Kerry Is Hoping to Nudge Egypt Toward Reforms

CAIRO — Secretary of State John Kerry told Egypt’s political and business leaders on Saturday that it was urgent their country institute economic reforms and satisfy the conditions the International Monetary Fund has set for a $4.8 billion loan.

“It is paramount, essential, urgent that the Egyptian economy get stronger, that it gets back on its feet,” Mr. Kerry told a group of Egyptian and American business executives in Cairo. “It’s clear to us that the I.M.F. arrangement needs to be reached, that we need to give the market that confidence.”

Mr. Kerry’s visit — his first trip to an Arab capital as secretary of state — comes at a time of economic peril in Egypt. The country’s economy has teetered near collapse for months, with soaring unemployment, a gaping budget deficit, dwindling hard-currency reserves and steep declines in the currency’s value.

The fund’s loan is critical, economists say, because it would provide a seal of approval that Egypt’s economy is on a path toward self-sufficiency, allowing it to obtain enough other international loans to fill in its deficit. Both the United States and the European Union are prepared to provide substantial additional assistance if Egypt and the I.M.F. can come to terms.

But even as Mr. Kerry stressed the need for prompt economic steps — and the political peace needed to achieve those changes — some opponents of President Mohamed Morsi sought to put the spotlight on the nation’s uneasy political course.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled for April. The major opposition group, the National Salvation Front, has announced that it plans to boycott the vote to protest what it says is a push by Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies to dominate politics.

The Obama administration has been criticized by some of Mr. Morsi’s rivals as being too supportive of the Egyptian president, as has Mr. Kerry, who was the first American senator to meet Mr. Morsi.

The delicacy of the issue was apparent when members of the political opposition were invited to a Saturday session with Mr. Kerry. Some members, including Hamdeen Sabahi, who came in third in the presidential election last year, decided not to attend. Mohamed ElBaradei, one of the leaders of the National Salvation Front, chose not to go, but to speak by phone with Mr. Kerry instead.

Those that attended, Mr. Kerry later said, engaged in a “very, very spirited” discussion.

 Mohamed El Orabi, a former foreign minister and a leading member of the National Congress Party who went to the meeting, said that Mr. Kerry had talked about the importance of democracy while driving home his message on the economy.

Mr. Kerry also met separately with Amr Moussa, a former secretary general of the Arab League and the head of the National Congress Party.

The two years of tumult that began with the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak has sharply slowed foreign investment and tourism, and economists say the Egyptian government urgently needs a cash infusion of several billion dollars to fend off the risk of an economic calamity that could lead to more unrest and instability.

In September, the United States brought more than 100 business executives to Cairo to encourage trade and economic development. But continuing political protests, including when demonstrators scaled the walls of the American Embassy here on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, discouraged many businessmen from following up, Mr. Kerry noted. (The protesters that day were angry over an amateurish American-made video denouncing Islam.)

The International Monetary Fund has held on-again, off-again negotiations with Egypt for more than a year about providing the $4.8 billion.

The fund has imposed two difficult conditions. It has required the Egyptian government to commit itself to undertaking painful reforms like raising taxes and reducing energy subsidies.

It has also required a demonstration of political support for the reforms and the loan, to ensure that the government will honor its commitments in the future. That requires a dependable political process, as well as a degree of consensus that Egypt’s political factions have been unable to sustain.

On Sunday, Mr. Kerry is scheduled to meet with Mr. Morsi. The secretary of state said he would discuss specific steps the United States could take to boost the Egyptian economy if Egypt worked out a loan package with the I.M.F. That will be Mr. Kerry’s final meeting in Egypt before departing for Saudi Arabia, the seventh stop on his nine-nation tour.

The protests and street violence that have destabilized Egypt’s transition continued Saturday. The Egyptian state media reported that a demonstrator in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura was killed when he was run over by an armored police vehicle.

Violence also flared again in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, where the state media reported that protesters had burned down a police station. The Port Said protests began Jan. 26 after 21 local soccer fans were sentenced to death for their role in a deadly riot at a match last year.

But over the past month, the demonstrations in Port Said have blurred together with sometimes-violent protests in several other cities along the Suez Canal or in the Nile Delta. Some protesters are angry at Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, accusing them of failing to deliver fast enough on the anticipated rewards of the revolution, including economic benefits.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Cairo, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Istanbul.

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French and Chad Forces Bear Down on Militants in Mali

DAKAR, Senegal — The French military struck at Islamist militants dug in along the remote, rocky mountain ranges of northern Mali over the last week, killing scores, a French military spokesman said Friday.

The week’s operations, conducted with Chadian troops, were a further sign that the French military intervention against the jihadists in Mali, initially viewed as a quick strike, was not winding down soon.

Meanwhile, the Chadian president, Idriss Déby Itno, confirmed that Abu Zeid, the most important commander in Al Qaeda’s regional franchise, had been killed in combat, Mr. Déby’s communications director, Dieudonné Djonabaye, said Friday night.

The Algerian newspaper El Khabar asserted that samples from the corpse presumed to be that of Abu Zeid — he was of Algerian birth — had been sent to Algiers for testing against relatives; a senior Algerian official declined to confirm the report on Friday night.

Abu Zeid’s death would represent a significant blow to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, as he was considered the toughest, most resilient of the local Qaeda commanders, and the most ruthless. Abu Zeid is held responsible for the executions of at least two Western hostages in 2009 and 2010 — an elderly Frenchman and an elderly Briton — and his Qaeda unit is believed to be holding perhaps half a dozen other Western hostages. In addition, he has an extensive network of contacts throughout the region, allowing him to recruit in many countries, analysts said.

Abu Zeid had been spotted at Timbuktu during the Islamist ascendancy in northern Mali last year, and the harsh Shariah rule instituted there — public whippings, destruction of monuments, banning of music and other leisure activities — is attributed at least in part to him.

Still, hundreds of jihadist fighters remain in the mountains, said a senior official with the Tuareg rebel movement, which is playing a supporting role in the French military campaign. Analysts suggested nonetheless that the French and Chadian successes this week — as many as 130 terrorists were killed in ground and air operations, according to the French spokesman — did not mean the French were getting bogged down in Mali, but rather that intelligence was improving and more extremists were being flushed out of their mountain retreats.

The French have some 1,200 soldiers in the region, and the Chadians 800, and they are concentrating their efforts on a 15-mile zone in the Adrar des Ifoghas, the rocky, barren mountains at Mali’s Algerian border, according to Col. Thierry Burkhard, the French military spokesman.

“From the beginning this has been the refuge of the region’s terrorist groups,” Colonel Burkhard said of the area around Tessalit, a settlement near the Algerian border. “Our objective is to comb through this zone, find the terrorist groups, then neutralize them.”

Colonel Burkhard said French forces alone had killed some 40 jihadists over the last week, while Chadian troops had eliminated perhaps 90. The French said there had been about 60 airstrikes, and about 10 of the jihadists’ vehicles had been destroyed.

“They are hanging on in a very determined fashion,” Colonel Burkhard said. “They are not looking to retreat. They want to hang on to their positions. They’ve been implanted in this region for a long time, and they’ve prepared the terrain. They’ve got foxholes, and they’ve got enough weapons to resist over the long term.”

Some 25 Chadian soldiers were killed in clashes with the jihadists last week — deaths that provoked Mr. Déby to call on other African nations to relieve Chad of some of the burden. Although other countries have deployed in Mali, they are generally well away from the fighting.

French and Chadian forces are carrying on the fight, more or less alone. “It’s not prolonged because of failure,” a Western defense attaché in the Malian capital, Bamako, said Friday night. “They are finding more jihadists. The French are very much keeping the tempo up. They are inflicting significant attrition,” but he added that the jihadists “are proving surprisingly resilient.”

Adam Nossiter reported from Dakar, Senegal, and Maïa de la Baume from Paris. Martin Zoutane contributed reporting from Ndjamena, Chad.

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Czechs Split Deeply Over Joining the Euro

PRAGUE — Vaclav Klaus, the departing president of the Czech Republic, has equated the European Union to the former Soviet bloc, blamed the euro for the Greek crisis and called the single currency a mistake. He has even refused to hang the Union’s gold-starred flag at the Prague Castle, the seat of the Czech president.

