In mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, was handed a piece of paper that threatened to doom his organization. It was already in deep crisis. Three months had passed since Hamas militants burst through the barrier between Gaza and Israel, killing about 1,200 people and dragging 250 back as hostages. In retaliation, Israel rained bombs on Gazan cities, killing tens of thousands as it vowed to eradicate Hamas.

Lazzarini’s organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, was uniquely equipped to respond to the humanitarian crisis that ensued. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are refugees, and providing them with services has given UNRWA an outsize role in the territory. After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, which now functions only in the West Bank, Gazans were left with a highly dysfunctional government and came increasingly to depend on the agency. Before the war, UNRWA maintained more than 300 schools, health centers, warehouses, fuel depots and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees. Unlike other U.N. agencies, its staff is made up not of international aid workers but almost entirely of local Palestinians. Amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment, there was simply no other organization as deeply integrated in the territory and with the infrastructure necessary to distribute food, provide shelter and meet the basic needs of so many displaced, traumatized people.

Lazzarini, a Swiss-Italian veteran of United Nations aid operations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, took the helm of UNRWA in 2020. He hoped to put the agency on sure footing. For more than seven decades, it had lurched from one emergency to another, as turmoil in the Middle East buffeted the impoverished Palestinians that UNRWA sought to help. The war put an end to those plans. Repeated evacuation orders and the destruction caused by Israel’s air campaign have displaced about nine in 10 Gazans, some multiple times. At various points, the agency says, more than a million people — nearly half of Gaza’s population — have sought shelter in UNRWA facilities, with large families crowded into its classrooms or into warehouses that once held flour and medicine.

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Stepped-up Russian bombardments in and around Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine cut off water supplies and destroyed a road overpass that blocked a key route out of the strategic city, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday, as conditions deteriorated for civilians.

Russian troops are pressing ahead with an offensive and are now on the city’s doorstep, about five miles away, officials said, renewing calls for all residents to evacuate. Those who remain must rely on water from wells dug near apartment blocks, according to residents. Already, much of the city is without natural gas or electricity.

“The situation is dire and won’t improve anytime soon,” Vadym Filashkin, the head of the military administration for the Donetsk region, said in a post on the Telegram messaging app of the loss of water in Pokrovsk. “Leaving is the only smart option,” he added.

The city is the focus of a monthslong Russian offensive that has not let up despite a risky move by Ukraine in August to divert forces by invading the Kursk region of Russia.

Ukrainian troops are now also facing a counterattack toward their positions in Kursk, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday. That statement came after posts on social media by Russian military bloggers and commentary by analysts that Ukraine had lost control of several villages in recent fighting.

“Russia began counteroffensive activities,” Mr. Zelensky said, according to the Interfax-Ukraine media outlet.

Inside Ukraine, Pokrovsk looks set for a similar grim fate experienced by other cities in the eastern Donbas region, like Sievierodonetsk and Bakhmut, as they came within range of Russian artillery or rockets that hit key infrastructure.

In those cities, the lights blinked out, water taps ran dry and most people of means fled, leaving a small number of citizens, many of them older people who took shelter in basements as frequent shelling reduced buildings around them to ruins.

Over the summer, the Russian Air Force began hitting Pokrovsk with glide bombs, which are far more destructive than ground-based artillery since they can carry far higher loads of explosives.

In an interview last month, the city’s military administrator, Serhiy Dobryak, said he expected bombing to target infrastructure first and then residential areas as the Russian army closed in on the city.

The Ukrainian military has prepared for urban combat in Pokrovsk, setting up concrete pillboxes on some roadsides. Russia’s offensive over the past about 10 days had concentrated on rural areas south of the city, but Pokrovsk remains at risk.

Ukraine has halted daily evacuation trains from the city’s train station, in a further sign of unraveling security in the city.

A bombardment overnight led to the collapse of an overpass.

Civilians are still able to evacuate by car or bus using side roads, but the loss of water and destruction of bridges heralded a new phase of worsening conditions in Pokrovsk, Ukrainian officials said.

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.

If in doubt, hold an inquiry.

That seems to be the thinking in Britain when tragedy or scandal strikes.

Last week, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, a government investigation that was created in 2017 after a devastating residential fire killed 72 people, issued its final findings.

The damning report found plenty of blame to go around: unscrupulous manufacturers failed to disclose that their products posed a catastrophic fire risk; reckless deregulation allowed those materials to be used on high-rise residential projects in Britain even after they were banned in other countries; and a cost-cutting local government approved the use of dangerous materials even though they had already been implicated in another deadly fire.

But it took more than six years for the inquiry to finish. And London’s Metropolitan Police Department has said that it will need a further 12 to 18 months to determine whether to bring criminal charges.

“If one was being very cynical, one could argue that this is kind of the point of doing these very long inquiries,” said Sam Freedman, a former adviser to a Conservative government minister and the author of the book “Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It.”

Because such inquiries take a long time, “by the time you get to publication, the people who are named as being responsible aren’t in power,” he said, and public anger has dissipated. There are still some political costs from opening an inquiry, Freedman said, but they’re far lower than more immediate and concrete policy responses would be.

