Pakistani Taliban punished a man accused of impersonating one of them to extort money in Matta, in the volatile Swat Valley.

Using a portable radio transmitter, a local Taliban leader, Shah Doran, on most nights outlines newly proscribed “un-Islamic” activities in Swat, like selling DVDs, watching cable television, singing and dancing, criticizing the Taliban, shaving beards and allowing girls to attend school. He also reveals names of people the Taliban have recently killed for violating their decrees — and those they plan to kill.

“They control everything through the radio,” said one Swat resident, who declined to give his name for fear the Taliban might kill him. “Everyone waits for the broadcast.”

International attention remains fixed on the Taliban’s hold on Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, from where they launch attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. But for Pakistan, the loss of the Swat Valley could prove just as devastating.

Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, a Delaware-size chunk of territory with 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within reach of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.

After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.

With the increasing consolidation of their power, the Taliban have taken a sizable bite out of the nation. And they are enforcing a strict interpretation of Islam with cruelty, bringing public beheadings, assassinations, social and cultural repression and persecution of women to what was once an independent, relatively secular region, dotted with ski resorts and fruit orchards and known for its dancing girls.

Last year, 70 police officers were beheaded, shot or otherwise slain in Swat, and 150 wounded, said Malik Naveed Khan, the police inspector general for the North-West Frontier Province.

The police have become so afraid that many officers have put advertisements in newspapers renouncing their jobs so the Taliban will not kill them.

One who stayed on the job was Farooq Khan, a midlevel officer in Mingora, the valley’s largest city, where decapitated bodies of policemen and other victims routinely surface. Last month, he was shopping there when two men on a motorcycle sprayed him with gunfire, killing him in broad daylight.

“He always said, ‘I have to stay here and defend our home,’ ” recalled his brother, Wajid Ali Khan, a Swat native and the province’s minister for environment, as he passed around a cellphone with Farooq’s picture.

In the view of analysts, the growing nightmare in Swat is a capsule of the country’s problems: an ineffectual and unresponsive civilian government, coupled with military and security forces that, in the view of furious residents, have willingly allowed the militants to spread terror deep into Pakistan.

The crisis has become a critical test for the government of the civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, and for a security apparatus whose loyalties, many Pakistanis say, remain in question.

Seeking to deflect blame, Mr. Zardari’s government recently criticized “earlier halfhearted attempts at rooting out extremists from the area” and vowed to fight militants “who are ruthlessly murdering and maiming our citizens.”

But as pressure grows, he has also said in recent days that the government would be willing to talk with militants who accept its authority. Such negotiations would carry serious risks: security officials say a brief peace deal in Swat last spring was a spectacular failure that allowed militants to tighten their hold and take revenge on people who had supported the military.

Without more forceful and concerted action by the government, some warn, the Taliban threat in Pakistan is bound to spread.

“The crux of the problem is the government appears divided about what to do,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier who until 2006 was in charge of security in the western tribal areas. “This disconnect among the political leadership has emboldened the militants.” From 2,000 to 4,000 Taliban fighters now roam the Swat Valley, according to interviews with a half-dozen senior Pakistani government, military and political officials involved in the fight. By contrast, the Pakistani military has four brigades with 12,000 to 15,000 men in Swat, officials say.

But the soldiers largely stay inside their camps, unwilling to patrol or exert any large presence that might provoke — or discourage — the militants, Swat residents and political leaders say. The military also has not raided a small village that locals say is widely known as the Taliban’s headquarters in Swat.

Nor have troops destroyed mobile radio transmitters mounted on motorcycles or pickup trucks that Shah Doran and the leader of the Taliban in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, have expertly used to terrify residents.

Being named in one of the nightly broadcasts often leaves just two options: fleeing Swat, or turning up headless and dumped in a village square.

When the army does act, its near-total lack of preparedness to fight a counterinsurgency reveals itself. Its usual tactic is to lob artillery shells into a general area, and the results have seemed to hurt civilians more than the militants, residents say.

In some parts of Pakistan, civilian militias have risen to fight the Taliban. But in Swat, the Taliban’s gains amid a large army presence has convinced many that the military must be conspiring with the Taliban.

“It’s very mysterious how they get so much weapons and support,” while nearby districts are comparatively calm, said Muzaffar ul-Mulk Khan, a member of Parliament from Swat, who said his home near Mingora was recently destroyed by the Taliban.

“We are bewildered by the military. They patrol only in Mingora. In the rest of Swat they sit in their bases. And the militants can kill at will anywhere in Mingora,” he said.

“Nothing is being done by the government,” Mr. Khan added.

Accusations that the military lacks the will to fight in Swat are “very unfair and unjustified,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the chief military spokesman, who said 180 army soldiers and officers had been killed in Swat in the past 14 months.

“They do reach out, and they do patrol,” he said.

Military officials also say they are trying to step up activity in Swat. This weekend, soldiers were deployed to protect a handful of educational buildings in Mingora, amid a wave of school bombings.

General Abbas said the military did not have the means to block Taliban radio transmissions across such a wide area, but he disputed the view that Mingora had fallen to the militants.

“Just because they come out at night and throw down four or five bodies in the square does not mean that militants control anything,” he said.

Few officials would dispute that one of the Pakistani military’s biggest mistakes in Swat was its failure to protect Pir Samiullah, a local leader whose 500 followers fought the Taliban in the village of Mandal Dag. After the Taliban killed him in a firefight last month, the militants demanded that his followers reveal his gravesite — and then started beheading people until they got the information, one Mandal Dag villager said.

“They dug him up and hung his body in the square,” the villager said, and then they took the body to a secret location. The desecration was intended to show what would happen to anyone who defied the Taliban’s rule, but it also made painfully clear to Swat residents that the Pakistani government could not be trusted to defend those who rose up against the militants.

“He should have been given more protection,” said one Pakistani security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject. “He should have been made a symbol of resistance.”

Gruesome displays like the defilement of Pir Samiullah’s remains are an effective tactic for the Taliban, who have shown cruel efficiency in following through on their threats.

