HONG KONG — The Chinese Communist Party has warned officials to combat “dangerous” Western values and other perceived ideological threats, according to accounts on Monday of a directive that analysts said reflects the top leader Xi Jinping’s determination to preserve top-down political control even as he considers economic liberalization.

The warning emerged when Chinese news websites carried accounts from local party committees describing a directive from the Central Committee General Office, the administrative engine of the party leadership under Xi.

The central document, “Concerning the situation in the ideological sphere,” has not been openly published, and most references to it disappeared from Chinese news and government websites by Monday afternoon, apparently reflecting censors’ skittishness about publicizing such warnings. But what did come to light in the local summaries exuded anxiety about the party’s grip on opinion.

—Chris Buckley, The New York Times

BENGHAZI, Libya — A car explosion on a busy street killed at least four people and injured more than a dozen on Monday, stirring new anger at the failure of the transitional government to fill the security vacuum left by the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi.

There was no apparent target. The blast, which took place about two blocks from a hospital, may have been set off by a car full of explosives intended for other locations. Over the last week unidentified assailants have bombed at least four empty police stations here in the early hours of the morning, in a new burst of violence after months of sporadic attacks. This was the first of the recent blasts to cause casualties and the first attack in recent memory to hit civilians.

Speculation about responsibility has focused on Islamists or others seeking retribution against security forces who previously worked for Gadhafi, but some have suggested that the attacks may be the work of criminal gangs or Gadhafi loyalists. A Facebook page for a group calling itself the Islamist Front of Derna sought to claim responsibility for Monday’s bombing, but its authorship or credibility could not be confirmed.

—David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times

MUNICH — It’s a family affair, but one that is very public and very political.

Bavaria’s dominant political force, the Christian Social Union, is embroiled in a nepotism scandal, accused of confusing family values with rewarding family members. Dozens of party members paid their spouses, children and parents to work as assistants. Some hired wives to run their “home office.” One lawmaker hired his teenage sons to keep up his computers.

The scandal has engulfed this economically powerful region in recent weeks, damaging the party’s image but also threatening Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chances of re-election in September. The Christian Social Union, which has governed Bavaria for decades, is the sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union.

“All of the top members of the CSU knew about this,” said Werner Weidenfeld, a professor of political science at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. “These family members were sitting in offices at the state capital all day. When a party leader went past, there would be the wife of a representative, working. This was not undercover.”

Last month Georg Schmid, the parliamentary chairman in the state legislature, resigned his chairmanship after it was revealed that he employed his wife for more than two decades, telling the Munich-based broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk that he paid her up to 5,500 euros ($7,100) a month.

—Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish, The New York Times

WASHINGTON — An exasperated President Barack Obama on Monday called Republican criticism of his handling of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, “a sideshow” and said that any accusation of a cover-up by his administration “defies logic.”

Speaking to reporters for the first time since his Republican adversaries used congressional hearings to renew their political assault, Obama was dismissive of the continuing controversy, saying that those in Washington who are playing politics with the issue “dishonor” the four people who died in Benghazi last fall.

“Suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no there there,” Obama told reporters during a news conference with David Cameron, the British prime minister.

The president took a strikingly different tone about the other controversy that is riveting attention in the nation’s capital: the revelation that Internal Revenue Service employees targeted conservative groups for audits.

Obama said he learned about those allegations from news media reports on Friday. He repeatedly called the charges “outrageous,” if true, and said that anyone found to be guilty of such actions should be held accountable.

“I’ve got no patience for it,” he said. “I will not tolerate it.”

The president’s blunt condemnation of the IRS appeared designed to head off fallout from the scandal, as Republicans — and some Democrats — called for hearings and investigations into the matter.

But on Benghazi, the president seemed resigned to a continuing barrage of political accusations, which he said were not designed to actually help the State Department make sure that similar attacks do not happen again.

Responding to Republican accusations over the weekend that his administration tried to cover up that the Benghazi attacks were linked to terrorism, the president pointed out that he sent the head of the counterterrorism center to brief lawmakers three days after Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, delivered the now-disputed talking points on several Sunday talk shows.

“Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp something down for three days?” he said. “This whole thing defies logic.”

Obama repeated that his administration was as transparent as it could have been in the hours after the attacks at the diplomatic facility in Benghazi on Sept. 11. He said “nobody understood” what exactly had happened there in the first few days after the attacks and that Republicans in Washington were not being helpful in fixing what went wrong that day.

Obama also said that he doesn’t “have time to be playing these political games in Washington” and said the focus should be on the four people who died, including the ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. “We dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus.”

In the 2011-12 fiscal year, the nation’s highest paid public university president was Graham B. Spanier, the president of Pennsylvania State University, who was forced out in November 2011 over his handling of a child sex abuse scandal involving a football coach.

According to the annual compensation report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Spanier was paid $2.9 million in 2011-12, including $1.2 million in severance pay and $1.2 million in deferred compensation.

“The fact that Graham Spanier turns out to be the highest paid president in the country says something about the nature of compensation packages for people who leave under a cloud,” said Jack Stripling, the Chronicle reporter who worked on the survey. “Severance agreements are often very lucrative.”

Three other public university presidents also had compensation topping $1 million: Jay Gogue of Auburn University, at $2,542,865; E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State University, at $1,899,420; and Alan G. Merten of George Mason University, at $1,869,369. Merten retired from George Mason in June after 16 years as president.

—Tamar Lewin, The New York Times

NEW YORK — During the sentencing of the former hedge fund manager Anthony Chiasson on Monday, Judge Richard J. Sullivan marveled at his prodigious wealth, ticking off the annual income listed on his tax returns. “$16 million, $10 million, $23 million,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine why someone would risk all that to engage in a crime like this,” the judge said.

The crime is insider trading, and Sullivan handed down one of the stiffest sentences yet in the government’s vast campaign to root out wrongdoing on Wall Street trading floors. He sentenced Chiasson, a founder of Level Global Investors, to 6 1/2 years in prison after a jury found him guilty in December of illegally trading technology stocks.

“This kind of conduct can’t go unpunished,” Sullivan of U.S. District Court in Manhattan said.

Chiasson, 39, who did not address the court, was ordered to pay a $5 million fine and forfeit illegally obtained proceeds of as much as $2 million. He must report to the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 90 days.

—Peter Lattman, The New York Times

NEW YORK — As the Brooklyn district attorney’s office pledged a complete review of about 50 murder cases after questions arose regarding the conduct of the detective assigned to them, renewed scrutiny has also focused on the role prosecutors play in what turn out to be wrongful convictions and whether they should be held responsible when justice goes awry.

Prosecutors working for the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, recently found that flawed police work by the detective, Louis Scarcella, and a partner led to the conviction of a man in the 1990 killing of a Brooklyn rabbi. A judge recently ordered the release of the man, David Ranta, after he spent 23 years in prison for the rabbi’s murder.

On Sunday, Jeffrey Deskovic, who served 16 years behind bars for the rape and murder of a woman in Westchester County that he did not commit, vowed that a foundation he established would conduct its own review of Scarcella’s work, to find out if anyone else had been wrongfully convicted.

“Considering that Scarcella was working in tandem with the prosecutors, relying on the DA to do the investigation is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse, particularly when exposing the cases would mean exposing prosecutorial complicity,” Deskovic said.

At least two protests have been planned this week against Hynes, who is in the midst of a primary campaign for a seventh term. On Tuesday, relatives and friends of inmates seeking to have their convictions overturned are planning a rally outside CBS to protest the network’s decision to offer Hynes a reality television show.

—Frances Robles, The New York Times

Labor, Latino and immigrant advocate groups called on President Barack Obama on Monday to suspend deportations of illegal immigrants who could be eligible for a pathway to citizenship under a bipartisan bill to overhaul the immigration system that is under consideration in the Senate.

Among the organizations demanding that the White House halt most removals were the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of labor unions; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, a Latino civil rights group; the National Day Laborer Organizing Network; and United We Dream, a national group representing young illegal immigrants. They said Obama should act immediately, even before Congress votes on the bill.

