With Bangladesh’s security forces seemingly on a deadly collision course with angry protesters after a crackdown on Sunday, eyes were turning to the country’s powerful military establishment to see how it might respond.

Protesters are demanding that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina leave office, after 15 years of rule that have turned increasingly authoritarian. If the violence on the street leads to instability and chaos, the military — which has sought to distance itself from the violent police reaction through weeks of unrest — would certainly be a central player.

It has been before. Bangladesh’s army has a history of staging coups and counter coups. But over the past couple decades, the military has taken a less overt role in public affairs, choosing more often to exercise influence from behind the scenes.

Part of that shift has been attributed to Ms. Hasina. Her father, Bangladesh’s first leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as well as much of her family, was killed in a deadly military coup in 1975. In her time in office, she has stacked its leadership ranks with loyalists, and allowed them access to lucrative government contracts and other businesses.

There are international incentives for the military, as well, which has been a major contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions that have given it another important side business. Any involvement in a coup would subject the army to criticism — or ostracism — from the United Nations, whose human rights chief responded to the recent killings by calling for restraint and accountability from those with “command responsibility.”

While the army was deployed on the streets during the crackdown to clear the protesters late last month, there have been reports of discomfort in the ranks over it. Dozens of former senior officers also issued a statement calling on the military not “to rescue those who have created this current situation” — a statement seen by some as referring to the police and paramilitaries, and possibly even to Sheikh Hasina herself.

On Sunday, the army’s chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, gathered senior officers for a meeting that was seen as an attempt to allay concerns. In a statement after the meeting, the army said its chief had reiterated that “the Bangladesh Army will always stand by the people in the interest of the public and in any need of the state.”

If Ms. Hasina’s power becomes untenable, analysts said the army would be unlikely to opt for a takeover. It might, though, try to aid some transition period from the sidelines with a caretaker government — something that happened in 2007.

“There are major international ramifications to a military coup. And more than leaders it is the younger officers who are hesitant to go ahead with anything of the sort,” said M. N. Khan, a retired general of the Bangladeshi Army.

A rebel army in Myanmar announced this weekend that it had overrun a regional military base near the border with China in what is likely to be the most significant victory yet for a patchwork of resistance groups that have challenged the country’s junta.

On Monday, Myanmar’s military rulers signaled that the insurgents had, in fact, made a major advance, saying the junta had lost contact with the base, the northeastern command in the city of Lashio in Shan State.

The junta leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, said in a speech later Monday that security forces had withdrawn in northern Shan State because they were “prioritizing the safety of the people.” He said the rebels were getting weapons and other supplies, including drones and short-range missiles, from “foreign countries,” which he didn’t identify. Some arms and ammunition were coming from factories just across the China-Myanmar border, he said.

“We need to investigate where these factories are getting their funds and technological support from,” the military leader said.

The junta has been on the defensive for months as a broad alliance of rebel militias and pro-democracy groups has made inroads across large swaths of the country. Suffering repeated losses of territory and troops, the junta in recent months has imposed a mandatory draft.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the latest development would ricochet in the wider civil war. But the fall of a regional military headquarters — one of 14 in Myanmar and home to thousands of government soldiers — would be a major defeat for the junta, which has been on a war footing for decades. It would also give the rebels control of Lashio, a strategic city, and its airport.

The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army claimed the victory after weeks of combat. On Saturday, the group’s fighters, who are from the Kokang ethnic Chinese minority, posted photos of themselves at the gates of the base. The group also claimed that it had in its custody three senior officers, all generals from the base.

“Senior officers closely supervised and participated in the fighting until 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 3, but contact was lost thereafter,” Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, said in an announcement on Monday. “Unconfirmed reports indicate that some senior officers have been captured.”

The commander of the base had reportedly fled to China, and the Kokang group said more than 4,000 troops and their families had surrendered. Those claims that could not be immediately verified.

It would be a historic loss for the Myanmar military, said Khin Zaw Win, a political analyst and director of the Tampadipa Institute, a think tank in Yangon. He added, “This is a crucial military area for the Myanmar military.”

The city of Lashio and its airport lie on a crucial trade corridor to Yunnan Province in China, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a high-speed rail link and other infrastructure projects on both sides of the border.

Beijing expressed support for the Myanmar junta after the country’s coup in February 2021 and has tried to mediate between the junta and the rebels. But analysts believe that the rebel advance in Lashio, as well as earlier offensives in the border region, would not have gone ahead without China’s approval.

