At War Blog: In Common

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Lance Cpl. Benjamin Whetstone Schmidt was killed in Afghanistan on Oct. 6. He was a 24-year-old native of San Antonio, a Marine scout sniper and a son of proud parents. Like many others, Corporal Schmidt volunteered for the combat tour that cost him his life because, as he explained to his friends and family, he wanted to go back to protect his fellow Marines.

Even before it emerged that he had been killed by friendly fire, his explanation had struck me because my son Ricky had given the same reason for extending his commitment in order to make his last deployment, though luckily for us it ended well. At the time, I had told him that he had done quite enough and that maybe it was time to leave the Marines and to go back to college. But he said he? had to go talk to the “Afghanistan dude:” the gunnery sergeant who would explain his options.

A few days later, as that discussion was related to me, Ricky, who had already served four years, was told he was free to leave the Marines — if he was comfortable with letting the younger guys he had helped train go into battle without having him there to guide and protect them. And, of course, that sealed it. I had warned him that the “dude” would be better skilled in the art of persuasive guilt than any grandmother or Catholic school nun ever could be, but I knew my words would have no more weight than the breath that conveyed them.

My son never met Corporal Schmidt, but they were not exactly strangers. The corporal’s father, Dr. David Schmidt, is well known in San Antonio as the team physician for the Spurs of the National Basketball Association. But, in a much less publicized role, he is also the team physician for the Trinity University Tigers, the Division III football team that my son joined when he returned home safely from Afghanistan and went to college.

In early September, Ricky had injured his shoulder in practice and was being treated by Dr. Schmidt. During office visits, they talked about football, the Marines, Afghanistan and, of course, Dr. Schmidt’s son. Corporal Schmidt had spent three semesters at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth before enlisting, just as Ricky had spent a year at the University of Connecticut. Benjamin Schmidt felt he was not ready for school and needed to distinguish himself in some other way before finishing his education; Ricky had felt the same way two years before.

Corporal Schmidt had also been a football player at Alamo Heights High School, a school that my daughter had attended before she also went to T.C.U. Dr. Schmidt described his son as handsome, complex and thoughtful, and very funny. But the words that would come to haunt Ricky were his own, when he told Dr. Schmidt just weeks before the scheduled end of his son’s deployment that he should not worry, adding that “Lance Corporal Schmidt will be O.K.”

On Oct. 7, Ricky called me, distraught on hearing the news of Corporal Schmidt’s death, and asked, “What can I ever say to Dr. Schmidt now that he’s not O.K.?” I told him that his reassurance was not a promise broken but a comfort, and that he was not accountable for Dr. Schmidt’s loss. But Ricky could not let it go, Nor, I suppose, could Corporal Schmidt have done so had their fates been reversed, an almost imponderable situation that I have now considered too many times to count. These Marines, all of them, are forever part of an organization that instills an ingrained responsibility to protect one other as both its principal weapon and its shield. And so for this one Marine, now a college sophomore, even being at home a half a world away did not soften the sting of this tragedy.

He wrote to Dr. Schmidt that night:

I do not know what to tell you, Dr. Schmidt, I have no idea, the only thing I can think to say is what I would hope somebody tell my father if my time was up: You see, over there, life doesn’t seem the same, not for us, the wins and the losses are too surreal to really hit home. We talk about “home” we talk about everything that that word means, or we think it means to us, “Ah man when I get back…,” but they are just fantasies. They are distant, and they are strictly when you have literally nothing better to do. The only thing that matters out there is the present, the guys you are with, and the idea of something greater. I believe that your son is not much different than me in this regard, not even a little. Your son is a hero, a true hero. Many people, such as me, have the burden of coming back, and fading away, forgotten. Your son will never be lost this way, he will live forever. There are many good men alive today because of a great man; and their stories, legacies and lives are a gift from him. My deepest condolences sir.

This year, with the end of the Iraq war, coming home is a common thought among us all. Still, skeptics see it as a ploy, strategically set to occur at the beginning of a national election year. Others see it as a victory and a promise kept. But to the troops and the families, from Iraq and Afghanistan, coming home is all that is on their minds. Dr. and Mrs. Schmidt, I want you to know that your son Benjamin is also on mine.

This is the fourth post that Tom Cassone has contributed to At War. Read his other posts here. If you have a loved one serving overseas and would like to contribute an essay about your experience, please write to us at AtWar@nytimes.com

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At War Blog: In Libya, Modified Weapon Becomes Less of a Threat

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An article in The New York Times last week discussed an American proposal to buy heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from the many armed groups and people in Libya who are holding them. Even the older variants of these missiles, known in nonproliferation circles as Manpads, are a threat to civilian aviation; the American proposal is intended to take as many of the weapons as possible out of circulation, with hopes of trimming the number available on black markets.

All of the Manpads identified to date in Libya have been variants of the SA-7, an early Soviet-designed variant of a class of weapon that would eventually evolve to the American-made Stinger and other similarly frightening but lesser known models made in several nations. The story noted that the West’s working estimate for the number of missiles imported by the Libyan military during Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s long rule runs to 20,000. But that is a rough guess at the quantity imported — not the quantity on the loose after the war.

…the number now missing is a fraction of that. Precise estimates are impossible, officials say, because no one is sure how many the military still possessed at the outset of the uprising or later after months of fighting.

Some of the missiles were fired in training and in war. Others were disassembled by rebels, who used their tubes as makeshift launchers for other looted ordnance. Many of the missing missiles were looted, either by rebels or would-be profiteers. Many more were destroyed in bunkers that were hit in airstrikes.

One line in there — about rebels using tubes as makeshift launchers — provides the background you will need to interpret the short video below. In it, Kevin Dawes, an unusual battlefield wanderer from the United States, has made a record of the phenomenon of Manpads being repurposed for ground-to-ground war.

As an aside, it is worth noting that Mr. Dawes is a controversial figure and his behavior in Libya and elsewhere has been the subject of considerable online critique. Some of his wanderings with Manpads were the subject of a separate post on my own blog, here. This post will steer wide of the larger discussion about who Mr. Dawes is, and what he was doing in Libya, to examine some of the video record he has been posting from his travels. If nothing else, his video record provides a useful window on Libyan rebel behaviors, and in places is valuable for that alone.

The video is short. Watch it.

Note the start. By the tenth second, what you see, notwithstanding Mr. Dawes’ description of an Igla, is an anti-Qaddafi fighter heading toward a firefight with an SA-7 tube. But at a glance you might notice that this is not an ordinary SA-7 tube, at least not an ordinary SA-7 tube that is ready to fire an SA-7. It is missing its battery unit, and it has no gripstock.

Moreover, someone has outfitted the tube with a wooden dowel as a foregrip, and what looks to be a wooden shoulder rest, too. If you look more closely, you’ll also see something — but not an SA-7 missile — protruding from its aft end. The activities of the many other rebels in the video should provide a hint at what is happening in the video. This fighter is obviously not preparing to fire at an aircraft. He is heading toward a group of cornered Qaddafi fighters — not a tactical situation that demands heat-seeking, ground-to-air fire.

What you are seeing is yet another improvised launcher for the 57-millimeter air-to-ground rockets. Libya’s rebels proved adept at working with what they could scrounge to carry on their war. In this case, by removing the heat-seeking missile from the SA-7 tube and replacing it with a captured 57-millimeter rocket, the rebel had become equipped with a lightweight launcher for firing a single high-explosive rocket at a ground target.

We’ve covered at some length the early Mad Max-style 57-millimeter rocket launchers that rebels put together by taking rocket pods designed for aircraft and fitting them to pickup trucks. The weapons were dangerous, and often used badly. Libya’s rebels may have seen in them a sign of their uprising’s resolve and grit. But they had little means of employing their truck-mounted systems discriminately or accurately. Rather, the way the rebels often fired them served to undermine their standing, showing that their battlefield conduct could resemble that of the Qaddafi forces they loathed.

The system on the video, documented by Mr. Dawes, was the man-portable version of the same rocket, and it summons a somewhat different reaction. The nature of shoulder-fired arms stands to make them potentially more discriminate. And in this case, though the weapon may be dangerous to the man who fires it and to his colleagues standing nearby, this particular makeshift weapon contains, in its own odd way, a good sign.

Libyans and the officials and contractors now trying to assess the risks of the former Qaddafi Manpad stocks have noted that some of the SA-7s were disassembled for this kind of use. Every SA-7 that has been dismantled for conversion to a makeshift 57-millimeter rocket launcher is an SA-7 that will never be fired at a Boeing, a Tupolev or an Airbus.

And so Mr. Dawes has given us a curious little record of the Libyan war. You won’t find many people who would endorse this kind of weapon. But you will find, here and there, a few nonproliferation heads nodding with grudging approval. Why? Because this is one heat-seeking missile that need not be tracked down, bought and destroyed. In the annals of makeshift arms, this is the law of unintended consequences, turned kind.

Follow C.J. Chivers on Facebook, on Twitter at @cjchivers or on his personal blog, cjchivers.com, where many posts from At War are supplemented with more photographs and further information.