So when Mr. Klaus, a Thatcher-loving economist who became a potent spokesman for continental Europhobes, steps down next week to make way for Milos Zeman as president, euro enthusiasts here will rejoice. Mr. Zeman has not only promised to hang the Union’s flag at the castle but has also suggested a referendum on whether to join the euro zone and suggested 2017 as the earliest possible date for entry.

But the celebrating could be premature. While the presidency, a largely ceremonial post, has the power to influence the debate, the Czech Republic remains deeply polarized between a business community clamoring to get into the euro club and skeptics who associate the currency with the economic pain buffeting Europe’s southern tier.

More than 80 percent of Czechs are against entering the euro zone, according to the latest Eurobarometer poll, making the Czechs the strongest opponents among the seven former Soviet bloc members in the European Union that have yet to join. Deeply resistant to embracing the euro’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy and loath to bail out cash-poor countries like Greece, many policy makers here insist that the Czech Republic is a striking example of why life outside the euro is simply better.

“Being inside the euro is not a sign of the quality of a country’s economy — the crisis has proved that,” Mojmir Hampl, 37, vice governor of the Czech National Bank, said in an interview. “The average Czech household says, ‘Thank God we don’t have to pay for these profligate Greeks.”’

Such sentiments are not limited to the Czech Republic, and enthusiasm for the euro is diminishing in most of those former Soviet-bloc countries, according to the Eurobarometer poll. The European Commission, which commissions the poll, noted that 54 percent of people in these countries, which include Poland, Hungary and Romania, think the euro will have negative consequences for their countries. Even in Latvia, which wants to adopt the euro by next year, 68 percent of people believe that joining would constitute losing part of their national identity.

Here in the Czech Republic, pushed and pulled between East and West over the centuries, the national sense of self has also played an important part in stoking ambivalence. Petr Pithart, a lawyer and former prime minister, argued that the antipathy toward the euro was a byproduct of a deep-seated mistrust of the West in the Czech soul, planted in 1938, when France and Britain yielded to Nazi pressure and allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. “Those wounds have not completely healed,” he said. “Klaus knew how to exploit this very well.”

Yet Mr. Hampl, an appointee of Mr. Klaus whose current term at the Czech National Bank ends in 2018, said the main reason for resisting the euro came down to hard-headed economics. Mr. Hampl argued that an independent monetary policy had allowed the central bank to cut interest rates in August 2008 after the crisis first hit hard, thereby helping to cushion the country against the worst effects of the downturn.

Moreover, he estimated that being outside the euro zone — and not contributing to the European Union’s bailout fund — had saved the country roughly €280 billion, or about $370 billion, in potential liabilities over a three-year period. “Knowing that we haven’t been saddled with that debt has helped me to sleep at night,” he said.

Yet the Czech Republic has hardly been immune from the European debt crisis, and some economists counter that in a country where 80 percent of exports go the euro zone countries, the economy is inextricably linked to the fate of the euro, even if the Czechs use the koruna instead.

Indeed, the country has slumped into a modest recession since 2011, weighed down by weak demand for Czech products like cars and Bohemian crystal. Consumption at home has also been lackluster as the center-right coalition government has instituted tough austerity measures, including raising sales taxes and slashing spending. Unemployment of about 7.5 percent in December was a far cry from the roughly 25 percent in Spain or Greece, but it has hit especially hard in the poorer parts of the country.

Against that backdrop, euro entry remains a hard sell for officials like Tomas Zidek, the deputy finance minister, who said in an interview that the European Union and the euro were now vastly different propositions than what the Czechs had signed up for when they joined the Union in 2004. The current efforts to shore up the monetary union by integrating banking and fiscal measures, he added, were as ill-advised in an economically diverse bloc as trying to call a Czech pilsner a German beer.

Mr. Zidek acknowledged that the Finance Ministry was under pressure to join the euro from Czech companies that face huge transaction costs because the country is outside the zone. “Companies complain all the time,” he said. “Our exports are hit by the lack of exchange rate stability.”

Skoda, the Czech automobile company that is owned by Volkswagen, said it supported the Czech Republic’s joining the euro, “the faster, the better,” because the company exports 60 percent of its cars to countries in the European Union and does the bulk of its business in euros. Michal Kadera, a senior manager at Skoda, said that production planning for cars took at least two years and that sudden fluctuations in the koruna against the euro made planning much more difficult and expensive.

Tomas Sedlacek, an economist who has advised President Vaclav Havel, said that not being in the euro zone was costing Czech companies billions of korunas a year in hedging costs associated with the fluctuation of the koruna against the euro. An independent monetary policy was no panacea, he added, pointing to Hungary, which has held on to its currency, the forint, and had sought a bailout before Greece.

“Those Czechs like Klaus,” he said, “who think having the koruna has saved us from the crisis, are living in a dream world.”

Hana de Goeij contributed reporting.

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The Lede: Syrians Describe Apparent Missile Strikes on Aleppo

A Human Rights Watch video report on the aftermath of apparent missile strikes in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, have concluded that the Syrian government fired at least four ballistic missiles into civilian neighborhoods there last week, killing more than 141 people, including 71 children. As my colleague Anne Barnard explained, the rights group released details of the four documented strikes, and a video report, on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, opposition activists added English subtitles to an emotional account of the devastation caused by one missile strike on Aleppo from a young boy who said he survived the bombing, but lost several family members and neighbors.

An interview with a boy who said he had survived a missile attack on a neighborhood in Aleppo.

The original interview with the boy was posted on YouTube on Monday by Orient News, a private Syrian satellite channel that began broadcasting from Dubai before the antigovernment uprising began. Within a week of the first protests in Syria, Ghassan Aboud, the Syrian businessman who owns the channel, told a Saudi broadcaster that senior government officials close to President Bashar al-Assad had threatened to kidnap his journalists if they did not stop covering the demonstrations.

The boy’s account was subtitled by the ANA New Media Association, a group of opposition video activists led by Rami Jarrah, who blogs as Alexander Page.

The new reports come weeks after experts told The Lede that video of a huge explosion at Aleppo University last month suggested that the campus had been hit by a ballistic missile.

When Liz Sly of the Washington Post visited Aleppo’s Ard al-Hamra neighborhood after two missile strikes, residents gave similarly graphic accounts of pulling the mangled bodies of victims from wrecked buildings. The scenes of devastation, she wrote, more closely resembled “those of an earthquake, with homes pulverized beyond recognition, people torn to shreds in an instant and what had once been thriving communities reduced to mountains of rubble.”

Ole Solvang, a Human Rights Watch researcher who helped document the damage in Aleppo, drew attention to video posted online by opposition activists, which is said to show the desperate search for survivors immediately after the strike on Ard al-Hamra.

Video said to show a neighborhood in Aleppo after a missile strike last week.

As Mr. Solvang assessed the wreckage in person on Thursday and Friday, he described the damage to Aleppo and a neighboring town in words and images posted on Twitter.

Visited a site of similar attack in Tel Rifat today. 25 houses destroyed and 3 killed last Monday. Unbelievable. http://t.co/FaFhNFiAsS

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 22 Feb 13

Today visited site of yesterday’s missile attack on Ard al Hamra in #Aleppo #Syria. Dozens houses destroyed. Unbelievable destruction. @hrw

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 23 Feb 13

Bodies are still under the rubble. 3 found during our 30 min visit. Casualty # still unclear. #Aleppo #Syria @hrw http://t.co/gaT7COpRT3

— Ole Solvang (@OleSolvang) 23 Feb 13

Late Tuesday, an Aleppo blogger who supported the uprising but has been critical of the armed rebellion on his @edwardedark Twitter feed, reported that another huge blast had shaken the city.

a massive blast shockwave shakes Aleppo city just now. no idea what it is yet #Syria

— edward dark (@edwardedark) 26 Feb 13

Ms. Sly reported on Twitter on Wednesday night that two more missiles were fired at rural Aleppo. “They landed in fields,” she observed. “That’s how accurate they are. Seems a bit pointless.”

Late Wednesday, Mr. Solvang pointed to video posted on YouTube by opposition activists, showing what they said were distant images of a missile being launched from Damascus in the direction of Aleppo.