It’s not difficult to see why that approach might be appealing for politicians. It’s less obvious why the public is willing to accept it.

Yet the scandal-inquiry-delay sequence appears to have become one of the British government’s go-to responses to outrageous harm. There were 69 public inquiries started between 1990 and 2017, compared with only 19 in the previous 30 years, according to the Institute for Government, a London-based research group.

The Grenfell inquiry was speedy in comparison to the Infected Blood Inquiry, which released its final report this year on harmful blood transfusions administered between the 1970s and 1990s. The 1989 Hillsborough disaster spurred multiple inquiries, the latest of which issued its report in 2012.

The Grenfell fire was one of the biggest public scandals of the last decade in Britain. The story commanded so much newspaper coverage that you could have measured it by the yard, including investigations that revealed much of the malfeasance detailed in the inquiry’s final report. Not only was the harm to those who lost their lives or family members catastrophic, but the radius of the disaster’s impact extended far beyond the tower. The cladding that had caused the fire to burn out of control had also been used on other buildings. Ordinary homeowners were faced with massive bills to replace the materials.

Yet the tragedy did not lead to resignations at high levels of government, or criminal prosecutions. The flammable cladding is still on thousands of buildings, stuck in place by a battle over who should pay for its removal. Some specific policies were introduced after the fire, but many were too narrow to tackle the broader dangers that the fire revealed.

Freedman, during our conversation, imagined an alternative timeline in which the government acted decisively. “What you could have done is say, ‘Now we’re going to prioritize this above a dozen other policies that we previously said were very important. We’re going to put 20 billion quid into fixing all the cladding. We’re going to put in an emergency program to hire all the people we need to do it,’” he said.

But, he added, “It’s easier to say ‘We’ll do an inquiry,’ and make this the next government’s problem.”

The unpredictable power of scandal

It is always difficult to figure out why something didn’t happen. But one explanation for why the government was able to avoid the kind of decisive action Freedman described is that the reaction to the scandal, while substantial, did not really connect with an existing, broader movement for change. “There needs to be an underlying movement for reform, which seizes on an outrageous scandal,” Alice Evans, a researcher at King’s College, London, told me via email. That can take the form of an organized campaign or widespread pent-up demand for change, but it forms the gear that connects outrage to consequences.

When those circumstances are present, scandals can be one of the most formidable forces in public life, unifying opinion and propelling change.

The best example of that from recent years is #MeToo, when a wave of revelations of sexual misconduct swept powerful men from their positions in politics, the media and other industries. Crucially, the #MeToo movement had been building long before the Harvey Weinstein scandal became the focus of outrage. The activist Tarana Burke coined the slogan “Me too” a decade earlier, as a way for women to show solidarity with victims and illuminate the scale of the problem. Demand for change had been building for even longer, as the lack of consequences for sexual misconduct became increasingly discordant with women’s growing power and presence in public life.

By contrast, the Grenfell tragedy did not connect with a powerful, existing movement for reform. Housing is a major issue in Britain, but the political and media debate tends to focus more on how hard it is to buy a house than on the safety of the rental housing supply. (Even less of the focus is on public housing, which most of the Grenfell units were.)

It didn’t help that the fire occurred in 2017, a particularly messy era for British politics. The Conservative government, led by a weak prime minister, Theresa May, was consumed by infighting over Brexit, and was unlikely to want to rake over the slashing of building regulations that the party had championed just a few years before.

All this is not to say that public inquiries have no value. They can give a voice to people who might struggle to be heard, and to expose malfeasance by powerful people and corporations. The Grenfell inquiry, for instance, revealed email chains that demonstrated that manufacturers and sellers of deadly cladding and insulation had engaged in “deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing processes, misrepresent test data, and mislead the market.” That is now part of a permanent public record.

But for many harmed by the fire, that was not enough. At a news conference last week, family members of those who died expressed their sorrow and outrage, and demanded criminal charges.

“This inquiry hasn’t taught me anything. In fact, it’s delayed the justice that my family deserves. And the only person I can blame for that is the government,” said Hisam Choucair, who lost six family members in the fire.

“This inquiry was forced on us,” he said. “To some it gives answers. To some it doesn’t do anything, except it’s put that extra nail in the coffin, as they say. Or in the heart.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday that a Russian missile struck a cargo ship in the Black Sea that was carrying wheat to Egypt, and a Ukrainian military spokesman said that the attack took place in Romanian waters.

If confirmed, it would be the first such direct attack on a civilian vessel in open water since Ukraine established a new maritime export route last year.

Mr. Zelensky said on social media that there were no casualties in the attack, which he said had happened overnight. He did not describe the extent of any damage.

There was no immediate independent confirmation of the claim; and Russia’s defense ministry did not mention it on its Telegram channel.

Captain Dmytro Pletenchuk, the spokesman for Ukraine’s southern command said in a telephone interview that the ship had been hit by a missile from a Russian military jet while it was in “the exclusive economic zone waters of Romania. It was not in the grain corridor of Ukraine.” He said the ship was sailing under the flag of a third country, but did not say which.

An attack in the exclusive economic zone waters of Romania, a NATO member, would not be equivalent to an attack on sovereign territory under international law. Rather, the zone is an area where a government can control economic activity, such as oil drilling.

