After Retirement, Pope Will Live in Vatican City

ROME — Though it may have come as a shock Monday to the world’s one billion-plus Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI’s plan to retire on Feb. 28 appears to have been in the works for some time, and was known to a handful of close advisers.

Still unclear, however, are some of the practical consequences of Benedict’s decision, Vatican officials acknowledged Tuesday, from how the former pope will be addressed, to what to do with the papal ring used to seal important documents, traditionally destroyed upon a pope’s death.“There are a series of questions that remain to be seen, also on the part of the pope himself, even if it is a decision that he had made some time ago,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said at a news conference. “How he will live afterward, which will be very different from how he lives now, will require time and tranquillity and reflection and a moment of adaptation to a new situation.”

Even though the Code of Canon Law allows popes to resign, the occurrence was rare enough to have caught Vatican officials off guard, including on issues like the protocol and potentially awkward logistics of having a former pope and his successor share a backyard.

When he leaves the papacy at the end of the month, Benedict will retire to his summer home in Castel Gandolfo, in the hills outside Rome, before moving to the Mater Ecclesiae convent, a plain, four-story structure built 21 years ago to serve as an international place “for contemplative life within the walls of Vatican City,” as it is described on a Vatican Web site.

Workers began transforming the building into a residence in November, after the cloistered nuns who had occupied the convent left, Father Lombardi said. He did not tip his hand about whether the renovations were carried out with the pontiff as the future occupant in mind. “The pope knew this place, this building and thought it was appropriate for his needs,” he said.

The timing, however, raised suspicions that the pope had been planning the details of his retirement for some time. The editor of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, wrote Monday that the pope had made his decision “many months ago,” after a demanding trip to Mexico and Cuba in March 2012, “and kept with a reserve that no one could violate.”

Father Lombardi said that the stress of that trip had further convinced the pope that he no longer had the stamina to do the job.

In fact, the pope had meditated on the possibility of resigning for years. In the 2010 book “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times,” from a series of interviews conducted by Peter Seewald, a German journalist, Benedict said that if a pope “clearly realized that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of carrying out the duties of his office,” he would have “the right, and under some circumstances also an obligation, to resign.”

Rumors of his imminent resignation began to appear periodically in the Italian news media in recent years, as the pope appeared increasingly frail in public appearances.

A Vatican official, who asked not to be named because he was discussing papal business, said that the number of people who had known about the pope’s decision “a long time, could be counted on one hand.” But the pope had informed a small group of other collaborators “in recent days.”

When he retires to Vatican City, the pope will be able to move freely, Father Lombardi said, though it was “premature” to say how involved he will be in day-to-day activities — like saying Mass — at the Vatican.

He would not, however, intervene in the choice of his successor. “You can be sure that the cardinals will be autonomous in their decision and he will have no specific role in this election,” Father Lombardi said, adding that the pope was “a very discreet person.”

The conclave to choose the next pope will begin 15 to 20 days after the pope resigns, and a new leader of the Roman Catholic Church is expected to be in place by Easter, which falls on March 31 this year.

Father Lombardi said the pope would continue to perform his regular duties until the end of the month, and would keep all the appointments on his calendar. Some parts of his schedule will be modified to take into account the heightened public interest in the pope during his final days in office, Father Lombardi indicated.

For instance, this week’s commemoration of Ash Wednesday, beginning the 40-day period of Lent preceding Easter, usually takes place in a church on the Aventine Hill. But this year it will be conducted in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican instead, to allow a greater number of the faithful to attend, Father Lombardi said.

His final audience, on Feb. 27, will be moved to St. Peter’s Square instead of the usual indoor venue used in winter, “to allow the faithful to say goodbye to the pope.”

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Syrian Insurgents Claim to Control Large Hydropower Dam

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syrian insurgents and opposition activists said Monday that rebel forces had taken control of Syria’s largest hydroelectric dam, an assertion that, if confirmed, would give them significant control over a vital reservoir and what remains of the sporadic power supplies in their war-ravaged country.

The Tabqa Dam, built more than 40 years ago with Russian help on the Euphrates River in northeast Syria’s Raqqa Province, provides electricity to areas that are both in rebel and loyalist hands, including the contested city of Aleppo, and would be the third Euphrates dam taken by the rebels, who control two smaller facilities upriver.

But the Tabqa Dam, which the government once boasted had made Syria self-sufficient in power generation, is considered a more potent weapon in the battle for allegiances in the nearly two-year-old Syria conflict. Rebel-held areas have been systematically denied electricity by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in their effort to turn the population against the insurgency.

Claims that the Tabqa Dam was now in rebel control came as a possible new confrontation was brewing between Turkey and Syria after a Syrian minivan exploded just inside Turkish territory at Cilvegozu, an important border crossing near the rebel-held Syrian town of Bab al-Hawa. The blast killed at least 13 people, including 3 Turkish civilians; wounded at least 28; and damaged at least 19 vehicles.

The Turkish fatalities were believed to be the first related to the Syrian conflict since October, when a Syrian mortar shell killed five Turks near the border-crossing town of Akcakale, Turkey, eliciting a warning of retaliation by the Turkish government.

Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Bulent Arinc, did not rule out a bombing or suicide attack as the cause of the Cilvegozu explosion, and said all possibilities were under investigation at the border post in southern Turkey’s Hatay Province. But Syrian rebels, who get military and financial support from Turkey, quickly blamed Mr. Assad’s government for the explosion. Turkey, which hosts nearly 200,000 Syrian refugees, has repeatedly warned Mr. Assad’s government that it would not tolerate attacks along the 550-mile border.

Reports by rebel commanders and by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain with a network of contacts in Syria, said insurgents had met little resistance as they swept into the Tabqa area on Sunday, seizing the dam and setting fire to an imposing statue of President Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez, in the city of Tabqa.

The reservoir created by the dam, known as Lake Assad, is Syria’s largest and is vital for irrigating area farms and supplying drinking water to Aleppo.

The Syrian government did not confirm the insurgent claims. But videos uploaded on the Internet by insurgents appeared to corroborate they were in control of areas inside and outside the dam, although not necessarily the control room. One rebel fighter was quoted as saying the insurgents intended to divert power from the dam to rebel-held areas.

“We will cut all sources for the regime,” said the fighter, who identified himself by a first name, Nawaf.

He said that rebels also had taken control of large areas of Tabqa, including a military police barracks, an air force facility and an artillery base, seizing weapons and ammunition, and that they did not intend to damage any infrastructure.

“The Shabiha says, ‘Assad or burn the country,’ ” he said, using the term for the feared plainclothes pro-government militias. “We say, ‘We will burn Assad and keep the country.’ ”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which had a similar account of events, also said rebel fighters had seized control of three neighborhoods that housed dam workers.

“The regime forces showed no resistance, while heads of security branches escaped using helicopters through Al Tabqa military airport,” the Observatory said in a statement. “The small town embodies the diverse Syrian society, as it has residents from different sects and ethnicities. The fighters have pledges not to harm any of the citizens.”

Fighters in the operation included members of the al-Nusra Front, the Islamic militant group that has developed a reputation for its fearless attacks on Mr. Assad’s military but has emerged as a problem for the United States. The United States wants to aid the insurgency but considers Al Nusra a terrorist organization with ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Hwaida Saad reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard in Beirut; Sebnem Arsu and David D. Kirkpatrick in Gaziantep, Turkey; and an employee of The New York Times in Damascus, Syria.

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Syrian War Closes In on the Heart of Damascus

DAMASCUS, Syria — Unkempt government soldiers, some appearing drunk, have deployed near a rebel-held railway station in the southern reaches of this tense capital. Office workers on 29th of May Street, in the heart of the city, tell of huddling at their desks, trapped inside for hours by gun battles that sound alarmingly close.

Soldiers have swept through city neighborhoods, making arrests ahead of a threatened rebel advance downtown, even as opposition fighters edge past the city limits, carrying mortars and shelling security buildings. Fighter jets that pounded the suburbs for months have begun to strike Jobar, an outlying neighborhood of Damascus proper, creating the disturbing spectacle of a government’s bombing its own capital.

