On Eve of Vote, Fragile Valley in Kenya Faces New Divisions

KIAMBAA, Kenya — After another long day, Joseph Kairuri Mwangi walked back to his farmhouse shack, the late afternoon sun slanting behind him, his strides slow, his shoes muddy with rich, freshly turned earth.

It has been five years since his right hand was nearly cut off, but it still hurts.

“Right here,” he said, gingerly touching the scars. “I still feel pain right here.”

This whole area is a land of scars. On the shanties made from burned-up sheet metal, salvaged from homes set afire by mobs. On people’s limbs and faces. And in their hearts.

Five years ago, the Rift Valley of Kenya, a spectacularly verdant landscape of rolling hills, emerald green tea plantations and quilted farmland, suddenly exploded. A disputed election set off ethnic clashes that killed more than 1,000 people nationwide — more than 30 were burned alive in a church here in Kiambaa — and thousands are still living in shacks and tents, driven off their land with nowhere to go.

This was the seething center of Kenya’s upheaval, and now that the country is about to hold another major election on Monday, the first since the tumult of 2007 and 2008, the Rift Valley is still polarized, though some of the prejudices and poisonous feelings have shifted along with changes in political alliances.

“Those Luos,” said David Wanjohi Chege, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, speaking derisively about another one of Kenya’s major ethnic groups. “Those Luos won’t stop at nothing.”

Most people agree that preparations for this election are a vast improvement from the last time around. The creaky manual voting systems that promptly broke down have been replaced with state of the art digital technology, and nonprofit groups have devised social media tools to detect and parry hate speech. PeaceTXT, for example, is a text messaging service that sends out blasts of pro-peace messages to specific areas when trouble is brewing.

Donor nations have been holding Kenya’s hand much tighter this time around, advising election officials and contributing more than $100 million in election preparation. Investors big and small have shown their confidence that the vote will be all right, with Kenyan stocks edging up in the past week.

“I don’t think this time will be as bad,” said Bidan Thuku Mwangi, who runs a small bridal shop in the Rift Valley town of Londiani. On the floor are seven charred sewing machines, destroyed in the mayhem of 2008, but next to them is a sheaf of papers — an application for a new loan. “I’m waiting till after the election,” he said with a cautious smile. “Just in case.”

According to Human Rights Watch, Rift Valley politicians have been holding secretive night meetings, and more guns may have seeped in. Machete sales are sharply rising, other human rights observers in Kenya said recently, though it is not clear how much of this is fact and how much is fiction.

Some people are beginning to move out of ethnically mixed areas, frightened that there could be postelection reprisals, along ethnic lines, like what happened in 2008.

“All this is the mischief of politicians,” said Dominico Owiti, who lives in a new trouble spot, Sondu, a bushy borderland between the Luos and the Kalenjins. The two ethnic groups were allies during the last election, but because of opportunistic political alliances struck between Kenya’s leading politicians, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a very combustible political divide.

Similarly, two groups that fought so bitterly here the last time, the Kalenjins and the Kikuyus, are now political allies because their leaders have teamed up to run for president and deputy president on the same ticket.

“I don’t like it,” said Mary Macharia, a Kikuyu woman whose daughter was killed in the church fire in 2008, which was set by a Kalenjin mob. “But who am I to refuse?”

Kenya is considered one of the most modern countries in Africa, but ethnically charged politics is an Achilles’ heel. Colonial policies typecast certain ethnic groups — the Masai were the guards, the Kikuyus the farmhands, the Luos the teachers — and ethnicity has continued to serve as a stubbornly important basis of identity.

During elections, politicians use ethnic differences to stir up voters, and already 200 people have been killed in the Tana River Delta area of Kenya in clashes that both sides say have been inflamed by electoral politics.

In neighboring Tanzania, also a mosaic of dozens of ethnic groups, the government has instituted specific policies — like pushing the use of a common language, Swahili, and outlawing ethnically based political parties — to build a common Tanzanian identity. But here in Kenya, many people still speak their “mother tongue,” and interethnic marriage remains relatively rare.

“Everything has always been tribe-based,” said Christine Ololo Atieno, a Luo, who sells secondhand shoes in Kisumu, a big city in western Kenya.

Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

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World Briefing | Africa: South Africa: 8 Officers Charged in Dragging Case

Eight South African police officers were charged with murder on Friday in connection with the death of a taxi driver dragged by a police vehicle, an episode that was captured on videotape. South Africa’s police chief, Gen. Riah Phiyega, said that she shared “the extreme shock and outrage” over the video evidence of abuse of the man, Mido Macia, left, by police officers and that his rights had been “violated in the most extreme form.” The restraining and dragging of Mr. Macia, who was said to have parked in the wrong spot, was videotaped by members of a horrified crowd of onlookers who beseeched the police officers to stop their abuse and questioned their motives in dragging him away with their police car. Mr. Macia was found dead in prison a few hours later, having sustained head and upper abdomen injuries, including internal bleeding.

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Jean-Claude Duvalier Faces Questions in Court About His Reign in Haiti

Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press

Supporters of Jean-Claude Duvalier held a picture of him, right, and his father outside court.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator known as Baby Doc accused of bearing responsibility for the deaths, torture and the disappearance of hundreds of people, walked into a muggy, packed courtroom here on Thursday, sat down next to shocked victims and for the first time answered questions in a court of law about his brutal, 15-year reign.

The hearing, one he had avoided three times before but attended under renewed pressure from a judge, provided few answers about the violent period in Haiti that eventually ended with his downfall and the first, halting steps toward democracy. But few here ever expected the spectacle of a former dictator, dressed in a blue suit and gray tie, to give patient if evasive, and occasionally inaudible, responses while being called to account for his terror.

The judge, Jean-Joseph Lebrun, presiding over a hearing to determine if a trial should go forward, informed Mr. Duvalier that he was accused of ordering illegal arrests, torture and political killings during his tenure from 1971 to 1986.

“Were there deaths and summary executions under your government?” the judge asked.

“Deaths exist in all countries,” Mr. Duvalier, 61, replied, speaking so softly that the stenographer had to repeat his answers. “I didn’t intervene in the activities of the police.”

Mr. Duvalier, who unexpectedly returned from exile in France in 2011, later denied complicity and said that he checked out reports of abuse when they came to his attention. He defended his rule “as the son of a great nationalist,” François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, another feared dictator whose death in 1971 put Mr. Duvalier, at age 19, in control of the country.

He painted a picture of a Haiti with less street crime than there is now and lamented the poverty and corruption that he said had become widespread.

“Upon my return, I found a country in ruins and engulfed by corruption,” he said. “It is my turn to ask, ‘what have you done with my country?’ ”

Mr. Duvalier, after his return, was charged with corruption; a court last year set aside human rights charges because it said the statute of limitations had expired. But advocates argued that it misinterpreted the law.

Some accuse the justice system of avoiding the human rights charges because Mr. Duvalier has been friendly with the current president, Michel Martelly. But victims’ lawyers pushed the case through appellate courts, leading to the pretrial hearing on Wednesday.

“This is already a historic victory in a country where the rich and powerful have always been above the law,” said Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch. “Who’d have thought that Duvalier would be forced one day to face his victims in a court of law, to submit to questioning about his alleged crimes, and to listen to details about his prisons and his police? Whatever happens next, Haitians will remember the image of their former dictator having to answer questions about the repression carried out under his rule.”

Mr. Duvalier’s rule was a bloody period of deaths and disappearances, many at the hands of a militia known as the Tonton Macoutes. He fled Haiti as civil unrest was tearing the country apart, leading to a period of tumultuous democracy marked by chaotic, sometimes violent elections.