There was no immediate comment from NATO.

Maritime shipments from Ukraine, one of the world’s most important grain exporters, collapsed at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in early 2022, threatening global food security. In July that year, a deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey allowed Ukraine to resume exports through an agreed upon Black Sea corridor.

Russia terminated that deal a year later, however, and began a campaign of attacks on Odesa and other Ukrainian ports, crippling trade flows that are vital to its economy. But the volume of shipments has bounced back as a result of a new maritime corridor set up a few months later, under which ships hugged the coast until they reached the waters of Romania.

“Ukraine’s food deliveries to African and Middle Eastern countries are critical,” Mr. Zelensky said. “We will continue to make every effort to safeguard our ports, the Black Sea, and food exports to global markets. This is Ukraine’s true priority, to protect life, and it should be the priority of all countries.”

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, also condemned the attack.

The Black Sea has been a crucial theater in the war, with Ukraine mounting a series of attacks on Moscow’s navy, including sinking the flagship of the Black Sea fleet in April 2022. In August last year, Russia’s navy boarded a freighter in the Black Sea to enforce a blockade, firing warning shots. But both sides have refrained from attacking such vessels.

A fleet of sea drones Ukraine developed after the Russian invasion in 2022 can target vessels in harbors and while underway, but had been used against military vessels and those supporting Russian logistics. The drones have hit military targets in ports that also serve Russian commercial shipping, including Novorossiysk, a major oil exporting terminal on the Black Sea.

The secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Sergei K. Shoigu, had said on Tuesday that Russia had considered a Turkish proposal for both militaries to refrain from strikes on civilian ships in the Black Sea and energy infrastructure within each country, but the talks ended last month after Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region.

Andrew E. Kramer in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed reporting.

In 2020, as the South Korean authorities were pursuing a blackmail ring that forced young women to ​make sexually ​explicit videos for paying viewers, they found something else floating through the dark recesses of social media: pornographic images with other people’s faces crudely attached.

They didn’t know what to do with these ​early attempts at deepfake pornography. In the end, the National Assembly enacted a vaguely worded law against those making and distributing it. But that did not prevent a crime wave, using AI technolog​y, that has now taken the country’s misogynistic online culture to new depths.

​In the past two weeks, South Koreans have been shocked to find that a rising number of young men and teenage boys had taken hundreds of social media images of classmates, teachers​ and military colleagues — almost all young women and girls, including minors — and used them to create sexually exploitative images and video clips with deepfake apps.

They ​have spread the material through chat rooms on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, some with as many as 220,000 members.​ The deepfakes usually ​combine a victim’s face with a​ body in a sexually explicit pose, taken from pornography​. The technology is so sophisticated that it is​ often hard for ordinary people to tell they are fake, investigators say. As the country scrambles to address ​the threat, experts have noted that in South Korea, enthusiasm for new technologies can sometimes outpace concerns about their ethical implications.

But to many women, these deepfakes are just the latest online expression of a deep-rooted misogyny in their country — a culture that has now produced young men who consider it fun to share sexually humiliating images of women​ online.

“Korean society doesn’t treat women as fellow human beings,” said Lee Yu-jin, a student whose university is among the hundreds of ​middle schools, high schools and colleges where students have been victimized. She asked why the government had not done more “before it became a digital culture to steal photos of ​friends and us​e them ​for sexual​ humiliation.”

Online sexual violence is a growing problem globally, but South Korea is at the leading edge. Whether, and how, it can tackle the deepfake problem successfully will be watched by policymakers, school officials and law enforcement elsewhere.

The country has ​an underbelly of sexual criminality that has occasionally surfaced. A South Korean was convicted of running one of the world’s largest sites for images of child sexual abuse. A K-pop entertainer was ​found guilty of facilitating prostitution through a nightclub. ​For years, the police have battled spycam porn. And the mastermind of the blackmail ring investigated in 2020 was sentenced to 40 years in prison for luring young women, including teenagers, to make the videos that he sold online through Telegram​ chat rooms.

​The rise of easy-to-use deepfake technology has added an insidious dimension to such forms of sexual violence​: The victims are often unaware that they are victims until they receive an anonymous ​message, or a call from the police.

‘Slave,’ ‘Toilet,’ ‘Rag’

For one 30-year-old deepfake victim, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy, the attack began in 2021 with an anonymous message on Telegram that said: “Hi!”

Over the next few hours, a stream of obscenities and deepfake images and video clips followed, featuring her face, taken from family trip photos she had posted on social media. Written on the body were words like “slave,” “toilet” and “rag.”

In April, she learned from the police that two of her former classmates at Seoul National University were among those who had been detained. Male graduates of the prestigious university, along with accomplices, had targeted ​scores of ​women, including a dozen former Seoul National students, with deepfake pornography. One of the men detained was sentenced to five years in prison last month.​

“I cannot think of any reason they treated me like that, except that I was a woman,” she said. “The fact that there were people like them around me made me lose my faith in fellow human beings.”

She says she has struggled with trauma since the attack. Her heart races whenever she receives a message notification on her smartphone, or an anonymous call.

