VOL. CLXIV . . . No. 56,689 © 2014 The New York Times NEW YORK, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2014

Late EditionToday, partial sunshine, blustery,much colder, high 34. Tonight,mainly clear, frigid, low 24. Tomor-row, clouds, sun, windy, cold, high34. Weather map is on Page B12.

$2.50

The New York Debate League includesstudents from schools as disparate asSuccess Academy Harlem West, above,and the Dalton private school. PAGE A20

NEW YORK A18-22

Civilized Dissent for All

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By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — As Ameri-cans shop in the health insurancemarketplace for a second year,President Obama is dependingmore than ever on the insurancecompanies that five years ago heaccused of padding profits andcanceling coverage for the sick.

Those same insurers have longviewed government as an unreli-able business partner that im-posed taxes, fees and countlessregulations and had the power tocut payment rates and cap profitmargins.

But since the Affordable CareAct was enacted in 2010, the rela-tionship between the Obama ad-ministration and insurers hasevolved into a powerful, mutuallybeneficial partnership that hasbeen a boon to the nation’s larg-est private health plans and ledto a profitable surge in their Med-icaid enrollment.

The insurers in turn have pro-vided crucial support to Mr. Oba-ma in court battles over thehealth care law, including a casenow before the Supreme Courtchallenging the federal subsidiespaid to insurance companies onbehalf of low- and moderate-in-come consumers. Last fall, a unitof one of the nation’s largest in-surers, UnitedHealth Group,helped the administration repairthe HealthCare.gov website afterit crashed in the opening days ofenrollment.

“Insurers and the governmenthave developed a symbiotic rela-tionship, nurtured by tens of bil-lions of dollars that flow from thefederal Treasury to insurers eachyear,” said Michael F. Cannon, di-rector of health policy studies atthe libertarian Cato Institute.

So much so, in fact, that insur-ers may soon be on a collisioncourse with the Republican ma-jority in the new Congress. Insur-ers, often aligned with Repub-licans in the past, have built theirbusiness plans around the lawand will strenuously resist Re-publican efforts to dismantle it.Since Mr. Obama signed the law,share prices for four of the majorinsurance companies — Aetna,

HEALTH CARE LAW RECASTS INSURERSAS OBAMA ALLIES

POWERFUL PARTNERSHIP

Seeing the G.O.P. as a

Threat to Lucrative

New Business

Continued on Page A15

By DAVID GELLES

Stocks are surging, corporateexecutives are ambitious anddebt is cheap. The result is one ofthe biggest booms in mergersand acquisitions.

Mergers worth $100 billion,made on Monday, put Wall Streeton pace for a year of deal-makingrivaling those during the dot-combubble and the private equityboom just before the financial cri-sis.

The announcement of the twonew mega-deals — the $66 billionacquisition of the Botox-makerAllergan by Actavis [Page B1],and the $34.6 billion takeover ofthe oil field services firm BakerHughes by a bigger rival, Halli-burton [Page B4] — made Mon-day a symbolic tipping point.

With those transactions on thebooks, about $1.5 trillion in dealstargeting American companieshave been announced this year,the most since 2000, according toThomson Reuters, the financialinformation company.

Five years after the end of thefinancial crisis that reshaped theeconomy, it appears that bigcompanies are finally willing tomake big bets again, especially inthe health care, technology andmedia industries. The conditionsare ideal, with borrowing costslow and share prices rising. Andchief executives are no longerworried about a double-dip re-cession or another eurozone cri-sis. Instead, they are betting ongrowth in the years ahead.

“The fact that we’re getting allthese deals suggests that C.E.O.sare feeling pretty good aboutthings,” said Mark Zandi, chiefeconomist at Moody’s Analytics.“It reflects the economy, and italso portends better times ahead.Deals don’t get done unless peo-ple feel pretty good about the fu-ture.”

Global deal-making in 2014 hastopped the $3 trillion mark in a

Mega-MergersPopular AgainOn Wall Street

Executives Betting on

Economic Growth

Continued on Page B4

KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

India plans to increase coal use despite predictions of dire effects on the climate. Above, a mine in Jharkhand State. Page A4.

