Libyan General’s Promotion Could Hinder United Nations Peace Talks

MISURATA, Libya — The speaker of Libya’s
internationally recognized Parliament named
Gen. Khalifa Hifter on Monday to the recently
created position of commander in chief of the
army, potentially hindering United Nations-
sponsored talks to end the country’s internal
strife.

General Hifter has had many roles: He was an
ally of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi when he came
to power; later became an opponent; returned to
join the uprising against him in 2011; and last
year announced an abortive military takeover of
Libya’s transitional government.

Since the spring of 2014, General Hifter has been
leading a military campaign with the stated goal
of ridding Libya of Islamists, whether they are
the extremists based in and around Benghazi or
the more moderate politicians who played a
major role in the first transitional Parliament.

A narrow majority of Libya’s internationally
recognized Parliament has been seated since last
summer in Tobruk, an eastern Libyan town
under Mr. Hifter’s control, where it has aligned
itself with his efforts. His appointment on
Monday for the first time gives him formal
legitimacy as the top military commander under
that government. The appointment should
ostensibly make General Hifter accountable to
Parliament.

But he and certain regional militias allied with
him are fighting a rival militia coalition that
includes both hard-line and more moderate
Islamists, and that coalition, known as Libya
Dawn, considers the general an aspiring autocrat
and its greatest enemy. Libya Dawn controls the
capital, Tripoli. It claims its own provisional
Parliament and prime minister, and it includes
the city of Misurata on the central coast.

The United States, Britain and other allies have
been hoping to help broker an agreement
between the two factions. They have threatened
to use sanctions to isolate those on either side
who oppose a reconciliation, including trying to
marginalize the Islamist extremists in the Dawn
faction and General Hifter, who christened his
military campaign Operation Dignity. His
appointment as commander in chief may make it
harder to separate him from the Tobruk-based
Parliament and the rest of the faction.

Many in eastern Libya have embraced General
Hifter as their best hope to tame extremist
militias that have dominated the eastern city of
Benghazi and to restore order to Libya. But
seemingly everyone in the Libya Dawn coalition,
meanwhile, rejects any government that includes
him.

“He just wants to be on top of the throne,” said
Fathi Bashaagha, a local leader in Misurata who
has participated in, and argued for, the unity
talks. “If any unity government appoints Hifter,
he will eat the unity government.”

Europe Unlikely to Meet Climate Goal, Study Finds

BERLIN — The European Union will fail to meet
an ambitious goal of significantly reducing
greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 unless it takes
more aggressive measures to limit the use of
fossil fuels and adopts new environmental
policies, according to a report scheduled for
release on Tuesday.

Although European countries are on track to
meet, and even surpass, the goal of reducing
1990-level greenhouse gas emissions by 20
percent by 2020, existing policies are not robust
enough to ensure that the 2050 targets are met,
the report said. Those targets, scientists have
said, are critical to forestalling the most
catastrophic effects of climate change , which are
linked to carbon emissions caused by human
activity.

“The level of ambition of environmental policies
currently in place to reduce environmental
pressures may not enable Europe to achieve long-
term environmental goals, such as the 2050 target
of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95
percent,” the report said.

The report also noted that transportation
continues to account for a quarter of all carbon
emissions within the European Union, and
reducing those by 60 percent by 2050 will require
“significant additional measures.”

The report, which will formally be released on
Tuesday, was compiled by the European
Environment Agency, based in Copenhagen, and
is produced every five years to assess how the
Union is progressing toward its environmental
goals and to inform European policy. It will be
presented to the European Commission and
debated in the European Parliament later this
month.

The findings are significant because Europeans
have taken a lead role in seeking to avert the
worst effects of climate change , in some cases
putting aside their own economic prospects and
political pressures to enact policies that could also
serve as models for other countries and regions.

The European Union’s failure to achieve its goals
could discourage efforts by more reluctant
nations, like China and India, and could loom
large later this year as nations gather in Paris to
discuss a global climate treaty.

Hans Bruyninckx, the executive director of the
European Environment Agency, characterized
the report as an alarming call that provides the
28 European Union member states with a fresh
opportunity to set a global example.

“Although we have colored the outlook red, it
doesn’t have to be red,” Mr. Bruyninckx said. He
named increased energy efficiency, ecological
innovation and improvements to transportation
systems as potential areas in which Europeans
could adjust their policies to meet their long-term
goals.

“Although we have all of these very different
countries with very different energy profiles, in
the long run, the commitment to these targets is
there, the level of ambition to reach the 80
percent is high on the political agenda,” Mr.
Bruyninckx said.