South Korea, whose pop culture is exported worldwide, has become the ​country most vulnerable to deepfake pornography. More than half of deepfakes globally target South Koreans, and the majority of those deepfakes victimize singers and actresses from the country, according to “2023 State of Deepfakes,” a study published by the U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Security Hero. Leading K-pop agencies have declared war on deepfakes, saying they were collecting evidence and threatening lawsuits against their creators and distributors.

Still, the problem is intensifying. The South Korean police reported 297 cases​ of deepfake sex crime between January and July, compared with 156 for all of 2021, when such data was first collected.

It was not until last month, when local news media exposed the extensive traffic in deepfakes on Telegram, that President Yoon Suk Yeol​ ordered his government to “root ​them out​.” Critics of Mr. Yoon noted that during his 2022 campaign for the presidency, he had denied that there was structural gender-based discrimination in South Korea and had promised to abolish its ministry of gender equality​.

News coverage of the rise in deepfakes this year led to panic among young women, many of whom deleted selfies and​ other personal images from their social media accounts, fearing they would be used for deepfakes. Chung Jin-kwon, who was a middle-school principal before assuming a role at the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education last month, said his former school had discussed whether to omit student photos from yearbooks.

“​Some teachers had already declined to have their photos ​there, ​replacing them with caricatures,” Mr. Chung said.

Young people in South Korea, one of the world’s most wired countries, become tech-savvy from an early age​. But critics say its school system is so ​focused on preparing them for the all-important college entrance exams that they aren’t taught to handle new technology in an ethical way.

“We produce exam-problem-solving machines,” Mr. Chung​ said. “They don’t learn values.”

A Push for Tougher Laws

Kim Ji-hyun, a Seoul city official whose team has counseled 200 teenag​ers implicated in digital sexual exploitation since 2019, said that some boys had used deepfakes to take revenge on ex-girlfriends — and that in some cases, girls had used them to ostracize classmates. But many young people were first drawn to deepfakes out of curiosity​, Ms. Kim said.

C​hat room operators attracted them with incentives, including Starbucks coupons​, and asked them to provide photos and personal data of women they knew​. Some ​of the Telegram channels, called “rape and humiliation rooms,” targeted individuals or women from certain schools, said Park Seong-hye, a team leader at the government-funded Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea, who has investigated digital sex crimes and provided help​ to victims.

Under the law enacted in 2020, people convicted of making sexually explicit or​ abusive deepfakes with an intent to distribute them can be sent to prison for up to five years. Those who seek to profit ​financially from distributing such content can face up to seven years. But there is no law against ​buying, storing or watching deepfakes.

Investigators must have court approval to go undercover to access deepfake chat rooms, and they can only do so to investigate reports that minors have been sexually abused. The process can also be slow.

“You find a chat room on a holiday, ​but by the time you get court approval, it’s gone,” said Hahm Young-ok, a senior investigator of online crimes at the National Police Agency.

The government has promised to push for tougher laws against buying or viewing sexually exploitative deepfakes.​ This month, the police investigating the latest spate of deepfakes said they had detained seven male suspects, six of them teenagers.

Pornography is censored on South Korea’s internet, but people can get around the controls by using virtual private networks, and the ban is hard to enforce on social media channels. The police have indicated that they might investigat​e whether Telegram ​had abetted deepfake sex crimes. Last month, ​Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested​ in France and charged with a range of offenses, including enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material.

Telegram ​said in a statement that it “has been actively removing content reported from Korea that breached its terms of service and will continue to do so​.”

Meanwhile, the government is being pressured to force ​online platforms to do more to filter out content like deepfake pornography.

“It’s time to choose between protecting the platforms and protecting our children and adolescents,” said Lee Soo-jung, a professor of forensic psychology at Kyonggi University​. “What ​we see happening now​ in 2024 was foretold back in 2020, but we have done nothing​ in between.”

Outside Mexico’s Senate building on Tuesday, university students wearing masks and dressed as the country’s Supreme Court justices took turns smashing a black piñata with a stick. The piñata, covered in the word “justicia,” or justice, was filled with fake money — a performance staged to illustrate the supposed corruption plaguing the country’s judiciary.

“The election of judges and magistrates by popular vote is a democratization of one of the most important powers of our country,” said Layla Manilla, 21, one of the participating students, who is studying politics.

Ms. Manilla is one of thousands of Mexicans who have taken to the streets in recent weeks to show their support for — or opposition to — the contentious judicial overhaul championed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his allies, which on Wednesday overcame its last major obstacle when it was narrowly passed in the Senate.

In interviews with The New York Times, Mexicans expressed a range of concerns and aspirations for the measure. Some worried about the end of judicial independence, while others celebrated the chance to vote in the people responsible for distributing justice. Many more were indifferent to the overhaul, unclear on exactly what to expect from the change.

The legislation would shift the judiciary from an appointment-based system, largely grounded in training and qualifications, to one in which voters elect judges and there are fewer requirements to serve. Some 7,000 judges would lose their jobs, from the chief justice of the Supreme Court down to those at state and local courts, and Mexicans could start voting as soon as next year.