Recently, Shah Doran broadcast word that the Taliban intended to kill a police officer who he said had killed three people.

“We have sent people, and tomorrow you will have good news,” he said on his nightly broadcast, according to a resident of Matta, a Taliban stronghold. The next day the decapitated body of the policeman was found in a nearby village.

Even in Mingora, a town grown hardened to violence, residents were shocked early this month to find the bullet-ridden body of one of the city’s most famous dancing girls splayed on the main square.

Known as Shabana, the woman was visited at night by a group of men who claimed to want to hire her for a party. They shot her to death and dragged her body more than a quarter-mile to the central square, leaving it as a warning for anyone who would flout Taliban decrees.

The leader of the militants in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, gained prominence from making radio broadcasts and running an Islamic school, becoming popular among otherwise isolated homemakers and inspiring them to sell their jewelry to finance his operation. He also drew support from his marriage to the daughter of Sufi Mohammed, a powerful religious leader in Swat until 2001 who later disowned his son-in-law.

Even though Swat does not border Afghanistan or any of Pakistan’s seven lawless federal tribal areas, Maulana Fazlullah eventually allied with Taliban militants who dominate regions along the Afghan frontier.

His fighters now roam the valley with sniper rifles, Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, mortar tubes and, according to some officials, night-vision goggles and flak vests.

His latest tactic is a ban on girls’ attending school in Swat, which will be tested in February when private schools are scheduled to reopen after winter recess. The Taliban have already destroyed 169 girls’ schools in Swat, government officials say, and they expect most private schools to stay closed rather than risk retaliation.

“The local population is totally fed up, and if they had the chance they would lynch each and every Talib,” said Mr. Naveed Khan, the police official. “But the Taliban are so cruel and violent, no one will oppose them. If this is not stopped, it will spill into other areas of Pakistan.”

A woman tried to sell incense to a passenger on Saturday in Mumbai, where the wealthy have a new sense of their vulnerability.

MUMBAI, India — Last Wednesday, an extraordinary public interest lawsuit was filed in this city’s highest court. It charged that the government had lagged in its constitutional duty to protect its citizens’ right to life, and it pressed the state to modernize and upgrade its security forces.

The lawsuit was striking mainly for the people behind it: investment bankers, corporate lawyers and representatives of some of India’s largest companies, which have their headquarters here in the country’s financial capital, also known as Bombay. The Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the city’s largest business association, joined as a petitioner. It was the first time it had lent its name to litigation in the public interest.

The three-day siege of Mumbai, which ended a week ago, was a watershed for India’s prosperous classes. It prompted many of those who live in their own private Indias, largely insulated from the country’s dysfunction, to demand a vital public service: safety.

Since the attacks, which killed 163 people, plus nine gunmen, there has been an outpouring of anger from unlikely quarters. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of urban, English-speaking, tank-top-wearing citizens stormed the Gateway of India, a famed waterfront monument, venting anger at their elected leaders. There were similar protests in the capital, New Delhi, and the southern technology hubs, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All were organized spontaneously, with word spread through text messages and Facebook pages.

On Saturday, young people affiliated with a new political party, called Loksatta, or people’s power, gathered at the Gateway, calling for a variety of reforms, including banning criminals from running for political office. (Virtually every political party has convicts and suspects among its elected officials.)

Social networking sites were ablaze with memorials and citizens’ action groups, including one that advocated refraining from voting altogether as an act of civil disobedience. Never mind that in India, voter turnout among the rich is far lower than among the poor.

Another group advocated not paying taxes, as though that would improve the quality of public services. An e-mail campaign began Saturday called “I Am Clean,” urging citizens not to bribe police officers or drive through red lights.

And there were countless condemnations of how democracy had failed in this, the world’s largest democracy. Those condemnations led Vir Sanghvi, a columnist writing in the financial newspaper Mint, to remind his readers of 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule. Mr. Sanghvi wrote, “I am beginning to hear the same kind of middle-class murmurs and whines about the ineffectual nature of democracy and the need for authoritarian government.”

Perhaps the most striking development was the lawsuit because it represented a rare example of corporate India’s confronting the government outright rather than making back-room deals.

“It says in a nutshell, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Cyrus Guzder, who owns a logistics company. “More precisely, it tells us that citizens of all levels in the country believe their government has let them down and believe that it now needs to be held accountable.”

In India’s city of gold, the distinction between public and private can be bewildering. For members of the working class, who often cannot afford housing, public sidewalks become living rooms. In the morning, commuters from gated communities in the suburbs pass children brushing their teeth at the edge of the street. Women are forced to relieve themselves on the railway tracks, usually in the dark, for the sake of modesty. The poor sometimes sleep on highway medians, and it is not unheard of for drunken drivers to mow them down.

Mumbai has been roiled by government neglect for years. Its commuter trains are so overcrowded that 4,000 riders die every year on average, some pushed from trains in the fierce competition to get on and off. Monsoons in 2005 killed more than 400 people in Mumbai in one day alone; so clogged were the city’s ancient drains, so crowded its river plains with unauthorized construction that water had nowhere to go.

Rahul Bose, an actor, suggested setting aside such problems for the moment. In a plea published last week in The Hindustan Times, he laid out the desperation of this glistening, corroding place. “We overlook for now your neglect of the city,” he wrote. “Its floods, its traffic, its filth, its pollution. Just deliver to us a world-standard antiterrorism plan.”

None of the previous terrorist attacks, even in Mumbai, had so struck the cream of Bombay society. Bombs have been planted on commuter trains in the past, but few people who regularly dine at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, one of the worst-hit sites, travel by train. “It has touched a raw nerve,” said Amit Chandra, who runs a prominent investment firm. “People have lost friends. Everyone would visit these places.” In any event, public anger could not have come at a worse time for incumbent politicians, who were at their most contrite last week. National elections are due next spring, and security is likely to be one of the top issues in the vote, particularly among the urban middle class. It remains to be seen whether outrage will prompt them to turn out to vote in higher numbers or whether politicians will be compelled to pay greater attention to them than in the past. “There’s a revulsion against the political class I have never seen before,” said Gerson D’Cunha, a former advertising executive whose civic group, A.G.N.I., presses for better governing. “The middle class that is laid back, lethargic, indolent, they’ve been galvanized.”

