Federal prosecutions reached a record high in the 2009 fiscal year, with the surge driven by a sharp increase in cases filed against immigration violators.

The 169,612 federal prosecutions were a jump of nearly 9 percent from the previous year, according to Department of Justice data analyzed by a research center at Syracuse University in a new report. Immigration prosecutions were up nearly 16 percent, and made up more than half of all criminal cases brought by the federal government, the report said.

Much of the spike, immigration experts say, arises from Bush administration efforts to increase immigration enforcement and to speed prosecutions. The administration greatly increased the number of Border Patrol agents and prosecutors, and also introduced a program known as Operation Streamline that relied on large-scale processing of plea deals in immigrant cases in some parts of the country.

The relatively simple cases have become the low-hanging fruit of the federal legal system: Immigration prosecutions, from inception to court disposal, are lightning quick, according to the report. While white-collar prosecutions take an average of 460 days and narcotics cases take 333, the immigration cases are typically disposed of in 2 days.

And while federal prosecutors decline to prosecute about half of the white-collar cases that are referred to them by pearl beads   law enforcement agencies, they prosecute 97 percent of the immigration cases, according to the Syracuse group.

The speed-up in federal immigration prosecutions, however, has run afoul of the federal courts presiding over Arizona, which processed more than 22,000 immigration cases in the fiscal year, nearly a quarter of those cited in the report. This month, a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the process of mass pleadings violates the federal rule that protects the accused from being forced into a guilty plea.

Michael A. Olivas, an immigration expert at the University of Houston Law Center, said he was not surprised to find  opera or rope necklace   immigration prosecutions ¡°No. 1 with a bullet¡± on the Syracuse list. ¡°I would have been astounded if it wasn¡¯t one or two,¡± Mr. Olivas said. ¡°We¡¯re simply pushing the cattle through the chutes.¡±

The fact that immigration prosecutions remained high ¡°shows that this administration is serious about enforcement to some degree,¡± said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a policy group in Washington that favors restricting immigration. ¡°This administration understands that it needs to appear tough on enforcement if it¡¯s going to make a credible case for legalization,¡± or amnesty programs, he said.

David Burnham, who is co-director of the Syracuse research group, known as the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, said that for whatever reason, ¡°the policy of Bush appears, from the data, to have continued and maybe accelerated.¡±

The rise in federal immigration enforcement figures has occurred as crime has dropped over all. According to new  loose pearl   statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also released Monday, violent crimes reported to the bureau¡¯s Uniform Crime Program dropped 4.4 percent over the previous year, the third straight decline. Murder was down 10 percent, and property crimes dropped by 6.1 percent, according to the report.

LANDOVER, Md. ¡ª The game began with a snowball landing a few yards behind Giants quarterback Eli Manning just before the first snap from the line of scrimmage. When it ended, a guy dressed as Santa Claus was shouting into the Giants¡¯ locker room that this one had been their Christmas gift.

If the Giants¡¯ 45-12 victory over the Redskins on Monday night had been less consequential, it would be tempting to dwell primarily on its sheer goofiness or perhaps on the Giants¡¯ impressive and unexpected domination.

The show included a bizarre fake field-goal attempt by the Redskins that ended in a Giants interception on the final play of the first half and a second-half fistfight between two heavyweights, Brandon Jacobs of the Giants and Albert Haynesworth of Redskins, that ended with no ejections.

The game also included five sacks by the Giants defense and three interceptions by the Giants¡¯ defense, one of them returned for a touchdown by Terrell Thomas.

¡°It¡¯s great to knock a quarterback out of the game,¡± defensive tackle Barry Cofield said of the way he and his teammates forced the brief exit of Washington¡¯s Jason Campbell late in the first half.

On offense, there were the three touchdown passes by Eli Manning among his 19 completions in 26 attempts for 268 yards. Manning said the Giants wanted to score early to seize control and discourage the Redskins. They did this, emphatically.

