Spill in China Lays Bare Environmental Concerns

Adam Dean for The New York Times

A member of the Handan Winter Swimming Association, which has sued over a chemical spill.

HANDAN, China — The first warning came in the form of dead fish floating in a river.

Then officials in this city got confirmation that a chemical spill had taken place at a fertilizer factory upstream. They shut off the tap water, which sent residents into a scramble for bottled water. In the countryside, officials also told farmers not to graze their livestock near the river.

The spill, which occurred on Dec. 31, affected at least 28 villages and a handful of cities of more than one million people, including Handan. Officials here were irate that their counterparts in Changzhi, where the polluting factory was located, had delayed reporting the spill for five days. For the past two months, Changzhi officials and executives at the company running the factory, Tianji Coal Chemical Industry Group, have generally stayed silent, exacerbating anxiety over water quality.

The conflict over the Changzhi spill has drawn attention to the growing problems with water use and pollution in northern China. The region, which has suffered from a drought for decades, is grappling with how industrial companies should operate along rivers. Local officials are shielding polluting companies and covering up environmental degradation, say environmentalists.

“Problems with water weren’t so serious before, but they have become much worse with industrial consumption,” said Yin Qingli, a lawyer in Handan who filed a lawsuit in January against Tianji, which uses water to convert coal to fertilizer at the factory in Changzhi.

Environmental degradation has led many Chinese to question the Communist Party’s management of the country’s economic growth. Addressing the problem is one the greatest challenges for the administration of Xi Jinping, the new chief of the Communist Party. Environmental issues will most likely be on the agenda at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, scheduled to begin on Tuesday.

The results of an official investigation into the Tianji spill were announced on Feb. 20 by Xinhua, the state news agency, which reported that a faulty hose had resulted in the leakage of about 39 tons of aniline, a potential carcinogen, from the fertilizer factory. Thirty tons were contained by a reservoir, but nearly nine tons leaked into the Zhuozhang River, which feeds into the Zhang River that runs to Hebei Province, where Handan is, and Henan Province. The Xinhua report said 39 people had been punished, including Zhang Bao, the mayor of Changzhi, who was removed from his post. But the party chief, Tian Xirong, the city’s top authority, was recently promoted to deputy director of the provincial Parliament.

Some critics say officials may be slow to divulge information because the acting governor of Shanxi Province, where Changzhi is, is Li Xiaopeng, the “princeling” son of Li Peng, a powerful Communist Party elder. At a news conference in January after news of the spill had emerged, the younger Mr. Li urged officials to make safety a top priority.

Handan officials first got a tip about a potential spill on Jan. 4 from a water management agency upstream. But when they tried contacting Changzhi officials, there was no response. “After more than 30 calls, we still weren’t able to reach them,” a Handan environmental official told Xinhua. Only the next day did Changzhi officials agree to meet with Handan officials.

At least two managers of Tianji have been fired, but the company, which is the foundation of Changzhi’s economy, appears to have suffered no other significant consequences. It is one of many companies in China’s booming coal-to-chemicals industry, in which a water-intensive gasification process is used to convert coal to chemicals that are critical for a wide range of products. The process results in large amounts of wastewater that is supposed to be treated and then contained.

After sending a team to Handan in January, Greenpeace East Asia issued a report on the spill. It said that there were about 100 coal-to-chemical factories on the upper reaches of the Zhuozhang River. “There is a history of clashes between heavily water-consuming coal-to-chemical factories and citizens downstream who are trying to compete for water to drink,” the report said. Larger factories like those of Tianji use 2,000 to 3,000 tons of water per hour, equivalent to the amount of water that more than 300,000 people use in a year.

The factory in Changzhi dumps more than six million tons of wastewater per year, about 30 percent of the water taken from the river, according to Greenpeace. The wastewater is supposed to drain into a receptacle.

Amy Qin and Patrick Zuo contributed research from Handan and Beijing.

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At War Blog: Remembering a Silent Success in Afghanistan

December in the mountains of southern Afghanistan greeted me and my men with strong and seemingly endless gusts of wind. The frigid temperatures were equally unforgiving. Our living quarters were constructed out of cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting, which didn’t create much of an escape. The highlight of my day, despite the obvious threat, was leading patrols as a squad leader. The physical activity kept me comfortably warm and allowed me to distance my mind from our frosty reality.

Despite daily patrols, it took me a few months to build rapport with the residents of Kunjak in Helmand Province. During the first month of my deployment in 2010, barely any villagers talked to me. This is when my interpreter, who we called H.B., suggested I start inviting the elders to our base for a meeting, or shura. He assured me this would build a mutual trust.

Soon, my Sunday mornings consisted of two to three hours of conversing with dozens of village elders. At 9 a.m., my interpreter and I would greet them as they climbed the steep and sandy hill to my remote outpost. To present a less hostile environment, I chose to meet them without my body armor or weapon.

We sat outside, suffering in the wind together. My interpreter would make chai, but I always brewed a pot of Starbucks coffee and offered some to my guests. Some liked it, some didn’t. I would like to think my generosity was appreciated.

The shuras were full of requests for new wells and mosques. But if there are two things Afghanistan has a plethora of, it’s those two things. I chose to propose something different, which thrilled them all.

We would build a school.

The Taliban had prevented them from being able to send their kids to school for years. With one suggestion, I had won over the villagers.

As the sun rose the following day, despite not having a school yet, I had over a dozen children waiting outside my base. Many had traveled from afar to attend what they thought was the first day of class. The last thing I wanted to do was send the children away. We invited them on the base, and H.B. taught them the Pashtu alphabet on our dry-erase board. It was on that Monday morning I realized I had to do something fast.

Our supplies were stored in a small tent at the back of our outpost, but I made the decision to move the tent to the base of our hill to serve as the school. By positioning it there, we could maintain its security, protecting it from Taliban attacks.

At 8:45 every morning, my Marines patrolled the school and used our metal detectors to sweep for improvised explosive devices. The safety of the children had to be paramount or our efforts would be for nothing. As the days passed, a growing number of children ranging in the age from 4 to 10 arrived for school. Within weeks we were teaching more than 40 boys and girls. During our time in Afghanistan, not a single child was injured at our school, and for the last four months of my deployment, the school was a giant success.

