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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The leader of a group with links to Al Qaeda that carried out attacks across the Middle East before shifting its focus to Syria's civil war died on Saturday while in custody in Lebanon, the Lebanese Army said.

In a short statement, the army said the militant, Majid bin Muhammad al-Majid "died this morning while undergoing treatment at the central military hospital after his health deteriorated." It did not elaborate.

Earlier, a Lebanese Army general said Mr. Majid died after experiencing kidney failure. The general was speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with regulations. The state-run National News Agency said Mr. Majid had died "after his health conditions deteriorated."

Mr. Majid, a Saudi citizen, was detained in Lebanon late last month and had been held at a secret location.

He was the commander of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, a Sunni militant group that is an offshoot of Al Qaeda, and one of the 85 most-wanted individuals in his native Saudi Arabia.

The State Department designated his group a foreign terrorist organization in 2012, freezing any assets it holds in the United States and barring Americans from doing business with the group.

The group has claimed responsibility for attacks throughout the region, including the 2010 bombing of a Japanese oil tanker in the Persian Gulf and several rocket strikes into Israel from Lebanon.

The most recent attack claimed by the group was the double suicide bombing in November outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut that killed at least 23 people and wounded dozens.

Reports surfaced about his arrest in Lebanon early last week. Security officials eventually confirmed they had a suspect in custody, but they said they were not certain of his identity. On Friday, the Lebanese confirmed his identity after a DNA test.

Mr. Majid was believed to have had serious kidney problems that required dialysis. He was an important militant figure in the region, and the Abdullah Azzam Brigades grew from a relatively small outfit to a larger terrorist group after he took over in mid-2012. He succeeded the organization's previous leader, Saleh al-Qarawi, who was gravely wounded in Pakistan.

According to Lebanese newspapers, Mr. Majid was detained during the last week of December while on his way from Beirut to the eastern Bekaa Valley, which borders Syria. Reports said he was captured while in an ambulance after he had undergone dialysis in Beirut.

In spring 2013, after the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah announced that it was fighting alongside Syrian government troops against the Syrian rebels, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades began to target Hezbollah as well — and by extension, the group's Iranian patrons.

Mr. Majid was taken into custody three days after Saudi Arabia pledged a $3 billion aid package to the Lebanese Army, a move seen as a Saudi attempt to counter the influence of Hezbollah.

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By Bethany Matta

Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Afghanistan's Unexplained Hunger Crisis: Throughout Afghanistan, there is what doctors call acute severe malnutrition. Most of the cases are seen in children under the age of 5.

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — In the Bost Hospital here, a teenage mother named Bibi Sherina sits on a bed in the severe acute malnutrition ward with her two children. Ahmed, at just 3 months old, looks bigger than his emaciated brother Mohammad, who is a year and a half and weighs 10 pounds.

In another bed is Fatima, less than a year old, who is so severely malnourished that her heart is failing, and the doctors expect that she will soon die unless her father is able to find money to take her to Kabul for surgery. The girl's face bears a perpetual look of utter terror, and she rarely stops crying. Half of the other children in the ward are crying as well, a cacophony that rarely pauses.

Afghan hospitals like Bost, in the capital of the war-torn Helmand Province, have been registering significant increases in severe malnutrition among children. Countrywide, such cases have increased by 50 percent or more compared with 2012, according to United Nations figures. Doctors report similar situations in Kandahar, Farah, Kunar, Paktia and Paktika provinces — all places where warfare has disrupted people's lives and pushed many vulnerable poor over the nutritional edge.

Even the capital has seen an increase. "In 2001, it was even worse, but this is the worst I've seen since then," said Dr. Saifullah Abasin, head of the malnutrition ward at Kabul's Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital.

Reasons for the increase remain uncertain, or in dispute. Most doctors and aid workers agree that continuing war and refugee displacement are contributing. Some believe that the growing number of child patients may be at least partly a good sign, as more poor Afghans are hearing about treatment available to them.

What is clear is that, despite years of Western involvement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, children's health is not only still a problem, but also worsening, and the doctors bearing the brunt of the crisis are worried.

Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here. Efforts to educate people about nutrition and health care are often stymied by conservative traditions that cloister women away from anyone outside the family. Agriculture and traditional local sources of social support have been disrupted by war and the widespread flight of refugees to the cities. And therapeutic feeding programs, complex operations even in countries with strong health care systems, have been compromised as the flow of aid and transportation have been derailed by political tensions or violence.

