundings when in public places, whether at one of our stores or elsewhere.”
Lieutenant Hollywood, anonymous in plain clothes, walked into a Starbucks in Times Square this week and pointed. “See that bag by the newspapers?” he asked, rolling his eyes. At another Starbucks on West 41st Street, he was surprised to recognize a woman he had arrested for shoplifting a few years ago, so he took a seat and watched her. She left empty-handed.
His task force arrested about 200 suspects in grand larcenies witnessed by officers last year. One of the arrestees, a 50-year-old man, sat near a woman in a Starbucks on Union Square West and took her purse in July, the police said.
In February last year, the team arrested a 53-year-old parolee when officers saw him grab a police “decoy bag” in a Starbucks on Fifth Avenue. Two blocks away, in 2009, the police said, a 46-year-old man snatched an unattended laptop off a table.
A good thief can sit back-to-back to a mark and empty a purse hanging on the chair between them.
Lieutenant Hollywood stood in the center of a Starbucks on West 47th Street, glancing about the room, when a man approached and said, “You in line?”
No. “I’m not a coffee guy.”

A Traditional Royal Wedding, but for the 3 Billion Witnesses

James Hill for The New York Times

Roaring crowds (and a scowling bridesmaid) greeted Prince William and Kate Middleton for their kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on Friday. More Photos »

LONDON — In the end, Friday’s wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton may not have ushered in a new dawn for the frayed royal family or brought a renewed era of optimism to a country beset by financial woes, as some predicted in the overheated countdown to the big day. But it proved that the British still know how to combine pageantry, solemnity and romance (and wild hats) better than anyone else in the world.

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Scenes From the Royal Wedding

Photographs: Submit Your Royal Wedding Photos

Heading to Westminster Abbey? Or attending a royal wedding party at a pub? At your neighbor’s home? We’d like to see your photos and we’ll publish the most creative. Show us hats, costumes, tchotchkes, breakfast spreads, etc.

The couple now known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left Buckingham Palace on Friday in an Aston Martin Volante. More Photos »

It was an impeccably choreographed occasion of high pomp and heartfelt emotion, of ancient customs tweaked by modern developments (Elton John brought his husband).
Viewing estimates for the ceremony, at 11 a.m. British time on the dot, hovered in the three billion range, give or take 500 million. Australians held bouquet-throwing competitions; people in Hong Kong wore Kate and William masks; New Yorkers rose by dawn to watch the entrance of guests like Victoria Beckham, teetering pregnantly in sky-high Christian Louboutin heels, Guy Ritchie, the former Mr. Madonna, and assorted monarchs from European countries that are no longer monarchies, like Bulgaria.
In London, the Metropolitan Police said, a million people lined the route of the royal procession, and half a million gathered in front of Buckingham Palace to watch the bride and groom, now known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, kiss (twice) on the palace balcony.
People paid attention almost despite themselves.
“I never really think too seriously about them,” said Kathy Gunn, 54, speaking of the royal family. Yet she had somehow been inexorably sucked into the spirit of the occasion, watching it unfold with a crowd on a huge screen at a cafe in central London. “It gives you a great sense of community and spirit,” she said. “I am a royalist for the day.”
In a world of scattered attention, the occasion had the effect of providing a single international conversation about a subject with universal appeal. It was like a party scene in “Dallas,” only with Prince Philip instead of J. R. Ewing.
Grizzled political correspondents, hauled in to television studios to serve as wedding anchors, found themselves talking in all seriousness about the passementerie of the mother of the bride’s dress and the provenance of Miss Middleton’s tiara. (She borrowed it from Queen Elizabeth, in case you were wondering. It is made of a great many diamonds.)
There was a feast of interesting particulars. First, Kate’s dress. Though The Daily Mail successfully predicted the name of the designer — Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen — it was still an official secret, so much so that Ms. Burton tried to sneak into Kate’s hotel on Thursday night with her face mostly obscured by a huge yeti-like fur hat.
St. James’s Palace released the details of the dress just as Miss Middleton stepped out of a royal Rolls-Royce with her father, Michael, to walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey.
Her “something old” was the design of the dress, using traditional craftsmanship. “Something new” was represented by her earrings, a gift from her parents. The tiara was borrowed, and she had a blue ribbon sewn into her dress for her blue item.
Prince William wore the bright scarlet coat of an Irish Guards mounted officer, the uniform of his senior honorary army appointment. He was wearing “gold sword slings,” St. James’s Palace said, but no sword.
The outfits of the guests were generally tasteful and royal-friendly. A few things stuck out. The exotic costumes of foreign dignitaries, seeming throwbacks to imperial times. The hats worn by the ladies, which resembled, variously, overturned buckets, flowerpots, lampshades, fezzes, salad plates, tea cozies, flying saucers, abstract artworks or, in one case, a pile of feathers. There were also a number of fascinators, decorative shapes with flowers or feathers, that are stuck in one’s hair but are not hats.
Catty observers pointed out that Prime Minister David Cameron’s wife, Samantha, was possibly the only female guest who wore no hat (or fascinator) at all.
Mr. Cameron wore a traditional morning suit. The dress code had filled him with angst this month when news broke out that in order to avoid appearing too posh, he intended to wear a regular business suit, what the British call a “lounge suit.” But as scorn poured upon him — he is in fact posh and frequently wears posh clothes — he said that he would wear a morning suit after all.
Some questions were also raised about the guest list. John Major and Margaret Thatcher, former Conservative prime ministers, were invited; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, former Labour prime ministers, were not. (Mr. Major attended; Lady Thatcher was ill and stayed home.) The Syrian ambassador was invited, and then uninvited. Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was never invited.
The new duchess, of course, has parents who made their own fortune with an Internet party-accouterments business. Even a generation ago, she would have been considered unthinkable as a prospective royal bride.
The country’s merciless news media have been watching hopefully, and mostly fruitlessly, for signs of middle-class behavior from the Middletons. One TV commentator, standing outside the Goring Hotel, which the Middletons rented for the night before the wedding, remarked, “It’s sometimes hard to tell who are Middletons and who are staff.”
But except for having no titles, no inherited tiaras and no military uniforms, the Middletons were indistinguishable from the guests at the wedding. The bride’s mother, Carole, wore a lovely outfit by Catherine Walker, an aristocrat-approved designer; she did not chew gum, as she was said to have done once when she appeared in public at a royal event, or exhibit déclassé tendencies of any kind.
Kate’s elevation, such as it is, to royalty adds a special frisson to the story of her romance with William. The world knows that there are often no fairy-tale endings to these made-for-television moments — the collapse of the marriage of William’s parents being the most obvious example. But this couple seems to be a real one, with the potential to resuscitate the image of a royal family tarnished by misadventures like the antics of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew, and resentment over privilege and expenditures.
Kate, who promised to love William but not to obey him, is not actually a princess yet (if she were, she would be called Princess William, which is perhaps not a dream title). But she seems already at ease in what will now be a lifetime job, one with a heavy burden of responsibility as well as great privilege. As the couple drove in their horse-drawn carriage from the church to Buckingham Palace, she waved like a pro — from the wrist, the royal way.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

