For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.

Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.

“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”

That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.

Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.

They liken their situation to that of other scapegoats in American history: Irish Roman Catholics before the nativist riots in the 1800s, the Japanese before they were put in internment camps during World War II.

Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.

Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.

“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”

Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).

“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”

American Muslims were anticipating a particularly joyful Ramadan this year. For the first time in decades, the monthlong holiday fell mostly during summer vacation, allowing children to stay up late each night for the celebratory iftar dinner, breaking the fast, with family and friends.

But the season turned sour.

The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a flurry of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Murfreesboro, Tenn; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in Madera, Calif.; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers. It is too soon to tell whether hate crimes against Muslims are rising or are on pace with previous years, experts said. But it is possible that other episodes are going unreported right now.

“Victims are reluctant to go public with these kinds of hate incidents because they fear further harassment or attack,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They’re hoping all this will just blow over.”

Some Muslims said their situation felt more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Patel explained, “After Sept. 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, ‘Islam means peace,’ and who said ‘Muslims are our neighbors and friends,’ and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam.”

Now, unlike Mr. Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Mr. Patel said.

“There is simply the desire to paint an entire religion as the enemy,” he said. Referring to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the proposed Muslim center near ground zero, “What they did to Imam Feisal was highly strategic. The signal was, we can Swift Boat your most moderate leaders.”

Several American Muslims said in interviews that they were stunned that what provoked the anti-Muslim backlash was not even another terrorist attack but a plan by an imam known for his work with leaders of other faiths to build a Muslim community center.

This year, Sept. 11 coincides with the celebration of Eid, the finale to Ramadan, which usually lasts three days (most Muslims will begin observing Eid this year on Sept. 10). But Muslim leaders, in this climate, said they wanted to avoid appearing to be celebrating on the anniversary of 9/11. Several major Muslim organizations have urged mosques to use the day to participate in commemoration events and community service.

Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many American Muslims were still hoping to salvage the spirit of Ramadan.

“In Ramadan, you’re really not supposed to be focused on yourself,” she said. “It’s about looking out for the suffering of other people. Somehow it feels bad to be so worried about our own situation and our own security, when it should be about empathy towards others.”

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday is to call for a down payment of $50 billion in government spending to start up a long-term public works plan for upgradingtransportation networks — roads, rail and airport runways — over the next six years.

Mr. Obama will lay out the plan, which is intended to promote the creation of jobs over the coming year and beyond, during a trip to Milwaukee on Monday afternoon, where he will observe Labor Day by attending a union festival. It would require Congressional approval, as it envisions extending and revising a broad transportation policy bill that is usually renewed every five years or so, but has been stalled in Congress.

Despite its uncertain prospects, the White House is highlighting its proposal as one part of a broader economic recovery package that Mr. Obama is to introduce during a speech in Cleveland on Wednesday.

With Democrats looking at a bleak election season, in large part because of high unemployment, the White House has been scrambling to find ways to jump-start the sagging economy.

Mr. Obama’s plan would call for investment over six years, the White House says it would be front-loaded with an initial investment of $50 billion in taxpayer money, followed by even more spending in later years, to help create jobs in as early as next year. The administration says it would work with Congress to find ways to pay for the plan, so that it would not add to the nation’s rising deficit. One possibility would be to cut existing subsidies for oil and gas exploration and production. Historically, transportation projects have been paid for largely with dedicated taxes like those on gasoline.

White House officials said Mr. Obama wanted to rebuild 15,000 miles of roads, construct and maintain 4,000 miles of railway — enough track to span the continent — and rehabilitate or reconstruct 150 miles of airport runways while putting in place a system that would reduce travel time and airport delays.

The president will also call for what the White House is describing as an “infrastructure bank” that would focus on paying for national and regional transportation projects.

The $787 billion economic recovery act passed by Congress at the beginning of Mr. Obama’s presidency already included considerable spending on roads and other transportation infrastructure. But the White House says Mr. Obama’s new plan is different, because it would focus on a “long-term vision” as well as create jobs in the near term.

Since the end of last year, when the long-term surface transportation legislation expired, infrastructure investments have been continued on a temporary basis, even as a trust fund that finances them has fallen into insolvency, the White House said. Mr. Obama’s plan would call on Congress to enact a long-term reauthorization of that bill.

The idea for an infrastructure initiative, and in particular an infrastructure bank to leverage public money for private investment, is one that the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has been promoting for some time within the West Wing. It was not included in the original $787 billion stimulus program in early 2009 because the administration and Congressional Democratic leaders wanted to pass that package as quickly as possible given how fast the economy was sinking in the weeks before Mr. Obama took office; changes in the way public projects are determined and financed would have met resistance in the large committees of Congress that have jurisdiction.

Lately the White House has been consulting with Representative James L. Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and who has been developing legislation of his own.

The administration also has consulted with an influential, tri-partisan trio — Ed Rendell, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania; Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California; and Michael R. Bloomberg, the independent who is mayor of New York — that recently formed a group called Building America’s Future to press for more public and private partnerships to invest in and modernize roads and bridges, air traffic control systems, waterways, electricity grids and more.

The White House offered only sketchy details of the plan during a background briefing for reporters Monday. Senior administration officials said they had no estimate for how many jobs would be created, but that it would be a ‘’a substantial number.” And they declined to specify the total cost of the transportation package, beyond saying that the initial $50 billion would represent a substantial chunk of it.

The officials said that, under the best-case scenario, if Congress acts quickly, the plan could start creating jobs over the course of 2011. But the officials emphasized that the White House does not view the proposal as a “stimulus, immediate jobs plan,” calling it instead a “six-year reauthorization that’s front-loaded.”

With only a few weeks of this year’s Congressional session left before lawmakers head home to campaign for re-election, the White House concedes it may face an uphill battle in getting the plan passed this fall, either before lawmakers break for the midterm elections or afterward, in a lame-duck session. Typically, transportation measures do get bipartisan support, but they often require months of work.

U.S. businesses added more jobs in the past three months than originally estimated, calming fears of a double-dip recession. Yet the pace of growth signaled that the wheels of the economic recovery were still spinning in place.