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At War Blog: Lens: From a Marine's Side of the Camera

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Over on the Lens blog, Sgt. Thomas James Brennan writes about the close bonds that form during battle, even between soldiers and the combat photographers documenting them. When Finbarr O’Reilly, a Reuters photographer, embedded with Sgt. Brennan’s squad of Marines in Afghanistan last October, he was a little guarded around the man with the camera. But the war didn’t give him time or space to hold onto those feelings. And conversations with Mr. O’Reilly, coupled with the closeness of battle, forged a bond between the men that continues to today. A bond was cemented with the commonalities the men shared, as Sgt. Brennan notes:

We mesh because we are so different, yet in so many ways alike, because we are not the status quo. We aren’t normal 9-to-5rs. Our 9 a.m. would start at 0600 hours and when our 5 p.m. would come, at 2100, we would tell stories of home or debate current events. Whether we shared the same ideals at that moment didn’t matter. The conversation was simply an escape from the harrowing reality we were in; a reality that few people share, a reality that brought Finbarr and me together.

Read the blog post here.

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Opinionator | Borderlines: Fighting over Parsley

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Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time.

On July 11, 2002, six Moroccan gendarmes occupied Isla de Perejil [1], or Parsley Island, an uninhabited, Spanish-administered rock of about 37 acres, just 220 yards off the Moroccan coast. If the standoff had lasted longer than a few days, and if blood had actually been spilled, we might now know it as the Parsley War. But on July 18, they were overwhelmed and forcibly ejected by Equipo 31, a crack team of Spanish special forces soldiers. No shots were fired.

And that was that. Morocco and Spain agreed to return to the status quo ante [2]: Spain’s claim to the island would remain disputed, but not actively challenged, by Morocco. The island itself would remain unoccupied by either side. Isla de Perejil’s non-occupation is now closely monitored by both the Moroccans and the Spanish (though it’s unclear whether the Moroccan goatherd who occasionally used to graze his flock on the island now has to show his passport).

Apart from that, the case seems closed. But in this part of the world, few things are merely what they seem [3]. Known to the ancients as the Pillars of Hercules, the strategically important gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is laced with mirroring versions of history — a commodity in no short supply here. Those versions of history have even left mirroring border phenomena on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

Perejil is one of seven Spanish territories on and off the Moroccan coast, once known collectively as “plazas de soberanía.” The two main ones are Ceuta and Melilla, two cities on the African mainland. Formerly called the “Major Plazas,” they are now each enjoying a separate, autonomous status within Spain. The remaining “Minor Plazas,” apart from Perejil, are all garrisoned with Spanish soldiers: the Islas Chafarinas, a three-island archipelago near the Algerian border; Alboran, a flat and empty fleck of land flanked by tiny Isla de las Nubes; and finally Pe?ón [4] de Alhucemas (which includes the two minuscule islets called Isla de Tierra and Isla de Mar) and Pe?ón de Vélez de la Gomera, both on Morocco’s central Mediterranean coast, not far from the city of El Hoceima. Morocco claims both autonomous cities and all of the plazas, except Alboran, 30 miles out to sea, the only bit of Spanish North Africa not hugging the Moroccan coastline.

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

Opposite Ceuta, across the STROG [5], is Gibraltar (“Gib” in British parlance), captured by the British in 1704 and granted to them “in perpetuity” by the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713. The Spanish have never accepted the loss of Gibraltar, besieging it on three occasions and most recently blockading it from 1969 to 1985.

It seems illogical, not to mention a bit petty, of the Spanish to demand the return of Gibraltar while they cling to their toeholds on the Moroccan side. But Spain’s position is cherry-picked from two opposing principles: Either occupying strategic bits of another country’s coast is an affront to its territorial integrity, in which case Spain can rightly claim Gibraltar but has to renounce its plazas and autonomous cities in North Africa, or Spain’s historic rights to those places can be maintained forever, in which case the same applies for British sovereignty over Gibraltar.

Naturally, Spain has an internally consistent way out of this conundrum: Ceuta and Melilla were Spanish cities long before present-day Morocco existed [6], so it can’t claim them. But Gibraltar was ripped from the bosom of the Spanish state and has been a British colony ever since — in fact, the last colony on European soil [7]. And what should happen to colonies? Right, they should be decolonized.

Another solution, examined first by the British in 1917 and then proposed independently by Spain’s King Alfonso in 1926, was an exchange between Spain and Britain, with Gibraltar reverting to Spain and Ceuta (and possibly also Melilla) becoming British. The swap would have been an interesting new chapter in the long association of Ceuta and Gibraltar. Both exclaves, barely 14 miles apart, poke into the strait, guarding this chokepoint of naval traffic between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Seen from above, they look like the hinges of a door that can be opened and shut by whomever controls them. Seen from the sea, Gibraltar’s Rock and Ceuta’s Monte Hacho [8] could be mistaken for the northern and southern pillars of a gigantic gate.

Google Earth

In fact, both rocks are the actual Pillars of Hercules known to the ancients, named after the legendary hero because they marked the westernmost extent of his 12 Labors. To the Greeks and Romans, the Pillars of Hercules were the proverbial end of the world. Tradition has it that the inscription on them warned “Nec Plus Ultra,” or “Beyond this, there’s nothing.”

That changed when Columbus brought back news of lands beyond the ocean, and riches beyond compare. The personal badge of Emperor Charles V, who ruled Spain soon after the discovery of the Americas, showed both pillars interwoven with the slogan: “Plus Ultra” — “There is more out there,” the perfect motto for a nascent transatlantic empire. Charles’s badge is at the origin of Spain’s coat of arms (which still shows both pillars), and possibly also of the dollar sign [9] — the two vertical bars being abstract renderings of Gibraltar and Ceuta, and the curling motto reduced to the S-shape that connects them.

(Nec) Plus Ultra: the pillars as endpoint or gateway. Again, two competing versions of history. And Ceuta and Gibraltar are connected by yet another history with two wildly differing versions. Early in the Eighth Century, Julian [10], a count tasked with “holding Ceuta for Christendom,” switched sides, exhorting and aiding the Muslim invaders of North Africa to cross the strait to Spain. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began when their general Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Mons Calpe in 711, henceforth renamed Jebel Tariq — i.e. Gibraltar.

Legend has it that Julian wanted revenge for the honor of his daughter Florinda, ravished by Roderic, the last Visigoth king of Spain. Muslim sources later described her as innocence incarnate, while Christian scribes depicted her as a loose woman — respectively maximizing and minimizing Julian’s casus belli. In Spanish history, Julian is the ultimate traitor, opening up the country to seven centuries of Moorish rule. But in his 1970 novel “Count Julian,” the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo takes the alleged traitor’s side, relishing in the destruction of Spain.

Examples of this mutability of allegiance persist across the strait. Spain’s claims to Gibraltar are supported by … Morocco — for surely, a return of Gib to Spain must mean a return of Ceuta to Morocco. Spain’s claims to Perejil are supported by Algeria, Morocco’s unfriendly neighbor, but not by Spain’s fellow European Union member France, Morocco’s former colonial overlord.

Perhaps Gibraltar is the northernmost part of Africa, for its Barbary Macaques are the only monkeys living in the wild in Europe [11]. And maybe Melilla is the southernmost city of Europe, because its Capilla de Santiago (St James’s Chapel) is the only gothic church in Africa.

All the while, the peculiar borders of these exclaves persist, and harden and soften according to circumstance. Spain and Britain’s co-membership of the European Union was instrumental in ending the blockade of Gibraltar, normalizing the border at La Linea — no longer a three-quarter mile strip of no man’s land garnished with barbed wire.

Read previous contributions to this series.

But the persistent disagreement between Spain and Morocco over the plazas, coupled with an increase in undocumented migration from Africa into Europe, has put Spain on the spot. For many thousands of poor Africans seeking a better life in Europe, Ceuta and Melilla are the entry points into the First World. The barbed-wire fence around both territories is hardly an impediment for those daring and hardy enough to trek across the Sahara.

Some in Spain suspect the periodic surges of migrants into its two African cities are co-orchestrated by Morocco, to underscore their untenability as Spanish, and EU, exclaves in Africa. But ironically, the surges more likely result from the improved Spanish surveillance of the strait, which many migrants try to cross. Like the flow of a river, the phenomenon of mass migration simply seeks the most convenient channel for its course. Hence the poor, huddled masses of boat people reaching Italy’s southernmost island Lampedusa, and likewise the Canary Islands, Spain’s archipelago off Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

For them too, the Strait of Gibraltar no longer is the Nec Plus Ultra of their dreams.

Frank Jacobs is a London-based author and blogger. He writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits.

[1] The official Moroccan nomenclature is “Tura,” which in Berber means “uninhabited,” but also used is “Leila,” which probably is a loan from the Spanish “la isla” (“the island”).

[2] In full: status quo ante bellum, “the state of things before the war.” This principle of international law holds that territorial conquest in battle should be nullified after the end of hostilities. The opposite principle, used to justify territorial gains, is uti possidetis — in full, uti possidetis, ita possideatis, “as you possessed [it], you shall possess [it] from now on.”

