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The suppression in November of a protest outside a controversial copper mine in central Myanmar shocked the Burmese public after images of critically injured monks circulated across the country. It also gave rise to fears that the civilian government of President Thein Sein, which came to power in 2011, was using the same repressive methods as the military governments that preceded it.

Burmese attorneys together with an American human rights lawyer gathered evidence at the site of the protest, including a metal canister that protesters said was fired by the police. The canister was brought to a private laboratory in Bangkok, where a technician determined that residue inside it contained high levels of phosphorus. Access to the canister and a copy of the laboratory report were provided to a reporter.

"We are confident that they used a munition that contained phosphorus," said U Thein Than Oo, the head of the legal committee of the Upper Burma Lawyers Network, which helped conduct the investigation. "They wanted to warn the entire population not to protest. They wanted to intimidate the people."

White Phosphorus has many uses in war – as a smoke screen or incendiary weapon - but is rarely if ever used by police forces.

Reached on Wednesday, Zaw Htay, a director in the office of President Thein Sein, declined to comment on what kind of weapon was used. "I can't say. I can't answer," he said.

John Hart, a senior researcher at the Chemical Weapons Program of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said by e-mail that although white phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon under a 1993 international convention, it is banned from uses that "cause death or other harm through the toxic properties of the chemical."

One of the monks injured at the protest, U Tikhanyana, 64, has burns over 40 percent of his body and was flown to Bangkok by the government because Myanmar does not have the facilities to treat such a serious case.

Two months after the crackdown Mr. Tikhanyana remains in intensive care. In an interview on Wednesday in his hospital room, Mr. Tikhanyana described the moment that the police came to disperse the crowds in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 29.

"I saw a fireball beside me and I started to burn," he said. "I was rolling on the ground to try to put it out."

Dr. Chatchai Pruksapong, a burn specialist treating Mr. Tikhanyana, said it appeared that the monk was seared with something "severely flammable."

Mr. Tikhanyana's wounds are similar to those he sees with soldiers injured by bomb blasts in Thailand's southern insurgency.

"Tear gas would definitely not cause this kind of deep wound," Dr. Chatchai said.

Myanmar government officials were initially quoted in the local news media as saying that police had thrown "smoke bombs" at protesters.

The canister found at the protest site appeared to have "smoke" stenciled on it and looks similar in appearance to smoke hand grenades once manufactured by the United States, said a security expert and former colonel in a European army who wanted to remain anonymous because he has dealings in Myanmar. Such smoke grenades emit burning particles within a radius of about 17 meters, he said.

Roger Normand, the American human rights lawyer who helped investigate the crackdown, said a report from the lawyers would be released "in the next few days."

Mr. Normand arranged to have the canister brought to the Bangkok laboratory, which is run by ALS, an Australian company that specializes in testing samples for their chemical content.

In an interview, Mr. Normand said it was "unheard of" for "highly volatile and dangerous weapons" to be used by police. "This raises serious questions about who in the military chain of command could have given the order to use these weapons."

The report prepared by Mr. Normand and the Burmese lawyers has been submitted to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate and opposition leader, who was appointed by the government soon after the crackdown to lead a separate, official commission of inquiry. The precise mandate of the commission is unclear, as is the timing of the release of the commission's findings.

The government initially announced the commission would report its work on Dec. 31 but that was delayed by a month. It may be further delayed because Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is currently on a five-day visit to South Korea.

The controversy over the copper mine centers on the government's attempt to relocate villagers in order to expand the mine, which is co-owned by a Chinese company and the Burmese military. The government ordered the dispersal of protesters after several months of intermittent demonstrations. The controversy received widespread coverage in the Myanmar media partly because land rights have become a major issue as the country opens up to the world.

But it is a measure of the villagers' resolve that even after the violent crackdown they say they are refusing to back down. Aye Net, a villager who has helped lead the protest movement, said by telephone Wednesday that villagers were calling for "justice for all those wounded in the crackdown."

"And we still want the total abolition of the project," she said.

Wai Moe in Yangon and Poypiti Amatatham in Bangkok contributed reporting.

