Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness. The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection,...

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Gays in Pakistan Move Cautiously to Gain Acceptance

Max Becherer for the International Herald TribuneHIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT Ali, a gay man who lives in Lahore, is in a support group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Pakistanis. “The gay scene here is very hush-hush,” he says. LAHORE, Pakistan — The group meets irregularly in a simple building among a row of shops here that close in the evening. Drapes cover the windows. Sometimes members watch...

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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NYC Marathon runners fill unexpected free time

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Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites

Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Jeffrey G. Katz, the chief executive of Wize Commerce, seen with employees. He says that about 60 percent of the traffic for the company’s Nextag comparison-shopping site comes from Google.

In a geeky fire drill, engineers and outside consultants at Nextag scrambled to see if the problem was its own fault. Maybe some inadvertent change had prompted Google’s algorithm to demote Nextag when a person typed in shopping-related search terms like “kitchen table” or “lawn mower.”

But no, the engineers determined. And traffic from Google’s search engine continued to decline, by half.

Nextag’s response? It doubled its spending on Google paid search advertising in the last five months.

The move was costly but necessary to retain shoppers, Mr. Katz says, because an estimated 60 percent of Nextag’s traffic comes from Google, both from free search and paid search ads, which are ads that are related to search results and appear next to them. “We had to do it,” says Mr. Katz, chief executive of Wize Commerce, owner of Nextag. “We’re living in Google’s world.”

Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.

So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.

The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.

The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s.

The staff of the Federal Trade Commission has recommended preparing an antitrust suit against Google, according to people briefed on the inquiry, who spoke on the condition they not be identified. But the commissioners must vote to proceed. Even if they do, the government and Google could settle.

Google has drawn the attention of antitrust officials as it has moved aggressively beyond its dominant product — search and search advertising — into fields like online commerce and local reviews. The antitrust issue is whether Google uses its search engine to favor its offerings like Google Shopping and Google Plus Local over rivals.

For policy makers, Google is a tough call.

“What to do with an attractive monopolist, like Google, is a really challenging issue for antitrust,” says Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and a former senior adviser to the F.T.C. “The goal is to encourage them to stay in power by continuing to innovate instead of excluding competitors.”

SPEAKING at a Google Zeitgeist conference in Arizona last month, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said he understood the government scrutiny of his company, given Google’s size and reach. “There’s very many decisions we make that really impact a lot of people,” he acknowledged.

The main reason is that Google is continually adjusting its search algorithm — the smart software that determines the relevance, ranking and presentation of search results, typically links to other Web sites.

Google says it makes the changes to improve its service, and has long maintained that its algorithm weeds out low-quality sites and shows the most useful results, whether or not they link to Google products.

“Our first and highest goal has to be to get the user the information they want as quickly and easily as possible,” says Matt Cutts, leader of the Web spam team at Google.

But Google’s algorithm is secret, and changes can leave Web sites scrambling.

Consider Vote-USA.org, a nonprofit group started in 2003. It provides online information for voters to avoid the frustration of arriving at a polling booth and barely recognizing half the names on the ballot. The site posts free sample ballots for federal, state and local elections with candidates’ pictures, biographies and views on issues.

In the 2004 and 2006 elections, users created tens of thousands of sample ballots. By 2008, traffic had fallen sharply, says Ron Kahlow, who runs Vote-USA.org, because “we dropped off the face of the map on Google.”

As founder of a search-engine optimization company and a recipient of grants that Google gives nonprofits to advertise free, Mr. Kahlow knows a thing or two about how to operate in Google’s world. He pored over Google’s guidelines for Web sites, made changes and e-mailed Google. Yet he received no response.

“I lost all donations to support the operation,” he said. “It was very, very painful.”

A breakthrough came through a personal connection. A friend of Mr. Kahlow knew Ed Black, chief executive of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google. Mr. Black made an inquiry on Mr. Kahlow’s behalf, and a Google engineer investigated.

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A Promising Drug With a Flaw

Dr. Bryan A. Cotton, a trauma surgeon in Houston, had not heard much about the new anticlotting drug Pradaxa other than the commercials he had seen during Sunday football games.

