Head of Tehran’s Cybercrimes Unit Is Fired Over Death of Blogger

By THOMAS ERDBRINK

TEHRAN — Iranian’s national police chief fired the commander of Tehran’s cybercrimes police unit on Saturday for negligence in the death of a blogger in prison.

The dismissal of the commander, Gen. Saeed Shokrian, follows investigations by Parliament and Iran’s judiciary into the unexplained death of the blogger, Sattar Beheshti, 35, who died in early November just a few days after being arrested by the cybercrimes police unit, known here as FATA.

“Tehran’s FATA should be held responsible for the death of Sattar Beheshti,” said Iran’s national police chief, Ismael Ahmadi-Moqaddam, according to the Iranian Labor News Agency.

It is unclear whether General Shokrian will also face judicial charges over the blogger’s death.

The public nature of his dismissal suggests that he will bear most of the responsibility for the death. In similar cases in the past, officials have been punished, but it is rare for them to be named and publicly dismissed on the same day.

Mr. Beheshti’s Web site, My Life for My Iran, criticized Iran’s financial contributions to the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. Mr. Beheshti posted pictures of Lebanese youths having parties alongside images of Iranians living in poverty.

The exact cause of Mr. Beheshti’s death remains murky. Mr. Ahmadi-Moqaddam said Tuesday that investigations had ruled out torture as a cause of death, saying it was possible that Mr. Beheshti, who in pictures looks big and strong, died of “psychological shock.”

Iranian activists and bloggers say Mr. Beheshti died of injuries following beatings. Iran’s judiciary spokesman, Gholam Hussein Mohseni-Ejei, recently admitted that Mr. Beheshti — while in prison — had lodged a written complaint against an interrogator, in which he accused the man of having beaten him during his detention in Tehran’s Evin prison.

“I, Sattar Beheshti, was arrested by FATA and beaten and tortured with multiple blows to my head and body,” read the document, published by the opposition Kalame Web site. He added, “If anything happens to me, the police are responsible.”

Mr. Ahmadi-Moqaddam said that Mr. Beheshti was given tranquilizers while in the prison’s clinic, but that when handed over to the cybercrimes unit its officers denied him the same tranquilizers. “This might be regarded as neglect,” he said. “However, there were no signs of beatings on his body.”

Official statements on the cause of death have been contradictory. An influential member of Parliament who earlier denied that Mr. Beheshti had been tortured in any way told the Tabnak Web site that the blogger had been beaten, but died of shock and fear.

“Definitely he was beaten inside the FATA detention center,” the lawmaker, Alaeddin Borujerdi, told the Web site, “but he didn’t die as a result of these beatings.” He also stressed that the cybercrimes unit must change the way it deals with prisoners.

Iranian activists who have been in contact with Mr. Beheshti’s family say his relatives were not allowed to see his body before a hurried funeral on Nov. 6 in his hometown, Robat Karim, 30 miles southwest of the capital, Tehran.

In Mr. Beheshti’s final post, on Oct. 29, a day before his arrest, he said he was being threatened by security officials. “They told me that if I didn’t close my big mouth my mother should prepare to wear black clothes,” for mourning.

The Iranian Parliament’s special investigator into the case, Mehdi Davatgari, said he welcomed the commander’s removal. “This move shows the civil rights of our citizens are our top priority,” he said.

Copyright 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

Brazilian GP – Sunday – Race Notes

Vettel wins championship, Button wins wet Brazilian GP

Jenson Button, Brazilian GP 2012 

 © Active Pictures

Jenson Button won an action-packed wet Brazilian Grand Prix in the McLaren-Mercedes, while Sebastian Vettel held on to finish sixth – winning the 2012 World Drivers title by three points over Fernando Alonso.

Alonso finished second to Button on the road in his Ferrari, followed by his team mate Felipe Massa in third place.

Sebastian Vettel is the youngest driver ever to win three consecutive drivers titles (along with Fangio and Schumacher).

Mark Webber in the Red Bull-Renault finished fourth, Nico Hulkenberg (after leading the middle of the race) in the Force India-Merceds finished fifth, followed by Vettel in the Red Bull in sixth, Michael Schumacher in his final career drive in the Mercedes GP was seventh, Jean-Eric Vergne in the Toro Rosso-Ferrari was eighth, Kamui Kobayashi in the Sauber-Ferrari was ninth and Kimi Raikkonen in the Lotus-Renault was tenth.

Before the start, there were concerns that rain might fall during the race, and drops of rain started to fall on the grid.

Schumacher the most successful driver in formula 1 history, completed a lap with a flag that thanked the fans on his way to the grid – in this his final race of his 21 year career.

Pastor Maldonado drops from 6th on the grid to 16th after failing to stop for a weigh-in during qualifying.

The championship contenders, Vettel will start fourth and Alonso starting from seventh.

As the cars leave the grid, a mist is in the air – most believing that the race will be mostly dry, but one can never be sure of the weather at this Brazilian track.

At the start Hamilton takes the lead followed by Button. Massa up to third, Webber and Alonso following, Vettel down to seventh.

At turn four Raikkonen goes wide, but then further back Bruno Senna comes down the inside of Vettel. The two drivers touch and Vettel spins, and then resumes, but has some damage to the Red Bull’s sidepod and floor.