The Afghan National Police officers attached to my outpost did not participate much in the security of the school. In fact, many of them disapproved of it because it catered to girls as well as boys. I fear that as the American military presence draws down in Afghanistan, initiatives like our school will be abandoned by the Afghan government or destroyed by the Taliban. While the district mayor of Musa Qala knew of our efforts at the school, we received little to no local government support. Requests for a teacher, supplies and a permanent structure were either ignored or forgotten.

Stories like the one of our school tend to never make the limelight. Far too often the news is only about the horrors of war, or mistakes made by NATO troops, rather than their successes. It is easy to focus on the negative, especially as the United States plans to withdraw most of its forces by the end of 2014.

As I left Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, dozens of Afghans were attending our shuras, and they were full of varying requests. They no longer asked for wells and mosques. Now they wanted a community center and a larger school. I left before I could make those dreams come true for them. But I hoped the Marines who relieved me would be able to fulfill them.

I came home and listened and watched the news a lot. I kept hoping I would see or hear something good from Afghanistan. To no avail; the stories were depressing. After spending seven months in Afghanistan, I now knew good things were happening, but they just weren’t being shown.

I hope that my school wasn’t short-lived, and I would like to think that it is still operating safely. Whether it is or not, I still fondly remember our efforts. They led to one of the silent successes that have happened and, I believe, will continue to happen in Afghanistan.

Thomas James Brennan is a military affairs reporter with the Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. Before being medically retired this fall, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, and is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Follow him on Twitter at @thomasjbrennan.

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Lens Blog: Gustav Arvidsson's Photos of Landless Peasants in Colombia

Land is no small thing in Latin America. Dynasties flush with wealth and power have arisen from plantations and cattle ranches owned by a select few families. For those left on the margins, taking over a tiny, fallow plot long forgotten by its owners may be the only thing keeping their family alive.

Until someone pushes them out.

Gustav Arvidsson has been following the plight of landless peasants in Colombia, where bureaucracy, chicanery and deadly force have been used to dislodge entire villages of subsistence farmers. Where families once grew rice, cassava and other basic crops, large corporations have swept in with palm oil plantations, cattle ranches and mines. The result has been devastating, Mr. Arvidsson said, in a country where armed conflict and economic hardship have displaced four million people — the second-largest number of such internally displaced people after Sudan.

Resolving the complexities of land tenure in the developing world has been seen by some policy experts as critical to uplifting the most impoverished sectors of society. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has long argued that finding ways to grant land titles to subsistence farmers and others can set them — and their country — on the path to stability and growth.

“A farmer once told me, ‘a farmer without land is not a farmer,’ ” Mr. Arvidsson said in a telephone interview from his native Sweden. “This is all about inequality.”

He started his project in 2010, when he was living in Bogotá while freelancing for Swedish publications. He read an article in The Guardian about a palm oil plantation whose owners had evicted 120 families from the land they had farmed for more than 10 years. Outcry over the eviction, which had been carried out by the police in riot gear, led the Body Shop cosmetics company to drop the firm as a supplier.

Soon, Mr. Arvidsson traveled to the area to track down the displaced families, who had moved to a spit of land along the Magdalena River, about an hour away on horseback. Where they once fed themselves, they had to rely on foreign relief groups for basic nourishment.

“It’s so tiny they can’t grow anything,” he said. “They don’t have space to grow their crops or be self-sufficient. To make it worse, they’re on this peninsula which gets flooded every year when the river rises and kills their crops.”

Mr. Arvidsson’s project has expanded in subsequent trips to look at other communities of displaced people. In the country’s western region he visited “peace villages,” settled by people who have declared their community off-limits to firearms and violence. Last August he went to a region where a huge open-pit coal mine is set to expand — but only after having to relocate several communities.

Even for long-established communities, convoluted contracts and bureaucracy have often made it difficult to sort out who the rightful owners are. And for those who acceded to pressure — either financial or physical — what they get in return often is never enough to make up for what they once had.

The Colombian government has passed legislation to help people who have been dislodged from their land. But human rights groups have voiced concern that the law is insufficient in its scope and benefits. People may get papers saying they own a particular plot, but that means little if those who pushed them out in the first place are still there, or nearby.

“If you want to be cynical, you can say this law was created to make all these land takeovers valid,” Mr. Arvidsson said. “People have papers, but many of them will be forced to sell the land anyway because they dare not return. Then everything gets validated.”

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Mr. Arvidsson’s “A Fragile State” first came to our attention by way of fotovisura.

Follow @GustavArvidsson, @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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The Lede: Video of Pope Benedict’s Public Farewell

An English translation from the Vatican of Pope Benedict XVI’s last general audience before his formal resignation on Thursday.

As our colleagues, Rachel Donadio and Alan Cowell report, Pope Benedict XVI held his final general audience in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, a day before he withdraws from the public for a cloistered life of prayer and meditation.

Before tens of thousands of people gathered in the square, the pope acknowledged the difficulties he faced during his papacy, describing “moments of joy and light but also moments that were not easy.”

From the full text of his address:

When, almost eight years ago, on April 19th, [2005], I agreed to take on the Petrine ministry, I held steadfast in this certainty, which has always accompanied me. In that moment, as I have already stated several times, the words that resounded in my heart were: “Lord, what do you ask of me? It a great weight that You place on my shoulders, but, if You ask me, at your word I will throw out the nets, sure that you will guide me” – and the Lord really has guided me. He has been close to me: daily could I feel His presence.

[These years] have been a stretch of the Church’s pilgrim way, which has seen moments joy and light, but also difficult moments. I have felt like St. Peter with the Apostles in the boat on the Sea of Galilee: the Lord has given us many days of sunshine and gentle breeze, days in which the catch has been abundant; [then] there have been times when the seas were rough and the wind against us, as in the whole history of the Church it has ever been – and the Lord seemed to sleep. Nevertheless, I always knew that the Lord is in the barque, that the barque of the Church is not mine, not ours, but His – and He shall not let her sink. It is He, who steers her: to be sure, he does so also through men of His choosing, for He desired that it be so. This was and is a certainty that nothing can tarnish. It is for this reason, that today my heart is filled with gratitude to God, for never did He leave me or the Church without His consolation, His light, His love.

On Twitter, the pope’s account, @Pontifex, which has more than 1.5 million followers, posted:

If only everyone could experience the joy of being Christian, being loved by God who gave his Son for us!

— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) 27 Feb 13

Shortly after he announced his resignation, he asked on Twitter for people “to pray for me and for the church, trusting as always in divine providence.”

