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The proposal was mired for months in an internal dispute about whether to aggressively scale back the rising salaries and benefits of some officials working for state-owned business and banks. The document that emerged from the discussions is filled with commitments to deal with that issue and other sources of public concern about the gap between the incomes of residents of dirt-poor villages and those living in privileged urban enclaves.

"There are some stark problems in income distribution that need urgent solving," said the plan, which was issued on the central government's Web site. "Chiefly, there remain quite large disparities in urban-rural development and incomes, income allocation is poorly ordered, and there are quite serious problems with invisible and unlawful sources of income." The document was drafted by the National Development and Reform Commission and other central agencies.

The income distribution plan was one of the initiatives promised by the departing Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, who leaves office in March. But it also underscores the extent to which the country's new generation of leaders under Xi Jinping has also promised to expand state spending on health care, education and social welfare.

Mr. Xi, who was appointed Communist Party chief in November and is set to become state president in March, has said he wants to accelerate economic changes in the spirit of Deng Xiaoping, who began the process of transforming China into a more modern economy after decades of rule by Mao Zedong. But in the process of introducing market forces in China, such changes have starkly widened income disparities.

Since Mr. Xi took office, Chinese news media have reported on a succession of officials who have been accused of siphoning bribes and public money into their pockets. The income plan, however, does not offer specific new initiatives to reduce corruption.

Beyond a general commitment to eliminate sources of illegal income, the plan says that officials must abide by already announced rules to report earnings and assets to superiors. Many experts, however, have said such rules are ineffective without public disclosure as well.

Average disposable annual income for Chinese urban residents in 2012 was the equivalent of about $4,000, an increase of 9.6 percent after taking inflation into account. Average rural net income was just under $1,300 per person, a rise of 10.7 percent after adjusting for inflation, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics announced in January.

The bureau also said that in 2012 China's Gini Coefficient, a widely used index of income inequality, was 0.474, slightly higher than levels of inequality in the United States, where income disparity has widened sharply in recent decades and now stands as one of the highest among advanced industrial nations. But some economists have said China's measure is actually much higher, when illicit and poorly reported sources of wealth are taken into account.

"Deepening reform of the income distribution system is an extremely arduous and complex task of systemic engineering," the new plan says. "It cannot be achieved in one step."

In his annual State of the Judiciary speech in Albany, the chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, said that New York was one of only four states that do not allow judges to consider public safety when making a bail determination. Only the risk that the defendant will return to court for trial can be assessed.

"As a result, defendants may be put back on the street with insufficient regard to public safety, with possibly catastrophic consequences," the judge said. "This makes no sense and certainly does not serve the best interests of our communities and our citizens."

Conversely, Judge Lippman said the bail system was stacked against those accused of minor crimes, keeping them in jail at great personal hardship and weakening their resolve in plea negotiations. The judge called that outcome "unfair" and said it "strips our justice system of its credibility."

He was harshly critical of the outsize role he said that bail bond businesses have taken in the process. The judge said bondsmen, who essentially ensure defendants will return to court for a fee and access to collateral, had typically ignored defendants held on low bail amounts because their fees were based on a percentage.

In recent years, the use of bail bonds and pretrial release rates have fallen, he said.

"With precious little public accountability, bail bondsmen exercise enormous influence over who is released pending trial and who stays in jail," he said. "The fact is that, in many cases, bail bondsmen, not judges and not prosecutors, ultimately make the most critical decisions affecting the liberty of those accused of crimes in our criminal justice system."

The judge suggested taking "the profit motive" out of bail bonding by encouraging more involvement of nonprofit organizations, something that was enabled by state legislation that passed last year and that the judge said had been a success in the Bronx.

He also called for the expansion of supervised release programs that monitor defendants awaiting trial and provide them access to social services, like programs to help overcome drug and alcohol abuse. Increasing the use of those programs would save significant amounts of public money, he said, because pretrial detention costs an average of $19,000 per defendant nationally, whereas monitoring a defendant in the community costs less than $4,600.

"You do the math," the judge said. "There is enormous potential savings if we can figure out how to safely and responsibly keep nonviolent defendants in the community while their cases are pending."