The majority of state legislatures adopted the measure by early Thursday — a requirement for its passage — paving the way for its anticipated delivery to Mr. López Obrador to be signed into law.

In the southern state of Yucatán, a group of protesters on Wednesday afternoon stormed the local congress, where Morena and its allies hold a majority. As demonstrators called for them to suspend the vote, chanting “The judiciary will not fall!” and shouting “Listen to us!,” lawmakers decided to delay it. They approved the project a few hours later. Critics of the measures also protested in several other states and tried to barge into congressional buildings, resulting in some injuries.

In recent weeks, more than 50,000 judges and court workers went on strike across the country, and protesters forced their way into the Senate building in Mexico City on Tuesday afternoon before the vote. Senators then moved to a second venue with a large police presence.

The president’s insistence in pushing through the measures has kept financial markets on edge, marked by a roughly 15 percent plunge in the value of the currency, the peso, since early June.

The government argues the measure is crucial for modernizing the judiciary, eradicating corruption and restoring faith in a system marred by graft, nepotism and influence-peddling. Mr. López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, takes office on Oct. 1 and has fully backed the plan.

However, critics oppose the overhaul, contending that it wouldn’t effectively address corruption, but rather bolster Mr. López Obrador’s nationalist political agenda.

“Judges, magistrates and justices are the voice of the law and the Constitution, not of the people,” said Luis Hernández, 21, a law and economics student, moments after delivering a rousing speech while protesting at the Senate building. “They are the voice of reason. There is no point in having a judicial career if, in the end, you have to be popular to deliver justice.”

José Luis Cázares Gayosso, 55, a federal employee who lives in Iztapalapa, a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, said that he had problems with the judicial system and that it needed to change. He said it took him too long — four years — to gain custody of his two children after he and his partner separated, and it was resolved only in 2019 after he took legal action against the judge.

Still, Mr. Cázares Gayosso said, he preferred that judges remain appointed but that they be forced to leave office sooner. He said he feared that voting for them might end up giving the country’s ruling party control of the judicial system.

“It’s dangerous to give all of the power to one party,” he said.

Polls commissioned by the Morena party indicate that around 80 percent of respondents think revamping the judicial system is necessary — though other polls have found that more than 50 percent of those surveyed don’t know what the overhaul entails.

“It’s very fashionable now to be of the people, but sometimes the people aren’t informed,” said Juan Diego Naranjo, 28, a plumber in Cancún. “If they’re not going to know much about the judicial candidates, then many won’t go out to vote. If in the presidential, governor and municipal elections many of us didn’t go out to vote, maybe there will be less for judges.”

Mr. Naranjo admitted that he himself didn’t cast a ballot during the 2018 presidential elections, which Mr. López Obrador won, because he didn’t have time to study the campaigns.

Ms. Manilla, the college student who supports the overhaul, said, “There’s never total certainty that majorities will make the right decisions.” But, she added, “if the people make mistakes, then the people are also going to be able to rectify.”

Other Mexicans said they worried there were important pieces missing from the discussion.

Laura Alvarez, 38, a restaurant manager in Monterrey, in northeastern Mexico, said that choosing a judge might improve public confidence. She said she had a terrible experience with the justice system when her daughter was sexually abused and the case was dismissed before it even reached a judge. Still, she felt the judicial overhaul needed more explanation from politicians.

“They’re not telling you, ‘This is what I want to change and this is what I’m going to offer you,’” she said. “That’s why I find myself in the middle. I want more transparency.”

Regardless of their differences on the plan, many Mexicans largely agreed there was a long-overdue need to rid the system of what they called privileges, nepotism and corruption.

Javier Martín Reyes, a law professor at National Autonomous University of Mexico, said that a majority of Mexicans’ interactions with the judiciary were not at the federal level but at the local one — such as labor, family or civil disputes — and that it was here that “more reforms” were needed.

But he said that two important parts of the justice system that the average Mexican dealt with most often — the police and prosecutors — weren’t addressed in the proposal.

“If Mexico today is a country with enormous rates of impunity, it is largely because the vast majority of crimes are not investigated and some that are investigated do not reach conclusions,” Mr. Reyes said. “And those that reach conclusions many times are cases that aren’t sufficiently well assembled or investigated to later be upheld in a tribunal or court.”

After living so long under a system he described as riddled with problems, José Luis Valderrama, a 68-year-old grocery bagger in Monterrey, said it was worth trying something new — especially if voters could elect qualified people.

“Possibly things will change,” he said. “We really don’t know. It’s a matter of trying.”

Chantal Flores contributed reporting from Monterrey, Mexico, and Ricardo Hernández Ruiz from Cancún.

When Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia returned to work this summer after recovering from gunshot wounds from a May assassination attempt, he released a video message titled “I forgive and I warn.”

Since then, there has been scant sign of forgiveness. But Mr. Fico has more than delivered on his warning to those he considers political enemies.

In recent weeks, he has presided over a rolling purge of anticorruption prosecutors, museum and theater directors, journalists and others he holds responsible for an atmosphere of “hatred and aggression” that he says led to the attack.

While his supporters cheer what they see as a long overdue cleansing of a system dominated by liberal elites, his critics see a vindictive, scattershot assault on people with little in common other than their shared role as perceived foes of Mr. Fico and his far-right allies in a coalition government.