Perhaps nowhere is the situation so obviously serious as in the malnutrition ward at Bost Hospital, which is admitting 200 children a month for severe, acute malnutrition — four times more than it did in January 2012, according to officials with Doctors Without Borders, known in French as Médecins Sans Frontières, which supports the Afghan-run hospital with financing and supplementary staff.

One patient, a 2-year-old named Ahmed Wali, is suffering from the protein deficiency condition kwashiorkor, with orange hair, a distended belly and swollen feet. An 8-month-old boy named Samiullah is suffering from marasmus, another form of advanced malnutrition in which the child's face looks like that of a wrinkled old man because the skin hangs so loosely.

Médecins Sans Frontières helped Bost Hospital nearly double the number of beds in the pediatric wing at the end of last year, and there are still not enough — 40 to 50 children are usually being treated each day, mostly two to a bed because they are so small. Nearly 300 other children, less severely malnourished, are in an outpatient therapeutic feeding program.

Now, M.S.F. is planning to open five satellite clinics with intensive feeding programs in Lashkar Gah to take the pressure off the overcrowded hospital.

Despite the increase in the malnutrition caseload, doctors and health officials are not sure there has actually been a sharp rise in child malnutrition that can be blamed on any single factor.

"It's quite an unusual situation, and it's difficult to understand what's going on," said Wiet Vandormael, an M.S.F. official who has helped coordinate with Bost Hospital.

In part, expansion of the hospital's facilities has acted as a magnet, drawing more cases, Mr. Vandormael said. Unlike at other public hospitals in Afghanistan, patients and their caregivers do not have to pay for their own medicine and food at Bost. And M.S.F. has been able to ensure that it gets regular deliveries of Unicef-provided therapeutic foods used to treat malnutrition.

"Our treatment is better, so we get more patients as they hear about it," said Dr. Yar Mohammad Nizar Khan, head of pediatrics at Bost Hospital.

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Boeing workers in Washington State voted late Friday to approve an eight-year contract extension, ensuring that the company's new 777X aircraft will be made in the Puget Sound region instead of another state.

The vote was close, with 51 percent of workers in favor of the contract, according to the union representing the workers, the International Association of Machinists. Local union leaders had encouraged workers to reject the contract because, they said, it had too many concessions on retirement and health care benefits.

Workers rejected a similar contract offer in November, 33 percent to 67 percent. But many workers became worried after Boeing received proposals from other states to build the 777X.

On Friday, Boeing officials said they were pleased by the vote and proud to be building the aircraft in Washington State.

"Thanks to this vote by our employees, the future of Boeing in the Puget Sound region has never looked brighter," Ray Conner, the president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said in a statement.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a Democrat, thanked the workers for taking "a hard vote that demands the respect of all Washingtonians who will benefit from having Boeing build the 777X here."

After the vote, local union officials reiterated their opposition to the contract offer, but said they accepted the workers' decision. "It's up to all of us now to pull together to make this airplane program successful," Tom Wroblewski, president of Machinists Union District Lodge 751, said in a statement.

The union represents more than 30,000 workers at the Boeing plants in Puget Sound. Boeing had promised that if the workers approved the contract, the company would put final assembly of the 777X in the region, as well as fabrication of the aircraft's wings.

The 777 is a long-range, twin-aisle aircraft that carries about 365 passengers. The new 777X model would be about one-fifth more fuel-efficient and carry up to 400 passengers.

Washington State, where the 777 is assembled, has promised Boeing $8.7 billion in tax breaks for putting the final assembly of the 777X in the state.

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Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers, whose hits with his older brother, Don Everly, carried the close fraternal harmonies of country tradition into pioneering rock 'n' roll, died Friday, according to the group's official website.

He died in a hospital in Burbank, near his home in Southern California, of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease after lifelong smoking, according to reports from The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press. He was 74.

With songs like "Wake Up Little Susie," "Bye Bye Love," "Cathy's Clown," "All I Have to Do Is Dream" and "When Will I Be Loved?," which was written by Phil Everly, the brothers were consistent hitmakers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They won over country, pop and even R&B listeners with a combination of clean-cut vocals and the rockabilly strum and twang of their guitars.

They were also models for the next generations of rock vocal harmonies for the Beatles, Linda Ronstadt, Simon and Garfunkel and many others who recorded their songs and tried to emulate their precise, ringing vocal alchemy. The Everly Brothers were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in its first year, 1986.