For how long? That is a question on everyone’s lips. At a memorial service on Thursday evening for a slain alumnus of the elite St. Xavier’s College here, a placard asked: “One month from now, will you care?”

“It’s helplessness, what do we do?” said Probir Roy, the owner of a technology company and an alumnus of St. Xavier’s. “All the various stakeholders — the police, politicians — you can’t count on them anyway. Now what do you do?”

Tops, a private security agency, has plenty to do. It is consulting schools, malls and “high net individuals” on how to protect themselves better. Security was a growth industry in India even before the latest attacks. Tops’s global chairman, Rahul Nanda, said the company employed 73,000 security guards today, compared with about 15,000 three years ago.

Mumbai is not the only place suffering from official neglect. Public services have deteriorated across India, all the more so in the countryside. Government schools are notoriously mismanaged. Doctors do not show up to work on public health projects. Corruption is endemic. In some of India’s booming cities, private developers drill for their own water and generate electricity for their own buildings.

Political interference often gets in the way of the woefully understaffed and poorly paid police force. Courts and commissions have called for law enforcement to be liberated from political control. Politicians have balked.

The three-day standoff with terrorists was neither the deadliest that India has seen, nor the most protracted; there have been other extended convulsions of violence, including mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Yet, the recent attacks, which Indian police say were the work of a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, were profoundly different. Two of the four main targets were luxury hotels frequented by the city’s wealthy elite: the Taj, facing the Gateway of India, and the twin Oberoi and Trident hotels, a few miles west on Nariman Point. They were the elite’s watering holes and business dinner destinations. And to lose them, said Alex Kuruvilla, who runs the Condé Nast publications in India, is like losing a limb.

“It’s like what I imagine an amputee would feel,” he said. “It’s so much part of our lives.”

Last Wednesday, on the night of the candlelight vigil, Mr. Kuruvilla’s driver made a wrong turn. A traffic policeman virtually pounced on the driver and then let him go with a bribe of 20 rupees, less than 50 cents. Mr. Kuruvilla is not optimistic about swift change. “Our cynicism is justified,” he said.

Ashok Pawar, a police constable from the police station nearest the Taj, entered the hotel the night the siege began. It was full of gunfire and smoke. He could not breathe, and he did not know his way around. “It was my first time inside the Taj,” he said. “How can a poor man go there?”

In The Indian Express newspaper on Friday, a columnist named Vinay Sitapati wrote a pointed open letter to “South Bombay,” shorthand for the city’s most wealthy enclave. The column first berated the rich for lecturing at Davos and failing in Hindi exams. “You refer to your part of the city simply as ‘town,’ ” he wrote, and then he begged: “Vote in person. But vote in spirit, too: use your clout to demand better politicians, not pliant ones.”

“In your hour of need today,” he added, “it is India that needs your help.”

An interdenominational prayer service on Thursday at Saint Xavier

MUMBAI, India — The Mumbai police on Thursday identified a second Pakistani terrorist as an engineer of the bloody assaults on the city last week and confirmed that they were investigating whether a Mumbai man arrested on terrorism charges had scoped out some of the high-profile targets the attackers struck, leaving more than 170 dead.

Gruesome new evidence also emerged Thursday suggesting that some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in Mumbai had been treated savagely. Some of the bodies appeared to have strangulation marks and wounds on their bodies did not come from gunshots or grenades, the police said.

The new links to Pakistan added fresh complications to American diplomatic efforts to secure cooperation between India and Pakistan, which has questioned some of the evidence that Pakistanis were involved. On Thursday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met in Islamabad with Pakistani leaders, a day after meeting with Indian leaders, to urge that the two countries work together to find the attackers and bring them to justice.

“What I heard was a commitment that this is the course that will be taken,” Ms. Rice told reporters at Chaklala Air Base after meeting with President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

Ms. Rice’s brief visit to Pakistan completed a delicate diplomatic minuet with visits to the region by the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who was in Pakistan on Wednesday and flew to India on Thursday for meetings.

In Mumbai, Rakesh Maria, India’s joint commissioner of police, said that the second Lashkar-e-Taiba military commander who helped engineer the attacks was Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. Mr. Maria said that the surviving attacker, 21-year-old Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, identified Mr. Lakhvi and said he helped indoctrinate all the attackers.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group that long focused on the disputed territory of Kashmir, is officially banned in Pakistan but, with a history of links to Pakistan’s intelligence, has been hiding in plain sight for years. On Thursday, a spokesman for the group’s leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, denied involvement in the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani news media reported.

Mr. Maria also said that it was believed that the attackers were in contact with Mr. Lakhvi on their journey from Karachi to Mumbai by sea and may have been during the attacks as well. Indian and American intelligence officials have already identified another Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, Yusuf Muzammil, as a mastermind of the attacks, and said he was in contact by satellite phone with the attackers during their journey.

Another police official, Deven Bharti, said the interrogation of Mr. Kasab, the captured gunman, was focusing on three lines of inquiry: the identities of the other nine; their training and planning; and whether they had local accomplices.

The suspected collaborator, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, was arrested on Feb. 10 in Rampur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh a in connection with gun and grenade attack on New Year’s Eve on a police camp. He was arrested with two others; all three are suspected members of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Mr. Ansari told police interrogators in Uttar Pradesh that from fall 2007 to February 2008, he had been in Mumbai scoping out possible targets for the guerrilla group, including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the old Victoria rail station.

The Uttar Pradesh police said that Mr. Ansari was arrested after he returned to Rampur to pick up weapons left behind from the New Year’s Eve attack and take them to Mumbai for use in a later operation.

Ms Rice, during talks with Pakistani leaders, stressed that Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.