Video said to show a missile being fired by Syrian government forces outside the capital, Damascus, on Wednesday night.

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Balloon Explosion in Egypt Kills at Least 19 Tourists

CAIRO — The explosion of a hot-air balloon over the ancient temples at Luxor killed at least 19 sightseers Tuesday, delivering a grim blow to Egypt’s critical tourism business just as it had begun to show signs of recovery from the shock of the revolution two years ago.

All of those killed were tourists, including nine Chinese from Hong Kong, four Japanese, two French, two Britons, a Hungarian and an Egyptian, Health Ministry officials said. The balloon’s pilot and a British passenger survived by jumping from the balloon’s basket. But the surviving passenger’s wife, also British, died in the blaze.

“It is just another nail in tourism’s coffin,” Hisham A. Fahmy, the chief executive of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which represents international companies here, said of the crash. “They were probably the only tourists in Luxor as it was.”

Even Egyptians trying to minimize the disaster’s potential effect on the tourist business compared it to the 1997 massacre of 62 people, 58 of them tourists, at one of Luxor’s temples by a group of Islamist militants. At least this was an accident and not terrorism, Egyptian officials said Tuesday. Others noted hopefully that tourism had eventually recovered after 1997.

“I thought that would be the end of tourism,” said Heba Handoussa of the Economic Research Forum here. “But to my surprise, the next year it was back. People seem to take it in stride.”

The tombs and temples of Luxor and the nearby Valley of the Kings are among Egypt’s premier attractions, and hot-air balloon rides over the valley at dawn are a staple of the local tourist trade. In 2008 and 2009, balloons collided with utility poles and crashed to the ground, injuring passengers. But few visitors had raised safety concerns, tour operators said.

The disaster unfolded in just minutes, shortly after 7 a.m., as the balloon was preparing to land in a field of sugar cane. The pilot was pulling a rope to stabilize the balloon when a gas hose ripped and a fire started, security officials said.

The pilot and the passenger who survived quickly escaped over the side of the basket, risking a 30-foot fall. Then escaping gas or hot air from the fire evidently sent the balloon soaring back skyward. Some reports said it had climbed as high as 1,000 feet before a gas cylinder exploded and it burst into flames.

State media reported that some of the dead had been “cremated” in the fireball. The Health Ministry said it would use DNA testing to identify the remains.

The ministers of aviation and tourism said they were traveling to Luxor. Officials started investigations into the crash as well as an examination of the permit for the balloon and the license for its pilot.

Some in Luxor faulted regulators. Tharwat Agami, the chairman of the Luxor tourist industry trade group, accused the aviation ministry of renewing licenses for the balloon operator and others despite their failures to meet safety requirements. Like other forms of law enforcement, balloon regulation and inspection have deteriorated sharply since the revolution, he told the state newspaper Al Ahram.

“As if tourism can take any more!” Mr. Agami said, according to the newspaper. “Where is the inspection of each balloon before takeoff by civil aviation?”

Tourism typically accounted for about 11 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product before the revolution, economists say. More important, tourism is Egypt’s second-largest source of hard currency, after remittances sent home by Egyptians working abroad. It helps reduce the trade imbalance, supporting the sagging value of the Egyptian pound.

But in the two years of unrest since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted, tourism revenue has plummeted to just a quarter of its former level, said Ms. Handoussa, the economist.

She said government figures, widely believed to understate the malaise, put unemployment at 14 percent, up from 8 percent before the revolt, while the number of Egyptians officially considered to be living in poverty has risen to 25 percent from 20 percent.

Two major European tour operators, TUI of Germany and Thomas Cook of Britain, said around the beginning of this year that they saw signs of recovery in the demand for vacations to North Africa, including Tunisia and Egypt. Tour operators and travel agents say the Red Sea beach resorts, farther from the unrest in Cairo, have suffered far less than other destinations.

But then at the end of January, vandals in Cairo capitalized on the chaos surrounding a street protest to loot and ransack the lobby of the historic Semiramis InterContinental Hotel. It was the first time since Mr. Mubarak’s exit that the unrest had so directly affected a tourist institution. Now the balloon accident may add new concerns about safety to the continuing fears of political instability.

Mina Agnos, a vice president of Travelive, a high-end tour operator based in Athens and Montclair, N.J., said it had stopped marketing trips to Egypt. Each fall in the last two years, seasonal demand would pick up, and then violence would erupt again, as it did around the American Embassy here last September over an online video mocking Islam.

“Something would happen,” she said. “We found that a lot of people who were thinking of going to Egypt ended up going other places.”

Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting.

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2 Palestinian Youths Hurt in Clashes With Israel

Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters

A Palestinian protester threw stones during clashes with Israeli soldiers on Monday in Hebron, West Bank, after a funeral for a Palestinian prisoner.

JERUSALEM — Two Palestinian teenagers were seriously injured Monday when Israeli soldiers used live ammunition to disperse a demonstration at a holy site outside Bethlehem, as clashes in the West Bank continued for a fifth day and thousands attended the burial of a 30-year-old Palestinian who died in an Israeli jail over the weekend.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, spoke for the first time on Monday about the prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, saying that Israel must be held responsible for his death and that its leaders were trying to foment chaos rather than work toward peace.

Other Palestinian officials have said Mr. Jaradat died because of torture during interrogation. An autopsy conducted Sunday did not immediately determine the cause of death, but an Israeli official said Monday that a report on the findings should be released by the end of the week and that the police and courts were investigating the death separately.

“Jaradat went to jail and returned back a dead body,” Mr. Abbas said Monday in Ramallah, hours before the teenagers were shot near Bethlehem. “We insist to know how this happened and who did this. We will not let them play in the lives of our sons. They are confronting children and killing them with live ammunition. We will not allow our prisoners to remain in the occupation jails all their lives for things that they did not commit.”

About 10,000 people accompanied Mr. Jaradat’s body from a hospital in Hebron to his family’s home in Sa’ir, a village nearby, and then to the cemetery. The Israeli military closed a main road for the procession, in which members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the militant wing of the Fatah party, fired guns into the air.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who sent a message on Sunday to the Palestinian leadership demanding that it restore calm in the West Bank, held security consultations on the matter on Monday, according to a statement from his office. Defense Minister Ehud Barak convened a special meeting on Monday with the military chief of staff and the leaders of Israel’s police force and prison service “during which possible scenarios were introduced,” according to a statement from Mr. Barak’s office, “as well as possible ways to cope with them and maintain security needs while trying to restore the calm on the ground.”

The United States Consulate in Jerusalem limited travel by government employees to the West Bank because of the demonstrations and advised all American citizens to avoid the area and “to exercise an extra measure of caution during this period.”

“The U.S. Consulate General takes this opportunity to remind U.S. citizens that demonstrations, even peaceful ones, can turn violent with little or no warning,” it said in a statement. “U.S. citizens should be aware of their surroundings at all times, and avoid large crowds.”

The Egyptian foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, called on the international community to take a firm stance against what he described as Israel’s inhumane practices against the Palestinian prisoners, according to the state newspaper, and warned that a continuation of such policies could lead to an explosion in the region.

So far, the situation seems to be on a simmer. Every day since Thursday, demonstrations have occurred in several West Bank cities and villages in which Palestinians have thrown rocks and sometimes gasoline bombs at Israeli soldiers, who generally respond with tear gas, rubber bullets and occasionally water cannons or live ammunition. Most of the demonstrations, including those in Hebron and Beituniya on Monday, have drawn crowds of a few hundred and resulted in a handful of light to moderate injuries.

But more serious clashes broke out near Rachel’s Tomb on Monday afternoon and evening. An Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that soldiers fired .22-caliber rounds at Palestinians who were throwing improvised grenades at worshipers near the tomb, which is next to the Aida refugee camp just outside Bethlehem.

A doctor at Beit Jala Hospital who spoke on the condition that he not be identified said a 13-year-old had been shot in a lung during that protest and was in the intensive care unit Monday night after undergoing surgery. Hours later, a 19-year-old Palestinian was shot as the demonstration raged on, the doctor said.