[3] For starters, how about the intriguing similarities between the Parsley Incident and the Falklands War, fought two decades earlier? Both involve failed attempts by former European colonies to reclaim islands off their coast held by former European superpowers. Kennedy-Lincoln assassination similarity buffs, start your engines!

[4] Literally a crag (a steep rocky outcrop), the Spanish word pe?ón has also come to mean a Spanish military outpost at such a location. Apart from the two mentioned here, other examples include the Pe?ón de Argel (i.e. Algiers), occupied by Spain from 1510 to 1529.

[5] Naval speak for the Strait of Gibraltar.

[6] 1640 and 1497, respectively. Morocco became independent from France in early 1956. Spanish Morocco — a protectorate since 1912 , not to be confused with the plazas — was allowed to join French Morocco in independence a few months later.

[7] Gibraltar had the status of Crown Colony from 1830 to 1981; in 2002, it was re-classified as a British Overseas Territory. Gibraltar has its own elected government, and thus claims no longer to be a colony, but Spain resists attempts to remove it from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization’s list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (16 at present, of which 10 are under British jurisdiction).

[8] Elevations 1,400 and 670 feet respectively; another candidate for the southern pillar is the Jebel Musa (2,800 feet), just beyond Ceuta’s border with Morocco.

[9] The pillars were pictured on the reverse of the Spanish dollar, legal tender in the United States until 1857.

[10] He might also have been called Urbano, or Ulban. He may have been a Berber, a Visigoth or a Byzantine. Perhaps he was the local ruler of Ceuta, or merely its governor. [11] According to tradition, the extinction of the Gibraltar macaques would signal the end of British rule over the Rock. A similar legend requires the Tower of London to house six raven, lest the monarchy should fail.

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World Briefing | Middle East: Saudi Arabia: Help Wanted

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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WORLD: A Date With the Censors

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Reality TV shows have become common on Chinese television but the sometimes racy and materialistic content has attracted the attention of China’s censors.

Produced by Jonah M. Kessel and Edward Wong

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World Briefing | Africa: South Sudan: Civilians Flee

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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U.S. Military Deaths in Afghanistan

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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World Briefing | Asia: Kashmir: Protesters Fired On

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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Lens Blog: Photos of an Isolated Region in Tajikistan

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Along a nearly inaccessible road in Tajikistan, the Greek photographer Myrto Papadopoulos is pursuing a quiet story of growth and change in a small, isolated society.

Ms. Papadopoulos’s project, “The New Plastic Road,” follows Liu Xin Jun, a Chinese truck driver, and Davlat, a Tajik merchandiser, along a trade route in the Pamir Mountains. From the town of Khorog, the most developed in the region, east to Murghab, a former Russian military post at high altitude close to the Chinese border, she sought to explore socioeconomic and political development in an area known as Badakhshan. Basic necessities?— food, water and electricity — are lacking in the area, in part because it is so far from the capital of Tajikistan, Dushanbe.

Ms. Papadopoulos sought images of the road, and life on the road.

“What we wanted to see is how this road really affects the society,” Ms. Papadopoulos said. “And do people receive what they want now with this opening of trade.”

Myrto Papadopoulos A mother and her children pass in front of a gas station in Murghab, Tajikistan.

Tajikistan is a very poor former Soviet state. Its nearly inaccessible roads have hurt development. To reach Khorog, Ms. Padadopoulos endured a long and difficult drive through the mountains. “That’s how the region is,” she said. “There are very difficult places to reach.”

Virtually unreachable in the winter months, it is anything but a haven for tourism. Aside from a group of bikers and one or two mountaineers, Ms. Papadopoulos met few other travelers. “If something happens to you there,” she said, “it just happens.”

The road, which was reconstructed by China and opened in 2004, has also been a haven for drug-trafficking.

With China’s trade increase in central Asia, though, the situation has been changing. “All these things are suddenly moving,” Ms. Papadopoulos said.

Ms. Padadopoulos was featured on Lens in September 2011 (“In the Grecian Caves Where Time Slows Down,” Sept. 22). This was her first trip to central Asia. She plans to go to China and find the source of the trade, “where all these things are and where do they go.” The project will ultimately become a film about China’s investments in central Asia, which she is working on with her partner, Angelos Tsaousis.

The first trip was, for the most part, exploratory. “I tried to photograph what I saw,” Ms. Padadopoulos said.

In a way, she said, the environment — always very dark at night — felt peaceful. She especially felt that peace when photographing women.

“I really enjoyed sharing moments with the women. I felt very strong.”

And yet she felt a sense of melancholy, which comes out in the pictures — painterly, almost mystical. “I felt there was a sadness to them,” she said.

Myrto Papadopoulos Washing clothes in Khorog, Tajikistan, which has a shortage of drinking water.

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World Briefing | The Americas: Peru: Mine Protest Resumes

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Competing histories across the Strait of Gibraltar contribute to its peculiar exclaves.

Medicare should demand evidence that a costly cancer treatment is more effective than cheaper options.

In Nigeria, designating Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist group will only inflame anti-Americanism among Muslims.

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German President’s Call to Paper Reignites Scandal Over Loan

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Mr. Wulff, a key ally of Mrs. Merkel, left a voicemail message last month on the mobile phone of Kai Diekmann, editor of the newspaper, Bild, in which he spoke of a “war” if the newspaper disclosed an unusual personal loan that Mr. Wulff had received from the family of a German entrepreneur.

Bild went ahead anyway, and the resulting scandal quickly consumed the news media and political classes, prompting calls for Mr. Wulff’s resignation.

The news of the president’s call to the editor, first reported by two rival German newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, intensifies the political pressure on Mr. Wulff, who is widely judged to have handled the scandal poorly, providing vague and grudging explanations about the loan.

The episode has embarrassed Mrs. Merkel as she seeks to muster political capital to deal with the euro crisis. The post of president is largely ceremonial in Germany, but as head of state, he or she is also seen as the ultimate defender of the Constitution, in which freedom of the press is enshrined.

The chancellor championed Mr. Wulff in 2010 at a special parliamentary assembly to succeed Horst K?hler, who resigned as president after appearing to suggest that the German military should take a more active role in defense of the country’s economic interests. Although Mrs. Merkel ultimately succeeded in getting Mr. Wulff elected, it took three rounds of voting. In the first round, 44 members of her own party humiliated Mrs. Merkel by voting against Mr. Wulff.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Wulff neither confirmed nor denied the latest allegations. “Freedom of the press is an important value for the president,” his office said. “But the president categorically declines to discuss off-the-record conversations and telephone calls.”

The news was met with a mixture of derision and outrage from the German news media establishment, prompting an unusual degree of solidarity with Bild, which uses a mix of sex, scandal and feel-good features to sell about three million copies a day.

“Prominent people have to accept critical reporting as part of freedom of speech,” Michael Konken, chairman of the German Association of Journalists, said in a statement. “No one ought to know this better than the head of state.”

The united front could make it more difficult for Mr. Wulff to cling to his post.

“Bild is Europe’s most powerful newspaper, and it is na?ve to think that you can stay in office without its support,” said Steffen Burkhardt, an expert on the German media and political scandals at the University of Hamburg.

Bild said Monday on its Web site that it had decided not to report on Mr. Wulff’s threatening message to Mr. Diekmann because the president had called the editor back two days later to apologize.

Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung did not disclose sources and did not publish transcripts of the call. But their reports, confirmed by Bild on Monday, gave new life to the imbroglio, which had fallen off front pages over the holidays.

“You always have in a scandal a first transgression and a second transgression, and the second transgression is often the one that matters more,” Mr. Burkhardt said.

In the message he left for Mr. Diekmann, Mr. Wulff reportedly threatened a lawsuit as well as a “final break” with Bild and its publisher, Axel Springer, which in the past has cultivated good relations with the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Wulff.

Mr. Wulff also called Mathias D?pf ner, the chief executive of Axel Springer, who rebuffed his entreaties, according to reports that were confirmed by Tobias Fr?hlich, a spokesman for Bild.

The disclosures demonstrate the continuing power of Bild, a newspaper that can make or break political careers. Bild strongly supported another ally of Mrs. Merkel’s, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the defense minister at the time, after the discovery that he had plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis. He often appeared in Bild in the company of his wife, Stephanie, a campaigner against child abuse. Despite Bild’s support, however, Mr. Guttenberg eventually resigned.

Mr. Wulff, too, burnished his image in the newspaper. Through a divorce in 2006, when he was the premier of the state of Lower Saxony, and a subsequent remarriage, he was depicted in Bild photos as a family man and devoted father.

The loan under scrutiny dates from 2008, the year in which Mr. Wulff married his second wife. He got €500,000, or about $650,000, from the wife of Egon Geerkens, the entrepreneur, to help him buy a home.

After Bild disclosed the loan, Mr. Wulff faced criticism that he had been economical with the truth in previously maintaining that he had no business relationships with Mr. Geerkens, a friend. Less than two weeks after the Bild article appeared, Mr. Wulff dismissed his longtime spokesman, Olaf Glaeseker, for unexplained reasons.