South Korea has attached an intense national pride to the 140-ton, 108-feet tall Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1, or KSLV-1, which was built with the help of Russian technology. Feeling besieged by China and Japan, both of which have successful space programs, South Korea has sought a technological prowess of its own.

That task has gained more urgency after North Korean successfully placed a rocket into orbit on Dec. 12. Only a handful of countries have succeeded in  independently launching satellites into orbit, with Iran also recently joining the club. After studying the debris of the North Korean rocket that splashed into South Korean waters, officials here determined that North Korea, despite its backward economy, has locally built key components of its rocket.

With all major South Korean television stations airing a live broadcast of the countdown, the two-stage rocket blasted off from the newly built Naro Space Center in  Goheung, 200 miles south of Seoul. 

"After analyzing the data, we determined that our satellite entered its intended orbit," said Lee Ju-ho, the government's minister of education, science and technology, during a nationally televised news conference. "Today, we took a leap toward becoming a power in space technology. This is a success for all the people."

Although part of the two-stage rocket was built by the Russians, South Korea considered the successful launching on Wednesday an important toehold in the space technology, the latest high-tech market where the country has decided to become a player. By 2021, it says, it will launch a completely indigenous three-stage, liquid-fueled rocket capable of carrying a 1.5-ton payload into orbit.

KSLV-1 was the first space rocket to take off from South Korea. The country purchased its liquid-fueled first booster stage from the Russian company Khrunichev in a deal that included a transfer of technology to South Korean engineers. South Korea has built the rocket's solid-fueled second stage that carried a small, 100-kilogram "Naro" Science and Technology Satellite-2C, built by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.  

The satellite, which has a one-year operational lifespan, will mainly collect data on space radiation. Officials said they needed until early Thursday to conclude whether the satellite was functioning properly.

Before Naro, the country had five satellites in orbit, but all of them were launched abroad foreign rockets. 

The two Koreas, which remain technically at war after their 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, have recently taken their rivalry into a rocket race. They both have suffered  spectacular failures before a successful launching. South Korea had previously fired the KSLV-1 rocket twice from Goheung, first in 2009 and again in 2010, but each time, the rocket failed to put a satellite into orbit. The third attempt, initially scheduled for October, has been twice delayed at the last minute because of technical glitches. 

The government of President Lee Myung-bak eagerly awaited the rocket's successful launching before he ended his five-year term on Feb. 25. But the success came at a sensitive time on the Korean Peninsula.

The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution last week tightening  sanctions against North Korea as punishment for its December rocket launching. The council considered the North Korean launching a cover for testing  intercontinental ballistic missile technology and a violation of its earlier resolutions that banned the country from conducting such tests.

North Korea has vehemently rejected the U.N. resolution, vowing to launch more long-range rockets and conduct a third nuclear test. It accused the Security Council and Washington, which led international support for its resolution, of applying "double standards," noting that countries like South Korea were free to launch rockets.

South Korea said that its program, unlike North Korea's, was solely for commercial purposes.

North Korea's three-stage Unha-3 rocket   put a small refrigerator-size satellite into orbit in December. Though South Korean officials doubted that the North Korean satellite was  functioning properly, they said that the successful launching demonstrated that North Korea was acquiring the technology for an intercontinental ballistic missile that can fly more than 6,200 miles.

For years, South Korea's space ambitions have languished under the constraints of  agreements with the United States, which feared that a robust rocket program might be transferred to the building of missiles and help accelerate a regional arms race.

South Korea has spent $500 million on its  rocket project. It's a paltry sum compared to the billions of dollars in space development projects by such regional leaders as China, Japan and India.

Still, like North Korea, South Korea has bestowed its rocket program with a halo of  national pride.

"Students and youths! The Republic of Korea is expanding around the world and toward space!" Mr. Lee, the science minister, said during the news conference, using the official name of South Korea.

The South Korean rocket blasted off from a launch pad in the southwestern coastal village of Goheung. Science officials told cheering spectators minutes later that the rocket delivered an observational satellite into orbit. There was no immediate confirmation that the satellite was operating as intended.