The private sector added 67,000 jobs in August, with some of the strongest gains in health care, food service and temporary help, according to the Labor Department. That was higher than consensus forecasts, and the government upwardly revised its numbers for June and July, suggesting that job creation was slightly stronger over the summer than originally reported.

But the continuing wind-down of the 2010 Census, as well as state and local government layoffs, led to an overall loss of 54,000 jobs in August.

With businesses adding about half the number of positions needed simply to accommodate population growth — much less dent the ranks of the jobless — the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent, from 9.5 percent.

“The overall picture is one where the labor market is still kind of treading water,” said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at MFR Inc. “It’s better than sinking, but it’s certainly not surging ahead.”

The August numbers, which pushed up stock gauges Friday, are likely to do little to assuage political pressure on the Obama administration in the run-up to the midterm elections.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning, President Barack Obama called the latest jobs report “positive news” but said he would be unveiling “a broader package of ideas next week” to shore up the flagging economy, although he declined to give specifics. The president once again urged Congress to pass a stalled bill that would offer tax breaks to small businesses and create a $30 billion program to encourage community banks to lend.

“There’s no quick fix for this recession,” he said. “The hard truth is that it took years to create our current economic problems, and it will take more time than any of us would like to repair the damage.”

Optimists were taking their good news where they could. By the end of the day, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was up 1.32 percent, continuing a rally that began in the middle of the week. Market reaction to the jobs data Friday was tempered somewhat by a report that said growth in the services sector had slowed in August.

“I can say with greater confidence that a relapse into recession now looks even more unlikely,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at Economic Outlook Group. “And the momentum is gradually building for a stronger fourth quarter and a better 2011.”

The Labor Department revised upward its private sector number for July, raising the number of jobs added to 107,000, from the 71,000 originally reported. And private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000 and lowered to 31,000, was raised again to 61,000.

Baumohl, who also noted that consumer confidence had edged up in recent surveys and that a closely watched index of manufacturing showed earlier this week that employment was increasing, pointed to the fact that the jobs report showed that average weekly earnings rose slightly, to $774.97 in August from $772.92 in July.

The average workweek among private workers was unchanged at 34.2 hours, but among production and nonsupervisory employees, it edged up to 33.5 hours, from 33.4. Economists generally see such increases in pay and workweeks as an indicator that companies are pushing their existing workers harder to meet rising demand, moves that tend to presage hiring.

According to the government, manufacturing, which has been a bright spot since the beginning of the year and remains so in some other measures, showed a surprise setback in the government numbers released Friday.

For the first time since January, the sector lost jobs, a total of 27,000 in August. The Labor Department said the decline was in part attributable to the fact that carmakers did not shut down plants in July as they usually do, throwing off seasonal adjustments in August.

Thomas J. Duesterberg, the president of the Manufacturers Alliance-MAPI, said that the organization’s members were slowly adding workers.

“It’s not the type of robust growth that we would all like to see and would need to see if we’re ever going to get back to the levels that we had before the recession,” Duesterberg said, “but nonetheless it’s growth.”

Slow growth is certainly cold comfort to those who are out of work and seeking a job, a number that rose to 14.9 million in August, from 14.6 million in July. In one small sign of improvement, the number of people out of work for 27 weeks — which grew alarmingly throughout the recession and its aftermath — declined by 323,000, to 6.2 million in August from 6.6 million in July. The median length of unemployment fell to 19.9 weeks in August, from 22.2 weeks in July.

The so-called underemployment rate — which includes people whose hours have been cut as well as those who would like work but have given up on the search out of discouragement, rose to 16.7 percent in August, compared with 16.5 percent in July. The number of people who were working part time because they could not find full-time work rose to 8.9 million in August, from 8.5 million in July.

Some struggling with unemployment say they will settle for any work, even with pay cuts.

Susan Howard, a Leander, Texas, single mother with a master’s degree, said she was laid off from her software on-demand job in June and since then has been interviewing for jobs that would pay half her previous salary.

But with only $406 a week in benefits and some child support, she has stopped paying her mortgage, deferred her car payments, reached out to a ministry for help with utility bills and enrolled her son in a reduced-cost school lunch program.

“My resume is posted on every career resume site there is,” she said. “I have been called in for three interviews, but none of them have ever gotten back to me.”

There is unlikely to be much relief in the coming months. Most economists are forecasting lukewarm growth in the second half of the year. Growth in the second quarter was revised down last week, to 1.6 percent from 2.4 percent.

Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman Sachs, said he believed the economy would grow at about 1.5 percent in the second half. That is not nearly enough to start bringing down unemployment in a significant way.

“Overall you generally need 3 percent GDP growth or more to start making a dent in the unemployment rate on a consistent basis,” said Hatzius, referring to gross domestic product.

He noted that Friday’s report might end up being something of a Catch-22 for government action, particularly from the Federal Reserve. Last week, the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said the central bank was prepared to act if the economy continued to weaken, but Hatzius said Friday’s labor market numbers might cause the Fed to hold its powder.

“If you had a really bad report, that would spur people into action more,” Hatzius said. “But this is going to reduce the need for immediate action.”

By early evening, the workers had been rescued with no serious injuries reported and the fire had been put out. Coast Guard officials said that no oil could be seen on the water near the platform, contradicting an earlier report.

In another year, the blaze may not have garnered much attention; it might have been seen as one of the scores of fires and explosions that occur on offshore platforms in the gulf every year. But coming so soon after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in April, which killed 11 workers and set off the largest marine oil spill in American history, it took on much larger significance.

Environmental groups quickly issued news releases, arguing that the fire proved the wisdom of the current federal moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling (though the platform was not drilling, nor was it in deep water).

Officials from Mariner Energy, which owns the well, will now take their turn answering to Congress, following in the well-worn footsteps of executives of BP and Transocean, which operated the Deepwater Horizon.

The three ranking House Democrats in the energy field — Henry A. Waxman of California, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee; Bart Stupak of Michigan, the chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee; and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee — sent a letter on Thursday to Scott D. Josey, the chairman and chief executive of Mariner Energy, requesting a briefing by next Friday.