From St. Peter’s Square, people posted photographs from the crowd, including a shot of the pope arriving in the so-called popemobile, on his way to deliver his final farewell.

St. Peter’s Square completely full of people! #vatican #pope #last #speaking http://t.co/m2RBoGNDJy

— Marko Style (@MarkoStyle44) 27 Feb 13

This is how close I got to the Pope http://t.co/BfOXkddkrE

— Becca Liudzius (@becksky123) 27 Feb 13

A panorama from a few hours before the Pope’s arrival. http://t.co/sf0ipbneks

— Pius Pietrzyk (@PiusOP) 27 Feb 13

Pius Pietrzyk, a Dominican priest from the United States, shared multiple photos from the square on his blog, and wrote about his experience in the square and the words in the pope’s farewell address that touched him the most.

I followed what I could of the audience in Italian. (It is already available online.) A number of lines struck me, but more than anything else probably was when he said, “the Barque of the Church is not mine, it’s not ours, it’s His and he will not let it flounder.”

As my colleague, Laurie Goodstein reports, the church faces, among its many challenges as cardinals gather to select a new pope, the wounds caused by sexual abuse cases involving minors all over the world that have been mishandled for years.

In St. Peter’s Square, the pope also spoke briefly in English to the crowd.

The pope spoke in English, and asked Catholics to pray for both him and the new pope.

I offer a warm and affectionate greeting to the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors who have joined me for this, my last General Audience. Like Saint Paul, whose words we heard earlier, my heart is filled with thanksgiving to God who ever watches over his Church and her growth in faith and love, and I embrace all of you with joy and gratitude. During this Year of Faith, we have been called to renew our joyful trust in the Lord’s presence in our lives and in the life of the Church. I am personally grateful for his unfailing love and guidance in the eight years since I accepted his call to serve as the Successor of Peter. I am also deeply grateful for the understanding, support and prayers of so many of you, not only here in Rome, but also throughout the world.

The decision I have made, after much prayer, is the fruit of a serene trust in God’s will and a deep love of Christ’s Church. I will continue to accompany the Church with my prayers, and I ask each of you to pray for me and for the new Pope. In union with Mary and all the saints, let us entrust ourselves in faith and hope to God, who continues to watch over our lives and to guide the journey of the Church and our world along the paths of history. I commend all of you, with great affection, to his loving care, asking him to strengthen you in the hope which opens our hearts to the fullness of life that he alone can give. To you and your families, I impart my blessing. Thank you!

The identity of the new pope will revealed from this balcony after the conclave, likely within 2 weeks. http://t.co/40Q9oWAz3f

— Eric Reguly (@ereguly) 27 Feb 13

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 26

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South Korea’s Park Geun-hye Warns North Against Nuclear Pursuits

Park Jin-Hee/Getty Images

Park Geun-Hye, South Korea's president, salutes during her inauguration ceremony in front of the National Assembly building on Monday in Seoul.

SEOUL, South Korea — The country’s new president, Park Geun-hye, was sworn into office on Monday, facing far more complicated fissures both within South Korea and with North Korea than her father did during his Cold War dictatorship, which ended with his assassination 33 years ago.

Ms. Park, 61, is the first child of a former president to take power here, as well as the first woman, a remarkable turn for a country where Parliament, the cabinet and corporate board rooms are predominantly male and the gender income gap is the widest among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In her address, Ms. Park called for the revival of an economic boom her father, Park Chung-hee, had once overseen and urged North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

After the ceremony, in front of the National Assembly, her motorcade moved through a downtown Seoul packed with well-wishers. Her return to the presidential Blue House, her childhood home, was a triumphant moment for her and old South Koreans loyal to her father. His quashing of dissent and censorship of the press in his 18-years of iron-fisted rulewere much maligned among South Koreans during the country’s struggle for democracy.

She was elected Dec. 19, thanks largely to the support of South Koreans in their 50s and older who grew disenchanted with fractured politics and recalled how, South Korea under the dictatorship had begun its evolution from a country where per-capita income was just $100 a year into what is now a global economic powerhouse whose smartphones, cars and ships are exported around the world.

But while her father, Ms. Park begins a single, five-year term facing sharp criticism from younger and liberal South Koreans who have no fear of speaking out. When she named Queen Elizabeth I of Britain as her role model, they filled blogswith derision for her sense of entitlement. They openly called her election a return to the past, arguing that the seeds of some of the country’s biggest problems, such as the unruly influence of family controlled conglomerates, were sown under her father and accused her of glorifying his rule.

South Korea’s political rivalries are freewheeling, evidenced most recently by the arrest of a 76-year-old Christian pastor last week who claimed that Ms. Park had sex with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il during her visit to Pyongyang in 2002. His videotaped allegations were circulated widely through the Internet.

Meanwhile, two weeks before Ms. Park’s inauguration, North Korea detonated an underground nuclear device, testing her campaign promise to reach out to the North to help end five years of diplomatic silence and high tension on the divided Korean Peninsula under her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, a fellow conservative.

In her inaugural address, “North Korea’s recent nuclear test is a challenge to the survival and future of the Korean people, and there should be no mistake that the biggest victim will be none other than North Korea itself.”

Speaking before a large crowd that was entertained by the rapper Psy of “Gangnam Style” fame on the lawn in front of the National Assembly, she urged North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions without delay, “instead of wasting its resources on nuclear and missile development and continuing to turn its back to the world in self-imposed isolation.”

Ms. Park invoked her father’s era, calling for a “second miracle on the Han River.” The first was the transformation under him of Seoul, the capital city, which straddles the river, from the rubble of the 1950-53 Korean War into an industrialized metropolis. He nurtured a handful of family controlled companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, as engines of an export-driven economy. These companies have grown into globally recognized conglomerates.

Now, decades later, his daughter vowed to bring South Korea’s slowing economy “rejuvenation” and “revival,” terms favored under her father. But she nodded to the biggest complaints of ordinary South Koreans — widening economic inequality and the conglomerates’ overpowering expansion at the cost of smaller businesses — grievances, saying the second Han River miracle should be based on “economic democratization.”

Ms. Park promised to end unfair practices by big businesses and strengthen small and medium-sized enterprises so that “such businesses can prosper alongside large companies.”

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In Last Sunday Address as Pope, Benedict Says He Will Continue to Serve

Andrew Medichini/Associated Press

Pope Benedict XVI delivered his final Sunday address from the window of his apartment overlooking St. Peter's Square.