“He is in a dangerous situation,” the doctor said of the second patient. “Doctors are trying to save his life.”

Khaled Abu Aker contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank; Nayef Hashlamoun from Hebron and Sa’ir, West Bank; and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.

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Kerry’s Meeting With Syrian Opposition at Risk

Pool photo by Jacquelyn Martin

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to reporters on the way to London on Sunday. Mr. Kerry has said that he has new ideas on how to force President Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria.

Mr. Kerry and foreign ministers from Europe and the Middle East are scheduled to meet in Rome on Thursday with opponents of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, including Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, who leads the opposition. But they are threatening to boycott the conference to protest what they see as fainthearted international support.

To try to rescue the meeting, Robert S. Ford, the American ambassador to Syria and chief envoy to the opposition, was sent to Cairo on Sunday to implore opposition leaders to attend the session in Rome.

“The Syrian opposition leadership is under severe pressure now from its membership, from the Syrian people, to get more support from the international community,” said a senior administration official who was traveling on Mr. Kerry’s plane. “And in that context, there’s quite a bit of internal discussion about the value of going in international conferences.”

The issue upset the first day of a carefully choreographed trip that is intended to introduce Mr. Kerry as the chief American envoy and to give a lift to the diplomatic stalemate on Syria. Mr. Kerry, who took office this month, is traveling to Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar over 11 days.

Even before his trip was formally announced, Mr. Kerry raised expectations by saying he had new ideas on how to change Mr. Assad’s calculations that he could remain in power.

Mr. Kerry has not publicly explained the proposals, but they appear to include marshaling support from Russia, which has been providing arms and financial help to Mr. Assad. Toward that end, Mr. Kerry plans to meet in Berlin on Wednesday with Sergey V. Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.

The meeting with the Syrian opposition is to be hosted by Italy. Last week, the European Union agreed to extend its embargo on weapons shipments to Syria for another three months, a move that precludes European arms shipments to the opposition.

But the European Union did agree to a British proposal that nonlethal assistance be expanded. As a result, body armor, night-vision goggles, armored vehicles and other equipment can be sent to armed opposition groups in Syria, an American official said.

So far, the Obama administration has not gone that far in its support. While the United States provides nonlethal assistance like computers and radios to the opposition, it has not been willing to provide nonlethal aid to armed factions within Syria, an approach that experts say has limited its influence with these groups.

State Department officials traveling with Mr. Kerry declined to discuss whether the United States would soon be prepared to take that step.

President Obama rebuffed a proposal last year from the State Department, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. that the United States arm and train a cadre of opposition fighters.

With the violence escalating, Aleppo under attack by Scud missiles and members of a quarrelsome Syrian opposition challenging the value of the Rome meeting — which was supposed to be a highlight of Mr. Kerry’s trip — the State Department issued a statement on Saturday evening that condemned the rocket attacks “in the strongest possible terms” and prodded the Syrian opposition to attend the session.

The statement continued, “We look forward to meeting soon with the leadership of the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, the Syrian Opposition Coalition, to discuss how the United States and other friends of the Syrian people can do more to help the Syrian people achieve the political transition that they demand and that they deserve.”

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Syrian Flood Into Lebanon Stirs Fear of Looming Disaster

QAA, Lebanon — Quietly but inexorably, a human tide has crept into Lebanon, Syria’s smallest and most vulnerable neighbor.

As Syrians fleeing civil war pour over the border, the village priest here, Elian Nasrallah, trudges through muddy fields to deliver blankets. His family runs a medical clinic for refugees. When Christian villagers fret about the flood of Sunni Muslims, he replies that welcoming them is “the real Christianity.”

But the priest and his parishioners cannot keep up. The United Nations counts more than 305,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon, but local officials and aid workers say the actual number is about 400,000, saturating this country of four million.

The Lebanese government — by design — has largely left them to fend for themselves. Deeply divided over Syria, haunted by memories of an explosive refugee crisis a generation ago, it has mostly ignored the problem, dumping it on overwhelmed communities like Qaa.

So far, Lebanon’s delicate balance has persevered, but there is a growing sense of emergency.

Sectarian tensions are rising. Fugitive Syrian rebels in border villages have clashed with Lebanese soldiers. The government’s anemic response has delayed international aid. Local volunteers are running out of cash and patience.

And the battle for Damascus, Syria’s capital, has barely begun. Should fighting overwhelm that religiously and politically mixed city of 2.5 million a half-hour drive from Lebanon, the Lebanese fear a cataclysm that could sweep away their tenuous calm.

“There is a limit to what the country can handle,” said Nadim Shubassi, mayor of Saidnayel, a Sunni town now packed with Syrians. “Maybe we have reached this limit now.”

Lebanon’s refugee crisis does not match the familiar image of vast, centralized tent camps and armies of foreign aid organizations. It is nowhere, and everywhere. Displaced Syrians seem to fill every nook and cranny: half-finished cinder block houses, stables, crowded apartments.

It is easy to miss them, until a second glance. Drying laundry peeks from construction sites. Bedsheets hang in shop windows, concealing stark living spaces. Daffodil sellers, shoeshine men, women and children begging in Beirut — all incant, “Min Suria.” From Syria.

At first, most refugees — mainly Sunnis, like most of the rebels fighting Syria’s government — headed for friendly Sunni areas. Now, those communities are swamped and resentful, and Syrians are spreading to places where they fit less comfortably, from Christian mountain villages to the Mediterranean city of Tyre in the southern Shiite Muslim heartland.

They are moving, with some trepidation, into Qaa, in the northern Bekaa Valley, the territory of the powerful Shiite militia Hezbollah, which is allied with Syria’s government and, to many refugees, just as fearsome.

As they flee increasingly sectarian killing, Syrians layer their fears onto those of a country deeply scarred by its own generation-long sectarian civil war. They are testing, yet also relying on, the fragile yet flexible balance that has endured here, punctured by occasional fighting, since Lebanon’s war ended 22 years ago.

In Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold where a poster of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, grins down on a busy street, refugees turn to Sawa, a community group that views helping them as embodying its nonsectarian mission. Still, they rattle Abbas Othman, a Sawa member.

“We are worried they will bring their civil war here,” he said.

One recent evening in Qaa, Mr. Nasrallah, the priest, stood outside a burlap shack that sheltering a Syrian family of 12. They clamored around him; they had eaten only potatoes that day. Cold crept in as a blue dusk fell. One man implored, “You are responsible for us!”

The priest threw up his hands.

“It’s wartime,” he said. “Is the government doing its job or not?”

Lebanese decision-makers wanted it this way, at first. A year ago, just 5,000 Syrians had fled here, and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful political party, denied any sense of crisis.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad, Hania Mourtada, Ben Solomon and Lynsey Addario.

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The Saturday Profile: Pavel Astakhov: The Man Behind U.S. Adoption Ban

Mikhail Metzel/Associated Press

Pavel A. Astakhov at a news conference in Moscow last month.

MOSCOW — Long before joining the federal government as Russia’s child rights commissioner and, more recently, becoming the leading force behind a ban on the adoption of Russian children by Americans, Pavel A. Astakhov transformed himself into a celebrity lawyer with mass market appeal — no small trick in a country where encounters with the legal system are as desirable as a tooth extraction.

There was “The Hour of Trial with Pavel Astakhov,” a courtroom reality television show casting him as Russia’s Judge Judy along with a radio program of the same name. There was a second radio program called “Advocacy Defense Techniques of Pavel Astakhov”; a series of books titled “Your Attorney: Pavel Astakhov,” with installments on housing, property rights, inheritance, pensions and family law; several legal-thriller novels fashioned in the tradition of John Grisham; a seminar series called “Pavel Astakhov’s School of Advocacy Skills”; and a law firm named the Pavel Astakhov Moscow City Law Bar.

The law banning adoptions by Americans was not named after him, but it might as well have been.

In the weeks before and after the law was approved by Parliament and signed by President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Astakhov was its loudest and most visible champion, insisting that Russia take care of its own orphans and not sell them to foreigners.

And it was Mr. Astakhov who this week stoked a furor over the latest death of an adopted Russian child in the United States, Max Shatto, with a post on Twitter that said: “Urgent! In the state of Texas, an adoptive mother killed a 3-year-old Russian child.”

