Elwood V. Jensen, Pioneer in Breast Cancer Treatment, Dies at 92

Tony Jones/Cincinnati Enquirer, via Associated Press

Elwood V. Jensen in 2004.

Elwood V. Jensen, a medical researcher whose studies of steroid hormones led to new treatments for breast cancer that have been credited with saving or extending hundreds of thousands of lives, died on Dec. 16 in Cincinnati. He was 92.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son, Thomas Jensen, said.

In 2004 Dr. Jensen received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, one of the most respected science prizes in the world.

When Dr. Jensen started his research at the University of Chicago in the 1950s, steroid hormones, which alter the functioning of cells, were thought to interact with cells through a series of chemical reactions involving enzymes.

However, Dr. Jensen used radioactive tracers to show that steroid hormones actually affect cells by binding to a specific receptor protein inside them. He first focused on the steroid hormone estrogen.

By 1968, Dr. Jensen had developed a test for the presence of estrogen receptors in breast cancer cells. He later concluded that such receptors were present in about a third of those cells.

Breast cancers that are estrogen positive, meaning they have receptors for the hormone, can be treated with medications like Tamoxifen or with other methods of inhibiting estrogen in a patient’s system, like removal of the ovaries. Women with receptor-rich breast cancers often go into remission when estrogen is blocked or removed.

By the mid-1980s, a test developed by Dr. Jensen and a colleague at the University of Chicago, Dr. Geoffrey Greene, could be used to determine the extent of estrogen receptors in breast and other cancers. That test became a standard part of care for breast cancer patients.

Scientists like Dr. Pierre Chambon and Dr. Ronald M. Evans, who shared the 2004 Lasker prize with Dr. Jensen, went on to show that many types of receptors exist. The receptors are crucial components of the cell’s control system and transmit signals in an array of vital functions, from the development of organs in the womb to the control of fat cells and the regulation of cholesterol.

Dr. Jensen’s work also led to the development of drugs that can enhance or inhibit the effects of hormones. Such drugs are used to treat prostate and other cancers.

Elwood Vernon Jensen was born in Fargo, N.D., on Jan. 13, 1920, to Eli and Vera Morris Jensen. He majored in chemistry at what was then Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, and had begun graduate training in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago when World War II began.

Dr. Jensen wanted to join the Army Air Forces, but his poor vision kept him from becoming a pilot. During the war he synthesized poison gases at the University of Chicago, exposure to which twice put him in the hospital. His work on toxic chemicals, he said, inspired him to pursue biology and medicine.

Dr. Jensen studied steroid hormone chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on a Guggenheim Fellowship after the war. While there, he climbed the Matterhorn, one of the highest peaks in the Alps, even though he had no mountaineering experience. He often equated his successful research to the novel approach taken by Edward Whymper, the first mountaineer to reach the Matterhorn’s summit. Mr. Whymper went against conventional wisdom and scaled the mountain’s Swiss face, after twice failing to reach the summit on the Italian side.

Dr. Jensen joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of surgery in 1947, working closely with the Nobel laureate Charles Huggins. He became an original member of the research team at the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research (now the Ben May Department for Cancer Research) in 1951, and became the director after Dr. Huggins stepped down.

He came to work at the University of Cincinnati in 2002, and continued to do research there until last year.

His first wife, the former Mary Collette, died in 1982. In addition to his son, Dr. Jensen is survived by his second wife, the former Hiltrud Herborg; a daughter, Karen C. Jensen; a sister, Margaret Brennan; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Jensen’s wife was found to have breast cancer in 2005. She had the tumor removed, he said in an interview, but tested positive for the estrogen receptor and was successfully treated with a medication that prevents estrogen synthesis.

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Senate Leaders Racing to Beat Fiscal Deadline

WASHINGTON — Senate leaders and their aides spent Saturday searching for a formula to extend tax cuts for most Americans that could win bipartisan support in the Senate and final approval in the fractious House by the new year, hoping to prevent large tax increases and budget cuts that could threaten the fragile economy.

As part of the last-minute negotiations, the lawmakers were haggling over unemployment benefits, cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, taxes on large inheritances and how to limit the impact of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income tax system that is intended to ensure the rich pay a fair share but that is increasingly encroaching on the middle class.

