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The attack followed a suicide bombing at a Shiite Muslim mosque elsewhere in the northwest on Friday that killed 23 people and wounded more than 50, police said. It was the latest in a rising number of sectarian attacks in the country.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for both attacks. The group has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for years and has carried out previous attacks on the country's minority Shiite sect.

The raid on the army camp in Serai Naurang town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province began around 3:45 a.m. local time and lasted for several hours, said senior police officer Arif Khan Wazir. The militants were armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and also seemed to include suicide bombers, he said.

Six security force personnel were killed and eight others were wounded in the attack, said an army official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the army has not yet issued a news release. Twelve militants were also killed, he said.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to The Associated Press from an undisclosed location. He said four suicide bombers were involved in the attack. He said that three of them were killed and the fourth is still resisting.

Ahsan said the attack was in retaliation for the recent deaths of two Taliban commanders in U.S. drone strikes. He accused the Pakistani army of helping with the attacks.

Pakistani officials often criticize drone strikes as a violation of the country's sovereignty, but are known to have assisted with some attacks in the past.

The attack on the mosque Friday took place in Hangu town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which has experienced previous clashes between the Sunni and Shiite communities that live there.

Shiites in Pakistan have increasingly been targeted by radical Sunnis who consider them heretics, and 2012 was the bloodiest year for the minority sect in the country's history.

The bomber staged his attack at one of the mosque's exits leading to a bazaar, said Hangu police chief Mian Mohammad Saeed.

The blast damaged several small shops and peppered a wall with shrapnel, leaving scores of pockmarks, according to local TV footage. Ambulances rushed in to pick up the dead and wounded, as police tried to keep back onlookers in the crowded bazaar.

The explosion killed 23 and wounded over 50 people, said another police officer, Naeem Khan. One policeman who was guarding the mosque was killed and another was injured. Most of the dead and wounded were Shiites, but some of the casualties were also from the country's majority sect since there is a Sunni mosque nearby, said Khan.

Ahsan, the Pakistani Taliban spokesman, claimed responsibility for the attack and said they were targeting Shiites.

The worst sectarian violence in Pakistan in recent years has been in southwestern Baluchistan province, which has the largest concentration of Shiites in the country. A twin bombing last month at a billiards hall in the provincial capital, Quetta, killed 86 people, most of them Shiites.

According to Human Rights Watch, more than 400 Shiites were killed in targeted attacks in Pakistan in 2012, including over 120 in Baluchistan.

Sectarian militant groups, such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, have increased their strength through alliances with al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban, which has been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for the past several years.

Rights organizations have criticized the Pakistani government for not doing enough to crack down on the attacks against Shiites.

Pakistan's intelligence agencies helped nurture Sunni militant groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in the 1980s, to counter a perceived threat from neighboring Iran, which is mostly Shiite. Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in 2001, but the group continues to operate fairly freely.

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Associated Press writers Hussain Afzal in Parachinar, Pakistan, and Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

MIAMI — Revive Miami, an anti-aging clinic, was tucked at the end of a hallway on the fourth floor of an office building on a bustling street crowded with restaurants and stores.

The clinic's door was locked this week; the company had apparently shut down. But a business card was wedged against the door. An investigator for Major League Baseball had stopped by, seeking answers.

Baseball officials and law enforcement officers are trying to penetrate the often opaque world of anti-aging clinics, which have proliferated in the Miami area in recent years and have become linked to some of the sport's biggest stars. Anthony Bosch, a former partner of the Revive Miami founders, is at the center of the burgeoning baseball doping scandal.

In this region's teeming medical industry, with businesses offering promises of weight loss, muscle gain and mood enhancement, the clinics can take on a glamorous sheen in their efforts to entice wealthy clients. But that was hardly the case behind the scenes at the clinic where Bosch, 49, treated patients in recent years, according to a business partner.

Bosch was a "disaster," disorganized and unreliable and at times "incoherent," said Xavier Romero, a former patient of Bosch's who later invested with Bosch.

A newspaper, the Miami New Times, reported this week that it had obtained medical records from the clinic Biogenesis of America that linked six major leaguers, including Alex Rodriguez and Melky Cabrera, to the use of banned substances. Biogenesis was run by Bosch.

Bosch, through a lawyer, has denied the claims, and several of the players whose names appeared in the article have issued statements denying involvement.

The allegations have once again tied baseball to the issue of performance-enhancing drugs and left the sport's officials scrambling. Without more substantial evidence, they are limited in how they can discipline the players.