On Sunday, the government sent tanks there to battle rebels for control of a key ring road.

In this war of murky battlefield reports, it is hard to know whether the rebels’ recent forays past some of the capital’s circle of defenses — in an operation that they have, perhaps immodestly, named the “Battle of Armageddon” — will lead to more lasting gains than earlier offensives did. But travels along the city’s battlefronts in recent days made clear that new lines, psychological as much as geographical, had been crossed.

“I didn’t see my family for more than a year,” a government soldier from a distant province said in a rare outpouring of candor. He was checking drivers’ identifications near the railway station at a checkpoint where hundreds of soldiers arrived last week with tanks and other armored vehicles.

“I am tired and haven’t slept well for a week,” he said, confiding in a traveler who happened to be from his hometown. “I have one wish — to see my family and have a long, long sleep. Then I don’t care if I die.”

For months, this ancient city has hunched in a defensive crouch as fighting raged in suburbs that curve around the city’s south and east. On the western edge of the city, the palace of the embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, sits on a steep, well-defended ridge.

In between, Damascus, with its walled Old City, grand diagonal avenues and crowded working-class districts, has remained the eye of the storm. People keep going to work, even as electric service becomes sporadic and groceries dwindle, even as the road to the airport is often cut off by fighting outside the city, and even as smoke from artillery and airstrikes in nearby suburbs becomes a regular feature on the horizon.

But after rebels took the railway station 10 days ago in a city district called Qadam and attacked Abassiyeen Square on an approach to the city center on Wednesday, a new level of alarm and disorder has suffused the city. Rebels have pushed farther into the capital than at any point since July, when they briefly held part of a southern neighborhood.

Near the Qadam railway station last week, many of the government soldiers, their hair and beards untrimmed, wore disheveled or dirty uniforms and smelled as if they had not had showers in a long time. Some soldiers and security officers even appeared drunk, walking unsteadily with their weapons askew — a shocking sight in Syria, where regimented security forces and smartly uniformed officers have long been presented as a symbol of national pride.

The deployment appeared aimed at stopping the rebels from advancing past Qadam, either across the city’s ring road and toward the downtown or to suburbs to the east to close a gap in the opposition’s front line.

But even stationed here in Damascus, the heart of the government’s power, the soldier at the checkpoint — who was steady on his feet — said he felt vulnerable.

“It is very scary to spend a night and you expect to be shot or slaughtered at any moment,” he said. “We spend our nights counting the minutes until daytime.”

The government has hit back hard, striking Qadam with artillery and airstrikes, and making pre-emptive arrests in Midan, the neighboring district, closer to downtown, where rebels gained a temporary foothold in July and which they said was their next target in this latest offensive. Soldiers summarily executed four people in Qadam on Friday, according to the Local Coordinating Committees, an anti-Assad activist network, though it was unclear if the victims were would-be military defectors or captured rebels.

On a recent journey along the front line, a traveler saw soldiers speaking harshly to residents at checkpoints outside Yarmouk Camp, a long-contested area east of Qadam that is home to both Syrians and Palestinian refugees, who have lived there for decades. Rebels took over much of the camp in December, drawing government airstrikes that drove out most residents. But about 20 percent of those people appear to have returned, in part, they said, because the government had attacked another refugee camp where they had taken shelter.

A Palestinian refugee who gave only a nickname, Abu Muhammad, was carrying a sack of bread into the camp. He said that he had started out with three sacks for his wife and three sons, but that officers — he said they were from Mr. Assad’s Alawite sect — had shouted at him and confiscated two sacks, accusing him of taking bread to the rebels.

The government is pressuring Palestinians to take the camp back from the rebels, Abu Muhammad said. He said that was an absurd demand from a government that bombed its own people but made no response to last month’s airstrike by Israel. “Why doesn’t the regime send its ‘hero’ army to liberate the camp?” he said.

Another center of recent fighting is just northeast of the city. Rebels who have taken over much of the suburb of Qaboun recently pushed across the ring road there into the city neighborhood of Jobar. From there, said Abu Omar al-Jobrani, a leader of fighters in the area, they moved mortars close enough to attack a munitions factory and air force security headquarters near Abassiyeen Square, a roundabout that is near a major stadium and that provides access to downtown.

Reports of rebel strikes on Wednesday on such a central landmark, which appeared to be backed up by videos showing black smoke pouring across the plaza, raised new fears in the capital. The government closed the roads around the square, causing traffic jams deep into downtown, and sent dozens of security men to protect the Parliament building. Terrified residents of the centrally located Old City closed their shops.

Fighting continued over the weekend, as the government and rebels fought for control of the ring road near Jobar. Shells and airstrikes kept raining on the neighborhood, sending dust and smoke into the air, higher than the minarets on its mosques.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, Lebanon.

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Israeli Says Syria Twisted Comments by Rebel Supporter

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A public relations controversy erupted Saturday after a leading Israeli newspaper published comments from a brief interview with the leader of Syria’s main exile opposition group.

The news media outlets of the Syrian government, and its ally Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, reported that the opposition leader had declared that Israel had “nothing to fear” from a rebel-led Syrian government. Moreover, the reports said, the opposition was working with other countries to keep Syria’s chemical weapons away from Hezbollah, which he called a “son of the devil.”

But the opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, never said any of that, according to the article in the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, and its author, a prominent Israeli defense expert, Ronen Bergman.

Sheik Khatib was quoted in the article reiterating the opposition’s promise to keep Syria’s chemical arsenal out of “the hands of unauthorized elements,” and it was the international community, he said, not Israel, that had “nothing to fear.”

When Sheik Khatib realized that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli — after glancing at his business card — he abruptly ended the conversation, Mr. Bergman said in a Skype interview, repeating what he had written.

The original article was published only in Hebrew — and only in print — so it was the Arabic and English versions put out by the Syrian government and Hezbollah that raced around the Internet on Saturday, provoking outrage from government supporters and opponents at Sheik Khatib, who posted a message on his Facebook page denying that he had given the interview.

Yet the episode appeared to have been more than a simple misunderstanding. Syria’s conflict is not only a shooting war but also a propaganda war. Pro-government media apparently could not resist the chance to bolster their contention that the rebellion had been promoted by Israel and the West to punish Syria and its president, President Bashar al-Assad, for taking uncompromising positions against Israel.

“Unfortunately, the original text was less exciting,” Mr. Bergman said. “I would be happy if he would say something like, ‘Yes, we will make peace with Israel’ — then I would get the front page.” As it was, the article elicited little reaction in Israel.

But misrepresentation of the article suggested that it hit a nerve on one issue. An unnamed opposition member, not Sheik Khatib, called Hezbollah “sons of the devil,” according to Mr. Bergman, and said the rebel coalition was working with other countries to ensure that “not one piece of military equipment, not chemical weapons and not any other item, will pass into their hands.”

Syria is Hezbollah’s main conduit for arms, and Hezbollah has backed Mr. Assad’s bloody crackdown at great cost to its popularity in the wider Arab world.

Although Mr. Bergman said the opposition member was offering his own opinion and not presenting official policy, his comments bolstered the widely held view that a rebel-led government might halt the shipment of Iranian arms through Syria to Hezbollah. Hezbollah, a Shiite group and political party, is also concerned about the rise within the rebel movement of extremist Sunni jihadists who view Shiites as apostates.

The misleading reports appeared to be an attempt to further divide the opposition. Sheik Khatib found himself fending off critics from within the anti-Assad movement who objected to his even speaking with an Israeli reporter, though by all accounts he did not initially realize that Mr. Bergman was an Israeli.

It was the second time in a month that Sheik Khatib found himself on the defensive. He recently proposed talks with members of Mr. Assad’s government, but had not built political support for the proposal.

On Friday, Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, gave the first official response to the proposal, saying that the government would negotiate with any opposition members who agreed to lay down their arms.

On Saturday, Mr. Assad named new cabinet ministers for oil, finance, social affairs, labor, housing, public works and agriculture, as Syria faces growing economic problems and shortages of electricity, fuel and bread.