They based their demand on an enthusiastically upbeat analysis of the bill’s prospects for passage.

“Immigration reform has unstoppable momentum,” said Ana Avendano, director of immigration for the AFL-CIO. “For the AFL, this bill is not fragile. It is supported by a broad coalition.”

While Latino and labor groups have long expressed anger at Obama over the more than 1.6 million deportations that have taken place under his administration, the support of the AFL-CIO for a suspension of deportations added new clout to their demands.

The groups, which generally support the Senate bill, said that thousands of immigrants who would most likely gain legal status under its terms were being expelled and separated from their families in the United States while Congress deliberates.

“It’s a simple matter of fairness and justice,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president of MALDEF. “It makes no sense to deport those who would be eligible for that relief.”

—Julia Preston, The New York Times

FRANKFURT, Germany — Record youth unemployment is emerging as the most urgent problem in the eurozone, if the political rhetoric of recent days is any measure. But leaders are struggling to come up with effective ways to prevent jobless young people in countries like Spain and Greece from becoming a lost generation and source of social upheaval.

One proposal, floated in a German news report Monday, would use a development bank owned by the European Union to funnel credit to companies that create jobs for young people in the eurozone, nearly a quarter of whom are without jobs.

Officials in Berlin quickly played down the report published in the online version of the Rheinische Post newspaper, based in Duesseldorf. But it is clear that policymakers are seriously worried that millions of frustrated young job seekers pose as much of a threat to the eurozone as excessive government debt or weak banks.

The issue is likely to come up when finance and economy ministers of the 17 eurozone countries meet Tuesday in Brussels.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, considers youth unemployment to be Europe’s biggest challenge, her spokesman said Monday.

“The issue is on the agenda of every European meeting, whether at the ministerial level or among leaders,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s spokesman, said in Berlin.

Seibert’s comments came a few days after Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, warned that youth joblessness could undermine faith in European institutions.

“We will have to speed up in fighting youth unemployment, because otherwise we will lose the support, in a democratic way, in some populations of the European Union,” Schauble said, shortly before meeting with his counterparts from the United States and other Group of 7 countries last weekend.

And Louis Gallois, former head of European Aeronautic Defence & Space and the French government’s commissioner for investment, told a gathering at the German Finance Ministry in Berlin that more investment should be directed toward getting people back to work, if the European project was to succeed.

“Support to Europe is more and more limited because Europe is seen more and more by European citizens only as a constraint,” Gallois said.

PARIS — After striking an unprecedented deal in March to make many bank depositors help pay for an international bailout, Cyprus on Monday received 2 billion euros, the first installment of that money, aimed at buttressing the economy after the near-collapse of its banking sector.

European officials say the release of the funds, equivalent to $2.6 billion, was recently approved by a working group of the 17 eurozone finance ministers, who gathered Monday evening in Brussels for their regular monthly meeting. Cypriot efforts to stabilize the economy may be on the agenda. A second allocation of up to 1 billion euros will be transferred by June 30, officials said.

That session was a prelude to the planned meeting of all 27 European Union finance ministers in Brussels on Tuesday, where the focus is expected to be on proceeding with a European banking union that could stabilize the European financial system and avoid future debacles like Cyprus. Officials on Tuesday were to consider a single set of rules for dealing with failing banks throughout Europe, as well as discuss continuing efforts to curb tax havens.

The thorniest issue revolves around whether some depositors in any other European country should be made to suffer losses if their banks require an international rescue, as happened in Cyprus in an unprecedented and still controversial provision for a eurozone bailout.

In exchange for a 10 billion-euro emergency aid package, Cyprus in March agreed to EU demands to effectively confiscate up to 60 percent of any depositor’s holdings above 100,000 euros held in two of the country’s largest banks, Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank. At the same time, Laiki Bank was forced to fold, merging into Bank of Cyprus.

On Tuesday in Brussels, part of the debate will involve where depositors should be placed in the hierarchy of creditors in the future rules on shutting down failing banks. The main focus is what to do with depositors holding more than 100,000 euros. Some countries want all EU members to have the same rules, while others want the flexibility to decide where savers should be in the hierarchy.