Officials from Mariner, echoed by others in the industry, took pains to note the differences between this fire and the explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon.

“There was no blowout, no explosion, no injuries, no spill,” said Patrick Cassidy, the director of investor relations for Mariner Energy, a relatively small oil and gas company in Houston with 330 employees and about $1 billion in annual revenues.

Mariner, which plans to merge with a subsidiary of the Apache Corporation, holds oil and gas interests around the Gulf Coast area, as well as in Arkansas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming.

But 85 percent of its production comes from offshore in the gulf.

The platform that caught fire is about 14 years old, and is located in a section of the gulf known as Vermilion Block 380.

It has four columns standing on the sea floor at a depth of 320 feet, and seven oil-producing wells are connected to it. Its production, averaging 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas and 1,400 barrels of oil daily, is much less than that of platforms now being built in far deeper waters of the gulf.

The fire broke out just after sunrise in the living quarters, as the crew was painting and cleaning the platform, Mr. Cassidy said. He said the company was investigating the cause but did not yet have any answers.

“It doesn’t appear to be related to the wells,” Mr. Cassidy said. “And it doesn’t appear that there was any release of oil.”

He said that automatic shut-off equipment on the platform sealed off the oil and gas wells before the fire had occurred and that the crew had abandoned the platform. But he could not explain why the equipment had been activated.

At 9:19 a.m., the Coast Guard received a call from a nearby platform saying that the Mariner Energy platform was engulfed in flames, Capt. Peter Troedsson, the chief of staff for the Coast Guard’s Eighth District, said at an afternoon news conference.

The 13 workers who had been aboard were spotted from a helicopter, huddled together and floating in protective suits about a mile from the platform.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana visited a hospital where the workers had been taken. In a statement, he said two of them told him that one of workers could not get a life jacket because it was too close the fire.

“Some of the workers held one of the men up in the water, which is probably why one worker was thought to be injured when seen from far away,” Mr. Jindal said.

An offshore supply vessel called the Crystal Clear, which was at a nearby oil platform, picked the crew members up and took them to the nearest platform. They were taken to land by helicopter later in the day.

The Coast Guard sent seven helicopters and six vessels to the scene. Earlier in the day, a response vessel had reported an oil sheen one mile long and 100 feet wide. But Captain Troedsson said that Coast Guard responders at the site could not see any sheen.

Responders working for Mariner were studying the wells attached to the platform to see if there were any leaks, but for now they appeared to have been closed off, he said.

“The company monitors each of these wells. and their data showed there’s no flow,” Captain Troedsson said. Similar assurances were made after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon — in that case, they proved to be wrong.

By midafternoon, Captain Troedsson said, the fire aboard the platform had been put out.

Federal records show that there have been at least four accidents at that platform in the past decade. At least one of them led to a serious injury, and another led to a hospitalization.

Mariner Energy itself has been forced to pay at least $85,000 in civil penalties for safety violations over the same period, including in two instances last year.

The fire reinvigorated the debate about the federal moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, which has been fiercely criticized by industry officials and residents of coastal states.

The moratorium is currently scheduled to expire on Nov. 30. But Michael R. Bromwich, the director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, is reviewing safety policies and records of deepwater drilling companies to determine whether the suspension could be modified or lifted sooner.

An Interior Department spokeswoman said that the Nov. 30 date had not been revised, in light of Thursday’s accident.

The three most recent drilling approvals for the Vermilion Block 380, the area where Thursday’s fire occurred, were approved by federal regulators in 1999 and 2000, using categorical exclusions, according to federal mining records.

Categorical exclusions are waivers that allow companies to proceed with drilling without having to undergo an in-depth environmental review.

This is the same type of waiver that was granted for the BP Deepwater Horizon project. Since the explosion on that rig, the use of categorical exclusions has come under attack as a prime example of lax regulatory oversight of the oil and gas industry.

In August, a presidential commission decided that the use of categorical exclusions would be halted for deepwater drilling but would continue to be allowed for shallow-water operations.

Jacqueline Savitz, a senior scientist at the environmental advocacy group Oceana, said that the accident showed that the government needs to keep the moratorium in place for new offshore drilling to ensure the safety of rig workers and marine ecosystems.

“It’s another reminder that drilling accidents happen all too frequently,” she said.

But industry officials said the fire had nothing to do with the issues being addressed in the moratorium.

The Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition, an industry group of several gulf operators, pointed out that there are many differences — in equipment and relative risks — between shallow-water production platforms and deepwater drillers.

“It is so unrelated to anything involved in the moratorium,” said Lee Hunt, the chief executive of the International Association of Drilling Contractors. “These platforms are regulated under a whole different set of standards.”

Patrick Kane, the 21-year-old winger, scored 4 minutes 6 seconds into overtime Wednesday, lifting the Chicago Blackhawks over the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-3, and giving Chicago its first Cup since 1961.

The Blackhawks had come up empty in five finals since their last Cup victory until Kane scored his third goal of the series. It came suddenly on a shot from the bottom of the right circle that whizzed under the stick and pads of Flyers goalie Michael Leighton.

Many in the crowd at the Wachovia Center did not know that a goal had been scored until they saw Kane and his teammates throw their sticks in the air in celebration.

No red light went on, and both teams had to wait several moments until the officials confirmed the goal after reviewing the replay and searching for the puck in the padding at the back of the net. But Kane did not need a review.

“I shot, I saw it go right through the legs, sticking right under the pad in the net,” he said. “I don’t think anyone saw it in the net. I booked it to the other end. I knew it was in. I tried to sell the celebration a bit.”

He added: “I think some guys were still kind of a little iffy to see if the puck was in the net. I saw the coaches there pointing at the puck and jumping around. It’s pretty surreal right now for sure.”

Chicago Coach Joel Quenneville described the view on the bench.

“When it went in, I don’t think too many people knew it,” he said. “But it made a funny strange sound. Like the back of the leather and the back of the net. And I asked Kaner where did it go in? He said it went in long pad, five hole, in that area,” he continued.