Relations between the two countries have warmed since the toppling of Egypt's former president, Hosni Mubarak, who was deeply hostile to Iran's leadership and portrayed himself to his allies, including the United States, the Persian Gulf monarchies and Israel, as a bulwark against Iranian influence.

Lately, though, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been promoting the idea that the recent Arab revolutions were inspired by the Iranian revolution of 1979.

"Egypt is a very important country in the region and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes it is one of the heavyweights in the Middle East," Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, told the state Islamic Republic News Agency in Munich on Tuesday. "We are ready to further strengthen ties."

While the Egypt's relations with Iran remains limited, the scene on the tarmac at the Cairo Airport on Tuesday — Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi, greeting Mr. Ahmedinejad warmly in a red-carpet ceremony — would have been unimaginable under Mr. Mubarak, and seemed likely to alarm the Obama administration.

Mr. Morsi and Mr. Ahmadinejad discussed "developments in the regional arena," including the war in Syria and "means of enhancing relations between Egypt and Iran," according to Egypt's state news agency. Mr. Ahmadinejad is in Egypt for a three-day visit to attend an Islamic summit.

Since becoming president in June as the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Morsi has framed his approach to foreign policy, including the thaw with Iran, as an effort to chart a more independent course than that of his predecessor and to reassert Egypt's historical regional leadership role. Mr. Morsi has also tried to place Egypt at the center of negotiations to end the crisis in Syria.

In August, in another historic first, Mr. Morsi traveled to Tehran for the summit of the Nonaligned Movement, a visit that was seen as helping to ease Iran's international isolation.

Analysts say it is unlikely that Egypt and Iran will restore full ties, noting the pressure on Mr. Morsi to keep his distance from Iran, particularly from the United States and Egypt's financial benefactors among the Persian Gulf monarchies.

During his visit to Tehran in August, Mr. Morsi embarrassed his hosts by delivering a stinging condemnation of their close ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, to the delight of allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. In further deference to the Saudis, in a later speech about the Arab uprisings, Mr. Morsi omitted mention of the Shiite-led uprising against Bahrain's Sunni monarchy.

On Tuesday, Egypt's foreign minister sought to deliver further reassurances, saying "the security of the Gulf states is the security of Egypt," according the state news agency.

In Cairo, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi said on Tuesday that the relationship with Egypt was "gradually improving," according to Reuters. "We have to be a little patient," he said.

The announcement could force the European Union to reconsider whether to designate the group as a terrorist organization and crack down on its extensive fund-raising operations across the continent. That could have wide-reaching repercussions for Europe's uneasy détente with the group, which is an influential force in Middle East politics, considers Israel an enemy and has extensive links with Iran.

Bulgaria's interior minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, said at a news conference that the investigation into the bombing in Burgas in July 2012 found that a man with an Australian passport and a man with a Canadian passport were two of the three conspirators involved in the attack, which claimed the lives of five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver.

Bulgarian investigators had "a well-founded assumption that they belonged to the military formation of Hezbollah," Mr. Tsvetanov said.

Bulgarian officials have found themselves under pressure from Israel and the United States, which consider Hezbollah a terrorist organization, to blame it for the bus attack. But the Bulgarians also have been facing pressure from European allies like Germany and France, which regard Hezbollah as a legitimate political organization, to temper any finding on the sensitive issue.

Mr. Tsvetanov spoke to reporters here after briefing top government officials and security personnel about the state of the investigation.

"We have followed their entire activities in Australia and Canada so we have information about financing and their membership in Hezbollah," he said.

Mr. Tsvetanov did not mention Iran, however, Hezbollah's ally and chief backer.

Analysts said the bombing was just one chapter in a shadow war pitting Israel against Iran and Hezbollah. Israel is believed to be behind the killings of Iranian nuclear scientists. Operatives of the Iranian Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, were believed to be behind a series of plots against Israeli targets in Thailand, India and Georgia. Israeli officials said the Burgas attack bore the hallmarks of a Hezbollah operation.

The European calculation all along has been that whatever its activities in the Middle East, Hezbollah does not pose a threat on the Continent. Thousands of Hezbollah members and supporters operate in Europe essentially unrestricted, raising money that is funneled back to the group in Lebanon.