Setting global emissions targets, however, has
proved elusive for years, and the latest
assessment of Europe’s progress illustrates that
once targets are reached, significant difficulties
remain in holding countries to their agreed-to
goals.

Even a country like Germany, where support for
the environment borders on a religion, has faced
unforeseen challenges as it aims to revamp its
energy sector from reliance on traditional
sources of energy, such as nuclear and fossil
fuels, to renewable sources, including wind, solar
and biofuels.

The race to shutter the country’s nuclear reactors
by 2022, for example, has resulted in many
power providers using brown coal, or lignite, the
cheapest and dirtiest of all fossil fuels to keep the
power flowing to customers. This, in turn, has led
to an increase in carbon emissions.

According to the report, Germany, whose
economy is the best in Europe, was the only
country with a significant rise in both its
emissions reductions and energy consumption
last year. Along with Belgium, it is one of only
two countries not on track to meet its 2020
targets in either category. According to the
German Association of Energy and Water
Industries, the country increased its carbon
omissions by 20 million tons from 2012 to 2013,
instead of reducing them.

In order to meet its goals, Germany must reduce
emissions annually by 3.5 percent over the next
six years, a feat that will result in substantial
increases in energy costs, and generate political
pressure to block measures that could hurt the
economy.

Harro van Asselt, a researcher at the Stockholm
Environment Institute’s Oxford Centre, said
Germany saw a drop in emissions after many
polluting industrial sites in the former East
Germany were shuttered between the late 1990s
and early 2000s. The closings occurred just as
Europe began tackling climate change, which
assisted the European Union in meeting its 2020
targets, he said.

“The question is not why they might stumble
now; the main question is why did they reach
their targets before,” Mr. van Asselt said.
Now the hard part begins, he said, as the
European Union faces the need to undertake
more difficult and costly measures in areas like
transportation and agriculture to ensure that
emissions targets remain on track.

“As long as the European Commission doesn’t
undertake more measures in these sectors, they
are going to have difficulties in even reaching
their goals for 2030,” Mr. van Asselt said.
Globally, the environmental news is not all bleak.
The United States failed to adopt the Kyoto
Protocol in 1997, in part because Congress feared
it would hurt the country economically. But last
year President Obama and President Xi Jinping
of China reached an agreement that set new goals
for those countries to curb their carbon
emissions within the next 15 years. The deal was
seen as a breakthrough, helping to resolve some
of the differences between two of the world’s
biggest polluters, whose dispute was partly the
reason a climate agreement was not reached in
Copenhagen in 2009.

European leaders are counting on recent
international efforts to help reach a global
agreement in Paris. The most recent report
issued by the United Nations last year warned
that failure to reduce emissions could alter the
climate so drastically that it could endanger life
as we know it. The Europeans hope this added
pressure, coupled with the moral example they
tried to set decades ago, will contribute to a
lasting global agreement on emissions
reductions.

“I think the role of Europe is essential and we
have demonstrated that we can make solid
multinational agreements that can work,” Mr.
Bruyninckx said.

Toronto Police Say Tunnel Mystery Is Solved

OTTAWA — Toronto’s mystery tunnel has turned
out to be a place for a couple of guys to get away
from it all, more a “man cave” than a terrorist
threat.

After being stumped for more than a month by a
33-foot-long, hand-dug and carefully reinforced
tunnel to nowhere, the Toronto Police said
Monday that they had identified two men in their
20s who did the backbreaking work.

“These two guys dug a hole to hang out,” a
getaway, Constable Victor Kwong said. He added,
“Kids do it, but I’ve never seen anyone in their
20s do it.”

Because the tunnel — which was narrow, damp
and lined with plywood and lumber — was near
a tennis complex at York University, which will
host Pan American Games events this summer,
there had been speculation that the hole was
intended for some sort of a terrorist attack.

Constable Kwong said its creators’ identities were
discovered through a public appeal for
information last week. After interviewing the
men and people who know them, Constable
Kwong said, “We are comfortable that there was
no criminal intention, no nefarious reason for
the tunnel.”

The men have not been charged with a crime, so
the police are not releasing their names.

“The thing is that people think that there’s a lot
more to this than there is,” said Mark Pugash,
another police spokesman.

The men selected the heavily wooded area for its
seclusion and proximity to their neighborhood,
Constable Kwong said. The pair, he added, have
no connection to the university, the tennis
facility or the Pan Am Games.

After coming across a pile of earth from the
excavation in January, a conservation officer
discovered the tunnel entrance hidden under dirt
and leaves. In a smaller hole nearby was an
electrical power generator that operated its
lights, an air compressor and a sump pump. A
plywood cover in that hole was lined with foam,
apparently intended to muffle the sound of the
generator.