In court, the names of several victims were read aloud and some of them were there, including Robert Duval, who said he was imprisoned and tortured in the 1970s and smiled when he heard his name and said: “I’m touching myself to see if I’m alive or if it’s a dream.”

Isabeau Doucet reported from Port-au-Prince, and Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City.

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As Castro Era Drifts to Close, a New Face Steps In at No. 2

Franklin Reyes/Associated Press

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, right, during the closing session of the Cuban National Assembly in Havana on Sunday.

MEXICO CITY — He may have just taken on the toughest job in Cuba. Rivals at home will try to take him down. Enemies abroad will discredit him. Almost anyone with an interest in Cuba — including American spies and Cuban intelligence officers — will dig through his public and private lives, rummaging for secrets or clues about his plans.

All the while, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, 52, the top contender to succeed the Castros after more than half a century of their rule, will need to display the authority of a future president while acting as if he does not want the job, maintaining the submissiveness and loyalty that the Castros require.

“It’s going to be a challenge,” said Brian Latell, a former C.I.A. agent who monitored Fidel Castro’s speeches for years and continues to track Raúl Castro as an outside analyst. “The record of the Cuban revolution is littered with the names of people who were thought to be No. 3 or 2 and all of them fell by the wayside, going back to Che Guevara.”

Though a stranger to many Cubans, Mr. Díaz-Canel suddenly became the chosen one when he was promoted to first vice president on Sunday as Raúl Castro, 81, announced he would retire after his current five-year term ended in 2018.

Mr. Díaz-Canel replaced José Ramón Machado Ventura, 82, and became one of the youngest members of Cuba’s political hierarchy. His elevation raised the curtain on an epic drama that had been envisioned dozens of times over the decades. Leader after leader has been mentioned as the next president of Cuba but now, with the Castro era drifting to a close, all the attention is focused on Mr. Díaz-Canel, who has been thrust into what experts describe as the most scrutinized leadership role in the country since Fidel Castro took power in 1959.

Several high-placed young guns who had been auditioning for the job have been banished from government since Fidel Castro fell ill and retired in 2006. Some were accused of corruption, others of disloyalty in the form of vulgar jokes (surreptitiously recorded) about Fidel Castro’s health and Raúl Castro’s political capabilities.

One of those sent packing off in an earlier purge — the Cuban expression is “plan pajama” — is an old boss of Mr. Díaz-Canel’s from their days at the Union of Communist Youth: Roberto Robaina, a brilliant mathematician and former foreign minister who can now be found painting or hanging out at his Havana restaurant, Chaplin’s Cafe.

But unlike others floated as possible future leaders, Mr. Díaz-Canel has managed to be officially anointed as the successor. No one else can claim that distinction, not even Che, Fidel Castro’s right-hand man during the revolution. And though much about Mr. Díaz-Canel remains a mystery, what is known suggests that Rául Castro made the selection. Mr. Díaz-Canel, though clearly an avowed loyalist, has little in common with Fidel Castro, in personality or outlook. He seems instead a younger, more casual version of Raúl.

Like Raúl, he is known for being funny and warm in small groups, and more demure when speaking to crowds. An engineer, he also shares with Raúl a hefty respect for competence over ideology, and an antipathy to showy appearances. While Fidel Castro took power riding a tank into Havana, Mr. Díaz-Canel is well known within Communist Party circles for riding his bike to work when he served as the top official in the province of Villa Clara. He was born there in a lush central region of sweet-smelling mills and pristine coastal keys on April 20, 1960. His father worked for a brewery and his mother was a primary school teacher, according to someone close to the family who did not want to be identified talking about the private life of a government official.

The insider said that Mr. Díaz-Canel was a keen chess player as a child and an avid reader. He is on Facebook, looking casual in a photograph with relatives, but online there are few examples of his published commentary.

He appears to have maintained a down-to-earth approach throughout his career. After graduating from the Central University of Las Villas in 1982, he served in the military for a few years, then slowly moved up the Communist Party ranks. While others behaved like bureaucrats, he had a touch of the mod, wearing his blondish hair long and listening to rock ’n’ roll.

Damien Cave reported from Mexico City, and Victoria Burnett from Havana. Alain Delaquérière contributed research from New York.

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New Report Details Syrian Missile Attack

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government fired at least four ballistic missiles last week that hit civilian neighborhoods in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, killing more than 141 people, including 71 children, according to a Human Rights Watch report released on Tuesday.

Syrian antigovernment activists had reported the missile strikes last week, corroborated by video of the aftermath posted on the Internet, but the Human Rights Watch report contained new details about the number of missile strikes and the scope of destruction, with a death toll that was far higher than previously thought.

“The extent of the damage from a single strike, the lack of aircraft in the area at the time, and reports of ballistic missiles being launched from a military base near Damascus overwhelmingly suggest that government forces struck these areas with ballistic missiles,” the report said.

The assessment came as both sides’ international backers called with increasing urgency for a political solution but remained unable to get the antagonists to talk. That impasse has been the main focus of the first foreign trip by John Kerry, the new American secretary of state, who met with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, on Tuesday to try to push the Syrian combatants into talks.

Fighting intensified in Aleppo, including around the 12th-century Umayyad Mosque, one of the architectural centerpieces of Aleppo’s Old City, and around a long-contested police academy, according to rebels and the government.

The ballistic missile strikes felled entire buildings in destruction that stands out even after months of fighting, according to Human Rights Watch. Its researchers visited all four sites, in residential areas, and found no evidence of military targets nearby, making the attacks a violation of international law, the organization said.

A resident of Ard al-Hamra, one of the neighborhoods hit, said he had just left his brother’s house after evening tea on Friday when “the sky was lit up by a tremendous flash and all air was sucked away.”

He ran back to find that “my brother’s house was gone,” he told Human Rights Watch. “We managed to find my five young nieces and nephews, aged between 3 and 17 years old. They were all dead under the rubble. We still have not found my brother. When will somebody stop this madness?”

As the death toll from the Syrian conflict exceeds 70,000, according to United Nations estimates, and the destruction of major cities continues unabated, fears are mounting that the conflict will spread throughout the region.

Jeffrey D. Feltman, the United Nations’ top political official, told the Security Council during a Middle East briefing, “The destructive military spiral churns more forcefully each day and threatens to pull its neighbors, most notably and worrisomely Lebanon, into its vortex.”

Lebanon, torn apart by political disagreements over Syria and longstanding sectarian divides exacerbated by the increasingly sectarian killing in Syria, last week became the country hosting the largest number of Syrian refugees, even though it is Syria’s smallest and most politically vulnerable neighbor.

“Even tentative steps to dialogue are struggling to take root,” Mr. Feltman said, referring to offers of negotiations issued — with caveats and conditions — by both the Syrian opposition and government in recent days. “Regrettably, the warring parties remain locked in military logic which is bound to bring more death and destruction.”

Before a meeting in Rome on Thursday of the opposition’s international backers, the main opposition group remains under pressure to further unify and organize itself — in part to make sure there is someone for the government to meet with should talks become possible.

The opposition group, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, has said that on Saturday it will select a prime minister to run an interim government to be established in rebel-held areas of northern Syria. But the group has set and missed such deadlines in the past, and members say there is no consensus yet on who should fill the post.

Even if a prime minister is appointed and empowered to negotiate with the Syrian government, it is unclear if talks will take place. The government of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, has long insisted that Mr. Assad be part of the process, while the opposition coalition, backed by the United States, declares that he cannot be.

Seeking to resolve that impasse, Mr. Kerry had his first meeting as secretary of state with Mr. Lavrov of Russia on Tuesday in Berlin.