A Traditional Royal Wedding, but for the 3 Billion Witnesses

James Hill for The New York Times

Roaring crowds (and a scowling bridesmaid) greeted Prince William and Kate Middleton for their kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on Friday. More Photos »

LONDON — In the end, Friday’s wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton may not have ushered in a new dawn for the frayed royal family or brought a renewed era of optimism to a country beset by financial woes, as some predicted in the overheated countdown to the big day. But it proved that the British still know how to combine pageantry, solemnity and romance (and wild hats) better than anyone else in the world.

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Scenes From the Royal Wedding

Photographs: Submit Your Royal Wedding Photos

Heading to Westminster Abbey? Or attending a royal wedding party at a pub? At your neighbor’s home? We’d like to see your photos and we’ll publish the most creative. Show us hats, costumes, tchotchkes, breakfast spreads, etc.

The couple now known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left Buckingham Palace on Friday in an Aston Martin Volante. More Photos »

It was an impeccably choreographed occasion of high pomp and heartfelt emotion, of ancient customs tweaked by modern developments (Elton John brought his husband).
Viewing estimates for the ceremony, at 11 a.m. British time on the dot, hovered in the three billion range, give or take 500 million. Australians held bouquet-throwing competitions; people in Hong Kong wore Kate and William masks; New Yorkers rose by dawn to watch the entrance of guests like Victoria Beckham, teetering pregnantly in sky-high Christian Louboutin heels, Guy Ritchie, the former Mr. Madonna, and assorted monarchs from European countries that are no longer monarchies, like Bulgaria.
In London, the Metropolitan Police said, a million people lined the route of the royal procession, and half a million gathered in front of Buckingham Palace to watch the bride and groom, now known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, kiss (twice) on the palace balcony.
People paid attention almost despite themselves.
“I never really think too seriously about them,” said Kathy Gunn, 54, speaking of the royal family. Yet she had somehow been inexorably sucked into the spirit of the occasion, watching it unfold with a crowd on a huge screen at a cafe in central London. “It gives you a great sense of community and spirit,” she said. “I am a royalist for the day.”
In a world of scattered attention, the occasion had the effect of providing a single international conversation about a subject with universal appeal. It was like a party scene in “Dallas,” only with Prince Philip instead of J. R. Ewing.
Grizzled political correspondents, hauled in to television studios to serve as wedding anchors, found themselves talking in all seriousness about the passementerie of the mother of the bride’s dress and the provenance of Miss Middleton’s tiara. (She borrowed it from Queen Elizabeth, in case you were wondering. It is made of a great many diamonds.)
There was a feast of interesting particulars. First, Kate’s dress. Though The Daily Mail successfully predicted the name of the designer — Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen — it was still an official secret, so much so that Ms. Burton tried to sneak into Kate’s hotel on Thursday night with her face mostly obscured by a huge yeti-like fur hat.
St. James’s Palace released the details of the dress just as Miss Middleton stepped out of a royal Rolls-Royce with her father, Michael, to walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey.
Her “something old” was the design of the dress, using traditional craftsmanship. “Something new” was represented by her earrings, a gift from her parents. The tiara was borrowed, and she had a blue ribbon sewn into her dress for her blue item.
Prince William wore the bright scarlet coat of an Irish Guards mounted officer, the uniform of his senior honorary army appointment. He was wearing “gold sword slings,” St. James’s Palace said, but no sword.
The outfits of the guests were generally tasteful and royal-friendly. A few things stuck out. The exotic costumes of foreign dignitaries, seeming throwbacks to imperial times. The hats worn by the ladies, which resembled, variously, overturned buckets, flowerpots, lampshades, fezzes, salad plates, tea cozies, flying saucers, abstract artworks or, in one case, a pile of feathers. There were also a number of fascinators, decorative shapes with flowers or feathers, that are stuck in one’s hair but are not hats.
Catty observers pointed out that Prime Minister David Cameron’s wife, Samantha, was possibly the only female guest who wore no hat (or fascinator) at all.
Mr. Cameron wore a traditional morning suit. The dress code had filled him with angst this month when news broke out that in order to avoid appearing too posh, he intended to wear a regular business suit, what the British call a “lounge suit.” But as scorn poured upon him — he is in fact posh and frequently wears posh clothes — he said that he would wear a morning suit after all.
Some questions were also raised about the guest list. John Major and Margaret Thatcher, former Conservative prime ministers, were invited; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, former Labour prime ministers, were not. (Mr. Major attended; Lady Thatcher was ill and stayed home.) The Syrian ambassador was invited, and then uninvited. Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, was never invited.
The new duchess, of course, has parents who made their own fortune with an Internet party-accouterments business. Even a generation ago, she would have been considered unthinkable as a prospective royal bride.
The country’s merciless news media have been watching hopefully, and mostly fruitlessly, for signs of middle-class behavior from the Middletons. One TV commentator, standing outside the Goring Hotel, which the Middletons rented for the night before the wedding, remarked, “It’s sometimes hard to tell who are Middletons and who are staff.”
But except for having no titles, no inherited tiaras and no military uniforms, the Middletons were indistinguishable from the guests at the wedding. The bride’s mother, Carole, wore a lovely outfit by Catherine Walker, an aristocrat-approved designer; she did not chew gum, as she was said to have done once when she appeared in public at a royal event, or exhibit déclassé tendencies of any kind.
Kate’s elevation, such as it is, to royalty adds a special frisson to the story of her romance with William. The world knows that there are often no fairy-tale endings to these made-for-television moments — the collapse of the marriage of William’s parents being the most obvious example. But this couple seems to be a real one, with the potential to resuscitate the image of a royal family tarnished by misadventures like the antics of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew, and resentment over privilege and expenditures.
Kate, who promised to love William but not to obey him, is not actually a princess yet (if she were, she would be called Princess William, which is perhaps not a dream title). But she seems already at ease in what will now be a lifetime job, one with a heavy burden of responsibility as well as great privilege. As the couple drove in their horse-drawn carriage from the church to Buckingham Palace, she waved like a pro — from the wrist, the royal way.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

