Monti Resigns in Italy, but May Seek to Regain Office

ROME — Prime Minister Mario Monti resigned on Friday evening following Parliament’s confidence vote on the 2013 budget, but he is still expected to play a major role in early elections, possibly as a candidate, analysts said.

At a news conference scheduled for Sunday, Mr. Monti is expected to present a political agenda — pro-Europe and pro-fiscal rigor — and call on all parties to endorse it, aides said Friday. Mr. Monti, an economist who has helped restore Italy’s international credibility but has suffered politically for championing a series of tax increases and budget cuts, has steadfastly refused to say whether he will run for prime minister or present an agenda that he hopes parties will endorse. Whether he does run or not, however, he has already radically shifted Italy’s political landscape.

With Italy facing economic uncertainty and sluggish growth, Mr. Monti has emerged as a centrist force in a field previously divided between the center-left Democratic Party of Pier Luigi Bersani, which opinion polls place first, and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has risen in polls since taking to the airwaves with a populist message critical of Mr. Monti’s tax increases.

“He’s de facto a candidate. He is the head politician of this coalition,” said Stefano Folli, a columnist for the business daily Il Sole 24 Ore, referring to a centrist grouping that has been courting Mr. Monti.

On Friday evening, Mr. Monti handed in his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano, who in a tough speech to lawmakers last week lamented the “brusque” end of the government and Parliament’s failure to carry out significant structural changes in Italy’s encrusted economy.

Mr. Napolitano is soon expected to dissolve Parliament, opening a hard-fought campaign amid rising unemployment, taxes and populism. Mr. Monti will stay on as caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed. In that time, he is expected to retain the power to pass emergency legislation.

“He’s already a senator for life, so he doesn’t have to become a candidate in the technical way,” Mr. Folli added.

After losing the support of Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party this month, Mr. Monti said that he would step down after the budget was passed. On Friday, lawmakers voted 373 in favor and 67 against with 15 abstentions in a confidence vote over the budget, which stipulates spending cuts of $4.8 billion through 2015.

Mr. Monti could run as a candidate or endorse a centrist alliance that includes a veteran political party, the Union of Christian Democrats, and Toward the Third Republic, a fledgling civic movement led by the chairman of Ferrari, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. If Mr. Monti lends his name to the centrists, he is expected to draw moderates from Mr. Berlusconi’s party. Mr. Monti also has the implicit support of the Catholic Church, which is crucial to the survival of any Italian government.

After weeks of wavering, Mr. Monti seems to have decided to stay involved in Italian politics after other European leaders, concerned about the prospect of an increasingly populist Mr. Berlusconi, urged him to stay in the picture.

Last week, members of the European People’s Party, a group of center-right parties across Europe, asked the unelected Mr. Monti to attend a summit in Brussels, which Mr. Berlusconi attended as the head of Italy’s largest center-right party. “I can say that there was massive support from E.P.P. members that Monti should remain at the helm of Italy,” said Kostas Sasmatzoglou, the group’s spokesman.

“It was Europe pushing him to continue,” Mr. Folli, the columnist, said. “Germany already has Hollande,” he said, referring to France’s Socialist prime minister, François Hollande. “It doesn’t want another country to go to the left, to go back on fiscal rigor.”

He added: “It can have Bersani, but Bersani ‘corrected’ and supported by Monti.”

Indeed, if he lends them his support, Mr. Monti and the centrist groupings are not expected to get more than 15 percent of the vote. Mr. Bersani’s Democratic Party is expected to place first, but without enough votes to govern in both houses even if it allies with the smaller Left Ecology and Freedom party. It remains to be seen if the center will take votes away from Mr. Berlusconi or Mr. Bersani.

On Thursday, Mr. Monti was widely perceived to have begun his campaign with a politically calculated speech at a Fiat automotive plant in southern Italy. With Fiat’s chairman, Sergio Marchionne, by his side, he said that Italy needed to stay the course on structural changes. The speech effectively challenged Mr. Bersani, a moderate who will most likely have to tack further left.