“When they lifted up the net, when they went searching for the puck, it was underneath in there deep. They lifted it up, it fell through. We knew that was the winner.”

The last time the Blackhawks were champions, Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita were young Chicago stars playing with curved sticks, Glenn Hall stood bare-faced in the goal, and John F. Kennedy was president.

Jonathan Toews, the Chicago captain, was named the winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the playoffs. He finished second in overall playoff scoring, but had played unevenly in the finals, with three assists and a minus-5 mark.

Nevertheless, he was a force on face-offs throughout the series, winning 97 and losing only 52, and for his preternatural leadership abilities.

“This is the best feeling you can ever get playing hockey, and I just can’t believe it’s happening,” Toews said.

He and his teammates Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, both defensemen, won the Stanley Cup and Olympic gold medals with Team Canada in February. The trio joined Ken Morrow (Team USA and the Islanders in 1980), Steve Yzerman and Brendan Shanahan (both Canada and the Red Wings in 2002) in this exclusive club.

The Cup drought was the second longest in league history, after the Rangers’ 54-year sojourn in the wilderness, which ended in 1994.

The Blackhawks seemed to be hanging on for a narrow victory in the third period against a furious Flyers attack, but they did not hold on in regulation. Philadelphia’s Scott Hartnell scored with 3:59 left for his second goal of the night, sending the game to overtime.

But Kane’s goal, which came after the Flyers had at least four clear chances at the Chicago net in the extra session, made the road team winners for the first time in the series.

It was a victory typical of this series: not well played, but exciting and unpredictable. Like the Olympic gold medal game at Vancouver in February, it ended memorably, in overtime.

John Madden threw his gloves into a corner after Kane scored, picked them up after he thought the goal might not count, then threw them again.

“It was like we won two Cups tonight,” said Madden, a former Devils wing. “It was pretty weird.”

Flyers fans stood and saluted their resilient team, then booed loudly as the Blackhawks paraded the Cup around the ice.

The Flyers had earned a berth in the playoffs on the last day of the regular season by winning a shootout against the Rangers and were seemingly eliminated in the Eastern Conference semifinals, trailing the Boston Bruins by three games to none, and by 3-0 in Game 7 in Boston. But the Flyers rallied to become the third N.H.L. team to win a best-of-seven-game series after trailing by 0-3.

The Blackhawks, with a 17-7 shooting advantage, were the better team in the opening period, but the score was tied at the first intermission after Dustin Byfuglien and Hartnell traded power-play goals.

The Blackhawks held the edge in play in the second period as well, outshooting the Flyers by 10-6. But they fell behind when Danny Briere, the leading scorer of the finals, beat Chicago goalie Antti Niemi on a play that started when Keith tripped over Hartnell’s skate.

Patrick Sharp tied the score by finishing a fine passing play with a shot from 21 feet that beat Leighton to the short side at 9:58 — a soft goal, but not quite as soft as Kane’s overtime winner. Andrew Ladd tipped in Niklas Hjalmarsson’s shot at 17:43, and the Blackhawks were ahead by 3-2 entering the third period.

Niemi, who had a shaky series, stopped 21 of 24 Flyers shots and ended with an .882 series save percentage. He became the first Finnish goalie to backstop his team to a Stanley Cup. Leighton ended with 37 saves on 41 shots. His save percentage in the series was .876.

The Flyers’ line of Hartnell, Danny Briere and Ville Leino was by far the best for either team in the series. Briere led the series in scoring with 3 goals and 10 assists for 13 points. Leino — a rookie even though he is 26 and who had already been named the most valuable player in the Finnish SM-liiga, Europe’s second-best professional league — had 7 goals and 14 assists for 21 points in the playoffs. That tied him for the postseason rookie scoring record, set by Dino Ciccarelli of the Minnesota North Stars in 1981.

It was the sixth straight final series that the Flyers have lost. That ties them with the Maple Leafs of 1933-40 and the Red Wings of 1956-95 for most consecutive finals lost.

At one point they ranked 29th in the 30-team league, but Peter Laviolette, who won the Stanley Cup in 2006 with a lightly regarded Carolina team, took over as coach in December.

“It hurts a lot,” said the Flyers captain Mike Richards, who had a quiet finals. “At the end, they got the last bounce.”

Chicago’s Stan Bowman, 36, became the youngest general manager to win the Cup. The son of the legendary coach and manager Scotty Bowman, Stan Bowman was in his first year at the helm of the Blackhawks.

It was also the first Stanley Cup for Blackhawks Coach Joel Quenneville, one of only three men to participate in at least 800 N.H.L. games as both a player and a head coach. His name is already engraved on the Cup, from when he was an assistant with Colorado in 1996. Now it will be etched onto the silverware with the 2010 Blackhawks.

The same is true of Marian Hossa, the first player to reach the Stanley Cup finals in three straight years with three different teams. After losing with the Penguins and the Red Wings the last two years, he finally won Wednesday.

Hossa was the first person Toews passed the Cup to.

“What a relief,” Hossa said. “I’m so happy to finally do this.”

On the ice after the game, the Blackhawks and their family, friends and fans celebrated as 2010 was added to the club’s previous Cup victories, in 1961, ’38 and ’34.

Kane, whose summer was marked by controversy when he and a cousin pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor after they got into a late-night dispute over a fare with a Buffalo cab driver, ended the season in glory, with the 16th overtime goal to win the Stanley Cup.

On the ice he was being horsecollared by his jubilant friends and showed the television audience his “famous cousin.”

“Got to shout out to my people back in Buffalo, my hometown,” Kane said. “I have four buddies who drove all the way to come out here; my five family members; three sisters, three beautiful sisters. My mom and dad. What a feeling, I can’t believe it. We just won the Stanley Cup.”

In London, business leaders urged the British government to defend BP against mounting political pressure from Washington where lawmakers have called on the company to suspend its dividend and advertising to pay for the cleanup. A senior official also said the Justice Department was “planning to take action.”

That sent BP depositary shares tumbling 15.8 percent Wednesday in New York. Shares in London were down 6.3 percent Thursday, and have fallen about 42 percent since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20.