President Obama said that if talks between the Senate leaders broke down, he wanted the Senate to schedule an up-or-down vote on a narrower measure that would extend only the middle-class tax breaks and unemployment benefits. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said he would schedule such a vote on Monday absent a deal.

If Congress is unable to act before the new year, Washington will effectively usher in a series of automatic tax increases and a program of drastic spending cuts that economists say could pitch the country back into recession.

The president and lawmakers put those spending cuts in place this year as draconian incentives that would force them to confront the nation’s growing debt. Now, lawmakers are trying to keep them from happening, though it seemed most likely on Saturday that the cuts, known as sequestration, would be left for the next Congress, to be sworn in this week.

“We just can’t afford a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy,” Mr. Obama said Saturday in his weekly address. “The housing market is healing, but that could stall if folks are seeing smaller paychecks. The unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 2008, but already families and businesses are starting to hold back because of the dysfunction they see in Washington.”

The fear of another painful economic slowdown appears to have accelerated deal-making on Capitol Hill with just 48 hours left before the so-called fiscal cliff arrives. Weeks of public sniping between Mr. Reid, the Democratic leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ebbed on Friday evening with pledges of cooperation and optimism from both.

On Saturday, though, that sentiment was put to the test as 98 senators waited for word whether their leaders had come up with a proposal that might pass muster with members of both parties. The first votes in the Senate, if needed, are scheduled for Sunday afternoon.

“It’s a little like playing Russian roulette with the economy,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. “The consequences could be enormous.”

Members of Congress were mostly absent from the Capitol on Saturday, after two days of Senate votes on other matters and a day before both chambers were to reconvene. However, senior aides were working on proposals in their offices or at their homes.

Speaker John A. Boehner stopped by the Capitol briefly to see his chief of staff on Saturday afternoon. Mr. McConnell spent much of the day in his office.

Aides to Mr. Reid were expecting to receive offers from Mr. McConnell’s staff, but no progress was reported by midday. Even if the talks took a positive turn, Senate aides said, no announcement was expected before the leaders briefed their caucuses on Sunday.

The chief sticking point among lawmakers and the president continued to be how to set tax rates for the next decade and beyond. With the Bush-era tax cuts expiring, Mr. Obama and Democrats have said they want tax rates to rise on income over $250,000 a year, while Republicans want a higher threshold, perhaps at $400,000.

Democrats and Republicans are also divided on the tax on inherited estates, which currently hits inheritances over $5 million at 35 percent. On Jan. 1, it is scheduled to rise to 55 percent beginning with inheritances exceeding $1 million.

The political drama in Washington over the weekend was given greater urgency by the fear that the economic gains of the past two years could be lost if no deal is reached.

Some of the consequences of Congressional inaction would be felt almost at once on Tuesday, in employee paychecks, doctors’ offices and financial markets. Analysts said the effect would be cumulative, building over time.

An early barometer would probably be the financial markets, where skittish investors, as they have during previous Congressional cliffhangers, could send the stock market lower on fears of another prolonged period of economic distress.

In 2011, the political battles over whether to raise the nation’s borrowing limit prompted Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its rating of American debt, suggesting a higher risk of default. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 635 points in a volatile day of trading after the downgrade.

This month, traders have again nervously watched the political maneuvering in Washington, and the markets have jumped or dropped at tidbits of news from the negotiations. Two weeks ago, Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, predicted that if lawmakers failed to reach a deal, “the economy will, I think, go off the cliff.”

Immediately — regardless of whether a deal is reached — every working American’s taxes will go up because neither party is fighting to extend a Social Security payroll tax cut that has been in place for two years.

Robert Pear and Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

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World Briefing | Africa: South Africa’s President Gives a Biting Critique of Pets

President Jacob Zuma, left, said in a speech that the idea of having a pet was part of “white culture” and that people should focus on family welfare, the newspaper The Star reported Thursday. The president’s office sought to clarify the remarks, saying that he was encouraging “the previously oppressed African majority” to uphold its own culture. It also suggested the way in which the comments were reported, rather than the comments themselves, was divisive.

During his speech on Wednesday to a crowd in KwaZulu-Natal, Mr. Zuma’s home province, the president said that people who loved dogs more than people had a “lack of humanity” and that some people were trying in vain to “emulate whiteness,” The Star reported. In a statement, the South African presidency said that Mr. Zuma was trying to “decolonize the African mind post-liberation” and enable people to take pride in their heritage and not feel pressure to adopt customs of minority cultures. Animals can be cared for, was the message, but not at the expense of people.