The meeting covered the range of American-Russian issues, from economic relations to adoption of Russian orphans. But more than half of the session was devoted to the situation in Syria.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Kerry’s predecessor as secretary of state, believed she had worked out an agreement with the Russians in Geneva in June that would have established the framework for negotiations on a political transition to a post-Assad government. But the Russians interpreted the agreement differently, saying that the understanding that Mr. Assad should leave power could not be a precondition for the talks.

Mr. Kerry, who has said he has new ideas on how to advance diplomacy on Syria, has been looking for a way to secure Russian backing for a transition.

“It was a really serious and hard-working session,” said Victoria Nuland, the State Department’s spokeswoman. Much of the discussion, she said, “focused on Syria and how we can work together to implement the Geneva agreement.”

Mr. Lavrov told Russian news agencies after the meeting that Russia would try to establish the conditions for initiating “a dialogue between the government and the opposition.”

Hania Mourtada and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, and Michael R. Gordon from Berlin.

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Ikea Recalls Its Meatballs Horse Meat Is Detected

LONDON — The furniture giant Ikea joined a growing list of brands that have been touched by Europe’s food scandal on Monday and withdrew its signature Swedish meatballs from its markets and cafeterias across most of Europe after one batch was found to contain traces of horse meat.

Ikea’s decision — which followed a recall by the Swiss food maker Nestlé last week — demonstrated that even closely guarded brand names have found themselves vulnerable.

In weeks of tracing the problem, European Union and national officials have conceded that their oversight had not been aimed at authenticating food products. Now that governments and companies have undertaken more extensive testing, the results appear to indicate that food adulteration may be more commonplace and widespread than previously believed.

“Clearly there has been fraud on a massive scale across multiple countries in the E.U.,” Simon Coveney, the agriculture minister for Ireland, which holds the union’s rotating presidency, told a news conference after a meeting with colleagues in Brussels on Monday.

Noting that “big brands and big names that people trust” have been caught up in the issue, Mr. Coveney said, “We are all eager to get to the bottom of this.”

The detection of horse meat, which began in Ireland and spread quickly, has raised questions about the quality and oversight of Europe’s complex chain of slaughterhouses, processed meat producers, distributors and retailers.

Already millions of products have been withdrawn, and new cases of adulteration are being discovered almost daily, involving some of the best-known food makers — including Findus and Iglo — and most prominent supermarket chains.

Ikea’s announcement underlined how few retailers can rest easy as more scrutiny is applied. The recall risks denting the homely Scandinavian image of Ikea, one of Sweden’s best-known companies.

A traditional part of Swedish cuisine, meatballs are consumed in huge quantities — 150 million a year, according to the company’s Web site — by customers in Ikea cafeterias and are also sold for consumption at home.

The company said its action concerned meatballs manufactured by one supplier in Sweden and applies to all European countries except Norway and Russia and to a limited number of products in Switzerland and Poland. The United States is not affected, the company said.

Clive Black, a retail analyst at Shore Capital, an investment banking company in London, said that Ikea’s announcement was “another left-field random outcome of the whole situation. Did Ikea want to sell horse meat? No. Have they been caught out by rogue elements? Yes.”

“The breadth with which contamination has been found clearly shows that there has been substantial rogue activity,” he added.

Ikea first said that it would not sell or serve any meatballs at its stores in Sweden after the Czech authorities detected horse meat in frozen meatballs that were labeled beef and pork, even though Ikea’s own tests two weeks ago had not detected horse DNA.

The company also said it was stopping sales in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, France, Britain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Ireland. The meatballs were produced by Ikea’s main supplier of the product, a Swedish company called Familjen Dafgard.

In a statement later in the day, Anders Lennartsson, a spokesman for Ikea Food Services, said, “We take seriously the test result from the Czech Republic authorities, indicating presence of horse meat in one batch of our meatballs.”

Results of DNA tests conducted by the food industry in Britain, released last week, showed that 1 percent of beef products were tainted with horse meat. But that news was offset by the discovery of tainted beef products destined for school meals in Scotland.

And, while the issue is primarily seen as one of fraud and mislabeling, there is concern that a powerful equine painkiller, phenylbutazone, or bute, may have entered the food chain.

Stephen Castle reported from London, and Andrew Higgins from Brussels.

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News Analysis: U.S. Confronts Cyber-Cold War With China

WASHINGTON — When the Obama administration circulated to the nation’s Internet providers last week a lengthy confidential list of computer addresses linked to a hacking group that has stolen terabytes of data from American corporations, it left out one crucial fact: that nearly every one of the digital addresses could be traced to the neighborhood in Shanghai that is headquarters to the Chinese military’s cybercommand.

Carlos Barria/Reuters

A building that houses a Chinese military unit on the outskirts of Shanghai, believed to be the source of hacking attacks.

That deliberate omission underscored the heightened sensitivities inside the Obama administration over just how directly to confront China’s untested new leadership over the hacking issue, as the administration escalates demands that China halt the state-sponsored attacks that Beijing insists it is not mounting.

The issue illustrates how different the worsening cyber-cold war between the world’s two largest economies is from the more familiar superpower conflicts of past decades — in some ways less dangerous, in others more complex and pernicious.

Administration officials say they are now more willing than before to call out the Chinese directly — as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did last week in announcing a new strategy to combat theft of intellectual property. But President Obama avoided mentioning China by name — or Russia or Iran, the other two countries the president worries most about — when he declared in his State of the Union address that “we know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets.” He added: “Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems.”

Defining “enemies” in this case is not always an easy task. China is not an outright foe of the United States, the way the Soviet Union once was; rather, China is both an economic competitor and a crucial supplier and customer. The two countries traded $425 billion in goods last year, and China remains, despite many diplomatic tensions, a critical financier of American debt. As Hillary Rodham Clinton put it to Australia’s prime minister in 2009 on her way to visit China for the first time as secretary of state, “How do you deal toughly with your banker?”

In the case of the evidence that the People’s Liberation Army is probably the force behind “Comment Crew,” the biggest of roughly 20 hacking groups that American intelligence agencies follow, the answer is that the United States is being highly circumspect. Administration officials were perfectly happy to have Mandiant, a private security firm, issue the report tracing the cyberattacks to the door of China’s cybercommand; American officials said privately that they had no problems with Mandiant’s conclusions, but they did not want to say so on the record.

That explains why China went unmentioned as the location of the suspect servers in the warning to Internet providers. “We were told that directly embarrassing the Chinese would backfire,” one intelligence official said. “It would only make them more defensive, and more nationalistic.”

That view is beginning to change, though. On the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was asked whether he believed that the Chinese military and civilian government were behind the economic espionage. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he replied.

In the next few months, American officials say, there will be many private warnings delivered by Washington to Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, who will soon assume China’s presidency. Both Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mrs. Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, have trips to China in the offing. Those private conversations are expected to make a case that the sheer size and sophistication of the attacks over the past few years threaten to erode support for China among the country’s biggest allies in Washington, the American business community.

“America’s biggest global firms have been ballast in the relationship” with China, said Kurt M. Campbell, who recently resigned as assistant secretary of state for East Asia to start a consulting firm, the Asia Group, to manage the prickly commercial relationships. “And now they are the ones telling the Chinese that these pernicious attacks are undermining what has been built up over decades.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 24, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect month for a visit to the Pentagon by a senior Chinese military leader. The visit took place in May 2011, not April 2011.

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Catholic Church Fills Growing Void in Africa

LAGOS, Nigeria — The young woman slept soundly on the cool marble floor before the altar, a break from the chaos at home. In the courtyard, neighborhood teenagers filled giant jerrycans with purified water from a stone fountain. In an aisle, a rail-thin young woman from a nearby slum said she had not eaten since yesterday but was expecting sustenance here.