The declines came even as the overall markets rose. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 185.80 points or 1.8 percent, fueled by a better than expected report on jobless claims. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose 1.8 percent and the Nasdaq was up 1.6 percent.

In Europe, the Euro Stoxx 50 index, a barometer of euro zone blue chips, rose 1.2 percent, while the drop in BP shares held back the FTSE 100 index with was 0.5 percent higher.

The threats to BP’s dividend are particularly worrisome among investors because the company has long had a reputation as one of the most dependable dividend payers, making it an attractive holding for retirees and others who need a steady income.

Last year, the company paid about $10.5 billion in dividends. It is one of the largest and most widely held British stocks.

Business leaders on Thursday urged the British government to come to BP’s defense.

“It’s a matter of concern when politicians get heavily involved in business in this way,” Richard Lambert, head of the CBI, the leading British business lobby group, said in an emailed statement, according to Reuters.

But Reuters quoted Prime Minister David Cameron as saying, “This is an environmental catastrophe. BP needs to do everything it can to deal with the situation, and the UK government stands ready to help. I completely understand the U.S. government’s frustration.”

Earlier, a spokesman for Mr. Cameron said the prime minister would be discussing the issue with President Obama in a weekend telephone call.

The company’s market capitalization has dropped by about half since the leak began. The expense of cleaning up the oil spill continue to grow; the cost of the response effort so far is about $1.43 billion, the company said Thursday. Some on Wall Street fear the company could be forced to seek bankruptcy protection or a merger, though the company had $6.84 billion in cash on hand at the end of the first quarter, according to its financial statement.

The company’s market capitalization has dropped by about half since the leak began. The expense of cleaning up the oil spill continue to grow; the cost of the response effort so far is about $1.43 billion, the company said Thursday. Some on Wall Street fear the company could be forced to seek bankruptcy protection or a merger, though the company had $6.84 billion in cash on hand at the end of the first quarter, according to its financial statement.

BP’s debt is trading at junk levels, and the cost of insuring it against default with credit-default swaps has soared in recent days. While the company is still rated at investment grade, Standard & Poor’s last week cut its long-term rating on BP to AA- from AA and said the outlook for its long- and short-term corporate credit ratings was negative.

The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, said Wednesday that BP would be asked to compensate energy companies for losses if they had to lay off workers because of the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling that the government has imposed.

Iain Conn, BP’s chief executive for refining and marketing, said Wednesday in London that BP was “totally committed to the cooperation with the administration” and that the company and the government were “joined together in a desire to mitigate this problem.”

The oil is not expected to stop gushing from the well until August at the earliest, when relief wells are completed.

In a report Thursday, the International Energy Agency said the ongoing oil spill could prove to be a “game changer” because it could restrict future undersea oil development and limit supply.

“Emotion is understandably running high, and the way deepwater hydrocarbon developments are approved, operated and regulated will of course be thoroughly examined and potentially amended,” the agency said in its monthly oil market report.

Increasingly frustrated American lawmakers have been echoing comments last week by Mr. Obama, who criticized BP for spending $50 million on TV advertising while people whose livelihoods were wrecked by oil spill were reporting difficulties in getting their claims paid.

Thomas J. Perrelli, the associate attorney general, testified Wednesday before a House committee that “we are looking very closely at this, and we are planning to take action.” And the Coast Guard is pressing BP to come up with a better plan for capturing the thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico.

In other markets, Asian shares were mostly higher. The Tokyo benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average finished up 1.1 percent. The main Sydney market index, the S&P/ASX 200, also gained 1.1 percent. In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index rose 0.1 percent, but in Shanghai the composite index fell 0.9 percent.

The dollar was lower against other major currencies. The euro rose to $1.2046 from $1.1979 late Wednesday in New York, while the British pound rose to $1.4611 from $1.4528. The dollar slipped to 91.27 yen from 91.30 yen.

Bond prices were little changed, with the yield on the benchmark U.S. 10-year Treasury note up three-hundredths of a percent at 3.2 percent.

The government of the Mexican state of Chihuahua condemned the killing of the teenager, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, 15, calling it a blow to all Mexicans and an example of the xenophobia that the anti-immigration law in Arizona has fomented in the United States.

American officials described the shooting as an act of self defense. Several agents were on a bike patrol in the concrete channel alongside the Rio Grande at about 6:30 p.m. Monday when they encountered a group of suspected illegal immigrants entering the United States. After two suspects were arrested, others in the group fled just across the border to Mexico and began throwing rocks at the agents, the FBI said in a statement. One agent fired several shots and hit the victim, who died at the base of the Paso Del Norte international bridge, officials said.

The Border Patrol says it is subjected to hundreds of rock attacks during its patrols and takes them seriously. From October 2007 to the end of May 2008, there were 537 rock-throwing incidents involving agents, officials said. That number dropped to 460 the following year and then rose to 604 incidents in the most recent reporting period, which ended on May 31.

“There’s a misperception people have that we’re having pebbles thrown at us,” said Mark Qualia, a United States Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Washington. “They are stones the size of baseballs in some cases or half a brick. You can’t take this lightly.”

It hardly seemed that life could get worse. And then, one Saturday afternoon last November, his sister burst into his apartment in Chongjin with shocking news: the North Korean government had decided to drastically devalue the nation’s currency. The family’s life savings, about $1,560, had been reduced to about $30.

Last month the construction worker sat in a safe house in this bustling northern Chinese city, lamenting years of useless sacrifice. Vegetables for his parents, his wife’s asthma medicine, the navy track suit his 15-year-old daughter craved — all were forsworn on the theory that, even in North Korea, the future was worth saving for.

“Ai!” he exclaimed, cursing between sobs. “How we worked to save that money! Thinking about it makes me go crazy.”

North Koreans are used to struggle and heartbreak. But the Nov. 30 currency devaluation, apparently an attempt to prop up a foundering state-run economy, was for some the worst disaster since a famine that killed hundreds of thousands in the mid-1990s.

Interviews in the past month with eight North Koreans who recently left their country — a prison escapee, illegal traders, people in temporary exile to find work in China, the traveling wife of an official in the ruling Workers’ Party — paint a haunting portrait of desperation inside North Korea, a nation of 24 million people, and of growing resentment toward its erratic leader, Kim Jong-il.