Mr. Monti came to power in November 2011, replacing Mr. Berlusconi amid global financial panic. He helped burnish Italy’s image abroad, but effectively raised taxes, worsening Italy’s recession. Although populists have depicted Mr. Monti and his government as a puppet of Europe and the banks, many Italians support him as a needed change from politics as usual.

“I prefer Monti to Berlusconi or any other politician, even if he left us in our underwear,” said Annalisa di Piero, 50, a costume designer and stylist, referring to the tax increases that have left Italians with less in their pockets in the holiday shopping season. “I just paid my property tax, but I still prefer him to these other clowns.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

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Gaps in F.B.I. Data Undercut Background Checks for Guns

Mary F. Calvert for The New York Times

Dennis Pratte, owner of a gun store in Falls Church, Va., said he sold weapons only to buyers who cleared a background check.

CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — Nearly two decades after lawmakers began requiring background checks for gun buyers, significant gaps in the F.B.I.’s database of criminal and mental health records allow thousands of people to buy firearms every year who should be barred from doing so.

The database is incomplete because many states have not provided federal authorities with comprehensive records of people involuntarily committed or otherwise ruled mentally ill. Records are also spotty for several other categories of prohibited buyers, including those who have tested positive for illegal drugs or have a history of domestic violence.

While some states, including New York, have submitted more than 100,000 names of mentally ill people to the F.B.I. database, 19 — including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Maryland and Maine — have submitted fewer than 100 records and Rhode Island has submitted none, according to federal data compiled by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. That suggests that millions of names are missing from the federal database, gun control advocates and law enforcement officials say.

“Until it has all the records of people out there in the country who have been deemed too dangerous to own a firearm, the background check system still looks like Swiss cheese,” said Mark Glaze, director of the group. The gaps exist because the system is voluntary; the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the federal government cannot force state officials to participate in the federal background check system. As a result, when a gun dealer asks the F.B.I. to check a buyer’s history, the bureau sometimes allows the sale to proceed, even though the purchaser should have been prohibited from acquiring a weapon, because its database is missing the relevant records.

While the database flaws do not appear to have been a factor in the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, they have been linked to other attacks, including the Virginia Tech mass murder in 2007. In that case, a Virginia state judge had declared the gunman mentally ill, but the record of that proceeding was not submitted to the F.B.I. He was able to pass a background check and buy the weapons he used to kill 32 people and wound 17 others.

Since then, Virginia has increased its submissions to the F.B.I. But other states have not taken similar steps because of lack of political will, technical obstacles and state privacy laws, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which conducted a survey of states last year about their compliance. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York is a co-chairman of the group.

A July report by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan Congressional watchdog, found that the total number of mental health records submitted by states to the background check system increased to 1.2 million from about 126,000 between 2004 and 2011, but that the increase largely reflected the efforts of just 12 states. And, it found, 30 states were not making noncriminal records — like positive drug test results for people on probation — available to the system.

Charles H. Ramsey, the police commissioner in Philadelphia, said the system needed to be strengthened immediately. “There is a lot of data sitting in different places, and we need to be able to access it in a timely fashion,” he said. “It ought to be a top priority now.”

The gaps in the database have exacerbated the effect of a loophole that results in violent felons, fugitives and the mentally ill being able to buy firearms when the F.B.I. cannot determine the person’s history during a three-day waiting period.

Roughly 97 percent of the time, specialists said, the F.B.I. can provide an instant answer, but sometimes an ambiguity — an arrest record that does not say whether someone was convicted, or a common name — requires calling local courthouses to track down the information.

That can cause delays as local officials search through records, some of which are not yet digitized, law enforcement officials said. If the F.B.I. investigation is not completed within the waiting period, would-be gun buyers are permitted to go ahead.

Since 2005, 22,162 firearms — including nearly 3,000 this year — have been bought after the waiting period by people later determined to have been disqualified because of their criminal and mental histories, according to an examination of F.B.I. data.

Some of the weapons were used in violent crimes, including a fatal drive-by shooting, but it is not clear how many were linked to criminal acts, because authorities are barred by Congress from tracking such information.