The pace has been so rapid and its scope so wide that many in Bratislava, the liberal-leaning capital, are filled with foreboding that he wants to diminish the space for critical voices. Mr. Fico, they say, is taking Slovakia down the illiberal road charted by Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of neighboring Hungary, including by setting a course that is more antagonistic to the West and more friendly toward Russia.

“He really changed physically and psychologically after he was shot, and it is becoming really dangerous,” said Lubos Machaj, 70, a widely respected journalist who has known Mr. Fico for years and lost his job as director general of Slovakia’s state-funded public broadcaster in July.

He was not fired: His old job simply ceased to exist after the government liquidated the public broadcaster, RTVS, and created a new one, STVR.

Mr. Fico “is attacking all the pillars of our democracy,” Mr. Machaj said.

That, said Lubos Blaha, deputy chairman of Mr. Fico’s governing Smer party, is just the “hysterical” chatter of Bratislava liberals.

“They say we are becoming more authoritarian and undemocratic. We are just trying to introduce more balance,” Mr. Blaha said, insisting that the actions were a response to “a world where the prime minister was almost killed by a person brainwashed by liberals.” Mr. Fico’s office did not respond to an interview request.

The prime minister has described the man charged with the assassination attempt — a 71-year-old amateur poet, Juraj Cintula — as a “messenger of evil and political hatred” sent by his enemies.

But no evidence has been made public that Mr. Cintula, had any fixed political views or connection to Mr. Fico’s opponents. The government initially described him as a “lone wolf” but later claimed he might have had accomplices.

Soon after Mr. Machaj was ousted from the public broadcaster, the same fate met Michal Surek, a prosecutor involved in corruption cases against members and allies of the governing party, Smer.

The special prosecutor’s office where he had worked was abolished in March, but he had kept working on several sensitive cases, including one involving a prominent Smer legislator.

In July, the general prosecutor, an ally of Mr. Fico, suspended Mr. Surek.

Then, a corrupt prosecutor whom Mr. Surek had put behind bars in 2021 by securing his conviction for bribery and leaking secret investigation files was released from prison at the request of Mr. Fico’s interior minister.

“They are taking revenge against people who made their life difficult,” Mr. Surek said.

Katarina Batkova, the executive director of Via Iuris, which researches legal issues, described Mr. Surek as “a clean and professional guy” who could not be compromised “so they had to get rid of him.”

Mr. Orban has done much the same in Hungary. After years of silencing independent voices, he has turned Hungary’s vibrant democracy into what is essentially a single-party state.

Mr. Fico has also emulated Mr. Orban in decrying the West’s support for Ukraine, denouncing NATO and the European Union, of which Slovakia is a member. He disbanded some government offices set up to counter Russian disinformation about the war and other issues.

But Mr. Fico has done nothing to block Western aid and has allowed Slovak weapons manufacturers to keep selling to Ukraine and allowed other countries to transport arms bound for Ukraine through Slovakia.

And unlike Mr. Orban, whose party has a large majority in Parliament, Mr. Fico has only a tenuous grip. His party failed to win a majority in elections last September, and his survival as prime minister depends on legislators from the ultranationalist Slovak National Party.

“We are moving in Hungary’s direction, but we are not there yet,” said Michal Simecka, the leader of the main opposition party, Progressive Slovakia. “In Slovakia you still have many independent media and some independent institutions, though of course they are now all under assault.”

One of the main targets in recent weeks has been cultural institutions.

Alexandra Kusa, the director of Slovakia’s national art gallery since 2010, said she had been axed in early August.

She said she was not particularly surprised. The head of the Slovak National Theater was fired the day before and the culture minister, Martina Simkovicova, has been vocal in her disdain for a cultural establishment she sees as too pro-European and out of touch with Slovak values and its traditional affinity with Russia.

“We have all known since the election that we were not compatible with the current government,” Ms. Kusa said.

Mr. Fico, a former leftist turned nationalist, has long had a combative relationship with Slovakia’s cultural, media and intellectual elites, saying they sneer at ordinary people and their values in favor of promoting things like L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

Ms. Kusa said that replacing the heads of some state-funded cultural institutions was fairly routine after a change of government. But the wave of dismissals, she added, had gone far beyond usual post-election churn.

The head of the national library, a children’s museum and other institutions have lost their jobs at the hands of Ms. Simkovicova, a member of Mr. Fico’s far-right coalition partner. The culture minister has also slashed funding for bodies out of step with her views.

“I stand by my work,” Ms. Simkovicova said in a message on Telegram, denouncing her critics as “supporters of the progressive agenda” who “call for tolerance but are absolutely intolerant of other opinions.”

Most worrying, said Mr. Simecka, the opposition party leader, has been the government’s drive to overhaul the legal system to restrict protests and make it more difficult to prosecute corruption cases.

A revised criminal code that went into force recently reduces sentences for economic crimes and tightens the statute of limitations for prosecution, meaning that politicians from Mr. Fico’s party who faced prosecution before last year’s election now have little to fear.