Behind its high spiked iron gates in this frenetic megalopolis of anywhere between 11 million and 21 million, the church of Christ the King is protector, feeder and healer.

In the 6 a.m. darkness, this working-class church is already filled with parishioners in shirt-sleeves and T-shirts, a pool of hymn-singing light in a blacked-out neighborhood. Six Masses are celebrated here each Sunday for up to 10,000 people, and 102 people were baptized last Saturday. The parish priest, the Rev. Ikenna Ikechi, dreams of building a multistory community center to accommodate his growing flock. “Our only limitation is space,” he said.

The Roman Catholic Church’s explosive growth here and across Africa has led to serious talk of the possibility of an African cardinal succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, and clerics from Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has the continent’s largest Catholic population, have been mentioned as top contenders.

With 16 percent of the world’s Catholics now living in Africa, the church’s future, many say, is here. The Catholic population in Africa grew nearly 21 percent between 2005 and 2010, far outstripping other parts of the world. While the number of priests in North America and Europe declined during the same period, in Africa they grew by 16 percent. The seminaries, clerical officials here say, are bursting with candidates, and African priests are being sent to take over churches in former colonial powers.

Untainted by the child sexual abuse scandals, the church here draws parishioners, many in their 20s and 30s, who flock eagerly to services, which can last hours, with no complaints.

“After work, a lot of young people come to Mass,” said Chinedu Okani, 29, an engineer in Lagos who was attending a service at the Church of the Assumption in the Falomo neighborhood. “It provides a serene environment.”

He acknowledges another attraction, too: that the church is a functioning institution in a country that lacks them.

“The welfare system is not working here,” Mr. Okani said. “We find a way to make up for it: the family, and the church.”

In Nigeria, at least 70 percent of the people live below the poverty line, and 80 percent of the country’s oil wealth goes to 1 percent of the population. The police do not respond to calls, and electricity is spotty.

Outside Christ the King, on the dirt streets of the Mushin neighborhood, there are armed robbers and no lights. It is little wonder that the priest must gently shoo away parishioners lingering to read or chat in the church’s arcaded meeting spaces under generator-powered lights.

“A lot of it is the challenge of living in Nigeria,” said Father Ikechi, who was educated at Fordham University in New York. “We can’t rely on the government for water, light, security. Whatever you want, you have to provide for yourself.”

For his parishioners, he said, “what they face is huge. So they tend to come to God as their last resort. You can’t go to the police. Who will you go to? You will go to God. Some of them, where they sleep is so bad, they just come to sleep here during the day.”

After a devastating bus accident recently the church paid parishioners’ hospital bills, the priest said. “Otherwise they would die,” he said.

In this way the church is fulfilling a role it played in its distant European past, providing for the people where the state cannot, but some question whether the African church’s growth and size can be sustained as the continent’s institutions develop.

“When people say Africa is the future, I say, ‘Oh, isn’t it the past?’ ” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “I see it as a repeat of the past, what happened in Europe centuries ago. What’s going to happen in Africa when everybody gets a television set, when modernity comes?”

For now, that question is largely academic here.

“Almost every system has collapsed,” said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, in northwestern Nigeria. “The entire architecture of governance has collapsed. The church remains the only moral force.

“The church offers the best schools, social services, medicine. The God talk in Africa is a mark of the failure of the economic, social and political system,” Bishop Kukah added, “We are being called left, right and center to mend the broken pieces of what are considered the failing states of Africa.”

In a continent rife with corruption, the church also provides a singular moral voice. Bishop Kukah, for example, has played a large role in good governance and human rights commissions, including the investigation into the 1990s military dictatorship.

In Congo, where the number of Catholics has more than tripled in the past 35 years, Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa has fiercely criticized the government, including the tainted election results that secured President Joseph Kabila’s re-election in 2011. The Catholic Church deployed an extensive network of independent observers during the December elections, and the bishops’ council later denounced the “culture of treachery, lies and terror.”

“It’s the church’s engagement on behalf of the Congolese people, the promotion of the whole man, you’ve got to bring forth bread and the Gospels,” said Bishop Bernard-Emmanuel Kasanda of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo. “We have to be with the people. Moral authority, yes. This is what pushes people towards us.”

In Nigeria, where over $5 billion was reported missing from a minerals ministry on Friday, the latest in a series of seemingly endless government scandals, the church offers an alternative to a life mired in corruption, poverty and hopelessness.

Laurence Emeka, 30, who sells telephone accessories at an open-air stall, rose at 5 a.m. last Sunday to attend Mass at Christ the King before going to work. The service gave him a kind of sanctuary. “Peace, satisfaction, confidence in God,” he said. “It helps me cope with the circumstances of daily life.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

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BBC Portrayed as Top-Heavy, Bickering and Dysfunctional

LONDON — A senior press officer for the British Broadcasting Corporation darkly volunteers to “drip poison” to discredit a BBC reporter he suspects of having leaked embarrassing information. The woman in charge of the corporation’s news divisions accuses Newsnight, a public-affairs program she oversees, of being out of touch and “sneery” toward rival BBC shows.

And, as investigators seek to uncover why the corporation canceled a Newsnight broadcast alleging that a once-beloved BBC personality who had recently died had in fact been a serial pedophile who preyed on vulnerable girls, everyone involved is scrambling to deflect blame onto someone else.

These and other unflattering details about the inner workings of Britain’s public broadcaster emerged Friday when the BBC released some 3,000 pages of internal documents — e-mails, memos and transcripts of interviews — from an external investigation into why the program, about the BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, had been canceled.

In all, the documents painted a picture of a highly dysfunctional, top-heavy organization divided into discrete, rival factions, and weighed down by mistrust, poor communication, buck-passing and internecine squabbling.

There were no startling revelations; all those came out in the so-called Pollard report into the Savile affair, which was published in December and which concluded that there were deep structural problems in the BBC. But the supporting documents released Friday shed light on just what Nick Pollard, who prepared the report, meant by his scathing critique, said John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons culture and media committee.

“It demonstrates the extent of unhappiness within the BBC structure, the frustration at the bureaucratic nature of the management, and the generally poor state of morale,” Mr. Whittingdale said in a television interview.

Referring to the fact that material in some of the newly released documents was blacked out, apparently because of concerns that it might give rise to lawsuits, Mr. Whittingdale added: “The fact that so much of the evidence can’t be published, because we are told the lawyers have advised it could be defamatory, in a sense tells its own story.”

Large portions of the testimony of Jeremy Paxman, a blunt-talking Newsnight host who is known for his testy and combative interview style, for instance, are blacked out in places where it appears he is about to make personal remarks about other people.

And in an annoyingly tantalizing instance, Peter Horrocks, director of global news, declares: “It is no secret that ...” What follows has been redacted, however, so that it is in fact a secret.

Lord McAlpine, a former Tory cabinet minister who, in another debacle at Newsnight, was unjustly accused of being a pedophile in a report that was broadcast, said that the BBC should not have left out any material. “The BBC is not the Secret Service, for Christ’s sake,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

But the BBC defended the redactions. Tim Davie, the acting director general, said that “97 percent plus of all the thousands of pages are out there.”

In an interview with an off-camera interlocutor that was broadcast on the BBC Web site, Mr. Davie continued: “We are not redacting or taking out material that is embarrassing or uncomfortable to the BBC. We have simply taken out stuff that external lawyers saw as a clear risk.”

He did not make himself available for interviews with other news organizations on Friday — indeed, no one from the BBC did. That strategy was roundly ridiculed by the broadcaster’s rivals.