“China has little interest in democracy in Myanmar,” Jason Tower, the Myanmar director at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan research organization, wrote in an analysis last week. He added: “Beijing is also unconcerned about furthering a broader peace: Its so-called mediation efforts center only on manipulating a subset of actors in the conflict to protect Chinese investments and weakening the military’s influence in the strategic borderlands to expand China’s.”

The Myanmar junta is now seeking military assistance from another authoritarian state, Russia. Casting the rebels as terrorists, U Khin Yi, the chairman of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a junta ally, made the plea to Moscow in an interview with a Russian state-owned news outlet on Sunday.

The resistance now holds roughly 75 cities and towns across Myanmar and two airports, one in Thandwe in Rakhine State in the west, and the other in Lashio.

Last week’s gains in Lashio were symbolic for another reason: The offensive that started last year and is credited with putting the junta on the defensive also began in Shan.

After a weekend of violent uprisings across Britain, set off by a deadly stabbing rampage and a disinformation campaign aimed primarily at immigrant Muslims that followed it, tensions are high from the streets to government leaders’ offices.

Here is what we know as the country enters a new week of uncertainty.

Where has the unrest taken place?

Protesters over the weekend took to the streets of a dozen cities across the United Kingdom, most of them in England. Trouble broke out from Aldershot in the south to Sunderland in the north and Liverpool in the west. Belfast, in Northern Ireland, was also drawn into the fray.

In some cases, the protesters were merely unruly, but in others the violence was far more pronounced.

On Sunday, rioters set upon a hotel that has housed asylum seekers in the town of Rotherham, in northern England, breaking windows before surging inside as the police struggled to control them. It remained unclear whether asylum seekers were still staying at the hotel and no guests were injured in the melee, police said.

In Middlesbrough, a group of rioters, some masked, hurled bottles and rocks at officers. Cars were set on fire, and at least nine people were arrested. On Saturday, a library and a food bank were set alight in Liverpool as groups damaged and looted businesses, and in Hull, fires were set and storefronts smashed in the city center.

Nearly 150 people were arrested over the weekend, national police representatives said, and dozens of police suffered injuries, including some that required trips to the hospital.

What set off the protests?

The unrest began after a 17-year-old wielding a knife attacked a children’s dance class on Monday in the seaside town of Southport, which is near Liverpool. Three children were killed, and eight were wounded.

The suspect was born and raised in Britain, but online rumors soon circulated that he was an undocumented immigrant. To counter those false claims, the authorities took the unusual step of publicly identifying him. But with migration a flashpoint issue in Britain, especially on the far right, the rumors were all it took.

Extremist groups urged their followers to take to the streets, and the day after the stabbings, they began to do so, starting in Southport.

How have the authorities responded?

The riots prompted a heavy police response. Nearly 4,000 additional officers were deployed, a law enforcement association said.

“Be in no doubt: Those who have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement on Sunday.

“I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder,” Mr. Starmer said, “whether directly or those whipping up this action online and then running away themselves. This is not protest. It is organized, violent thuggery.”

BJ Harrington, the head of public order for Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, said online disinformation had been “a huge driver of this appalling violence.”

Intelligence teams, detectives and neighborhood officers, Mr. Harrington said, are working to identify the people fomenting the violence.

“They won’t win,” he said.

Even as the authorities vow to crack down on the violence, they have long struggled to tamp down disinformation on social media, one of the accelerants behind the riots. Britain and other democracies have found that policing the internet is legally murky terrain, where individual rights and free speech protections are balanced against a desire to block harmful material.

What are the political implications?

The riots are the first political crisis for Mr. Starmer, who took office only a month ago after his Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, who had been in power in Britain for 14 years.

While in power, the Conservatives tried to capitalize on public unhappiness over immigration, vowing to reduce it (though they failed to do so). But in recent days, they joined Labour in condemning the violent protests.

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is now the opposition leader, said the unrest had “nothing to do with the tragedy in Southport.” The police, he said, have “our full support to deal with these criminals swiftly.”

Mr. Starmer held an emergency meeting on Monday, part of an established protocol that brings together relevant government ministers, civil servants, and representatives from the police and intelligence services.

Ngu Thazin wanted to leave her war-torn country for a better future. She set her sights on Japan.

In Myanmar, she studied Japanese and graduated with a chemistry degree from one of her country’s most prestigious universities. Yet she gladly took a job in Japan changing diapers and bathing residents at a nursing home in a midsize city.