Investigators say the circumstances of that death remain murky, and Mr. Astakhov has backed away from the murder accusation — but only slightly. At a news conference, he equated the boy’s mother, Laura Shatto, with two adoptive fathers, Miles Harrison of Virginia and Brian Dykstra of Iowa, who were acquitted of killing their toddler sons.

“Well, the presumption of innocence, you know how it is — sometimes it becomes so rigid,” Mr. Astakhov said.

Referring to the acquittals of Mr. Harrison and Mr. Dykstra, he declared, “For everyone it was completely clear that in one way or another they were guilty for the deaths of their children.”

In frequent television appearances, Mr. Astakhov denounces international adoptions in general as a sinister, profit-driven business, and he is pushing to extend the ban to all countries. He has been advocating that since 2010 after a woman in Tennessee put her 7-year-old adopted son on a flight back to Russia alone, with a note saying, “I no longer wish to parent this child.”

THIN, impeccably dressed and telegenically handsome with perfectly coifed hair that occasionally glints with an unnatural shade of bronze, Mr. Astakhov delivers nearly every statement that he makes with the silver-tongued flair of a courtroom closing argument.

“Don’t present me as an America-hater,” Mr. Astakhov, who holds a Master of Laws degree from the University of Pittsburgh, said after a recent news conference. “I am a fighter for the rights of Russian children. I am fighting with those who violate children’s rights.”

He added: “I am only saying that it’s a shame that Russia is giving away its children. America does not give away its children, does it?”

But he also often peppers his remarks with references to abusive American parents who he says have mostly escaped proper punishment, calling them “bastards” and “pedophiles.”

In response to his aggressive promotion of the ban, critics have denigrated his nationalist statements as hypocrisy, noting that the eldest of Mr. Astakhov’s three biological children attended private schools in England and the United States, while the youngest was born in 2009 in the same private hospital in Nice, France, where Angelina Jolie gave birth to twins.

A magazine spread showed Mr. Astakhov; his wife, Svetlana; and their children posing in luxurious surroundings in France where they spend the summers, and in an accompanying article he marveled at the prenatal care that his wife received, saying that while pricey it was still cheaper than elite maternity hospitals in Russia.

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The Lede: Police Brutality, Catalyst for Egypt’s Revolution, Continues Under Morsi

More than two years after tens of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets on Police Day to demand the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and an end to impunity for the security forces, activists report that civilians continue to be raped, tortured and killed in police custody.

As one of the protesters who marched that day, Adel Abdel Ghafar, recalled in a post for The Lede last year, anger over routine police brutality was a catalyst from the first day of Egypt’s revolution. “Several groups were mobilizing on this day, including fellow members of the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said,” Mr. Ghafar wrote. “Khaled Said had been brutally murdered by policemen in Alexandria on June 6, 2010 in broad daylight, and it disgusted me how the Mubarak regime had so blatantly tried to cover up his death.”

On Thursday, Sherief Gaber, a member of Cairo’s Mosireen film collective, drew attention to a harrowing new video report from the group, presenting vivid testimony from minors about the violence they endured and witnessed after they were arrested during recent protests.

A Mosireen video report on the violent abuse of minors by the Egyptian police.

Later on Thursday, the Egyptian activist Wael Eskandar posted a link on Twitter to a compilation of graphic, disturbing video clips documenting incidents of police brutality since the election of President Mohamed Morsi last year put the security forces nominally under civilian control. Mr. Morsi, who was in jail on Jan. 25, 2011, is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group whose members endured brutal treatment by the police during the Mubarak era.

A summary of the most important police violence clips under #Morsi’s regime in #Egypt lest we forget http://t.co/nSxyc0WKmv

— Wael Eskandar (@weskandar) 21 Feb 13

Last weekend, as the rights activist Hossam Bahgat noted, police officers beat a suspect to death at the funeral of a colleague they accused him of killing.

Egyptian police publicly beat to death man suspected of killing officer http://t.co/t1zA568O via @ahramonline

— hossam bahgat (@hossambahgat) 16 Feb 13

After listening to Mr. Bahgat describe some of the continuing abuse documented by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, in an interview this week on a private television channel, the journalist Rawya Rageh was moved to ask what the point of Egypt’s revolution had been.

In over a decade I have not seen as many cases of male activists fully raped in police custody as in the past few weeks #Egypt

— hossam bahgat (@hossambahgat) 16 Feb 13

@hossambahgat to ONTV: I have no faith there’ll be genuine police reform #Egypt

— Rawya Rageh (@RawyaRageh) 19 Feb 13

Listening to all the cases of police brutality, torture in detention – is this really a post-revolution #Egypt? What was the point really?

— Rawya Rageh (@RawyaRageh) 19 Feb 13

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Cyprus Trial Offers a Rare Look Inside Hezbollah

LIMASSOL, Cyprus — In a little-watched trial in a small courtroom here on Wednesday, a 24-year-old man provided a rare look inside a covert global war between Israel and Iran, admitting that he is an operative of the militant group Hezbollah, for which he acted as a courier in Europe and staked out locations in this port city that Israelis were known to frequent.

Breaking with the group’s ironclad discipline and practiced secrecy, the operative, Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, described being handled by a masked man he knew only as Ayman. He told of doing simple tasks at first: picking up a couple of bags in Lyon, France, taking a cellphone, two SIM cards and a mysterious package wrapped in newspaper from Amsterdam to Lebanon.

When he was arrested last July, he had a small red notebook with the license plate numbers of two buses ferrying Israelis to vacation spots in the vicinity.

He claimed that none of this was related to planning an attack, as prosecutors have charged. One of the plates, LAA-505, reminded him of a Lamborghini sports car, he said, while the other, KWK-663, reminded him of a Kawasaki motorcycle.

Yet, less than two weeks after he was taken into custody, a bomb blew up alongside a bus at the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria, killing five Israeli tourists and the Bulgarian driver — an attack similar to the one he seemed to be planning, experts say, and one that the Bulgarian authorities later tied to Hezbollah.

Mr. Yaacoub’s testimony offered unaccustomed insights from an active Hezbollah member into the militant group’s secret operations. But it carried potentially greater significance for the European Union, which has thus far resisted following Washington’s lead in declaring the group a terrorist organization. Experts say that a conviction here would substantially raise the pressure on the bloc for such a designation.

“Foreign ministries around Europe are watching this quite closely because many Europeans, particularly the Germans, have laid such a stress on courtroom evidence being the basis for a designation,” said Daniel Benjamin, until December the top counterterrorism official at the State Department, who visited Cyprus last year after the arrest.

Security experts also suspect that Mr. Yaacoub was playing a small but potentially deadly role in a much broader shadow war that has produced what some Israeli and American intelligence officials say were nearly a dozen plots by Iran and Hezbollah against Israel and its allies abroad.

“The evidence seems quite compelling that what he was doing was conducting surveillance for a bombing that would parallel almost exactly what happened in Bulgaria,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the program on counterterrorism and intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of a forthcoming book on Hezbollah’s global footprint.

In written testimony read in Greek by his interpreter, as he sat quietly beside her, Mr. Yaacoub described how he would be picked up in a van to meet with his handler, Ayman, and used code words to confirm his identity. “I never saw the face of Ayman because he was always wearing a mask,” Mr. Yaacoub said.

He said he was trained in the use of weapons and had acted as a courier for the group inside the European Union; with his Swedish passport, Mr. Yaacoub was an ideal candidate for such missions. He also acknowledged staking out the locations where Israelis appeared in large numbers — a parking lot behind a Limassol hospital and a hotel called the Golden Arches.

But Mr. Yaacoub was adamant that he was not participating in a plot to kill Israeli tourists. “Even if they asked me to participate in a terrorist action, I would refuse,” he said. “I could never do that. I’m only trained to defend Lebanon.”

Cyprus has traditionally had strong ties to Israel, but even more so to the Arab world. The island was widely considered a safe place to do business, even informally viewed as something of a cease-fire zone for the region’s conflicts, said Petros Zarounas, an expert in international relations in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital.

“They considered it neutral ground where everyone will have access to Cyprus soil, to feel safe, secure, quiet,” he said.