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut.

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U.S. Use of Mexican Battery Recyclers Is Faulted

United States companies are sending spent lead batteries to recycling plants in Mexico that do not meet American environmental standards, according to an environmental agency created under the North American Free Trade Agreement, putting Mexican communities at risk.

In a blistering report submitted this week, the agency, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, notes that the United States does not fully follow procedures common among developed nations that treat international battery shipments as hazardous waste. It faults environmental agencies on both sides of the border for lapses in regulation and enforcement. Cross-border trade in lead batteries increased by up to 525 percent from 2004 to 2011, the report said.

The report, which has been circulating in draft form, has been forwarded to the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico, which have 60 days to object to its publication. An estimated 20 percent of lead acid batteries from the United States now go to Mexico for recycling, according to trade statistics.

“There needs to be better coordination between government agencies and better cross-border tracking,” said Evan Lloyd, who was the agency’s executive director until late last year and oversaw the yearlong study.

The report highlighted a number of shortcomings: Customs data on the number of batteries crossing the border did not mesh with counts by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Though the E.P.A. requires notice of batteries leaving the United States, there was no effort to make sure that they had arrived at qualified recyclers in Mexico. The data that battery companies sent to the E.P.A. about exports consisted of “piles of paper,” Mr. Lloyd said, and it was never amassed into an electronic database that would be “useful to regulators.”

Almost all lead acid batteries used in the United States are recycled to extract the lead for reuse because lead is a dangerous pollutant and because it is a valuable commodity. Lead batteries are used in vehicles, cellphone towers and wind turbines.

Since 2008, new United States limits on lead pollution have made domestic recycling complicated and costly. That has helped propel the recycling trade to Mexico, both legally and illegally, environmental groups say, because that country has less stringent limits for lead pollution, and far less vigorous enforcement.

“There’s a pretty consistent pattern suggesting that exports are the direct result of U.S. emissions standards,” said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, which has led the campaign against lead poisoning internationally. Mr. Gottesfeld noted that a Mexican plant owned by a major American recycler, Johnson Controls International, puts out more than 30 times as much lead emissions as its newest plant in the United States.

“What Mexico needs to do is to get its recycling up to U.S. standards, and the U.S. needs to do a much better job of tracking batteries overseas,” he said. In an e-mail, Johnson Controls, based in Milwaukee, said it was “modernizing and reinvesting” in the Mexican facility, acquired in 2005, “to reduce its environmental footprint.”

The report was initiated in response to a report by Occupational Knowledge International and Fronteras Comunes, a Mexican environmental group, as well as to an investigative article in The New York Times, Mr. Lloyd said. Soil collected by The Times in a school playground near a recycling plant outside Mexico City were found to have lead levels five times those allowed in the United States.

Lead poisoning causes high blood pressure, kidney damage and abdominal pain in adults, and serious developmental delays and behavioral problems in young children. When batteries are broken for recycling, the lead is released as dust and, during melting, as lead-laced emissions.

In the United States, recyclers operate in highly mechanized, tightly sealed plants, with smokestack scrubbers and extensive monitors to detect lead release. Plants in Mexico vary greatly in safety standards, and in some, the recycling process is little more than men with hammers smashing batteries and melting down their contents in furnaces.

In recent months, there have been new efforts to curb the flow of batteries south of the border, though many battery makers have fought that. In response to a draft of the report released late last year, Battery Council International, an industry group, said it opposed “the creation of additional burdensome certification programs.”

Last year, the United States General Services Administration, which is responsible for federal vehicles, asked ASTM International, an independent standards agency, to explore a voluntary standard for battery recycling.

But that effort came to naught after the proposal was voted down at an open meeting attended by representatives from industry, government and environmental groups in December. Of the 103 people at the meeting, 49 worked for Johnson Controls.

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Russian Performers Support U.S. Adoptions

MOSCOW — A panel of respected figures from Russia’s art world issued an emotional appeal to President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday to make an exception to a recent ban on adoptions by Americans, and allow children to join American parents they have already come to know.

Chulpan Khamatova, revered here for her charity work as well as her acting, spoke in front of a screen showing blown-up photographs of families whose adoptions have been halted. Beside her sat Beth Hettinger of Westfield, N.J., who flew to Russia to bring back Aleksei, who is 18 months old. Ms. Hettinger was scheduled to leave Russia without Aleksei on Friday.

“A child, even if he is very small, is already waiting for his mama to come and get him, and she does not come,” Ms. Khamatova said. “When he grows up he is told, ‘When you were small, this thing took place.’ This will happen, anyway. I think he will hate his country, and hate his motherland.”

She said she had visited children’s homes in Russia “where children lie in heaps, in huge wards,” and added: “Dear, respected president, dear, respected society, let’s make an exception. Our country is so big, and we always ignore the specific fates of people. Just once, let’s not ignore them.”

Ms. Khamatova, who has a husky voice and an unguarded manner, commands unusual moral authority in Russia, and shocked many in creative circles by agreeing to star in a campaign advertisement for Mr. Putin last year.

Her appeal on Thursday pointed to the passionate social divide over Mr. Putin’s decision to ban American adoptions, a response to American legislation aiming to punish Russian officials accused of corruption. While polling shows that the move met with approval in Russia’s heartland, people in Moscow were far more critical, and tens of thousands joined a protest march in January.

A few dozen children whose adoptive parents had already received a court order have been allowed to leave. Approximately 100 families have petitioned Russia’s government to allow adoptions that were near that stage when Mr. Putin signed the law. At a news conference on Thursday, Lesley Philips, of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., described a three-year process to retrieve a girl from a facility for children with special needs in Kaliningrad.

“Imagine that you have been pregnant for three years, and then you see your child, but you only spend a week with him, because someone takes her away,” she said. In an interview, she said she had raced to Russia at the end of the year — delayed because Hurricane Sandy held up a document — and was waiting for a court date when Mr. Putin signed the ban.

Ms. Philips is raising Misha, a child adopted from St. Petersburg, and said she wanted him to have a Russian sibling “so that they would have a bond.”

“When we met her, it just felt like our family was complete,” she said.

Among the Russian cultural figures who joined Ms. Khamatova in her appeal were Andrei Makarevich, lead singer of the rock band Time Machine, and the actors Yevgeny Mironov and Sergei Yursky.

Andrew Roth contributed reporting.

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At War Blog: Interview With Gen. John R. Allen on Leaving Afghanistan

The New York Times interviewed Gen. John. R. Allen on Sunday, a week before his scheduled departure from Afghanistan after 19 months as the commander of the American and allied forces.

Following are some of General Allen’s comments. Brief explanations have been provided in brackets.

On his relationship with President Hamid Karzai:

“I wanted him to understand that he was always going to have my loyalty and I was always going to work with him. In fact, I said a number of times, ‘I’m proud to have served you at the same time I served my own leadership, whether it’s a NATO leadership or U.S. leadership.’ Now, I wanted him to believe it because it happened to be true. I think our personalities matched in that regard.”

“Now, we’ve had some tough times. This has been a time of really dramatic change for the campaign. When I got here, I measured success in how well we and how often we were fighting. Today, it’s a very different environment. The Afghans are virtually entirely in the lead across Afghanistan.”

“This is what I’ve learned about the president. If you listen to him, he’s got some pretty good ideas, and often the controversy that has arisen in the relationships hasn’t been because necessarily you disagree with the ideas. It’s because you haven’t listened to them early enough.”

“And sometimes it’s been strained. I don’t think he ever believes that actions that I have taken were ever intended to disadvantage him as the president, or not do everything I possibly could for the Afghan people. I told him, I’m prepared to die in this country on behalf of his people. I take that very seriously.”

On civilian casualties:

“I’ve met with the families of the casualties that we’ve inflicted. I’ve flown to the villages to personally apologize for the casualties, and do what I can to do the right thing for those families. I’ve taken measures with respect to the employment of certain kinds of fires.” ["Fires” is common military shorthand for a variety of munitions, from bullets to missiles to mortar shells.]