Groups Form to Aid Democrats With Anonymous Money

MANCHESTER, N.H. — A group including former White House officials, union leaders and one of Hollywood’s biggest producers have joined forces to start an outside effort to help President Obama and Congressional Democrats in 2012 by using the very sort of anonymous, unlimited donations from moneyed interests that the president has so deplored.

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Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

Bill Burton a former White House deputy press secretary, is a founder of the new groups established to aid Democrats in 2012.

Related

• Democrats Sue to Force U.S. Election Agency to Reveal Political Donations (April 22, 2011)

• Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit (January 22, 2010)

Blogs

The Caucus

The latest on President Obama, the new Congress and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

• FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus
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Seongjoon Cho/Bloomberg News

The Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg is also a co-founder of the new aid groups.

Co-founded by the former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton and with seed money from the Service Employees International Union and the film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, the group’s entrée into the early 2012 contest all but ensures that the presidential race will be awash in cash from undisclosed corporate and labor sources with huge stakes in Washington policy making.
At the heart of the effort, introduced Friday morning, are two groups: Priorities USA Action, which will engage directly in electioneering backed by donors who will have to be identified but can give unlimited amounts, and Priorities USA, which will advertise about related campaign issues using money from undisclosed sources.
The effort is modeled on the one Republicans started last year — with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove — that attacked Democrats with a barrage of advertisements, mailings and phone calls. It was widely credited with helping the party to take control of the House and diminish the Democrats’ edge in the Senate last fall. One of those groups, Crossroads GPS, was set up under a section of the tax code that allowed its donors to remain anonymous, leading Mr. Obama to refer to such groups collectively as “a threat to democracy” for the way they had shielded corporate interests from view as they sought to sway elections.
Democrats had eschewed the formation of such groups last year at Mr. Obama’s public urging, but after the elections in November prominent liberals vowed to form with outside groups of their own to combat the likes of Crossroads.
Speaking aboard Air Force One on Friday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said that the president’s views had not changed and that the administration had nothing to do with the new groups.
“We don’t control outside groups,” Mr. Carney said. “These are not people working for the administration.”
The Priorities USA organizers said they hoped to raise enough money to keep pace with the Crossroads groups, which have set a goal of raising $120 million for the 2012 election cycle.
The organizers said they would coordinate their efforts with a series of other liberal groups that have formed in recent months to bolster Democrats and Mr. Obama and attack Republicans and conservatives, much the way the Crossroads groups have coordinated with like-minded organizations against Democrats.
The announcement brought immediate criticism from groups calling for tighter campaign finance restrictions, and broader adherence to existing law, that Democrats were now getting into the act themselves.
Former Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and a co-sponsor of the landmark legislation of 2002 that had placed tight restrictions on corporate giving but has since been chipped away by court rulings, said in a statement that efforts to imitate the “right-wing tactics” of Mr. Rove and others “do our nation no favors.”
Fred Wertheimer, president of the group Democracy 21, said his group was looking into filing a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service questioning the tax status of Priorities USA, saying that he was skeptical that it was serving anything other than a political purpose intended to influence the upcoming election. (The section of the tax code it was formed under — 501(c) (4) — is for groups that are not seeking to directly affect elections). He has registered a similar complaint against Crossroads GPS.
Mr. Wertheimer predicted that the 2012 campaign would have more anonymously donated money working for or against the election of federal candidates than any other has since the Watergate scandal kicked off the decades-long effort to reform the system — unless, he said, new legislative steps are taken to force greater transparency (an unlikely seeming eventuality for now given that both parties are getting so deeply involved in soliciting secret money).
Republicans seized on the formation of the group and its connections to the White House via Mr. Burton and the other co-founder of the groups, Sean Sweeney, a onetime deputy to the former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, as an example of hypocrisy.
Crossroads GPS publicized Mr. Obama’s remarks in Philadelphia in October questioning anonymous donations that were spent in the service of Republicans. “The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections, and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people,” Mr. Obama said then.
An aide to the Senate minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sent an e-mail quoting Mr. Burton as saying last year, “The president thinks that if you’re going to participate in politics, you ought to be transparent about it.”
Coordination between outside groups and federal candidates is strictly prohibited, if hard to prove and harder still to enforce.
Asked if he had any contact with the White House on the formation of the groups, Mr. Burton said in an e-mail, “We will be clear that we cannot coordinate with anyone at the White House or on the campaign.”
Asked if the issue had come up during his time at the White House, Mr. Burton said, “Outside groups were obviously a topic of conversation” there, but “We decided to do this on our own, after we left the White House and spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it.”
He said the groups were planned strictly as a reaction to the formation of groups by Mr. Rove and the Koch family, among others, adding, “We don’t think progressives should live by a different set of rules than conservatives.”
Advisers to the groups include Harold Ickes, a former Clinton White House deputy chief of staff; Ellen Malcolm, founder of Emily’s List, which supports candidates favoring abortion rights; and Robert McKay, chairman of Democracy Alliance, which took a leading role in organizing liberal groups.