On lap 2 Webber is battling Massa for third place. Down the main straight Alonso comes down the inside and passes both at once and takes third.

Red Bull tells Vettel that they can’t fix the damage to his car and that he should continue on.

Senna and Sergio Perez are out, as a result of the first lap incidents.

On lap 3 Hulkenberg passes Webber for fourth place. Vettel sets fastest lap at 1m21.3s.

On lap 4 DRS is disabled due to the rain. The rain is getting heavier.

On lap 5 DRS is enabled again.

On lap 6 Raikkonen pits for intermediate wet tyres, as well as Schumacher pitting for dry tyres.

Alonso slithers wide in the first corner, and rejoins – Hulkenberg gets by the Ferrari to take third.

On lap 7 Grosjean spins and hits the tyre barriers. Button battles with his team mate Hamilton for the lead. Vettel is up to eighth place.

On lap 8 Button takes the lead.

On lap 9 Kobayashi pits as well as Schumacher, both taking intermediates tyres.

On lap 10 Webber and Nico Rosberg pit for intermediate tyres. The next lap Hamilton and Alonso also pit for intermediates.

On lap 11, Button leads from Hulkenberg, both having not pitted.

At lap 11 Button leads Hulkenberg by 2.7 seconds, followed by Massa (20.4s), Hamilton (20.8s), Vergne (25.3s), Kovalainen (26.5s), Vitaly Petrov (28.1s), Timo Glock (28.5s), Pedro de la Rosa (31.2s) and Charles Pic (31.3s) in tenth place – Vettel (38.0s) runs in 17th.

On lap 13 Vettel passes Webber for 16th. Pic runs wide.

On lap 14 Vettel is pressuring Rosberg.

On lap 16 Hulkenberg is chasing Button for the lead. Vettel passes Kobayashi. Massa, Vergne and Kobayashi pit.

On lap 19 Hulkenberg passes Button to take the lead in the Force India. Hamilton, Alonso, and Kobayashi as well as others pit.

On lap 20 Vettel pits for hard tyres. Webber, Daniel Ricciardo and Raikkonen pit.

On lap 21 Hulkenberg sets fastest lap at 1m21.6s. Button sets fastest lap the next lap at 1m19.8s. Rosberg has a tyre puncture and limps around to the pits.

At lap 21 Hulkenberg leads Button by 1.2 seconds, followed by Hamilton (45.5s), Alonso (64.8s), Vettel (67.4s), Kobayashi (69.4s), Webber (76.0s), Paul di Resta (78.2s), Ricciardo (1 lap) and Vergne (1 lap) in 10th place.

On lap 22 Alonso reports to the team that there is a lot of debris on the track.

On lap 23 with debris on the track the safety car is deployed and bunches up the field.

Hulkenberg and Button both pit, getting out before the safety car comes around.

Hulkenberg leads Button, Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Kobayashi, Webber, Di Resta, Ricciardo, Raikkonen and Massa in 11th place.

On lap 30 the race resumes with Hulkenberg still leading from the two McLarens, Kobayashi passes Vettel, while Webber runs wide at the first corner.

On lap 31 Hamilton passes Button for second place. Massa battles Di Resta for seventh. Hulkenberg pulls out a 2.4 second lead. Alonso closes on Button in third.

On lap 32 Glock pits. Kobayashi passes Alonso in the DRS zone for fourth place. Massa gets past Di Resta in seventh – Ricciardo gets past as well.

On lap 33 Raikkonen runs wide in the first corner. Alonso repasses Kobayashi for fourth.

On lap 34 Hulkenberg sets fastest lap. Massa passes Vettel for sixth place in the DRS zone. Hamilton sets fastest lap at 1m18.7s.

At half distance, on lap 35 Hulkenberg leads Hamilton by 2.3 seconds, followed by Button (4.0s), Alonso (5.8s), Kobayashi (7.7s), Massa (8.3s), Vettel (9.2s), Ricciardo (10.5), Di Resta (11.2s) and Webber (11.9s) in tenth place.

Reports of more rain in turn 9.

On lap 37 Button sets fastest lap at 1m18.1s. Massa passes Kobayashi for fifth – Kobayashi immediately pits. Kovalainen pits as well.

Di Resta spins and falls to 12th place.

On lap 39 Raikkonen and Schumacher battle for tenth – Raikkonen takes the position.

On lap 41 Di Resta passes Schumacher for 11th place. Webber passes Ricciardo for eighth.

Hulkenberg leads Hamilton by 1.9 seconds. It is still drizzling at spots around the circuit.

On lap 43 Webber half-spins at turn 12 but continues.

At lap 45 Hulkenberg leads Hamilton by 1.2 seconds, followed by Button (3.3s), Alonso (9.2s), Massa (13.9s), Kobayashi (18.3s), Vettel (19.1s), Webber (24.5s), Ricciardo (25.8s), Raikkonen (26.9s) in tenth place.

On lap 47 Petrov spins, the battle for tenth place in the team standings shifts back to Marussia.

On lap 49 Hulkenberg half-spins, but continues, but Hamilton dives down the inside and takes over the lead.

Many drivers tyres are suffering.