Then people using Pradaxa started showing up in his emergency room. One man in his 70s fell at home and arrived at the hospital alert and talking. But he rapidly declined. “We pretty much threw the whole kitchen sink at him,” recalled Dr. Cotton, who works at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. “But he still bled to death on the table.”

Unlike warfarin, an older drug, there is no antidote to reverse the blood-thinning effects of Pradaxa.

“You feel helpless,” Dr. Cotton said. The drug has contributed to the bleeding deaths of at least eight patients at the hospital. “And that’s a very bad feeling for us.”

Pradaxa has become a blockbuster drug in its two years on the market, bringing in more than $1 billion in sales for its maker, the privately held German drug maker Boehringer Ingelheim.

But Pradaxa has been linked to more than 500 deaths in the United States, and a chorus of complaints has risen from doctors, victims’ families and others in the medical community, who worry that the approval process was not sufficiently rigorous because it allowed a potentially dangerous drug to be sold without an option for reversing its effects.

Pradaxa is an example, some critics say, of what can happen when a drug that performs well in tightly controlled trials is released into the messy world of real-life medicine. Boehringer Ingelheim said it was working on developing an antidote but that even without one, patients in a large clinical trial died at roughly the same rate as those who were taking warfarin.

The Food and Drug Administration released a report on Friday that found that the drug did not show a higher risk of bleeding than for patients taking warfarin. The report did not address the lack of an antidote for Pradaxa.

“The evolving spontaneous reporting patterns do not indicate a change in the favorable benefit-risk profile of Pradaxa, when used correctly according to the approved label,” Boehringer Ingelheim said in a statement. In other words, the drug is still safe. But some reports have indicated that doctors are not sufficiently cautious when prescribing Pradaxa, giving the drug to older people or those with kidney problems even though there is evidence that the bleeding risks are higher in those groups. The company recommends testing patients’ kidney function before prescribing Pradaxa and notes that the risk of bleeding increases with age.

“The problem is that the people that prescribe this, as a general rule, are cardiologists and family practitioners,” said Dr. Mark L. Mosley, director of the emergency room at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kan. “The people that see the harm are your E.R. docs and your trauma docs.”

Critics say that at least until an antidote is found, better disclosure or more limited use of Pradaxa may be preferable. Patients’ lawyers have begun turning their attention to the drug. More than 100 lawsuits have been filed in federal courts and lawyers say thousands more are expected.

When the F.D.A. approved Pradaxa in October 2010, the drug was hailed as the first in a new category of replacements for warfarin, the nearly 60-year-old drug used to prevent strokes in people with a heart-rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation.

Warfarin requires careful monitoring of a patient’s diet and drug regimen, and frequent blood tests to ensure that it is working. Pradaxa required no such monitoring and, compared with warfarin, appeared to be better at preventing strokes.

Sales of the drug took off. By the end of 2011, after just over a year on the market, 17 percent of patients with atrial fibrillation were being prescribed Pradaxa, compared with 44 percent for warfarin, according to a study released in September. About 725,000 patients in the United States have used the drug, according to the F.D.A.

But almost as soon as doctors started prescribing Pradaxa, concerns surfaced about its safety. Pradaxa was identified as the primary suspect in 542 patient deaths reported to the F.D.A. in 2011, and was linked to more reports of injury or death than any of the more than 800 drugs regularly monitored by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit based in Pennsylvania that monitors medicine safety.

Dr. Mosley said he found it “shocking, just shocking” that the F.D.A. approved Pradaxa, which is also called dabigatran, even though no antidote was available.

In a statement, the F.D.A. said, “the lack of an antidote notwithstanding, dabigatran was superior to warfarin in preventing strokes in a large clinical trial. The rates of bleeding were similar.” In the study it released on Friday, the F.D.A. examined health insurance claims and hospital data and reached a similar conclusion.

Warfarin, which is also known by the brand name Coumadin, can often be reversed by giving a patient vitamin K or other substances. Warfarin, too, can be deadly but, doctors said, they at least have options.

“The practical experience is that once hemorrhagic complications occur in this drug, it is much more likely to be a catastrophe than with Coumadin,” said Dr. Richard H. Schmidt, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the University of Utah, who treated an 83-year-old man who died from bleeding and was using Pradaxa.