On Twitter, Ben de Pear, editor of Channel 4 News, said that over his career he had successfully coaxed interviews out of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. “We are still trying for Tim Davie,” he said.

Much of the material focused on who said what to whom, and when, during Newsnight’s investigations into the allegations against Mr. Savile — and during the subsequent decision to cancel the broadcast. But there were also general interviews with many key figures in the corporation about what was wrong and how to fix it.

The testimony of Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, was particularly sharp, as he described the chaotic flow of information, the preponderance of high-ranking officials (the BBC had “more senior leaders than China,” he said) and the general mistrust within the corporation. “Is a lesson I should take from this that I can’t believe it when I’m told things by the next director general, that I have to query everything he says or the director of news says to me or whatever?” he asked rhetorically.

No, he said in response. “With the next director general I won’t — or his senior colleagues — I won’t begin every conversation on the assumption that he or she or they may not be telling me the whole truth,” he said. “I will want to be more convinced that there is a structure in place which ensures that the truth is being told.”

Lark Turner contributed reporting from London, and Matthew Purdy from New York.

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Embezzlement Scandal Threatens Spain’s Royal Family

MADRID — The Web site of the Spanish royal family features pictures of the king, Juan Carlos I, in a blue sash, his bejeweled wife, Queen Sofía, and the couple’s three glamorous children. But most of the photographs of the dashing Duke of Palma, the king’s son-in-law, were scrubbed from the site last month.

The duke’s official biography was also banished from the site. And for more than a year, the royal family has barred the duke, a former Olympic handball player named Iñaki Urdangarin, from attending official family functions.

With a multitude of graft cases undermining Spaniards’ faith in just about every institution of government, an intensifying investigation aimed at Mr. Urdangarin has placed the palace under siege as well, and left the nation’s aging monarch and his aides struggling to quell the crisis.

Mr. Urdangarin, 45, who is married to the king’s youngest daughter, Cristina, 47, is scheduled to testify on Saturday before an investigating judge over allegations that he embezzled millions of euros after leveraging his blue-blood connections to gain inflated, no-bid contracts from regional politicians for his nonprofit sports foundation, Instituto Nóos.

The royal family has tried mightily to distance itself from the investigation. Officially, the palace has insisted that the king knew nothing about the foundation activities of Mr. Urdangarin, who has pledged to prove his innocence. It publicly maintains that Juan Carlos ordered his son-in-law to abandon the troubled foundation in 2006, a year before dubious financial dealings surfaced.

But last weekend, the duke’s former business partner, Diego Torres, who is also under investigation, told a judge that the duke made no move without palace approval, and he turned over nearly 200 e-mails to support his claim. Many of those e-mails have now surfaced in the Spanish news media. Others were provided to The New York Times by a person close to the legal process who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution.

The e-mails suggest that the palace was concerned about what was going on at the sports charity well before it has acknowledged, and began pressuring Mr. Urdangarin to leave it at a time when investigators now say he and his partner were involved in inflating contracts and moving money offshore. Despite the palace’s insistence that the king had little to do with his son-in-law, the e-mails show that the king was monitoring his affairs. They include boasts by Mr. Urdangarin about the king’s backing of sponsorships for events he was organizing.

The e-mails do not indicate any wrongdoing by the king. But they have brought the scandal to the palace doorstep, further tarnishing a monarchy that has come under scrutiny as Spaniards suffer through an economic downturn and as corruption cases — including envelopes of cash handed out to top politicians — stoke their resentment over the privileges and special connections that have insulated Spain’s elite from the same pain.

Meanwhile, the king and his courtiers have been working aggressively at damage control. Over the past 10 days, the king, his attendants and the Spanish intelligence service have been pressuring the suspected sources of leaks and approaching top newspaper executives to tone down coverage of the investigation, according to people with ties to the palace and some of Spain’s leading newspapers.

Top editors at leading newspapers like El País and ABC, a loyal supporter of the monarchy, have denied being pressured.

The e-mails obtained by The Times suggest that the worries over potential harm to the palace are not new. Some show the palace searching relentlessly for a way to steer Mr. Urdangarin away from the sports foundation, scouring for a new job for him through a blue-chip network of contacts in 2004, two years before it has publicly acknowledged.

As the hunt extended into 2005, the duke complained about mounting pressures to avoid conflicts of interest. “We have been suffering a permanent surge of press releases, not always precise concerning our professional and private lives,” he wrote in stilted English in an e-mail to an associate, Corinna Sayn-Wittgenstein.

Ms. Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German princess through a former marriage, has described her role as an unpaid adviser and friend of the king, dismissing reports in the Spanish news media that they had a romantic relationship.

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Egypts Floods Smuggling Tunnels to Gaza With Sewage

Hatem Moussa/Associated Press

A Palestinian clearing a tunnel of sewage in Rafah, between Egypt and the southern Gaza Strip.

GAZA —The Egyptian military is resorting to a pungent new tactic to shut down the smuggling tunnels connecting Sinai and Gaza: flooding them with sewage. Along with the stink, the approach is raising new questions about relations between Egypt’s new Islamist leaders and their ideological allies in Hamas who control the Gaza Strip.

“Awful,” said Abu Mutair Shalouf, 35, a Palestinian smuggler on the Gaza side, watching workers haul buckets of sewage-soaked soil from the shaft of a tunnel flooded by the Egyptian military 15 days ago. “I don’t know why they did this.”

Advisers to the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, say the answer is simple: they are determined to shut the tunnels to block the destabilizing flow of weapons and militants into Sinai from Gaza — a vow Mr. Morsi made with evident passion in an interview five months ago.

And the more muted response from Hamas, a militant offshoot of the Brotherhood, is the strongest indication yet that its leaders are now pinning their hopes on their ideological allies in Cairo, even if at the moment they appear to be harming the interests of the citizens of Gaza. The tunnels remain a vital source of certain imports to Gaza and smuggling-tax revenue for Hamas, and when the former president, Hosni Mubarak, used far less effective methods to close the tunnels, Hamas screamed of betrayal.

After the sewage flooding, several Hamas officials instead emphasized Egypt’s right to protect its borders as it chose. “Egypt is a state of sovereignty and we do not impose on it anything,” said Salah al-Bardawil, a Hamas official in Gaza. “We address the Egyptian side about the issue and hope they will understand us and our needs,” he added. “We trust the Egyptian leadership that they will not leave the Palestinian people alone.”

Analysts offer many theories about the timing. At a moment of political and economic difficulties, with a financial aid package stalled in the United States Congress, Egypt’s Islamist-led government “is showing itself once more as a valuable ally,” speculated Yasser el-Shimy, Egypt analyst at the International Crisis Group. “It can do something like this, which, perhaps, promotes strategic interests.”

Or perhaps, Mr. Shimy said, Mr. Morsi’s government aimed to remind Israel that it, and not Egypt, still bore responsibility for Gaza’s poverty and problems. Or perhaps the Egyptian military was sending some domestic message of its own, either to the Brotherhood or other domestic constituents, about the generals’ independence from the Islamists.

Concern in Cairo about the tunnels spiked last August, when 16 Egyptian soldiers died in a militant attack on a military outpost in Sinai. The Egyptian government believes the attackers came through the tunnels.

Then, after Egypt helped broker a truce between Hamas and Israel to end a week of fighting in Gaza last November, Israel eased restrictions on imports over the border. Most notably, it began allowing in more construction material previously considered to have a potential military use, though Palestinians say the Israelis still block steel and other materials.

Essam el-Hadded, Mr. Morsi’s national security adviser, suggested this week that the loosened restrictions at the border crossing might have encouraged the crackdown on tunnels. “Now we can say that the borders are open to a good extent — it could still be improved — and the needs of the Gazan people are allowed in,” Mr. Hadded told Reuters.

Under Mr. Mubarak, Palestinians said, the Egyptians sometimes flooded tunnels with gas, which was easily remedied by pumping in air.

But around the beginning of February the Egyptian military began for the first time to use waste water instead, eventually flooding about two dozen of the 200-odd tunnels. (The Egyptian authorities say there are 225; Palestinians say 250.)

Mr. Shalouf, 35, who imported mainly gravel, said that before removing the buckets of dirt he had pumped out the water. Now he plans to lay down sand and sawdust and reinforce the ceiling. Repairs could take three weeks.

Palestinians say that so far the flooding has hurt individual livelihoods but not the total volume of goods moving below ground. On Wednesday, about two cargo trucks per minute were pulling out of the main smuggling zone inside Gaza, laden with cement, gravel, canned food, citrus and vegetables. Hamas customs officers kept a record of each truck and load.

Fares Akram reported from Gaza, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Mayy El-Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Oslo Journal: In Norway, TV Program on Firewood Elicits Passions

Kyrre Lien for The New York Times

Lars Mytting at his home in Elverum, Norway. His best-selling book, “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired a TV program about cutting, stacking and burning firewood.

OSLO — The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the angry responses came pouring in.

“We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.”

He explained, “One thing that really divides Norway is bark.”

One thing that does not divide Norway, apparently, is its love of discussing Norwegian wood. Nearly a million people, or 20 percent of the population, tuned in at some point to the program, which was shown on the state broadcaster, NRK.

In a country where 1.2 million households have fireplaces or wood stoves, said Rune Moeklebust, NRK’s head of programs in the west coast city of Bergen, the subject naturally lends itself to television.

“My first thought was, ‘Well, why not make a TV series about firewood?’” Mr. Moeklebust said in an interview. “And that eventually cut down to a 12-hour show, with four hours of ordinary produced television, and then eight hours of showing a fireplace live.”

There is no question that it is a popular topic. “Solid Wood” spent more than a year on the nonfiction best-seller list in Norway. Sales so far have exceeded 150,000 copies — the equivalent, as a percentage of the population, to 9.5 million in the United States. — not far below the figures for E. L. James’s Norwegian hit “Fifty Shades Fanget,” proof that thrills come in many forms.

“National Firewood Night,” as Friday’s program was called, opened with the host, Rebecca Nedregotten Strand, promising to “try to get to the core of Norwegian firewood culture — because firewood is the foundation of our lives.” Various people discussed its historical and personal significance. “We’ll be sawing, we’ll be splitting, we’ll be stacking and we’ll be burning,” Ms. Nedregotten Strand said.

But the real excitement came when the action moved, four hours later, to a fireplace in a Bergen farmhouse.

Perhaps you have seen a log fire burning on television before. But it would be very foolish to confuse Norway’s eight-hour fireplace extravaganza on Friday with the Yule log broadcast in the United States at Christmastime.

While the Yule log fire plays on a constant repeating loop, the fire on “National Firewood Night” burned all night long, in suspensefully unscripted configurations. Fresh wood was added through the hours by an NRK photographer named Ingrid Tangstad Hatlevoll, aided by viewers who sent advice via Facebook on where exactly to place it.

For most of the time, the only sound came from the fire. Ms. Hatlevoll’s face never appeared on screen, but occasionally her hands could be seen putting logs in the fireplace, or cooking sausages and marshmallows on sticks.

“I couldn’t go to bed because I was so excited,” a viewer called niesa36 said on the Dagbladet newspaper Web site. “When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher.

“I’m not being ironic,” the viewer continued. “For some reason, this broadcast was very calming and very exciting at the same time.”

To be fair, the program was not universally acclaimed. On Twitter, a viewer named Andre Ulveseter said: “Went to throw a log on the fire, got mixed up, and smashed it right into the TV.”

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Seeking Direction in Yemen

Yemenis gathered in Change Square in the capital, Sana, this month. Two years after the start of the country’s uprising, the square is almost empty of protesters. 

Yemen, having pulled back from the brink of war in 2011, is slowly embarking on a national dialogue aimed at reconciling its rancorous political factions, under the watchful eyes of Arab and Western monitors.

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Rafael Correa Wins Re-election in Ecuador

Rodrigo Buendia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Rafael Correa, left, and Vice President Jorge Glass celebrated at the presidential palace in Quito on Sunday.

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Rafael Correa of Ecuador swept to re-election on Sunday in a vote that showed the broad popularity of his government’s social programs and support for the poor in a country to which he has brought stability after years of political and economic turmoil.

With close to half of the ballots counted on Sunday evening, Mr. Correa had received 56 percent of the votes cast, according to news media in Ecuador. Guillermo Lasso, a banker, the closest of his seven opponents, had 24 percent.

Thousands of supporters in the main square in Quito, the capital, began celebrating shortly after voting finished at 5 p.m., when television stations announced the result of exit polls showing Mr. Correa as the runaway winner.

“Many thanks for this immense trust,” Mr. Correa said from the balcony of the presidential palace. “We have never failed you, and we never will fail you.”

Critics of Mr. Correa have worried that such a strong mandate would embolden him to further concentrate power and proceed with policies that could limit press freedom and quash dissent.

Following the re-election last fall of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Mr. Correa’s victory ratified the lasting appeal in the region of leftist governments that have used revenues from booming oil and mining industries to finance social welfare programs aimed at redistributing wealth and curbing inequality.

Now, with Mr. Chávez battling cancer, Mr. Correa could raise his profile as one of the most vocal leaders on the Latin American left.

Mr. Correa told reporters that he would continue policies aimed at ending poverty and diminishing inequality, saying the challenge of the next four years “is go faster and deeper in the same direction.”

His victory also highlighted the weakness of the political opposition in Ecuador. He faced a raft of opponents from across the political spectrum who split the vote from a fractured opposition that was unable to coalesce behind a single candidate or project a unified message.

Mr. Correa also won points from voters for bringing stability to Ecuador, a country that had seven presidents in the decade before he took office and was buffeted by severe economic problems. According to the new Constitution that was passed at his urging in 2008, Mr. Correa cannot run again when his new term ends in 2017.

Mr. Correa, an economist who studied at the University of Illinois, has improved access to education and health care for the poor and has built or improved thousands of miles of roads and highways. In a new term, he has pledged to continue signature social programs and to pass laws covering the news media, land reform and the penal code.

But he has governed with aggressive tactics that critics say undermine democracy by expanding presidential power; weakening the independence of the courts; and lashing out often at perceived enemies, including political opponents, the media and, at times, the United States.

“You have to trust Correa because he has done a lot that other governments never did in all these years,” said Rita Bastidas, a 42-year-old nurse, after voting for the president in the south of Quito. “Correa came along, and, in very little time, everything changed for the better.”

She added, “They accuse him of being authoritarian and arrogant, but this country needed someone like that to change things.”

An employee at the Ministry of Health said he voted against Mr. Correa because he did not like the way the president managed the health system, adding that qualified personnel had been pushed into retirement and replaced by members of Mr. Correa’s party.

“I want better days where they govern for everyone and not just for the greens,” he said, referring to the color used by the president’s party, Alianza País. The man spoke anonymously because he feared reprisals at work if it were known that he voted against the president.

Domingo Paredes, the president of the National Electoral Council, said Sunday that officials had detected an attack on electoral computer systems but that it was not successful.

Maggy Ayala contributed reporting from Quito, Ecuador.

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A Ticket, a Lie and a British Official’s Downfall

LONDON — It began mundanely enough with a speeding violation 10 years ago.