On lap 51 Di Resta closes on Raikkonen.

On lap 52 Rosberg pits for intermediate wet tyres. Ricciardo pits as well for hard compound tyres.

On lap 53 Vettel pits from eighth for medium tyres, and rejoins in tenth.

On lap 54 Raikkonen goes off track, and seemingly gets lost on the escape road trying to rejoin.

On lap 55 Hamilton passes a backmarker down the main straight – Hulkenberg dives down the inside into the first corner, slides into Hamilton making contact – Hamilton is out on the spot with a broken front suspension. Button takes the lead, and Hulkenberg resumes in second place.

The rain is getting harder.

Vettel pits again for intermediate tyres.

On lap 56 Webber pits. Alonso pits from third for intermediates and rejoins in fourth.

On lap 57 Hulkenberg is handed a drive-through penalty for causing the accident with Hamilton.

On lap 58 Button pits from the lead for intermediate tyres. Hulkenberg pits to serve his penalty. Rain is expected for the next 20 minutes.

At lap 60 Button leads Massa by 16.2 seconds, followed by Alonso (19.8s), Webber (28.5s), Hulkenberg (29.3s), Schumacher (42.3s), Vettel (47.3s), Kobayashi (49.6s), Vergne (59.4s) and Di Resta (61.4s) in tenth place.

The rain comes down harder.

On lap 62 Alonso closes on his team mate Massa. Kovalainen pits and takes full-wet tyres. Alonso passes Massa for second place. Alonso is currently 1 point behind Vettel in the championship as it currently stands. Button leads Alonso by 20 seconds.

On lap 64 Ricciardo changes to full-wet tyres as well.

On lap 65 Vettel passes Schumacher for sixth place, solidifying his championship lead with 6 laps remaining.

On lap 66 Petrov passes Pic for 12th, swinging 10th in the team standings back to Caterham.

Unless Alonso can win the race, Vettel will win the title.

On lap 68 Di Resta passes Vergne for ninth place. Red Bull tells Vettel to slow down, and take no risks.

On lap 69 Kobayashi tries to pass Schumacher, spins but continues.

On lap 70 Di Desta crashes on the final corner – the safety car is deployed.

The race finishes behind the Safety Car, and Button wins over Alonso and Massa. Vettel takes his third consecutive title.

Copyright 1988-2012, Inside F1, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Alison Seiffer

Guess Who Isn’t Coming to Dinner

By GUY TREBAY

It is, according to Susan Gutfreund, the society hostess, the epitome of civilized living. It is, said Karen Mordechai, an entrepreneur behind the successful dining series Sunday Suppers, in Brooklyn, a far less geeky way of networking than a Meetup. It is, said Alex Hitz, the author of a new cookbook, “My Beverly Hills Kitchen: Classic Southern Cooking With a French Twist,” the great social equalizer.

It is the dinner party. Remember those?

“The world is so changed, hardly anyone does them anymore,” said Louise Grunwald, widow of the former diplomat and Time Inc. editor in chief Henry Anatole Grunwald and among the last left standing of New York’s acknowledged great hostesses.

“It’s over,” Ms. Grunwald said, not entirely convincingly, given that invitations to her dinners remain much coveted, only partly because her kitchen turns out great food. “You may want the dinner party to come back, harkening back to another era. But it will never happen.”

There was a time, not so very long ago, when any such doomful pronouncement would have sounded far-fetched. New York, after all, has always been oversupplied with those who pride themselves on their tables, competing to populate them with lively strivers who do their social networking not on tiny, glowing screens but cheek by jowl.

Increasingly, such gatherings seem outmoded, squeezed out by overcrowded schedules, the phony urgency of affinity sites, restaurants cultism and overall tectonic shifts in how New Yorkers congregate.

“When I think of all those great hosts and hostesses who were around when I moved to New York,” from Atlanta in the 1980s, Mr. Hitz said, “many are now gone with the wind.”

Mr. Hitz was referring to types celebrated by Women’s Wear Daily as social lions and lionesses, people like Patricia Buckley, the wife of the conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.; the clotheshorse gadabout Nan Kempner; the philanthropists Judith Peabody and Brooke Astor; the designer Bill Blass; or the cabaret artist Bobby Short.

“Every single one was different,” Mr. Hitz said. “What they had in common was a sense of fun and community and gathering people together for good simple food.”

Naturally they shared other likenesses: social prominence, deep pockets, commodious apartments, household staffs and no allergy to drink.

Yet that is not entirely the point. Trained from birth or on the job, the best hosts of another era commanded their tables as though part of the European Theater of Operations, emplacing and deploying and juxtaposing guests in charged combinations, going to the rescue when conversation flagged and a combatant went down. Of course, they made sure the blowhard mogul was seated beside the lissome ingénue. What else is a dinner party besides a comic operetta without a score?

But they also orchestrated every element of the evening, arrival to departure, most crucially directing the conversation, which they either allowed to follow a traditional serve-and-volley pattern (20 minutes right, 20 minutes left), or else commandeered for so-called “general discussion” as provocateur hosts like the television journalist Barbara Walters still do.