The Everlys carried a mountain-music blend, rooted in gospel and bluegrass, into pop songs that reached teenagers. They often sang in close tandem, with Phil Everly on the higher note and the brothers' two voices virtually inseparable. That sound was part of a long lineage of country "brother acts" like the Delmore Brothers, the Monroe Brothers and the Louvin Brothers. In an interview in November, Phil Everly said: "We'd grown up together, so we'd pronounce the words the same, with the same accent. All of that comes into play when you're singing in harmony."

Paul Simon, whose song "Graceland" includes vocals by Phil and Don Everly, said in an email on Saturday morning: "Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful. The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock and roll."

The Everly Brothers' music grew out of a childhood spent singing. Phil Everly was born in Chicago on Jan. 19, 1939, the son of a Kentucky coal miner turned musician, Ike Everly, and his wife, Margaret. The family had left Kentucky, where Don Everly was born in 1937, for musical opportunities in Chicago. They soon moved on to Iowa, where Ike Everly found steady work playing country music on live radio. In Shenandoah, Iowa, Ike Everly got his own show — at 6 a.m. on the radio station KMA — and in 1945, "Little Donnie" and the six-year-old "Baby Boy Phil" started harmonizing with their parents on the air. They went to school after they performed.

The Everly family moved on to radio shows in Indiana and Tennessee. In 1955 the teenage brothers settled in Nashville, where they were hired as songwriters before starting the Everly Brothers' recording career.

They had a blockbuster in 1957: "Bye Bye Love," a song written by the husband-and-wife team Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. It reached No. 1 on the country chart, No. 2 on the pop chart and No. 5 on the rhythm and blues chart, selling more than a million copies. They followed it with another Bryants song, "Wake Up Little Susie," that was a No. 1 pop hit and another million-seller. For the next few years, they were rarely without a Top 10 pop hit. Wmong them were "All I Have to Do Is Dream" in 1957, "Bird Dog" and "Devoted to You" in 1958, "(Till) I Kissed You" in 1959, and, in 1960 alone, "Let It Be Me," "Cathy's Clown" (written by Don and Phil Everly) and "When Will I Be Loved."

Their hitmaking streak ended in the United States in the early 1960s, lasting slightly longer in Britain. But the Everlys continued to tour and make albums, notably the 1968 "Roots," a thoughtful foray into country-rock which included a snippet of a 1952 Everly Family radio show. They had a summer variety series on CBS in 1970.

But the brothers were growing estranged. In 1973, at a concert in California, Phil Everly smashed his guitar and walked offstage, and Don Everly announced the duo's breakup. They recorded solo albums for the next decade before reuniting in 1983, with a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London that was filmed as a documentary. They returned to the studio for a 1984 album, "EB84," that was produced by the British pub-rocker Dave Edmunds and included a song written for the Everlys by Paul McCartney; they made two more studio albums together in the 1980s.

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MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin on Saturday eased a sweeping ban on public protests in Sochi starting Tuesday and continuing through the Olympic and Paralympic Games that end in March, though any demonstrations will require approval in advance from the authorities.

The ban, which Mr. Putin ordered in August, had prompted criticism from human-rights organizations and expressions of concern from the International Olympic Committee. Mr. Putin's new order, published on the Kremlin's website, appeared to be a new effort to burnish Russia's reputation as the Olympics near. It follows the amnesty of some of the country's most prominent prisoners, including the tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, two performers from Pussy Riot and 30 activists from Greenpeace.

Saturday's announcement formalized plans that had already been in the works to allow approved protests at a park in a region called Khosta, about halfway between the center of Sochi and the region of Adler, where the main Olympic Village is.

"Please, everybody, welcome," the president of the Sochi Olympic organizing committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko, said in an interview in December when asked about criticism Russia faces over issues ranging from political freedoms to gay rights to environmental damage caused by the construction in Sochi. "You're free to express those opinions during the Games."

The establishment of a protest zone – about nine miles from the nearest Olympic site – is similar to three created by China's government during the Olympics in Beijing in 2008. In China's case, however, the authorities refused to grant permission for any rallies in them and instead harassed or arrested those who applied.

Tanya Lokhina, the director in Russia for Human Rights Watch, said on Saturday that the easing of the ban was part of Russia's "efforts to convince critics that it's a democracy where freedom of expression is respected within reasonable limits."

"I suggest they shouldn't let themselves be convinced that easily," she said.