Boehringer Ingelheim recommends treating bleeding patients with dialysis to help flush the drug from the body, although it notes that “the amount of data supporting this approach is limited.”

Several doctors said that option was not realistic. “People that are bleeding to death aren’t going to tolerate being put on dialysis,” Dr. Cotton said.

Two other new drugs intended as warfarin replacements also lack antidotes. Doctors said they had not seen as many bleeding deaths associated with Xarelto, which was approved in 2011 and is sold by Bayer and Johnson & Johnson. On Friday, the F.D.A. approved Xarelto to also treat deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, two kinds of blood clots. Pradaxa is approved in the United States only to prevent stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. A third drug, Eliquis, by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer, has not yet been approved by the F.D.A. Representatives for both drugs said trials showed their products were safe, adding that the companies were investigating different antidotes. Boehringer Ingelheim is expected to present several new studies of Pradaxa’s safety and efficacy — including one that examines potential antidotes — at the American Heart Association scientific conference next week in Los Angeles.

Some cardiologists have said that Pradaxa and the other new drugs represent real advances over warfarin. Around 40 percent of people with atrial fibrillation do not take any drugs for it, a recent study showed, putting them at risk for strokes.

“I think the benefit of the drug clearly exceeds the risk because to me, a disabling stroke has a greater weight than a bleeding complication,” said Dr. Sanjay Kaul, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a member of the F.D.A. committee that voted to approve Pradaxa.

But those calculations make little sense to Walter Daumler, who said he watched his 78-year-old sister, Doris, bleed to death in May. Mr. Daumler, who lives in Wisconsin, has hired a lawyer and is considering suing. He said the doctors told him that because she was on Pradaxa, there was nothing they could do.

“My No. 1 goal is to stop this insidious drug,” Mr. Daumler said. “To get this off the market, so others will not undergo or witness what I saw.”

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Petraeus’s Lower C.I.A. Profile Leaves Benghazi Void

WASHINGTON — In 14 months as C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus has shunned the spotlight he once courted as America’s most famous general. His low-profile style has won the loyalty of the White House, easing old tensions with President Obama, and he has overcome some of the skepticism he faced from the agency’s work force, which is always wary of the military brass.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

The low-profile style of David H. Petraeus, right, has won the loyalty of the White House, easing old tensions with President Obama.

Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, right, appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in Washington in January.

But since an attack killed four Americans seven weeks ago in Benghazi, Libya, his deliberately low profile, and the C.I.A.’s penchant for secrecy, have left a void that has been filled by a news media and Congressional furor over whether it could have been prevented. Rather than acknowledge the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi, Mr. Petraeus and other agency officials fought a losing battle to keep it secret, even as the events there became a point of contention in the presidential campaign.

Finally, on Thursday, with Mr. Petraeus away on a visit to the Middle East, pressure from critics prompted intelligence officials to give their own account of the chaotic night when two security officers died along with the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and another diplomat. The officials acknowledged for the first time that the security officers, both former members of the Navy SEALs, worked on contract for the C.I.A., which occupied one of the buildings that were attacked.

The Benghazi crisis is the biggest challenge so far in the first civilian job held by Mr. Petraeus, who retired from the Army and dropped the “General” when he went to the C.I.A. He gets mostly high marks from government colleagues and outside experts for his overall performance. But the transition has meant learning a markedly different culture, at an agency famously resistant to outsiders.

“I think he’s a brilliant man, but he’s also a four-star general,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Four-stars are saluted, not questioned. He’s now running an agency where everything is questioned, whether you’re a four-star or a senator. It’s a culture change.”

Mr. Petraeus, who turns 60 next week, has had to learn that C.I.A. officers will not automatically defer to his judgments, as military subordinates often did. “The attitude at the agency is, ‘You may be the director, but I’m the Thailand analyst,’ ” said one C.I.A. veteran.

Long a media star as the most prominent military leader of his generation, Mr. Petraeus abruptly abandoned that style at the C.I.A. Operating amid widespread complaints about leaks of classified information, he has stopped giving interviews, speaks to Congress in closed sessions and travels the globe to consult with foreign spy services with little news media notice.