“We had a couple of pretty rough incidents where Afghans were killed by the delivery of aviation fires. I eventually said to President Karzai that civilian structures, tents, potential areas where civilians might be either taking refuge or hiding or living, I’m not going to deliver any more fires on those structures unless my troops are pinned down, can’t move, and the only option they have is to deliver fires on these structures, or I decide, the senior leader out here, I decide to deliver fires on these structures.”

“The civilian causalities as a result of air fires plummeted immediately. It was probably the decision I could have made long before that and none of our forces were put at risk, or a greater risk because of this.”

On the aftermath of the burning of Korans at Bagram Air Base:

“I have to tell you, I thought this could be it for the relationship.

“I immediately got on the phone to a number of Afghan media outlets, immediately cut a video apologizing for this as sincerely as I could possibly appear and sound because this was going to be bad, it could be really bad. I called the president, I went to see him, apologized to him for this. It was completely inadvertent but this culture deserved that apology. We were in their home, so to speak. We are guests in their home and even though it was an accident, even though it was not intentional, we had made a bad mistake, a real error and the people deserved my apology, the president deserved my apology.

“He accepted it and I think in many respects, the personal nature of our relationship was what tempered the language coming out of the palace, the relief, his own engagement with the media and so on. Because of both of our actions, both of them supporting each other, we were able to keep this from being the result of a bad mistake from being something that could have really fractured the relationship.”

On the fallout in March after an American soldier killed 16 villagers in the southern Afghan district of Panjwai, which he first heard about when he was in the United States to testify before Congress:

“The first phone call was something of the effect of — we’ve got mixed reporting from Panjwai. We think an American soldier maybe shot some people and my response was, ‘All right. Let’s develop the situation quickly. Tell me what we got in front of us because we’ve got to make the Afghans were included on this.’ ”

“Then the phone calls started coming in and the numbers started going up and pretty quick and this is as bad a circumstance as you might have imagined.”

“I called President Karzai from home and we had a long conversation about it. I promised him once again that we would take all steps, measures, take all actions necessary to get to the bottom of this and we would do a full and complete investigation and those people necessary would be held accountable.”

“This was still unfolding. It was one shooter. It was multiple shooters. There were wild rumors associated with things that he had done in addition to shooting. So the information environment was wide open at this point. And both for the purposes of internal stability in Afghanistan for the purposes of preserving our relationship we were working very, very hard to confirm what we knew to be the facts and try very hard to get after the rumors that were just flying.”

“Once again, when he could have been angry, when it could have been a very negative conversation, I mean, he was tutorial. He explained to me why this is bad for the relationship, why this is bad for the campaign, and why this will shake the confidence of the Afghan people, his personal gesture of measured conversation with me. He wasn’t angry.”

On why the United States should stay engaged in Afghanistan:

“I put it in the context of this has been worth it. This is bigger than anyone of us. It’s bigger than the president. It’s bigger than the president of Afghanistan, because this isn’t about today. This is about tomorrow. This is about doing all we can to facilitate President Karzai with his desire to be successful. But it’ll be about doing all we can do to set up his successor for success.”

On overcoming the skepticism of officials in Washington, who often express frustration with Mr. Karzai:

“For this president, at this moment of its history, the Afghanistan history, to be able to hold together these tribes and these ethnic groups with these kinds of challenges has got to be one of the hardest jobs going. And so I try to paint the context of the challenges that he faces, the history from which he originates and help conceivably, he will interpret our actions. He may not understand what we are trying to do, or may misinterpret what we’re trying to do or say. And frankly, one of the great things about our democracy is also one of the hardest things about our democracy: That is, we don’t always speak with the same voice.

“So he’ll hear a voice from one part of the government, it will be different for another part of the government and he’ll see to square the differences. It’s not a criticism, it just is who we are. The farther you are away from Kabul, the farther you are away from the palace, the farther you are away from the history of this country in the complexities of society, the easier it is to generalize, frankly.”

On the need for the Afghan government to better serve its people and stamp out corruption within its ranks:

“We’ve worked very hard, obviously, to build a capacity in those. But when your ability to survive the night, or put food on the table was — well, for many years are functionally, what tribe you were part of, or what group you were part of. And those patronage networks undertook economic opportunities which made them some respect, criminal patronage networks.

“They can only survive because institutions of governance are weak. And so now, we find ourselves in this — at this very moment when the future of the country relies on the strength of institutions. The criminal patronage networks recognized that their future, their survival can only be sustained by keeping these institutions weak. That’s the moment we find ourselves in, and the presidential directive on any corruption and government reform and the Mutual Accountability Framework came out of Tokyo.

“These created very helpful, very useful, both domestic and international expectations for reform. So we need to see how smoothing past the written word and the spoken word and start moving towards action. I think the president, if he were sitting here would tell you that they have achieved some good action, good results in his presidential decree. The Mutual Accountability Framework is constantly being audited to see that there’s progress on reform. But again, we’re still pretty fresh in the process and we’ve got to let this play out some more.”

On the future of the war and Afghanistan:

“Let me make sure I’m clear on this. Nothing is sure in a post-conflict society. But I think the indicators, as far as I’m concerned, are that we’re on the right trajectory. What you have to understand, what people have to understand is some of these reforms take a very long time. In an environment where human rights were crashed under multiple different invasions or civil wars or the Taliban, creating once again the kind of bias for human rights that we would all expect in the Western society, just doesn’t come easily to this country.

“Nothing will happen in this country without security. And that security is being purchased every single day by the Afghan National Security Forces. And then, on the platform of that security, this president has announced a program or platform that he intends to follow. Now, he’s moving forward in some areas, he’s having resistance in others, but we just have to expect this is going to take time. That’s where huge patience has to come in. That’s where the decade of transformation comes in.”

On the surge of “insider attacks” against Westerners that took place in 2012:

“The losses became to this particular means of attack became very troubling, very significant, and tragic. And while on the tactical level and on the operational level, we were able to deal with the problem. This was becoming a strategic crisis — a strategic crisis in capitals, a strategic crisis for the alliance — and the Taliban saw this. They knew this. They saw that. They saw that the future of the A.N.S.F. relied on our being close, partner or adviser inside the Afghan formations.

“We were very careful in our reaction to insider attacks. Not to wall ourselves off from the Afghans and create distance. I used to tell them, you may not be able to do anything about the linear distance that you have to deal with but there’s a lot you can do about your proximity and the closer you all feel to each other, the more secure you will be. And that’s in an environment where we’re transitioning to being advisers almost entirely across Afghanistan. That has to be one of the operative principles for philosophically how we’re going to live with the Afghans. You treat them like brothers. You live with them like they’re family. That reduces the unknowns, it reduces the potential for cultural affront, and it makes you more secure.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to keep a close eye on the environment. We still have these people called Guardian Angels because there are enemies in the ranks and they’re waiting to take that shot.”

“We took a lot of measures and the numbers are down. But I don’t in any way want anybody to become complacent about the number being down. I don’t want anyone to lift up on the security measures that they’re taking or reduce the attentiveness that they have to the environment around. So, I want everybody to be attentive and we’re going to periodically refresh our training both at the very lowest levels and for the units coming in. So, we’re not going to give up on this.”

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IHT Rendezvous: Worse Than Poisoned Water: Dwindling Water, in China's North

BEIJING — When 39 tons of the toxic chemical aniline spilled from a factory in Changzhi in China’s Shanxi province at the end of December, polluting drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people downstream along the Zhuozhang River and dangerously fouling the environment, it seemed a grave enough disaster. And it was.

So it’s hard to believe, perhaps, but in mid-January, just days after local officials belatedly revealed the spill to the public, a “rapid response team” sent by Greenpeace China to investigate found something even worse than the spill, the blogger Zhou Wei wrote in chinadialogue, an online magazine about China’s environment. Greenpeace found that the fast pace of water consumption by coal and chemical industries in the area is drying up all water resources further downstream. In fact, by 2015, water consumption by coal and chemical industry in China’s dry, western areas is set to use up a whopping quarter of the water flowing annually in the nearby Yellow River, which forms much of the border of Shanxi Province and is popularly known as China’s “Mother River,” wrote chinadialogue.