“I can remember a dinner at Jimmy Davison’s, when he was living on 72nd Street, not in the biggest apartment,” Mrs. Grunwald said, referring to a cowboy socialite whose grandfather owned a chunk of Arizona. “There were a couple of tables for the grandes dames like Mrs. Gilbert Miller, and the rest of us ate on the floor.”

Plenty of New Yorkers eat on the floor, of course. They do it in their sweat pants while juggling an iPad, a remote wand and the chopsticks that they use to share General Tso’s chicken eaten straight from the carton.

The seated dinner, with its minuet of invitation and acceptance, its formalities and protocols, its culinary and dietary challenges, its inherent requirements of guest and host, alike is under threat, many say.

Or is it? “If there’s one thing you learn in the etiquette business, it’s that life is cyclical,” said Judith Martin, the etiquette arbiter known as Miss Manners. “The idea of cooking for others is not something that is going to die.”

It is the idea that, having cooked for others, one will then invite them to table that has run into problems. “Conversation is in trouble,” she said. “People have been brought up to express themselves rather than to exchange ideas.”

What Ms. Martin termed “food fussing” has had the effect of giving hosts the jitters not just about the quality of their cooking but also about its possible adverse effects. Nut allergies anyone?

The influence of hand-held devices, Ms. Martin said, has been disastrous for the social contract. “People don’t even respond to dinner invitations anymore,” she said. “They consider it too difficult a commitment to say, ‘I’ll come to dinner a week from Saturday.’ ” Not only do they cancel at the last minute, they do it by text message.

Those who show up find an additional challenge to keeping things lively, given that in a litigious age, that durable staple of dinner parties, the innocent flirtation, has become a minefield of signals missed or, worse yet, taken up.

What has also occurred, said David E. Monn, a prominent event planner, is that party manners have become so rusty from disuse, and guests so generally clueless, that a need has emerged for people like him to train socialites not to eat peas with a knife.

“People want to be civilized, so it all doesn’t turn into Caligula, and so they come to me saying: ‘I don’t know what to do if I’m having friends over for cocktails. What tray do you use? What do you put on the tray? Do you put out a piece of cheese?’ ”

Understandably, few anymore can tell at a glance the difference between a fish fork and a dessert fork or whether the curious tongs inherited from Aunt Mabel are meant for serving asparagus, or else flipping a hamburger on the grill.

What is surprising is that fewer still see the point in accumulating china, silver and crystal at all, a truth driven home by the dwindling of departments devoted to table-top appointments at traditional purveyors like Tiffany & Company. Prime real estate once allotted to the staples of the bridal registry at Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship have now been supplanted by cases of leather accessories.

Things like the classic Tiffany bamboo silver, designed by the midcentury design god Van Day Truex in 1961 and kept in stock for years, were discontinued some years back, part of a purge that swept away all but a handful of patterns. “I freaked out when I heard they were discontinuing bamboo,” said Todd Alexander Romano, an interior decorator and man about town. “I bought every piece I could.”

Mr. Romano seldom uses the silver, however. Why bother, when it’s so much easier and more convenient to meet friends in restaurants.

Yet even the best restaurants don’t approximate the intimate spirit of eating at home, said Ms. Mordechai, a photographer who developed the Sunday Suppers to renew an experience recalled from the Sabbath dinners of her youth. “My favorite part of dinner is just sitting at the table talking for hours, and that doesn’t exist when you are at a restaurant,” Ms. Mordechai said. “I was born in Israel and grew up in a big, Jewish, Middle Eastern family. We think there’s nothing better than sitting around the table with family and friends.”

The point of Sunday Suppers was not originally to turn dinner parties into business, Ms. Mordechai added. “I photographed our first one and posted it to a blog. Suddenly we were getting e-mails from strangers and people from all over who, I guess, wanted that old-school dinner-party feel.”

Now the dinners, for which subscribers pay $150, sell out as soon as the reservation list is posted online. “It’s basically about making friends and hanging out,” Ms. Mordechai said. “And eating good food.”

The food itself is kept deliberately simple; her preferred culinary style, like that of Mr. Hitz, Mrs. Grunwald, Mrs. Gutfreund and Mr. Monn, is home cooking. Unlike the giddy society matron Billie Burke played in the George Cukor classic “Dinner at Eight,” these cooks don’t worry about the aspic crashing to the floor.

“Only real food,” said Mrs. Grunwald, who like the late and celebrated hostess Nora Ephron likes to keep her hors d’oeuvres simple (“Nora put a can of nuts on the coffee table, and that was it,” she said flatly). She serves her guests meatloaf or veal stew and shuns every manner of culinary affectation and fad.

“No filet mignon, nothing nouvelle,” Mrs. Grunwald said. “No pyramids and no foam.”

The standard for a certain kind of ideal dinner party was probably set by the Hollywood hostess Connie Wald, who died this month at 96 and at whose tables so many stars routinely gathered that, as her obituary pointed out, guests didn’t drop names so much as trip over them.

At her rambling, unpretentious house on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, Ms. Wald assembled newcomers and the Hollywood gratin at a table where she served them meatloaf, roast chicken or veal stew.

“Connie was relaxed and cozy, and it worked on a level that wasn’t grand,” said Shelley Wanger, a Random House editor whose parents were Walter Wanger, the film producer, and Joan Bennett, the patrician movie star. “It was not caviar pie.”