Groups Form to Aid Democrats With Anonymous Money

MANCHESTER, N.H. — A group including former White House officials, union leaders and one of Hollywood’s biggest producers have joined forces to start an outside effort to help President Obama and Congressional Democrats in 2012 by using the very sort of anonymous, unlimited donations from moneyed interests that the president has so deplored.

Enlarge This Image

Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

Bill Burton a former White House deputy press secretary, is a founder of the new groups established to aid Democrats in 2012.

Related

• Democrats Sue to Force U.S. Election Agency to Reveal Political Donations (April 22, 2011)

• Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit (January 22, 2010)

Blogs

The Caucus

The latest on President Obama, the new Congress and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.

• FiveThirtyEight: Nate Silver's Political Calculus
• More Politics News

Enlarge This Image

Seongjoon Cho/Bloomberg News

The Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg is also a co-founder of the new aid groups.

Co-founded by the former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton and with seed money from the Service Employees International Union and the film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, the group’s entrée into the early 2012 contest all but ensures that the presidential race will be awash in cash from undisclosed corporate and labor sources with huge stakes in Washington policy making.
At the heart of the effort, introduced Friday morning, are two groups: Priorities USA Action, which will engage directly in electioneering backed by donors who will have to be identified but can give unlimited amounts, and Priorities USA, which will advertise about related campaign issues using money from undisclosed sources.
The effort is modeled on the one Republicans started last year — with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove — that attacked Democrats with a barrage of advertisements, mailings and phone calls. It was widely credited with helping the party to take control of the House and diminish the Democrats’ edge in the Senate last fall. One of those groups, Crossroads GPS, was set up under a section of the tax code that allowed its donors to remain anonymous, leading Mr. Obama to refer to such groups collectively as “a threat to democracy” for the way they had shielded corporate interests from view as they sought to sway elections.
Democrats had eschewed the formation of such groups last year at Mr. Obama’s public urging, but after the elections in November prominent liberals vowed to form with outside groups of their own to combat the likes of Crossroads.
Speaking aboard Air Force One on Friday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said that the president’s views had not changed and that the administration had nothing to do with the new groups.
“We don’t control outside groups,” Mr. Carney said. “These are not people working for the administration.”
The Priorities USA organizers said they hoped to raise enough money to keep pace with the Crossroads groups, which have set a goal of raising $120 million for the 2012 election cycle.
The organizers said they would coordinate their efforts with a series of other liberal groups that have formed in recent months to bolster Democrats and Mr. Obama and attack Republicans and conservatives, much the way the Crossroads groups have coordinated with like-minded organizations against Democrats.
The announcement brought immediate criticism from groups calling for tighter campaign finance restrictions, and broader adherence to existing law, that Democrats were now getting into the act themselves.
Former Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and a co-sponsor of the landmark legislation of 2002 that had placed tight restrictions on corporate giving but has since been chipped away by court rulings, said in a statement that efforts to imitate the “right-wing tactics” of Mr. Rove and others “do our nation no favors.”
Fred Wertheimer, president of the group Democracy 21, said his group was looking into filing a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service questioning the tax status of Priorities USA, saying that he was skeptical that it was serving anything other than a political purpose intended to influence the upcoming election. (The section of the tax code it was formed under — 501(c) (4) — is for groups that are not seeking to directly affect elections). He has registered a similar complaint against Crossroads GPS.
Mr. Wertheimer predicted that the 2012 campaign would have more anonymously donated money working for or against the election of federal candidates than any other has since the Watergate scandal kicked off the decades-long effort to reform the system — unless, he said, new legislative steps are taken to force greater transparency (an unlikely seeming eventuality for now given that both parties are getting so deeply involved in soliciting secret money).
Republicans seized on the formation of the group and its connections to the White House via Mr. Burton and the other co-founder of the groups, Sean Sweeney, a onetime deputy to the former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, as an example of hypocrisy.
Crossroads GPS publicized Mr. Obama’s remarks in Philadelphia in October questioning anonymous donations that were spent in the service of Republicans. “The American people deserve to know who’s trying to sway their elections, and you can’t stand by and let the special interests drown out the voices of the American people,” Mr. Obama said then.
An aide to the Senate minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, sent an e-mail quoting Mr. Burton as saying last year, “The president thinks that if you’re going to participate in politics, you ought to be transparent about it.”
Coordination between outside groups and federal candidates is strictly prohibited, if hard to prove and harder still to enforce.
Asked if he had any contact with the White House on the formation of the groups, Mr. Burton said in an e-mail, “We will be clear that we cannot coordinate with anyone at the White House or on the campaign.”
Asked if the issue had come up during his time at the White House, Mr. Burton said, “Outside groups were obviously a topic of conversation” there, but “We decided to do this on our own, after we left the White House and spent a considerable amount of time thinking about it.”
He said the groups were planned strictly as a reaction to the formation of groups by Mr. Rove and the Koch family, among others, adding, “We don’t think progressives should live by a different set of rules than conservatives.”
Advisers to the groups include Harold Ickes, a former Clinton White House deputy chief of staff; Ellen Malcolm, founder of Emily’s List, which supports candidates favoring abortion rights; and Robert McKay, chairman of Democracy Alliance, which took a leading role in organizing liberal groups.