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Country singer Tate Stevens wins Fox's 'X Factor'

NEW YORK (AP) — Tate Stevens, who was mentored by music exec L.A. Reid on the second season of "The X Factor," has won the Fox singing competition.

The 37-year-old country singer from Belton, Mo., beat runner-up Carly Rose Sonenclar, a 13-year-old schoolgirl from Westchester, N.Y., and teenage girl group Fifth Harmony on the finale that aired live Thursday night.

Stevens wins a $5 million recording contract.

More than 35 million votes were cast by viewers after Wednesday's performance show.

Besides Reid, judges this season included Demi Lovato, Britney Spears and series creator Simon Cowell.

Thursday's show was also the grand finale for Reid. Earlier this month, he said he wouldn't be returning to "The X Factor" next year. No replacement has been announced.

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Boehner Tax Plan in House Is Pulled, Lacking Votes

Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio leaving a meeting Thursday with fellow House Republicans on talks over the “fiscal cliff.”

WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner’s effort to pass fallback legislation to avert a fiscal crisis in less than two weeks collapsed Thursday night in an embarrassing defeat after conservative Republicans refused to support legislation that would allow taxes to rise on the most affluent households in the country.

House Republican leaders abruptly canceled a vote on the bill after they failed to rally enough votes for passage in an emergency meeting about 8 p.m. Within minutes, dejected Republicans filed out of the basement meeting room and declared there would be no votes to avert the “fiscal cliff” until after Christmas. With his “Plan B” all but dead, the speaker was left with the choice to find a new Republican way forward or to try to get a broad deficit reduction deal with President Obama that could win passage with Republican and Democratic votes.

What he could not do was blame Democrats for failing to take up legislation he could not even get through his own membership in the House.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement that said responsibility for a solution now fell to the White House and Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

The stunning turn of events in the House left the status of negotiations to head off a combination of automatic tax increases and significant federal spending cuts in disarray with little time before the start of the new year.

At the White House, the press secretary, Jay Carney, said the defeat should press Mr. Boehner back into talks with Mr. Obama.

“The president will work with Congress to get this done, and we are hopeful that we will be able to find a bipartisan solution quickly that protects the middle class and our economy,” he said.

The refusal of a band of House Republicans to allow income tax rates to rise on incomes over $1 million came after Mr. Obama scored a decisive re-election victory campaigning for higher taxes on incomes over $250,000. Since the November election, the president’s approval ratings have risen, and opinion polls have shown a strong majority not only favoring his tax position, but saying they will blame Republicans for a failure to reach a deficit deal.

With a series of votes on Thursday, the speaker, who faces election for his post in the new Congress next month, had hoped to assemble a Republican path away from the cliff. With a show of Republican unity, he also sought to strengthen his own hand in negotiations with Mr. Obama. The House did narrowly pass legislation to cancel automatic, across-the-board military cuts set to begin next month, and shift them to domestic programs.

But the main component of “Plan B,” a bill to extend expiring Bush-era tax cuts for everyone with incomes under $1 million, could not win enough Republican support to overcome united Democratic opposition. Democrats questioned Mr. Boehner’s ability to deliver any agreement.

“I think this demonstrates that Speaker Boehner has a real challenge,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat. “He hasn’t been able to cut any deal, make any agreement that’s balanced. Even if it’s his own compromise.”

Representative Rick Larsen of Washington accused Republicans of shirking their responsibility by leaving the capital. “The Republicans just picked up their toys and went home,” he said.

Futures contracts on indexes of United States stock listings and shares in Asia fell sharply after Mr. Boehner conceded that his bill lacked the votes to pass.

The point of the Boehner effort was to secure passage of a Republican plan, then demand that the president and the Senate to take up that measure and pass it, putting off the major fights until early next year when Republicans would conceivably have more leverage because of the need to increase the federal debt limit. It would also allow Republicans to claim it was Democrats who had caused taxes to rise after the first of the year had no agreement been reached.

That strategy lay in tatters after the Republican implosion.“Some people don’t know how to take yea for an answer,” said Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a Republican who supported the measure and was open about his disappointment with his colleagues.

Opponents said they were not about to bend their uncompromising principles on taxes just because Mr. Boehner asked.