While the tunnel appeared to be expertly
reinforced with plywood and 2-by-8-inch
lumber, Constable Kwong said that the tunnelers
have no training in construction or carpentry.
The police filled in the tunnel as a safety
measure.

“It’s not that we’re saying it’s O.K. to dig a hole
anywhere,” Constable Kwong said.
But even if the tunnelers have breached
municipal bylaws or conservation regulations,
they apparently have nothing to fear. Rick
Sikorski, a spokesman for the Toronto and
Region Conservation Authority, said that given
that the police had closed their case, it did not
plan to pursue the men.

Figures From U.S.-Led Coalition Show Heavy 2014 Losses for Afghan Army

WASHINGTON — The Afghan Army lost more
than 20,000 fighters and others last year largely
because of desertions, discharges and deaths in
combat, according to figures to be released
Tuesday, casting further doubt on Afghanistan ’s
ability to maintain security without help from
United States-led coalition forces.

The nearly 11 percent decline from January to
November 2014, to roughly 169,000 uniformed
and civilian members from 190,000, is now an
issue of deep concern among some in the
American military. For example, the former No.

2 American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen.
Joseph Anderson, called the rate of combat deaths
unsustainable before he departed at the end of
last year.

Concern over how soon Afghan forces will be
ready to stand on their own is one reason that
the Obama administration is weighing whether it
should slow the withdrawal of American troops,
the bulk of whom are supposed to be out by the
end of 2016.

The newly available numbers also lay bare the
challenge faced by the 10,000 American troops
and thousands of private contractors who have
remained in Afghanistan since the end of the
combat mission in December to help prepare
Afghan forces to fight the Taliban on their own.

The American-led military coalition, citing
internal figures, said the Afghan Army’s size had
inched back up in the past few months, reaching
about 173,000 in January. But that would still put
the army at its smallest level since the fall of
2011, when the American project to build viable
Afghan security forces was still in its early stages
and the coalition did almost all the fighting
against the Taliban militants.

More than three years on, the American combat
mission is now over and the Afghan military is
supposed to be fully in charge of securing its
own country. But the army, along with the
Afghan police, struggled last year to hold back a
resurgent Taliban, and Afghan forces remain far
more reliant on American air support, logistics
and raids by Special Operations forces than the
Obama administration had intended going into
this year.

Most of the losses in the Afghan Army over the
past year appear to be due to desertion, the
coalition said in a written response to questions
about the newly declassified data. Smaller
percentages came from ordinary discharges and,
more worryingly, from deaths in combat, of
which there were more than 1,200 last year, a
record for the army.

But no matter the reasons, the numbers cast a
harsh spotlight on one inescapable fact: The
army, the centerpiece of the American-led
campaign to stabilize Afghanistan, is losing
people far faster than it can replace them. The
rate of decline, if not reversed, could leave the
army effectively incapable of fighting the Taliban
across much of Afghanistan within the next year
or two, according to some American military
officials and analysts.

The data being released on Tuesday — a month
after the American military abruptly reversed its
decision to keep data about the Afghan security
forces classified — is being published by the
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan
Reconstruction, an American government
watchdog agency that puts out quarterly reports
on American spending in Afghanistan.

Until late last year, the inspector general’s
reports regularly included details about Afghan
forces, such as the size of the army and the
police. Then the American military command in
Afghanistan decided to classify most of the basic
data it had been supplying about the Afghan
Army and police. It argued that the public
release of the data would imperil Afghan and
coalition forces.

That decision provoked sharp criticism from
Congress and within the command itself when it
became public in January. The military reversed
itself about a week later, saying that, upon
further review, it could safely release the
information.

The American command has not elaborated
further on its decision. But ahead of the release
of the data on Tuesday it said that it was working
with the government of Afghanistan to make
leadership changes in the Afghan Army in an
effort to stem the desertion rate, which has been
a problem for years.

The coalition said it was also helping to improve
the Afghans’ ability to evacuate wounded soldiers
from the battlefield and get them properly
treated, and training and equipping Afghan
forces to better find and neutralize improvised
explosive devices, which remain the most deadly
weapon in the Taliban’s arsenal.

Since the United States and its allies began
building Afghan forces in earnest in 2009, the
size of the Afghan Army has oscillated,
sometimes falling by thousands of troops from
month to month. Desertion has been a persistent
problem, and the army has never reached its
target strength, which currently stands at 195,000
people.

But the long-term trend appeared to be generally
upward until the start of 2014, when Afghan
forces took on the lead combat role across the
country — and the army’s numbers started what
would become an 11-month decline.