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Stomach bug knocks Nadal from Australian Open

MADRID (AP) — Rafael Nadal will miss the Australian Open because of a stomach virus, further delaying his comeback after being sidelined since June.

The Spaniard also will skip the preceding Qatar Open. The Australian Open, the year's first Grand Slam tournament, begins Jan. 14. The virus kept Nadal from making his return at Abu Dhabi this week.

Nadal said Friday his withdrawals had nothing to do with the tendinitis in his left knee, which forced him to take a break last summer following his second-round loss at Wimbledon to then 100th-ranked Lukas Rosol. Nadal also missed the London Olympics.

"My knee is much better and the rehabilitation process has gone well as predicted by the doctors," Nadal said in a statement. "But this virus didn't allow me to practice this past week, and therefore I am sorry to announce that I will not play in Doha and the Australian Open."

The former No. 1 player hopes to return at Acapulco, Mexico, starting Feb. 27. However, he did not rule out playing an earlier tournament if his recovery went well enough.

"I always said that my return to competition will be when I am in the right conditions to play," he said. "And after all this time away from the courts I'd rather not accelerate the comeback and prefer to do things well."

Nadal, ranked No. 4, won the Australian Open in 2009. Last year, he lost to top-ranked Novak Djokovic in a title match that lasted 5 hours, 53 minutes, the longest recorded Grand Slam final.

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Well: Spinach Recipes for Health

Spinach goes well with all kinds of foods. It’s also a green that is easy to find year-round. As Martha Rose Shulman writes in this week’s Recipes for Health:

Spinach has remained a part of my holiday ritual. I love the convenience of bagged spinach, but I prefer the richness of the lush bunches I get at the farmers’ market. I don’t mind stemming and washing it, but if you are pressed for time the bagged spinach is a godsend, especially if you live in a cold climate and don’t have access to farmers’ market spinach in December.

Below are five new ways to add spinach to your meal. And for more spinach recipes, see “Making Spinach the Star of the Meal.”

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Spinach and Millet Timbale With Tomato Sauce
A timbale is a molded custard, somewhat similar to a quiche without a crust.

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Garlic Soup With Spinach
A quick and easy soup that is a great way to use any leftover turkey stock from Thanksgiving.

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Penne With Mushroom Ragout and Spinach
This is a delicious meal no matter what variety of mushrooms you have on hand.

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Spinach Gnocchi
A considerably lighter version of the classic gnocchi made with spinach and ricotta.

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Spinach, Sardine and Rice Gratin
This classic Provençal gratin is a good way to work fish that is high in omega-3s into your diet.

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Amid Fiscal Stalemate, How to Handle Tax Rate Uncertainty

So we’re left with no idea how much we’ll be paying in federal income taxes in 2013, and a wide range of possibilities for taxes on investments and estates and tax deductions for mortgage interest and charitable contributions. Plenty of people will spend the next several days feeling helpless, with one eye on the stock market and the other on Washington.

For all the uncertainty, though, there are a few things we do know about how things will change next year. For example, new taxes, some of which will help pay for Medicare, will affect a few million affluent households.

We also know that in all likelihood, whatever happens in Washington in the coming days or weeks won’t come close to solving the problem that tends to clear the room when you say it aloud: We are not collecting enough money to pay for the promises we’ve made to one another. It isn’t just Medicare, either. Many states have steadfastly refused to set aside the trillions of dollars they will need to cover benefits for public workers once they retire.

As for what you should do about all of this, the answer, for now, is probably nothing. In the short term, stock prices may decline and the economy may get the hiccups, but it’s foolish for amateurs to try to alter their investment portfolios to take advantage of the situation. Leave that to the hedge funds, and watch how many of them get it wrong.

In the long term, however, prepare to make the kind of attitude adjustment that can take a while to embrace. A decade or two from now, most of us will probably be paying more in taxes or getting fewer services from the government than we do now. Once that happens, you’ll need to earn more, save more, live on less or take better advantage of legal tax avoidance strategies.

In fact, you may want to try to do all of these things in the next couple of years, just to see which ones you can accomplish with the least amount of pain.

Here is what we do know will happen in 2013. First, there is a new tax of 0.9 percent on wages, other compensation and self-employment income above $200,000, if you’re single, or $250,000, if you’re married and filing your taxes jointly. This is on top of the existing Medicare tax.