As chinadialogue wrote, citing Greenpeace, “Even more worrying than the chemical leak is the high water consumption of the coal and chemical industries in the area.”

The blog post, which chinadialogue says hasn’t been translated into English yet, cited Tong Zhongyu of Greenpeace’s East Asia office as saying that the situation was “growing more severe by the day.”

None of this may be news to hardened followers of China’s crumpling environment, but the scale of the water consumption in the water-scarce area is nonetheless shocking: The Tianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, which caused the spill, consumes water equivalent to the consumption of about 300,000 people per year, chinadialogue wrote, citing the Greenpeace investigation.

The coal and chemical industry is simply “a major water-eater,” the post said.

Water is a key challenge for the country as the racing economy guzzles it faster and faster. In the last 40 years, 13 percent of China’s lakes have disappeared, half its coastal wetlands have been lost to reclamation and 50 percent of cities left without drinking water that meets acceptable hygienic standards, the World Wildlife Fund said, according to another article in chinadialogue. The United Nations has singled China out as one of 13 countries with extreme water shortages.

“By any measure, the situation is bleak,” chinadialogue said. For now, the government is split between small-scale, practical solutions to the problem and huge engineering projects, such as the South-North water diversion scheme, which aims to transfer water from the rainy south to the dry north but has been widely criticized by environmentalists as too big, inefficient and ultimately unworkable.

“My heart is really out for the leadership trying to come up with solutions because China’s just so maddeningly complex,” Michael Bennett, an environmental economist, was quoted as saying. As evidence of serious efforts to solve the problem, Mr. Bennett pointed to widespread, small-scale, government-approved water conservation programs taking place around the country.

Will China solve its really serious water problems?

“The trend is in the right direction, the question is whether it’s going to be fast enough,” Mr. Bennett said.

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Afghan Airline, Kam Air, No Longer Under U.S. Ban

KABUL, Afghanistan — The American military on Monday reversed a recent decision to blacklist one of Afghanistan’s main airlines, Kam Air, on suspicion of drug smuggling, and it agreed to share details of its accusations with the Afghan government.

The turnaround came after days of Afghan criticism and what some Western officials described as a disagreement between the military and the American Embassy on the prudence of the ban, which would have forbidden any American military contracts with Kam Air. The prohibition came to light in news reports last week, and it was an embarrassment after a positive meeting between President Obama and President Hamid Karzai in Washington in which Mr. Karzai stressed the importance of Afghan sovereignty.

According to a statement released late Monday evening by United States Forces-Afghanistan, the military said that senior officials met with senior Afghan officials at the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, explaining the reasons behind the blacklisting and offering information about the company that led to the ban.

In return, the statement said, the Afghan government agreed to investigate Kam Air and take further action, if needed. Afghan officials could not be reached for comment.

The statement noted deference to the Afghan government’s sovereignty as one reason that it had lifted the ban. The United States military does not directly contract with Kam Air, but the lines are somewhat blurry because the military pays for many activities by the Afghan government. Banning Kam Air from military contracts cast a shadow over the company and posed difficulties for Mr. Karzai’s travel plans. He frequently charters Kam Air planes for official visits abroad, but he was forced to make other plans for his current visit in Europe, officials said.

On Monday, he met in London with Prime Minister David Cameron and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to discuss halting efforts to restart the peace process with the Taliban. The leaders reaffirmed support for establishing an office in Qatar to aid in talks with Taliban delegates there, and set a six-month deadline for progress, officials said.

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The Lede Blog: Two Iranian Space Monkeys Got Confused, an Official Says

A senior official at Iran’s space agency confirmed on Saturday that state media reports on the launching of a monkey into the thermosphere had used images of two different monkeys. The official insisted, however, that the monkey had survived the journey and that Iran was not trying to cover up a failed flight.

As The Lede explained on Friday, doubts about Iran’s claim that the monkey had survived the journey spread after journalists noticed that the monkey pictured in the first reports from state-run news organizations had a prominent mole over its right eye, before the launch, but had clear skin when it showed up at postflight celebrations broadcast on Iranian television the next day.

Video from Iranian television of the monkey that Iran says it launched into space.

The space agency official, Mohammad Ebrahimi, told The Associated Press in Tehran that the first images provided to Iran’s official news outlets to illustrate their reports had mistakenly shown another of the five monkeys that trained for the flight at the space agency — the one with the mole — and not the one that had actually taken part.

A report from Press TV, Iran’s English-language satellite news channel, broadcast on Monday used the still images of the first monkey.

A report on simian space travel broadcast on Monday on Press TV, Iran’s state-run news channel.

The second monkey was featured in a Press TV report broadcast on Tuesday.

A report on Iran’s space monkey broadcast on Tuesday by Press TV.

In his interview with The A.P., Mr. Ebrahimi insisted that the monkey that had made the flight was in good health and said that of several monkeys that had been trained for the flight, the one that seems least stressed for the journey had been chosen at the last moment. One of the photographs of the monkey with the mole over its eye did appear to show the monkey in distress while strapped into a launch seat.

The space agency did not, apparently, offer to disprove rumors that one of the monkeys had died by showing them both to the A.P. reporter on Saturday.

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Egypt’s Government Apologizes After a Beating Is Televised

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

A funeral protest on Saturday in Cairo for Mohammed Hussein Korani, 23, who died Friday night in clashes with the police. More Photos »

CAIRO — Egypt’s interior minister offered a rare apology on Saturday after officers under his command were seen on television beating a naked man two blocks from the presidential palace. But under what his family said was police coercion, the victim, Hamada Saber, said in an interview later that the officers had been helping rather than attacking him.

The spectacle of the beating quickly revived fury at Egypt’s police force, whose record of brutality helped set off the revolt against Hosni Mubarak, the former president, and served as a reminder that nearly two years later, the new president, Mohamed Morsi, had taken few steps to reform the police.

Mr. Morsi’s office issued a statement saying it was “pained by the shocking footage.”

More than 50 people have been killed over the last 10 days in fighting in several Egyptian cities, in some of the worst violence since the fall of Mr. Mubarak in 2011. The beating of Mr. Saber has provoked a different kind of outrage, crystallizing for many the collapse of order and civility that has derailed Egypt’s transition from its authoritarian past.

In the shifting versions of the attack given on Saturday, it was hard to know exactly what happened.

In video images, a group of riot police officers are heard cursing at Mr. Saber on Friday night as they beat him on the ground and drag him across a street to an armored vehicle. A witness, Mai Sirry, said that when she saw Mr. Saber, his pants were around his knees. In its initial statement, the Interior Ministry said it regretted the beating and called it an “individual attack” that did not reflect police doctrine.

Later, though, in a television interview, Mr. Saber gave an account of the beating from his hospital bed in which he said the officers had come to help as he was running from a group of protesters who had stripped and robbed him. They had apparently thought he was an officer, he said, and left him alone after deciding he was “just an old man.”

“I was afraid,” he said, adding that as he ran away from the protesters, officers came to help. He ran from them too, but they pulled him back, he said, telling him he would die if he did not let them help him.

A woman who identified herself as Mr. Saber’s daughter Randa, speaking Saturday on another Egyptian channel, said her father was being prompted to lie during the interview and was “afraid to talk.”

“We were with him” when he was attacked on Friday, she said. “They took his clothes off and started kicking him, beating him,” she said, referring to the police. “They dragged him and put him in the car. All this happened. What he says are lies.”

Speaking to local news media on Saturday, the interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, said that after Mr. Saber was released from the hospital, he would invite him to the ministry’s offices to offer his apologies. He repeated Mr. Saber’s account, though he still acknowledged that the officers’ conduct was “excessive” and said he had ordered an investigation.

The latest violence deepened the sense of crisis in Egypt, and it undermined efforts by the country’s quarreling political forces to settle their differences. After the clashes, supporters and opponents of President Morsi blamed each other.