Romero's connection to the anti-aging industry began in mid-2011, when a friend recommended he see Dr. Tony Bosch at a clinic called Biokem. Romero, 28, had always been skinny and was trying to bulk up. Soon after seeing Bosch, he began to put on weight, adding about 30 pounds.

"He was God to me," said Romero, who later learned that Bosch was not a licensed doctor. "No one could do that for me, no matter what I ate."

Romero said he was so impressed by the results that he decided to invest with Bosch and his partner Carlos Acevedo, who were interested in expanding. Using capital Romero provided, the three set out to launch Revive Miami L.L.C., which initially shared space with Biokem.

It was Bosch's job, Romero said, to use his contacts to get the prescriptions necessary to fuel the business, although it remains unclear how he obtained chemicals like human growth hormone. However, Romero said he quickly grew uncomfortable with Bosch and his work ethic, and in the spring of 2012, he and Acevedo decided to move Revive Miami to its own offices a few miles away, leaving Bosch behind to launch Biogenesis of America.

Romero said that when they parted, Bosch told him, "You are going to come back to me in six months because you failed — because I'm the king." The two have not spoken since, and both clinics appear to be out of business.

Bosch's lawyer, Susy Ribero-Ayala, declined to respond to Romero's comments.

Hernan Dominguez Jr., who said he was a longtime friend of Bosch's, said the portrayal of Bosch in the news media was unfair.

"Because a businessman fails in various ventures does not make him a failure," Dominguez said in an electronic message. "Because a man and a woman fail in a marriage doesn't make them failures. It makes them human. He has a fantastic relationship with his ex-wives and all his children. Public records may be accurate, but they do not reflect a person's relationship with his friends and family."

Choosing a Different Path

Bosch grew up in a wealthy Miami neighborhood filled with majestic banyan trees and graduated from one of Miami's best-known preparatory schools, Christopher Columbus High, an all-boy institution founded by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic organization.

Bosch's father, Pedro Publio Bosch, has been a doctor for more than 36 years. In a statement issued through his lawyer to reporters, he denied involvement with the players mentioned in the Miami New Times article. He did not respond to phone messages seeking comment.

Pedro Bosch's success gave Anthony access to Miami's exclusive, well-connected Cuban-American social circle, which has produced many of the city's power brokers. But Anthony seemed to choose a different path, one that prized quick money and instant gratification, a decision that over the years led him into a spiral of divorces, broken partnerships, businesses gone bust and dishonesty, according to court records and business associates. The latest split came last year, apparently prompting him to launch Biogenesis.

Biogenesis is in Coral Gables, across U.S. 1 from the University of Miami, among a group of offices on property that used to be a motel. The swimming pool is still there, as well as old concrete picnic tables. A canal runs along the back.

Major League Baseball investigators believe that many of the players never met face to face with Bosch there, receiving substances instead through intermediaries, according to two baseball officials briefed on the matter. The investigators' suspicions have been stoked in recent days by several denials from players who said they never had direct contact with Bosch.

In recent months, the investigators have uncovered evidence that an employee for the player agents Sam and Seth Levinson was one of those intermediaries. Last summer, investigators discovered that the employee, Juan Carlos Nunez, had helped Cabrera hatch a cover-up scheme to avoid being suspended for testing positive for elevated testosterone. Cabrera received a 50-game suspension.

Baseball officials believe that the Levinsons knew about the plot, although the players union has cleared them of wrongdoing. After discovering the plot, Major League Baseball began to more closely scrutinize Nunez and the Levinsons. That led investigators to clinics in Florida.

Three of the players identified in the Miami New Times article — Cabrera, Gio Gonzalez and Nelson Cruz — were the Levinsons' clients.

The two baseball officials said Friday that many of their investigators were trying to learn more about the clinic. "It's all hands on deck," one official said.

The investigators have sought to talk to Romero and Acevedo, among others, the officials said.

When baseball's investigators began looking into Nunez, the Levinsons and the clinic last summer, they created an improvised war room in the commissioner's Park Avenue office in New York, where they mapped out a web of people tied to the clinic. Acevedo was among those people, according to one of the officials.

A Facebook page linked to Revive Miami said Acevedo was its founder, calling him an "avid health specialist and program director for the hormone therapy treatment." It continued, "His experience comes from years of research and experience at some of South Florida's most reputable health and rejuvenation clinics."

Acevedo could not be reached for comment, and the Facebook page is no longer visible to the public.

Romero, who said he cut ties with the anti-aging business last year and turned Revive Miami over to Acevedo, said he was surprised to learn of the allegations that Bosch had professional athletes spending thousands of dollars on treatment. He said that such money did not flow back to the business when he was affiliated with Bosch. There had been rumors that Bosch treated such people, he said, but he was not familiar with any baseball players who were patients.