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Piñera Defends Response to Chile Wildfires

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AppId is over the quota

The wildfires are believed to have begun in the majestic Torres del Paine National Park last Tuesday, and they broke out in other areas over the weekend. An elderly man who refused to leave one area was the only reported death, but altogether 90 square miles of forest have been destroyed, some 100 homes burned, hundreds of people evacuated, and a plywood plant owned by Arauco, a major lumber producer, ruined.

Still, the fires remain less destructive than some blazes in other countries. For instance, Australia’s bushfires of 2009 claimed more than 170 lives.

The government of Mr. Pi?era rejected accusations that it was slow in responding. Protests demanding changes in transportation, energy and above all education have driven his approval ratings down to 23 percent, the lowest for any Chilean leader since Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship ended in 1990.

Mr. Pi?era said a red alert was declared just two hours after the Torres del Paine fire started on Dec. 27, and measures were quickly taken to combat the blaze. Still, Mr. Pi?era said the fire began in a zone of “very difficult access, with very difficult topography and additionally with conditions of intense winds.”

Neighboring Argentina and Uruguay have contributed to a force of more than 750 firefighters deployed in the country’s south, and Mr. Pi?era said that Chile had the helicopters and aircraft it needed to fight the blazes.

So far, the fires have burned more than 7 percent of Torres del Paine, a tourism draw known for its soaring granite peaks, and areas of two other regions, Bio Bio and Maule. Mr. Pi?era said four of six focal areas in Torres del Paine were coming under control, and that the park could partially reopen by Wednesday.

Fires have whipped through Torres del Paine before. In 2005 a 31-year-old Czech tourist accidentally started a fire in the park that caused more than $5 million in damage. The government of the Czech Republic subsequently issued a letter of apology and offered to send forestry experts to assist in the recuperation.

In the latest fires, an Israeli tourist, Rotem Singer, 23, has been arrested and charged with starting the park blaze. By the account of a prosecutor, Ivan Vidal, people traveling with Mr. Singer said he set fire to toilet paper after going to the bathroom, and then failed to put it out completely. But he strongly denied the accusation, saying his translator may have contributed to misunderstandings.

Yediot Aharonot, a leading Israeli newspaper, said it interviewed Mr. Singer by telephone. It quoted him as saying: “I did not cause the blaze. I have been framed and turned into a scapegoat.”

The newspaper said Mr. Singer was met at court with angry shouts and anti-Semitic curses like “stinking Jew.” He said he feared for his safety. Mr. Singer denied that he had confessed to anything. “I am not guilty of anything, and I don’t know how this story landed on me,” he said.

The Israeli Embassy in Chile said in a statement Monday that it would not take part in the “judicial procedure” involving Mr. Singer. “We understand his family will hire an attorney for his defense,” the embassy said. In the statement, the embassy added that it shared Chileans’ “distress over the environmental damage in Torres del Paine.”

The embassy “trusts the Chilean authorities will determine the circumstances in which it was produced,” the statement said.

Simon Romero reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago, Chile. Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

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As European Union Expands, Unanimity Breaks Down

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But, as the union expands, the notion of universal consent is seen as increasingly unworkable and could be starting to break down. Legislators here are devising new approaches that will enable smaller groups of countries to adopt laws among themselves — without the threat of a veto if all 27 member nations fail to agree.

The move toward smaller groupings reflects a growing fragmentation of the European Union and has been developing for some time. But it took on added significance after a spectacular dispute at the European summit meeting in December, when Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain failed to achieve new safeguards from European Union laws for his nation’s financial-services sector. In retaliation, he blocked a proposed treaty change aimed at helping to strengthen the euro.

Under current rules, groups of at least nine nations may go ahead with legislation if an agreement has stalled. However, they can do so only after all 27 countries have been through the time-consuming process of trying and failing to agree. So far, that has happened in only two cases, but others in which this principle may apply are working their way slowly through the system.

Most prominent are two pieces of draft tax legislation that have been drawn up in a way that ensures that they could work without the cooperation of the British if necessary. Moreover, they seem intended to operate in a way that could prevent Britain from gaining a big competitive advantage from staying outside the plan and undercutting other nations that adopt it.

The most diplomatically fragile proposal involves a financial transaction tax, which has been proposed by the European Commission and could raise about $74 billion a year, starting in 2014. Under the plan, the tax would be levied at a rate of one-tenth of 1 percent on all transactions between institutions. Derivatives contracts would be taxed at the rate of one-hundredth of 1 percent.

French and German policy makers see this as a “Robin Hood tax,” a way of discouraging speculative transactions and raising cash from the bankers who provoked the financial crisis.

Financial analysts say that it was Britain’s concern over this impending legislation — and the potential damage it could do to its banking industry — that was at least partly responsible for its unyielding stance at the December meeting. British leaders feared that in the absence of global regulations, banks would simply relocate from London to New York, Singapore or other lower-tax domains. The British government points out that even a study by the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, suggests that the tax could reduce European gross domestic product by 1.76 percent.

Under the proposed legislation, a British veto would no longer prevent nine or more nations that wanted to go ahead from doing so. In principle, this would allow Britain to continue as a partial tax haven. But a clause in the law would require banks in the smaller group of nations to pay the tax on some transactions, even if they operate in London.

Similarly, moves to harmonize the base on which corporate taxes are assessed in Europe could work among a smaller number of nations even if Britain did not take part. Large corporations operating across borders would be able to opt for a unified tax system in the countries that sign up for the plan. That would simplify tax issues for companies operating in the participating nations and might even tempt some to relocate to them at the expense of Britain, which is likely to stay out.

“Obviously, these proposals are both on the table for 27 member states, and we would like to see them agreed by the 27,” said Emer Traynor, spokeswoman on taxation for the European Commission. “However, if that is not possible, these proposals are also workable if done by a smaller group. It is still completely feasible for a smaller group of member states to go ahead with them and deliver big benefits.”

Despite Britain’s December veto of the treaty change on the euro, no additional protection for financial services was secured by the British. Neither of the two tax plans has yet been discussed fully by the 27 member nations, and smaller groups of countries could not contemplate forging ahead unless they were rejected.

The new way of devising laws is not always aimed against Britain. The British have, in fact, joined one plan, which aims to build a European system for patent protection. But the shift in the way the union is legislating is significant because it changes the rules of the game.

Some European officials argue that Britain, which has long promoted the idea of a more variable model of European integration, with countries free to pick and choose the degree of cooperation, is now experiencing the downside. Laws are being drafted in the knowledge that Britain may not take part and so are intended to prevent it from reaping a competitive advantage by staying out.

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Conflicting Reports of Attack on Iraq’s Finance Minister, Rafe al-Essawi

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But on Monday, no one seemed to be able to agree on any of the details of the attack against the official, Finance Minister Rafe al-Essawi, or even whether it had happened at all. Not for the first time, the facts seemed to be scrambled by Iraq’s growing political and sectarian discord.

Security forces from the Salahuddin Operations Command, which answers to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, denied that there had been any attack in Salahuddin Province, a largely Sunni area that is home to a renowned Shiite shrine and includes Saddam Hussein’s hometown. A security official at the command said officials “didn’t witness any security breach.”

But two hours later, the local police in Salahuddin contradicted that account, and accused the operations command of “hiding” the incident.

Mr. Essawi himself was in no doubt. He said in a telephone interview that he and a few other Iraqi politicians were returning to Baghdad from a funeral when a blast slammed their convoy outside the holy city of Samarra. Mr. Essawi, who has been an outspoken critic of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, said he did not know whether the bombing was an assassination attempt aimed specifically at him. But he quickly laid blame for the bombing on the government, which is struggling to keep a lid on terrorist attacks and politically motivated violence in the country.

“With such a violated security situation, it could happen to everyone,” Mr. Essawi said.

The contradictory accounts were reminiscent of late November, when news of a suicide car bombing just outside Iraq’s Parliament was swamped by competing narratives. Immediately after the blast, a spokesman for the Sunni speaker of Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, said the attack appeared to be an attempt to assassinate Mr. Nujaifi. A few days later, a security spokesman said on television that the true target was Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite.

Within weeks of that disputed attack, a long-running feud between Mr. Maliki and his political opponents erupted into one of the country’s worst political crises in years, one that has exposed sectarian tensions and raised worries that Mr. Maliki was consolidating power against his rivals now that American military forces have withdrawn from Iraq.

The Sunni vice president has fled to the Kurdish north to avoid arrest on terrorism charges, and Mr. Maliki is trying to oust the deputy prime minister, another Sunni. Iraqiya, a political coalition with wide Sunni support, is boycotting Parliament, and so far Mr. Maliki and the Iraqiya bloc’s leaders have been unable to even agree to talk about the crisis.

Mr. Essawi, a former hospital director from Anbar Province in the western Sunni heartland, has been a central figure in the political furor. He has called for Mr. Maliki to be replaced and is refusing to attend meetings of Iraq’s cabinet — moves that have prompted the prime minister to try to push him aside.