“He thinks he has to be very discreet and let others in the government do the talking,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar who is a friend of Mr. Petraeus’s and a member of the C.I.A.’s advisory board.

Mr. Petraeus’s no-news, no-nonsense style stands out especially starkly against that of his effusive predecessor, Leon E. Panetta, who is now the defense secretary.

Mr. Panetta, a gregarious politician by profession, was unusually open with Congress and sometimes with the public — to a fault, some might say, when he spoke candidly after leaving the C.I.A. about a Pakistani doctor’s role in helping hunt for Osama bin Laden, or about the agency’s drone operations.

Mr. Petraeus’s discretion and relentless work ethic have had a positive side for him: old tensions with Mr. Obama, which grew out of differing views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, appear to be gone. Mr. Petraeus is at the White House several times a week, attending National Security Council sessions and meeting weekly with James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, and Thomas E. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser. Mr. Donilon said recently that the C.I.A. director “has done an exceptional job,” bringing “deep experience, intellectual rigor and enthusiasm” to his work.

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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NYC Marathon is canceled following storm damage

NEW YORK (AP) — With the runners ready but ravaged residents still recovering from Sandy, this weekend's New York City Marathon was canceled Friday when Mayor Michael Bloomberg reversed himself and yielded to mounting criticism that this was no time to run a race.

The death toll in the city stood at 41 and thousands of shivering people were without electricity, making many New Yorkers recoil at the idea of assigning police officers to protect a foot race and evicting storm victims from hotels to make way for runners.

Bloomberg, who as late as Friday morning insisted that the world's largest marathon should go on as scheduled Sunday, changed course hours later after intensifying opposition from the city comptroller, the Manhattan borough president and sanitation workers unhappy that they had volunteered to help storm victims but were assigned to the race instead. The mayor said he would not want "a cloud to hang over the race or its participants."

"We cannot allow a controversy over an athletic event — even one as meaningful as this — to distract attention away from all the critically important work that is being done to recover from the storm and get our city back on track," the mayor said.

Around 47,500 runners — 30,000 of them out-of-towners, many of them from other countries — had been expected to take part in the 26.2-mile event, with more than 1 million spectators usually lining the route.

The race had been scheduled to start in Staten Island, one of the storm's hardest-hit places, and wind through all of the city's five boroughs. The nationally televised race has been held annually since 1970, including 2001, about two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

For runners, the cancellation was a devastating disappointment.

At the midtown New Yorker Hotel, the lobby was filled with anguished runners, some crying and others with puffy eyes. In one corner, a group of Italian runners watched the news with blank looks.

"I have no words," said Roberto Dell'Olmo, from Vercelli, Italy. Then later: "I would like that the money I give from the marathon goes to victims."

Elsewhere across the metro area Friday, the recovery made slow progress. Companies turned the lights back on, and many employees returned to their desks. Many major retailers also reopened.

But patience was wearing thin among New Yorkers who had been without power for most of the week.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo told utilities to step up power repair work or risk losing business in the state. And officials said the cost of the storm could exceed $18 billion in New York alone.

From storm-scarred New Jersey to parts of Connecticut, a widespread lack of gasoline frustrated people who were just trying to get to work or pick up a load of groceries.

Lines of cars, and in many places queues of people on foot carrying bright red jerry cans, waited for hours for precious fuel. And those were the lucky ones. Other customers gave up after finding only closed stations or dry pumps marked with yellow tape or "No Gas" signs.

Bloomberg called the marathon an "integral part of New York City's life for 40 years" and insisted that holding the race would not require resources to be diverted from the recovery effort. But, he said, he understood the doubts.

"We would not want a cloud to hang over the race or its participants, and so we have decided to cancel it," Bloomberg said in a statement. "We cannot allow a controversy over an athletic event — even one as meaningful as this — to distract attention away from all the critically important work that is being done to recover from the storm and get our city back on track."

City and race officials considered several alternatives: a modified course, postponement or an elite runners-only race. But they decided cancellation was the best option.

Organizers will donate various items that had been brought in for the race to relief efforts, from food, blankets and portable toilets to generators already set up on Staten Island.

The cancellation means there won't be another NYC Marathon until next year.