“Pakistan should also take the necessary steps to prevent any non-state actors from indulging in such activities against any country from its soil,” Ms. Rice said, according to a statement from the Pakistani prime minister’s office.

At the news conference in Chaklala, Ms. Rice said that the Indian government is concerned and determined “to find the perpetrators, bring them to justice, determined to prevent the next attack.”

“I found the Pakistani leadership understanding the importance of doing so. Particularly in rooting out terrorists and rounding up whoever perpetrated this attack, from wherever it was perpetrated, whatever its sources, whatever the leads, because everybody wants to prevent further attacks,” she said.

For his part, Mr. Zardari told Ms. Rice that he will take “strong action against any Pakistani elements found involved in the Mumbai attacks,” according to a spokesperson for the Pakistani president.

Ms. Rice said Pakistan should be seen as acting sincerely and quickly.

Within India, sharp questions have been raised about the stunning inadequacy of Indian security forces and intelligence services. On Thursday, the Indian Air Force chief, Fali Homar Major told reporters that new intelligence reports had persuaded the authorities to declare an alert at airports. “This is based on a little warning that has been received,” he said. “We are prepared as usual.”

He offered no further details, but an Indian television network, NDTV, said the warning related to what it called a “9/11” plot timed to coincide with the anniversary on Dec. 6 of the destruction by Hindu militants of the Babri mosque in northern India in 1992.

News reports on Thursday said six airports, including those at New Delhi and Mumbai, were on alert, with heightened security searches for passengers and warplanes ready to take to the skies.

Jeremy Kahn reported from Mumbai, India, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Somini Sengupta and Robert F. Worth from Mumbai, India; Jane Perlez from Lahore, Pakistan; Hari Kumar from New Delhi; Eric Schmitt from Washington and Alan Cowell from London.

A bullet hole was visible on Monday in the window of a pizza restaurant at Chhatrapati Shivaji in Mumbai.

MUMBAI, India — In a new sign of rising tensions between two nuclear-armed neighbors, Indian officials summoned Pakistan’s ambassador Monday evening and told him that Pakistani nationals were responsible for the terrorist attacks here last week and that they must be punished.

With public anger building against both the Indian government and Pakistan, officials of India’s Foreign Ministry also suggested that the planners of the attacks are still at large in Pakistan, and that they expected “strong action would be taken” by Pakistan against those responsible for the violence, according to a statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs. Nine of the 10 men who appear to have carried out the attacks are now dead, with the remaining one in custody.

The statement added tartly that Pakistan’s actions “needed to match the sentiments expressed by its leadership that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India.”

It was not clear whether India had supplied Pakistan with any proof of its claims. Pakistani officials have said they are not aware of any links to Pakistan-based militants, and that they would act swiftly if they found one.

The Indian government is facing strong criticism at home for its handling of the attacks, in which 173 people were killed over three bloody days here in the country’s financial capital. (The authorities revised the number downward on Monday, saying that some names had been counted twice.)

With elections just months away the government needs to be seen as acting decisively in the face of the atrocities. But it could be accused of raising a red herring if it does not furnish convincing evidence for its claims of Pakistani involvement.

There is also a groundswell of popular anger here aimed at Pakistan, and the attacks have raised tensions between the two countries to a level not seen since 2001, when a suicide attack on the Indian parliament pushed them to the brink of war.

The ominous atmosphere poses a special challenge for the United States, a strong ally of India that also depends on Pakistan for cooperation in fighting Al Qaeda. Renewed tensions between India and Pakistan could distract Pakistan from that project.

President Bush has dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to India, where she is expected to arrive on Wednesday. Speaking in London on Monday, she called on Pakistan in blunt terms “to follow the evidence wherever it leads,” adding “I don’t want to jump to any conclusions myself on this, but I do think that this is a time for complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation.”

India’s assertion that the attackers were all Pakistani echoes a claim by the one attacker who was captured alive, identified as Ajmal Amir Qasab, said Inspector Rakesh Maria, head of the crime control bureau at the Mumbai police, in a news conference. Mr. Qasab also said he was a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Islamist group blamed for terrorist attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere, Inspector Maria said.

However, no foreign identification documents were found, and some of the attackers had fake Indian papers, he added.

Inspector Maria also said there were only 10 attackers in all, denying earlier suggestions by public officials that there were more actual attackers. However, it remains unclear whether the militants had at least some accomplices on the ground before the violence began on Wednesday night.

Some new details emerged Monday about the difficulties faced by the Indian police commandos who responded to the killings here last week. The attackers used grenades to booby trap some of the bodies in the two hotels where they struck, the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and the Oberoi, so they would explode when they were moved, Inspector Maria said. It was not always clear, he added, whether the people were dead or just wounded.

That tactic made fighting the attackers more difficult, and significantly delayed the cleanup after the violence ended, Inspector Maria said. The last militants were routed on Saturday morning, but the Taj was not returned to the control of its owners until Monday morning. But those details seemed unlikely to blunt the rising public anger at the government’s handling of the attacks, which have been widely described here as India’s version of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The ease with which the small band of attackers mowed down civilians in downtown Mumbai and then repelled police commandos for days in several different buildings, has exposed glaring weaknesses in India’s intelligence and enforcement abilities.

Indian intelligence officials issued at least one warning about a possible attack on the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, but that was in September. Security was increased for a while and then relaxed, intelligence officials said. There were reports of many other unheeded warnings, but it was not clear how many were actually communicated.

On Monday, the rising public outcry pushed the chief minister of Maharashtra State, Vilasrao Deshmukh, a member of the governing Congress Party, to offer his resignation. Party leaders were still considering his offer Monday night.

“I accept moral responsibility for the terror attacks,” he said at a news conference.

Earlier in the day, his deputy, R.R. Patil, officially stepped down. The two gestures came a day after India’s highest-ranking domestic security official, Home Minister Shivraj Patil, resigned, saying he took responsibility for the failure to forestall or quickly contain the three-day killing spree.

His successor as home minister, Paliniappan Chidambaram, the former finance chief, briefly addressed reporters on Monday, promising to respond vigorously to the terrorist threat.

