Politics

For more than three years, Myanmar’s biggest cities have remained under the unyielding grip of the military junta. But the streets of places like Yangon were uncharacteristically quiet Monday evening as a sense of fear pervaded the country.Residents had a new reason to avoid contact with soldiers on patrol: Over the weekend, the regime said that it was invoking a decades-old law to start drafting young men and women into the army, setting off widespread alarm across the country.The regime’s forces have been depleted in recent months as they battle a growing insurgency by pro-democracy rebels and armed ethnic groups. The move to conscription to beef up the forces’ ranks suggested that the junta was on the defensive and growing desperate.But while the rebels have posed the most widespread ch...

Brazil is experiencing an enormous outbreak of dengue fever, the sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease, and public health experts say it is a harbinger of a coming surge in cases in the Americas, including Puerto Rico.Brazil’s Health Ministry warns that it expects more than 4.2 million cases this year, outstripping the 4.1 million cases the Pan-American Health Organization recorded for all 42 countries in the region last year.Brazil was due for a bad dengue year — numbers of cases of the virus typically rise and fall on a roughly four-year cycle — but experts say a number of factors, including El Niño and climate change, have significantly amplified the problem this year.“The record heat in the country and the above-average rainfall since last year, even before the summer, have increased ...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has ordered the Israeli military to come up with a plan for civilians sheltering in the southern city of Rafah to evacuate, his office said on Friday, as Israeli leaders have increasingly indicated they intend to ultimately send ground troops into the crowded city.“Any forceful action in Rafah would require the evacuation of the civilian population from combat zones,” the prime minister’s office said, without saying what area those zones would cover or when such an operation would begin.Roughly 1.4 million Palestinians are now sheltering in Rafah, according to the United Nations. Lying on the border with Egypt, the city is one of the last areas of the Gaza Strip in which Israeli ground troops have yet to deploy in force. Many of the people who ha...

When deportation flights from the United States to Venezuela resumed last fall after four years, it was a move meant to show that President Biden was aggressively tackling the record numbers of crossings at the U.S. southern border.The expulsions were also meant to deter other Venezuelans who might be considering the journey.But on Wednesday, for the second week in a row, U.S.-run flights to Venezuela carrying migrants did not depart as planned — a move that seems to be initiated by Venezuela.The Venezuelan government did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether it was permanently halting the deportation flights, but a social media post by Venezuela’s vice president last month threatened to stop them after the United States reimposed some economic sanctions.Officials at t...

On Monday night, Buckingham Palace made a sudden announcement that King Charles III had been diagnosed with cancer, less than 18 months after beginning his reign. He is receiving outpatient treatment in London.The British monarch’s diagnosis prompted an outpouring of sympathy from leaders around the world, with President Biden saying that he was praying for “a swift and full recovery,” and the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, describing himself as “shocked and sad” at the news. “He’ll just be in our thoughts and our prayers,” Mr. Sunak told BBC radio on Tuesday. “Many families around the country listening to this will have been touched by the same thing.”Here is what to know about the king’s condition and its implications for Britain’s monarchy.What do we know about the king’s diagnosi...

In the ancient prehistory of Earth, there is a chapter that waits to be told known as Romer’s gap. Researchers have identified a hiatus in the tetrapod fossil record between 360 million and 345 million years ago, after fish had begun to adapt to land and more than 80 million years before the first dinosaurs.While mysteries remain about evolution’s experiments with living things during that 15-million-year gap, a fossilized tree described in a new paper offers greater insights to some of what was happening during this period in nature’s laboratory.Named Sanfordiacaulis densifolia, the tree had a six-inch diameter with a nearly 10-foot-tall trunk composed not of wood, but of vascular plant material, like ferns. Its crown had more than 200 finely striated, compound leaves emanating from spira...