Guests at Mr. Monn’s dinner parties are served hors d’oeuvres of raw fennel, celery and carrots, with a spiced dipping powder of turmeric and curry, a recipe swiped, he said, from the repertory of Mrs. Grunwald. He also serves pigs in a blanket, which he stocks up on at Costco.

“I grew up poor in a farm town in Pennsylvania,” said Mr. Monn, whose client list includes many of the city’s most prominent names. “It took me years in New York to learn that the simplest things are usually the best.”

There is no leveler quite like a dinner table, said Mr. Hitz, a longtime bicoastal whose dinners at his California digs, an aerie perched high above Sunset Boulevard, tend to be populated by Hollywood types from across the demographic spectrum. “The 20-year-olds enjoy the 90-year-olds,” he said. “And I can assure you the 90-year-olds enjoy the 20-year-olds.”

It is safe to assume that former first lady Nancy Reagan, widow of Ronald Reagan and a frequent guest at Mr. Hitz’s table, has dined at the finest tables. What she likes best, Mr. Hitz said, is a simple chicken potpie.

“If anyone tells me, ‘I’m freaking out, I have six people coming to dinner, what do I do?’ ” Mr. Hitz said, “I say serve chicken potpie and a salad, make sure there’s plenty of wine and keep the lights low. How can it go wrong?”

After all, Susan Gutfreund said, what draws most people to the bright lights of big cities is not the lure of minced peacock tongue on anchovy toast points.

“The most important part of entertaining is being able to mix people,” Mrs. Gutfreund said. “If you live in New York and don’t take advantage of that … well, you might as well stay home in Butte.”

Copyright.2012 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

Luke Sharrett for The New York Times

Dave Heinrichs removed water-damaged insulation from his brother-in-law’s house in Tuckerton Beach, N.J., on Nov. 7, just over a week after Hurricane Sandy hit.

Post-Storm Cost May Force Many From Coast Life

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

New York and New Jersey residents, just coming to grips with the enormous costs of repairing homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, will soon face another financial blow: soaring flood insurance rates and heightened standards for rebuilding that threaten to make seaside living, once and for all, a luxury only the wealthy can afford.

Homeowners in storm-damaged coastal areas who had flood insurance — and many more who did not, but will now be required to — will face premium increases of as much as 20 percent or 25 percent per year beginning in January, under legislation enacted in July to shore up the debt-ridden National Flood Insurance Program. The yearly increases will add hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to homeowners’ annual bills.

The higher premiums, coupled with expensive requirements for homes being rebuilt within newly mapped flood hazard zones, which will take into account the storm’s vast reach, pose a serious threat to middle-class and lower-income enclaves. In Queens, on Staten Island, on Long Island and at the Jersey Shore, many families have clung fast to a modest coastal lifestyle, often passing bungalows or small Victorian homes down through generations, even as development turned other places into playgrounds for the well-to-do.

While many homeowners are beginning to rebuild without any thought to future costs, the changes could propel a demographic shift along the Northeast Coast, even in places spared by the storm, according to federal officials, insurance industry executives and regional development experts. Ronald Schiffman, a former member of the New York City Planning Commission, said that barring intervention by Congress or the states, there would be “a massive displacement of low-income families from their historic communities.”

After weeks of tearing debris from her 87-year-old, two-story house on the bay side of Long Beach, N.Y., Barbara Carman, 59, said she understood the need to stabilize the flood insurance program, but she compared coming premium increases to “kicking people while they’re down.”

Ms. Carman and her husband, who had hoped to retire in a few years, were reconsidering whether they could afford to remain on the coast on fixed incomes. But she said she feared that even selling their home could be hard.

“Only wealthy people could afford it, I guess, not middle-class people,” she said. “You’re going to price us out of here.”

The heightened financial pressure has emerged as an unintended consequence of efforts to stop the government subsidization of risk that has encouraged so many to build and rebuild along coasts increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. Supporters of the effort acknowledged that it would squeeze lower-income residents but said it was vital for the insurance program to reflect the risk of living along the shore.

“The irony is, if we allowed market forces to dictate at the coast, a lot of the development in the wrong places would never have gotten built,” said Jeffrey Tittel, director of the Sierra Club’s chapter in New Jersey. “But we didn’t. We subsidized that development with low insurance rates for decades. And we can’t afford to keep doing that. Should a person who lives in an apartment in Newark pay for someone’s beach house?”

Because private insurers rarely provide flood insurance, the program has been run by the federal government, which kept rates artificially low under pressure from the real estate industry and other groups. Flood insurance in higher-risk areas typically costs $1,100 to $3,000 a year, for coverage capped at $250,000; the contents of a home could be insured up to $100,000 for an additional $500 or so a year, said Steve Harty, president of National Flood Services, a large claims-processing company.

Premiums will double for new policyholders and many old ones within three or four years under the new law.

Across the board, rates will begin rising an average of 20 percent after Jan. 1, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency; rate increases had previously been capped at 10 percent. For properties older than the flood insurance program, where premiums cost half as much as for newer buildings, those discounts are being phased out, through yearly rate increases of 25 percent.