“The speaker should be meeting with us to get our views on things rather than just presenting his,” said Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who recently lost a committee post for routinely crossing the leadership.

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting.

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Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up

Finlay MacKay for The New York Times

Jerry Seinfeld: How to Write a Joke:
The comedian describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

Jerry Seinfeld began his commute after dinner, in no particular hurry. Around quarter to 8 on a drizzly Tuesday, he left his Manhattan home — a palatial duplex apartment with picture windows and a broad terrace overlooking Central Park — and made for a nearby garage. Due to tell jokes at a comedy club downtown, he decided to drive what he calls his “city car”: a 1998 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S. Stepping into the garage, he tugged a thick fabric cover from the car. The interior was a pristine matte black, and the paint job was a startlingly luminous azure. “It’s called Mexico blue — a very traditional Porsche color,” Seinfeld said. “In the ’70s it looked normal, but now it looks insane.”

Finlay MacKay for The New York Times

Jerry Seinfeld’s comedic persona is unflappable — annoyed plenty, but unmarked by extremes of emotion, much less tragedy.

His hair, flecked with gray, was buzzed almost to the scalp, and he was dressed in light-blue Levi’s, a navy knit polo and a dark wool blazer. Seinfeld, who once said he wore sneakers long into adulthood “because it reminds me I don’t have a job,” has lately grown partial to Nike Shox, which he likes for their extravagant cushioning, but tonight he opted for tan suede desert boots. When he’s in the workplace — on a stage, microphone in hand, trying to make a crowd erupt — the feel of a harder sole helps him get into the right mind-set.

“I just tried a little Twitter experiment,” Seinfeld said. His appearance, at Gotham Comedy Club, had so far been kept secret, but just before leaving home, he’d announced the gig online on a whim. “They’ve only got a half-hour to get there, so I’m not expecting a flash mob,” he said. Gotham was an opportunity for Seinfeld to audition brand-new material and fine-tune older bits in a relatively low-stakes context. In two days, he would perform for nearly 3,000 people at Manhattan’s Beacon Theater, and that show loomed large. It would be Seinfeld’s first performance in New York City since 1998, not counting impromptu club appearances and the odd private event, and it would kick off a citywide tour, with performances in each of the other boroughs. Born in Brooklyn, educated in Queens and famous for a fictional Manhattan apartment, Seinfeld called the tour “a valentine,” but he was, on one level, ambivalent about it. “ ‘The Hometown Hero Returns’ is not my narrative of being a stand-up,” he said. “For me, it’s the hotel. It’s ‘I Don’t Belong Here.’ It’s ‘The Stranger Rides Into Town.’ That’s the proper form of this craft.”

Seinfeld wondered if hordes would see his tweet and hustle over to Gotham, but sparse attendance would be fine, too. Several weeks earlier he materialized, unannounced, at the Creek and the Cave, a club in Long Island City, and performed for “14 people.” Most comedians dislike telling jokes to empty seats, but at this point Seinfeld enjoys a room that offers some resistance. “I miss opening for Frankie Valli and Ben Vereen, walking out as an unknown and there’s no applause: let’s get it on,” he said. “I once opened for Vic Damone at a nooner on a basketball court in Brooklyn. They’re going, Who is this kid? Oh, god! They’re sure you’re not worth the trouble. But I’d win over some of those rooms.” After you’ve helped create and starred in one of television’s best-rated, best-loved sitcoms — a show that, thanks to rampant syndication, is still bursting Kramer-style into people’s living rooms 14 years after its finale — tough crowds are tougher to come by. “I would love it if there were only two people there tonight,” he said.

To get the Porsche out of the garage, Seinfeld had to execute something like a 12-point turn, somehow managing, as he nudged the car back and forth, not to leave chips of Mexico blue all over an unnervingly close concrete column. Seinfeld is 58, and his face is rounder and more deeply lined than it once was, but it has retained the bright-eyed boyishness of his sitcom days. He smiles readily, either at something someone else has said or — since he is frequently the funniest person within earshot — at something he came up with. His default display of amusement is to squint hard and scrunch up his nose till his front teeth protrude from a rictus grin: a groundhog tickled by the sight of his own shadow.