The president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, said at his recent monthly news conference that ordinary depositors should be hit only after people who took risks by buying bonds in banks were forced to take losses. “If it can be avoided,” he said, “uninsured depositors should not be touched.”

In Cyprus, the issue came to a head after Germany and some other EU countries insisted on finding a new way to pay for a bailout of troubled Cypriot banks, which held large deposits from wealthy Russians. Some of the money was suspected of having questionable origins, meaning it would be hard for Berlin to justify using German taxpayer funds to clean up Cyprus’ mess. In the end, EU and Cypriot officials agreed that wealthy depositors would effectively have to help foot the cleanup bill.

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service’s special scrutiny of small-government groups applying for tax-exempt status went beyond keyword hunts for organizations with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names, to a more overtly ideological search for applicants seeking to “make America a better place to live” or “criticize how the country is being run,” according to part of a draft audit by the inspector general that has been given to Capitol Hill.

The head of the division on tax-exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, was briefed on the effort in June 2011, seemingly contradicting her assertion on Friday that she learned of the effort from the news reports. But the audit shows that she seemed to work hard to rein in the focus on conservatives and change it to a look at any political advocacy group of any stripe seeking tax exemptions.

The new information will only add to the criticism that has emerged since Lerner apologized to Tea Party and other conservative groups on Friday for unwarranted scrutiny. The full audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration is set to be released this week.

House Republicans have vowed to begin their own hearings and investigations. And Republicans fanned out on the political talk shows on Sunday to express outrage that is only likely to grow.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine and a prominent moderate, said on CNN that the singling out of conservative groups was “absolutely chilling.”

Since last year’s elections, Republicans in Congress have struggled for traction on their legislative efforts, torn between conservatives who drove the agenda after their 2010 landslide and new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Barack Obama’s re-election and the loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate.

For the first time since 2011, Democrats have been dictating Washington’s political agenda, including tax increases on the rich, gun control and an overhaul of immigration laws.

But the accusations of IRS abuse are sure to fuel an effort that appears to be uniting dispirited Republicans and their conservative political base: investigating Obama and his administration. Republicans are pushing a portrayal of an administration overreaching its authority and punishing its enemies.

“The bottom line is they used keywords to go after conservatives,” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Sunday on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” He requested the inspector general’s audit along with another Republican, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. As an audit, it will not find blame or refer anyone for criminal prosecution.

BERLIN — The effort in Europe to adopt the world’s strongest data protection law has drawn the attention of dozens of lobbyists from U.S. technology and advertising companies.

Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon and IBM, individually and through industry groups, have all sought to actively participate in a legislative process that could give half a billion consumers the right to withhold basic personal details while using the Web, putting a major crimp in the financial model that makes those business run.

On Monday, their European counterparts showed up in force at a conference in Berlin to discuss the potential law, which is expected to come to a vote sometime next year. Representatives from European Aeronautic Defence & Space, BMW, Daimler and Rovio Entertainment, the creator of mobile apps like Angry Birds, filled a hotel meeting room and tried to figure out how new rules would affect them.

Even nontech companies like UBS, the Swiss bank, were among the 70 attendees at the Pullman Hotel Scheizerhof near the Tiergarten central park, as the new regulations are expected to affect virtually every type of business.

The effort to create strict new online privacy protections in Europe is motivated by a desire to rein in the data use of social media companies like Google and Facebook, said Ian Walden, a professor of information and communications law at the University of London and a speaker at the conference.

“But the problem is this proposal is going to create a whole new layer of regulation for the vast majority of businesses that have nothing to do with social media,” he said. “They are going to see their compliance loads increase greatly with very little benefit.”

The measures would prohibit the use of a range of standard Web tracking and profiling practices that companies use to produce targeted advertising, unless consumers gave their explicit prior consent. The bill would also grant European consumers a fundamental new right: data portability, or the right to easily transfer an individual’s posts, photographs and video from one online service site to another.

The measures, as well as the creation of an EU-wide data privacy regulator, were originally proposed last year by Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner.