Second homes and businesses will see these increases next year without exception. Primary homes will lose their discounted rates if repairs cost more than half the value of the home, if the home has had recurring flood damage or if the owner refuses an offer of money to help elevate or relocate the building — the exact situations being confronted by many homeowners affected by Hurricane Sandy. The discounted rates disappear if owners sell, let their policies lapse or make major improvements.

The practice of grandfathering is also being discontinued: homes that were built in areas deemed safe at the time, but later added to flood hazard areas, will no longer be treated as though they are on high ground.

At the same time, avoiding the expense of flood insurance will become harder for middle-class homeowners, many of whom have historically dropped their policies after a few uneventful years even though it is required for homeowners with federally backed mortgages who live in flood-prone areas. Lenders who do not enforce the requirement will face higher penalties.

The stiffened penalties, higher premiums and elimination of subsidies enacted in July were meant to bolster the finances of the flood insurance program; it fell $18 billion into debt afterHurricane Katrina and had just $3 billion of borrowing capacity left before Hurricane Sandy, which could prompt claims of $6 billion to $12 billion. Congress was prodded into action not just by fiscal conservatives but also by environmental advocates who believed the program encouraged reckless development in harm’s way.

But the law did not address affordability, except to say that FEMA should study it.

“You have to move toward fiscal soundness,” said J. Robert Hunter, a federal insurance administrator during the Ford and Carter administrations who is now insurance director for the Consumer Federation of America. “But we’ve said you also have to add some protection for low-income people. But they’ve never done it.”

Mr. Hunter, who was named to a post-storm commission on resilience by New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, said his analysis of FEMA data showed that fewer than 30 percent of homes in areas affected by the storm had policies in effect.

Agency officials said it would be months before the new flood maps were finished, which means that homeowners are approaching the question of rebuilding without a full understanding of the requirements they may face.

Dave Miller, head of the National Flood Insurance Program, said FEMA would provide guidance on map updates to local officials long before the maps were made official.

But he urged homeowners to think beyond the current standards. “It may not hit you today,” Mr. Miller said, “but a year or two from now, when the maps are adopted, it’s going to hit your community, and you’re going to ask, ‘Why didn’t we hear this before?’ ”

Edward Thomas, a longtime FEMA official who is now president of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association, said raising a structure even higher than the new minimum elevation was the only prudent option.

Premiums when the next maps are adopted could be “absolutely enormous: a doubling or tripling of the rate,” he said.

Yet exceeding still-unwritten flood standards is a ruefully far-fetched notion for New York and New Jersey residents, for whom mountains of ruined possessions are the immediate reality and rebuilding at all is a financially daunting question.

In Breezy Point, on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, Jimmy O’Meara, 66, a retired Wall Street executive, said he had the means to rebuild his 1930s-era bungalow, though he had no flood insurance. But he worried aloud that his neighbors — firefighters, police officers and retirees — could give up when they realize the costs of returning.

“I don’t want to live there alone,” he said. “If there’s no ceiling on the cost of insurance, it may dissuade people from rebuilding or staying. It could depopulate Breezy, if not just the threat of storms increases, but the cost of living there increases dramatically.”

Andrew Spear for The New York Times

Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State, was named as a mediator by the World Wide Web Consortium. The international group is trying to come up with standards that would allow Internet users to keep their online activities private from advertisers.

Mediator Joins Contentious Effort to Add a ‘Do Not Track’ Option to Web Browsing

By NATASHA SINGER

Over the last few months, an international effort to give consumers more control over the collection of their online data has devolved into acrimonious discussions, name-calling and witch hunts.

The idea was to work out a global standard for “Do Not Track,” a computer browser setting that would allow Internet users to signal Web sites, advertising networks and data brokers that they did not want their browsing activities tracked for marketing purposes.

But some industry executives involved in the negotiations have questioned the agenda of privacy advocates, saying their efforts threaten to undermine an advertising ecosystem that fuels free online products and services. At the same time, some technology experts and privacy advocates have accused industry executives of stalling and acting in bad faith.

Into this rancorous battle steps a new mediator, Peter Swire, a professor of law at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official during the Clinton administration. On Wednesday, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, the international consortium that has been trying to develop technical Do Not Track standards, said that Mr. Swire would take over as co-chairman of its Tracking Protection Working Group.

While parties on both sides welcomed the move, many said they were doubtful that Mr. Swire could bring opponents to agreement, especially at a time when some industry groups are questioning whether the W3C is an appropriate forum.

On one hand, industry executives have an interest in protecting “behavioral” ads, marketing pitches that use data about an individual’s online activities to tailor ads to that person. On the other hand, consumer advocates argue that Internet users should be able to limit that kind of online surveillance.

Mr. Swire, a former chief counselor for privacy at the Office of Management and Budget, said he hoped to strike a balance that was palatable to both sides. He said he viewed a Do Not Track system as a kind of digital equivalent to the Do Not Call list, a national registry in the United States through which consumers may opt out of phone solicitations.

“People can choose not to have telemarketers call them during dinner. The simple idea is that users should have a choice over how their Internet browsing works as well,” Mr. Swire said in a phone interview. But he added: “The overarching theme is how to give users choice about their Internet experience while also funding a useful Internet.”