On Monday, Mr. Nujaifi, another Iraqiya leader, made a televised speech warning of the deteriorating human rights picture in Iraq, marked by arbitrary arrests and abuses, and accused Mr. Maliki of using the security forces to advance his political interests.

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Samarra, Iraq.

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Kinshasa Journal: In Congolese Capital, ‘Power Cut’ Applies to Food

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Of course, the small ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any,” said their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month. There will have been a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more.

“At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”

The Berboks are practicing a Kinshasa family ritual almost as common here as corrugated metal roofs and dirt streets: the “power cut,” as residents in this capital of some 10 million have ironically christened it. On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days, all the children eat, and the adults do not. Or vice versa.

The term “power cut” — in French, délestage — is meant to evoke another unloved routine of city life: the rolling blackouts that hit first one neighborhood, then another.

Délestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe these state-decreed power cutoffs, but when applied to rationing food it illustrates a stark survival calculus, one the head of a household must painfully impose on the rest. And unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness mandated from on high.

“If today we eat, tomorrow we’ll drink tea,” said Dieudonné Nsala, a father of five who earns $60 a month as an administrator at the Education Ministry. Rent is $120 a month; the numbers, Mr. Nsala pointed out, simply do not add up. Are there days when his children do not eat? “Of course!” Mr. Nsala answered, puzzled at the question. “It can be two days a week,” he said.

Though residents here frequently gather on crowded street corners to argue politics, their daily struggle may help explain why the capital did not experience sustained mass demonstrations after disputed election results were announced last month. Sporadic protests and street clashes certainly erupted, but the margin of survival here is simply too slim for most people to demonstrate for very long.

“People in Kinshasa are so poor, they are living hand to mouth,” said Théodore Trefon, a researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium. “They simply don’t have the means to mobilize for a long time.”

Beyond that, the government leaves little room for expressions of popular discontent. Human Rights Watch said that Congolese soldiers had killed at least 24 people and detained dozens more after the flawed elections that returned President Joseph Kabila to office.

Whatever the city’s misgivings about the vote, daily life itself is enough of a challenge.

“On the weekend, you’ve got to do everything you can to have food because you are at home with the children,” said Mr. Nsala, the administrator. “But there are days, for sure, when we don’t eat. I’ll say, ‘There isn’t enough to eat, so you, maman and the kids, you take it.’?”

Mr. Nsala, soft-spoken and precise in his diction, stared at the floor of his modest cinder-block, metal-roofed living room. Fuzzy television news played in the background. His wife was selling vegetables out front, to supplement the meager family income. Don’t ask him about meat.

“Maybe, if we make a sacrifice,” he said, pointing out that a pound of beef costs $5.

At the Berbok household — where Ghislaine’s husband, a teacher, earns $42 a month, adding to her salary as a police officer — there has been no fish in a year.

“Délestage. That means: ‘Today we eat. Tomorrow we don’t.’ The Congolese, in the spirit of irony, have adopted this term,” said Mr. Nsala quietly. He added that the family had eaten the day before: “So, today, there is nothing.”

The food délestage is not new in Congo, a country rich in minerals and verdant landscapes yet also one of the hungriest on earth, according to experts. It is last on the 2011 Global Hunger Index, a measure of malnutrition and child nutrition compiled by the International Food Policy Research Institute, and has gotten worse. It was the only country where the food situation dropped from “alarming” to “extremely alarming,” the institute reported this year. Half the country is considered undernourished.

Ten years ago, even poor Congolese could expect to eat one substantial meal a day — perhaps cassava, a starchy root, with some palm oil, and a little of the imported frozen fish that is a staple here. But in the last three years, even that certainty has dropped away, said Dr. Eric Tollens, an expert on nutrition in Congo at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, where he is an emeritus professor at the Center for Agricultural and Food Economics.

Isaac Ngwenza contributed reporting.

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France’s Treasury Chief Works to Guard Credit Rating

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Mr. Fernandez, the head of the Treasury within the Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry, has already been through a similar crisis-management exercise. That came in early August, when Standard & Poor’s cut the top credit rating of the United States government while most of the French elite was on vacation.

Within hours on a summer Saturday morning, Mr. Fernandez helped organize a series of emergency calls with his boss, Finance Minister Fran?ois Baroin, and others in Paris’s circle of policy makers, to prevent the American crisis from sending a financial tsunami across the Atlantic.

Later that day, Mr. Baroin appeared on French television to question the validity of the United States downgrade. President Sarkozy interrupted his vacation in a show of engagement. But behind the scenes, Mr. Fernandez did much of the heavy lifting.

It was not the first time in the two-year-long European crisis that Mr. Fernandez has quietly kept things moving. And it probably will not be the last.

As France and Germany take the lead in trying to hold the euro currency union together, Mr. Fernandez has emerged as one of Paris’s top power brokers — whether in promoting the French position on the banking sector’s participation in a Greek bailout, or the creation of a rescue fund for troubled countries, or the recent deal by most European Union governments to shore up the foundations of the euro zone.

So much confidence has been placed in Mr. Fernandez that the French news media have started calling him the “guardian of the triple-A.”

But Mr. Fernandez, at 44 a youthful technocrat whose soft blue eyes belie an inner sang-froid, chuckles about the moniker with an almost embarrassed air.

“I’m a civil servant,” he said demurely. “I do what I have to do.”

What he must do now could prove crucial to how well France weathers the country’s seemingly inevitable debt downgrade. Because the demotion has been widely telegraphed by the three major credit rating agencies, Mr. Fernandez and other officials do not expect the impact to be devastating.

Still, a lower credit rating will probably make it more expensive for France to service its debt, and more difficult for the Europewide rescue fund — of which France is a major backer — to operate. That, in turn, could renew tensions between France and Germany over how to manage the euro crisis.

For every photo op in which Mr. Sarkozy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany trumpet a new step forward, Mr. Fernandez has spent countless hours behind the scenes with an influential man in the presidential cabinet, Xavier Musca, Mr. Sarkozy’s powerful chief of staff, and Berlin’s point man, J?rg Asmussen, to smooth and soothe the sometimes testy French-German relationship.

Mr. Fernandez also exchanges e-mails frequently with officials at the Treasury Department to keep up on developments across the Atlantic. And his ability to parse mind-numbing financial issues better than nearly any other French civil servant helped French leaders look smart during the Group of 20 meetings to which France played host in 2011.

Doing all this largely below the public radar is apparently the way Mr. Fernandez prefers to work. In a country where discretion is a highly prized commodity, his effectiveness comes from operating in the shadows.

“Ramon is the right man in the right place,” said Christine Lagarde, who worked with Mr. Fernandez until last summer, when she resigned as France’s finance minister to become the managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

“He is smart, experienced, a good negotiator, but also a critical part of a close-knit network of advisers to the leading political figures,” Ms. Lagarde said.

For Mr. Fernandez’s efforts, he was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in December, in a ceremony under the gilded ceilings of the élysée Palace. Mr. Sarkozy cited Mr. Fernandez as a pillar in the management of France’s future.

Yet such moments are rare. Mr. Fernandez generally eschews the elitist trappings embraced by most other government dignitaries.

He rides a motor scooter to work, for example. The idea of being chauffeured around “gives me a headache,” he said. On the scooter, “you take some fresh air, and you are forced to focus on just one thing.”

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Pakistani Panel Begins Inquiry Into Memo

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ISLAMABAD — A three-member Supreme Court panel opened an inquiry on Monday into a controversial memo suggestive of a civilian-military power struggle, seeking statements from the Pakistani spy chief and Pakistan’s recently resigned ambassador to United States, as well as a former American national security adviser, before adjourning to Jan. 9.

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The panel also asked the attorney general to approach the Canadian company Research In Motion to obtain the record of BlackBerry messages between the former Pakistani ambassador, Husain Haqqani, and an American businessman of Pakistani origins, Mansoor Ijaz, who brought the memo to light.

The memo was purported to be from the Pakistani government, and asked for help in warding off a coup by the military in the wake of its humiliation by the American operation that killed Osama bin Laden, promising in exchange to alter parts of the country’s spy agency. Mr. Ijaz said in October that he was asked to convey the memo to Adm. Mike Mullen, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Eventually, he identified Mr. Haqqani as being behind the memo.

Mr. Haqqani has denied having anything to do with the memo. James L. Jones, a retired Marine Corps commandant and former national security adviser who delivered the memo to Admiral Mullen, said in a statement last month that he had no reason to believe that Mr. Haqqani had any role in its creation.

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Ismail Haniya of Gaza Visits Turkey

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Here in Turkey, where Mr. Haniya arrived after visiting Egypt and Sudan, he was quoted by the semiofficial Anatolian Agency on Monday as saying that “the Arab Spring is turning into an Islamic spring.”

Turkey, ruled by the Islamic-based Justice and Development Party, has grown close to Hamas and has downgraded its relations with Israel. In 2010, a group of ships and boats sailed from Turkey in an effort to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, and Israeli commandos boarded the vessels to stop them. When they met with resistance, the commandos killed nine activists on board. Turkey has demanded an apology and compensation; Israel has refused.