¡°Kind of a buzz killer,¡± Manning said of the Giants¡¯ opening drive for a touchdown, one of two on runs by Ahmad Bradshaw.

But there was more at stake here than just a victory over an old rival in the National Football Conference East. Technically, this was not a ¡°must-win¡± game for the Giants. They did not face elimination from the playoffs. Had they lost, they still would have remained eligible for postseason play.

But they are running out of chances, so they pounded the home team the way the snow pounded the Washington region last weekend.

The victory left the Giants with an 8-6 record, one game behind Green Bay (9-5) and Dallas (9-5) in the chase for the cultured pearl jewelry   two N.F.C. wild-card playoff berths. Two of those teams will qualify and one will not.

The teams each have two games left. Should there be a tie in the final standings, the Giants would prevail over either the Packers or the Cowboys because they have the edge in the tie-breaking formulas.

¡°Two more of these performances and we¡¯ll be sitting pretty in the playoffs,¡± Cofield said. Seemingly catching himself in midthought and not wanting to sound overconfident, he quickly added, ¡°We¡¯ve got a decent chance.¡±

Indeed they do, although they may need help. The Giants could clinch a berth by winning their final two games if either Dallas or Green Bay were to lose even once. The Giants host the Carolina Panthers on Sunday and finish their regular season at Minnesota.

The Giants have not missed the playoffs since 2004, but they are wearing down with injuries. Hakeem Nicks, their promising rookie wide receiver, left the game with a hamstring problem that he said was not too serious. ¡°I¡¯m fine, just wanted to be safe,¡± said Nicks, who nevertheless freshwater pearl strands    had a look of caution on his face.

Offensive left guard Rich Seubert left with a knee injury when he tangled up on the pile on Bradshaw¡¯s first touchdown. He was replaced by Kevin Boothe. At right tackle, William Beatty played in place of Kareem McKenzie, who has a knee injury.

On defense, Aaron Ross was unable because his hamstring is troubling him again. Also out was another cornerback, Corey Webster, with a knee injury. Kevin Dockery and Bruce Johnson filled in.

There was also a different sort of somber note after the game when defensive end Justin Tuck, who got had of the sacks, stood quietly by his locker, consoled by several teammates. Tuck is usually one of the team¡¯s most willing spokesmen.

A team aide said Tuck was dealing with a personal matter. It was one of many unusual or memorable scenes of the evening.

Perhaps the most interesting play of the game ¡ª and one of the strangest of the N.F.L. season ¡ª came at the end of the second quarter when the Redskins let the clock run down to two seconds and lined up for what looked to be a field-goal attempt of 37 yards.

But, before snapping the ball, eight players ran over to the left side of the field in a bunch formation that is often seen on an onside kick. This left the snapper, holder and kicker in place for what appeared to be a fake kick.

The Giants responded by calling a timeout. When both teams lined up again, the Redskins ran into a similar formation with Hunter Smith, the punter and placekick holder, taking a long snap and silver pearl jewelry    cocking his arm to throw.

His pass, into a cluster of players, was intercepted by Aaron Rouse of the Giants, who ran it back from the Giants¡¯ 6-yard line to the 45 of Washington.

Football has a long tradition here, and these fans have seen many things, good and bad. But few had seen anything like this play, and a murmur of bewilderment was audible in the crowd all through halftime.

The play, presumably, was called or at least approved by Jim Zorn, the head coach, whose job may be in jeopardy now that the struggling team last week named Bruce Allen week as its new general manager.

Before the game, in a radio interview with the popular former Redskins quarterback Sonny Jurgensen, Zorn unintentionally said more than he intended when he told Jurgensen that his Redskins ¡°want to showcase some of the things we¡¯ve been lax on lately.¡±

The other strange moment was the fight that began when Jacobs grabbed Washington¡¯s DeAngelo Hall by the facemask after Manning tried to avoid a sack by throwing to Jacobs.