“To be honest, I want to live in Japan because it is safe,” said Ms. Thazin, who hopes eventually to pass an exam that will allow her to work as a licensed caregiver. “And I want to send my family money.”

Japan desperately needs people like Ms. Thazin to fill jobs left open by a declining and aging population. The number of foreign workers has quadrupled since 2007, to more than two million, in a country of 125 million people. Many of these workers escaped low wages, political repression or armed conflict in their home countries.

But even as foreign employees become much more visible in Japan, working as convenience store cashiers, hotel clerks and restaurant servers, they are treated with ambivalence. Politicians remain reluctant to create pathways for foreign workers, especially those in low-skill jobs, to stay indefinitely. That may eventually cost Japan in its competition with neighbors like South Korea and Taiwan, or even places farther afield like Australia and Europe, that are also scrambling to find labor.

The political resistance to immigration in long-insular Japan, as well as a public that is sometimes wary of integrating newcomers, has led to a nebulous legal and support system that makes it difficult for foreigners to put down roots. Foreign-born workers are paid on average about 30 percent less than their Japanese counterparts, according to government data. Fearful of losing their right to stay in Japan, workers often have precarious relationships with their employers, and career advancement can be elusive.

Japan’s policies are designed for “people to work in Japan for preferably a short period of time,” said Yang Liu, a fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry in Tokyo. “If the system continues as it is, the probability that foreign workers will stop coming has become very high.”

In 2018, the government passed a law authorizing a sharp increase in the number of low-skilled “guest laborers” allowed into the country. Earlier this year, the government committed to more than doubling the number of such workers over the next five years, to 820,000. It also revised a technical internship program that employers had used as a source of cheap labor and that workers and labor activists had criticized as fostering abuses.

Still, politicians are far from flinging open the country’s borders. Japan has yet to experience the kind of significant migration that has convulsed Europe or the United States. The total number of foreign-born residents in Japan — including nonworking spouses and children — is 3.4 million, less than 3 percent of the population. The percentage in Germany and the United States, for instance, is close to five times that.

Japan has tightened some rules even as it has loosened others. This spring, the governing Liberal Democratic Party pushed through a revision to Japan’s immigration law that would allow permanent residency to be revoked if a person fails to pay taxes. Critics warned that the policy could make it easier to withdraw residency status for more minor infractions, such as failing to show a police officer an identification card upon request.

Such a threat “robs permanent residents of their sense of security” and “will undoubtedly encourage discrimination and prejudice,” Michihiro Ishibashi, a member of the opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, said during a parliamentary discussion.

In a separate parliamentary committee, Ryuji Koizumi, the justice minister, said the revision was intended to “realize a society where we can coexist with foreigners,” by making sure they “abide by the minimum rules necessary for living in Japan.”

Long before foreigners can obtain permanent residency, they must navigate labyrinthine visa requirements, including language and skills tests. Unlike in Germany, where the government offers new foreign residents up to 400 hours of language courses at a subsidized rate of just over $2 per lesson, Japan has no organized language training for foreign workers.

While politicians say the country should do a better job of teaching Japanese, “they are not yet ready to go as far as pouring money into this from taxes,” said Toshinori Kawaguchi, director of the foreign workers affairs division at the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.

That leaves individual municipalities and employers to decide whether and how often to provide language training. The nursing home operator that employs Ms. Thazin in Maebashi, the capital of Gunma Prefecture in central Japan, offers some of its caregivers one day of group Japanese lessons, as well as one more 45-minute lesson, each month. Workers who prepare meals receive just one 45-minute lesson a month.

Akira Higuchi, the president of the company, Hotaka Kai, said he gives workers an incentive to study Japanese on their own. Those who pass the second-highest level of a government Japanese language proficiency test, he said, “will be treated the same as Japanese people, with the same salary and bonuses.”

Particularly outside the largest cities, foreigners who don’t speak Japanese can struggle to communicate with local governments or schools. In health emergencies, few hospital workers will speak languages other than Japanese.

Hotaka Kai has taken other measures to support its staff, including housing newcomers in subsidized corporate apartments and offering skills training.

A dormitory kitchen shared by 33 women ranging in age from 18 to 31 offers a glimpse of the heritages that mingle together. Peeking out from plastic bins labeled with the residents’ names were sachets of Ladaku merica bubuk (an Indonesian white pepper powder) and packets of thit kho seasoning for making Vietnamese braised pork with eggs.