VATICAN CITY — In his last Sunday blessing before he retires, Pope Benedict XVI reassured Catholics that he was not abandoning them but would continue to serve the church even in his retirement.

Romans, pilgrims and curious tourists filled St. Peter’s Square on Sunday for Benedict’s second-to-last public appearance before he steps down on Thursday, the first pope in six centuries to do so willingly.

Reading from prepared remarks as he stood at the window of the Apostolic Palace, Benedict that said he was being called by God “to climb up on the mountain” and to dedicate himself more to “prayer and meditation.”

“This doesn’t mean abandoning the church,” the pope added, to the applause of the crowd. “On the contrary, if God asks me, this is because I can continue to serve” the church “with the same dedication and the same love which I have tried to do so until now, but in a way more suitable to my age and to my strength.”

Cardinals from around the world have begun gathering in Rome to greet Benedict before he retires at 8 p.m. on Thursday. At that point, the cardinals will meet to discuss when to begin the conclave to elect his successor.

One member of the crowd in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Jan Cartwright, 61, said she had traveled to Rome from Wales. “We’ve come for the rugby, but we’re Catholic, and it is history, isn’t it,” she said.

Ms. Cartwright said she was surprised that the pope had decided to resign. “We have the queen,” she said. “No one in the royal family would step down, they just go on until they die, really.” But she said she admired Benedict’s decision. “I think it’s a brave thing to do,” she said. “He’s an old man.”

Maria Concetta Campanella from Rome was also in the crowd. “It’s a historic moment,” she said. “It teaches us humility. He teaches us that we can’t sit in our chairs forever, that when the time is right, we have to leave the chair.”

Vito Ugo, an Augustinian monk holding a Brazilian flag, was taking pictures with two of his fellow monks, all dressed in long black robes. “We feel great emotion to be here,” he said.

Asked whether he hoped the cardinals would elect a South American pope in the conclave, Brother Ugo smiled. “It’s what God wants,” he said humbly.

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Italy Set to Vote for a New Parliament

ROME — As Italian voters head to the polls on Sunday and Monday to elect a new Parliament and three regional governments, the prevailing mood is one of anger and disillusionment.

The fledgling, anti-establishment parties that campaigned on promises of radical change could benefit from the voters’ discontent, but the lack of a clear winner could also leave Italy mired in uncertainty.

“Italians feel frustration, anger, but also some hope for renewal,” said Nicola Piepoli, who runs a polling company. They are frustrated, he said, because their taxes are rising but they see no improvements in their “economic and social life,” and they are angry because candidates did not address “concrete problems” during the campaign, focusing instead on “futile, absurd things.”

“But many still hope for some change,” Mr. Piepoli added, explaining the growing support for populists like the comedian Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement, and for smaller parties like Civil Revolution, led by Antonio Ingroia, a former prosecutor, and Act to Stop the Decline, a movement guided by Oscar Giannino, a journalist.

Mostly though, the mood is dark among Italians fed up with protracted political scandals and disinclined to believe election promises because they are so rarely fulfilled.

(On Friday, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, campaigning to return to office, made a new promise: he said that if he won, he would personally refund an unpopular property tax paid by Italians in 2012. “I will take four billion euros of my own fortune and give it to Italians,” he said on television, a pledge of about $5.3 billion.)

“There’s no one to vote for, and if I went to the polls I’d choose the least-worst candidate, so I prefer not to vote,” said Concetta Rossi, a recruiter for hotel employees in Rome. “It’s never been this bad.”

The center-left Democratic Party, led by Pier Luigi Bersani, a low-key former industry minister, is expected to place first but is unlikely to win enough seats to govern without a coalition. The centrist movement backing the current prime minister, Mario Monti, is a possible ally, but even together they might not prevail in the Senate because the electoral law allocates seats based on regional votes. Lombardy and Sicily, where polls suggest that the right is strong, are crucial.

For the past year, Mr. Bersani, a former Communist who has played up his Catholic upbringing, has supported Mr. Monti’s reformist agenda, though sometimes grudgingly. He has backed Mr. Monti’s commitments to the European Union for greater fiscal responsibility, but would review policies that might have hurt workers and retirees.

Investors and economic analysts have their own concerns about the potential instability that could emerge in the absence of a strong government.

In its 15 months in office, Mr. Monti’s technocratic government tried to pass much-needed reforms, but it failed to stimulate the economic growth required to pull Italy out of a persistent recession. On Friday, the European Commission said in its winter forecast that Italy’s economy would shrink by 1 percent in 2013, double its November estimate.

Gains made by anti-establishment parties, including the Five Star Movement, could stall Mr. Monti’s overhauls, and a strong showing by the center-right party led by Mr. Berlusconi could derail the austerity measures meant to keep Italy on a fiscally responsible track.

“The fear remains that the general election produces a significant no-confidence vote on the current austerity plan and the need to reform further,” Raj Badiani, an economist with IHS Global Insight, wrote in a research report last week. “Without the prospect of a stable coalition government with a credible reform agenda, Italy could be forced to reconstruct a technocratic government to keep the markets at bay.”

Alessandro Amadori, the director of Coesis, which conducts marketing and opinion polls, said the “emotional mapping” of Italy highlighted the population’s “disenchantment and rage,” and even its resignation. “People don’t think that much will change. They hope for a sign, but they don’t have high expectations.”

Mr. Amadori added: “These elections will probably mark a moment of transition, rather than long-term change. Italians are looking for something that will shake things up, but what will emerge, we still don’t know.”

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Russia Sends Aid to Mali as Fighting Flares

MOSCOW — Russia sent a planeload of food, blankets and other aid to war-stricken Mali on Friday, a day after Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov warned about the spread of terrorism in North Africa, which the Russian government has linked to Western intervention in Libya.

Mr. Lavrov met on Thursday with the United Nations special envoy for the region, Romano Prodi, to discuss the situation in Mali, where Russia has supported the French-led effort to oust Islamic militants. But Russia has also blamed the West for the unrest and singled out the French in particular for arming the rebels who ousted the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

“Particular concern was expressed about the activity of terrorist organizations in the north, a threat to regional peace and security,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement after the meeting. “The parties agreed that the uncontrolled proliferation of arms in the region in the wake of the conflict in Libya sets the stage for an escalation of tension throughout the Sahel.” The Sahel is a vast region stretching more than 3,000 miles across Africa, from the Atlantic in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east.