Mr. Haniya visited the Mavi Marmara, the largest ship of the flotilla, on Monday and said, “The blood of Mavi Marmara martyrs and that of Palestinian martyrs is joined for a hopeful future.”

While Mr. Haniya tours the region seeking financial and political support — he is heading to Iran, a major backer, in the coming days, according to the semiofficial Iranian news agency FARS — his rivals in the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority were due to meet with Israeli officials on Tuesday for the first time in 15 months.

The meeting, organized in Amman, the Jordanian capital, by King Abdullah II of Jordan, is viewed as an effort to revive peace negotiations aimed at establishing a Palestinian state, but both Palestinian and Israeli officials were keeping expectations for the meeting low. Hamas opposes negotiations with Israel as a waste of time, and it urged the Palestinian Authority not to attend.

By calling the meeting, King Abdullah is, in part, seeking to parry the rise of Islamism, especially that of Hamas within the Palestinian movement. Though Israeli officials want to help him in that task, it was not clear whether they would arrive in Jordan with proposals that could lure the Palestinians back into direct talks.

Hamas has long maintained its political headquarters in Syria, where an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad has shaken the country for nearly a year. Mr. Haniya declined Monday to comment on the situation in Syria, or to directly address numerous reports that the group is seeking another base.

“The Hamas leadership currently lives in Damascus,” Mr. Haniya said on NTV, a private television news channel, declining to elaborate on a possible move. “Everything, however, remains open to discussion.”

In a meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on Sunday, Mr. Haniya thanked him for Turkey’s continuing support for the lifting of the Israeli embargo on Gaza, and he briefed senior Turkish officials on civilian hardships in Gaza. Mr. Haniya also praised Turkey’s acceptance of 11 Palestinians, former prisoners who were released last year as part of the exchange that led to release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Omer Celik, a senior party official in Turkey, called the Gaza conflict Turkey’s “national issue” and urged Israel to recognize Hamas as a legitimate political organization; Israel, the United States and European nations regard it as a terrorist group.

“If Israel is sincere about the peace process,” Mr. Celik said on NTV, standing next to Mr. Haniya, “it should quit declaring organizations like Hamas that support the peace process illegal, and stop building settlements.”

Turkey backs Egyptian-led reconciliation efforts between Hamas and Fatah that began in May but are moving slowly. Israel says that if Hamas joins the Palestinian Authority, there can be no peace talks. At the moment, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority and head of Fatah, is caught between reconciling with Israel and reconciling with Hamas.

Mr. Haniya’s tour is expected to take him to Qatar, Tunisia and Bahrain in addition to Iran.

Sebnem Arsu reported from Istanbul and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.

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Yaffa Yarkoni, 86, Who Sang for Israeli Wartime Troops, Is Dead

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AppId is over the quota

Ms. Yarkoni died of pneumonia after a years-long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Ruth Yarkoni-Suissa told Israel’s Army Radio.

Ms. Yarkoni’s career largely echoed Israel’s own history, and she became a symbol of the generation that built the state, her classic ballads harking back to a time Israelis remember as more heroic and less complicated.

One of her most beloved songs, “Bab el Wad,” is an ode to the Israeli fighters who died in ambushes while driving convoys to Jerusalem during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The lyrics were written by Haim Gouri, who later became one of Israel’s national poets.

Yitzhak Rabin, who went on to become prime minister, commanded the brigade that captured the area where the ambushes occurred. In a television interview shortly before his assassination in 1995, Mr. Rabin said “Bab el Wad” was one of his favorite songs.

That and other vintage songs sung by Ms. Yarkoni became anthems of Israeli memorial days.

Though she was renowned for performing for the troops on the front lines, Ms. Yarkoni told interviewers in her later years that she did not like being known as “the songstress of the wars” — and that she was hurt by critics who said she had built a career on the back of military conflict.

In 2002, she caused an uproar at the height of Israel’s military offensive in the West Bank meant to quell the violent second Palestinian uprising. She criticized the military and expressed empathy for the Palestinians, telling Army Radio: “We are a nation that went through the Holocaust. How can we do things like this to another nation?” She described Israel as “leaderless.”

Coming after months of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli cities, her comments touched a nerve in Israeli society, which is particularly sensitive to any comparisons made between its actions and those of Nazi Germany.

Ms. Yarkoni was branded a traitor by some. An organization of Israeli patriots canceled a gala concert that had been planned in her honor.

Still, Ms. Yarkoni’s death prompted an outpouring of popular affection.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that her songs “were the soundtrack of Israel from its pre-state days, through the establishment of the state until our time.” President Shimon Peres said that while the Israeli military “conquered enemy positions, she conquered the hearts of the soldiers.” He called her the “nightingale” of the army and the entire nation.

Yaffa Abramov was born on Dec. 25, 1925, in Tel Aviv, to parents who had immigrated from the Caucasus. She began performing as a child with her siblings in a cafe run by their mother that became popular with artists.

She joined a local ballet company and married in 1944. Her husband, Joseph Gustin, joined the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and was killed in action in Italy in 1945, shortly before the end of World War II.

In 1948, she married Shaike Yarkoni, and together they had three daughters, Orit, Tamar and Ruth. Mr. Yarkoni died in 1983. Ms. Yarkoni is survived by her daughters, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

She initially served as a wireless operator during the 1948 war, but soon joined an army entertainment unit.

As her career progressed, Ms. Yarkoni moved from singing mostly nationalistic songs to ballroom dance music, being a fan of swing, jazz and blues.

She was surprised and upset by the furor over her Army Radio interview in 2002. “How can anybody call me a villain?” Ms. Yarkoni said in an interview at the time with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. She added, “Every time I see an Israeli flag, I cry.”

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Workers Locked Out at Caterpillar Locomotive Plant in Canada

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AppId is over the quota

The action came after the employees in London, Ontario, rejected a contract proposed by Electro-Motive Canada. The Canadian Auto Workers union said the proposal would cut wages in half, substantially reduce benefits and end the current pension plan.

“It’s not really a proposal, it’s an ultimatum,” said Tim Carrie, president of the union local that represents the factory’s workers. “This is an attack on middle-class jobs.”

On a Web site with updates about the dispute, Electro-Motive, which Caterpillar acquired in 2010, said the lockout would remain in effect “until a ratified contract is in place.”

The company said the union’s decision not to strike constituted “acceptance of the new wages and benefits as represented in EMC’s final offer.” The company said it was “hopeful of a speedy ratification allowing union members to return to work.”

But some of the union’s executive members have suggested that Caterpillar’s contract demands were intended to provoke a shutdown of the Canadian factory as a prelude to moving all production to the United States.

Caterpillar has a long history of tough labor negotiations and bitter labor disputes. In 1995, workers at the company’s unionized operations in the United States returned to work after declaring a 17-month strike a failure. In 2009, workers took executives at Caterpillar France hostage during a dispute over the restructuring of operations in Grenoble.

Electro-Motive is the second-largest maker of locomotives in North America, after General Electric, and for most of its history was a unit of General Motors. While the parent company, Electro-Motive Diesel, is based in LaGrange, Ill., its only assembly plant in recent years has been the Canadian operation.

But last October, Progress Rail, Caterpillar’s rail operations holding company, opened a new locomotive assembly plant in Muncie, Ind.

The Canadian Auto Workers say that wages and benefits are substantially lower at the new American factory.

The union has suggested that, in addition to reducing labor costs, the company may also want to end Canadian production to avoid potential problems with “Buy American” provisions of United States government procurement rules. While the United States government has said that Canada is exempt from any such measures, labor leaders say that has not always been the case in practice.

The purchase of Electro-Motive Canada was reviewed by the Canadian government under the nation’s foreign investment laws. The union has asked the government to release what conditions, if any, were attached to the subsequent approval. The Canadian government recently settled a dispute with United States Steel under those laws after the company shut down a Canadian steel maker shortly after acquiring it.

“When a foreign company comes in and purchases an existing facility, there has to be a benefit to Canadians,” said Mr. Carrie, the union executive. “Americans coming in and trying to slash wages in half is not a benefit to Canadians.”

Industry Canada, the government department that handles investment reviews, was closed for the New Year holiday on Monday and did not respond to requests for comment.

Anne Marie Quinn, a spokeswoman for Electro-Motive Canada, declined to answer questions about the company’s contract demands, its long-term production plans or any commitments made to the Canadian government.

The company’s Web site about the labor dispute, though, said that the cost of wages and benefits for its workers in Illinois, who are represented by the United Automobile Workers, is about half that for the London plant.

The site says that the now-expired contract at the Canadian factory “also has?antiquated work rules that make the London operation inefficient.”

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Relatives of 9/11 Victims, Suspecting Hacking, Await Answers

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AppId is over the quota

Some heard mysterious clicking sounds on their home and mobile phones. The fiancée of one man who died at the World Trade Center remembers listening to snippets of someone else’s conversation on her line. A husband of another victim recalls hearing somebody remotely accessing his home answering machine, which still held the final, reassuring message left by his wife shortly before the crash of Flight 93. Others say they are baffled as to how details about their loved ones appeared in British tabloids within days of the attacks.