"It was a side thing, I guess," Romero said, referring to Bosch.

A Challenging Industry

The Miami New Times article, which Romero said he read three times, explained that Bosch had notebooks full of patient notes. The newspaper said that it received records from an unnamed former employee of the clinic, and that the records included handwritten notations of drugs that were supposedly given to players. The newspaper displayed some of the records on its Web site, but the documents had not been independently authenticated.

Romero said that he was familiar with the notebooks and that the handwriting looked like Bosch's, adding that it looked almost like "hieroglyphics." He said he was not privy to the contents of the notes.

He said it was hard to believe that an athlete of Rodriguez's caliber would trust Bosch. "I don't know how the guy can tie his shoes, let alone have A-Rod as a client," Romero said.

For many reasons, Romero said, the anti-aging business amounted to a losing proposition. Despite the inherent challenges, plenty of people have tried it in recent years. Drive around or search the Web and their numbers are obvious, although statistics in Florida are elusive because the centers are not licensed or regulated by the state.

"The Florida Department of Health does not license a facility type known as anti-aging clinics, and does not recognize this type of facility in our state," said Ashley Carr, a spokeswoman with the department.

The state does regulate pain management clinics, massage establishments and electrolysis facilities, among other things. Many of the doctors are legitimate.

Bosch launched a number of failed medical businesses before returning from Belize in 2009 with a degree from the Central America Health Sciences University, according to the Miami New Times. He would wear a white lab coat with "Dr. Tony Bosch" embroidered on it, the article said, and a medical degree from the university hung on his wall.

Many believed he was a medical doctor, including Romero, and by looks alone, he played the part well. He was smart and sounded well-informed when he spoke about treatment, Romero said.

A growing number of physicians in South Florida are pursuing anti-aging practices full time or dabbling in them.

"Part of that is because people are tired of being sick and tired and are looking for something that can help them look better feel better and have great sex," said Dr. Mitchell Ghen, who has been practicing anti-aging, or integrative, medicine in South Florida for three decades. Ghen has written several textbooks on the subject for other doctors.

It can also be lucrative.

Sales of hormones and androgens around the country have jumped in the last five years. In 2011, 5.3 million hormone and androgen drugs were dispensed. In 2007, that number was 2.9 million, according to data from IMS Health, a company that provides market research to the pharmaceutical and health care industries.

Florida, which had rampant sales of prescription painkillers through so-called pill mills until a recent crackdown, has also seen a spread of clinics that dole out hormones for unnecessary reasons. In recent years, there have been several high-profile arrests of doctors, pharmacists and clinic operators. The practitioners and clinics were also selling painkillers like oxycodone, turning the establishments into one-stop shops.

In most cases, the doctors were complicit in allowing clinics to use their prescription pads to access the drugs. The pharmacists dispensed the drugs without question.

That is when Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky took to the Senate floor to deride Mr. McCain's opposition to his measure that would punish Egypt as "spurious and really, frankly, absurd," not the first time Mr. Paul has wielded verbal scythes toward his colleagues.

The willingness of Republicans to skewer one of their own became increasingly apparent on Friday as more and more members of the party peeled away from Mr. Hagel, President Obama's nominee for secretary of defense, saying they would not vote to confirm him after Mr. Hagel melted like chocolate on a dashboard under combative questioning from Republicans.

Still, Republican senators and aides said that despite a halting performance, Mr. Hagel would probably be confirmed with Democratic votes. A filibuster of his nomination is still possible, a likely first for a cabinet nominee. Aides to Senators John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican, and Ted Cruz, a Texas newcomer, said Friday that they had not ruled out procedural roadblocks to stop Mr. Hagel's nomination.

But Republican Senate aides say Democrats would probably be able to muster 60 votes to move to a final, up-or-down tally.

"For a cabinet office, I think 51 votes is generally considered the right standard for the Senate to set, and at that level, I think he makes it," Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said Friday on Fox News, even as he announced his opposition to Mr. Hagel.

The White House shared that view.

"I would be stunned if, in the end, Republican senators chose to try to block the nomination of a decorated war veteran who was once among their colleagues in the Senate as a Republican," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

Privately, White House officials agreed that Mr. Hagel came across poorly. "No one would argue that he had a good performance," said one official, who declined to be named to be more candid.

Mr. Hagel has long been on the outs with some party mates because of policy disagreements with them over the years, which sometimes made him seem more like a Democrat. But stemming from their Senate ranks as he did, the intensity of their grilling was striking and illustrative of how the old ways of the Senate are disappearing.