Second, there is a new tax of 3.8 percent on investment earnings, including interest, dividends and capital gains, in addition to whatever the capital gains tax ends up being. It applies to single people with modified adjusted gross income of $200,000, or $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.

There is still some time to maneuver around the second tax. If you have winning investments you were planning to sell soon anyway, say for a down payment on a house, you might as well do it by Monday. That way, you can avoid the new tax if you’re certain you’ll be in the qualifying income category next year.

A few other changes: For now, you can generally take a tax deduction only for unreimbursed medical expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income. That floor will rise to 10 percent next year, except for people 65 and over, who won’t be subject to it until 2017.

Also, if you save money in a flexible spending account for health care expenses, 2013 will bring a $2,500 cap on what you can set aside each year while avoiding income taxes. Many people routinely saved $5,000 in the past.

Sometime in the next few weeks, we’ll presumably learn more about the new tax rates on income, capital gains, dividends and estates. A solution may come in stages, with a temporary patch now and the promise of a longer-term deal later.

But this is only the beginning, and if you want to read the Stephen King version of our collective fiscal story, there are a few sources to consult. You could start with the radical centrists at Third Way, a research group, who are the best splashers of cold water that I’ve read on the topic of the federal budget. They present some truly scary data while attempting to persuade Democrats to accept cuts to Medicare and other programs.

In 2010, for instance, 11,712 people turned 25 each day, while just 6,670 turned 65. By 2030, 12,499 people will be turning 25 each day, but the number turning 65 will jump to 10,948. The 65-year-olds in 2030 will probably live longer than the people who turned 65 in 2010, and keeping them alive could cost a lot more.

The Pew Center on the States, using the states’ own actuarial data, estimates that there is a $1.38 trillion dollar gap between what governments have set aside to pay for public employees’ pensions and retiree health care costs and their actual obligations. Robert Novy-Marx, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business, and Joshua D. Rauh, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, believe the shortfall in pension financing alone is actually $3 trillion to $4 trillion.

If states were to try to fill the gap solely by raising taxes, Mr. Novy-Marx and Mr. Rauh estimate that the cost per household in 2011 would have been $2,250 in New York, $2,000 in New Jersey and $1,994 in California — and we’d need to pay that amount every year for 30 years, with adjustments for inflation. Happy New Year!

These numbers boggle the mind, which is why you’re not seeing them in the newsletters that state legislators send to your home. Instead, lawmakers are trying to change the benefits promised to public employees. But even minor changes have led to lawsuits that could take a decade to resolve. By then, the obligations will probably have grown much larger.

Read enough of these reality checks, and a hazy sort of reckoning starts to take shape. It’s not clear how high taxes will go or how many services — from retiree health care to garbage removal — we may someday need to pay more for, or cover ourselves. But it’s going to cost you more money one way or the other, unless you’re in a truly low tax bracket.

That brings us to those legal tax avoidance maneuvers, which often benefit people who can save. Flexible spending accounts for medical costs will still save you hundreds of dollars in taxes each year, even with a $2,500 cap. A health savings account, the kind that pairs up with a high-deductible health insurance policy, can grow into a sizable pile if you save the money and use it in retirement instead of to pay out-of-pocket medical expenses now. And the fact that the affluent can still avoid capital gains taxes, and get an income tax break in many states, on hundreds of thousands of dollars of college savings via 529 plans is a minor miracle.

There is also the Roth individual retirement account, where even the low-six-figure set can put away money on which they’ve already paid income taxes, leave it there for decades in stocks and bonds, and pull it out without paying a dime of capital gains or other taxes.

That’s the story — for now, at least. In 30 or 40 years, if things are really grim, might the federal government try to tax withdrawals from Roth accounts with enormous balances? As we’re learning now, most great tax deals, like the mortgage interest deduction for beach houses and the tax-free health insurance benefits that many of us get from our employers, may not last forever.

We don’t have much control over what will happen in Washington or our state capitals next year, or 10 years from now. But most of us can probably find ways to earn a little more, save a little extra or spend a little less. Pick just one of those options, make it your New Year’s resolution and see if it helps you feel more in control of your financial destiny by this time next year.

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McElroy has concussion, Sanchez to start for Jets

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. (AP) — Greg McElroy has a concussion and will be replaced by Mark Sanchez as the New York Jets' starting quarterback in the season finale at Buffalo on Sunday.