The restrictions on protests are part of some of the most extensive security measures ever put in place for an international sporting event. The threat of terrorism has been a paramount concern at all Olympics, but it has been heightened in Sochi because of the simmering Islamic insurgency that Russia faces not far away in the North Caucasus.

Twin suicide bombings that killed at least 34 people last week in Volgograd, a city about 400 miles away, raised new fears that followers of the terrorist leader Doku Umarov intended to make good on his threat last summer to disrupt the Games in Sochi.

Beginning on Tuesday, the authorities will ban all vehicles not registered in Sochi and increase security are public places. Russia's equivalent of the National Security Agency is reported to have created a surveillance system to intercept any phone calls or emails made to or from those in the area. Visitors to the Games, which are to on begin Feb. 7, will have specially encoded passes in addition to tickets for events. Anyone seeking to hold a demonstration will be required to seek approval from the mayor's office as well as the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor of the K.G.B.

The Kremlin issued the new order as Mr. Putin toured Sochi for a second day to oversee final preparations of the two "clusters" of Olympic facilities, on the Black Sea coast and in the mountains at Krasnaya Polyana, where he skied on Friday.

He was accompanied by many of the most senior officials in his government, underscoring the project's prominence. With only five weeks to the opening ceremony, not everything is ready, including the main stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies are to l take place, and the ski jump, which has been plagued by scandal and cost overruns.

Vladimir I. Yakunin, the president of Russian Railways, which built a network of lines and stations linking Sochi to the Olympic sites, joined Mr. Putin as he rode the train from the mountains to the coastal site.

"The most difficult stage of the preparation of our facilities is finished," Mr. Yakunin told reporters, according to Interfax. "Of course, there are some details to be finished, but in general everything is ready."

Putin as he rode the train from the mountains to the coastal site.

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WASHINGTON — President Obama, seeking the upper hand with Congress as he heads back from his Hawaiian vacation, insisted Saturday that lawmakers make restoring unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans out of work their "first order of business" in the new year.

An emergency program providing up to 47 weeks of supplemental payments to the long-term unemployed expired last month after Congress did not include an extension in a two-year budget deal passed before it left town for the holidays. Mr. Obama said in his weekly address on Saturday that he would sign legislation renewing the benefits for another three months.

Mr. Obama said that the program helped parents trying to feed children while they looked for work. "And denying families that security is just plain cruel," the president said in the address, taped before his scheduled Saturday night departure for Washington after two weeks on Oahu. "We're a better country than that. We don't abandon our fellow Americans when times get tough; we keep the faith with them until they start that new job."

Mr. Obama added, "Instead of punishing families who can least afford it, Republicans should make it their New Year's resolution to do the right thing and restore this vital economic security for their constituents right now."

Some Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, are open to renewing the benefits as long as the cost can be offset elsewhere. They have complained that Democrats did not offer such a plan before leaving town last month.

Other Republicans have more philosophical objections, arguing that extending benefits beyond the basic program merely consigns jobless workers to the ranks of the perpetually unemployed by removing an incentive to finding work.

In their own weekly address, Republicans focused on another spending initiative, one that would direct more money to research to help children with autism, cancer and other diseases. The money would be taken from federal funds set aside to pay for the two parties' presidential nominating conventions. The House passed the plan last month on a lopsided bipartisan vote and sent it to the Senate for consideration.

"Instead of funding these conventions once every four years, we'll make it a daily priority to explore the full potential of clinical trials and advancements," said Representative Gregg Harper, Republican of Mississippi, a sponsor of the legislation.

The bill, the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, was renamed last fall for a 10-year-old Virginia girl with an inoperable brain tumor who drew attention for her efforts to promote pediatric cancer research; she later died.

Mr. Harper noted that he had a personal interest in the proposal. "Livingston, our oldest, was 4 when he was diagnosed with fragile X syndrome, a disorder that is often misdiagnosed as autism," he said. "Today, he's making his way through college in a program for students with intellectual disabilities."

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MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has rescinded a blanket ban on demonstrations in and around the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Sochi.

An order published on the Kremlin's website Saturday says that meetings, gatherings, demonstrations, marches and picketing that is not connected with the games may be held in places or along routes approved by the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the country's police.

Putin last year ordered a ban on any demonstrations in Sochi not connected with the games from Jan. 7 to March 21. The move was widely criticized by human rights organizations.

Although the Saturday order lifts the blanket ban, Russian authorities generally are stingy about granting rally permission to opposition groups and critics.