In India, Digging Deeper for Coal Despite Warnings

By STEVE EDER

CINCINNATI — MercedesSands and her husband, Robert, asafety for the Cincinnati Bengals,started fighting early, just a fewmonths after they were married.But when Ms. Sands drove hercar into a neighbor’s house whiletrying to flee, knocking herselfunconscious and prompting a vis-it from the police, the Bengals be-came alarmed.

Within days of the episode, inJanuary 2012, the team’s headcoach, Marvin Lewis, called ameeting at Paul Brown Stadiumto try to help the couple workthrough their problems.

He offered encouragement,Ms. Sands said in an interview,telling them that young couplesoften fought and that they shouldseek counseling. He also advisedthem to reach out to the Bengals

first if there were further prob-lems because a call to the policecould attract attention from thenews media and cause an embar-rassing distraction.

“They made it seem like we area family,” Ms. Sands recalled.“‘Anything you need, you come tous. We are here to help you.’”

As outrage has mounted thisfall over the National FootballLeague’s handling of domesticabuse cases, the primary focushas been on questions of policyand punishment. Little has beenheard from the victims, in partbecause they often recant theiraccusations and stay with theirpartners.

But in interviews with TheNew York Times, two women

who left their husbands — Ms.Sands and Brandie Underwood,who was married to a Green BayPackers player — described abu-sive relationships in which theyfelt trapped, in part because ofeach team’s close-knit cultureand a protocol that emphasizedavoiding disruptions.

It was better to endure indigni-ties like infidelity, other wivestold them, and to keep quiet evenif the hostility in their marriagesseemed unbearable than to causea ruckus that could upend thesuccess and harmony of theteam.

“You feel like that’s all youhave,” said Ms. Underwood, 28,who left her husband, BrandonUnderwood, in 2011. “Other thanthem, I knew nobody. You cometo this town when your husbandis drafted, and you get kind of

N.F.L. Was Family, Till Wives Reported Abuse

Continued on Page B11

NOWHERE TO TURN

Second of two articles.

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and NIKITA STEWART

The end came at Gracie Man-sion, where Mayor Bill de Blasio,his wife and her top aide gath-ered on Sunday to discuss a deci-sion none of them had wanted tomake.

After months of damaging re-ports — about ethics lapses, un-paid parking tickets, a boyfriendwith a serious criminal past —Rachel Noerdlinger, the chief ofstaff to New York City’s first lady,Chirlane McCray, was at the endof her rope. Her 17-year-old sonhad been arrested over the week-end. A controversy on the vergeof fading was heating back up.

Ms. Noerdlinger, after what

friends described as hours of ago-nizing, told the mayor and hiswife that she needed to stepdown. On Monday, she an-nounced that she would take anindefinite leave of absence — thefirst significant shake-up of themayor’s 321-day-old administra-tion, and, for Mr. de Blasio, a dis-maying turn weeks after declar-ing the matter “case closed.”

The departure of Ms. Noerd-linger ends a situation that hadbeen a persistent distraction forMr. de Blasio, a Democrat, as hesought to pursue the politicalgoals of his first year in office.

A Wrenching Exit at City Hall

Continued on Page A22

Missouri’s governor declared a state ofemergency that would let him deploythe National Guard in anticipation ofmore unrest over a grand jury report onthe killing of Michael Brown. PAGE A14

Bracing for Ferguson Decision

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — PresidentObama is poised to ignore starkwarnings that executive actionon immigration would amount to“violating our laws” and wouldbe “very difficult to defend le-gally.”

Those warnings came not fromRepublican lawmakers but fromMr. Obama himself.

For years, he has waved asidethe demands of Latino activistsand Democratic allies whobegged him to act on his own, andhe insisted publicly that a deci-sion to shield millions of immi-grants from deportation withoutan act of Congress would amountto nothing less than the dictatesof a king, not a president.