Haynesworth rushed into it and Jacobs squared off in a boxing stance. It is a sport Jacobs loves. He fought in his youth and manages boxers.

Only Haynesworth was penalized, 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct. Had it been hockey, each man would have probably spent five minutes in the penalty box. After the game, Jacobs was one of the last players to leave the field.

With his helmet off, he loped into the end zone with a hop, a skip and a jump, landing heavily on both feet, tilting back his head and roaring at the Giants fans who remained late to cheer their team on its way back toward home and, perhaps, to the postseason play.

EXTRA POINTS

ELI MANNING¡¯s touchdown passes were to STEVE SMITH (6 yards), DEREK HAGEN (23 yards), and MARIO MANNINGHAM (25 yards). Smith performed a little dance routine after his. Smith caught five passes for 40 yards. HAKEEM NICKS led receivers with 66 yards, including a catch-and-run for 45. ... AHMAD BRADSHAW led Giants runners in yards with 61, on nine carries. ... Jeff Feagles punted only twice. 

JERUSALEM ¡ª A struggle for the character of the Western Wall, this city¡¯s iconic Jewish holy site and central place of worship, is under way, and it is being fought with prayer shawls and Torah scrolls.

On Friday, sheets of rain obscured the Old City¡¯s ancient domes. But by 7 a.m. about 150 Jewish women had gathered at the Western Wall to pray and to challenge the constraints imposed on them by traditional Jewish Orthodoxy and a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court.

Under their coats many of the women, supporters of a group of religious activists called Women of the Wall, wore a tallit, or fringed prayer shawl, a ritual garment traditionally worn only by men. Some wore their prayer shawls openly, an illegal act in this particular setting that can incur a fine or several months in jail.

Last month Nofrat Frenkel, 28, an Israeli medical student and a committed follower of Conservative Judaism, a modern, egalitarian strain, was the first woman in Israel to be arrested during prayers at the Western Wall, also known as the Kotel, for publicly wrapping herself in a tallit.

The police accused her of acting provocatively and in a way that upset public order. Ms. Frenkel said the investigation was still under way.

The Women of the Wall, who meet for prayers at the Kotel at the start of every Hebrew month, are at the vanguard of a feminist struggle in Orthodox Judaism and other more contemporary strains to adapt time-honored religious practice for the modern age. They came in droves on Friday, the first day of the Hebrew month of Tevet, to express their outrage over Ms. Frenkel¡¯s case.

Anat Hoffman, chairwoman of Women of the Wall, which was founded in 1988, said she had never seen so many turn up in the month of Tevet.

¡°We are pushing the envelope. History is made of moments like this,¡± she said.

The group¡¯s activities present a head-on challenge to the religious establishment, which is dominated in Israel by Orthodox rabbis who interpret and apply the rules of religious law in their strictest form.

The Kotel is defined in Israel as a national and holy site that is open to all. In practice, the women say, it operates like an Orthodox synagogue, with separate prayer sections for men and women and a modesty patrol to ensure that visitors are appropriately dressed.

Traditional Orthodox women pray individually, and quietly, by the Kotel¡¯s massive beige stones, a remnant of the retaining wall of the mount revered by Jews as the site where their ancient temples once stood. Al Aksa mosque now sits on the top of the mount.

Critics of the Women of the Wall say that their practices ¡ª like holding organized prayers, singing out loud, carrying a Torah scroll and wearing prayer shawls ¡ª offend the more traditional worshipers at the site.

Twenty years ago, having suffered verbal and physical abuse as they prayed, the Women of the Wall petitioned the Supreme Court to have their right to religious freedom recognized, on grounds that the Kotel does not belong to the Orthodox establishment alone.

After a lengthy legal battle, the court ultimately ruled against the women in the interest of public order. Consequently, it is illegal for them to read aloud from the Torah or to wear prayer shawls openly by  cultured pearl   the wall. Instead, the authorities have allocated them a special area where they can conduct services in their own fashion, in an archaeological garden tucked around a corner, out of sight.