Still, Mr. Swire may not be able to overcome the bitterness that remains among the negotiating parties after months of public accusations, personal attacks and recriminations.

Earlier this year at an event at the White House, industry representatives publicly committed to incorporating and honoring a browser-based Do Not Track system under certain conditions. The conditions included a requirement that individual users would actively choose to turn on a don’t-track-me setting. Industry groups also said any system should still permit companies to collect information about users’ browsing activities for market research and product development purposes.

But after months of wrangling with consumer advocates, industry representatives now say the W3C is not an appropriate forum for them to work out policy details, arguing that the group’s expertise is more technical than practical.

In an online discussion forum for the working group, for example, senior industry executives have suggested that respected technology experts are out of touch with commercial reality.

“The advocacy side of the group tends to lean toward absolutist terms and solutions,” Shane Wiley, the vice president for privacy and data governance at Yahoo, wrote in a message in September to Ed Felten, a professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. “The real world isn’t that easy even if it feels that way in a classroom or a small lab.”

Then there are the technologists who say industry executives are playing down the privacy risks of online data-mining.

“For want of a better metaphor: you are the climate change skeptic of computer privacy,” Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student in computer science and law at Stanford University, wrote last month to Yahoo’s Mr. Wiley. “Unlike some of the more patient members of the group, I long ago ceased pretending you’re negotiating in good faith.”

Now the industry has begun an effort to distance itself from the W3C process and promote its own self-regulatory program that allows consumers to decline targeted advertising by installing opt-out buttons from dozens of member companies.

“We’ve seen the W3C falter,” said Mike Zaneis, the general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group. “So industry is redoubling its efforts to come up with a meaningful standard for browser controls.”

As the debate rages on, newer iterations of popular browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome have already installed Do Not Track settings for their users. But in the absence of accepted global standards for these systems, ad networks and data brokers are not yet honoring the don’t-track-me browser flags. Even Microsoft’s and Google’s own ad services don’t respond to such signals coming from their own browsers.

Although Mr. Swire said he hoped to spur progress, for the moment Do Not Track browser settings have no more significance than emoticons.

“Do Not Track is a work in progress,” Mr. Swire said. “So is the Internet.”

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

Andy Russell, once of Moomba, is back with a social networking site.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Andy Russell at a masquerade ball at the Westway organized on his Web site.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Patrons arrive for the ball.

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

A keeper of the guest list.

A Night Life Veteran Bets on Social Media

By LAURA M. HOLSON

IT was 10:30 p.m. on a recent Saturday, and  the Westway, on Clarkson Street in Manhattan’s West Village, was practically throbbing. The club would not be open to the public until midnight, but for an hour and a half a private masquerade birthday ball had been going on inside.

Guests, mostly in their 20s, had paid $25 to attend. Some were lined up three-deep at the bar; others crowded an adjoining black-walled room dominated by a raised catwalk. There, young men in jackets and ties stared slack-jawed as female revelers danced in short skirts onstage. As midnight approached, the crowd of 200 — some already coupling in dark corners — danced wildly as “Call Me Maybe” blasted overhead.

Near the dance floor, Andy Russell, 41, a married father of two, surveyed the crowd. At seven feet tall he has an imposing yet boyish presence; even more so that night from the metallic eye mask strapped to the top of his head, his errant curls slipping through the eyeholes. By the time Mr. Russell was the age of many of those dancing, he had engineered hundreds of parties like this one, several as a founder of Moomba, the celebrated late 1990s restaurant and nightclub on Seventh Avenue South that was packed nightly with celebrities like Madonna and Leonardo DiCaprio until it closed in 2001.

Now, after leaving behind night life for a career as an investor in and adviser to digital media companies like DailyCandy and Thrillist, Mr. Russell is back. He, as much as anyone, understands the short shelf life of a Manhattan club. And it is why he founded Host Committee, a social networking Web site that arranges private early evening events like the one at the Westway.

Most Manhattan clubs don’t come alive until well past midnight. Mr. Russell wants to reimagine night life, or at least resuscitate parts of it, by getting night crawlers to come out early, giving club owners much-needed revenue during slow hours and Host Committee guests access to venues where it is hard to pass the forbidding velvet rope.

Much has changed since Mr. Russell and his brother, Chris, a restaurant consultant and entrepreneur, stormed downtown with Moomba, which was so popular in its heyday it was featured in a “Saturday Night Live” skit; its investors included Oliver Stone, the director, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian. “New York City was alive and electric, you had the Palladium, the Limelight, all walks of people were mixing and matching,” Mr. Russell said earlier Saturday night at Miss Lily’s on Houston Street, where he had ordered the curried goat. “Now I think it’s uniform. People have found a model and rarely deviate.”

Before the smartphone generation took over the 2000s, clubs like Moomba thrived on mystique, big personalities and the promise of cool. But now, said Noah Tepperberg, an owner of Avenue and Marquee in New York and Lavo in Las Vegas, “the idea of creating an elusive place that people want to get into is gone.” With easy access to information on cellphones or online, club-going has become more democratic, he said. “Now, you can be stuck outside waiting in line and know what’s going on inside,” he said. “People don’t want to go someplace unless they know what they are getting.”