“This is the threat to the very idea of India, the very soul of India, the India that we know, the India that we love — namely a secular, plural, tolerant and open society,” he said. “I have no doubt in my mind that ultimately the idea of India will triumph.”

Also on Monday, mourners attended an emotional funeral for a Jewish couple who were murdered at Nariman House, a Jewish outreach center the terrorists took over during their bloody rampage.

The couple’s orphaned two year-old son, Moshe Holtzberg, cried out for his parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, from Brooklyn, and his Israeli wife, Rivka Holtzberg, 28. The boy, carrying a small orange inflatable basketball, first cried “Dada” and then inconsolably “Ima,” which means Mama, in Hebrew, as he accompanied his grieving grandparents and dignitaries, including Israel’s ambassador to India, Mark Sofer, at a synagogue memorial service.

“The house they built here in Mumbai will live with them,” said Shimon Rosenberg, Rivka’s father, his voice breaking. “They were the mother and father of the Jewish community in Mumbai.”

Later in the day, thousands of Mumbai residents gathered on the seaside esplanade facing the Taj, where they stared sadly at the black smoke marks marring the building’s stately Victorian architecture. Some chanted “long live India!” and held up banners proclaiming their defiance. Others placed candles and flowers on makeshift memorials to the dead.

“I never knew what terrorism was as a kid,” said Mahesh Bhatt, a 36-year-old former Indian Navy officer who now works for a shipping company. “Now, it’s become part of our lives. We can’t continue like this. Something must be done.”

MUMBAI, India — Indian commandos staged a dramatic helicopter raid and battled pockets of militants on Friday as security forces tried to end the bloody assault by terrorists on Mumbai, the financial and entertainment capital of India. The police said the death toll reached 143 with the discovery of 24 bodies in the luxury Oberoi hotel.

Commandos slid down ropes from a hovering Army helicopter Friday morning as they stormed a Jewish center that had been seized. The blue-uniformed troopers landed on the roof and soon made their way inside Nariman House, home to the Orthodox Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch.

A gun battle raged inside the building, with the thump of explosions and the rattle of automatic fire echoing throughout the day. There was no immediate word on the fate of hostages assumed to be held there.

Late in the day, commandos in black uniform wearing heavy body armor moved into buildings around Nariman House, relieving commandos in blue or black uniforms who have been in action all day. For the first time, a van with six medics in surgical gowns and masks parked close to Nariman House, apparently in anticipation of casualties.

Indian Army and paramilitary commandos made their way through the Oberoi and through the charred passageways of a second luxury hotel, the Taj, searching for bodies and survivors while continuing to battle gunmen from the teams that struck the city Wednesday night. In addition to the Jewish center and the hotels, the terrorists, armed with grenades and automatic weapons, had hit at least four other sites on Mumbai’s southern tip — the main train station, a hospital, a cinema and a historic café.

While there was still no definitive word on the identity or affiliation of the attackers, an Indian official said one assailant had been captured alive and was a Pakistani citizen. The assertion by R.R. Patil, the home affairs minister of Maharashtra State where Mumbai is located, could further increase tension between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed states who have fought wars in the past.

In a significant development, Pakistan said on Friday it was prepared to send its intelligence chief, Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India to share information in the investigation into the attacks.

News agencies cited police reports that 93 foreigners — some of them wearing Air France and Lufthansa uniforms — had been rescued on Friday from the Oberoi. The Mumbai police chief, Hassan Ghafoor, said 24 bodies had been found at the hotel and the security forces had completed their operation there.

At the other hotel, the Taj Mahal Hotel and Tower, several trucks carrying members of India’s elite Rapid Action Force arrived at 1:15 p.m. on Friday. The troopers appeared to be starting an assault on the hotel, where an army official said at least one militant was still holding hostages. Explosions and small arms fire were heard from the hotel throughout the day as security forces sought to free hostages. Outside the hotel, a sniper took up position in a cherrypicker. By late afternoon, smoke had again begun to billow from the roof after a huge blaze on Thursday.

The leader of a commando unit involved in a gun battle Thursday morning inside the Taj said during a press conference on Friday that he had seen a dozen dead bodies in one of the rooms.

His team also discovered a gunman’s backpack, which contained dried fruit, 400 rounds of AK-47 ammunition, four grenades, Indian and American money, and seven credit cards from some of the world’s leading banks. They pack also had a national identity card from the island of Mauritius, off Africa’s southeastern coast.

The attackers were “very, very familiar with the layout of the hotel,” said the commander, who disguised his face with a scarf and tinted glasses. He said the militants, who appeared to be under 30 years old, were “determined” and “remorseless.”

Fears were growing in Mumbai that the death toll would rise. Dozens of people, and perhaps many more, remained trapped in the hotels, though it was uncertain if any were being held hostage. More than 300 people were known to have been wounded.

The police said 14 police officers had been killed in the city, along with nine gunmen. Nine suspects were taken into custody, they said.

Earlier in the day, an Army general, N. Thamburaj, was quoted as saying he expected all anti-terrorist operations in Mumbai to be wrapped up by midafternoon.

There remained much mystery around the group behind the attack, which terrorism experts said was unusual in its scale, planning and boldness.

In a televised speech Thursday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed forces “based outside this country” in a thinly veiled accusation that Pakistan was involved. A day later, India’s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee was quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying that, according to preliminary reports, “some elements in Pakistan are responsible.”

A guest in a wheelchair was escorted by hotel staff after her rescue from Oberoi Trident Hotel on Friday.

On Friday, Pakistan seemed anxious to defuse the mounting crisis in relations with its neighbor. Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said India and Pakistan should join hands to defeat a common enemy, and urged New Delhi not to play politics over the attacks in Mumbai, Reuters reported.

“Do not bring politics into this issue. This is a collective issue. We are facing a common enemy and we should join hands to defeat the enemy,” the foreign minister told reporters in the Indian town of Ajmer during a four-day visit to India.