Changing the designation to a terrorist entity raises the prospect of unsettling questions for Europe — how to deal with those supporters, for example — and the sort of confrontation governments have sought to avoid.

"There's the overall fear if we're too noisy about this, Hezbollah might strike again, and it might not be Israeli tourists this time," said Sylke Tempel, editor in chief of the German foreign affairs magazine Internationale Politik.

The significance of their determination has put pressure on Bulgarian officials, who would like to maintain strong ties with Israel and the United States, and European allies like France and Germany. Bulgarian officials had maintained a studied silence for more than six months since the attack.

"If you factor in the suspicion that there are political implications beyond Bulgaria's borders, it's completely understandable that they've been playing for time," said Dimitar Bechev, head of the Sofia office of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Tsvetanov spoke after the meeting of the president's council for national security, which includes the prime minister, top cabinet members and military and security personnel.

Bulgarian officials are acutely aware of the consequences of their findings even though larger European Union members did not exert blatant pressure on them regarding the Hezbollah question. "It was not a campaign," said Philipp Missfelder, a leading member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and the foreign policy spokesman for the party in Parliament. "Some German officials dropped a few words."

But Mr. Missfelder said that attitudes toward Hezbollah were gradually shifting. "It's clear that they are steered from Iran and they are destabilizing the region," Mr. Missfelder said. "The group that thinks Hezbollah is a stabilizing factor is getting smaller."

Hezbollah's dual nature as what Western intelligence agencies call a terrorist organization and a political party with significant social projects, including schools and health clinics, make it more difficult to dismiss. Hezbollah is a significant political actor in Lebanon, and many European officials are particularly wary of upsetting the status quo as the civil war drags on in Syria.

A sort of modus vivendi exists where Hezbollah keeps a low profile for its fund-raising and other activities and Europeans do not crack down. In Germany alone, 950 people have been identified as being associated with the organization as of 2011. The group has always been treated as a benign force, even if assessments of the danger it presented vary greatly.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of undercutting an expected statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Jerusalem was pleased with the Bulgarian report, which he said would "make it much more difficult" for European countries "to circumvent debate about the true nature of Hezbollah."

"We quickly came to the conclusion that Hezbollah was behind it," the official said. "The Bulgarians wanted to dig deeper before they were willing to say in public what they found. And who that led to. They dug deeper and deeper, and the deeper they dug, the closer they got to Hezbollah."

The official said that Israel had shared intelligence reports with the Bulgarian authorities and that the Bulgarian investigators had briefed Jerusalem about their findings, but that Israel purposely kept its distance because an independent report from a European country would be more powerful. "We didn't know what they were going to say," he said. "It was up to them to decide how they want to play this politically."

The Israeli official, along with an Israeli counter-terrorism expert, said that it was not surprising that Iran was not mentioned, because Bulgaria's investigation did not extend beyond its own borders, and was focused on what happened on the ground, not the larger question of who approved or financed the operation.

"The fact that they didn't put their finger in front of Iran and leading to the responsibility of Iran, one cannot blame them," said Boaz Ganor, head of the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzilya, Israel."You need a different level of intelligence, a different level of facts in your hands, to prove the next level, which is that Hezbollah was conducting that under the initiation or the approval of Iran. That they probably don't have right now."

But Mr. Ganor and others said the connections between Hezbollah and Iran are so well known that they hardly need to be articulated.

"If the Bulgarians have clear proof that Hezbollah is responsible for the attacks, all security services around the world know that Iran is behind it," Mr. Ganor said. "This kind of terrorist attack, which is being defined as a quality attack — this is not launching a Katuysha rocket here or there — when those types of terrorist attacks are being conducted by Hezbollah, it's either by the direct initiation of Iran or at least approval of Iran.

"Anyone who plans such an attack takes into consideration implications of a failure," Mr. Ganor continued. "Hezbollah would not dare to conduct an attack that would not just embarrass Iran but also might cause harm to the Iranian international interests – before conducting such an attack they would get at least an approval of Iran."

Mr. Ganor called the Bulgarian report "brave" and "courageous."

"Many other states, the Western society, even if they had the facts in their hands, would not say that," he said, noting that only a handful of countries define Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. "I think they were very cautious. It took them quite a considerable time. They did that only when they could back it up with concrete facts."