U.S. Moves Cautiously Against Syrian Leaders

WASHINGTON — A brutal Arab dictator with a long history of enmity toward the United States turns tanks and troops against his own people, killing hundreds of protesters. His country threatens to split along sectarian lines, with the violence potentially spilling over to its neighbors, some of whom are close allies of Washington.

Enlarge This Image

President Bashar al-Assad, right, with his brother Maher at the funeral of their father, Hafez al-Assad, in Damascus in 2000.

Libya? Yes, but also Syria.
And yet, with the Syrian government’s bloody crackdown intensifying on Friday, President Obama has not demanded that President Bashar al-Assad resign, and he has not considered military action. Instead, on Friday, the White House took a step that most experts agree will have a modest impact: announcing focused sanctions against three senior officials, including a brother and a cousin of Mr. Assad.
The divergent American responses illustrate the starkly different calculations the United States faces in these countries. For all the parallels to Libya, Mr. Assad is much less isolated internationally than the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. He commands a more capable army, which experts say is unlikely to turn on him, as the military in Egypt did on President Hosni Mubarak. And the ripple effects of Mr. Assad’s ouster would be both wider and more unpredictable than in the case of Colonel Qaddafi.
“Syria is important in a way that Libya is not,” said Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is no central U.S. interest engaged in Libya. But a greatly destabilized Syria has implications for Iraq, it has implications for Lebanon, it has implications for Israel.”
These complexities have made Syria a less clear-cut case, even for those who have called for more robust American action against Libya. Senator John McCain, along with Senators Lindsey Graham and Joseph I. Lieberman, urged Mr. Obama earlier this week to demand Mr. Assad’s resignation. But Mr. McCain, an early advocate of a no-fly zone over Libya, said he opposed military action in Syria.
Human rights groups are even more cautious. “If Obama were to call for Assad to go, I don’t think it would change things on the ground in any way, shape or form,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, which had supported military action in Libya. In this case, he said, sanctions were the right move.
Those measures freeze the assets of three top officials, most notably Maher al-Assad, President Assad’s brother and a brigade commander who is leading the operations in Dara’a. But Syrian leaders tend to keep their money in European and Middle Eastern banks, putting it beyond the reach of the Treasury.
The measures also take aim at Syria’s intelligence agency and the Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite paramilitary unit already under heavy sanctions from the United States. Iran, officials said, is using the force to funnel tear gas, batons and other riot gear to Syria.
The administration did not impose sanctions on President Assad, saying it focused on those directly responsible for human-rights abuses. A senior official said the United States would not hesitate to add him to the list if the violence did not stop. But the White House seemed to be calculating that it could still prevail on him to show restraint.
“Our goal is to end the violence and create an opening for the Syrian people’s legitimate aspirations,” said a spokesman for the National Security Council, Tommy Vietor. “These are among the U.S. government’s strongest available tools to promote these outcomes.”
The European Union said Friday that it was preparing an arms embargo against Syria and threatened further sanctions and cuts in aid. And in Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the violence, though the statement was diluted from one drafted by the United States.
The debate over the United Nations resolution demonstrated the difficulty in marshaling international censure of Syria. In Geneva, 26 countries supported the resolution, but nine voted against it, including Russia and China. The two countries blocked a similar effort to pass a resolution at the Security Council this week, a stark contrast to the tough action on Libya.
Even for the Obama administration, abandoning Mr. Assad has costs. For two years, it cultivated him in hopes that Syria would break the logjam in the Middle East peace process by signing a treaty with Israel. The United States tried to lure Syria away from Iran, the greatest American nemesis in the area.
Even the possibility of a change in leadership in Syria had reverberations this week, with the surprise agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to form a unity government. By most accounts, Hamas was motivated in part by a fear that if Mr. Assad were forced from power, it could lose its patron in Damascus.
Disarray in Syria could threaten Israel’s security more directly. While Israeli officials point out that Mr. Assad has hardly been a friend of Israel, if he were replaced by a militant Sunni government, this could pose even greater dangers.
Israel’s sensitivity about Syria is so acute that when reports began circulating this week that Israeli officials were pressing the White House to be less tough on Damascus, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, called reporters to insist that his government was doing nothing of the sort.
Among other countries that are sensitive: Turkey, which shares a border with Syria and a Kurdish population that could be stirred up by unrest; and Saudi Arabia, which does not want to see another Arab government topple. While Mr. Assad’s fall would damage Iran’s regional ambitions, analysts offer caveats.
“The regime coming down in a speedy, orderly transition to a Sunni government would be a setback for Iran, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We’re headed for something much messier. The Iranians can play around in that.”
As the administration weighs its options, it faces a sobering fact: The United States has little influence over Damascus. Still, some analysts said the United States must leave open the possibility of tougher measures.
“If a Benghazi-style massacre is threatened, we would have to consider a humanitarian intervention under the same principle,” said Martin S. Indyk, Brookings Institution’s director of foreign policy. “Hard to imagine at this point when the death toll is 400. But if it rises to tens of thousands?”

Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels.

U.S. Moves Cautiously Against Syrian Leaders

WASHINGTON — A brutal Arab dictator with a long history of enmity toward the United States turns tanks and troops against his own people, killing hundreds of protesters. His country threatens to split along sectarian lines, with the violence potentially spilling over to its neighbors, some of whom are close allies of Washington.

Enlarge This Image

President Bashar al-Assad, right, with his brother Maher at the funeral of their father, Hafez al-Assad, in Damascus in 2000.

Libya? Yes, but also Syria.
And yet, with the Syrian government’s bloody crackdown intensifying on Friday, President Obama has not demanded that President Bashar al-Assad resign, and he has not considered military action. Instead, on Friday, the White House took a step that most experts agree will have a modest impact: announcing focused sanctions against three senior officials, including a brother and a cousin of Mr. Assad.
The divergent American responses illustrate the starkly different calculations the United States faces in these countries. For all the parallels to Libya, Mr. Assad is much less isolated internationally than the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. He commands a more capable army, which experts say is unlikely to turn on him, as the military in Egypt did on President Hosni Mubarak. And the ripple effects of Mr. Assad’s ouster would be both wider and more unpredictable than in the case of Colonel Qaddafi.
“Syria is important in a way that Libya is not,” said Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is no central U.S. interest engaged in Libya. But a greatly destabilized Syria has implications for Iraq, it has implications for Lebanon, it has implications for Israel.”
These complexities have made Syria a less clear-cut case, even for those who have called for more robust American action against Libya. Senator John McCain, along with Senators Lindsey Graham and Joseph I. Lieberman, urged Mr. Obama earlier this week to demand Mr. Assad’s resignation. But Mr. McCain, an early advocate of a no-fly zone over Libya, said he opposed military action in Syria.
Human rights groups are even more cautious. “If Obama were to call for Assad to go, I don’t think it would change things on the ground in any way, shape or form,” said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, which had supported military action in Libya. In this case, he said, sanctions were the right move.
Those measures freeze the assets of three top officials, most notably Maher al-Assad, President Assad’s brother and a brigade commander who is leading the operations in Dara’a. But Syrian leaders tend to keep their money in European and Middle Eastern banks, putting it beyond the reach of the Treasury.
The measures also take aim at Syria’s intelligence agency and the Quds Force of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite paramilitary unit already under heavy sanctions from the United States. Iran, officials said, is using the force to funnel tear gas, batons and other riot gear to Syria.
The administration did not impose sanctions on President Assad, saying it focused on those directly responsible for human-rights abuses. A senior official said the United States would not hesitate to add him to the list if the violence did not stop. But the White House seemed to be calculating that it could still prevail on him to show restraint.
“Our goal is to end the violence and create an opening for the Syrian people’s legitimate aspirations,” said a spokesman for the National Security Council, Tommy Vietor. “These are among the U.S. government’s strongest available tools to promote these outcomes.”
The European Union said Friday that it was preparing an arms embargo against Syria and threatened further sanctions and cuts in aid. And in Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the violence, though the statement was diluted from one drafted by the United States.
The debate over the United Nations resolution demonstrated the difficulty in marshaling international censure of Syria. In Geneva, 26 countries supported the resolution, but nine voted against it, including Russia and China. The two countries blocked a similar effort to pass a resolution at the Security Council this week, a stark contrast to the tough action on Libya.
Even for the Obama administration, abandoning Mr. Assad has costs. For two years, it cultivated him in hopes that Syria would break the logjam in the Middle East peace process by signing a treaty with Israel. The United States tried to lure Syria away from Iran, the greatest American nemesis in the area.
Even the possibility of a change in leadership in Syria had reverberations this week, with the surprise agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to form a unity government. By most accounts, Hamas was motivated in part by a fear that if Mr. Assad were forced from power, it could lose its patron in Damascus.
Disarray in Syria could threaten Israel’s security more directly. While Israeli officials point out that Mr. Assad has hardly been a friend of Israel, if he were replaced by a militant Sunni government, this could pose even greater dangers.
Israel’s sensitivity about Syria is so acute that when reports began circulating this week that Israeli officials were pressing the White House to be less tough on Damascus, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, called reporters to insist that his government was doing nothing of the sort.
Among other countries that are sensitive: Turkey, which shares a border with Syria and a Kurdish population that could be stirred up by unrest; and Saudi Arabia, which does not want to see another Arab government topple. While Mr. Assad’s fall would damage Iran’s regional ambitions, analysts offer caveats.
“The regime coming down in a speedy, orderly transition to a Sunni government would be a setback for Iran, but that’s not what’s happening,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We’re headed for something much messier. The Iranians can play around in that.”
As the administration weighs its options, it faces a sobering fact: The United States has little influence over Damascus. Still, some analysts said the United States must leave open the possibility of tougher measures.
“If a Benghazi-style massacre is threatened, we would have to consider a humanitarian intervention under the same principle,” said Martin S. Indyk, Brookings Institution’s director of foreign policy. “Hard to imagine at this point when the death toll is 400. But if it rises to tens of thousands?”

Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Brussels.

Parties Seeking to Blame Each Other’s Policies for Gas Prices

WASHINGTON — Congress returns next week to a flaring brawl over oil industry profits and tax breaks, with both parties hoping to capitalize on growing public ire at high gasoline prices.

“When oil companies are making huge profits and you’re struggling at the pump, and we’re scouring the federal budget for spending we can afford to do without, these tax giveaways aren’t right,” President Obama said in his weekly address on Saturday. But in the Republican response, Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma countered: “For more than two years, his administration has knowingly increased energy prices by choking off new sources of traditional American energy and smothering our economy in new energy regulations.
Last week, Mr. Obama touched off the latest flurry with a letter to Congressional leaders last week calling for the repeal of $4 billion a year in tax incentives for domestic oil and gas production, saying the industry was doing very well, thank you, and needed no help from the government. Republicans responded that the president’s proposal would only raise the cost of production and the price of gasoline, which now tops $4 a gallon in many parts of the country.
Both parties are planning legislative maneuvers this week to try to caricature their opponents as either in the pockets of the oil companies or hostile to domestic energy production.
The debate may generate a fair amount of noise that provides one side or the other with a temporary political advantage but is unlikely in the end to have an appreciable impact on gasoline prices.
“Every time Americans have to shell out $60 or $80 to fill their tanks, they mutter under their breaths about government and it puts pressure on Congress and the White House to do something,” said Byron L. Dorgan, the former Democratic senator from North Dakota who is now co-chairman of an energy project at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “But it’s just howling at the moon. The basic laws of supply and demand haven’t changed.”
House Speaker John Boehner unwittingly gave the Democrats a political opening to pile on the oil companies by saying in an interview with ABC News last week that oil companies should “pay their fair share in taxes” and that Congress ought to reconsider some of the tax incentives they enjoy. He has since walked away from those remarks and said that raising any taxes would choke off the economic recovery and lead to higher prices of gasoline and other goods.
His comments came as lawmakers from both parties were home on recess, hearing a torrent of constituent complaints about the high cost of gasoline at the same time major oil companies were reporting near-record quarterly profits. Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest oil company, said it earned $10.7 billion in the first three months of the year, and other companies reported similarly robust earnings.
Mr. Obama seized on the opportunity to try to deflect some of the heat he has been feeling as gas prices have steadily climbed. He noted wryly at a political fund-raiser last weekend that his poll numbers tend to go up and down with pump prices, even as he admitted he had no “silver bullet” to bring those prices down in the short term. But he found ammunition in the tax breaks the oil industry has enjoyed for decades, portraying the industry as undeserving of them at a time when government needs all the revenue it can get.
“As we work together to reduce our deficits,” Mr. Obama said in a letter to Congressional leaders last week, “we simply can’t afford these wasteful subsidies.” Mr. Obama says the money saved should be used to finance more research into clean energy alternatives — a proposal he has made in his last two budget requests that has largely been ignored.
“The odds are low that the tax repeal goes through as a stand-alone measure, but you might see it as part of a broader deal,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environment specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. He said it was in Mr. Obama’s interest to keep the issue alive both to align Republicans with the unpopular oil companies and to use as leverage as new budget negotiations begin.
Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, said he would press for a vote as early as next week on repealing the tax subsidies. Democrats hope to paint Republicans who vote against the plan as tools of the industry.
“Now is not the time to stand idly by while large oil and gas companies get billions of dollars in tax breaks,” said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the finance committee. “Now is the time to take concrete steps toward cleaner, more affordable, domestically produced energy.”
The measure could well pass in the Democratic Senate, although some Democrats from oil-producing states, like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska, are likely to oppose it.
But it has little chance of even coming to a vote in the Republican-run House, where Speaker Boehner is orchestrating a fresh chorus of “drill, baby, drill” with a series of votes on bills to allow new oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Virginia.
“Our goal is to expand the supply of American energy to lower gas prices and create jobs,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for Mr. Boehner. “Raising taxes would have the opposite effect.”
Neither the Senate tax measure nor the House drilling bills is likely to become law because of the fierce partisan calculus of the current Congress. But some Republicans, including Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s leader on budget matters, have left open the door for rethinking a range of government tax breaks as part of an agreement on the federal budget and deficit ceiling.
Some conservatives oppose energy subsidies of all sorts — including those for ethanol, wind, nuclear and solar power — and would be willing to see them all repealed as part of a reform of the business tax code.
Oil industry tax breaks — some of them dating back a century — have been debated for years but have survived every elimination attempt. According to a breakdown by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, oil companies receive about $4 billion a year in federal subsidies and can avail themselves of tax breaks at virtually every stage of the prospecting and drilling process.
One lingering provision from the Tariff Act of 1913 — enacted to encourage exploration at a time when drilling often led to dry holes — allows many small and midsize oil companies to claim deductions for tapped oil fields far beyond the amount the companies actually paid for them.
Another subsidy, devised by the State Department in the 1950s, allows U.S.-based oil companies to reclassify the royalties they are charged by foreign governments as taxes — which can be deducted dollar-for-dollar from their domestic tax bill. That provision alone will cost the federal government $8.2 billion over the next decade, according to the Treasury department.