President Asif Ali Zardari called Mr. Singh, Reuters reported, to say he was “appalled and shocked” by the terrorist attacks. “Non-state actors wanted to force upon the governments their own agenda, but they must not be allowed to succeed,” he said.

The attacks could threaten recent American efforts to reduce the overall enmity between Pakistan and India, which were meant to enable Pakistan to focus more military resources against the rising threat of the Taliban in its lawless tribal areas.

Mr. Singh had issued a warning Thursday that seemed clearly aimed at Pakistan, which India has often accused of allowing terrorist groups to plot anti-Indian attacks.

“The group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country,” he said. “We will take up strongly with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them.”

The suspicions raised by the attack seemed a blow to relations between India and Pakistan, which had been recovering from a low earlier this year after India blamed the Pakistani intelligence agency for abetting the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan. India has frequently accused Pakistan-based militant groups of fueling terrorist attacks on Indian soil, though lately it has also acknowledged the presence of homegrown Muslim and Hindu militant organizations.

Al Qaeda suicide bombers could target New York City subways, federal security officials say.

WASHINGTON — Federal authorities have received a “plausible but unsubstantiated” report that al Qaeda may have discussed targeting transit systems in or around New York City, the Department of Homeland Security said.

“These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives” on subway or passenger rail trains, according to a joint DHS and FBI statement issued Tuesday.

“We have no specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning, but we are issuing this warning out of concern that such an attack could possibly be conducted during the forthcoming holiday season,” the statement said.

The uncorroborated information indicates al Qaeda may have discussed in late September targeting New York transit systems, DHS spokeswoman Laura Keener said. She said the memo was issued as a precaution so that local officials could make decisions appropriate for their areas.

While no adjustment is being made to the national threat level, she said, transit passengers in large metropolitan areas such as New York may see increased security in the days to come. That presence might include uniformed or plainclothes security officers, federal air marshals, canine teams and security inspectors, Keener said.

New York police also are deploying additional resources on the city’s mass transit systems as a precaution, said a statement by Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

“It is not uncommon for the department to receive threat information and to adjust our resources accordingly,” Browne said.

The FBI received the information through a channel that has provided reliable information in the past, so the agency is taking the threat seriously, counterterrorism sources said.

The FBI and DHS said they had no further information on the threat. “We are working closely with the U.S. intelligence community, state and local law enforcement and homeland security officials to vet and corroborate this reporting, and will continue to investigate every possible lead. We’ll provide updates as we obtain further information,” the statement said.

The public should remain vigilant and report suspicious activity to authorities, it said.

Al Qaeda has the means to launch such an attack, said CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson, who has covered al Qaeda extensively since before the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“The al Qaeda-affiliated groups are still willing to make these attacks,” Robertson said. “What we’ve seen in the past is, they’ve become capable of making these homemade bomb devices with detonators and exploding them by cell phones or by suicide bombings.”

However, he said, it also would be possible for al Qaeda deliberately to plant false information.

“They would love to sort of create fear when they’re not actually capable of creating a strike. … I’ve seen it myself, in Afghanistan. You get the Taliban out there on the ground, and they’re very capable of knowing that the troops are listening to them, and feeding and sowing false information trails saying, ‘We’re over on this part of the hill’ when they’re nowhere near it. They’re very capable and knowledgeable about feeding false information.”

An injured man is carried to a hospital in Mumbai.

Several people have been killed in a series of coordinated attacks targeting sites popular with tourists and business people, according to police and CNN’s sister network in India.

Ongoing battles between police and gunmen were reported at two five-star hotels by CNN-IBN.

Gunmen armed with automatic weapons and grenades attacked targets including the hotels, a cafe, and a train station, police say.

Police confirmed two deaths but IBN said at least 18 people were killed in the coordinated strikes, according to IBN.

The attacks included five shootouts and two grenade attacks, said a police officer who answered Mumbai’s police control room line.

IBN reported an ongoing battle at the five-star Oberoi Hotel where gunmen have reportedly taken hostages after searching out people with U.S. or British passports.

At a second top hotel, the Taj, IBN reported more gunfire and chaos as a grenade exploded.

The attacks began about 2230 local time (1700 GMT) and more than two hours later witnesses were reporting new explosions and gunfire.

The targets include businesses frequented by international visitors.

CNN correspondent Andrew Stevens said: “We are getting reports of ongoing incidents at the railway station and the Oberoi Hotel.

“We do not know if this has reached its peak or if more attacks to come.”

A local journalist told CNN he had seen evidence of an attack at the city’s domestic airport, which is on the outskirts of the Mumbai.

IBN reported explosions at a gas station and inside a taxi on a dockside road.

Attacks were reported at the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the popular Café Leopold, and Cama Hospital, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station.

When Roqaya Khalili wants to visit friends or relatives, or do the weekly shopping at the supermarket, she picks up the phone and dials a four-digit number.

A few minutes later, a bright green taxi draws up outside Roqaya’s home in a suburb of west Tehran.

At the wheel is Sahar Foghani, one of around 700 women cab drivers in Tehran who are making a living, or supplementing the family income, working for a taxi agency run by women, for women.

It’s a scenario that would be unthinkable in nearby Saudi Arabia, where women are banned from driving.

Women’s rights in Iran may have some way to go.

But they are free to go out on their own, to drive their own vehicles, or to take taxis driven by men if they like.

‘Better drivers’

But Roqaya Khalili is one of around 40,000 registered customers who prefer to move around in cabs with women in the driving seat.

“I feel safer in a woman’s taxi, from all points of view,” she says.

“A lot of the men drivers are young and impatient, and they’re not disciplined. Women are simply better drivers.”

That’s a view with which Sahar Foghani, battling daily with Tehran’s traffic jams and antisocial driving habits, clearly agrees.

“I’ve been driving for nearly two years now, and have never had a bump, or a violation ticket,” she says.

Sahar has two teenage children, and says she took to the roads to help her husband make ends meet in harsh economic times.

“It’s tough on the kids, as they’re often stuck at home on their own, but they’ve been really helpful,” she says.