An elite anti-corruption police unit was disbanded in August, after the abolition of Mr. Surek’s special prosecutor’s office.

The special prosecutor’s office had been in Mr. Fico’s sights for years because of its role in investigating the 2018 murder of a Slovak journalist, who had been reporting on government corruption, and his fiancée.

Accusations that a businessman with ties to the government, headed at the time of the murder by Mr. Fico, had ordered the killings set off huge street protests that forced Mr. Fico to resign. And that left him nursing a deep grievance against what he saw as a justice system dominated by enemies.

“I keep 10 percent of my energy for revenge,” he told political and business friends in 2021, according to the transcript of a secret recording made by investigators.

The following year, Mr. Fico and a longtime Smer party ally, Robert Kalinak, who is now defense minister, were charged with organized crime offenses. The case was later shut down by the prosecutor general, who in late July ordered Mr. Surek suspended.

“The only agenda they have now is a vendetta — and making sure that Smer and people connected to Smer are free from justice,” Mr. Simecka said.

Mr. Blaha, the Smer vice chairman, instead said the government is “just doing what we promised in last year’s election. We have a mandate to make changes.”

Marek Janiga contributed reporting.

A deadly uptick of Russian guided glide bombs slamming into Ukrainian cities — as many as 800 in a single week this summer — has injected new urgency into a long-running debate over whether Ukraine should be allowed to launch missiles supplied by the West at military targets deep in Russian territory.

Amid signs that President Biden is wavering, the issue will be on the table when he meets in Washington on Friday with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, after the two leaders dispatched their top diplomats to Kyiv on Wednesday to hear out the latest pleas from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ukraine has for months asked to use Western long-range weapons to attack more of the military sites that Russia uses to launch missiles and house the warplanes that drop the large, free-fall glide bombs that are wreaking havoc on Ukrainian forces and cities.

This past spring, Mr. Biden put specific limits — around 60 miles — on how far Ukraine can fire American-made surface-to-surface Army Tactical Missile Systems into Russia, leery of spurring a harsh retaliation from President Vladimir V. Putin.

U.S. officials said Britain and France, which gave Ukraine long-range, air-launched “bunker busters” in 2023, appear to be waiting for Mr. Biden’s endorsement before allowing those European missiles to hit targets far into Russian territory. The officials, like other U.S. officials interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, warned on Wednesday that Russia was preparing “appropriate countermeasures” should the West extend Ukraine’s authority, RIA Novosti, a Russian state-run news agency, reported.

But earlier presumed provocations that the Biden administration resisted — including sending Western tanks and F-16s to the fight, as well as Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, a Russian border region — have not prompted a Russian retaliation against NATO.

And Mr. Zelensky is now pushing for the permissions on a near-daily basis.

“Terror can be reliably stopped only in one way: by strikes on Russian military airfields, on their bases, on the logistics of Russian terror,” Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday. “We have to achieve this.”

Mr. Biden is also facing pressure in American foreign policy circles to loosen the restrictions. Senior American military planners no longer advise against doing so, and high-ranking former U.S. diplomats and generals urged him in a letter on Tuesday to “let Ukraine defend itself.”

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, noted the recent escalation in Russian airstrikes on Wednesday. “The time has come to ease restrictions on Ukrainians’ use of U.S.-provided weapons,” he said.

But another U.S. official cautioned that no imminent change in the restrictions was expected. And, ultimately, the decision rests with Mr. Biden.

“We’re working that out right now,” Mr. Biden told reporters on Tuesday.

Here is how Ukraine could use that broader authority.

“Attack ’ems”

Right now, it appears Mr. Biden is weighing how much farther into Russia to allow Ukraine to fire the Army Tactical Missile Systems — known as ATACMS, or “attack ’ems” — that the United States first gave Kyiv last year. The ATACMS have a range of about 190 miles.

In May, Mr. Biden reluctantly agreed to let Ukraine fire ATACMS into Russia to target military bases that were used to launch attacks on the Ukrainian border city of Kharkiv. That authority extended about 60 miles. But U.S. and European military officials now say Russia moved 90 percent of the air bases that house its bomber jets out of the ATACMS range.

“A missed chance to attack them, when they were still in range,” said Col. Markus Reisner, who oversees force development at Austria’s main military training academy and closely follows how weapons are being used in the war in Ukraine.

Experts say the ATACMS could also target Russian ground-based air-defense systems that threaten Ukraine’s nascent fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

F-16s

The first tranche of American-made F-16s — Ukraine will not say how many, but believed to number around a dozen — arrived this summer. While Ukrainian officials say they will initially be used for air defense, like shooting down incoming Russian cruise missiles, it is expected the F-16s will also fly combat missions.When used in a ground-attack role, the fighter jets have a range of about 500 miles, according to the Air Force.

The F-16s could play a crucial role against the guided glide bombs that have pummeled population centers and military posts in eastern Ukraine. Experts said that Ukraine wants to use the F-16s to intercept Russian warplanes to prevent them from releasing the glide bombs.

The glide bombs, many of which are old warheads that have been refitted with pop-out wings and satellite navigation systems, are dropped dozens of miles from the border — outside the reach of Ukraine’s short-range surface-to-air missiles.