In a television interview earlier this month, Mr. Lavrov said, “France is fighting against those in Mali whom it had once armed in Libya against Qaddafi.”

French forces quickly drove Islamist fighters out of the population centers of northern Mali — Timbuktu and Gao, in particular — when France began a military intervention in the country last month. Those dispersed fighters, who are members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and several allied groups, have now begun a small campaign of harassment and terror, dispatching suicide bombers, attacking guard posts, infiltrating liberated cities or ordering attacks by militants hidden among civilians.

On Friday, suicide attackers detonated two car bombs near the town of Tessalit, in Mali’s far north, according to news reports, while Islamist fighters clashed with Malian soldiers further south in Gao, where fighting has flared in recent days.

The twin suicide bombings in Tessalit killed three fighters for the M.N.L.A., an ethnic Tuareg armed group that has allied with the French forces, a spokesman for the group told Agence France-Presse. The attackers were killed as well. On Thursday, a guard and an attacker were killed in a car bombing in Kidal, south of Tessalit, that appeared to target a civilian fuel depot, France’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.

Responsibility for that attack was claimed by the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, an offshoot of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. The group said it would continue to press its fight, and also intended to retake Gao, hundreds of miles to the south.

“More explosions will happen across our territory,” a group spokesman, Abu Walid Sahraoui, told A.F.P. “Our troops have been ordered to attack,” he said. “If the enemy is stronger, we’ll pull back only to return stronger, until we liberate Gao.”

In central Gao late Thursday morning, Malian and French forces killed about 15 militants from “infiltrated terrorist groups” that had seized the town hall and court, according to France’s Defense Ministry. The initial firefight involved only Malian soldiers and militant fighters, the ministry statement said, but several French armored vehicles and two helicopters were later involved.

Two militants were killed outside a checkpoint north of the city after “sporadically” attacking the Nigerien soldiers standing guard, the Defense Ministry said. As many as six Malian soldiers were reported wounded.

On Friday, sporadic gunfire and at least two rebel rocket attacks were reported in Gao, according to a Malian officer cited by The Associated Press. Most of the militants fled to the east of the city aboard seven vehicles, the officer said.

Russian officials have pointed repeatedly to the unrest in North Africa and political turmoil in Egypt as evidence that the Western-supported Arab Spring has created a dangerous and chaotic situation and potential breeding grounds for terrorists. Russia has also used the examples of Libya and Egypt to justify its opposition to any Western effort to oust the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Russia voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the deployment of African troops in Mali, but Russia has also stressed that the resolution required the consent of the Malian government.

Russia’s state-controlled weapons company, Rosoboronexport, has been selling small arms to the Malian government and is considering a request to buy additional matériel, including armor and helicopters.

The plane dispatched to the Malian capital, Bamako, by Russian’s Emergency Situations Ministry was carrying about 36 tons of aid cargo, including 45 tents, 2,000 blankets, canned food, cereals and rice.

David Herszenhorn reported from Moscow and Scott Sayare from Paris.

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IHT Rendezvous: Europe's Jobless Youth: Should the Old Make Way?

LONDON — A British minister has advised people aged over 60 to go to university and update their skills if they want to continue working.

With youth unemployment on the rise across Europe, it might seem an odd time to be encouraging older people to keep working rather than take a well-earned break and free up jobs for a younger generation.

But with pension funds in deficit and the number of over-60s on the rise, governments and individuals are under pressure to accept that a graying work force will have to work longer.

“There is nothing stopping older people applying for university,” David Willetts, Britain’s higher education minister, said this week. “If they can benefit from it, they should have that opportunity.”

The rules have been eased to allow people of any age to take out student loans to help finance their university education.

“If people need it in order to keep up to date with changes in their jobs, that is an opportunity they are going to take,” the Daily Telegraph quoted the minister as saying.

The advice comes at a time, however, when growing numbers of young Europeans are emigrating in order to find jobs that are unavailable at home.

“From Ireland to Greece, young Europeans are now the ones desperately seeking exit strategies from economies in free fall,” according to The Guardian.

László Andor, the European Union’s employment commissioner, recently quoted jobless figures indicating that 1 in 4 young people under 25 were out of work, a total of 5.7 million, in the 27 member states.

In a special report on Thursday the EurActiv Web site said the Continent faced a digital brain drain as a consequence of a generation of educated young people leaving Europe to seek work elsewhere.

It said the situation was particularly bad in southern states where unemployment was highest. In countries such as Spain, the mass exodus of young, educated people amounted to a brain drain “the likes of which has not been seen since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.”

For those who stay at home — whether they are 25 or 65 — there is clearly no guarantee that university degrees will get them jobs.

When a British coffee chain recently advertised for staff at one of its new stores, it received 1,701 applications for just eight jobs. Among the rejected candidates were a number of jobless new graduates.

Should older people be encouraged to keep working? Or should they step aside to widen the job market for jobless newcomers? Tell us what you think.

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Former Lebanon Minister and Syrian Co-Defendant Could Face Death Penalty

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A Lebanese military court judge on Wednesday charged a former government information minister and his suspected Syrian accomplice of a conspiracy to kill Lebanese political and religious leaders and foment sectarian strife, recommending the death penalty for both.

The announcement about the defendants, Michel Samaha, the former minister, and Mr. Mamlouk, a Syrian security official, came amid increased sectarian tensions in Lebanon that are directly tied to the nearly two-year-old conflict in neighboring Syria, which occupied Lebanon for nearly three decades until 2005 and still deeply polarizes Lebanese politics.

Lebanese officials have said explosives were found in a car belonging to Mr. Samaha, who was arrested on Aug. 9. Mr. Mamlouk was accused of plotting with Mr. Samaha to transport the explosives into the country. An arrest warrant for Mr. Mamlouk was issued this month. His whereabouts is unclear.

It also was unclear how long a trial would last or whether the judge’s recommendations of punishment would be followed if the pair were found guilty. But the Lebanese government’s handling of the politically sensitive case carries its own risks of aggravating sectarian tensions in this country.

On Tuesday, a group claiming to represent a faction of Syrian rebels threatened to lob mortar shells into Lebanon to attack Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that is also Lebanon’s most powerful political party, in retaliation for what rebels say is a Hezbollah military campaign against rebels in Syria. The statement warned Lebanese citizens, especially in the Shiite, pro-Hezbollah border town of Hermel, to stay away from Hezbollah positions that it said were shelling the rebels across the border.