They are now contained in a bill sponsored by Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament from Hanover. But the fate of the bill, meant to revise an 18-year-old statute, remains murky.

It has been a cool start to the week, with high temperatures yesterday barely making it to 60°F, a trend that will continue today. It may get a few degrees warmer than yesterday, but we are still looking at the low 60°Fs, but that could be knocked down with the development of an afternoon seabreeze. Temperatures tonight will also be chilly, with lows in the low 40°Fs. Last night, in fact, the National Weather Service put out frost advisories because away from the coast, low temperature were expected to drop into the 30°Fs. Luckily for the warm weather lovers, milder air will work its way into the region for the end of the week, with highs Thursday and Friday expected to be in the mid to upper 70°Fs.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan is ready to let the United States and its allies keep military bases here after the end of the NATO combat mission next year, President Hamid Karzai said Thursday, offering a concrete public signal that foreign troops would remain welcome in the coming years.

The United States and Afghanistan are negotiating a security agreement that would allow U.S. forces to stay here beyond the end of 2014, and Karzai said the Obama administration has asked for nine bases spread across the country.

“We agree to give them these bases,” Karzai told students during a speech at Kabul University. “We consider our relations with the United States beyond 2014 to be positive for Afghanistan.”

The U.S. reaction, though, was far less positive than what one would expect. Officials characterized Karzai’s comments as premature, at best, and said they appeared to reflect the Afghan government’s desire for a larger force than the United States is likely willing to commit.

The Obama administration has yet to decide how large a force it would like to keep in Afghanistan, but administration officials have signaled that it is unlikely to total more than 10,000 service members.

—Matthew Rosenberg, The New York Times

The tumult that has characterized New York City’s The Village Voice in recent years resurfaced Thursday when the top two editors said they were leaving the weekly publication.

Will Bourne, who became editor-in-chief in November, and Jessica Lustig, the deputy editor since January, met with the staff at 11 a.m. Thursday to announce their departure. In a phone interview, Bourne said Christine Brennan, executive editor of Voice Media Group, had instructed them to lay off or drastically reduce the roles of five employees on the 20-person staff. Rather than carry out the cuts, they resigned and left immediately, in the middle of closing Monday’s edition.

Turnover at The Village Voice has become something of a pattern as the weekly and its owners have struggled to come to grips with declining revenue and increased competition for readers and advertisers on the Web. When Bourne took over last year, he became the sixth Voice editor since 2005.

—David Carr, The New York Times

YouTube on Thursday detailed its plan to let producers sell paid subscriptions to their videos, creating a prominent new marketplace for programming on the Internet.

The sprawling video website, a unit of Google, said the first paid video channels would come online Thursday afternoon, with subscription rates ranging from 99 cents to $7.99 a month. The early participants include Sesame Workshop, the producer of “Sesame Street,” which will stream full episodes of the children’s show to paying subscribers; Ultimate Fighting Championship, the mixed martial arts league, which will stream classic fights to fans; and The Young Turks, a progressive talk show.

YouTube identified about 30 of these partners on Thursday and said other video makers would soon be able to set up their own paid channels, using YouTube’s infrastructure. In a conference call for reporters, Malik Ducard, the director of content partnerships for YouTube, suggested that this “self-service feature” was the most important piece of the announcement.

“As we roll out wider and as we roll out self-serve, you’ll see a lot of innovation,” he said, predicting that homegrown YouTube stars with fan followings would choose to set up paid channels.

—Brian Stelter, The New York Times

CLEVELAND — A man accused of kidnapping and raping three women later found alive in his home after a decade of captivity was ordered held on $8 million bail Thursday.

The man, Ariel Castro, 52, appeared in court for the first time since his arrest during an arraignment hearing in municipal court in Cleveland. Castro did not speak and kept his head down and his eyes lowered during the proceedings.

The hearing came a day after Castro was charged with the rape and kidnapping of Amanda Berry, held 10 years; Gina DeJesus, held nine years; and Michelle Knight, held 11 years. He was also charged in the kidnapping of the 6-year-old daughter Berry gave birth to during her captivity; the authorities said he would undergo a paternity test. The judge, Lauren Moore, set his bail at $2 million for each of the four cases.