The report, which was provided to The New York
Times ahead of its release, was supposed to be
published last week. But a day before its
scheduled release, the coalition command in
Afghanistan quietly informed the inspector
general that it had been supplying incorrect data
on the size of the Afghan Army through all of last
year.

The incorrect data overestimated the strength of
the army by thousands of troops. At one point
last year, the incorrect data counted nearly
14,000 more Afghan troops than there now
appears to have been at the time.

The coalition attributed the problem to what it
called an accounting error, and offered no
further explanation, the inspector general’s
report said. It remains unclear whether data for
years before 2014 was similarly corrupted.

Bus Driver in Delhi Gang Rape Blames Victim

NEW DELHI — In the months after a young
woman was brutalized and gang-raped on a
moving bus in New Delhi in 2012, thousands of
politicians, activists and ordinary citizens
crowded onto India’s airwaves and into its public
spaces to say their piece about the crime.

But there was no comment from the six slight,
ordinary-looking men accused of her murder.
Whisked in and out of the courtroom past
shouting crowds of journalists, they listened
impassively to testimony and offered
monosyllabic answers on the stand. Courtroom
guards said they hummed Bollywood tunes under
their breath. Their opinions were anyone’s guess.

Now, in his first in-depth interview, one of the
men, Mukesh Singh, has told a British filmmaker
that the young woman invited the rape because
she was out too late at night.

“You can’t clap with one hand,” said Mr. Singh,
who drove the bus during the crime but denied
taking part in the assault. “It takes two hands. A
decent girl won’t roam around at 9 o’clock at
night. A girl is far more responsible for rape
than a boy. Boy and girl are not equal.

Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not
roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong
things, wearing wrong clothes. About 20 percent
of girls are good.”

The woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student,
had been to see “Life of Pi” with a male friend,
and they both boarded the private bus without
realizing that the six men aboard had been
driving the streets in search of a victim. After
knocking her friend unconscious, they took her
to the back of the bus and raped her, then
damaged her internal organs with an iron rod.

An hour later, they dumped the pair out on the
road, bleeding and naked. She died two weeks
later of her injuries.

In the interview, for a film that will air Sunday
on the BBC , Mr. Singh said the woman had
provoked the deadly assault by resisting the rape.
“When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back,” he
told the filmmaker, Leslee Udwin, according to a
transcript provided by the BBC. “She should just
be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have
dropped her off after ‘doing her,’ and only hit
the boy.”

In footage from the film, Mr. Singh tonelessly
narrates the assault, saying that he heard her
screaming for help but that his brother instructed
him to keep driving as they “dragged her to the
back” and “went turn by turn.” Afterward, he
said, he saw the youngest of the assailants, who
was 17 at the time of the crime, withdraw
something from her body.

“It was her intestines,” Mr. Singh said. “He said,
‘She’s dead. Throw her out quickly.’ ”
He called the killing “an accident.”

Ms. Udwin, at a news conference in New Delhi,
said the film crew interviewed Mr. Singh for 16
hours and saw no sign of remorse. “He is almost
like a robot,” she said. “I tried every trick to get
a tear in his eye, but nothing. No tear.”

Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday
demanded an explanation from the Tihar Jail,
where Mr. Singh is incarcerated, as to why they
had allowed the interview while the case was
pending trial.

The prison authorities in Tihar told The Indian
Express, a daily newspaper, that they are in the
process of filing a legal notice against the BBC for
violating its agreement to submit the footage for
approval. The filmmakers said that they
submitted the footage, and that it was approved.

According to police records, the six men divided
the pair’s possessions: Mr. Singh took one mobile
phone, and Vinay Sharma, a 20-year-old gym
instructor, took the other. Pawan Gupta took the
man’s watch and 1,000 rupees cash, a little less
than $20. Akshay Kumar Singh, a bus cleaner,
took the woman’s rings. The juvenile was given a
bank card and some cash from the spoil.

Mr. Singh’s brother, Ram Singh, hanged himself
with his bedsheet in his prison cell months before
the trial. The juvenile defendant, whose identity
was never made public in accordance with
Indian law, was sentenced to three years in a
detention center — the heaviest sentence possible
in India’s juvenile justice system. The remaining
four men pleaded not guilty; they are appealing
their death sentences.

Mr. Singh told the filmmaker that he believed the
harsh sentences, instead of acting as a deterrent,
would drive more rapists to kill their victims in
the future. “Now, when they rape, they won’t
leave the girl like we did,” he said. “They will kill
her. Before, they would rape and say, ‘Leave her
alone. She won’t tell anyone.’ Now, when they
rape, especially the criminal types, they will just
kill the girl. Death.”