Coach Rex Ryan says Thursday that McElroy, preparing to make his second NFL start in place of the benched Sanchez, was lifting weights and had headaches. He went to the team's training staff and then revealed he was suffering concussion-like symptoms after being sacked 11 times in the Jets' 27-17 loss to San Diego last Sunday.

Ryan says he chose to start Sanchez over Tim Tebow because the team has just two practices and a walkthrough to prepare before the game and he feels "more comfortable" with Sanchez. Sanchez was benched after turning the ball over five times at Tennessee on Dec. 17.

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Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL

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New York’s Mental Health System Thrashed by Services Lost to Storm

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum hospitals, at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.

When a young woman in the grip of paranoid delusions threatened a neighbor with a meat cleaver one Saturday last month, the police took her by ambulance to the nearest psychiatric emergency room. Or rather, they took her to Beth Israel Medical Center, the only comprehensive psychiatric E.R. functioning in Lower Manhattan since Hurricane Sandy shrank and strained New York’s mental health resources.

The case was one of 9,548 “emotionally disturbed person” calls that the Police Department answered in November, and one of the 2,848 that resulted in transportation to a hospital, a small increase over a year earlier.

But the woman was discharged within hours, to the shock of the mental health professionals who had called the police. It took four more days, and strong protests from her psychiatrist and caseworkers, to get her admitted for two weeks of inpatient treatment, said Tony Lee, who works for Community Access, a nonprofit agency that provides supportive housing to people with mental illness, managing the Lower East Side apartment building where she lives.

Psychiatric hospital admission is always a judgment call. But in the city, according to hospital records and interviews with psychiatrists and veteran advocates of community care, the odds of securing mental health treatment in a crisis have worsened significantly since the hurricane. The storm’s surge knocked out several of the city’s largest psychiatric hospitals, disrupted outpatient services and flooded scores of coastal nursing homes and “adult homes” where many mentally ill people had found housing of last resort.

One of the most affected hospitals, Beth Israel, recorded a 69 percent spike in psychiatric emergency room cases last month, with its inpatient slots overflowing. Instead of admitting more than one out of three such cases, as it did in November 2011, it admitted only one out of four of the 691 emergency arrivals this November, records show. Capacity was so overtaxed that ambulances had to be diverted to other hospitals 15 times in the month, almost double the rate last year, in periods typically lasting for eight hours, officials said.

Dr. Richard Rosenthal, physician in chief of behavioral services for Continuum Health Partners, Beth Israel’s parent organization, said he was proud of how much Continuum’s hospitals had done to handle psychiatric overflow since storm damage shuttered Bellevue Hospital Center, the city’s flagship public hospital; NYU Langone Medical Center; and the Veterans Affairs Hospital. But these days, he said, as he walks on Amsterdam Avenue between Continuum’s Roosevelt hospital on West 59th Street and its St. Luke’s hospital on West 114th Street, he notices more mentally ill people in the streets than he has seen in years.

“When you have the most vulnerable folks, all you need is one chink in the system and you lose them,” Dr. Rosenthal said. “Whether they lost their housing, or the outpatient services they usually go to were closed and they were lost to follow-up, they have become disconnected, with predictable results.”

Similar patterns are playing out in Brooklyn, where Maimonides Medical Center has been overwhelmed with mental health emergencies from the Coney Island vicinity since Coney Island Hospital, one of the city’s largest acute care psychiatric hospitals, suspended operations, hospital officials said.

“Triage has reached a different level: You have to get sicker to get in,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the chairman of psychiatry at Maimonides, citing a 56 percent increase in psychiatric emergency room visits there from Oct. 26 to Dec. 7, compared with the same period last year, and a 24 percent rise in admissions. The increase in admissions was possible only with emergency permission from the state to exceed licensed limits.

“Not only is there decreased capacity, because Bellevue and Coney Island are off line,” Dr. Kolodny added, “but there’s increased demand because the storm or the loss of their residence has been a stressor for mental illness.”

The storm battered a mental health system that still relies heavily on private nursing homes and substandard adult homes to house people with mental illness. Such institutions have a sordid history of neglect and exploitation, and the courts have repeatedly found that their overuse by the state isolated thousands of people in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Plans are under way to increase supportive housing — dwellings where mentally ill people can live relatively independently, with support services. But even before Hurricane Sandy, the expansion fell far short of demand.