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Facebook predicted to overtake Google in mobile display ad revenue this year

Shares of Facebook (FB) have begun to rebound since the company’s disastrous initial public offering this past May. After opening at $ 38 per share the company’s stock plummeted into the mid-20s over the summer months and eventually fell to a low of $ 17.55 in early September. Since then, however, Facebook shares have begun to bounce back after the company posted better-than-expected results in the third quarter. While Facebook stock is still down more than 25% on the year, it is rising steadily as analysts and investors become increasingly bullish about the company’s future as a leading advertising platform.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 browser smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test [video]]

According to a new report from eMarketer, Facebook is predicted to surpass Google (GOOG) in mobile display advertising in 2012. Google is expected to generate $ 339 million in mobile ad revenue this year, a significant increase from previous estimates of between $ 45 and $ 100 million. The research firm notes that Facebook is expected to capture an 18.4% share of the mobile display ad market in the U.S. this year, compared to Google’s 17% share, which is down from 23% in 2011.

[More from BGR: New iMac early adopters upset that they can’t run Boot Camp]

“Major ad publishers are strengthening their offerings much faster than previously expected,” said Clark Fredricksen, vice president of communications at eMarketer. “I don’t think anybody thought after the second quarter that Google and Facebook would be in position that they are now in the mobile ad marketplace.”

The company’s mobile ad revenue is expected to more than triple by 2014 when it will reach an estimated $ 1.2 billion. The firm predicts that Facebook and Google will continue to battle for the No.1 spot in the mobile ad market over the next few years. Facebook is expected to increase its lead to 25.2% in 2013, compared to Google’s 19.6% share. Google is estimated to bounce back in 2014, however, with a market leading 23.1% share, ahead of Facebook’s 22.7% share.

Despite the impressive numbers, eMarketer notes that mobile still represents a small slice of the total advertising market. In 2012, only 2.4% of total ad spending in the U.S. is expected to go towards mobile ads, but the market is expected to reach an 11% share by 2016 when it surpasses both radio and print spending.

This article was originally published by BGR

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Study: Solo stars at higher death risk than bands

LONDON (AP) — Rock 'n' roll will never die — but it's a hazardous occupation.

A new study confirms that rock and pop musicians die prematurely more often than the general population, and an early death is twice as likely for solo musicians as for members of bands.

Researchers from Liverpool John Moores University studied 1,489 rock and pop stars who became famous between 1956 and 2009 and found they suffered "higher levels of mortality than demographically matched individuals in the general population."

American stars are more likely to die prematurely than British ones.

Lead researcher Mark Bellis speculates that could be because bands provide peer support at stressful times.

The research was published Thursday in online journal BMJ Open.

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Female Vaccination Workers, Essential in Pakistan, Become Prey

LAHORE, Pakistan — The front-line heroes of Pakistan’s war on polio are its volunteers: young women who tread fearlessly from door to door, in slums and highland villages, administering precious drops of vaccine to children in places where their immunization campaign is often viewed with suspicion.

Now, those workers have become quarry. After militants stalked and killed eight of them over the course of a three-day, nationwide vaccination drive, the United Nations suspended its anti-polio work in Pakistan on Wednesday, and one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health campaigns has been plunged into crisis. A ninth victim died on Thursday, a day after being shot in the northwestern city of Peshawar, The Associated Press reported.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets, while government officials reported that some polio volunteers — especially women — were afraid to show up for work.

At the ground level, it is those female health workers who are essential, allowed privileged entrance into private homes to meet and help children in situations denied to men because of conservative rural culture. “They are on the front line; they are the backbone,” said Imtiaz Ali Shah, a polio coordinator in Peshawar.

The killings started in the port city of Karachi on Monday, the first day of a vaccination drive aimed at the worst affected areas, with the shooting of a male health worker. On Tuesday four female polio workers were killed, all gunned down by men on motorcycles in what appeared to be closely coordinated attacks.