Indian State Passes Beef Ban Championed by Right-Wing Hindus

MUMBAI, India — The western state of
Maharashtra this week became the first Indian
state to ban the possession and sale of beef,
imposing fines and up to five years in prison for
violations.

The ban, which was passed on Monday, came as
an amendment to a 1972 law prohibiting the
slaughter of cows, which has been expanded to
ban the slaughter of bulls, bullocks and calves.

The slaughter of water buffaloes will still be
allowed under the new law, subject to permission
from the authorities. The populous western state
includes Mumbai, the Indian financial capital.

The Maharashtra Animal Preservation
(Amendment) Bill, championed by right-wing
Hindu organizations, was first passed in 1995
but languished for two decades under a governing coalition between the Indian National Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party. The
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won a
clear majority in state elections last October,
after Narendra Modi, the party’s leader, took
office as prime minister in May.

The law, which allows a fine of 10,000 rupees,
about $162, took effect Monday night after
approval from President Pranab Mukherjee.
Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra
Fadnavis, gave the president credit and
expressed his thanks over Twitter.

“Our dream of ban on cow slaughter becomes a
reality now,” he wrote.
The move was far less popular with those who
run Mumbai’s restaurants, and some retailers
warned that it would eliminate jobs and send the
price of other meats spiraling upward.

“This is extremely sad to hear,” Glyston Gracias,
brand chef at Smoke House Deli in Mumbai, told
The Indian Express, a daily newspaper. “I will
have to go to another country.”

“A lot of our foreign clientele, such as Japanese
and Europeans, will miss beef on the menu,” he
said. “I will find it difficult to do international
cuisine.”

The protection of cows is a volatile subject in
India, where the animal is revered by the
majority-Hindu population. Nearly all of India’s
states already have legal provisions restricting or
banning cow slaughter. The B.J.P.’s election
manifesto included promises to work toward “the protection and promotion of cow and its progeny.”

As India’s beef trade is largely controlled by
Muslim traders, a religious minority in the
country, the issue has become a point of
contention between the two religious groups, and
it is particularly politicized during elections.

Last month, beef traders in Maharashtra
complained that they were being harassed by
right-wing Hindu groups that were attacking
vehicles transporting cattle to abattoirs, seizing
the animals by force and beating the drivers. In
February, beef traders across the state went on
strike for over a week until the chief minister,
Mr. Fadnavis, assured them protection.

India is a top exporter of meat from buffaloes,
which are more common and less revered in
India than cows. India’s exports of beef,
including buffalo meat, have been rising steadily.

Ahead of the state elections, Satpal Malik, a vice
president of the farmers’ wing of the B.J.P., said
that if elected, the party would “crack down on
beef exports” and “review the subsidy the
government gives for beef or buffalo meat
exports,” according to a report by Reuters.

Reduce Embassy Staff. Venezuela Tells U.S

CARACAS, Venezuela — With diplomatic relations
fraying rapidly between the United States and
Venezuela, the government of President Nicolás
Maduro has given the American Embassy here 15
days to come up with a plan to drastically shrink
its staff, Venezuela’s foreign minister announced
Monday.

Mr. Maduro has repeatedly accused the United
States of supporting a plot to overthrow him, and
on Saturday he announced a series of diplomatic
measures that he said were intended to halt
American meddling.

He said the United States would have to reduce
the number of officials at its embassy to a
number similar to the staff at the Venezuelan
Embassy in Washington. He said there were 100
American officials here and just 17 Venezuelan
officials in Washington, although those numbers
have not been verified by the State Department.

“Regarding the reduction to 17 officials with
which the Embassy of the United States in
Venezuela must operate, they were given 15 days
to present a plan as to the classification and rank
of the officials that will remain,” the foreign
minister, Delcy Rodríguez, said at a news conference.

She said the change was in keeping with “the
reciprocity that should govern relations between
sovereign states.” The United States denies Mr.
Maduro’s claim that it is involved in any plan to
overthrow him, saying he is seeking to deflect
attention from the country’s worsening economic crisis.

Mr. Maduro also said Saturday that Americans
traveling to Venezuela would now need visas to
enter the country and that they would have to
pay a fee equal to what Venezuelans pay for a
visa to the United States.

Mr. Maduro’s anti-Washington language was
tamped down for several weeks after the
surprise diplomatic opening between the United
States and Cuba, a close ally of the Caracas
government.

But last month, as pressure grew on Mr. Maduro
to address the country’s many economic ills, he
once again stepped up accusations against the
United States.