Across Gunma Prefecture, the reliance on foreign workers is unmistakable. In Oigami Onsen, a rundown mountainside village where many restaurants, shops and hotels are shuttered, half of the 20 full-time workers at Ginshotei Awashima, a traditional Japanese hot springs inn, are originally from Myanmar, Nepal or Vietnam.

With the inn’s deeply rural location, “there are no more Japanese people who want to work here,” said Wataru Tsutani, the owner.

Several of its foreign workers have educational backgrounds that would seem to qualify them for more than menial work. A 32-year-old with a degree in physics from a university in Myanmar serves food in the inn’s dining rooms. A 27-year-old who studied Japanese culture at a university in Vietnam is stationed at the reception desk. A 27-year-old Nepali who was studying agricultural history at a university in Ukraine before the Russian invasion now washes dishes and lays out futon, Japanese-style bedding, in guest rooms.

Most of the customers at Ginshotei Awashima are Japanese. Sakae Yoshizawa, 58, who had come for an overnight stay with her husband and was enjoying a cup of tea in the lobby before checking out, said she was impressed by the service. “Their Japanese is very good, and I have a good feeling about them,” she said. Ms. Yoshizawa said she works with foreign-born colleagues at a newspaper delivery service.

Ngun Nei Par, the inn’s general manager, graduated from a university in Myanmar with a degree in geography. She hopes that the Japanese government will smooth a path toward citizenship that would allow her to bring the rest of her family to Japan someday.

Mr. Tsutani, the owner, said that a public that had not caught up with reality might object if too many foreigners obtained citizenship.

“I hear a lot that Japan is a ‘unique country,’” Mr. Tsutani said. Ultimately, “there is no need to make it that difficult” for foreigners to stay in Japan, he said. “We want workers.”

The 17-story hotel, a giant and graceless gem of socialist modernist architecture cherished by aficionados of concrete, took four years to build in the 1970s and became a proud symbol of the Soviet Union’s embrace of modernity.

Reduced to a ruin in the more than 30 years since Moldova gained independence, the National Hotel in Chisinau, the capital, is today a study in the post-Soviet dysfunctions of one of Europe’s poorest countries.

Wealthy tycoons have wrangled over it, shuffling ownership between opaque offshore companies, while competing groups of graffiti artists have turned its facade into a huge tableau displaying their rival loyalties. One group daubed it with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, then a group opposed to Ukraine painted a Russian military symbol. In June, a new group painted the exterior with the colors of Moldova’s flag.

Prosecutors and preservationists have struggled to understand how what was once a prize piece of real estate has fallen on such hard times.

“It is a monument to corruption in Moldova,” said Valeriu Pasa, the head of WatchDog, a Chisinau research and anti-corruption activist group.

“It moved from one oligarch to another, but our justice system has for years failed to hold those responsible for the mess accountable,” he added.

Opened in 1978 as a four-star hotel whose size and modern design were intended to wow foreign visitors, the National is now a dystopian dive, its wiring, plumbing, windows and marble tiles all stripped by thieves, its lobby a dark cavern strewed with empty bottles and mattresses used by homeless people.

What to do with the formerly state-owned hotel, privatized nearly two decades ago in a series of murky deals, has been argued over for years without result.

“It seems that nobody can figure out how to clean up our system,” said Sergiu Tofilat, a former presidential adviser who has pushed in vain for prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into what went wrong.

Businessmen with a stake in the property, several of whom are now on the run outside Moldova to escape arrest, want it demolished to make way for office blocks or luxury housing, while preservationists and fans of modernist architecture want it preserved.

On a recent afternoon, the only person inside the ruin was an apparently intoxicated young man roaming the empty floors. He shouted that he was “looking for my girl” before wandering off past an open elevator shaft and then vanishing. Even the elevator call buttons on the wall have been stolen.

Anetta Dabija, a city councilor and a member of Save Chisinau, a group lobbying to protect old buildings from demolition by developers, said she would never enter the hotel alone out of safety concerns. Its entrances have been boarded up, and the police occasionally expel squatters and chase away graffiti artists.

But, easily accessible through a broken garage door, the building provides a safe space for amorous couples unbothered by the stench of urine and a lure for fans of urban exploration, which often involves visiting and taking photographs of derelict, creepy places.