¡°These women come here like a persecuted group,¡± said David Barhoum, a criminal lawyer there on behalf of the Women of the Wall. If anything, he said on Friday, the criminal behavior seemed to be coming from the other side.

Across a partition, in the men¡¯s section of the Kotel, a group of ultra-Orthodox men gathered to harass the women as they sang and prayed. The men shouted ¡°Gevalt!¡± ¡ª expressing their revulsion in Yiddish ¡ª and called the women¡¯s prayer an abomination. One or two threw objects and spat at them. In the women¡¯s section, some Orthodox female worshipers joined in the insults.

Jewish religious law is open to interpretation. The Women of the Wall argue that even according to  pearl beads  some Orthodox opinions, they are doing nothing wrong.

¡°Women are exempt from carrying out certain commandments, but not forbidden,¡± said Ms. Frenkel, who kept her prayer shawl hidden beneath her jacket by the Kotel this time around.

But the rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, said ¡°there is no value to prayer that creates controversy and offends other female worshipers¡± at the site.

The dispute is not about interpretations of religious law, he added, but about the sanctity and the accepted custom of the place. ¡°On Friday the heavens wept,¡± he said.

Others saw the rain as a blessing in this parched land. The downpour was ¡°so fitting,¡± said Simonne Horwitz, an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan in western Canada, who said she had flown in especially for the event.

By and large, the inclement weather was on the  freshwater pearl earrings   side of the police who were sent to uphold the law and keep the peace.

There had been a plan for the women concealing their prayer shawls to open their coats, but Ms. Hoffman said most did not want to because of the storm.

Plans to take out a Torah scroll at the Kotel, and perhaps to read from it, were also aborted for fear the parchment would be damaged by the rain. Even so, one of the scrolls ended up with water stains.

Whether or not it was an act of divine intervention, the deluge allowed everyone to claim victory ¡ª the drenched women, their detractors and the police. The women were obviously wearing prayer shawls at the wall, but no arrests were made. 

By the time Bryan Lee headed to work along Highway 51 in Texas on Sept. 15, 2005, the road-building industry and its government overseers were painfully aware of a deadly, though easily corrected, construction hazard: pavement-edge drop-offs.

Accidents involving dangerous drop-offs kill about 160 people and injure 11,000 each year. Numerous studies have shown that the steeper the drop-off, the greater the danger.

In Texas in 2002, seven people were killed when a car slipped off a sharp edge of roadway and onto the shoulder, causing the driver to overcorrect into the path of a minivan. Four years before, six people died in a succession of accidents in another Texas work zone, where contractors had failed to smooth out the edge of a newly paved lane.

Yet when the contractors repaving Highway 51 west of Fort Worth discovered that they lacked sufficient equipment, they decided to pave only part of the roadway and finish the rest days later, leaving a sharp drop-off that ran for miles within the travel lane. A state inspector warned that it was dangerous, but no one ¡ª not his superiors, not the contractor ¡ª listened.

Two days after that warning, Mr. Lee, a 26-year-old oil field worker with a wife and two young sons, rounded a curve in the early-morning darkness, and the wheels of his Suzuki motorcycle slid off the asphalt edge. He tumbled from the bike and was run over by a pickup truck.

The deadly accident was one of thousands in highway work zones across the country that have killed at least 4,700 people ¡ª more than two a day ¡ª and injured 200,000 in the last five years alone pearl beads  . Ubiquitous annoyances of on-the-go American life, work zones are sometimes death traps, too.

Behind this human toll is a litany of mundane hazards: concrete barriers in the wrong position, obsolete lane markings left in place, warning signs never deployed.