A cross-border skirmish between Hezbollah and Syrian rebels could be a dangerous escalation in Lebanon, which has struggled to stay out of the conflict in Syria.

Representatives of the main group of rebel fighters, the Free Syrian Army, issued conflicting statements, with one saying the threat was a provocation fabricated by Hezbollah, and another confirming it and giving Hezbollah 48 hours to end its attacks or face retaliation.

Hezbollah is closely allied to the Syrian government, while its Sunni rivals in Lebanon largely support the majority Sunni rebels. Rebels say Hezbollah has stepped up its military activity inside Syria, taking over numerous villages near the border. Hezbollah says its fighters have been active only in Syrian villages where Lebanese citizens live and are defending themselves.

With the Syrian conflict threatening to destabilize the region, Russia’s foreign minister said on Wednesday that his country would work with the Arab League to bring about direct talks between Syria’s government and the armed opposition in a bid to end the deadly civil war.

Speaking after a meeting with Arab League officials in Moscow, the minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, told reporters there were “signs of tendencies for dialogue from both the side of the government and the opposition,” Agence France-Presse reported.

Russia has long called for a political solution, but Mr. Lavrov’s statement seemed to indicate a new level of engagement in pushing for talks. Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moallam, is scheduled to visit Moscow on Monday for talks, and the president of Syria’s main opposition coalition, Moaz al-Khatib, is expected to visit Moscow in March, Mr. Lavrov said.

Yet it is unclear whether Mr. Moallem and Mr. Khatib have the full backing of their own sides for talks. Mr. Khatib’s group, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, insists that it will speak only with members of Mr. Assad’s government without “blood on their hands.” Lakhdar Brahimi, the special Syria peace envoy representing the United Nations and the Arab League, has appeared to support Mr. Khatib’s position, calling on the government to send an “acceptable delegation.”

But on Wednesday, Mr. Lavrov said that the two sides should not impose preconditions or “say that I am going to talk to this person but not that one.” He was speaking after a meeting of the Russia-Arab Forum from which the representatives of the rebels’ main Arab backers, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, were absent.

In Syria on Wednesday, rebel shells appeared to reach new areas in Damascus, activists and witnesses reported. Goran Tomasevic, a photographer for The Associated Press who has recently produced images of fighting in the Damascus suburbs as one of the few foreign journalists with rebel fighters there, described a deadly stalemate between two well-coordinated fighting forces that he said was reminiscent of wars that gutted cities like Sarajevo and Stalingrad.

“Rebel fighters in Damascus are disciplined, skilled and brave,” he wrote in an account published on Wednesday. “In a month on the front-line, I saw them defend a swath of suburbs in the Syrian capital, mount complex mass attacks, manage logistics, treat their wounded.”

But, he added, “as constant, punishingly accurate, mortar, tank and sniper fire attested,” government soldiers, often fighting at close range, “are also well drilled, courageous — and much better armed.”

Both state media and opposition activists reported on Wednesday that mortar rounds had hit the Tishreen sports stadium in the downtown neighborhood of Baramkeh. The state news agency, SANA, said the explosion killed an athlete from the Homs-based Al Wathba soccer team as he was practicing.

Government forces hit a rebel command center in a suburb east of the capital on Wednesday, injuring a founder of the Liwaa al-Islam brigade, Sheik Zahran Alloush, the brigade said in a statement.

It said the attack “won’t stop or weaken the will of the battalion” and asked for “God’s help to reach the criminals for retribution.”

Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 19

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 18

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Letter From Washington: A Sensible Deal Can Avert a 'Sequester' Disaster

WASHINGTON — Democrats and Republicans in Washington agree: It would be a disaster if the “sequester,” with its more than $1 trillion of cuts to U.S. defense and domestic spending, took effect on March 1, as scheduled.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta says the reductions to the Pentagon budget would undermine national security; the cuts to already pared-down domestic spending will set back critical needs like cancer research; Head Start, the preschool program for low-income children; and funding for the Border Patrol. The U.S. economic recovery would be impeded, at a cost of as many as 750,000 jobs.

President Barack Obama says the cuts “are a really bad idea.” In a rare display of accord, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, says the “meat ax” approach would “weaken” the nation’s defense. Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner were two of the authors of the 2011 sequester agreement, figuring a sensible alternative would have emerged by now.

It has not, and the sequester could kick in on March 1, even if only temporarily. It is a textbook case of Washington dysfunction.

Both sides created this debacle, but there is no equivalency of blame today. Any alternative must emphasize cuts in mandatory entitlement programs and add revenue. Mr. Obama, publicly and privately, has left no doubt that he will surrender the Democrats’ political trump card and accept cuts in entitlement programs like Medicare, which offers health coverage to the elderly and disabled. Republican leaders insist that they will not give any ground on new revenue, without which there can be no deal.

An impasse would be unsettling to markets and the economy in the long run, even if deficit hawks exaggerate the severity of the crisis.

“The 10-year budget outlook remains tenuous,” says Bill Gale, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “Even if seemingly everything goes right — in economic terms and political terms — we are still on the edge of dangerously high debt and deficit levels.”

It is not hard to devise a feasible alternative, if the irrational politics are put aside. First, any deficit-reduction plan should wait two years. That is because, as broke as Washington is, the deficit has already been narrowed by almost $2.5 trillion over the coming decade. In the short term, the government needs to bolster the shaky recovery by spending more on infrastructure and other projects.

Then, it should put in place a long-term $1 trillion deficit-reduction package, half of which is achieved through entitlement cuts, one-third through tax increases and the rest by shrinking discretionary programs, chiefly defense, which are funded through annual appropriations from Congress. That would send an encouraging sign to markets and help the economy, but only if it is a long-term plan, rather than the one-year fix that Senate and House Democrats are proposing.

Entitlements or mandatory programs like Medicare and Social Security, the government retirement system, make up almost 60 percent of the U.S. budget and are the engine of chronic deficits. Getting $500 billion over 10 years would not be pain-free, though it does not have to hurt those who can least afford to sacrifice.

The president has said he would go along with the scope of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission’s proposed cuts to Medicare. That is about $350 billion. It would not require cuts for the most needy but would contain a means test for more affluent senior citizens. A sensible deal would not increase the eligibility age and would introduce more stringent cost controls and hit up drug companies for a little more.