The storm underscored the fragility of the system. Many disabled evacuees who were sent first to makeshift school shelters lost access to the psychiatric medications that kept their symptoms at bay, Dr. Kolodny said. Even those lucky enough to have the drugs they need are at greater risk of relapse as they experience crowded living conditions. “If they’re now sleeping in a gym with 100 people, that can tip them over the edge and start making them really paranoid,” he said.

On Staten Island, where the chief of psychiatry at Richmond University Medical Center says psychiatric resources have been stretched to the limit, clergy members report that mentally ill people transferred to a large adult home in New Brighton from one that was washed away in Far Rockaway, Queens, are now showing up at church rectories, begging for socks and underwear.

“It’s heartbreaking, because they just found us by chance,” said Margaret Moschetto, a missionary at the Church of Assumption-St. Paul in New Brighton. “They were just walking around the neighborhood. They really didn’t know where they were.”

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As Fiscal Deadline Looms, Path to Deal Remains Unclear

Alex Wong/Getty Images

House Republican leaders called on the Senate to act on fiscal legislation, which focused new attention on Senator Mitch McConnell, right.

WASHINGTON — With just five days left to make a deal, President Obama and members of the Senate were set to return to Washington on Thursday with no clear path out of their fiscal morass even as the Treasury Department warned that the government will soon be unable to pay its bills unless Congress acts.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, adding to the building tension over how to handle a year-end pileup of threatened tax increases and spending cuts, formally notified Congress on Wednesday that the government would hit its statutory borrowing limit on Monday, raising anew the threat of a federal default as the two parties remained in a standoff.

Mr. Geithner wrote that he would take “extraordinary measures” to keep the government afloat but said that with so much uncertainty over the shape of the tax code and future government spending he did not know how long the Treasury could shuffle accounts before the government could no longer pay its creditors.

For months, President Obama, members of Congress of both parties and top economists have warned that the nation’s fragile economy could be swept back into recession if the two parties did not come to a post-election compromise on January’s combination of tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts.

Yet with days left before the fiscal punch lands, both sides are exhibiting little sense of urgency, and new public statements Wednesday appeared to be designed more to ensure the other side is blamed rather than to foster progress toward a deal.

After a high-level telephone conference call, House Republican leaders called on the Senate to act but opened the door to bringing to the House floor any last-minute legislation the Senate could produce.

“The House will take this action on whatever the Senate can pass, but the Senate first must act,” said the statement issued on behalf of Speaker John A. Boehner and his three top lieutenants.

But Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, instead called on House Republicans to pass an existing Senate measure that would prevent tax increases on household income up to $250,000. “The Senate has already rejected House Republicans’ Tea Party bills, and no further legislation can move through the Senate until Republicans drop their knee-jerk obstruction,” he said in a statement.

Senators will return to the Capitol on Thursday evening with nothing yet to consider. The series of votes waiting for them are unrelated to the fiscal deadline. The House will be gaveled into session at 2 p.m., but since Mr. Boehner has not called the members back to Washington, it will most likely be gaveled back into recess shortly thereafter.

The shift to the Senate has focused new attention on Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a deal-making veteran. Democrats say they need assurances from Mr. McConnell that he will not use procedural tactics to delay any potential bill for an interim solution to avert the fiscal crisis.

But Don Stewart, a spokesman for Mr. McConnell, said no one from the White House or from Mr. Reid’s office has reached out to begin negotiations. Democrats say that Mr. McConnell knows full well what they are proposing: the same Senate bill that passed in July extending all the expiring Bush-era income tax cuts on incomes below $250,000, setting the tax rate on dividends and capital gains at 20 percent, and stopping the alternative minimum tax from rising to hit more middle class taxpayers. Onto that, Democrats would like to add an extension of expiring unemployment benefits and a delay in across-the-board spending cuts while negotiations on a broader deficit reduction plan slips into next year.

Democrats now suggest that Republicans are content to wait until after the January deadline. On Jan. 3, Mr. Boehner is likely to be re-elected speaker for the 113th Congress. After that roll call, he may feel less pressure from his right flank against a deal.

For its part, the Senate may simply be out of time. Without unanimous agreement, Mr. Reid would have to take procedural steps to begin considering a bill. He could then be forced to press for another vote to cut off debate before final passage. If forced to jump through those hoops, the 112th Congress could expire before final votes could be cast.