What seems missing — for now, at least — is social instability. Widespread hardship, popular anger over the currency revaluation and growing political uncertainty as Mr. Kim seeks to install his third son as his successor have not hardened into noticeable resistance against the government. At least two of those interviewed in China hewed to the official propaganda line that North Korea was a victim of die-hard enemies, its impoverishment a Western plot, its survival threatened by the United States, South Korea and Japan.

South Korea’s charge that North Korea sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March was just part of the plot, the party official’s wife said.

“That’s why we have weapons to protect ourselves,” she said while visiting relatives in northern China — and earning spare cash as a waitress. “Our enemies are trying to hit us from all sides, and that’s why we lack electricity and good infrastructure. North Korea must keep its doors locked.”

Others were more skeptical of the government’s propaganda, but still cast war as an inevitability. “We always wait for the invasion,” said one former primary school teacher. “My son says he wishes the war would come because life is too hard, and we will probably die anyway from starvation.”

They and other North Koreans spoke only on the condition that they could withhold their names in discussions largely arranged by underground churches operating in China just across the border. If they were identified as traveling or working in China illegally, they could be deported and imprisoned, along with their relatives.

About half of those interviewed said they planned to return to North Korea; the other half hoped to defect to South Korea.

On many details, their accounts, given separately, dovetailed. They also reinforced descriptions by economists and political analysts of a stricken nation.

A Reeling Economy

Citing aerial photos of plumeless smokestacks, economists say roughly three of every four North Korean factories are idle. The economy has been staggering badly since 2006, when Kim Jong-il pulled out of multinational talks aimed at ending his nuclear weapons program. The sinking of the Cheonan will further damage the economy: South Korea has suspended nearly all trade, depriving the North of $333 million a year from seafood sales and other exports.

When the Korean Peninsula was divided in 1945, South Korea was poorer than its neighbor. Now its average worker earns 15 times as much as an average North Korean, according to cost-of-living-adjusted data. The number of defectors who make it through China to South Korea has steadily risen for a decade, hitting nearly 3,000 last year.

Infant and maternal mortality rates jumped at least 30 percent from 1993 to 2008, and life expectancy fell by three years to 69 during the same period, according to North Korean census figures and the United Nations Population Fund.

The United Nations World Food Program says one in three North Korean children under the age of 5 are malnourished. More than one in four people need food aid, the agency says, but only about one in 17 will get it this year, partly because donors are reluctant to send aid to a country that has insisted on developing nuclear weapons.

The currency devaluation has only heightened the suffering. Its aim was to divert the proceeds of North Korea’s vast entrepreneurial underground — its street markets — to its cash-starved government businesses.

The markets are the sole source of income for many North Koreans, but they flout the government’s credo of economic socialism. Theoretically, everyone except minors, the elderly and mothers with young children works for the state. But state enterprises have been withering for 30 years, and North Koreans do all they can to escape work in them.

Farmers tend their own gardens as weeds overtake collective farms. Urban workers duck state assignments to peddle everything from metal scavenged from mothballed factories to televisions smuggled from China.

“If you don’t trade, you die,” said the former teacher, a round-faced 51-year-old woman with a ponytail. She went from obedient state employee to lawbreaking trader, but could not escape her plight.

Too Hungry to Study

She taught primary school for 30 years in Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city, with roughly 500,000 people. What once was an all-day job shrank by 2004 to morning duty; schools closed at noon. At least 15 of her 50 students dropped out or left after an hour, too hungry to study.

“It is very hard to teach a starving child,” she said. “Even sitting at a desk is difficult for them.”

Teachers were hungry, too. Her monthly salary scarcely bought two pounds of rice, she said. A university graduate, she pulled her own child out of the third grade in 1998, instead sending her to a neighbor to learn to sew.

She quit in 2004 to sell corn noodles outside Chongjin’s main market, an expanse of stalls and plastic tarpaulins half the size of a city block where traders mainly sell Chinese goods, including toothpaste, sewing needles and DVDs of banned South Korean soap operas.

But noodles were barely profitable, so she tried a riskier trade in state-controlled commodities: pine nuts and red berries used in a popular tea. That scheme collapsed in October. After she and her partners collected 17 sacks of goods from a village, a guard at a checkpoint confiscated them all instead of taking a bribe to let them pass. She was left with $300 in debt.

Like her, the construction worker, a rail-thin 45-year-old with a head for numbers, figured that private enterprise was his family’s only salvation. But as a man, it was harder for him to shake off his work assignment.

On paper, he said, a Chongjin state construction company employs him. But the company has few supplies and no cash to pay its employees. So like more than a third of the workers, the worker said, he pays roughly $5 a month to sign in as an employee on the company’s daily log — and then toil elsewhere.

Such payments, widespread at smaller state companies, are supposed to keep companies solvent, said one 62-year-old woman who is a trader in Chongjin. Even a major enterprise like the city’s metal refinery has not paid salaries since 2007, she and others said, though workers there collect 10 days worth of food rations each month.

“How would the companies survive if they didn’t get money from the workers?” she asked without irony.

Recently, the construction worker’s firm has been more active. The state has resurfaced Chongjin’s only paved road and built a hospital and a university for the 2012 centennial of the birth of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il’s father and North Korea’s founder.

But the burst of projects bore a cost: each family was required to deliver 17 bags of pebbles every month to its local party committee. The construction worker enlisted his elderly parents to scour creek beds and fields for rocks that the family smashed by hand into grape-size stones.

With no state salary, he earns money by his wits. Every October, he sells squid caught from a boat he pilots in treacherous coastal waters. In other months, he bicycles about 20 miles every day looking for goods to sell, typically detergent bought from a factory that is resold by his wife at a 12 percent markup on a purple tarpaulin outside the main market.

The government periodically tries to rein in the markets, regulating prices, hours, types of goods sold, the sellers’ age and sex and even whether they haul their wares on bicycles or their backs.