The hit jobs then moved to Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which, along with the adjoining tribal belt, constitutes Pakistan’s main reservoir of new polio infections. The first victim there was one of two sisters who had volunteered as polio vaccinators. Men on motorcycles shadowed them as they walked from house to house. Once the sisters entered a quiet street, the gunmen opened fire. One of the sisters, Farzana, died instantly; the other was uninjured.

On Wednesday, a man working on the polio campaign was shot dead as he made a chalk mark on the door of a house in a suburb of Peshawar. Later, a female health supervisor in Charsadda, 15 miles to the north, was shot dead in a car she shared with her cousin.

Yet again, Pakistani militants are making a point of attacking women who stand for something larger. In October, it was Malala Yousafzai, a schoolgirl advocate for education who was gunned down by a Pakistani Taliban attacker in the Swat Valley. She was grievously wounded, and the militants vowed they would try again until they had killed her. The result was a tidal wave of public anger that clearly unsettled the Pakistani Taliban.

In singling out the core workers in one of Pakistan’s most crucial public health initiatives, militants seem to have resolved to harden their stance against immunization drives, and declared anew that they consider women to be legitimate targets. Until this week, vaccinators had never been targeted with such violence in such numbers.

Government officials in Peshawar said that they believe a Taliban faction in Mohmand, a tribal area near Peshawar, was behind at least some of the shootings. Still, the Pakistani Taliban have been uncharacteristically silent about the attacks, with no official claims of responsibility. In staying quiet, the militants may be trying to blunt any public backlash like the huge demonstrations over the attack on Ms. Yousafzai.

Female polio workers here are easy targets. They wear no uniforms but are readily recognizable, with clipboards and refrigerated vaccine boxes, walking door to door. They work in pairs — including at least one woman — and are paid just over $2.50 a day. Most days one team can vaccinate 150 to 200 children.

Faced with suspicious or recalcitrant parents, their only weapon is reassurance: a gentle pat on the hand, a shared cup of tea, an offer to seek religious assurances from a pro-vaccine cleric. “The whole program is dependent on them,” said Mr. Shah, in Peshawar. “If they do good work, and talk well to the parents, then they will vaccinate the children.”

That has happened with increasing frequency in Pakistan over the past year. A concerted immunization drive, involving up to 225,000 vaccination workers, drove the number of newly infected polio victims down to 52. Several high-profile groups shouldered the program forward — at the global level, donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations and Rotary International; and at the national level, President Asif Ali Zardari and his daughter Aseefa, who have made polio eradication a “personal mission.”

On a global scale, setbacks are not unusual in polio vaccination campaigns, which, by dint of their massive scale and need to reach deep inside conservative societies, end up grappling with more than just medical challenges. In other campaigns in Africa and South Asia, vaccinators have grappled with natural disaster, virulent opposition from conservative clerics and sudden outbreaks of mysterious strains of the disease.

Declan Walsh reported from Lahore, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal

The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that prompted the BBC to cancel a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a BBC fixture who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.

While the scandal led to the resignation and reassignment of several top executives — including George Entwistle, just two months into his tenure in the BBC’s top job as director general — Mr. Pollard absolved top management of applying “undue pressure” in the decision to stop the broadcast.

The report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation and was unaware of the sexual abuse accusations until he left the BBC this September. Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.

The report traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Its central conclusion was that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile segment on “Newsnight,” an investigative program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the segment was scheduled to run.

“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after a rival channel, ITV, broadcast its own exposé in October 2012.

That segment presented the accounts of five women who said they had been sexually abused as teenagers by Mr. Savile, the report said. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”

Mr. Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, dismissed a widely circulated theory that BBC News executives or their superiors pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment to avoid embarrassing the BBC. Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, said that he canceled the report because he thought the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile were inadequately substantiated.

“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he does not believe that they went beyond journalistic considerations.

After publication of the report, Tim Davie, the BBC’s acting director general, said that Stephen Mitchell, the deputy director of news, would be taking early retirement and that Mr. Rippon would be moved to another job. Helen Boaden, director of the news division, who along with Mr. Rippon and Mr. Mitchell was suspended while the nine-week Pollard inquiry was in progress, will return to her job, overseeing new editorial leadership at “Newsnight.”