But recently the island nation has grown closer to Israel, deepening economic ties. Like Bulgaria, Cyprus is a popular tourist destination, with nearly 40,000 Israelis visiting in 2012.

Officials in Cyprus have tried to keep the case as low-key as possible, declining in most instances to comment or to release documents. “It’s a very serious and delicate case,” the justice minister, Loucas Louca, said shortly after Mr. Yaacoub was arrested. “I don’t want to make a statement because any publicity could harm the case.”

The prosecution and the defense have both declined to comment before a verdict is reached, expected to be sometime in March. But a preliminary ruling by the three-judge panel last week found that the prosecutor had provided enough evidence to proceed on all eight counts, including four charges of conspiracy to commit a felony, two charges of participating in a criminal organization, one of participating in the preparation of a crime and a charge of covering it up.

Andreas Riris contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An earlier version of a Web summary on this article misspelled the surname of the defendant. He is Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, not Yaccou.

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Pistorius Denies Murdering Girlfriend

PRETORIA, South Africa — Early on Feb. 14, Oscar Pistorius says, he heard a strange noise coming from inside his bathroom, climbed out of bed, grabbed his 9-millimeter pistol, hobbled on his stumps to the door and fired four shots.

“I fail to understand how I could be charged with murder, let alone premeditated,” Mr. Pistorius said in an affidavit read Tuesday to a packed courtroom by his defense lawyer, Barry Roux. “I had no intention to kill my girlfriend.”

Prosecutors painted a far different picture, one of a calculated killer, a world-renowned athlete who had the presence of mind and calm to strap on his prosthetic legs, walk 20 feet to the bathroom door and open fire as his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, cowered inside, behind a locked door.

“The applicant shot and killed an unarmed, innocent women,” Gerrie Nel, the chief prosecutor, said in court on Tuesday. That, Mr. Nel argued, amounted to premeditated murder, a charge that could send Mr. Pistorius to prison for life.

In court, Mr. Pistorius, a Paralympic track star who competed against able-bodied athletes at the London Olympics despite having lost both his lower legs as an infant, wept uncontrollably as Mr. Roux gave the runner’s account of the fateful early morning. At one point, Magistrate Desmond Nair called a recess to allow Mr. Pistorius, who was sobbing loudly, his face contorted, to regain his composure.

“My compassion as a human being does not allow me to just sit here,” Magistrate Nair said.

As the defense and prosecution laid out their competing versions of the shooting, some details were beyond dispute.

Mr. Pistorius and Ms. Steenkamp were alone in the house, having spent the evening there. Around 3 a.m., Mr. Pistorius shot Ms. Steenkamp through the bathroom door, fatally wounding her. He broke down the door and carried her down the stairs, where she died in the foyer of his upscale home in a highly secured compound.

The young woman, a model, was cremated Tuesday on the other side of the country in her hometown, Port Elizabeth. Her family and friends mourned her and called for the authorities to deal harshly with Mr. Pistorius.

“There’s a space missing inside all the people that she knew that can’t be filled again,” her brother, Adam Steenkamp, told reporters after the memorial service.

In court, Mr. Pistorius is seeking bail on the charge of premeditated murder, but he faces an uphill battle. Magistrate Nair ruled Tuesday that the case would be treated as the most serious kind of offense, which means bail will be granted only if the defense can prove extraordinary circumstances requiring it.

The court proceedings, though they concerned only whether Mr. Pistorius would receive bail, offered the first real glimpse into what unfolded at his home on the day of the shooting.

In his affidavit, Mr. Pistorius said that he and Ms. Steenkamp had decided to stay in for the night. He canceled plans with his friends for a night on the town in Johannesburg, while she opted against movies with one of her friends. They had a quiet evening, he said. She did yoga. He watched television. About 10 p.m., they went to sleep.

In the early morning hours, he said, he woke up to move a fan from the balcony and to close the sliding doors in the bedroom.

“I heard a noise in the bathroom and realized that someone was in the bathroom,” he said. “I felt a sense of terror rushing over me.”

He had already said in the affidavit that he feared South Africa’s rampant violent crime, and later added that he was worried because there were no bars on the window to the bathroom. Construction workers had left ladders in his garden, he said.

“I believed someone had entered my house,” he said in the affidavit. “I grabbed my 9-millimeter pistol from underneath my bed. On my way to the bathroom I screamed words to the effect for him/them to get out of my house and for Reeva to phone the police. It was pitch dark in the bedroom, and I thought Reeva was in bed.”

Walking on his stumps, he heard the sound of movement inside the toilet, a small room within the bathroom.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.

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For His Second Act, Japanese Premier Plays It Safe, With Early Results

Toru Hanai/Reuters

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose policies have sent the Tokyo stock market up, will visit Washington this week.

TOKYO — Since taking office less than two months ago, Japan’s outspokenly hawkish new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has been in what some political analysts are calling “safe driving mode.” He has carefully avoided saying or doing anything to provoke other Asian nations, while focusing instead on wooing voters with steps to revive the moribund domestic economy.

So far, his approach seems to be working. His plans for public-works projects, stimulus measures called “Abenomics,” have sent the Tokyo stock market surging along with Mr. Abe’s own approval rating, which is now at 71 percent, according to the latest poll by Yomiuri Shimbum. On Friday, he will seek to build on his strong start when he meets President Obama at a Washington summit meeting aimed at improving relations with the United States, which regards Japan as its most important ally in Asia.

Mr. Abe, 58, has said he wants to be what Japan has not seen in almost a decade: a steady-handed leader who lasts long enough in office to actually get things done. Analysts say his success hinges on whether he can lead his Liberal Democratic Party to victory in Upper House elections in July, and end the split Parliament that undermined many of his predecessors.

What is less clear is what he will do if he wins that election. One trait that makes Mr. Abe a bit of an enigma, some analysts say, is that he seems to have two sides: the realist and the right-wing ideologue. In analysts’ view, if he does jettison some of his current caution, for instance by trying to revise Japan’s antiwar Constitution to allow a full-fledged military instead of its current Self-Defense Force, he risks provoking a standoff with China over disputed islands, and possibly isolating Japan in a region still sensitive to its early-20th-century militarism.

“In his first six weeks, he has done everything he can to show he is a moderate,” said Andrew L. Oros, director of international studies at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. “But after July, he might feel he has a freer rein to do things that he thinks are justified.”

Part of the problem, Mr. Oros and others say, is that Mr. Abe faces conflicting political pressures. His base in the governing party’s most conservative wing expects bold steps to end what it sees as Japan’s overly prolonged displays of contrition for World War II. But he must also convince the broader public that he is a coolheaded, competent steward of a declining nation that also depends on China for its economic future.

There is also the ghost of his past failure. The last time he was prime minister, six years ago, he stepped down amid criticism that he had been “clueless” for having pursued a nationalistic agenda of revising the Constitution and history textbooks, and for not doing more to reduce unemployment and spur the economy.

This time, Mr. Abe is acting with the determined carefulness of a man given a second chance. He has focused on extricating Japan from its recession with steps that have quickly buoyed the country’s economy, the world’s third-largest. Since being named prime minister after his party’s election victory in December, Mr. Abe has promised $215 billion in public works spending to create jobs and promote growth.

He has also publicly pressured the central bank, the Bank of Japan, to move more aggressively to end years of corrosive price declines known as deflation — threatening, for example, to amend the law on the bank’s independence if it does not reach its target of 2 percent inflation. The bank’s governor, Masaaki Shirakawa, announced this month that he would step aside to allow Mr. Abe to appoint a new chief who will work more closely with the government by pumping more money into the economy to prompt banks to lend more and companies to spend more.

“Mr. Abe has clearly learned the lessons of his past failure,” said Norihiko Narita, a political scientist at Surugadai University, near Tokyo. “And the biggest lesson is that voters care more about the economy.”

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Netanyahu Defends Israel’s Handling of Prisoner X Case

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday defended his government’s handling of an Australian-Israeli who was held under a pseudonym for months in a maximum-security prison until he committed suicide in 2010, suggesting that the threats his country faces justify the extraordinary measures and the secrecy shrouding the case.