That is what makes Host Committee, which is almost three months old, interesting to nightclub promoters. The recession has affected club business, and owners will do anything to bring in new customers, said Michael Musto, the gossip columnist for The Village Voice and tireless bon vivant. “I once had to wait outside a club for an office party to end,” he said with a laugh. “In the old days you needed a song and dance to get past the door of a club. Now you just pull out money. It is the democratization of night life.”

But he is skeptical that private parties like the ones arranged by Host Committee will become a permanent part of the local club scene.

“Everything goes in a cycle, and clubs are doing everything they can to make a dollar,” Mr. Musto said. “I think once we enter a more prosperous era, this will vanish and the pleading and begging to get into clubs will begin again.”

AS a Manhattan teenager in the mid-1980s, Mr. Russell used to gather with his friends on weekend nights on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “There were all these kids in New York hanging out with no place to go,” he said. “You couldn’t go to bars or people’s apartment.” It was then he decided to host parties in empty dance studios. Mr. Russell would meet the social leaders at a local high school and ask them to host a party and invite their friends. Attendees were charged a fee at the door, usually $10. Some nights, Mr. Russell said, parties brought in $2,000 or more.

After Mr. Russell left Manhattan for Cornell in 1989 (from which he graduated with a degree in psychology in 1993), he continued to host Manhattan soirees. “We hired pretty girls to get mailing lists,” he said. In the early 1990s, for example, 1,000 people showed up at a New Year’s Eve event he held at a downtown club; it lasted until 4 a.m. “I came home with $40,000 in cash,” Mr. Russell said. (He stuffed the money in his wall for safekeeping.) “I loved partying with a purpose.”

Mr. Russell loves partying, period. He said he once flew to Reykjavik, Iceland, for 27 hours to attend a bachelor bash. He has an old-style bar at his country home in North Salem, N.Y., and built a movie theater in a former grain silo attached to the house. (He also has an apartment in Manhattan.)

Bob Pittman, a friend and chief executive of CC Media Holdings, which owns radio stations and who worked with Mr. Russell for eight years after Moomba closed, remembered a beer-guzzling contest at Mr. Pittman’s home in Mexico during a 2005 retreat. “He lost,” Mr. Pittman said of Mr. Russell. “He was crestfallen.”

“I think he is an eager puppy about everything,” he added. “That is what endears him to a lot of his friends.”

In November 1996, two months before he went to business school at Columbia, Mr. Russell and his brother opened Moomba. “It was the first of the smaller venues that had great success,” said David Rabin, a partner in the Lambs Club and the Double Seven who has known Mr. Russell for 15 years and who is on his advisory board. Mr. Russell sold most of his stake in Moomba in 1999. But despite the club’s popularity, it wasn’t much of a moneymaker; Mr. Russell said he made only about $100,000 after investors were paid off.

In 2003, he joined the Pilot Group, a private investment firm founded by Mr. Pittman, where he focused on investing in digital media companies, until last year when he started his own company, Trigger Media, with about $22 million from investors.

“I wouldn’t do it again,” Mr. Russell said of opening a Moomba today. “I’m interested in building a business, not building a restaurant or a club.”

KIARA HORWITZ, 26, a publicist for Fingerprint Communications, was one of eight people who hosted the masquerade birthday ball at the Westway. She said she knew nearly half the crowd there and noted it was refreshing to get home by 12:30 a.m. “I like getting everyone together in one place,” she said. “I thought people were really into the early thing. It kind of blew my mind.”

Host Committee is based in principle on the parties Mr. Russell gave in high school, with a new-media twist. At the company’s office on 26th Street, Zeeshan Zaidi, the venture’s chief executive, oversees party pages that are set up for hosts to invite friends (who, in turn, invite their friends), mostly over Facebook or by e-mail. Once a guest accepts an invitation and pays a fee (typically around $25), a profile is posted online so other guests can see who is coming. There is incentive to show up early: free drinks are served for the first hour. There’s a cash bar after that.

Mr. Russell is mindful that he is past his prime networking days; his other major current venture is an e-mail newsletter called “InsideHook,” which advises men from 35 to 55 where to find an expert tailor or a good steak. So he recently bought DBD Social, a free-event planning service run by Carli Roth and Yvonne Najor, two 20-something women who have a large contact list to mine for potential hosts and their paying guests.

Ms. Roth and Ms. Najor were two of the 16 hosts for “Hump Day,” a party organized by Host Committee on Oct. 10 from 8 to 11 p.m. at the Double Seven, the upscale cocktail lounge in the meatpacking district of which Mr. Rabin is an owner. One hundred and eighty-seven guests paid $20 each to attend. Mr. Rabin said that, thanks to those guests’ enthusiastic drink purchases, the Double Seven made about $6,000 “in a period when we wouldn’t take in one-third of that.” He waved away the issue of exclusivity (“Why wouldn’t we want 100 or 150 people in our target demographic telling people they like the place?”) and added that he told Mr. Russell to target guests who will become regulars. “For Andy, it is finding the sweet spot for the different venues,” he said.

Mr. Russell, though, has a bigger goal in mind. He said he wants Host Committee to be responsible for at least 2,000 marriages.

“A lot of people feel more comfortable socializing online than in person,” he said. “The problem with social media is that it has destroyed the social part.”

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved