The police clashed with residents of two villages near a smelting plant in northern China that is blamed for the lead poisoning of nearly all the children in the
villages, reports said Monday. It was another sign of growing anger over China’s rampant industrial pollution.

Several hundred villagers tore down fences and blocked traffic outside the Dongling Lead and Zinc Smelting Company in Shaanxi Province after news of the poisoning
emerged last week, state news media and villagers said. Fighting between angry parents and scores of police officers broke out Sunday, and trucks delivering coal to
the plant were stoned.

No immediate word on injuries or arrests was available. Local officials, the police and people at the company refused to confirm the reports.

China’s breakneck economic development has left much of its soil, air and waterways dangerously polluted, and environmental showdowns with outraged residents are
growing more frequent. Authorities routinely pledge to close down polluting industrial operations but often back down because of their importance to the local economy.

The blast struck the police headquarters in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia, about 9 a.m. local time as many police officials were arriving at work.

The attack seemed to further undermine the authority of Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, Ingushetia’s populist president, who came to power last October vowing a softer approach
in dealing with rebel violence than that of Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of neighboring Chechnya.

It was the bloodiest single attack to hit Ingushetia in some time, though violence against the police and government officials in this and other North Caucasus
republics occurs almost daily.

Mr. Yevkurov himself was seriously wounded in a suicide attack on his convoy in June and announced last week that he would soon return to work. Ingushetia’s
construction minister, Ruslan Amirkhanov, was assassinated in his office last week.

Russian television coverage of Monday’s attack showed rescue workers picking through smoldering rubble punctuated by a huge crater.

“It was a suicide bomber,” said Kaloi Akhilgov, the spokesman for Mr. Yevkurov. “He rammed the gate of the police headquarters, drove into the courtyard and blew
himself up.”

The blast occurred in a heavily populated area, not far from several banks and government buildings. A six-story residential building nearby was also heavily damaged.

About 60 people were wounded, the prosecutor general’s office said, though the Emergency Situations Ministry put the number of wounded at 138. Mr. Akhilgov said 10 of
the wounded were children.

Then the officer, Capt. Bryant Williams, upped the ante, telling the contractors that if they wanted to keep receiving lucrative orders from his office, they would
have to buy his wife a diamond ring he had found on the Internet, according to a federal indictment announced in Manhattan on Monday.

From there, the indictment says, the scheme expanded to envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in bribes mailed to a bagman in Iowa. And when the contractors
tried to pull out of the deal, Captain Williams brandished his Army firearm and threatened them with physical harm, according to the indictment, which charged him with
one count each of mail fraud and bribery.

In a war burdened with seemingly bottomless corruption, the crimes allegedly carried out by Captain Williams, 38, of Clarksville, Tenn., a member of the celebrated
101st Airborne Division, may appear of little significance: taking at least $20,000 to award favored companies more than half a million dollars in contracts for things
as varied as copiers and guard towers in 2005 and 2006.

But the indictment, handed up last Wednesday in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, provides a rare window into the troublesome question of how
military and civilian contracting officers — few of them sophisticated in the ways of clandestine wire transfers and money laundering — have so often managed to set
up corrupt deals at the heart of the United States enterprise in Iraq, and more recently in Afghanistan.

The latest case seems to show how easy it is for amateur thieves to set up payment schemes in a distant war zone that has little on-the-ground supervision but plenty
of electronic communication with the United States.

Divers pulled two people from the space below the plant’s main turbine hall, but feared that many more remained trapped inside.

“We are trying to find out the fate of 72 people,” Andrei Mitrofanov, the plant’s chief engineer, said after a meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin in
Moscow on Monday evening.

It will take about three to eight days to drain the water from the flooded areas, officials said.

The accident shut down the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant, Russia’s largest power generator, in the Khakassia region of Siberia. It cut power to five major
factories and to residents, who rushed to stock up on foodstuffs and gasoline. Vitaly Zubakin, the acting chief executive of RusHydro, which owns the plant, said
restoring the damaged plant could take “four years, or even longer.”

The company expects to incur monthly losses of 1.5 billion rubles, or about $47 million, per month as a result of the accident. The plant’s towering dam was not
damaged, and the emergency situations minister, Sergei Shoigo, reassured residents that there was no danger of widespread flooding.

Within hours, the damaged plant had released an oil slick covering 10 square miles on the surface of the Yenisei River, the Natural Resources Ministry said.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s general prosecutor’s office, told the Itar-Tass news service that the accident occurred when a transformer exploded during
repairs, cracking the walls and ceiling and causing water to fill an engine room. But RusHydro officials said the flooding was caused by a surge in hydraulic pressure,
which they believed was caused by human error.

The policy would have once been unthinkable, as American detention centers swelled with those suspected of carrying out attacks. Now it underscores just how much
American interests, as the military begins its withdrawal, are taking a back seat to Iraqi ones: Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki extracted a promise that the
group, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, or League of the Righteous, would renounce attacks against Iraqis in exchange for the release of its members from United States detention.

Iraq’s changing contours came into clearer view on another front on Monday: General Odierno announced an initiative to deploy American troops along with Kurdish pesh
merga forces and Iraqi Army forces in northern Iraq, to stop Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from exploiting friction between Arabs and Kurds.

For months American and Iraqi officials warned that northern Iraq was becoming the most likely place for any widespread resumption of violence, as tension has risen
between Arabs and Kurds over land and resources.

Since American troops withdrew on June 30 from towns and cities, 140 people have been killed in village bombings in the north. “Al Qaeda is exploiting these fissures
you’re seeing between Arabs and the Kurds in Nineveh Province and the K.R.G.,” General Odierno said, referring to the Kurdistan regional government, in a briefing
with a small group of reporters. “What we’re trying to do is close that fissure.”

How much longer American troops remain in Iraq is still something of an open question. Mr. Maliki’s office said Monday that it would seek a January referendum on the
Iraqi-American security agreement. If Iraqis vote it down, the American military will have to pull out all troops within a year, possibly accelerating the complete
withdrawal planned by the end of 2011.

The move is part of a nationalistic drive to increase the country’s benefits from its natural resources and cement its position as a global power. But it could
significantly slow the development of the oil fields at a time when the world is looking for new sources, energy and risk analysts said.

This month, Brazil’s government said it wanted the national oil company, Petrobras, to control all future development of the deep-sea fields discovered in 2007, which
international geologists estimate could hold tens of billions of barrels of recoverable oil.

The change would make Petrobras the operator for the 62 percent of the new area that has yet to be bid out, consigning foreign companies to the role of financial
investors. That would limit their ability to help set the pace for the oil fields’ development, while giving Petrobras significantly more power to generate jobs and
award lucrative contracts.

The oil lies beneath about 20,000 feet of water, shifting sand, and a thick layer of salt. This so-called pre-salt region, stretching hundreds of miles, is the biggest
oil reserve being developed in the world today, especially given the lack of headway in gaining access to Iraq’s extensive deposits, said Daniel Yergin, chairman of
IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy research consultancy. It is also expected to be among the most complicated sets of projects in the history of the
oil industry.

“The timing and scale of the development of the pre-salt will be one of the most significant factors for the global oil balance in the next decade, and even more so
after 2020,” when Brazil is expected to ramp up production even further, Mr. Yergin said. “If it doesn’t happen it will be a big setback for Brazil in terms of
revenue, and a significant loss for the world in terms of new oil supplies.”

After nearly three-quarters of a century Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” picture from the Spanish Civil War remains one of the most famous images of combat ever. It
is also one of the most debated, with a long string of critics claiming that the photo, of a soldier seemingly at the moment of death, was faked. Now, a new book by a
Spanish researcher asserts that the picture could not have been made where, when or how Capa’s admirers and heirs have claimed.
In “Shadows of Photography,” José Manuel Susperregui, a communications professor at the Universidad del País Vasco, concludes that Capa’s picture was taken not at
Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba, but near another town, about 35 miles away. Since that location was far from the battle lines when Capa was there, Mr.
Susperregui said, it means that “the ‘Falling Soldier’ photo is staged, as are all the others in the series taken on that front.”