Half the remaining savings could come from changing the formula for the cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other inflation-adjusted entitlements. That is a realistic proposal if protections are carved out for the very poor and the very elderly. The Center for American Progress has offered workable specifics. The rest could come from cutting agricultural subsidies and other entitlement programs.

The White House would buy this, and it has been the dream of Republicans for years.

On taxes, Republicans contend that the fiscal cliff deal in January, which raised taxes on the wealthy by $600 billion, means any further revenue-raisers are off the table.

A number of party leaders also pay lip service to the Bowles-Simpson recommendations, which proposed $1 of new revenue for every $2 of spending cuts, after eliminating former President George W. Bush’s high-end tax cuts. If these Republicans have their way and the sequester or any alternative to it is exclusively spending cuts, that ratio would be more than four to one.

The easiest way to get those revenues would be a plan resembling the administration’s proposal to limit deductions to the 28 percent rate and then exclude charitable deductions from that cap. That would raise more than $300 billion.

The other Republican argument is that any tax changes should await broad tax reform. But limiting deductions would not narrow their options or dash their hopes of using changes to the tax code as a vehicle for lowering rates.

There are endless possibilities for curbing tax breaks in a revenue-neutral measure that also lowers rates, such as scaling back big-ticket items like the home mortgage deduction, the health care exclusion or the preferential treatment for capital gains. Other changes are politically appealing, like ending the carried-interest loophole for rich investors or the tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.

What should not be cut is nondefense discretionary spending, like veterans’ programs, medical and scientific research and education. Even without the sequester, these programs are headed toward their lowest level, as a percentage of the economy, since the Eisenhower administration.

An entitlements and revenue-based deal, however, would approximate the Bowles-Simpson targets, and engender confidence in markets and businesses. The politicians could then turn to tax reform, immigration, gun violence, maybe a modest climate-change measure, and substantive oversight.

As a bonus, a successful deal might also lessen public cynicism about Washington.

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Russians Seek Clues and Count Blessings After Meteor Blast

CHEBARKUL, Russia —After a brilliant flash illuminated the sky on Friday morning like a second sun, Alyona V. Borchininova and several others in this run-down little town in the rust belt of western Siberian wandered outside, confused and curious.

They followed the light’s path to the town’s lakefront, where they trudged for about a mile over the open ice until they came to a startling sight: a perfectly round hole in the ice, about 20 feet in diameter, its rim glossy with fresh ice that had crusted on top of the snow.

“It was eerie,” Ms. Borchininova, a barmaid, said Saturday. “So we stood there. And then somebody joked, ‘Now the green men will crawl out and say hello.’ ”

Russians are still coming to terms with what NASA scientists say was a 7,000-ton chunk of space rock that came hurtling out of the sky at 40,000 miles an hour, exploding over the Ural Mountains, spraying debris for miles around and, amazingly, killing no one.

As the Russian government pursued the scientific mysteries of Friday’s exploding meteor by sending divers into the inky waters of the hole in Lake Chebarkul on Saturday, residents reacted with a kind of giddy relief and humor over their luck at having survived a cosmic near miss.

NASA estimates that when the meteor entered the atmosphere over Alaska, it weighed 7,000 to 10,000 tons and was at least 50 feet in diameter, a size that strikes the Earth about once every hundred years. They said it had exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT.

The shock wave injured hundreds of people about 54 miles away in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, most from broken glass; collapsed a wall in a zinc factory; set off car alarms; and sent dishes flying in thousands of apartments. Broken windows exposed people and pipes to the Siberian winter; many residents focused Saturday on boarding windows and draining pipes, to preserve heating systems.

If pieces of meteorite reached the surface, as NASA said was likely, they fell largely into the sea of birch and pine trees of Siberia, now blanketed in snow.

Lake Chebarkul is one of four sites the government believes to felt a significant impact, the minister of emergency situations, Vladimir Pushkov, told Interfax.

As the sun rose Saturday, the snow crystals sparkling in the sun like a million tiny mirrors, steam wafted from the site, apparently related to the work of divers, but the lake yielded little to shed light on the mystery.

Mr. Pushkov later said divers found nothing on the lake bed, but did not rule out meteor shrapnel as the cause of the hole.

“Experts are studying all possible places of impact,” he said. “We have no reports of confirmed discoveries.”

The discovery of a confirmed fragment could help scientists better apprehend the composition of the meteor, perhaps shedding light on how close it was to descending further before exploding from the heat, or of hitting the surface, potentially causing vastly more casualties in this region of military and industrial towns, a major nuclear research site and waste repository and other delicate infrastructure.

In Chelyabinsk, the worst hit town, most who had sought medical attention were released from hospitals by Saturday, the Ministry of Health reported. A total of 1,158 people, including 298 children, asked for medical assistance. Of these 52 people were hospitalized. By Saturday afternoon, 12 adults and three children remained in hospitals.

Health officials evacuated to Moscow a woman who broke two vertebrae after falling down a flight of stairs. One man’s finger was cut off by broken glass.

Overshadowing these misfortunes, a fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was being hailed as a hero for saving 44 children from glass cuts by ordering them to crawl under their desks after she saw the flash. Having no idea what it was, she executed a cold war-era duck-and-cover drill, with salutary results.

Ms. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated by glass that severed a tendon in her arm, Interfax reported; not one of her students suffered a cut.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 15

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Way of the World: Technology, Trade and Fewer Jobs

NEW YORK — President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech this week confirmed it: The pre-eminent political and economic challenge in the industrialized democracies is how to make capitalism work for the middle class.

There is nothing mysterious about that. The most important fact about the United States in this century is that middle-class incomes are stagnating. The financial crisis has revealed an equally stark structural problem in much of Europe.

Even in a relatively prosperous age — for all of today’s woes, we have left behind the dark, satanic mills and workhouses of the 19th century — this decline of the middle class is more than an economic issue. It is also a political one. The main point of democracy is to deliver positive results for the majority.

All of which is why understanding what is happening to the middle class is urgently important. There is no better place to start than by talking to David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Autor is one of the leading students of the most striking trend bedeviling the middle class: the polarization of the job market. That is a nice way of saying the economy is being cleaved into high-paying jobs at the top and low-paying jobs at the bottom, while the middle-skill and middle-wage jobs that used to form society’s backbone are being hollowed out.