Like 70% of the drivers working for Women’s Taxis, Sahar owns her own car, buying it off the company in instalments.

“I can pay off the car over 60 months, so this is an investment as well as providing some extra income,” Sahar says.

“Tehran traffic is really heavy, so you have to love driving to do this job,” she adds.

High gear

Women learn basic maintenance such as how to change a tyre

The agency’s control centre on the southern edge of Tehran handles about 2,500 jobs a day.

Customers phone in to the centre, and their details are sent out by radio to whichever of the cabs is closest to the address concerned.

At the centre, the women drivers are also given lessons in basic car maintenance and such essentials as how to change a burst tire.

All the operators at the centre are women too.

But the concept was the brainchild of a man, Mohsen Uruji, who says he spotted a gap in Tehran’s transport system.

“What was missing was a role for women,” he says.

“By setting up this purely private sector company, we’ve been able to provide jobs for many women, as well as a service for other women who want to travel around in a more relaxed way.”

Many of the drivers are war widows or divorcees who really need the work, and are referred to the agency by some of the big welfare foundations.

The project has mushroomed.

“We started off with 10 ten cars,” says Mr Uruji.

“Now we have 700, and plan to expand to 2,000 in Tehran, as well as opening up in other cities.”

Ahead of the pack

Many of the customers are of course highly conservative Muslim women who feel uncomfortable travelling alone in a vehicle with an unknown man at the wheel.

So in that respect, the service is catering to traditional tastes.

At the same time though, it is giving the women drivers the opportunity to get out there and earn some money in a profession which even in most western countries is often regarded as something of a male preserve.

The concept seems to have caught on and identified a real need.

So the bright green taxis driven by Sahar Foghani and others have become an increasingly familiar sight, forging their way through the horrendous traffic jams that are such a dominant feature of life in Tehran.

In Peshawar on Saturday, Pakistanis condemned an American missile attack that killed a British militant.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A British militant who was a liaison to Al Qaeda and was a main suspect in the plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners in 2006 was killed Saturday in a missile strike by an American aircraft in northern Pakistan, senior Pakistani and American officials said.

The militant, Rashid Rauf, was among the five people killed in the attack by a remotely piloted aircraft in North Waziristan, close to the Afghan border, the officials said. He is perhaps the best-known of the figures killed in an American airstrike campaign there that has intensified since August and has caused increased strains between the United States and Pakistan.

In August 2006, Mr. Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent, was detained in Pakistan, leading to the arrest of 25 suspects in Britain in connection with what prosecutors said was a plot to destroy seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada. This September, a British jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder, failing to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of using beverage bottles filled with liquid explosives to blow up the aircraft.

But Mr. Rauf was not among those defendants. All terrorism charges against him in that case were dropped in December 2006. A year later, he slipped out of his handcuffs and ran from his guards after a court hearing in Islamabad, Pakistan, on a separate case in which he faced extradition to Britain.

Pakistani officials confirmed on Saturday that Mr. Rauf was the main target of the American missile strike, with Abu Zubair al-Masri, an operative of Al Qaeda. “Rashid Rauf and al-Masri were the targets and have apparently been killed in the missile strike,” a senior government official said.

In Washington, an American official confirmed the death of Mr. Rauf. “There are good reasons to believe, as the Pakistanis have said, that this major terrorist is gone,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Residents in the village of Alikhel, in the Mirali area of North Waziristan, said two missiles hit the well-guarded compound of a Taliban commander, Maulvi Khaliq Noor, Saturday morning. Three children were wounded in the attack, the residents said.

Brought up in Britain by parents who were Pakistani immigrants from Kashmir, Mr. Rauf, 27, settled in southern Punjab Province in Pakistan in 2002. He married into a family at the center of the Army of Muhammad, an outlawed Islamist group.

When Pakistani authorities arrested him in August 2006, the interior minister at the time, Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, called him “a key Al Qaeda operative.” Mr. Rauf was described at the time as being instrumental in devising the airline plot.

The British police, who had the group in Britain under surveillance at the time, complained that the Pakistani police arrested Mr. Rauf too early and forced them to round up the suspects in Britain before enough incriminating evidence had been gathered.

Mr. Rauf’s escape was particularly embarrassing to the government because it showed police laxity a day after Pervez Musharraf, who was president then, had announced that the security forces had thwarted the militants and that stability was returning to Pakistan.

Mr. Rauf was wanted in Britain as a suspect in the murder of an uncle who was stabbed in Birmingham in April 2002.

The missile strike in North Waziristan on Saturday was the third by the Americans in almost three days. Since August, there have been more than two dozen strikes by remotely piloted aircraft, including one last week that hit a settled area in the North-West Frontier Province outside the tribal region.

American military commanders have declared the strikes successful in eliminating important Qaeda and Taliban figures.

But the Pakistani authorities have protested that the strikes are an infringement of national sovereignty and harm the government’s efforts to persuade the Pakistani public that the war against the militants is in the country’s interest.

Many Pakistanis argue that the American missile strikes are responsible for the suicide bomb attacks that have struck law enforcement targets, funerals and politicians in the North-West Frontier Province and in Islamabad, the capital.

After the strike on Saturday, a Taliban spokesman, Ahmadullah Ahmadi, said that no foreigners had been killed.

“Americans have killed innocent people and none of them were foreigners,” he said in a statement issued on behalf of a top militant commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadar, in Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan.

Mr. Ahmadi said the militants would seek revenge. “We will avenge the death of innocent people by striking in settled areas” against security forces, he said.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.

Thousands of graduates crowd a jobs fair in Nanjing but vacancies are becoming harder to find.

BEIJING, China – China’s job outlook is “grim,” and the global financial crisis could cause more layoffs and more labor unrest until the country’s economic stimulus package kicks in next year, the nation’s minister of human resources and social security said Thursday.

The stimulus package, unveiled earlier this month, will pump $585 billion into rebuilding communities destroyed by the May earthquake, constructing railways, housing, airports and highways, and funding other projects.