But it escalated, through the tangled, explosive passions of a failed marriage and one partner’s new love affair, into one of the most tawdry political scandals Britain has seen in years.

And it has claimed the political career of an ambitious cabinet minister, Chris Huhne, a Liberal Democrat who resigned his position as energy and climate change secretary in Prime Minister David Cameron’s coalition government and his parliamentary seat. He now finds himself facing what the judge in the case has described as the strong likelihood of a prison sentence.

Mr. Huhne’s former wife, Vicky Pryce, a prominent Greek-born economist who was joint head of the Government Economic Service until 2010, may go to prison, too, if a verdict expected this week finds her guilty of perverting the course of justice by falsely certifying that she, and not her husband, was the driver who had been speeding.

That was the offense to which Mr. Huhne (pronounced HEWN) pleaded guilty when the trial began two weeks ago, though he had maintained for years — up to the moment the court sat — that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Along the way, the trial veered far from the speeding offense, into painfully intimate details of the couple’s family life, in what some British commentators have described as an egregious invasion of their privacy.

The court has heard that Ms. Pryce, 60, a mother of five, twice faced demands from her husband that she have an abortion, and that she acceded the first time, to her bitter regret. It has been told of her fury and humiliation when Mr. Huhne, who is 58, left her for a female political aide, Carina Trimingham, who was previously in a relationship with another woman.

It heard, too, of her subsequent decision to reveal the speeding ticket switch to one of Britain’s most widely read newspapers, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, in order to “nail” her former husband and “bring Huhne down,” as she expressed it in e-mails shown to the court.

Evidence at the trial showed The Sunday Times aggressively encouraging Ms. Pryce to join in an effort to end Mr. Huhne’s career.

In the e-mails introduced by the prosecution, the paper’s political editor, Isabel Oakeshott, assured Ms. Pryce that going public with the story of the subterfuge over the speeding ticket in front-page articles without naming her as the person who falsely signed as the driver would inflict “maximum, perhaps fatal damage” to Mr. Huhne, by then a minister in the government and in the process of divorcing Ms. Pryce. This, Ms. Oakeshott said, would achieve “the dual purpose of bringing Huhne down, if we can, without seriously damaging your own reputation.”

The evidence also included a string of text messages between Mr. Huhne and the couple’s youngest child, Peter, now a 20-year-old college student. Distressed by what Mr. Huhne had done to his mother, the youth responded to overtures for understanding with expletive-littered repudiations in which he said, “You are the most ghastly man I have ever known,” “I hate you” and “You make me sick.”

The justification given in court for venturing so deeply into the couple’s family life was that Ms. Pryce had employed the rarely used “marital coercion” defense, adopted into English law in 1925. Using this as a plea, a woman can be found not guilty of any crime other than treason or murder if she can show she committed it under coercion from her husband while he was physically present.

Ms. Pryce asserts that her husband pressured her insistently to take the blame for the speeding violation, while the prosecution has argued that she was a willing partner in the subterfuge and constructed her account of the episode out of a desire for revenge for her husband’s affair and his abrupt ending of their 25-year marriage, shortly after he became a minister.

That has made the entire sweep of the couple’s troubled marriage and divorce an open book in court, in a way that has made allies of powerful groups that have not always seen eye to eye. Among those are women’s rights advocates deeply sympathetic to Ms. Pryce and people critical of the judiciary for leaping to the defense of individuals’ privacy rights in some cases and for adopting a seeming indifference to the same rights in others.

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U.S. Troops Leave Afghan Outposts, Still Facing Fire

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Afghanistan Army soldiers, left, and their American counterparts on Thursday destroyed a Taliban firing position in a village in Kandahar Province. More Photos »

STRONG POINT HAJI RAHMUDDIN II, Afghanistan — When the last American soldiers to occupy this squat, lonely outpost in southern Afghanistan pulled out this week, they left the same way earlier units had arrived: ready for a fight.

They were leaving this violent patch of land outside Kandahar, the south’s main city, just as Taliban fighters were filtering back in from winter havens in Pakistan. It was, as First Sgt. Jason Pitman, 35, bluntly put it, “no time to get stupid.”

The Americans knew they would be most vulnerable in their final hours after taking down their surveillance and early-warning systems. The Taliban knew it, too, and intelligence reports indicated that they had been working with sympathetic villagers to strike at the departing soldiers. Two days earlier, the militants made a test run against the outpost, taking the rare step of directly engaging it in a firefight, albeit a brief one, soon after the first radio antennas came down.

On the same day that President Obama announced that roughly half of the American troops still in in Afghanistan would withdraw this year, and that Afghan forces would begin taking the lead in the war, the smaller-scale departure from the Haji Rahmuddin II outpost was an uncelebrated milestone.

But it pointed at a harsh reality of the process: that some of the withdrawal will happen under fire in areas of the Taliban heartland where the idea of Afghan-led security remains an abstraction. With the start of the annual fighting season just weeks away, some of the hardest-won gains of the war are at risk of being lost.

In the years since the Obama administration’s additional tens of thousands of American soldiers and their Afghan allies pushed into the grape fields, pomegranate orchards and opium poppy fields of southern Afghanistan, some islands of relative calm have been cleared.

But even though this corner of Kandahar Province — the Zhare district — was also a focus of the troop increase, it is far from calm. And it is not unique: many areas in the south and east where troop pullouts are under way have had only tenuous security gains at best, despite years of hard-fought American-led advances.

The Taliban here have not given up their fight, on ground where Mullah Muhammad Omar and his followers first rose up against a local warlord, in the movement’s genesis. In one telling indication of the level of strife in Zhare, even many Afghans are hesitant to make the hourlong trip from Kandahar to the district’s mud-brick villages, many of which stand semiabandoned after three summers of intense fighting.

“My sons live in Kandahar City, and they do not like to come back here,” said Abdul Malik, an elder from Tieranon, a village in central Zhare. Once you are in the villages, he added, “anything can happen.”

The American withdrawal is picking up pace regardless, and American commanders have begun to cede even the most contested of ground to Afghan forces.

There are still places “that the Taliban can find sanctuary, and we still believe there is an informal network or support structure in place that they can rely on,” said Maj. Thomas W. Casey, the executive officer of the Third Battalion, 41st Infantry, which operates in the eastern and central half of Zhare.

So the Americans are out on patrol alongside Afghan units here almost every day, and running larger operations on a regular basis. Last week, they used a weapon that shoots a line of explosives and is intended to clear mined roads to knock down roughly 600 yards of trees that could provide cover for Taliban scouts and attackers.

On Thursday, they demolished a hill that the Taliban had used as a fighting position. Three huge explosions — 100 pounds of high explosives were used in each of the last two, which could be felt over a mile away — reduced the hill to dust and dirt. The Americans on the mission outnumbered Afghan soldiers nearly three to one.

There are some things the Americans have to do solo because the Afghans cannot do them, nor will they be able to anytime soon, commanders say. One example is using high-tech surveillance — blimps, drones, cameras mounted on towers at every base — to help spot militants before they attack, and to direct airstrikes against them. They have launched numerous such attacks in the past month alone.

Bryan Denton contributed reporting.

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Israel Museum’s Herod Show Draws Anger Over Use of West Bank Objects

Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

The exhibition “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” includes a reconstruction of his tomb, with his sarcophagus, center.