"I understand why it cannot be held under the current circumstances," Meb Keflezighi, the 2009 men's champion and a former Olympic silver medalist, said in a statement. "Any inconveniences the cancellation causes me or the thousands of runners who trained and traveled for this race pales in comparison to the challenges faced by people in NYC and its vicinity."

"Bloomberg's decision came just a day after he appealed to the grit and resiliency of New Yorkers, saying, "This city is a city where we have to go on."

Mary Wittenberg, president of the New York Road Runners, the group that organizes the marathon, said canceling was the right move.

"This is what we need to do and the right thing at this time," she said.

"It's been a week where we worked very closely with the mayor's office and felt very strongly, both of us together, that on Tuesday, it seemed that the best thing for New York on Sunday would be moving forward. As the days went on, just today it got to the point where that was no longer the case."

Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association — the police department's largest union — called the decision to cancel the marathon "a wise choice."

ING, the financial company that is the title sponsor of the marathon, said it also supported the decision to cancel. The firm's charitable giving arm has made a $500,000 contribution to help with relief and recovery efforts, and is matching employee donations.

Wittenberg said about 10,000 runners were expected to drop out after the storm arrived.

For now, marathon organizers are sticking to their policy of no refunds for runners, but they will guarantee entry to next year's marathon. However, Wittenberg said the group would review the refund policy.

Eric Jones said he was part of a group from the Netherlands that collected $1.5 million to donate to a children's cancer charity if the runners competed.

"We understand, but maybe the decision could have been made earlier, before we traveled this far," said Jones, whose group came to New York a day earlier.

Steve Brune, a Manhattan entrepreneur, was set to run his fourth New York City Marathon.

"I'm disappointed, but I can understand why it's more important to use our resources for those who have lost a lot," he said.

Brune said he thinks foreign runners who traveled for the race will be even more disappointed.

"When you have a significant amount of people voicing real pain and unhappiness over its running, you have to hear that. You have to take that into consideration," said Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor for government affairs and communications.

"Something that is such a celebration of the best of New York can't become divisive. That is not good for the city now as we try to complete our recovery effort, and it is not good for the marathon in the long run," he said.

Earlier in the day, race preparations seemed under way as normal.

White tents where the runners would meet were already erected. Plastic crates lined the park's wall for two blocks, with tangles of electric wires and other setup equipment where workers buzzed around. A few TV news crews set up camp.

Along the race route in Queens, a couple of marathon banners hung from street lamps.

"I'm not a fan of what he's doing," Manhattan resident Michael Folickman said of Bloomberg's decision. "I think that if the bridge is cleared and the streets are clear, I don't think it'll wreak any more havoc than what's already been wreaked."

"And I think it could be an uplifting experience for the city to have something exciting like that happen on top of this terrible hurricane," he said.

In Staten Island, Eddie Kleydman said the marathon wasn't important amid all the storm's devastation.

"Look at this," he said, motioning toward the huge piles of discarded furniture and household items that line his street. "Who cares about the marathon? We need garbage trucks, we need FEMA to act quicker. He's worried about the marathon; I'm worried about getting power."

At the midtown New Yorker Hotel, Gisela Clausen of Munich, Germany, told her fellow runners about the cancellation as they walked in.

"You don't understand. We spend a year on this. We don't eat what we want. We don't drink what we want. And we're on the streets for hours. We live for this marathon, but we understand," she said.

___

Associated Press writers Cara Anna, Verena Dobnik, Melissa Murphy, Christina Rexrode and Michael Rubinkam in New York contributed to this report.

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For Hourly Workers After the Storm, No Work, No Pay

Chantal Sainvilus, a home health aide in Brooklyn who makes $10 an hour, does not get paid if she does not show up. So it is no wonder that she joined the thousands of people taking extreme measures to get to work this week, even, in her case, hiking over the Williamsburg Bridge.

While salaried employees worked if they could, often from home after Hurricane Sandy, many of the poorest New Yorkers faced the prospect of losing days, even a crucial week, of pay on top of the economic ground they have lost since the recession.