“We are not like other countries,” Mr. Netanyahu told his cabinet, in his first public comments on the case of Prisoner X, which made headlines on at least three continents last week. “We are an exemplary democracy and maintain the rights of those under investigation,” he said. “However, we are more threatened and face more challenges; therefore, we must maintain proper activity of our security agencies.”

In the face of growing calls from politicians and the public for investigations into the prisoner’s death and a court order that barred the local news media from reporting about it for more than two years, the prime minister said, “Let the security forces do their work quietly so that we can continue to live in security and tranquillity in the state of Israel.”

Prisoner X, the subject of Israeli news reports in 2010 that were quashed by the broad court order, was identified by an Australian television report last week as Ben Zygier, a 34-year-old lawyer and father of two who grew up in the Melbourne area, immigrated to Israel as a young man, served in the military and may have worked for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Arrested in February 2010, and held pending trial on charges that have been described only as serious and relating to national security, Mr. Zygier was considering a plea bargain when he apparently hanged himself with a shirt in the bathroom of his cell.

News reports here and in Australia have suggested that Israel detained him because he was about to reveal information about the Mossad’s use of foreign passports, and that he helped set up a Mossad front company in Europe that sold electronics equipment to Iran. A Kuwaiti report saying that he was involved in the 2010 assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai has been dismissed by several people with knowledge of the case.

An Israeli Justice Ministry investigation that declared Mr. Zygier’s death a suicide is expected to be released in the coming days, but several Israeli lawmakers and watchdog groups have demanded further inquiries by the attorney general and the state comptroller. And Australia’s foreign minister said Sunday that he had asked Israel to cooperate as he and his staff look into the matter.

“We want to give them an opportunity to submit to us an explanation of how this tragic death came about,” the minister, Bob Carr, told reporters in Sydney. “The key is to get all the information.”

Nahman Shai, a member of Parliament from the Labor Party, said Australia’s investigation should force Israel to look closer at the behavior of all involved. “We are witnessing oversights in various aspects of the case that include intelligence, legal, public, media and parliamentary,” Mr. Shai said Sunday. “The Australian government will publish the information it has and again make Israel appear irrelevant to the international community and the Israeli public.”

Two of Mr. Shai’s colleagues, meanwhile, called for the formation of a parliamentary committee to investigate the case. And many Israelis joined social-media campaigns that are demanding more information.

“No Israeli citizen will be able to sleep comfortably in a country in which an affair such as Prisoner X can take place,” wrote Uri Misgav, a blogger for the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, in a lengthy post. “The Israeli public deserves to know whether the Israeli prisons are holding on to Prisoner Y and Prisoner Z,” he wrote. “The Israeli public deserves to be told how all of the monitoring mechanics failed and how such a systematic failure will not be repeated.”

But Mr. Netanyahu seemed untroubled by the affair. “I rely completely on the security forces,” he told the cabinet. “I also completely rely on the legal authorities.”

“The overexposure of security and intelligence activity could harm, sometimes severely, state security,” he added. “The security interest cannot be made light of, and in the reality in which the state of Israel lives, this must be a main interest.”

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Karzai to Forbid His Forces to Request Foreign Airstrikes

KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that he would issue a decree forbidding his military forces from turning to NATO or American forces to conduct airstrikes, and he condemned the use of torture on detainees by his security forces.

He made his comments in a speech at the Afghan National Military Academy in Kabul. It was the first time he had dwelt at such length and with such passion on human rights.

His proposed ban on Afghan troops from calling in airstrikes came after a joint Afghan-NATO attack last week in Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan, that killed four women, one man and five children, all of them civilians, according to local officials.

Mr. Karzai said Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the commander of the international coalition forces fighting the Taliban and other insurgents in Afghanistan, told him that the airstrike had been requested by the National Directorate of Security, the country’s intelligence service. The attack took place in the Shigal district, an area where two known Taliban commanders were visiting family members, Afghan officials have said.

“Our N.D.S. in their own country calls foreigners to assist them and bombard four or five Al Qaeda or Taliban,” Mr. Karzai said.

“It is very regrettable to hear this,” he added. “You are representing Afghan pride. How do you call for an airstrike from foreigners on your people?”

Civilian casualties in the war on the Taliban has long vexed Mr. Karzai and has been a major point of contention with American and NATO troops. New rules instituted by commanders from the International Security Assistance Force have minimized the loss of life, and the coalition has all but stopped air attacks on populated areas and on homes. The result has been a dramatic drop in civilian casualties caused by foreign forces.

Nevertheless, Afghan troops, who lack their own air support, still turn to foreign forces for help during pitched battles with the Taliban and other insurgents. It was not clear whether there would be exceptions to Mr. Karzai’s decree, but he was clearly dismayed that his own forces would be employing the very techniques he had worked so hard to persuade the West to abandon.

In an unusual move, the Afghan president also publicly acknowledged that torture was a problem in Afghan detention centers and pledged to halt it. In the past, the government has largely deflected charges of torture raised by human rights organizations, contending that any abuse was the work of a few bad actors.

But after a United Nations report released in January detailed abuses or torture at a number of detention sites around the country, Mr. Karzai took a closer and more independent look at the complaints.

He appointed a delegation to investigate the report’s validity, and when the inquiry confirmed many of the allegations, he ordered the security ministries to implement the team’s recommendations. He reiterated that order on Saturday. The recommendations include prosecuting perpetrators of torture, giving detainees access to defense lawyers, providing medical treatment for detainees who are ill or have been beaten, and videotaping all interrogations.

“Not only have foreigners tormented and punished Afghans, but our people have been terrorized and punished by our own sons too,” Mr. Karzai said. “The U.N. report showed that even after 10 years, our people are tortured and mistreated in prisons.”

The United Nations’ human rights office here emphasized the importance of Mr. Karzai’s attention to the issue.

“It is encouraging that the president appears to be personally taking the issue of human rights of all Afghans seriously,” said Georgette Gagnon, the office’s director of human rights. She added that the government should act immediately on the delegation’s recommendations. “We urge them to do so without delay,” she said.

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Venezuela Releases First Pictures of Chávez

CARACAS, Venezuela — Amid a heated national debate over the state of the health of President Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan government on Friday released photographs of him for the first time since his cancer surgery in Cuba more than nine weeks ago.

Officials also provided a rare glimpse into the sequestered world of the convalescing leader, saying he has difficulty breathing and speaking but writes notes to aides while making all government decisions. Sometimes, there is music in his hospital room and it is like a party, one official said.

The four photographs released by the government show Mr. Chávez lying in bed and smiling, with two of his daughters, Rosa Virginia and María Gabriela, on either side.

Jorge Arreaza, the minister of science and technology, who is married to María Gabriela, said the pictures were taken Thursday. In three of the them, Mr. Chávez is holding a copy of what Mr. Arreaza said was Thursday’s edition of the Cuban newspaper Granma.

“There he is with his family, always attentive to the people of Venezuela, always attentive and in charge of his functions, working tirelessly,” Mr. Arreaza said.

The Venezuelan information minister, Ernesto Villegas, said that doctors had controlled a severe lung infection, but added that the president was breathing with a “tracheal tube,” making speech difficult.

In the photographs, Mr. Chávez wore what appeared to be a white and blue jacket, which covered his throat. No tube was visible.

Mr. Chávez, 58, has had four cancer operations in Cuba since June 2011. The latest was on Dec. 11. But in contrast to his previous absences from the country, Mr. Chávez has remained out of sight and has not even telephoned a government television program, which he often did before. That has led to widespread speculation about the severity of his illness, especially after he could not return from Cuba in time to be sworn in for the start of his new term on Jan. 10.

Government officials have repeatedly insisted that Mr. Chávez is continuing to run the government from his hospital bed in Havana, but the political opposition has long challenged that assertion, questioning how he could manage the country but be too sick to communicate with the public directly.

As Mr. Chávez’s absence has dragged on, the opposition has consistently demanded that the government provide proof that he is well enough to lead the nation. Some have even questioned whether he was still alive.

On Friday, an opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, posted on Twitter: “A few days ago, the liars said they talked with the Pdt., now they say he can’t talk! They make fun of their own people.”