Ten years later, their long-held suspicions aroused by The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London, dozens of relatives of victims contacted the Justice Department. On Aug. 24, eight of them met with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and asked him to determine whether their privacy had been violated. As a first step, they asked him to see whether Scotland Yard had a record of their names or phone numbers among the material seized from a private investigator who hacked cellphone messages for the tabloid.

Four months later, they are still waiting to hear back and are frustrated by the Justice Department’s silence.

“It’s not that hard to find out — it’s quite a simple thing, really, isn’t it?” said Patricia Bingley, a British citizen whose son, Kevin Dennis, a 43-year-old trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

Ms. Bingley said she was stunned to see, in the Sept. 18, 2001, issue of The Sun, a photograph of her son reading a bedtime story to his two sons, which she did not give to the paper. The story also contained details about her son that she said no one from her family had provided to The Sun. “It never made sense to me,” she said, adding that she suspects hacking or worse by the paper. “I’d like very much for the government to tell us whether this happened or not. Celebrities seem to have no trouble finding out.”

In July, as revelations about widespread phone hacking by the tabloid were spilling out, another British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reported that a private investigator said that News of the World reporters had offered to pay him to retrieve phone records of Sept. 11 victims. After the report, which was not confirmed by other news organizations, the Justice Department opened an investigation. To date, no evidence has emerged publicly that Sept. 11 victims were hacking targets.

Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer at a South Carolina firm that represents more than 6,700 relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said she and her colleagues had scoured the British tabloids and found scores of details about the victims. Relatives were not certain how the tabloids found out so much so quickly after the attacks.

One of the relatives, whom she declined to identify, said that five days after Sept. 11, The Sun published the words from a voice mail message left on his cellphone by his son, who was aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. (British authorities are also investigating whether hacking occurred at The Sun, which, like The News of the World, is owned by News Corporation.)

In late September, Ms. Flowers, of the Motley Rice law firm, sent Mr. Holder phone numbers of two dozen relatives of victims and asked that Scotland Yard run them through the 12,000 pages of documents seized from the home of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator responsible for most of the hacking by the now-shuttered News of the World. She said at least 100 of her clients, in both the United States and Britain, now want similar information.

On Nov. 3, Vida G. Bottom, chief of the Justice Department’s public corruption unit, wrote to the lawyers, saying, “The F.B.I. has undertaken a preliminary review to assess the veracity of those allegations.”

Ms. Flowers said she was disappointed by the vagueness of the response. “We asked a simple threshold question, and we basically received a nonanswer,” she said.

Ms. Flowers added, “If there was no hacking, it is wildly coincidental that so many people describe similar experiences.”

Even so, two Justice Department officials with knowledge of the inquiry said they did not expect much to come of the investigation. The officials, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss a continuing criminal inquiry, said the investigation remained open in case Scotland Yard discovered evidence confirming the suspicions of the Sept. 11 relatives. They both said they were doubtful such evidence would emerge.

Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said only, “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

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Exxon Could Receive $555 Million in Cash from Venezuela

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AppId is over the quota

The arbitration award decided by the International Court of Arbitration, which is based in Paris, was valued at $907.6 million. In addition to the cash Exxon stands to receive, the oil giant will be released from the payment of debts totaling about $352 million. The ruling was dated Dec. 23, but Exxon said it did not receive the decision until Friday.

The Venezuelan government and Exxon both sought to portray themselves as victors in the arbitration, which stemmed from the 2007 nationalization of a heavy crude oil production project in the Orinoco Belt, considered one of the world’s richest potential petroleum reserves.

Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-run oil company, released a statement on Monday saying that Exxon had sought a much larger compensation and that the arbitrator’s conclusion showed that the company’s claims were “exorbitant” and “completely exaggerated and beyond all logic.”

The state oil company said that its “successful defense” in the case meant that it was required to make only a $255 million payment to Exxon.

But the state oil company’s statement acknowledged that Exxon would also receive about $300 million in cash from bank accounts in the United States belonging to the state oil company; those accounts were frozen by a court ruling after the nationalization. Exxon said the frozen accounts contained $305 million.

The government statement said that Venezuela has always been willing to compensate private interests for the nationalization of assets as long as the compensation was “fair and reasonable.”

In a statement Monday, Exxon said that the arbitration affirmed the state oil company’s contractual liability in its agreements with Exxon over what was known as the Cerro Negro project.

“Contract sanctity and respect for the rule of law are core principles used to manage our business over the long term,” Exxon said.

The nationalization of the Exxon project and other oil projects involving multinational corporations was a major step in a campaign of expropriations by the government of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

Exxon and Venezuela are involved in a second arbitration over the same project before the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, part of the World Bank, which could increase the amount the company receives.

The country faces several other potential settlements with foreign companies over a spate of nationalizations that have taken place in recent years. One of those involves a project of the oil company Conoco Phillips, also in the Orinoco Belt.

The ruling appeared to lend weight to Venezuela’s argument that it should compensate companies for the amount they had invested, the so-called book value, rather than the market value that an asset would receive if it were put up for sale.

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Opposition Protests New Hungarian Constitution

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The protest — a day after the country’s new “majoritarian” Constitution took effect — was the first time that opposition groups, from political parties to civil organizations, joined forces to rally against the new Constitution, which was drawn up and ratified by Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party in defiance of criticism from Europe and the United States.

Fidesz used its two-thirds supermajority in Parliament to adopt the Constitution, which critics say tightens the government’s grip on the news media and the courts and dismantles democratic aspects of the judiciary. Last month, the government passed a measure that critics said seriously weakened the independence of the nation’s central bank.

While various organizations have staged protests over the past year, Monday’s rally was a previously unseen show of unity by various opposition parties and civil groups, and timed to coincide with the extravagant gala organized by Fidesz to celebrate the signing of the Constitution. Thousands of disgruntled Hungarians poured into Budapest’s Andrássy Street, which is lined with luxury shops leading down from the opera house.

“Democracy has disappeared in Hungary — they even took the republic from us,” said Tamas Kollar, 56, referring to his nation’s name change, from the Republic of Hungary to simply Hungary. Mr. Kollar said he felt robbed of his rights under Mr. Orban’s government.

Organizers addressing the crowd estimated that tens of thousands had turned out to fill the square outside the ornate National Opera, in the heart of the city. Riot police officers had secured the area and moved into the crowd after scuffling broke out among protesters and members of the far right, identified by the red and white flags they carried, who then dispersed.

The far-right Jobbik party said in a statement that it would not participate in the protest, but called its supporters to a parallel demonstration nearby, leading to fears of clashes reminiscent of 2006 riots over demands that Ferenc Gyurcsany, then the prime minister, step down.

Since then, Hungarians have seemed reluctant to take to the streets. Although protests took place throughout 2011, they were relatively small. Monday’s turnout fed opposition hopes that a sizable crowd could send a clear message to the government.

Petr Konya of the Hungarian Solidarity Movement, which helped organize the demonstrations, told the cheering crowd that 2012 would be a year of hope.

“We want the rule of law back and we want the republic back,” Mr. Konya said, to loud cheers. “Viktor Orban forgot that the power belongs to the people, it belongs to us, and we will get it back from them.”

Mr. Orban and his supporters insist that the changes to the Constitution and other laws are only steps that make good on campaign promises to do away with the old order and complete the transition from Communism that had stalled under previous governments.

Palko Karasz reported from Budapest, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.

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Bob Anderson, Sword-Fight Choreographer, Dies at 89

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Philip Bruce, president of the British Academy of Fencing, confirmed the death.

Mr. Anderson was a superior and versatile athlete who as a sailor in the Royal Marines in the 1940s won interservice fencing championships with all three of the sport’s weapons — foil, épée and saber. Saber, a flat-bladed weapon with which points are scored by striking with the side of the blade, was his specialty. (In foil and épée only the tip of the swords are used to score.) Mr. Anderson represented Great Britain at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and twice in the world championships in the saber competition.

Just before the Olympics, Mr. Anderson was asked to be a fight choreographer and stunt double for the film “Master of Ballantrae,” an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling tale of an 18th-century Scottish lord who takes up piracy, Mr. Anderson and the film’s star, Errol Flynn, became great pals in spite of a mishap during which, as the two men were being filmed in a sword fight, Flynn was wounded in the thigh. Flynn immediately took responsibility for the accident, though Mr. Anderson was thereafter known as the man who stabbed Errol Flynn.

Over the next several decades Mr. Anderson became well-known in Hollywood as a sword master — part instructor, part stuntman, part fight choreographer. With a reputation as a perfectionist, he earned the nickname “Grumpy Bob.”