With the current era of hyperpartisanship in Washington, the intra-Senate discord has reached new levels in the usually approbatory chamber in recent months, a place where a certain level of respect for fellow and retired members of the same party is generally more or less a given.

The easy, celebratory hearing afforded Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts on his way to confirmation as secretary of state was much more in keeping with Senate tradition than the smackdown delivered to Mr. Hagel, though his own search for answers did him no favors. The clubbiness of the Senate was what made the 1989 rejection of former Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas, for secretary of defense astonishing even with multiple tales of personal problems.

But Senate Republicans, in particular, who have added more conservative members to their ranks in the last two years, and who fear the constant and imminent threat of primary challengers from the right, have loosened their grip of late on the bonds that distinguish the Senate from any other legislative body.

In December, Bob Dole, the former majority leader, went to the Senate floor in a wheelchair to advocate for a disability treaty, and many of his Republican colleagues, including some who had praised the measure previously, waited for him to be wheeled away before turning the measure down. That would have been almost unthinkable in the past.

"Part of the shift in the Republican Party," said Don Ritchie, the Senate historian, "means that old-time senators like Dole who were to the right of their party when they came here are to the left of their party now because the party has shifted so much beneath them. This all reflects that a bit."

There were other moments as well. Earlier in the week, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, took to talk radio to refer to a Republican colleague, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, as "amazingly naïve" for his proposals to overhaul the nation's immigration system. Mr. Rubio did not choose to respond or question the judgment of Mr. Vitter, whose phone number once appeared in a client list of a Washington madam.

The Labor Department said on Friday that the jobless rate rose to 7.9 percent last month, up from 7.8 percent in December, in the latest evidence that the economy still is not growing fast enough to repair the damage of a recession that ended in 2009.

Some economists found the disappointing data an indication the Fed had reached the limit of its powers, or at least of prudent action. But there is evidence that the Fed is not trying as hard as it could to stimulate growth: it is allowing inflation to fall well below the 2 percent pace it considers most healthy.

Inflation, unlike job creation, is something the Fed can control with some precision. Higher inflation could accelerate economic growth and job creation by encouraging people to spend more and make riskier investments.

Yet annualized inflation fell to 1.3 percent in December, and asset prices reflect an expectation that the pace will remain well below 2 percent in the next decade.

"By their own framework, they're not doing enough," said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. "They said that they were going to expand the economy and keep inflation around 2 percent, and they just haven't done it."

The rest of the government is making that task more difficult. Federal spending cuts, tax increases and the prospect of further cuts March 1 are hurting growth. The Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, has warned repeatedly that monetary policy cannot offset such fiscal austerity.

And it is likely that the latest economic data does not reflect the full impact of the Fed's efforts. Despite the rise in unemployment, job creation has increased in recent months, consumer spending has strengthened and the housing market is healing. Partly because monetary policy is slow-acting, most forecasters expect modest growth this year.

But the Fed also is acting with a clear measure of restraint. Mr. Bernanke and other officials have made clear that they believe the central bank could do more to increase the pace of inflation and bolster growth and job creation. They simply are not persuaded that the benefits outweigh the potential costs — in particular, the risk that their efforts will distort asset prices and seed future financial crises.

The Fed is constrained in part because it already has done so much. The central bank has held short-term interest rates near zero since December 2008, and it has accumulated almost $3 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities to push down long-term rates and encourage riskier investments.

Under its newest effort, announced in September and extended in December, it will increase its holdings of Treasuries and mortgage bonds by $85 billion a month until the job market improves. The Fed also said that it planned to hold short-term rates near zero even longer, at least until the unemployment rate fell below 6.5 percent.

In normal times, the Fed would respond to flagging inflation and growth by cutting interest rates. At present, it could still increase the scale of its asset purchases. The two policies work in a similar way, stimulating economic activity by reducing borrowing costs and encouraging risk-taking. But asset purchases are a less direct method to reduce rates, and the available evidence suggests that the effect is less powerful.

The Fed's holdings of mortgage bonds and Treasuries also are growing so large that it could begin to distort pricing in those markets, and some transactions could be disrupted by a dearth of safe assets. Some Fed officials are concerned that asset prices for farmland, junk bonds and other risky assets are being pushed to unsustainable levels. As a result, Mr. Bernanke has said, the Fed is doing less than it otherwise would.

"We have to pay very close attention to the costs and the risks and the efficacy of these nonstandard policies as well as the potential economic benefits," Mr. Bernanke said last month, in response to a question about the low pace of inflation. "Economics tells you when something is more costly, you do a little bit less of it."