Low-wage workers, more likely to be paid hourly and work at the whim of their employers, have fared worse in the recovery than those at the top of the income scale — in New York City the bottom 20 percent lost $463 in annual income from 2010 to 2011, in contrast to a gain of almost $2,000 for the top quintile. And there are an increasing number of part-time and hourly workers, the type that safety net programs like unemployment are not designed to serve. Since 2009, when the recovery began, 86 percent of the jobs added nationally have been hourly. Over all, about 60 percent of the nation’s jobs are hourly.

Even as the sluggish economy has accentuated this divide, Hurricane Sandy has acted as a further wedge, threatening to take a far greater toll on the have-littles who live from paycheck to paycheck.

“There’s a lot of people in our society that are living in a very precarious situation in terms of low wages or very insecure work,” said Arne L. Kalleberg, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.” “That’s why it’s important to have a safety net that’s based on the idea of people working insecure jobs like this.”

On Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that New York City and four suburban counties were eligible for disaster unemployment relief, which covers a broader spectrum of workers than regular unemployment benefits, including the self-employed like taxi drivers and street vendors as well as those who were unable to get to work.

New Jersey has also declared people in 10 counties eligible for disaster unemployment assistance. In Connecticut, residents of four counties and the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Reservation are eligible.

A New York Department of Labor spokesman emphasized that workers who lost wages should call to apply because the program is flexible and many eligibility issues would be determined on a case-by-case basis.

But the program might not help people whose commute simply lasted longer or cost more, like Ibezim Oki, a cabdriver who spent $50 on a cab to get from his Brooklyn home to Manhattan on Friday, rather than risk long bus delays, and “now I don’t know how long I’m going to have to wait for gas.”

The commute alone represented a hardship for workers whose jobs require a physical presence, while neighborhood coffee shops in the boroughs and suburbs overflowed with those who needed nothing more than a laptop and Wi-Fi to stay connected to work.

Ms. Sainvilus estimated that on Thursday, she had traveled eight hours to work for five, making her effective pay less than $4 an hour.

Others could not work because their place of business was closed. At a food distribution center in Chelsea, Mike Samuel, 55, a delivery man for a florist, was feeling the pain of five days of lost income. “We don’t work, we don’t get no tips, we don’t get no pay,” he said.

Muta Prather said the chemical company where he works in Newark was flooded, causing him to miss three days of work. He worked part of the day on Thursday helping to clean up, but worried about how he would pay for damage to his own roof.

“It hurts, you know,” said Mr. Prather, who is 49 and lives in West Orange, N.J. “I looked up at my roof, and it’s going to cost me like seven grand. I don’t make that kind of money.”

But at a playground in the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn, Damien Carney stood with his baby daughter strapped to his chest and his toddler on a nearby swing, enjoying a surprise week off. For Mr. Carney, a salaried portfolio manager for a wine distributor that was closed because it had no power, the storm was amounting to something like a paid vacation with time for cooking and rearranging the living room. “They basically said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ ” Mr. Carney said of his employers.

Federal labor laws include more protections for salaried workers than hourly workers when a disaster hits. Employers must continue to pay salaries if the worksite is closed for less than a week, even though they are allowed to require employees to use vacation or paid leave for the duration of the closure. Hourly workers, on the other hand, do not have to be paid if the worksite closes. If the workplace is open but salaried workers cannot get there, their pay may be reduced.

Of course, policies vary from workplace to workplace, and some hourly workers were luckier than others. Cassandra Williams, 54, waiting for the bus from Brooklyn to Manhattan with her 6-year-old granddaughter, said the family for whom she keeps house would pay her full wages despite her missing three days of work. Tinash Makots, a 24-year-old salesman at the Nike store in Midtown Manhattan, said he would be paid for the days missed as well.

One nanny in the bus line said she would be paid her regular wages, while another said she would not be compensated for hours missed.

A financial district worker who would identify himself only as William S. said he did not strictly need to go into Manhattan to do his job, but felt that he should make an appearance after one of his staff members showed up every day at 6 a.m. and another paid $40 a day to get to a distant office in Queens.

But Anthony Howell, a 42-year-old hair stylist in Chelsea, said he hadn’t worked all week because his salon, like his high-rise apartment, has no electricity.

“That’s the brutal part,” he said. “The hair industry is like that. You don’t do the work, you don’t get the money.”

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