Among many other projects, he worked with James Bond (a k a Sean Connery) on “From Russia with Love” (1963); with Ryan O’Neal in Stanley Kubrick’s picaresque 19th-century drama based on a novel by Thackeray, “Barry Lyndon” (1975); with Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin, who played ambidextrous combatants in “The Princess Bride” (1987); with Aramis, Athos, Porthos and D’Artagnan (Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt and Chris O’Donnell) in “The Three Musketeers” (1993); with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in “The Mask of Zorro” (1998) and “The Legend of Zorro” (2005); and with the director Peter Jackson on the epic Medieval fantasy “The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring” (2001).

Most famously, Mr. Anderson worked on George Lucas’s original “Star Wars” trilogy. He played a behind-the-scenes role in the first film, “Star Wars” (1977), but in the next two, “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “The Return of the Jedi” (1983), he appeared on-screen as the evil, black-helmeted Darth Vader in the scenes in which he battles the young hero, Luke, who is secretly his son, with sabers whose blades are laserlike lights.

He was uncredited in the part; the role was voiced by James Earl Jones and played by David Prowse, a hulking actor, 6 feet 7 inches tall, who was simply not good with a saber. Mr. Anderson stepped in, and though he was six inches shorter than Mr. Prowse, his identity was a secret until Mark Hamill disclosed it in an interview.

“I finally told George I didn’t think it was fair any more,” Mr. Hamill told Starlog, a science fiction magazine. “Bob worked so bloody hard that he deserves some recognition.” Robert James Gilbert Anderson was born on Sept. 15, 1922, in Hampshire, England, southwest of London. Survivors include his wife, Pearl, three children and several grandchildren.

In addition to his film work, Mr. Anderson was for many years the coach of Great Britain’s national fencing team, and he was also, in the 1960s and 1970s, president of the British Academy of Fencing, which oversees the training of fencing coaches in the United Kingdom. A statement by the academy on Monday said, in part: “It is true to say that nearly 100 percent of fencing in Britain today is directly or indirectly attributable to the work of this man.”

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Kiro Gligorov, Macedonia President in 1990s, Dies at 94

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AppId is over the quota

His death was confirmed by an aide, Zivko Kondev.

Mr. Gligorov became president of Macedonia in January 1991 when it was still a Yugoslav republic. He led his countrymen through a referendum in which they voted for independence, and the territory of 2.1 million people became the only republic to secede from Yugoslavia without a war. He served two consecutive terms, leaving office in November 1999.

Severely injured in an assassination attempt in October 1995, Mr. Gligorov emerged from a roughly four-month hospital stay with deep facial scars. A bomb, which targeted his car as he headed to work in the capital, Skopje, cost him an eye and killed his driver and a bystander. No suspects were ever arrested.

The early days of Mr. Gligorov’s presidency were overshadowed by a bitter dispute with Greece over the newly independent nation’s name — a dispute that continues to this day.

Greece objected to the use of the name Macedonia, saying it implied territorial ambitions on its own northern province of the same name. It also objected to a symbol on the new country’s flag and articles of the Macedonian Constitution that Greece believed suggested territorial claims.

Greece imposed a crippling 19-month embargo on its northern neighbor. In 1995, the Macedonian government signed an accord with Greece agreeing to remove the symbol from its flag and revising some articles of the Constitution, but talks on the country’s name have made little progress. In official bodies such as the United Nations, the country is known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Mr. Gligorov also faced domestic unrest, with the country’s large ethnic Albanian minority pressing for greater cultural and political autonomy.

The demands eventually boiled over into armed conflict in early 2001, about a year and a half after Mr. Gligorov left office. The two sides eventually signed a peace accord under which minorities were guaranteed greater rights, and NATO peacekeepers were sent to the country.

Born in the central Macedonian town of Stip on May 3, 1917, Mr. Gligorov graduated from law school in Belgrade and was working as a lawyer for a private bank in Skopje when World War II broke out. He joined the partisan movement fighting against the Nazi occupation from its early days.

He is survived by two daughters and a son. His wife, Nada, died in 2009.

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Global Update: New H.I.V. Cases and AIDS Deaths Plummet in British Columbia

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New H.I.V. cases and AIDS deaths are both going steadily down in British Columbia, according to data released last week.

“We’re particularly pleased to see that our treatment-as-prevention strategy has taken off big-time,” said Dr. Julio S. G. Montaner, director of the British Columbia Center for Excellence in H.I.V./AIDS. His center was a pioneer in the strategy, which involves searching aggressively for people at risk of H.I.V. infection, talking them into being tested and putting those who are infected on antiretroviral drugs immediately, which lowers by 96 percent the chances that they will infect others.

In Vancouver, where he works, AIDS is concentrated in two largely separate groups: gay men and drug addicts. To reach the addicts, the city opened a center where they can inject under a nurse’s supervision without fear of arrest; the nurses also offer medical care, including tests.

Testing is increasing, and syphilis rates are holding steady, Dr. Montaner said, so the drop in new cases is not a result of fewer tests or greater condom use.

AIDS cases remain steady in Canada’s other provinces, except for those in the Prairies region, where they tripled, mostly among Indian addicts in Saskatchewan, which has no safe-injection center.

Last week, Science magazine named the treatment-as-prevention strategy, with the clinical trial of 1,763 couples on four continents that proved it worked, as its 2011 “Breakthrough of the Year.”

Dr. Montaner said he is frustrated that rich countries will not donate enough money to roll out the strategy in poor countries with huge H.I.V. epidemics.

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American Awaits Verdict After Iran Spy Trial, Report Says

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AppId is over the quota

Amir Mirza Hekmati, a 28-year-old of Iranian descent, could face the death penalty if found guilty of cooperating with a hostile government and spying for the CIA. He was arrested in December.

Iran's Intelligence Ministry accused Hekmati of receiving training at U.S. bases in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq.

Shortly after his detention, state television showed a taped interview of him confessing to being a spy. At his trial he admitted to having links with the CIA but said he had no intention of harming Iran.

The trial comes at a time of heightened tension between Iran and the United States, which is leading efforts to tighten sanctions on Tehran because of its controversial nuclear program.

U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner last week urged Tehran to release Hekmati immediately.

He said that Switzerland, which represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of formal diplomatic ties, had formally requested permission for consular access to Hekmati on December 24 but Iran had refused.

"America's request for the return of the accused, indicates their utmost impudence and he should be tried based on the country's laws," justice ministry spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei said.

Iran said in May it had arrested 30 people on suspicion of spying for the United States, and 15 people were later indicted for spying for Washington and Israel.

(Writing by Mitra Amiri; Editing by Ben Harding)

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President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea Predicts Changes in Peninsula

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AppId is over the quota
Kim Jong-un visited with members of a tank division in a photograph released Sunday by North Korea's official news agency.

SEOUL, South Korea — President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea vowed on Monday to “deal strongly with any provocations” from the North, predicting a “big change” on the divided Korean Peninsula following the death of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, and his untested young son’s rise to power.

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In his nationally televised New Year’s speech, Mr. Lee did not elaborate on what change he foresaw. But policy-makers and analysts in the region are closely watching whether the designated successor in the North, Kim Jong-un, who is believed to be in his 20s, can consolidate his grip on power or will depend on caretakers and even regents to run the country, and how that might affect the country’s external policies, especially its nuclear weapons programs.

“A big change is expected in the situation on the Korean Peninsula and northeast Asia following the death of Chairman Kim Jong-il,” Mr. Lee said. “The situation on the Korean Peninsula is now entering a new turning point. But there should be a new opportunity amid changes and uncertainty.”

Mr. Lee’s warning against North Korean provocations came amid fears that the North, as it has in the past, might attempt military or terrorist attacks on the South to reinforce internal unity at a time of sensitive transition and to boost a new leader’s military credentials.

Over the weekend, North Korea made Mr. Kim supreme commander of the 1.2 million-member Korean People’s Army, a move considered crucial to protecting his power, and issued a series of statements calling Mr. Lee’s government in Seoul “national traitors” and vowing “punishment” and “revenge.”

Mr. Lee, though, kept open the possibility of inter-Korean talks despite North Korea’s repeated statements that it had no intention of dealing with his government.

“It is South and North Korea, before anyone else, that must try to achieve the task of building peace, security and reunification on the Korean Peninsula,” he said. “We are leaving a window of opportunity open. If North Korea shows its attitude of sincerity, a new era on the Korean Peninsula can be opened.”

He urged North Korea to suspend its nuclear activities, including its uranium-enrichment program, so that six-nation talks can resume to discuss eliminating its nuclear weapons programs in return for security guarantees and economic assistance for the North.

Mr. Lee’s speech came a day after North Korea issued a New Year’s Day statement that sought to cement support for Mr. Kim and his family’s dynastic rule. It also lambasted South Korea for not expressing official condolences for Kim Jong-il’s death.

In his speech, Mr. Lee called taming inflation and creating jobs two of his top goals as he entered his last year in office. (By law, he cannot run in the next presidential election in December.) He also apologized for a recent series of corruption scandals that implicated his former aides and relatives.

“While economic growth is important, I will focus on bringing consumer prices down,” he said, promising to keep inflation below 3.5 percent this year. South Korea’s consumer prices rose 4.2 percent last month.

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