Yet there are virtually no laws or regulations mandating safety measures in work zones. There are standards, but they are loosely enforced and differ from state to state. As a result, there are few penalties levied against contractors when, because of ignorance, carelessness or a desire to save money, guidelines are violated. Problem contractors often just keep on getting hired, and dangerous practices remain uncorrected, sometimes for years.

Ultimately, the hazards persist through a kind of collective indifference, a presumption that, given the crush of traffic and the vagaries of driver behavior, accidents happen.

But interviews and internal government documents, along with a review of more than 100 legal cases involving  pearl earrings   work zone crashes around the country, illuminate a more complex calculus of blame ¡ª one that often encompasses the actions of the construction industry and its regulators as well.

¡°A lot of work-zone crashes are entirely preventable,¡± said David Holstein, Ohio¡¯s chief traffic engineer. ¡°It¡¯s not explainable by just driver error or inattention. We can intervene to keep them from happening.¡±

After transportation officials in Ohio created a system to monitor work-zone crashes in real time, they were startled to discover that the presence of construction caused accident rates to jump as much as 70 percent, Mr. Holstein said.

¡°We were seeing that crashes were happening day after day after day, and nothing was being done about it,¡± he said. ¡°Sometimes there were hundreds of crashes over the life of a project.¡±

Now the stakes are increasing, as $27 billion from President Obama¡¯s economic stimulus package is prompting a nationwide boom in highway construction. Federal transportation officials are concerned that work-zone fatalities, after declining in recent years along with traffic deaths in general, could rise again.

¡°The number of people killed as a result of crashes in work zones remains significant,¡± the Federal Highway Administration says on its Web site. ¡°Safety and mobility impacts from work zones will  akoya pearl ring   likely be magnified with the infusion of a large number of new projects.¡±

Transportation officials are responding pretty much as they always have: by focusing primarily on drivers. States have raised fines for speeding in work zones, cracked down on drunken or distracted drivers and stiffened penalties for killing or injuring highway workers, even though roughly 85 percent of those killed in work zones are motorists.

WASHINGTON ¡ª Even as the Senate took a significant step toward passing its version of a sweeping overhaul of the health insurance system before Christmas, Democrats were grappling Monday with deep internal divisions over abortion, the issue that most complicates their drive to merge the Senate and House bills and send final legislation to President Obama.

In the House, advocates and opponents of abortion rights and conservative Democrats have made clear that they object, for different reasons, to the Senate¡¯s compromise language on abortion. Interest groups on both sides of the spectrum ¡ª Planned Parenthood on the abortion rights side, Catholic bishops for the anti-abortion rights camp ¡ª also oppose the abortion provision in the Senate bill, leaving Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a challenge in rounding up the votes she needs in the House.

Ms. Pelosi¡¯s room for maneuvering is limited because any changes to the language in the Senate bill could unravel the deal that provided Democrats with the 60 votes they need to get the legislation through the Senate.

Ms. Pelosi, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and the White House will have to find a way forward on abortion even as they confront other big differences between the House and Senate bills, including how to pay to expand insurance coverage to more than 30 million Americans and whether to include a government-run plan to compete with private insurers.

The Senate bill cleared a major hurdle early Monday, when the Senate voted 60 to 40, along party lines, to limit debate on the guts of its measure. Two more votes are set for Tuesday. Calling it a ¡°historic vote,¡± Mr. Obama said, ¡°The United States Senate knocked down a filibuster aimed at blocking a final vote on health care reform, and scored a big victory for the American people.¡±

Senate Democrats got another lift on Monday when the American Medical Association endorsed their legislation, which embodies Mr. Obama¡¯s top domestic priority.

¡°Of all the organizations and individuals that have supported this bill, I rate this one as the most important,¡± said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and a co-author of the bill.

Jubilant and exhausted after winning the 1 a.m. test vote, Democrats on Monday were already thinking ahead to the next stage of the legislative process. The Senate and the House will try to hash out their differences, with members of the House under intense pressure to accommodate the  pearl beads  tenuous deals in the Senate despite their ideological qualms. And no issue is shaping up to be more complex than abortion.

Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan and the author of the anti-abortion provisions in the House bill, said Monday, ¡°It would be extremely difficult for me to vote for a bill¡± taking the Senate approach on abortion.

The House, more liberal than the Senate on many issues, would impose more stringent restrictions, barring coverage of abortion by any health plan bought even partly with federal subsidies.

Under the bill that is likely to be approved this week by the Senate, health plans could cover abortion. But people who enroll in such plans would have to write two premium checks, one for  jewelry boxes   abortion coverage and one for everything else. Insurers would have to keep separate accounts, and state officials would police the ¡°segregation of funds.¡±

Douglas D. Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, said it was difficult to envision a compromise because ¡°people opposed to abortion see it as the taking of innocent human life.¡±

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, said Monday that the compromise she struck last week with Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, offered a potential road map for successful negotiations on the issue with the House.

In an interview, Mrs. Boxer said the Senate bill created ¡°a firm wall¡± that would prevent the use of federal money to pay for insurance coverage of abortions, meeting a demand of opponents of abortion rights, while allowing women to use their own money to buy health plans that cover the procedure.

¡°When you have both extremes saying they¡¯re unhappy, I think it¡¯s a fair compromise,¡± Mrs. Boxer said. ¡°Because we have this compromise that¡¯s being attacked on either side, I think that gives us momentum going into the final conference.¡±

Sixty-four House Democrats, representing one-fourth of the House Democratic caucus, voted for stringent restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion. And 41 of them voted for passage of the House bill, so they constitute a crucial bloc. The bill was approved, 220 to 215, on Nov. 7.

But leading supporters of twisted pearl necklace   abortion rights in the House said they would not vote for a final bill if it included those restrictions, which they fear would curtail access to abortion for many women who already have insurance.

The House bill would establish a tax surcharge on income over $500,000 for individuals and over $1 million for couples. The Senate bill would tax high-cost employer-sponsored health plans and increase the Medicare payroll tax on individuals with incomes over $200,000 and couples over $250,000.

Lawmakers said they could envision a compromise mixing the two approaches.

More than 190 House members have gone on record against the Senate¡¯s proposed excise tax on ¡°Cadillac health plans,¡± which is also opposed by organized labor. But the White House and some health economists say the tax could help control health costs by encouraging employers to shop for cheaper policies that would not be hit by the tax.

It is unclear whether the House and the Senate will appoint a formal conference committee or just try to work out their differences in negotiations with Democratic leaders and committee chairmen from the two chambers. In any event, White House officials expect to play a huge role.

The Senate may have the upper hand in negotiations on a government health plan, championed by liberal Democrats.

Senate Democratic leaders dropped the public option after concluding they could not get 60 votes for it. Their bill calls instead for two or more nationwide health plans, to be offered by private insurers under contracts negotiated with the federal Office of Personnel Management.

Ronald F. Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal advocacy group that works closely with the White House, said Monday: ¡°I think we will not have a public option in the final bill. It would be close to impossible to pass it in the Senate.¡±

On this, as on several other issues, Mr. Pollack said, ¡°the Senate has somewhat greater leverage than the House¡± because Senate Democrats need 60 votes, the exact number in their caucus, to overcome Republican opposition.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said, ¡°There is a natural tendency to split the difference between the Senate and the House.¡± But on major issues in the health bill, Mr. Lieberman said, ¡°splitting the difference means you won¡¯t have 60 votes in the Senate.¡±

In the eyes of consumers and voters, the success of the legislation will hinge, to a large degree, on whether it makes insurance more affordable. One of the most important issues for House and Senate negotiators is how to aid low- and middle- income people.

The House would expand Medicaid to cover people with incomes less than 150 percent of the poverty level ($33,075 for a family of four). The Senate would expand eligibility to 133 percent of the poverty level ($29,327 for a family of four). Many advocates for low-income people prefer the House approach.