In a Telemundo interview inSeptember 2013, Mr. Obama saidhe was proud of having protectedthe “Dreamers” — people whocame to the United States ille-gally as young children — fromdeportation. But he also said thathe could not apply that same ac-tion to other groups of people.

“If we start broadening that,

ImmigrationHas PresidentAltering Stand

Continued on Page A15

BERLIN — Not far from theBrandenburg Gate, PotsdamerPlatz was a no man’s land duringthe Cold War. Then the BerlinWall fell, and the German au-

thorities made it apetting zoo for ce-lebrity architec-ture. The corpo-rate headquartersof Germany’s newglobal swagger.

But the ambi-tions for Potsdamer Platz, likethe hopes and fears about a unit-ed Germany, turned out differ-ently. The architecture was not sogreat. Many companies fled. Ber-liners and newcomers alike pre-ferred the dingy, more atmos-pheric quarters of the old formerEast. “Poor but sexy” becamethe city slogan.

“Twenty-five years ago, therewas the expectation that a reuni-fied Berlin would become the eco-nomic engine of the new Germa-ny, a great metropolis,” recalledPeter Schneider, a novelist andthe author of “Berlin Now.”

“There was even talk of 10 mil-lion inhabitants,” he said. “In-

stead of going up, the populationdropped.”

A friend recently took me towhere he lived in East Berlin be-fore the wall fell. He still sees thewall in his mind every day, hetold me, when he drives acrossthe city. But he could not findwhere it had blocked off the

street just yards from his oldapartment. Almost all traces of itare gone now, obliterated in therush to wipe clean the historicalslate.

Few Germans thought aboutpreserving significant parts ofthe wall in 1989, as a cautionarytale. Today, many Berliners re-

gret the haste with which it wasdemolished and sold in bits andpieces.

“It’s horrible, how we deletedit,” lamented Simon Schaefer,who runs Factory, a Berlin incu-bator for start-ups, recentlyopened in a refurbished brewery

Berlin After the Wall: A Microcosm of the World’s Chaotic Change

Continued on Page A11

Potsdamer Platz in 1962, left, isolated by the Berlin Wall, and this year, after efforts to develop it.

MICHAELKIMMELMAN

CRITIC’SNOTEBOOK

EDWIN REICHERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS MARKUS SCHREIBER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A large study found that another drugwas also highly successful at loweringLDL cholesterol, offering hope to mil-lions at risk of heart attacks. PAGE A13

NATIONAL A12-17

Alternative to StatinsChancellor Angela Merkel of Germany,abandoning a traditionally cautioustone, castigated Russia for its actions inUkraine and for threatening to spreadconflict across Europe. PAGE A10

INTERNATIONAL A4-11

Merkel Assails RussiaThe Broadway revival of “Side Show”reintroduces audiences to conjoinedtwins who became vaudeville stars.Charles Isherwood reviews. PAGE C1

ARTS C1-7

Two Lives Entwined

Thousands in Prague commemoratedthe 25th anniversary of the start of theVelvet Revolution that ended Commu-nist rule. PAGE A10

Czechs Honor TheirRevolution

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s stimulusprogram was supposed to be an exam-ple for other countries, but now Japan isofficially in a recession. PAGE B1

BUSINESS DAY B1-9

Alarm Over Japan’s Recession

David Brooks PAGE A25

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A24-25

Irving Peress, anArmy dentist witha progressive past,drew the wrath ofJoseph R. McCar-thy’s anti-Commu-

nist crusade. He was 97. PAGE A23

OBITUARIES A23

A TargetOf McCarthy

Despite positive signs, the Monarch but-terfly is imperiled. Efforts to save it maymake matters worse. PAGE D1

SCIENCE TIMES D1-6

Monarch’s Long Road Back

Weeks after hiring Jamie Horowitz toguide the show, NBC said it was agreedthat “this is not the right fit.” PAGE B1

NBC Fires ‘Today’ Executive

C M Y K Nxxx,2014-11-18,A,001,Bs-4C,E2