On Saturday, just days after leaders of a secular-leaning opposition coalition sat down at a rare meeting with representatives of Mr. Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, the opposition group released a statement saying it was “aligned” with those who want “to topple the regime of tyranny, and domination of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In Tahrir Square early on Saturday morning, Mr. Morsi’s prime minister, Hesham Qandil, bore the brunt of the antigovernment anger. He was forced to cut short his visit to protest tents in the square after he was heckled, according to state media. His office said Mr. Qandil left to avoid creating a “pretext” for violence.

In a speech later in the day, the prime minister acknowledged the widespread perception that both the government and opposition were losing control. “Let us admit that the government, all the political forces, all the parties failed in containing the youth,” he said. “This is something that we all have to work on.”

At least one person was killed in the clashes on Friday, which broke up what had been a peaceful afternoon sit-in, when a small group of protesters, some wearing masks, tried to ram the gates of the presidential palace, according to video of the episode.

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting.

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Another Reset of Relations With Russia in Obama’s Second Term

MOSCOW — Four years ago, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., used an audience of world leaders at an annual security conference in Munich to propose a “reset” with Russia, the Obama administration’s first big foreign policy statement. But as Mr. Biden arrives in Germany for the same conference this weekend, the United States is quietly adopting a new approach to its old cold war rival: the cold shoulder.

The intense engagement on the reset led to notable achievements, including the New Start nuclear arms treaty and Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization. But after more than a year of deteriorating relations, the administration now envisions a period of disengagement, according to government officials and outside analysts here and in Washington.

The pullback — which may well be a topic of discussion when Mr. Biden meets with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on the sidelines of the conference — is a response to months of intensifying political repression in Russia since Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency last May and a number of actions perceived by Washington as anti-American.

Because American officials do not want to worsen the relationship and still hope for cooperation, they declined to publicly describe the plans. But within the administration it is taken for granted that the relationship with Russia is far less of a priority.

“We have real differences and we don’t hide them,” said Tony Blinken, who has served as Mr. Biden’s national security adviser and is now joining the president’s national security team.

Briefing reporters before the Germany trip, Mr. Blinken said: “We have differences over human rights and democracy. We have differences over — in a number of areas that have been in the media in recent days and weeks.”

The distancing began with the recent withdrawal by the United States from the “civil society working group,” one of 20 panels created in 2009 to carry out the reset between Moscow and Washington under an umbrella organization known as the Obama-Medvedev Commission.

If that step was barely perceptible outside diplomatic circles, the strategy will soon become far more obvious. American officials say President Obama will decline an invitation — publicly trumpeted by Mr. Lavrov and the Russian news media — to visit Moscow on his own this spring. Instead, he will wait until September, when the G-20 conference of the world’s largest economies is scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg, Russia.

And while Secretary of State John Kerry has yet to select his first overseas destination, officials said Russia had been ruled out.

The main goal seems to be to send a message that the United States views much of its relationship with Russia as optional, and while pressing matters will continue to be handled on a transactional basis, Washington plans to continue criticizing Russia on human rights and other concerns. As for the anti-Americanism, the new approach might be described as shrug and snub.

Nevertheless, Mr. Blinken said there was real potential to work through the differences. And American officials are clearly betting that Mr. Putin desires a prominent role on the world stage and will ultimately decide to re-engage.

But the chances of that seem slim. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, warned that a pullback would be a shirking of American responsibility to work with Russia to maintain global stability. He said that Russia wanted to improve economic ties and build a stronger relationship, but that the United States must stay out of Russia’s affairs.

“We have heard numerous times the word in Washington that Russia’s domestic affairs are not satisfactory,” Mr. Peskov said. “Unfortunately these voices cannot be taken into account here and we cannot agree with them. We are a genuine democratic country and we are taking care of ourselves.”

In the nearly three years since the signing of the New Start treaty, followed by Russia’s vote two months later at the Security Council in support of sanctions on Iran, American officials say only one major thing has changed: the return of Mr. Putin to the presidency.

Confronted by the emergence of a potent political opposition movement among Moscow’s urban middle class, Mr. Putin has taken steps since his inauguration last May to suppress political dissent. Many of those steps were also seen in Washington as anti-American and undermining human rights.

These included the prosecution and jailing of members of the punk band Pussy Riot; the decision to end more than 20 years of cooperation on public health programs and civil society initiatives run by the United States Agency for International Development; cancellation of a partnership to dismantle unconventional weapons, and approval of legislative initiatives clamping down on pro-democracy groups and other nonprofit organizations.

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington, and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.

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Sept. 11 Hearing Censorship Ordered Stopped

FORT MEADE, Md. — The military judge overseeing the prosecution of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other detainees accused of aiding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks ordered the government on Thursday to disconnect the technology that allows offstage censors — apparently including the Central Intelligence Agency — to block a public feed of the courtroom proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The order by the judge, Col. James L. Pohl of the Army, followed an interruption on Monday of a feed from the military tribunal courtroom during a hearing on a pretrial motion. The episode brought to light that unidentified security officials outside the courtroom could censor a feed of the proceedings that the public and the news media receive on a 40-second delay.

“This is the last time,” Colonel Pohl said, that any party other than a security officer inside the courtroom who works for the military commission “will be permitted to unilaterally decide that the broadcast will be suspended.”

He said that while some legal rules and precedents governing the tribunals might be unclear, there was no doubt that only the judge has the authority to close the courtroom. Colonel Pohl made clear he would not tolerate anyone having control over a censorship button in the case other than his courtroom security officer.

Separately on Thursday, Colonel Pohl ordered the Pentagon official in charge of the tribunals — Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, retired — to testify at a hearing next month. Defense lawyers are seeking to scuttle the charges and reboot the case, asserting that his original decision to refer the capital charges to the tribunal was flawed.

One of several relatives of victims who traveled to Guantánamo to watch the hearing, Phyllis Rodriguez, whose son Gregory Rodriguez was killed at the World Trade Center, said she was disturbed by the limits on the openness of the proceedings and difficulties that defense lawyers had in gathering information that could mitigate against death sentences. Ms. Rodriquez said she opposed death sentences on principle and was opposed to prosecuting the case in a tribunal.

But Matthew Sellitto, whose son — also named Matthew — was also killed in the attacks, called the process fair, saying the defendants would have already been executed by now in most countries. His wife, Loreen Sellitto, urged defense lawyers not to delay the proceedings, while describing the emotional experience of seeing the defendants in the courtroom.

“I didn’t expect them to look normal and have normal faces,” Ms. Sellitto said. “That scared me.”

In a related development, the Pentagon disclosed that earlier this week, Admiral MacDonald withdrew tribunal charges against three other detainees at Guantánamo. Accused of conspiracy and of providing material support to terrorism in connection with allegations related to explosives training, the three were among those arrested in a March 2002 raid in Pakistan that also captured a more prominent terrorism suspect, Abu Zubaydah.

The validity of bringing charges of material support and conspiracy in a tribunal — at least for actions before October 2006, when Congress approved them as triable offenses in a military commission — has been a point of sharp contention inside the Obama administration. A federal appeals court recently vacated two such verdicts from tribunal cases because such offenses were not recognized as international war crimes.

The chief tribunal prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, had asked Admiral MacDonald to withdraw conspiracy as one of the charges pending against the Sept. 11 defendants and focus on classic war crimes, like attacking civilians. But Admiral MacDonald refused, saying it would be “premature” to do so since the Justice Department — over General Martins’s objections — is still arguing in court that conspiracy is a valid tribunal offense.

Most of the attention on Thursday, however, was focused on continuing fallout from the revelation that there were offstage censors — something that even Colonel Pohl apparently had not known — and his order to “unconnect whatever wires need to be unconnected.”

Defense lawyers used the incident as new ammunition in their assertions that the tribunals are unfair.

On Thursday they asked Colonel Pohl to stop any further consideration of motions in the case until they all could learn more about what kind of technology is in place in meeting rooms and in the courtroom, and whether their confidential conversations with their clients and one another are private.