JERUSALEM — In one room sits a sarcophagus of reddish-pink limestone believed to have held the body of King Herod, painstakingly reconstructed after having been smashed to bits centuries ago. In another, there are frescoes from Herod’s elaborate underground palace, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, elaborate animated videos show the king’s audacious construction — atop the desert fortress Masada; at his burial place, Herodium; and his most famous work, the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

The Israel Museum on Tuesday opened its most ambitious archaeological exhibition and the world’s first devoted to Herod, the lionized and demonized Rome-appointed king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 B.C.E. and is among the most seminal and contentious figures in Jewish history. But the exhibition, which the museum director described as a “massive enterprise” that involved sifting through 30 tons of material from Herodium and reconstructing 250 artifacts, has also brought its own bit of controversy.

The Palestinian Authority says the exhibition is a violation of international law because much of its material was taken from near Bethlehem and Jericho, both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An Israeli group of archaeologists and activists complains that the museum, however unwittingly, is helping the Jewish settlement movement advance its contention that the West Bank should be part of Israel and not a Palestinian state.

“What the Israel Museum is doing is like coming and saying, ‘Listen, the heritage of the West Bank is part of our heritage first of all,’ ” said Yonathan Mizrachi, an archaeologist who helped found the Israeli group, Emek Shaveh, in 2009. “It’s part of the idea to create the narrative that those sites, no matter what the political solution,” are “part of the Israeli identity.”

James S. Snyder, the director of the museum, dismissed such criticism as propaganda and political opportunism. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and Mr. Snyder said that at the end of the exhibition, the museum plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or to store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” He noted that the museum had spent a “huge” sum — he would not specify how much — to restore and make available for public consumption artifacts that might otherwise have been lost, like many of the antiquities in Iraq and Egypt.

“We’re not about geopolitics, we’re not about minefields, we’re about trying to do the best and the right thing for the long term for material cultural heritage,” Mr. Snyder said. “Our goal was to invest in the preservation of this material and return it to the sites. We are but custodians, and we are always ready for it to be where it belongs.”

But Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Authority’s department of antiquities and cultural heritage, said that while Oslo provides for Israel’s excavation in the West Bank, exhibiting the material was another story. He complained that the Palestinians were never consulted about the project, which he called “an aggression against Palestinian cultural rights in their own land,” and said it would “not help to reconstruct peace between the Palestinians and Israel.”

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University archaeologist who spent 40 years searching for Herod’s burial place before discovering it in 2007 at Herodium. He died after being injured in a fall at the site in 2010. The tholos, a circular set of columns that topped the tomb, is partly rebuilt in the exhibition, along with the sarcophagus said to be that of Herod and two others.

The many rooms are filled with pottery, coins, busts and frescoes that illustrate the legend of Herod. The king has been admired by historians for his remarkable buildings, but condemned for the murder of his wife and children, among many others. His Judaism was questioned, and he was often denounced as a puppet of Rome, an image the exhibition does little to defy as it explores his relationships with Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus and Marcus Agrippa.

Shmuel Browns, a tour guide and expert on Herodium who helped Netzer excavate the site as a volunteer, said he was awed by the meticulous reconstruction, particularly of a large basin adorned with several heads that was found in pieces in two disparate places at the site, now an Israeli national park.

“They’ve built things from what was found that you could never imagine from what you saw at the site,” Mr. Browns said. “The message is very, very strong about who Herod is and what he did. He wasn’t intimidated by topography, he wasn’t intimidated by material, he wasn’t intimidated by lack of water.

“He’s a fascinating character,” Mr. Browns added. “He just got very, very bad press.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2013

An article on Thursday about the Israel Museum’s new archeological exhibition devoted to King Herod and the controversy generated because many artifacts were taken from West Bank territories occupied by Israel since 1967 referred incompletely to plans for returning the items. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and the museum director, James S. Snyder, said that at the end of the exhibition, it plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” There are no plans to hand the items over to the Palestinians at the end of the exhibition.

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Israel Museum’s Herod Show Draws Anger Over Use of West Bank Objects

Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

The exhibition “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” includes a reconstruction of his tomb, with his sarcophagus, center.

JERUSALEM — In one room sits a sarcophagus of reddish-pink limestone believed to have held the body of King Herod, painstakingly reconstructed after having been smashed to bits centuries ago. In another, there are frescoes from Herod’s elaborate underground palace, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, elaborate animated videos show the king’s audacious construction — atop the desert fortress Masada; at his burial place, Herodium; and his most famous work, the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

The Israel Museum on Tuesday opened its most ambitious archaeological exhibition and the world’s first devoted to Herod, the lionized and demonized Rome-appointed king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 B.C.E. and is among the most seminal and contentious figures in Jewish history. But the exhibition, which the museum director described as a “massive enterprise” that involved sifting through 30 tons of material from Herodium and reconstructing 250 artifacts, has also brought its own bit of controversy.

The Palestinian Authority says the exhibition is a violation of international law because much of its material was taken from near Bethlehem and Jericho, both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An Israeli group of archaeologists and activists complains that the museum, however unwittingly, is helping the Jewish settlement movement advance its contention that the West Bank should be part of Israel and not a Palestinian state.

“What the Israel Museum is doing is like coming and saying, ‘Listen, the heritage of the West Bank is part of our heritage first of all,’ ” said Yonathan Mizrachi, an archaeologist who helped found the Israeli group, Emek Shaveh, in 2009. “It’s part of the idea to create the narrative that those sites, no matter what the political solution,” are “part of the Israeli identity.”

James S. Snyder, the director of the museum, dismissed such criticism as propaganda and political opportunism, saying the Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s give Israel responsibility for antiquities in the West Bank until a final-status arrangement is in place. The accords call for the two sides to work together to protect archaeological sites and allow for excavation, with a gradual transfer of control to the Palestinians.

Mr. Snyder said all the material taken from Palestinian territory would be returned if the conflict could be resolved and an appropriate place to keep it was created. He noted that the museum had spent a “huge” sum — he would not specify how much — to restore and make available for public consumption artifacts that might otherwise have been lost, like many of the antiquities in Iraq and Egypt.

“We’re not about geopolitics, we’re not about minefields, we’re about trying to do the best and the right thing for the long term for material cultural heritage,” Mr. Snyder said. “Our goal was to invest in the preservation of this material and return it to the sites. We are but custodians, and we are always ready for it to be where it belongs.”

But Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Authority’s department of antiquities and cultural heritage, said that while Oslo provides for Israel’s excavation in the West Bank, exhibiting the material was another story. He complained that the Palestinians were never consulted about the project, which he called “an aggression against Palestinian cultural rights in their own land,” and said it would “not help to reconstruct peace between the Palestinians and Israel.”

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University archaeologist who spent 40 years searching for Herod’s burial place before discovering it in 2007 at Herodium. He died after being injured in a fall at the site in 2010. The tholos, a circular set of columns that topped the tomb, is partly rebuilt in the exhibition, along with the sarcophagus said to be that of Herod and two others.

The many rooms are filled with pottery, coins, busts and frescoes that illustrate the legend of Herod. The king has been admired by historians for his remarkable buildings, but condemned for the murder of his wife and children, among many others. His Judaism was questioned, and he was often denounced as a puppet of Rome, an image the exhibition does little to defy as it explores his relationships with Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus and Marcus Agrippa.

Shmuel Browns, a tour guide and expert on Herodium who helped Netzer excavate the site as a volunteer, said he was awed by the meticulous reconstruction, particularly of a large basin adorned with several heads that was found in pieces in two disparate places at the site, now an Israeli national park.

“They’ve built things from what was found that you could never imagine from what you saw at the site,” Mr. Browns said. “The message is very, very strong about who Herod is and what he did. He wasn’t intimidated by topography, he wasn’t intimidated by material, he wasn’t intimidated by lack of water.

“He’s a fascinating character,” Mr. Browns added. “He just got very, very bad press.”

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