In a statement, the BBC Trust, which oversees the broadcaster, said the report made clear the need for major changes in the BBC’s operation. It said top executives must take initiative and responsibility, share information and embrace criticism, and persuade employees to rid the company of the “insularity and distrust” revealed in the report.

“The BBC portrayed by the Pollard review is not fundamentally flawed, but has been chaotic,” it said. “That now needs to change.”

The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile program, including Mr. Rippon and the top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Ms. Boaden and Mr. Mitchell, saying they had reached a “flawed” conclusion in canceling the “Newsnight” segment that overrode the “cogent evidence” against Mr. Savile that the “Newsnight” team had gathered.

But it paid scant attention to the role of the former director general, Mr. Thompson, and did not fault him for missing opportunities to learn the details of the allegations against Mr. Savile.

After Mr. Thompson was told about the scuttled segment by a BBC reporter at a reception in late December 2011, he said, he asked his news executives about it. According to his testimony to the Pollard inquiry, he “received reassurances” that it had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons” and “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”

Matthew Purdy contributed reporting from New York.

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Inquiry Into Libya Attack Is Sharply Critical of State Department

WASHINGTON — An independent inquiry into the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans on Sept. 11 sharply criticized the State Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and for relying on untested local militias to safeguard the compound, according to a report by the panel made public on Tuesday night.

The investigation into the attack on the diplomatic mission and the C.I.A. annex in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans also faulted State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests from the American Embassy in Tripoli for more guards for the mission and for failing to make sufficient safety upgrades.

The panel also said American intelligence officials had relied too much on specific warnings of imminent attacks, which they did not have in the case of Benghazi, rather than basing assessments more broadly on a deteriorating security environment. By this spring, Benghazi, a hotbed of militant activity in eastern Libya, had experienced a string of assassinations, an attack on a British envoy’s motorcade and the explosion of a bomb outside the American Mission.

Finally, the report blamed two major State Department bureaus — Diplomatic Security and Near Eastern Affairs — for failing to coordinate and plan adequate security. The panel also determined that a number of officials had shown poor leadership, but they were not identified in the unclassified version of the report that was released.

“Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus,” the report said, resulted in security “that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”

The attack in Benghazi and the Obama administration’s explanation of what happened and who was responsible became politically charged issues in the waning weeks of the presidential campaign, and Republicans have continued to demand explanations since then. Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, took herself out of consideration for secretary of state after Republican criticism of comments she made in the aftermath of the lethal attack threatened to become a divisive political battle.

The report affirmed there were no protests of an anti-Islamic video before the attack, contrary to what Ms. Rice had said on several Sunday talk shows days after the attack.

While the report focused on the specific attack in Benghazi, the episode cast into broader relief the larger question of how American diplomats and intelligence officers operate in increasingly unstable environments, like those in the Arab Spring countries across North Africa and the Middle East, without increased security.

In response to the panel’s findings, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a letter to Congress that she was accepting all 29 of the panel’s recommendations, five of which are classified. “To fully honor those we lost, we must better protect those still serving to advance our nation’s vital interests and values overseas,” Mrs. Clinton said in the letter. She is already taking specific steps to correct the problems, according to officials.

They say the State Department is asking permission from Congress to transfer more than $1.3 billion from contingency funds that had been allocated for spending in Iraq. This includes $553 million for hundreds of additional Marine security guards worldwide; $130 million for diplomatic security personnel; and $691 million for improving security at installations abroad.

Noting that the Libyan militias in Benghazi proved unreliable, the report recommended that in the future the United States must be “self-reliant and enterprising.”

In recent weeks, teams of State Department and Pentagon security specialists have been sent to 19 “high threat” diplomatic posts around the world to conduct assessments.

The State Department last month for the first time also appointed a senior official — a deputy assistant secretary of state — to ensure that embassies and consulates in dangerous places get sufficient attention. To that end, the department is revamping deployment procedures to increase the number of experienced and well- trained personnel serving in those posts, and to reduce the high turnover rate that the panel identified as a problem.

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