Savings Wiped Out

In one 2007 Central Committee communiqué, Kim Jong-il complained that the markets had become “a birthplace of all sorts of nonsocialist practices.” The Nov. 30 currency devaluation upended them. The state decreed that a new, more valuable won would replace the old won, but that families could trade only 100,000 won, about $30 at the black market rate, for the new one. The move effectively wiped out private stores of money.

To cushion the blow, workers say, they were promised that their salaries would be restored if they returned to their government jobs. In fact, the construction worker and others say, they got one month’s pay, in January, before salaries again disappeared.

Some with political connections skirted the worst. One woman from Hamhung, North Korea’s second-largest city, said the local bank director allowed her relatives to exchange three million won, 30 times the official limit.

The party official’s wife, hair softly curled, a knock-off designer purse by her side, boasted about her six-room house with two color televisions and a garden. In the next breath, she praised devaluation as well-deserved punishment of those who had cheated the state, even though she acknowledged that it led to chaos and noted that a top finance official was executed for mismanaging the policy.

“A lot of bad people had gotten rich doing illegal trading with China, while the good people at the state companies didn’t have enough money,” she said. “So the haves gave to the have-nots.”

The former teacher gave all she had. After her creditors stripped her of all her money, she said, she walked across the frozen Tumen River at night and into China to seek help from her relatives there. Famished and terrified, she said she banged randomly on doors until a stranger helped her contact them.

Now safe in her relatives’ home, she said, she marvels over how they enjoy delicacies like cucumbers in winter. But temporarily deserting her son and daughter, both in their mid-20s, has left her so guilt-ridden that she sometimes cannot swallow the food set in front of her. “I don’t know whether my children have managed to get some money, or whether they have starved to death,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears.

For the construction worker, his sister’s news of the coming devaluation unleashed a furious scramble to salvage the family nest egg. He emptied the living-room cabinet drawer that held their savings and split it with his wife and daughter, telling them, “Buy whatever you can, as fast as you can.”

The three bicycled furiously to Chongjin’s market. “It was like a battlefield,” he said.

Thousands of people frantically tried to outbid one another to convert soon-to-be worthless money into something tangible. Some prices rose 10,000 percent, he said, before traders shut down, realizing that their profits soon would be worthless, too.

The three said they returned home with 66 pounds of rice, a pig’s head and 220 pounds of bean curd. The construction worker’s daughter had managed to purchase a small cutting board and a used pair of khaki pants. Together, he said, they spent the equivalent of $860 for items that would have cost less than $20 the day before.

His daughter tried to comfort him. “Father, I will keep this pair of pants until I die!” she pledged. He told her the cutting board would be her wedding gift.

“At that moment, I really wanted to kill myself,” he said. He gestured toward the safe-house window and beyond toward nighttime Yanji, brightly lighted and humming with traffic. “It is not like here,” he said. “Here, it is not a big deal to make money. There, it is suffering and suffering; sacrificing and sacrificing.”

He said he lay awake night after night afterward, fixated on the navy track suit his daughter had coveted. She had said it put her thick winter sweater and plain trousers to shame. He had put her off because the cheapest ones were nearly $15. When she brought it up once too often, he had cursed and shouted, “People in this house need to eat first!”

“I cannot describe how terrible I feel that I didn’t buy that for her,” he said, his voice trembling.

A Profound Isolation

Those North Koreans who have never crossed the border have no way to make sense of their tribulations. There is no Internet. Television and radio receivers are soldered to government channels. Even the party official’s wife lacks a telephone and mourns her lack of contact with the outside world. Her first question to a foreigner was “Am I pretty?”

Slowly, however, information is seeping in. Traders return from China to report that people are richer and comparatively freer, and that South Koreans are supposedly even more so. Some of the traders have cellphones that are linked to the Chinese cellular network and can be surreptitiously borrowed for exorbitant fees.

Punishment for watching foreign films and television shows is stiff. The trader said a 35-year-old neighbor spent six months in a labor camp last year after he was caught watching “Twin Dragons,” a farcical Hong Kong action film starring Jackie Chan. Yet to the dismay of the former teacher, her 26-year-old son takes similar risks.

Her sister is married to a government official in the capital, Pyongyang, she said, but neither is a fan of Kim Jong-il. On her most recent visit, she said, her sister whispered to her, “ ‘People follow him because of fear, not because of love.’ ”

Since the currency devaluation, she and others say, people are noticeably bolder with such comments.

“Now, if you go to the market, people will say anything,” the construction worker said. “They will say the government is a thief — even in broad daylight.”

His wife was not among them. For weeks after the devaluation, he said, she lay on a living-room floor mat, immobilized by depression. “I had no strength to say anything to her,” he said.

Finally, he told her to get up. It was time to start over.

A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.

“We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ”

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.

“I think they’ve been trying to limit access,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who fought BP to release more video from the underwater rovers that have been filming the oil-spewing pipe. “It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did.”

Officials at BP and the government entities coordinating the response said instances of denying news media access have been anomalies, and they pointed out that the company and the government have gone to great lengths to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have traveled to the gulf to cover the story. The F.A.A., responding to criticism following the incident with Southern Seaplane, has revised its flight restrictions over the gulf to allow for news media flights on a case-by-case basis.

“Our general approach throughout this response, which is controlled by the Unified Command and is the largest ever to an oil spill,” said David H. Nicholas, a BP spokesman, “has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access.”

Anomalies or not, reporters and photographers continue to be blocked from covering aspects of the spill.

Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson’s office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security’s legislative affairs office called the senator’s office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.

“They said it was the Department of Homeland Security’s response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same ‘federal asset,’ ” said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. “No further elaboration” was given, Mr. Gulley added.

Mr. Nelson has asked the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, for an official explanation, the senator’s office said.

Capt. Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that about a week into the cleanup response, the Coast Guard started enforcing a policy that prohibits news media from accompanying candidates for public office on visits to government facilities, “to help manage the large number of requests for media embeds and visits by elected officials.”

In a separate incident last week, a reporter and photographer from The Daily News of New York were told by a BP contractor they could not access a public beach on Grand Isle, La., one of the areas most heavily affected by the oil spill. The contractor summoned a local sheriff, who then told the reporter, Matthew Lysiak, that news media had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the beach.