Mr. Arreaza said later in a television interview that Mr. Chávez “does not have his characteristic voice” and sometimes writes notes when meeting with aides.

“He has difficulty expressing himself verbally,” Mr. Arreaza said. “Nevertheless, he makes himself understood. We are with him. You have to pay attention, and he perfectly communicates his decisions.”

Mr. Arreaza said in Spanish that Mr. Chávez was undergoing “palliative treatments,” which he described as strong and hard. He did not say what those treatments were but did say that Mr. Chávez had undergone the same treatments previously in the course of his illness. He has had both chemotherapy and radiation since his cancer was diagnosed.

In its Spanish definition, the word “palliative” refers especially to treatments used to relieve pain or slow the progress of an incurable disease. Mr. Villegas, the information minister, described Mr. Chávez on Friday as being in “delicate circumstances.”

Mr. Arreaza said that Mr. Chávez was keeping his spirits up. “There are days in which the commander practically has a party there in his room,” he said, “with his music from his beloved plains and with jokes and laughter.”

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Pakistani Political Parties Call for Talks With Taliban

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Representatives from many of Pakistan’s political parties Thursday called on their government to engage in peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, on a day when continuing militant violence in the country’s northwest killed at least 18 people.

The call for a “peace through dialogue” was spearheaded by the Awami National Party, a secular political party that rules the restive northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, where Taliban violence has been most concentrated since 2007. The initiative followed recent overtures from the Pakistani Taliban that suggested it was ready for talks.

The proposal is entirely separate from efforts in Afghanistan, supported by the Western alliance, to draw the Afghan Taliban — a related but separate group — into negotiations.

Following daylong deliberation at a luxury hotel in Islamabad, representatives from 27 political parties issued a joint, one-page statement. But there is widespread skepticism about whether the Pakistani Taliban, which aims to overthrow the state, is really open to negotiations. It is equally unclear whether the powerful military is fully behind the process.

Two opposition political parties, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which is led by Imran Khan, and Jamaat-e-Islami, considered the most organized Islamic party, declined to attend the meeting on Thursday.

The meeting came after a decade of domestic conflict that has cost thousands of civilian lives, and that many Pakistanis blame on their government’s difficult alliance with the United States. Political opinion is increasingly wary of using force against insurgents and many instead advocate holding talks.

“Time has come for Pakistani government to withdraw from United States-led war,” said a meeting participant, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, an extremist religious leader, who leads an alliance of far-right political parties and banned militant groups.

At the same time, political parties are under pressure to curry favor with right-wing voters or demonstrate their effectiveness in combating militancy in advance of the coming national election, due to take place by May.

Cyril Almeida, a columnist for Dawn, the country’s leading English daily, said the Awani National Party was being driven by its own electoral needs in the northwest, and predicted that the calls for peace with the Taliban would go nowhere.

“The A.N.P. is pushing a seemingly vague agenda: keep the door to talks open while trying to build consensus for punitive actions,” Mr. Almeida said, “in the likely scenario of the Taliban reverting to type and continuing down their path of violence.”

Despite the tentative signs of reconciliation, militants have not slowed down their attacks.

On Thursday the police in Hangu district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa said they had killed six suicide bombers, probably of Uzbek origins, who had assaulted a police station. Elsewhere in the same district, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into a police checkpoint, killing seven people, including four policemen.

In the neighboring Orakzai tribal region, at least eleven people were killed when a roadside bomb targeted a bus carrying members of an anti-Taliban militia. As people gathered for rescue work, another explosion went off, wounding at least 19 people.

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IHT Special: Sanctions Chill Reaches Banking Clients in the Persian Gulf

DUBAI — For Syrian and Iranian citizens living in the Gulf, finding a bank to deal with just became a little tougher.

Banks like Barclays and HSBC have begun turning away new customers from countries that are facing sanctions. They are closing down some existing accounts, further isolating Syrian and Iranian citizens from the global financial industry.

Mary Rose Khamasmieh, a Syrian public relations professional who has lived and worked in Dubai since 2005, has used HSBC as her bank for the past six years. Since last November, she has received a flurry of notices from HSBC requesting more information, including her visa validity and work history.

“This is the most information they requested since I opened the account, and they said if I didn’t give them information my account would have to close,” she said. “It went well for me and I continue to bank with HSBC, but I do have some Syrian friends that were forced to find another bank or even leave the country.”

Also under the new measures, Syrian or Iranian customers with bank balances of less than 100,000 dirhams, or $27,225, will be asked to close their accounts within 30 days. Customers with salaries of less than 15,000 dirhams will also be affected.

This is because the cost to the bank of making the enquiries necessary to enforce compliance is higher than the benefit or “profit potential” of keeping a customer with a small bank balance. It is cheaper for HSBC to close an account or not to open a new one with a balance of less than 100,000 dirhams.

Banks have increased due diligence procedures for clients from countries facing sanctions by the United States or the European Union and for any customer who conducts business or lives there. This means that if the bank is not satisfied with the information a customer provides, it will not accept the customer’s business. By doing this, banks are hoping to avoid hefty penalties imposed by regulators related to sanction evasion.

In December 2011, the U.S. government issued a new set of laws that were enforced in March 2012 to penalize any significant transaction by a foreign bank involvijng a country like Iran that was facing sanctions by threatening to close down a bank’s correspondent account. This means that the bank would not be permitted to make a wire transfer in U.S. dollars anywhere in the world.

“This will bankrupt banks, not being able to conduct dollar transactions,” said Ramsey Jurdi, a compliance attorney specializing in sanctions who is based in the Dubai office of Chadbourne & Parke, a New York law firm. “This is in line with a gradual tightening of sanctions focused on this point of leverage over the last two years.”

HSBC’s stricter compliance approach in the region is part of a global measure to avoid penalties and improve transparency. In December, HSBC, one of the largest banks in Europe, paid a $1.92 billion fine related to illegal funds from Mexican drug cartels and money-laundering from Iran. To avoid further risk, HSBC is now closing the accounts of some customers with links to Syria and Iran, though it has no presence in those countries. In all, HSBC has 14 offices in the Middle East and North Africa.

“HSBC has a commitment to adopt the highest compliance standards, and as a result we must apply enhanced oversight on any customer with connections to sanctioned countries,” an HSBC spokeswoman, based in Dubai, wrote in an e-mail. “Where we are unable to maintain sufficiently detailed information about such a customer through a relationship managed account, we have to discontinue that relationship.”

Enforcement is becoming stricter. In 2010, Barclays paid $298 million in fines related to sanctions breaches, including transactions connected with Iran, Cuba and Sudan. More recently, Standard Chartered Bank settled $327 million in fines in December 2012 over dealings with Iran, Libya, Myanmar and Sudan.

“The Iranian financial industry has become very isolated,” said Mr. Jurdi of Chadbourne & Parke, adding this was one reason banks had become more diligent with regard to Iranians and Syrians. “With financial isolation, people are finding new ways of evading sanctions by conducting banking offshore or listing a company account as an individual account so fewer questions are asked.”

While this has raised compliance standards and costs, some banks are not universally turning down customers from certain countries, so long as enough due diligence is done.

“Standard Chartered does not sever relationships with clients based on their nationality, and we adhere to the highest standards of compliance to local and international standards,” Ramy Lawand, spokesman for Standard Chartered Bank in the Middle East and North Africa, wrote in an e-mail. Standard Chartered is focused on Asia, Africa and the Middle East, which generate 90 percent of its profit and revenue.

Barclays and Mashreq Bank have also tightened their compliance standards. Barclays no longer accepts corporate accounts for Syrian, Iranian or Sudanese companies, and assesses more carefully any funds flowing to or from residents of countries facing sanctions.

“Barclays works closely with regulators and abides by their requirements in all the jurisdictions we operate in,” a spokesman for Barclays, based in Dubai, wrote in an e-mailed statement.

Hossein Asrar Haghighi, co-founder of the Iranian Business Council, a nonprofit, nongovernmental network for Iranian businessmen in the United Arab Emirates, said banks were playing it safe, preferring to eliminate Iran from their portfolios. “It doesn’t really matter if a person is rich or poor, the problem is that they are Iranian, and it’s getting harder to find a bank that’s O.K. with that.”

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