David Kocieniewski contributed reporting from New York.

Parties Seeking to Blame Each Other’s Policies for Gas Prices

WASHINGTON — Congress returns next week to a flaring brawl over oil industry profits and tax breaks, with both parties hoping to capitalize on growing public ire at high gasoline prices.

“When oil companies are making huge profits and you’re struggling at the pump, and we’re scouring the federal budget for spending we can afford to do without, these tax giveaways aren’t right,” President Obama said in his weekly address on Saturday. But in the Republican response, Rep. James Lankford of Oklahoma countered: “For more than two years, his administration has knowingly increased energy prices by choking off new sources of traditional American energy and smothering our economy in new energy regulations.
Last week, Mr. Obama touched off the latest flurry with a letter to Congressional leaders last week calling for the repeal of $4 billion a year in tax incentives for domestic oil and gas production, saying the industry was doing very well, thank you, and needed no help from the government. Republicans responded that the president’s proposal would only raise the cost of production and the price of gasoline, which now tops $4 a gallon in many parts of the country.
Both parties are planning legislative maneuvers this week to try to caricature their opponents as either in the pockets of the oil companies or hostile to domestic energy production.
The debate may generate a fair amount of noise that provides one side or the other with a temporary political advantage but is unlikely in the end to have an appreciable impact on gasoline prices.
“Every time Americans have to shell out $60 or $80 to fill their tanks, they mutter under their breaths about government and it puts pressure on Congress and the White House to do something,” said Byron L. Dorgan, the former Democratic senator from North Dakota who is now co-chairman of an energy project at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “But it’s just howling at the moon. The basic laws of supply and demand haven’t changed.”
House Speaker John Boehner unwittingly gave the Democrats a political opening to pile on the oil companies by saying in an interview with ABC News last week that oil companies should “pay their fair share in taxes” and that Congress ought to reconsider some of the tax incentives they enjoy. He has since walked away from those remarks and said that raising any taxes would choke off the economic recovery and lead to higher prices of gasoline and other goods.
His comments came as lawmakers from both parties were home on recess, hearing a torrent of constituent complaints about the high cost of gasoline at the same time major oil companies were reporting near-record quarterly profits. Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest oil company, said it earned $10.7 billion in the first three months of the year, and other companies reported similarly robust earnings.
Mr. Obama seized on the opportunity to try to deflect some of the heat he has been feeling as gas prices have steadily climbed. He noted wryly at a political fund-raiser last weekend that his poll numbers tend to go up and down with pump prices, even as he admitted he had no “silver bullet” to bring those prices down in the short term. But he found ammunition in the tax breaks the oil industry has enjoyed for decades, portraying the industry as undeserving of them at a time when government needs all the revenue it can get.
“As we work together to reduce our deficits,” Mr. Obama said in a letter to Congressional leaders last week, “we simply can’t afford these wasteful subsidies.” Mr. Obama says the money saved should be used to finance more research into clean energy alternatives — a proposal he has made in his last two budget requests that has largely been ignored.
“The odds are low that the tax repeal goes through as a stand-alone measure, but you might see it as part of a broader deal,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environment specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. He said it was in Mr. Obama’s interest to keep the issue alive both to align Republicans with the unpopular oil companies and to use as leverage as new budget negotiations begin.
Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, said he would press for a vote as early as next week on repealing the tax subsidies. Democrats hope to paint Republicans who vote against the plan as tools of the industry.
“Now is not the time to stand idly by while large oil and gas companies get billions of dollars in tax breaks,” said Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the finance committee. “Now is the time to take concrete steps toward cleaner, more affordable, domestically produced energy.”
The measure could well pass in the Democratic Senate, although some Democrats from oil-producing states, like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska, are likely to oppose it.
But it has little chance of even coming to a vote in the Republican-run House, where Speaker Boehner is orchestrating a fresh chorus of “drill, baby, drill” with a series of votes on bills to allow new oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Virginia.
“Our goal is to expand the supply of American energy to lower gas prices and create jobs,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for Mr. Boehner. “Raising taxes would have the opposite effect.”
Neither the Senate tax measure nor the House drilling bills is likely to become law because of the fierce partisan calculus of the current Congress. But some Republicans, including Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s leader on budget matters, have left open the door for rethinking a range of government tax breaks as part of an agreement on the federal budget and deficit ceiling.
Some conservatives oppose energy subsidies of all sorts — including those for ethanol, wind, nuclear and solar power — and would be willing to see them all repealed as part of a reform of the business tax code.
Oil industry tax breaks — some of them dating back a century — have been debated for years but have survived every elimination attempt. According to a breakdown by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, oil companies receive about $4 billion a year in federal subsidies and can avail themselves of tax breaks at virtually every stage of the prospecting and drilling process.
One lingering provision from the Tariff Act of 1913 — enacted to encourage exploration at a time when drilling often led to dry holes — allows many small and midsize oil companies to claim deductions for tapped oil fields far beyond the amount the companies actually paid for them.
Another subsidy, devised by the State Department in the 1950s, allows U.S.-based oil companies to reclassify the royalties they are charged by foreign governments as taxes — which can be deducted dollar-for-dollar from their domestic tax bill. That provision alone will cost the federal government $8.2 billion over the next decade, according to the Treasury department.

David Kocieniewski contributed reporting from New York.