The Fed to some extent may be a prisoner of its own success in persuading investors over the last three decades that it was determined to keep inflation below 2 percent. It said in December that it would let expected inflation in the next two to three years rise as high as 2.5 percent. But expectations have not budged.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland calculated in a January report that average expected inflation over the next decade was just 1.48 percent per year.

Fed officials themselves generally expect somewhat higher inflation, but their most recent predictions, published in January, still show that none of the 19 policy makers expected inflation to exceed 2 percent over the next two years.

The Egyptian Health Ministry reported that one protester was killed in the violence, which quickly dashed hopes of reconciliation between Egypt's quarreling political parties. On Thursday, Islamist and secular-leaning groups had been coaxed to sit down together on Thursday to issue a joint declaration condemning the violence after more than a week of unrest that left more than 50 people dead.

But on Friday, as clashes raged on a broad avenue outside the presidential palace, the warring parties reverted to the recriminations that Egypt's defense minister recently warned had brought the country to the brink of collapse. The parties' feuds have fed an atmosphere of growing polarization that many Egyptians blame for a rising tide of violence. The actions by some protesters on Friday — and the officers' response — seemed to confirm another fear: neither the opposition parties nor the government exercises firm control over the confrontations in the streets.

In a statement, President Mohamed Morsi blamed unnamed "political forces" for inciting what he said was an attempt to "storm the gates of the palace."

"We stress that such violent practices have nothing to do with the principles of the revolution or legitimate means of expression," the statement said. It called on "patriotic forces" to denounce the violence and "urge their supporters to immediately withdraw from the palace area."

The National Salvation Front, the largest coalition of secular-leaning opposition groups, said it had no connection to the violence and blamed "Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood group that he belongs to" for the "state of congestions and tension prevailing in the Egyptian society for the last two months."

It remained to be seen whether the fighting at the palace would turn into a deeper conflagration, like the deadly clashes outside the presidential palace in December between Mr. Morsi's supporters and anti-government protesters. The Brotherhood said on Friday that its members were staying away from the clashes and did not wish to be "dragged into the violence."

The clashes started after a peaceful sit-in that lasted several hours outside the palace walls, where protesters chanted against the rule of Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement he once led. As night fell, a small group of protesters threw fire bombs over a palace gate, and launched fireworks toward buildings on the palace grounds. Officers inside fired a water cannon back, to disperse demonstrators but also to douse small fires, including one that started in a guardhouse by the gate.

Within an hour, the fighting had intensified, with armored personnel carriers advancing and firing tear gas into the crowd, which was forced back several blocks from the palace. Security officers set fire to tents set up by protesters across the street from the palace and threw flags and banners on bonfires that had been lit in the street. As the police started firing birdshot at the protesters, a small fire started in a cafe near the fighting, sending patrons running for the door.

The riot police officers, who serve under the command of the Interior Ministry, also captured and beat several protesters, witnesses said. In one of the beatings, which was captured on live television, officers could be seen dragging a naked, middle-aged man, covered in soot, across the asphalt toward an armored personnel carrier. The officers appeared to drag him by his arms and then his legs. One officer appeared to beat the man, and then another took a turn, appearing to hit the man in the face before finally placing him in the vehicle.

For many, the image served as a reminder that more than two years after Egypt's uprising, the Interior Ministry remains one of the country's many recalcitrant institutions, saddled with poorly trained officers who resort quickly to abuse. It also threatened to deepen hostility after a week of deadly clashes in several Egyptian cities.

In recent days, signs emerged that Egypt's political elite, unnerved by the sudden erosion of the state's authority, were working to settle some of their differences. Earlier this week, opposition parties reached across ideological lines for the first time, as a hard-line Islamist party joined with the National Salvation Front to put pressure on Mr. Morsi to form a new government.

Then on Thursday, a group of young revolutionaries managed to organize a meeting between opposition leaders and representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood. The meeting did not result in any breakthroughs, but the simple act of putting the antagonists in the same room was seen as a step forward.

Those efforts a[[reared to come undone in Friday's protests, with the quick descent into violence outside the presidential palace.

Shady el-Ghazali-Harb, one of the young organizers who helped guide the revolt against Hosni Mubarak two years ago, was on the scene, with a gas mask draped around his neck. "This will not stop. As long as the demands of the people are not met, people will stay in the street, and no one can control this violence," he said, arguing that the underlying issue was the failure of the Islamist-backed constitution to address the goals of the revolution — bread, freedom and social justice, as the familiar chant goes.