Experts at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, where Capa’s archive is stored, said they found some aspects of Mr. Susperregui’s investigation
intriguing or even convincing. But they continue to believe that the image seen in “Falling Soldier” is genuine, and caution against jumping to conclusions. “Part
of what is difficult about this is that people are saying, ‘Well if it’s not here, but there, then, good God, it’s fabricated,’ ” Willis E. Hartshorn, the center
’s director, said in an interview. “That’s a leap that I think needs a lot more research and a lot more study.”

The administration added 10 previously unreported deaths to the official roster and disclosed an 11th, which occurred Friday: that of Huluf Guangule Negusse, a 24-
year-old Ethiopian. Mr. Negusse died from the effects of an Aug. 3 suicide attempt in the Wakulla County correctional facility near Tallahassee, Fla.

What Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials call “the death roster” stands at 104 since October 2003, up from the 90 that were on the list the agency gave to
Congress this spring.

The latest search for records began late last month, officials said, when Freedom of Information litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union uncovered one of the
10 deaths that had gone unreported — that of Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorean who settled in New York and died of testicular cancer on Jan. 18,
2007, after being detained two months at an immigration jail run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America in Eloy, Ariz.

On Saturday, after inquiries about that case by The New York Times, the new chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, issued a directive for field
offices to make sure that other deaths had not been overlooked, a spokesman said.

David Shapiro, staff lawyer with the A.C.L.U. National Prison Project, said: “Today’s announcement is a tragic confirmation of our worst fears. Our nation’s
immigration detention system has been plagued by a total lack of transparency and accountability, and even with today’s announcement there is no way we can be fully
confident that there are not still more deaths that somehow have gone unaccounted for.”

In fact, no one even knew he had left the Capitol, because he never did. Mr. Weisenberg, 75, a Long Island Democrat, “retired” last year but continued to work as a
lawmaker and remained on the payroll. As a result, he earns $101,500 in salary and collects a pension of about $72,000, according to the comptroller’s office.

Similarly, Assemblywoman Rhoda Jacobs, a 72-year-old Brooklyn Democrat, retired last year after 31 years, but continued to serve her district. She earns $104,500 and
draws an annual pension of more than $71,000. And Assemblyman John J. McEneny, a 65-year-old Albany-area Democrat who retired last year but kept his seat in the
Assembly chamber, now earns $94,500 and a pension of about $73,000.

All of them are beneficiaries of “double dipping,” a practice in which public servants simultaneously collect government salaries and pensions, sometimes for the
same job.

Most people who have a traditional pension put in years or decades of work at a job, then retire, leave the job and begin collecting monthly pension payments. Some
companies do allow double dipping, though the practice has most likely declined during the recession and federal rules impose more restrictions on corporate pension
funds.

Several NATO troops and civilians were killed in a suicide car bombing in Kabul on Tuesday, and other violence rocked the country in what seemed to be further
indications of Afghanistan’s precarious security situation just two days before presidential elections.

A statement from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said a military convoy had been attacked on the road leading east to Jalalabad, but it did not
say how many people had been killed. A statement from Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said seven civilians were killed and 50 wounded in the attack.

The United Nations confirmed that two of its Afghan staff members were among those killed, though it was unclear whether they were included in the Interior Ministry’s
count.

The area near the presidential palace also came under attack Tuesday.

“We understand that two mortars or rockets — as we call it, indirect fire — hit somewhere in the vicinity of the presidential palace and the Ministry of Defense,”
said Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, a spokeswoman for the U.S. military. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The deputy presidential spokesman, Hamid Elmi, who spoke to The Associated Press, said the palace was not seriously damaged and President Hamid Karzai had not been
hurt.

In another attack Tuesday morning, in Oruzgan Province, in southern Afghanistan, a suicide bomber walked up to an Afghan National Army checkpoint and detonated his
explosive vest, killing three soldiers and two civilians, according to the provincial police chief, Juma Gul Himat.