But when I asked him this week what had gone wrong for the U.S. middle class, he gave a different answer: “The main problem is we’ve just had a decade of incredibly anemic employment growth. All of a sudden, around 2000 and 2001, things just slowed down.”

Academics can usually be counted on to have a confident explanation for everything. That is why I was surprised and impressed by Mr. Autor’s answer when I asked him where the jobs had gone. “No one really understands why that is the case,” he said.

It was a winningly modest reply. But work by Mr. Autor and two colleagues — David Dorn, a visiting professor at Harvard, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego — is starting to untangle the two forces that both the conventional wisdom and the academy agree are probably responsible for a lot of what is happening to the middle class.

Those forces are technological change and trade. The easy assumption is that the two go together. After all, trade needs technology — it is hard to imagine outsourcing without the Internet, sophisticated logistics systems and jet travel. Technology is dependent on trade, too: The opportunity for global scale is one reason technological innovation has yielded such outsize rewards.

But in a careful study of local labor markets in the United States, Mr. Autor, Mr. Dorn and Mr. Hanson have found that trade and technology had very different consequences for jobs.

“We were surprised at how distinct the two were,” Mr. Autor said. “We found that the trade shock had a very measurable impact on the employment rate. Technology led to job polarization, but its employment effect was minimal.” Trade, at least in the short term, really did ship jobs overseas. Technology did not kill jobs per se, but it did hollow out those essential jobs in the middle.

The big surprise, at least for believers (like me) in the classic liberal economic view that trade benefits both parties, is the strong and negative impact of globalization on U.S. workers — Mr. Autor estimates it accounts for 15 to 20 percent of jobs lost.

“The rise of China was such a huge change. It really did matter,” Mr. Autor said. “First, China is such a huge country. Two, China was 40 or 50 years behind in technology, so it had a lot of catching up to do. Third, it happened so fast.”

What is striking, and frightening, is the extent to which, at least in the U.S.-China trade relationship, the knee-jerk, populist fears intellectuals tend to deride actually turned out to be true.

“U.S.-China trade is almost a one-way street. This trade relationship doesn’t clearly give you the benefit that you can sell a lot of stuff to your trade partner,” Mr. Dorn said. “If you talk to someone who is somehow involved in the promotion of free trade, they may say that maybe the headquarters of Apple benefits. That may be true. But the first-order effect is of job loss.”

The impact of technology is more familiar. Mr. Autor, Mr. Dorn and Mr. Hanson found that it did not create fewer jobs overall, but it did hollow out the jobs in the middle.

“Technology has really changed the distribution of occupation. That doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with reduced unemployment, but it creates a more bimodal set of opportunities,” Mr. Autor said. “There is an abundance of work to do in food service and there is an abundance of work in finance, but there are fewer middle-wage, middle-income jobs.”

What is challenging about both of these trends, and what makes the hollowing out of the middle class a political problem as well as an economic one, is how different they look depending on whether you own a company or work for one.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss. That profound difference is why politics in the rich democracies are so polarized right now. Capitalism and democracy are at cross-purposes, and no one yet has a clear plan for reconciling them.

Chrystia Freeland is editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.

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International Military Officials Investigate Afghan Deaths

KABUL, Afghanistan — International military officials are investigating two episodes in which as many as 11 Afghan civilians may have been killed in what appeared to be American-led military actions.

In the more lethal episode, Afghan officials said 10 civilians were killed overnight in Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan in a village where two known Taliban commanders were visiting family members.

“Ten civilians were killed last night in a joint Afghan and American operation that took place in Chogam Valley in Shigal District,” said Fazullah Wahidi, the provincial governor. He said four women, one man and five children between the ages of 8 and 13 were killed; four teenagers were wounded, three of whom were girls.

Increasingly over the last two years, foreign insurgents, sometimes with links to Al Qaeda and other non-Afghan groups, have taken refuge in Kunar and neighboring Nuristan Province. Both provinces have a long border with Pakistan, and insurgents can hide easily in the rugged and forested mountain terrain Mr. Wahidi said the target of Kunar operation was a Taliban leader named Shahpour, “a known and really dangerous Afghan Taliban commander with links to Al Qaeda operatives in Kunar” and another Taliban commander, known as “Rocketi,” a Pakistani citizen from the Northwest Frontier Province. Both men were killed in the attack.

Mr. Wahidi said that the operation was not coordinated with Afghan security forces, but that locally hired Afghan paramilitaries were involved in the raid, which included an airstrike and a ground operation. Sometimes other United States government agencies rather than the military use special commandos.

Maj. Adam Wojack, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said they had no information on the operation but “were aware of the reports” of civilian deaths and were looking into it.

Local officials in Kunar said that Shahpour was believed to have links to Al Qaeda and narrowly escaped being killed last year when the Americans attacked another Al Qaeda-linked Taliban commander known as Abu Hafez Al-Najde, who also went by the name Commander Ghani. Shahpour was the Taliban leader in charge of nearby Dangam district but was visiting relatives at the time of the raid.

People from Chogam, who brought injured from the remote village where the attack took place to the main hospital in the provincial capital of Asadabad, described a precise but damaging hit on two adjacent houses.

“Two homes were totally destroyed; air power was used during the operation,” said a man who brought a boy with cuts to the hospital for treatment, but refused to give his name. “There are still dead bodies under the rubble and human flesh scattered in the area.”

The other episode in which an Afghan civilian was killed by foreign troops occurred on Tuesday during daylight hours.

It took place as NATO-led forces were checking a stretch of heavily traveled highway between Kandahar and Spin Boldak for explosives during a road clearance mission and shot at an oncoming car that did not stop when signaled to do so, Major Wojack said.

An Afghan policeman, Taj Mohammed, the local Border Police commander, corroborated much of the ISAF account, but did not see the shooting himself. He said the car was carrying people from a wedding party.

Major Wojack said that the forces had followed standard procedure of signaling to the car to stop. After the driver stopped, he then started to accelerate toward the convoy, at which point the soldier ISAF shot at the car, Mr. Wojack said.

Reporting was contributed by Taimoor Shah in Kandahar and by an employee of The New York Times in Kunar Province.

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India Ink: Image of the Day: Feb. 12

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The Lede: Latest Updates on the Pope’s Resignation

The Lede is providing updates on Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement on Monday that he intends to resign on Feb. 28, less than eight years after he took office, the first pope to do so in six centuries. (Turn off auto-refresh to watch videos.)

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