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The Lede Blog: Germans Press Morsi on Slurs Against Jews as Berlin Marks Somber Anniversary

Last Updated, 7:32 p.m. During a visit to Germany that coincided with somber commemorations of Hitler’s rise to power eight decades ago on Wednesday, Egypt’s president was pressed several times to explain anti-Semitic comments he made in 2010, when he called Israelis “bloodsuckers” and “the descendants of apes and pigs.”

As my colleagues Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish report, President Mohamed Morsi insisted that his comments had been taken out of context, when asked about them by a German reporter at a joint news conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. “I am not against Judaism as a religion,” he replied. “I am not against Jews practicing their religion. I was talking about anybody practicing any religion who spills blood or attacks innocent people — civilians. I criticize such behavior.”

Before her meeting with the Egyptian president, Ms. Merkel spoke at the opening of a new exhibition on the Nazi era at the Topography of Terror Museum and urged Germans to remember that Hitler was appointed chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, with popular support.

A video report from the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on commemorations of Hitler’s rise to power on Jan. 30, 1933.

Speaking at the museum, which is on the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, Ms. Merkel said, “There is no other way to say this: the rise of the National Socialists was made possible because the elite and other groups within German society helped and, most importantly, because most Germans at least tolerated their rise.”

Later in the day, when Mr. Morsi sat down for a discussion of the upheaval in the Arab world after an address to the Körber Foundation, he was again reminded of how seriously Germans take his inflammatory remarks about Zionists and Jews.

Morsi’s speech in Berlin to be broadcast here: http://t.co/1NOFtcPB

— arabist (@arabist) 30 Jan 13

As video of the event shows, the first question put to the Egyptian president by Georg Mascolo, editor in chief of Der Spiegel, concerned “this infamous video” of Mr. Morsi calling Jews “bloodsuckers.” In response to Mr. Mascolo’s question, “did you really say that or not?,” Mr. Morsi first complained that he had already answered the question “five times today” and reiterated his claim that the comments needed to be put into context.

He then went on to essentially defend his rhetorical attacks on Jews and Zionists as an appropriate response to the killing of civilians in Gaza by Israel’s military during the offensive that preceded his remarks in 2010. “The bloodshed of innocent people is universally condemned, now and in the future. The colonizing of the land of others is to be condemned as unacceptable, and the right to self-defense is also guaranteed” as a human right, Mr. Morsi said.

Mr. Mascolo then asked about a report in his magazine this week, in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood said that Mr. Morsi, in his previous role as a senior leader of the organization, was ultimately responsible for the publication of even more inflammatory remarks in articles on the society’s Web site, Ikhwan Online. In one such article from 2010 that was discovered last week by an anti-Islamist American Web site, a Brotherhood official called the Holocaust a myth fabricated by American intelligence agents and “the biggest scam in modern history.”

That Spiegel report was based on an interview with Abdel-Jalil el-Sharnoubi, a former editor of the Brotherhood’s Web site, who said that Mr. Morsi had used the same words about Zionists in 2004 and had never objected to hate speech against Jews on the site.

Sharnoubi wasn’t surprised by the Morsi hate video. “Agitation against the Israelis is in keeping with the way Morsi thinks. For the Morsi I know, any cooperation with Israel is a serious sin, a crime.” Morsi’s choice of words is also nothing new, says Sharnoubi. As proof, he opens his black laptop and shows us evidence of the former Muslim Brotherhood member’s true sentiments.

Indeed, the video gaffes do not appear to be a one-time occurrence. In 2004 Morsi, then a member of the Egyptian parliament, allegedly raged against the “descendants of apes and pigs,” saying that there could be “no peace” with them. The remarks were made at a time when Israeli soldiers had accidentally shot and killed three Egyptian police officers. The source of the quote can hardly be suspected of incorrectly quoting fellow Brotherhood members: Ikhwan Online, the Islamist organization’s website.

Few people are as familiar with the contents of that website as Sharnoubi, who was its editor-in-chief until 2011. The current president became the general inspector of the organization in 2007, says Sharnoubi. In this capacity, Morsi would have been partly responsible for the anti-Jewish propaganda on the website, which featured the “banner of jihad” at the time and saw “Jews and Zionists as archenemies.”

Without pointing to any specific factual errors, Mr. Morsi claimed that the Spiegel article was inaccurate and reiterated that he was “not against Judaism or Jews,” but reserved the right to criticize Zionism in the strongest terms.

Belief in the conspiracy theory that the Holocaust was either completely fabricated or vastly exaggerated to justify the creation of Israel is not unusual in Egypt — nor is deep suspicion about the Central Intelligence Agency. As The Lede reported in a previous post, that was evident in a survey carried out in 2008 by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a collaborative project of research centers in various countries managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked more residents of 17 nations the question, “Who do you think was behind the 9/11 attacks?” Egypt was the only country where a majority said that either the United States government or Israel was to blame, with 43 percent saying the Jewish state was responsible.

Mr. Morsi was also met in Berlin by protesters who objected to his government’s continued use of tear gas and bullets against demonstrators.

Demo gegen #Mursi in Berlin startet jetzt. You are not welcome here! http://t.co/pCyhgffz via @Pedam73 #mursiberlin #Ägypten

— Heike Hänsel (@HeikeHaensel) 30 Jan 13

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London Journal: Welcome to Britain. Our Weather Is Appalling.

LONDON — The 100 Years’ War actually lasted 116 years. Pantomime dames tend to be men dressed as women. The hovercraft was invented by Sir Christopher Cockerell. York Minster has very nice stained glass windows. Margaret Thatcher successfully tamed the unions and turned London into a powerful international financial center by deregulating the financial markets.

These and other interesting pieces of information can be found in “Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents,” a revised book issued by the Conservative-led government that, starting in March, will form the basis of the country’s revised immigration test. To pass, applicants who want to become citizens or live here permanently will have to answer 18 of 24 questions correctly.

Judging from the sample questions released by the government, the test may end up being relatively easy. But the guidebook, crammed with information, reflects the Conservative view that too many people are trying to immigrate to Britain, and that once they arrive they are failing to appreciate the country properly.

“The new book and test will focus on events and people who have contributed to making Britain great,” Mark Harper, the immigration minister, said last weekend.

In announcing the revised guidebook, Mr. Harper went out of his way to criticize the old one, “Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship,” which was issued by the rival Labour government in 2007.

While it contains some history, the Labour version tends to concentrate less on the excitements of the British past than on the practicalities of the British present. (Plus, in its own partisan contribution, it says that Mrs. Thatcher was a “divisive figure” whose policies might have “caused a massive decline in industry.”)

“The new book rightly focuses on values and principles at the heart of being British,” Mr. Harper said. Referring to the old book, he said: “We’ve stripped out mundane information about water meters, how to find train timetables and using the Internet.”

Indeed, a chapter called “Everyday Needs” in the old Labour version gives advice on things like what to do if you feel sick (“call your G.P.,” is one possibility); how to rent a house; and, weirdly, how best to refer to garbage. “Refuse is also called waste, or rubbish,” it explains.

Roger Helmer, a member of the European Parliament from the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe U.K. Independence Party, said it was about time the old manual was retired.

“They’ve taken out a lot of references to New Labour achievements, which is a jolly good thing,” Mr. Helmer said in an interview.

But Don Flynn, director of the Migrants’ Rights Network, an interest group, said the new version propagated a snobby, atavistic, superior approach to British culture and history. He singled out as particularly objectionable the historical chapter, called “A Long and Illustrious History,” whose first page depicts a rousing scene from the Battle of Trafalgar.

“The chapter which primes applicants’ knowledge about history is permeated with the sort of Whig views of the world-civilizing mission of the British realm which have encouraged generations of Etonians and Harrovians to play their role in the great imperial enterprise,” Mr. Flynn told The Guardian, referring to Eton and Harrow, two elite boarding schools.

In the section, would-be immigrants are taken on a speedy 56-page tour of the past 100 centuries, beginning with the Stone Age (“People came and went, following the herds of deer and horses which they hunted”) and ending with a flourish at the climax of the 2010 election. (“The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, became prime minister.”)