“I think there’s some chance that we get a deal done in the early weeks of January, which technically means you’re going over the cliff,” Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, said on CNBC on Wednesday.

Lawmakers from both parties say Mr. McConnell could be the key to a resolution. He has played the role of adjudicator for Congressional Republicans before, during last year’s fight over a payroll tax extension and the battle between Democrats and Republicans over how, or if, to pay for an emergency disaster financing bill.

With days to spare, Mr. McConnell must decide whether to allow on the Senate floor the Democrats’ bill to extend expiring tax cuts. If passed without a filibuster, that legislation could force the House speaker’s hand and quiet his raucous Republican conference. Or Mr. McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2014 and would like to avoid a primary fight, could stand back quietly and hope that Mr. Boehner and Mr. Obama somehow manage to put together a deal that saves him the trouble.

If Mr. McConnell cannot come to the rescue, there is another hope: Starbucks. Howard Schultz, the company’s chief executive officer, asked baristas who work in Washington-area Starbucks to scrawl “Come Together” on coffee cups for the rest of the week to generate enthusiasm for a compromise.

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Syrian General Defects in a Public Broadcast

Aref Heretani/Reuters.

Mannequins were set up to confuse snipers loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the old city of Aleppo on Sunday.

Syria’s embattled leadership suffered a new setback on Wednesday with the publicly broadcast defection of its military police chief, the highest-ranking officer to abandon President Bashar al-Assad since the uprising against him began nearly two years ago.

The defector, Maj. Gen. Abdul Azia Jassem al-Shallal, announced his move in a video broadcast by Al Arabiya, saying that he had taken the step because of what he called the Syrian military’s deviation from “its fundamental mission to protect the nation and transformation into gangs of killing and destruction.”

Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab broadcaster heavily critical of the Syrian government, said General Shallal had made the video on Tuesday somewhere on the Turkish-Syrian border, implying that he was now inside Turkey, where other Syrian military defectors have sought refuge in the conflict. Many have regrouped there to join the Free Syrian Army, the main insurgent force fighting Mr. Assad.

Reading from a prepared statement while sitting at a desk, dressed in a camouflage uniform with red epaulets, the general did not specify in his message when he had decided to defect but said that he had been “waiting for the right circumstances to do so.” He also said “there are other high-ranking officers who want to defect, but the situation is not suitable for them to declare defection.”

General Shallal’s statement came as Syrian insurgents were claiming new territorial gains against Mr. Assad in the northern and central parts of the country and as a special envoy from the United Nations and the Arab League was visiting Damascus as part of an effort to reach a political settlement that would halt the conflict, the most violent of the Arab Spring revolutions that began in the winter of 2010-2011. More than 40,000 people have been killed since protests against Mr. Assad began in March 2011.

There has been speculation that the special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, presented Mr. Assad with proposals for relinquishing his authority and possibly leaving the country. But Mr. Assad, whose Alawite minority has ruled Syria for more than four decades, has consistently said he will not leave the country, even as his control over it seems to be slipping further away.

Dozens of lower-ranking Syrian military officers and hundreds of soldiers have fled Syria over the past two years, but General Shallal, the head of the military police division of the Syrian Army, is the highest-ranking military defector so far. He outranked Brig. Gen. Manaf Tlass, a boyhood friend of Mr. Assad’s, who fled last July. General Tlass is now believed to be living in France.

Among civilians who have abandoned Mr. Assad, the highest-ranking defector so far has been the prime minister, Riyad Farid Hijab, who fled to Jordan on Aug. 6. In the past few weeks, unconfirmed reports also have abounded about the possible defection of Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, a smooth-talking English speaker who had numerous foreign contacts and who disappeared from public view in early December. The Lebanese television channel Al Manar, which is sympathetic to Mr. Assad, said Mr. Makdissi had been fired.

The Guardian reported this week that Mr. Makdissi had fled to the United States and was cooperating with American intelligence. Officials in Washington have not responded to requests for comment on that report.

In Lebanon, Syria’s interior minister, Mohammed al-Shaar, who had been recovering at a Beirut hospital from wounds said to have been received in a Dec. 12 suicide bombing attack outside his offices in Damascus, was on his way back to the Syrian capital on Wednesday. The Associated Press quoted Beirut airport officials as saying the minister flew home on a private jet.

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