Prosecutors described the decade of abuse as a “horrifying ordeal,” in which the women were beaten, bound, restrained and sexually assaulted. Castro’s lawyer argued for a lower bond, noting that he had lived in the city for 39 years and had no prior felony convictions.

Castro’s brothers Onil Castro, 50, and Pedro Castro, 54, also appeared in court Thursday morning to sort out prior misdemeanor charges not related to the kidnapping case. The judge released the two brothers. Pedro Castro was fined $100 after pleading no contest to an open-container charge. The charges against Onil Castro for drug abuse and having an open container were dismissed.

New details continued to emerge Thursday about the kidnappings, including how the women were initially abducted. In each case, the women accepted Castro’s offer of a ride home while they were walking down the street, according to a police report that included the first statements the women gave after their rescue. The report had a chilling detail: Castro’s daughter was a close friend of one of the victims.

Berry was 17 when she was abducted as she left her job at a Burger King. Castro gained her trust by telling her that his son worked for the fast-food chain and offered her a ride home, according to the police report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

DeJesus, who was only 14 when she disappeared, was friends with Castro’s daughter Arlene Castro. Ariel Castro approached her with his daughter on April 2, 2004, according to the account DeJesus gave police. Shortly after, “Ariel came back without his daughter, and told Gina he would give her a ride to his house to meet up with his daughter,” the report said.

The accounts by DeJesus and the other women were made immediately after officers freed them from Ariel Castro’s sealed-up house on Seymour Avenue, as they sat in a police vehicle. Since Castro’s arrest, news accounts have focused on the connections between the Castro and DeJesus families, including reports that Castro attended a vigil for the missing girl.

LONDON — With the British economy showing feeble signs of resilience and a new central bank governor waiting in the wings, the Bank of England decided Thursday to keep its benchmark interest rate and its economic stimulus program unchanged.

The central bank left its interest rate at 0.5 percent, a record low, and also held its program of bond-buying at 375 billion pounds or about $581 billion. The stimulus program, also known as quantitative easing, frees more money for lending to businesses and individuals.

Some economists expect the Bank of England to expand its stimulus program later this year to help the recovery, while others said recent economic data were encouraging and that further stimulus might not be necessary.

“There are broad improvements in business sentiment and with equity markets heading to new highs, we are not expecting anything” until Mark Carney takes over as governor of the Bank of England in July, said James Knightley, an economist at ING Bank in London.

—Julia Werdigier, The New York Times

BEIJING — China’s most celebrated film director, Zhang Yimou, is being investigated for a potential violation of family-planning laws, according to state news media reports that were confirmed by an official Thursday.

Family-planning officials are examining discussions on the Internet that say Zhang has fathered up to seven children with four women. If he is found to have violated the laws, he could be fined nearly $27 million because the fines are based on the offender’s income, according to a report on the Web version of People’s Daily, whose print edition is the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party.

An official in a propaganda office attached to the family-planning committee of Jiangsu province, near Shanghai on the east coast, confirmed the substance of the People’s Daily online report, which was published Wednesday. The official said further details could be provided by the family-planning committee of Wuxi, the city where Chen Ting, Zhang’s second wife, is officially registered as a resident.

Although the family-planning laws generally restrict urban families to one child, many rural families and ethnic minorities are allowed to have more than one without penalty. Xinhua, the state news agency, said Thursday that the local family-planning committee would release the results of their investigation into Zhang “soon.”

—Edward Wong, The New York Times

BEIRUT — The leader of Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group, escalated tensions with Israel on Thursday over the recent Israeli airstrikes near Damascus, suggesting that the Syrian government would respond by providing Hezbollah fighters with the same weapons that Israel wants to keep out of their hands.

While the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, did not specify the type of arms, he said they were “unique weapons that it never had before” that would “change the balance” of power with Israel, which regards his group’s alliance with Syria and Iran as one of its most potent security threats.

In a televised speech, Nasrallah said the transfer of the weapons would be Syria’s “strategic response” to the airstrikes that hit the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday.