The launch is a culmination of years of efforts by South Korea — Asia's fourth-largest economy — to advance its space program and cement its standing as a technology powerhouse whose semiconductors, smartphones and automobiles command global demand. North Korea's long-range rocket program, in contrast, has generated international fears that it is getting closer to developing nuclear missiles capable of striking the U.S.

South Korea's success comes amid increased tension on the Korean Peninsula over North Korea's threat to explode its third nuclear device. Pyongyang is angry over tough new international sanctions over its Dec. 12 rocket launch and has accused its rivals of applying double standards toward the two Koreas' space programs.

Washington and Seoul have called North Korea's rocket launch a cover for a test of Pyongyang's banned ballistic missile technology.

Both Koreas see the development of space programs as crucial hallmarks of their scientific prowess and national pride, and both had high-profile failures before success. South Korea tried and failed to launch satellites in 2009 and 2010, and more recent launch attempts were aborted at the last minute.

The satellite launched by Seoul is designed to analyze weather data, measure radiation in space, gauges distances on earth and test how effectively South Korean-made devices installed on the satellite operate in space. South Korean officials said it will help them develop more sophisticated satellites in the future.

U.S. experts have described the North's satellite as tumbling in space and said it does not appear to be functioning, though Pyongyang has said it is working.

The South Korean rocket launched Wednesday had its first stage designed and built by Russian experts under a contract between the two governments. North Korea built its rocket almost entirely on its own, South Korean military experts said earlier this month after analyzing debris retrieved from the Yellow Sea in December.

This reverses an earlier decision to use the revenues to offset at least part of the Palestinian debts to Israeli utility companies as a punitive measure following the Palestinians' successful bid to upgrade their status at the United Nations to that of a nonmember observer state in late November.

But the official emphasized that the decision was "a one-time event" and was "not an indication of what Israel might do next month."

The decision to transfer the funds came after a meeting on Monday between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Tony Blair, the envoy of the so-called quartet of Middle East peacemakers that groups the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. In a statement after the meeting, both men pledged to work on peace and security issues.

Nour Odeh, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority, said that Palestinian and Israeli officials were scheduled to hold a regular technical meeting on Wednesday where they would calculate the amount of revenues collected and owed. Revenues usually amount to around $100 million a month.

The Palestinian Authority, a self-rule body with limited control over parts of the West Bank, has been in financial crisis for about two years, largely because of a drop in donor funds, and it has been struggling to pay its 150,000 government workers their full salaries on time, leading to growing restiveness and strikes.

Israel's decision to withhold the transfers after the United Nations move was expected, but special funds pledged by Arab states to the authority as a so-called "safety net" after the diplomatic clash with Israel have not yet materialized.

Israel has withheld transfers of Palestinian tax revenues at least five times before, sometimes for weeks and, after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in 2000, for two years. But this was the first time that Israel had used the money, which constitutes about two-thirds of the authority's income, to pay off Palestinian debts to the Israel Electric Corporation and other Israeli providers without the consent of the authority.

The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, called in December for a voluntary boycott of Israeli goods by Palestinian consumers in what he called a "logical response" to the Israeli measure because the tax revenues are accrued on Palestinian trade with Israel. The call did not appear have had much impact either in the Palestinian territories or on the Israeli economy.

Israel's former foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, had said in December that it would take four months of tax revenues collected by Israel for the Palestinian Authority to repay its debts. He had threatened that no money would be transferred from Israel to the authority until the debts were paid.

In a statement released by the Palestinian Authority cabinet after a meeting on Tuesday, the withholding of tax revenues was described as "Israeli piracy." The cabinet said that government workers would be paid the remaining half of their November salaries in the next two days, "if work is resumed in the ministries, at the least by those responsible for executing the salary payment procedures."

The cabinet also "affirmed the urgency for our Arab brethren to accelerate the implementation of their commitments to support the state treasury," according to the statement.

Israel is engaged in a delicate balancing act since it does not have an interest in seeing the Palestinian Authority collapse, officials there have said. In the weeks before the United Nations action, they said, Israel advanced money to the Palestinian Authority in response to calls for help and to provide some relief ahead of a Muslim holiday.