BP did not respond to requests for comment about the incident.

“For the police to tell me I needed to sign paperwork with BP to go to a public beach?” Mr. Lysiak said. “It’s just irrational.”

In the first few weeks after the oil rig explosion, BP kept a tight lid on images of the oil leaking into the gulf. Even when it released the first video of the spewing oil on May 12, it provided only a 30-second clip. The most detailed images did not become public until two weeks ago when BP gave members of Congress access to internal video feeds from its underwater rovers. Without BP’s permission, some members of Congress displayed the video for news networks like CNN, which carried them live.

For journalists on the ground, particularly photographers who hire their own planes, one of the major sources of frustration has been the flight restrictions over the water, where access is off limits in a vast area from the Louisiana bayous to Pensacola, Fla. Each time they fly in the area, they have to be granted permission from the F.A.A.

“Although there’s a tremendous amount of oil, finding out exactly where it’s washing ashore or where booming is going on is very difficult,” said John McCusker, a photographer with The Times-Picayune. “At 3,000 feet you’re shooting through clouds, and it’s difficult to tell the difference between an oil slick and a shadow from a cloud.”

A spokeswoman for the agency, Laura J. Brown, said the flight restrictions are necessary to prevent civilian air traffic from interfering with aircraft assisting the response effort.

Ms. Brown also said the Coast Guard-F.A.A. command center that turned away Southern Seaplane was enforcing the essential-flights-only policy in place at the time; and she said the BP contractor who answered the phone was there because the F.A.A. operations center is in one of BP’s buildings.

“That person was not making decisions about whether aircraft are allowed to enter the airspace,” Ms. Brown said.

But the incident with Southern Seaplane is not the only example of journalists being told they cannot go somewhere simply because they are journalists. CBS News reported last month that one of its news crews was threatened with arrest for trying to film a public beach where oil had washed ashore. The Coast Guard said later that it was disappointed to learn of the incident.

Media access in disaster situations is always an issue. But the situation in the gulf is especially nettlesome because journalists have to depend on the government and BP to gain access to so much of the affected area.

Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, likened the situation to reporters being embedded with the military in Afghanistan. “There is a continued effort to keep control over the access,” Mr. Oreskes said. “And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it’s still a problem because it’s still access obtained through the government.”

The iPhone 4 is faster and thinner than previous models, with a crisper display and a more angular look. It has a 5-megapixel camera and can shoot and edit high-definition video.

“This is our new baby,” said Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, as he presented the phone during the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference here. “I hope you love it as much as we do.”

Analysts said the new phone came at an opportune moment for Apple. While previous versions of the device continue to sell briskly, buyers have been faced with an increasingly large array of attractive smartphones.

Some phones powered by Google’s Android software match and in some cases exceed the capabilities and speed of the iPhone 3GS, the most recent model.

The iPhone 4 should help Apple re-establish its leadership, some analysts said.

“When it ships, it will be the best smartphone on the market,” said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, who has been following Apple for nearly three decades. “It gives Apple a year’s lead on competitors, if not more.”

A Google spokesman, Mike Nelson, declined to comment on the new phone.

The iPhone 4, priced at $199 for a model with 16 gigabytes of storage or $299 for one with 32 gigabytes with a two-year contract, will go on sale June 24 in the United States and four other countries. Apple plans an aggressive international rollout after that; Mr. Jobs said the phone would be on sale in 88 countries by September.

While the iPhone 4 was greeted with cheers by the loyal Apple developers in the hall, Mr. Jobs’s presentation included few surprises. Some of the secrets of the iPhone 4 were revealed after a prototype, apparently left behind in a bar by an Apple engineer, ended up in the hands of reporters for the technology blog Gizmodo, which published details of the device’s hardware.

And Mr. Jobs did not introduce a new version of the Apple TV device or announce that the iPhone would be available on Verizon Wireless, despite speculation on technology blogs that he might do so.

Analysts and developers were particularly impressed by the iPhone’s video chat feature, called FaceTime. For now, however, chats can be conducted only with other iPhone 4 owners, and only over Wi-Fi networks. Mr. Jobs said Apple would work with carriers to bring video chats to cellphone networks.

“I think video chat is going to be something that really differentiates the iPhone from other devices,” said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company.

The phone includes a new high-resolution display and is powered by Apple’s A4 chip, the same microprocessor that is in the iPad tablet computer. And Mr. Jobs said the phone’s battery life had been improved.

At 9.3 millimeters, it is 24 percent thinner than the iPhone 3GS, and Mr. Jobs called it “the thinnest smartphone on the planet.” A gyroscope inside the iPhone 4 will allow developers to add new motion input to games and other applications.

Much of Mr. Jobs’s presentation was dedicated to demonstrating how the new iPhone would work with the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system, now called iOS 4, which will be made available free to current iPhone owners.

There were signs of Apple’s intensifying rivalry with Google. At one point, Mr. Jobs showed an e-mail message from a developer who said that he had made more money in the first day of sales of his iPad application than in five years of selling Google ads on his Web site.

Mr. Jobs also said existing ads that appeared in applications on the iPad and the iPhone, many of which are sold by Google-owned AdMob, were not good because clicking on them took people out of the apps and onto the Web.

Mr. Jobs said Apple’s new iAds system, which is built into iOS 4, would keep users inside the apps and allow them to go back easily to what they were doing.

He said that major advertisers, including Nissan, Target, Sears and Best Buy, had agreed to spend about $60 million on iAds in the second half of the year.

Analysts said the iPhone 4 should help Apple sustain its sales momentum, appealing both to new iPhone customers and to owners of the two-year-old iPhone 3G who were looking to upgrade. They also said that less expensive plans from AT&T, which put caps on the amount of data that users can consume, would help sell the iPhone 3GS, whose price will drop to $99.

“I think they are going to sell a lot of new subscriptions to people who have held back on buying a smartphone with a data plan,” said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Apple shares fell $5.02, or 1.96 percent, to close at $250.94 on Monday amid a broad market drop.