Ms. Dabija said she had not been a fan of socialist architecture but decided the National was worth saving after a visit to Berlin, where iconic structures of the Communist era, like the Berlin Congress Center and Kino International, have been restored.

“People often hate modernist buildings, but that is not an excuse for demolition,” Ms. Dabija said.

Also dead set against demolition are the graffiti artists.

Dmitri Potapov, who with friends painted the Ukrainian flag on the facade to protest Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, said the hotel should be turned into a public art space.

Since it “gained its private status through dubious means in the 1990s,” he said, it must be returned to the state or turned over to squatters. “Our main concern should be to prevent its demolition,” he added.

In the Soviet era, the National was run by Intourist, a state company that operated a chain of mostly shabby hotels catering to foreigners across Moscow’s empire. The National, then called The Intourist, was one of its jewels.

Vladimir Paladi, 82, who lives in a nearby apartment block, said the hotel was mostly restricted to foreigners at that time but had a restaurant open to locals.

He said he could never afford to eat there, but had a friend working as a waiter who showed him around what he remembers as a place of unimaginable splendor, at least for Soviet Moldova.

All that remains of that is a collection of black-and-white photographs of the hotel kept by Moldova’s national archive. “It was so beautiful,” said Lucia Myrza, an archivist responsible for the collection, peering at fading images of a well-lit but hardly luxurious lobby and the hotel’s imposing spotless exterior.

“It was the proud symbol of our city,” she said.

Intourist pulled out of Chisinau after the collapse of Communism, when the Soviet Republic of Moldavia became the new state of Moldova. Ownership of the hotel passed to MoldovaTur, a Soviet tourism company taken over by the new nation. The Intourist became The National.

For a few years, the National continued receiving guests, but they became increasingly rare after a brief war broke out in 1992 in the mainly Russian-speaking Moldovan region of Transnistria.

As stability slowly returned and newly minted millionaires looked for investments — usually a euphemism for state-owned assets that could be grabbed for a pittance — Alfa Engineering, a company controlled by Vlad Plahotniuc, later the country’s most powerful oligarch, in 2006 bought a controlling share of MoldovaTur.

It paid around $2 million and promised to put more than $30 million into renovating and upgrading what was by then already a derelict concrete shell.

“Of course, they invested nothing,” recalled Victor Chironda, a former deputy mayor responsible for urban development. “Their plan from the start,” he said, “was to demolish everything and take the land for a new development.”

Mr. Tofilat, the former presidential adviser, said the hotel later ended up in the hands of Ilhan Shor, another tycoon.

Convicted of fraud in 2017 in connection with the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from Moldova’s banking system between 2010 and 2014, Mr. Shor initially fled to Israel and recently moved to Moscow.

Mr. Shor then sold the hotel through a series of convoluted offshore transactions that, according to Mr. Tofilat, ended up giving control of the property to Vladimir Andronachi, a former legislator close to Mr. Plahotniuc. In 2022, Mr. Andronachi was arrested during a visit to Ukraine and sent back to Moldova to face criminal charges in connection with that bank fraud and other crimes.

A year before his arrest, long-stalled secret plans to demolish the hotel had become public. Developers working with Mr. Andronachi in 2021 asked for permission to tear the building down and replace it with high-end office towers.

Mr. Chironda, who was still a deputy mayor at the time, rejected the idea, arguing that it was illegal because the hotel had been left to rot in violation of the original privatization deal.

Suffering from Covid-19, he took sick leave. When he returned, he discovered that another official had approved the demolition plan.

The city’s mayor, Ion Ceban, then fired Mr. Chironda but relented to public pressure and canceled the demolition plan. He declined to be interviewed.

With the demolition plan halted and no sign that anyone is ready to invest the tens of millions needed for restoration, the hotel is stuck in limbo. Its ownership has been frozen by a court order pending the outcome of the criminal cases against Mr. Andronachi.

“We have been waiting, waiting and waiting for someone to rescue this place,” said Mr. Paladi, the nearby resident, “but it just keeps falling apart.”

Ruxanda Spatari contributed reporting.

Darja Stefancic, a painter in Slovenia known for technicolor landscapes, thought it strange when an obscure online art gallery run by a woman from Argentina contacted her out of the blue and asked her to join its thin roster of artists.

The painter suspected a scam, and she worried that the gallery, which virtually nobody in Slovenia’s tiny, tight-knit art scene had heard of, “just wanted to cheat people.”

It did — but in ways that far surpassed even her darkest suspicions.

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