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Labour’s most important politician in the past 20 years, gets a paragraph; his successor, Gordon Brown, gets a sentence.

The chapter sometimes skates shallowly over contentious issues. Discussing the often bloody, often traumatic shedding of the component parts of the British Empire in the 20th century, for instance, it says happily that there was, “for the most part, an orderly transition from empire to commonwealth, with countries being granted their independence.”

As The Guardian pointed out, “There is no mention of the million or more people who died in communal and religious violence at Britain’s withdrawal during the 1947 partition of India.”

Britain is actively trying to find ways to tighten its borders. The British news media reported recently that the government, terrified that the lifting next year of European Union restrictions on Bulgarians and Romanians living and working here would result in an influx of unwanted people, is considering an advertising campaign pointing out Britain’s bad qualities, like its climate.

A spokesman for the Home Office did not deny the reports, but said that officials “are working closely with other government departments to look at the pull factors that may encourage E.U. nationals, including those from Bulgaria and Romania, to come to the U.K.”

Mr. Helmer of the U.K. Independence Party scoffed at the government’s attitude.

“Rather than simply say, ‘We only want 500 of those people coming in,’ ” he said, choosing a random number and referring to Romanians and Bulgarians, “we have to run an ad campaign saying that it rains in Britain. For heaven’s sake, how ridiculous is that?”

The guidebook does its best to promote what the government considers Britain’s best qualities (rain is not among them). But filled as it is with proud references to great kings, great achievements and great prime ministers, it is strangely at odds with the quirky, creative, nonmilitary image Britain presented of itself at last summer’s ecstatic and much-loved Olympics opening ceremony.

Keith Vaz, a Labour member of Parliament who is chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, said the Conservatives had taken “a very odd approach” to their guidebook and questioned whether it was right that a government department should unilaterally get to decide how to present British history to the outside world.

“This is the kind of work that is best written by people who are not party political,” he said in an interview.

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Japan to Ease Restrictions on U.S. Beef

Reflecting diminishing fears over mad cow disease, Japan eased its decade-old restriction on imports of American beef on Monday. But industry experts say beef producers have many more challenges to overcome if they are going to reverse a prolonged slump that has pared the nation’s herd to its lowest level in 60 years and sent prices soaring.

A Japanese government council that oversees food and drug safety cleared a change in import regulations on Monday that would permit imports of meat from American cattle aged 30 months or younger, rather than the current 20 months, according to materials distributed at the council’s meeting in Tokyo.

The change is set to take effect on Feb. 1 for American beef processed after that date, and shipments could start arriving in Japan in mid-February, according to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture. Bans remain on parts of cattle considered to carry a higher risk of transmitting the disease.

Japan, the world’s largest net importer of food, slapped a ban on American beef in 2003 after bovine spongiform encephalopathy, an illness more commonly known as mad cow disease, was found in a single cow in Washington State. Humans are thought to catch the disease’s fatal human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, by eating meat, including the brain and spinal cord, from contaminated carcasses.

Japan eased the ban in 2006 but only for meat from cattle 20 months or younger, an age limit American exporters said had no scientific basis. Japanese officials argued that the incidence of the disease was higher in older animals.

Aside from the reduction in exports, ranchers have also been grappling over the last half-dozen years or so with rising feed prices —as ethanol producers drove up the price of corn — and with drought that has parched grazing land and deprived their animals of water. The recession and changing consumer tastes contributed to the woes. While the industry has had boom and bust cycles lasting on average four to five years, the current decline is firmly entrenched.

“Previous cycles of production and prices going back 100 years related to the particular workings of the beef industry and were usually self-correcting,” said Derrell Peel, professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State. “But the current cycle is largely due to external factors and that is really why we are at this historic low.”

Cameron Bruett, the spokesman for one of the largest beef processors, JBS, welcomed Japan’s decision, saying it would help increase business certainty and reduce complexity for the company’s beef production, which operates in Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the United States. “While the declining herd remains a challenge for the industry, any time you increase access to additional consumers that benefits the whole supply chain,” Mr. Bruett said.

JBS has eight processing facilities in the United States and Canada. While another major producer, Cargill, announced plans two weeks ago to close a plant in Texas — one of 10 it has in the United States — Mr. Bruett said JBS has no closure plans.

Japan’s decision will mark a bright spot at the annual gathering next week in Tampa of what Chandler Keys, a beef industry consultant, calls “the hat and boots crowd,” or the members of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. 

“It should be a shot in the arm to the market, which will be helpful,” said Bob McCan, a rancher who will be named the association’s president-elect at that meeting. Mr. McCann and his family operate a ranch in Victoria, Tex., with more than 3,600 head of Braford cattle, down from 5,000 six years ago. “Everyone looks at the high price of beef and says we must be making money, “ he said. “But profitability is more difficult due to the drought that started in Texas, the biggest cattle producing state, almost five years ago and has since widened into the Midwest.”

That has raised the cost of production, as corn used in feed has become more scarce and animals have to rely on pumped water rather than water holes.

“The bottom line is that the beef production system we have used for the last 40 or 50 years depends heavily on the incentive of very cheap grain,” Professor Peel said. “Now we don’t have cheap grain, and we are seeing fundamentally higher production costs that I don’t think are going to go away.”

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Britain Warns Its Citizens in Somaliland to Flee

LONDON — Citing a “specific threat to Westerners,” the British government issued a warning on Sunday for any of its citizens living in Somaliland to flee the breakaway territory that lies between Ethiopia and the Gulf of Aden, on the northern tip of the Horn of Africa.

The notice came only days after Britain and other European nations issued urgent warnings to their citizens to leave the Libyan city of Benghazi, 2,500 miles northwest of Somaliland, because of what Britain described as “a specific, imminent threat to Westerners.”

A person who has been briefed on the new British warning said that a terrorist organization, most likely the Shabab, had threatened to kidnap foreigners in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. As the Shabab fighters have been routed from parts of Somalia by African Union forces, many have moved north, to Somaliland and the semiautonomous Puntland region of northeastern Somalia, Western intelligence officials have said.

The Foreign Office in London linked its Benghazi warning on Thursday to the French military intervention against Islamic militant rebels in Mali. Its advisory then said there was a risk of retaliatory attacks against Western interests in the region in the wake of the French campaign in Mali and the attack on a remote gas plant in Algeria, described by some of those claiming to be its masterminds as a response to events in Mali.

There was no repeat of the link to the Mali conflict in the new British warning on Somaliland, only a brusque note appended on the Foreign Office Web site saying, “We cannot comment further on the nature of the threats at this time.”

But Africa experts in London said there was little doubt that a common thread in the two warnings was the high-profile role the British government had taken in its response to the surging tempo of Islamic militancy in North Africa.

Britain was the first European country to pledge support for the French effort in Mali, deploying two C-17 military transport aircraft to carry French troops, vehicles and equipment to Mali. On Friday, while renewing its vow not to join in ground combat in Mali, Britain said it had deployed a military spy plane to the region to bolster French intelligence gathering.

But it has been Prime Minister David Cameron’s strident warnings about the events in Mali and Algeria and their significance as milestones in the metastasizing threat of Islamic militancy that has attracted the greatest attention to Britain.

Describing it as a “global threat,” he has said that it will require a “global response” that will last “years, even decades, rather than months,” and he has warned other countries, including the United States, not to underestimate the gravity of the challenge.

At the height of the gas plant siege, in which six Britons are believed to have died, Mr. Cameron said that Al Qaeda’s ambition was to establish “Islamic rule” across the Sahel, the vast region stretching more than 3,000 miles from the Atlantic in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east, and that the militants’ ambitions were a threat not only to the nations involved, but “to us,” meaning Britain, the rest of Europe and the United States.

It was in that context that the Benghazi warning, and now the Somaliland one, were issued, Africa experts in London said.

Somaliland has been in international limbo since a secessionist rebellion seeking independence from Somalia erupted 20 years ago, and its history throughout that period has been marked by assassinations, abductions and bombings.

Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Nairobi, Kenya.

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