Israel has not publicly acknowledged responsibility for those strikes. But Israeli leaders have said they would take military action to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining “game changing” weapons like chemical arms, which Syria is believed to possess in large quantities, and sophisticated long-range missiles that could hit anywhere in Israel from Hezbollah-controlled areas of southern Lebanon.

Analysts close to Hezbollah said they believed Nasrallah was referring to long-range missiles, not chemical munitions. But the Israelis have expressed growing concern about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war, suggesting that the transfer of such weapons to groups hostile to Israel was more and more likely.

The airstrikes believed to have been carried out by Israel last Sunday heightened fears that Syria’s war could lead to a regional conflagration.

Syrian officials said Thursday that they would respond forcefully to any future Israeli attacks and that they planned to retaliate for Sunday’s strikes, possibly by authorizing Syria-based militant groups to attack in the Golan Heights, the disputed border region captured by Israel from Syria in the 1967 war.

Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, said in an interview with Agence France-Presse in Damascus that any new Israeli attack would bring a “harsh and painful” response from Syria’s military.

“Instructions were given to respond immediately to any Israeli attack,” he said in the interview, which was also published on the website of Press TV, an Iranian satellite channel. “Syria will not allow this to be repeated.”

The Minnesota House of Representatives on Thursday voted to permit same-sex marriage, clearing the way to add Minnesota to a string of states that have recently made it legal for gay and lesbian couples to wed.

The House, which is controlled by Democrats, approved the measure 75-59, dividing mostly along party lines.

In recent months, as the debate over same-sex marriage emerged in St. Paul, a capital newly dominated by Democrats, the outcome in the House had been seen as most uncertain. State Senate leaders say that the outlook is more assured in that chamber and that they expect to approve same-sex marriage next week. Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, urged approval and said he would sign the bill, which would allow same-sex marriages starting Aug. 1.

If the measure is approved, Minnesota would become the 12th state, in addition to the District of Columbia, to permit marriages for gay and lesbian couples and the third to decide to do so, along with Delaware and Rhode Island, this month alone.

Minnesota would also become the first state in the middle of the nation to make such a choice through legislative action. Elsewhere in the Midwest, Iowa allows same-sex marriage, but that was decided in the courts. In Illinois, which allows civil unions, state House members are considering a same-sex marriage bill already approved in the state Senate.

In a way, the vote here came as a remarkable shift. Just a few months ago, in November, voters had cast ballots following a hard-fought campaign aimed at amending the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The amendment failed, and, with Democrats winning control of both legislative chambers in the same election, a renewed effort to allow same-sex marriage emerged.

Dueling campaigns — an RV tour, rallies, leaflets and advertisements — have consumed the state in recent weeks.

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans continued a campaign to delay confirmation of President Barack Obama’s second-term Cabinet-level nominees on Thursday, blocking a committee vote on Gina McCarthy, the president’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

The action came a day after Republicans on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee threw a wrench in the nomination of Thomas E. Perez to be labor secretary, delaying it for at least a week.

In both cases, Republican committee members said the nominees had failed to adequately respond to their questions.

The eight Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee, led by the ranking member Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, boycotted a committee meeting to protest what they called McCarthy’s “unresponsive answers” to more than 1,000 written questions about EPA policies and internal practices.

Democrats were unable to muster a majority to move the nomination without any Republicans present and were left to fulminate in a near-empty committee room over what several of them called Republican obstructionism. Committee Democrats are likely to regroup and try to approve McCarthy’s nomination along party lines, but it is unclear whether they could clear a 60-vote threshold on the Senate floor.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. and the majority leader, accused Republicans of using procedural roadblocks and stall tactics to deny confirmation to qualified nominees.

Today should be mostly clear and warm, with a high temperature near 80°F — time to install air conditioning! After today, the air will remain humid as the weather takes a turn for the worse. Expect rain showers and thunderstorms on Saturday, ahead of a cold front that will move in Saturday night. Sunday will be cooler and cloudy, with some rain possible. Such weather is not confined to New England; forecasts predict precipitation in 47 of the continental U.S. states in the next 36 hours.