China is most concerned about the growing labor unrest, the human resources minister, Yin Weimin, said at a news conference. The increase in unrest has paralleled the increase of business and factory closings and job losses.

Yin noted that in the past two months, some businesses, mainly smaller ones, have been forced to close or suspend production.

Several hundred taxi drivers went on strike Wednesday in Chongqing, in southwestern China, after the government said it planned to put more cabs on the district’s roads, thereby increasing competition, the Gansu Daily newspaper said

And about 2,000 people rioted Monday in the impoverished northwestern province of Gansu over plans to move Longnan’s city government offices, which were damaged in the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, to a nearby county.

Residents, fearing the change would reduce their property values and threaten their livelihoods, clashed with police and looted government offices, the Gansu Daily reported.

China’s manufacturing sector, which produced 14 percent of the clothing, toys and footwear imported into the United States last year, has decelerated rapidly over the past few months, pulled down by a pair of factors.

First, the global economic slowdown and the subsequent drop in consumer spending stymied demand for discretionary goods made in China.

Workers start on a housing construction project in the area hit by May

Second, Chinese manufacturers are battling rising labor and material costs at the same time that the yuan’s rising value versus the dollar is making Chinese exports to the United States and elsewhere more expensive.

Because of these challenges, more than 65,000 Chinese factories have gone bankrupt this year, said Lan Hailin, professor of business strategy with the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, China.

And as overseas orders continue to shrink, he thinks the number of bankruptcies will keep rising.

The urban unemployment rate through October this year was 4 percent, lower than the government’s projection of 4.5 percent.

But Yin said Thursday the jobless numbers do not include migrant rural workers — probably the most-affected group — because they move so frequently. There are about 150 million migrant laborers in China, mostly in cities.

Xinhua said Yin has predicted unemployment will rise in the first quarter of 2009. After that, he said, the stimulus package and other steps China has taken to boost the financial sector should boost employment, according to Xinhua.

China hopes the growth of jobs will then cool down the protests. Until then, China is bracing for more demonstrations.

Meng Jianzhu, minister of public security, was quoted by the BBC as warning police this week to be “fully aware of the challenges brought by the global financial crisis.”

He said officers should be careful about how they handle “mass incidents.”

Taking the long view at a time of financial crisis, China is investing heavily in commodity-producing countries, and Cuba is no exception. More than a dozen deals agreed to by President Hu Jintao included purchases of Cuban nickel and sugar, along with pledges to send food and building materials to help the Caribbean nation recover from three major hurricanes.

Hu signed off on a second, $70 million phase of $350 million in Chinese credit to renovate Cuban hospitals. China also committed to help renovate Cuba’s crucial, but aging, ports.

It was unclear how many of the deals were on credit. Havana has already borrowed extensively from Beijing — loans it might have trouble repaying as it recovers from Hurricanes Gustav, Ike and Paloma, all of which hit Cuba this year.

Hu thanked Cuba for sending doctors to China after last year’s devastating earthquake, and for educational programs on the island attended by about 2,000 Chinese, including medical students.

China’s president also met with ailing former President Fidel Castro. Cuba released a photo of the pair shaking hands and chatting. Hu wore a business suit and the former Cuban president had on exercise clothing that has become his standard uniform since undergoing emergency intestinal surgery and disappearing from public view in July 2006.

Cuban authorities provided no further details, but China’s official Xinhua News Agency said the two held a long discussion.

“I see in person that you have recovered and have been energetic, so I feel very pleased,” Xinhua reported Hu told Castro.

Castro replied: “We are old friends. I am happy to see that you are as energetic as when I met you last time.”

Hu met with Castro during his first visit to Cuba in 2004. The 82-year-old has an undisclosed illness and brother Raul Castro, five years his junior, formally succeeded him as president in February.

Accompanying Hu on a visit to a school for Chinese students on Tuesday, Raul Castro sang snippets of a song about China and Mao Zedong that he said he learned while traveling the world in 1953. At first, hundreds of students gathered in an auditorium seemed confused, but they soon sang along, clapping in time.

“Even though the physical distance that separates China and Cuba is great, friendship between both people goes back a long way,” Hu said.

Cuba depended heavily on Soviet largesse and turned a cold shoulder to China during the Cold War’s Sino-Soviet split. But ties warmed after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Cuba now has no problem dealing with both Beijing and Moscow.

With bilateral trade topping $2.6 billion a year, China is Cuba’s No. 2 trading partner after Venezuela, where socialist President Hugo Chavez provides nearly 100,000 barrels of oil a day to the island at favorable prices.

The ties have brought a tangible benefit to residents of the Cuban capital, where more than 3,000 shiny new Yutong buses replaced smoke-belching, Soviet era buses.

But Hu’s visit poses something of an ideological challenge, since some Cubans speculated that Raul Castro might follow a Chinese model of reform after becoming president in February. China transformed its economy three decades ago by embracing market reforms even as its Communist Party maintained strict political control.

Cuba’s communist government, however, still controls well over 90 percent of the economy and shows no sign of easing its grip on political or economic matters, even as Raul Castro has expanded foreign trade 39 percent since becoming president and signed a major offshore oil exploration deal with Brazil.

On the eve of Hu’s visit, the Communist Party newspaper Granma praised China’s reforms as having “sparked a gigantic investment process that brought quick results.” But it also criticized “the evils of such an accelerated spiral: unequal distribution of the country’s income, a marked difference between city and country, and the erosion of the environment.”

Hu brought a large delegation of Chinese businessmen who have busily pursued deals despite the global financial crisis, continuing a trend that has seen China’s trade with Latin America jump from to $103 billion last year from $10 billion in 2000.

Kirby Jones, president of the Washington-based U.S.-Cuba Trade Association, said Hu’s stop in Cuba is more about business than ideology. Jones, whose organization opposes the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, said Cuba is eagerly pursuing deals with other countries.

Noting that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visits next week, he said Russia and China are “perfect examples of the rest of the world jumping in to fill the void left by the U.S.”