But it remains unclear whether Ukraine will fly the F-16s into Russian territory, and the NATO countries that donated the jets are divided over whether they should.

But if they were to cross the border, they could target Russian aircraft with medium-range missiles known as AMRAAMs that the United States has already sent to Ukraine. Depending on the model, AMRAAMS can be fired both from an airborne F-16 and a ground-based air-defense launching system. According to the Air Force, the missiles can reach targets more than 30 miles away.

JASSMs, Storm Shadows and SCALPs

The Biden administration is also poised to give Ukraine air-launched cruise missiles that can be used with the F-16s. The weapons, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, or JASSMs, are older models, but they have a range of about 230 miles and carry a 1,000-pound warhead. They could strike targets — like air bases and ammunition depots — deep into Russian territory without leaving Ukrainian airspace.

But a U.S. official said that even if the U.S. decided to send JASSMs to Ukraine, they would not be delivered for months. And it remains unclear if the Biden administration would allow the JASSMs to be launched into Russia, as opposed to Crimea and other parts of Ukraine that are controlled by Russia.

Britain and France have already sent Ukraine their own air-launched cruise missiles that, so far, have struck Russian targets in Crimea and in the Black Sea. They have a range of about 155 miles and have been fired from Ukraine’s aging fleet of Soviet-era and Russian-designed fighter jets. Virtually the same model of missile, they are known as Storm Shadows in Britain and SCALPs in France.

Ukraine is already able to strike deep inside Russia using domestically produced drones and is testing a new long-range surface-to-surface missile that can be fired without asking the West’s permission. That domestic production capability has been one reason the Biden administration has resisted allowing American weapons to be used for those attacks.

Yet when it comes to combating the glide bombs in particular, American officials and experts said that Ukraine will need to strike deep into Russia with a mix of fighter jets and ground-based air systems — nearly all of which will require Western approval.

“As Ukraine gains new Western arms and technologies, it can better address the threat,” John Hoehn and William Courtney, munitions experts and former U.S. officials, wrote in an analysis for the RAND Corporation in June. “But the West will also need to show more flexibility in the conditions it sets for Ukraine’s use of advanced weaponry.”

Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and John Ismay contributed reporting.

An Israeli airstrike on Wednesday killed at least 18 people, Palestinian officials said, at a school turned shelter in the Gaza Strip that Israel said Hamas used as a command post, and a United Nations agency said six of the dead were its employees.

The attack in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, came as the Israeli military resumed the offensive on another front, launching a new round of deadly raids in the occupied West Bank.

The chief U.N. relief agency for Palestinians, known as UNRWA, said the strike on the Jaouni School building in Nuseirat was the deadliest single incident for its staff over the 11 months of a war that has killed more than 200 of its workers.

The Gaza Civil Defense emergency services said that those killed included women and children and that, in addition to 18 confirmed dead, a similar number were wounded, some of them critically. It said the strike was the fifth time the school, which housed displaced people, had been hit during the war.

Gaza’s schools have not held classes since the fighting began in October, and many school buildings have become shelters for people forced to flee their homes. Israel has increasingly been targeting such schools, with analysts saying that its military has largely destroyed Hamas’s network of tunnels, forcing more fighters above ground.

Since invading Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Israeli forces have also sharply increased the frequency and intensity of raids in the West Bank, saying that it is rooting out armed militants there, as well.

The military mounted raids and at least one airstrike overnight and into Wednesday in the cities of Tulkarm and Tubas in the northern West Bank and in other locations nearby, killing several people it described as terrorists. The actions came after a lull of a few days, following lengthy and destructive incursions into the same region.

Israel’s military said that its forces were carrying out an operation against militants, and that early Wednesday its aircraft struck in Tubas “and eliminated a terrorist cell consisting of five terrorists armed with explosives who posed a threat” to Israeli forces. Palestinian officials also said that five people were killed, and Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that the dead were young men near a mosque.

Wafa also said that three other people were killed in another airstrike, on a car in Tulkarm. The Israeli military did not confirm that strike but said that in Tulkarm it had killed at least one person and “located and dismantled an explosives laboratory.”

Since the start of the war, Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 650 people in the West Bank, including civilians, according to the United Nations. In that time, Israel has carried out 55 airstrikes in the West Bank, which previously were quite rare, the United Nations said.

On Wednesday, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both issued their first extensive remarks on the killing last week of an American woman, Aysenur Eygi, 26, who was in the West Bank to protest Israeli settlements. The Israeli military has acknowledged that one of its troops most likely fired the fatal shot during a clash with demonstrators throwing rocks. Other protesters say that Ms. Eygi never took part in the violence, and that the shots were fired after the clash had ended.

Mr. Biden said he was “outraged and deeply saddened” by the killing of Ms. Eygi and demanded “full accountability” from Israel for her death. Ms. Harris said the shooting “raises legitimate questions” about the conduct of Israeli military forces in the West Bank.

The new raids in Tulkarm, on the border with Israel, and Tubas, about 20 miles to the east, followed a series of destructive and lengthy incursions, a particularly intense 10-day campaign that killed at least 39 people, according to the Palestinian authorities, who do not separate civilians from combatants in their casualty counts.

Many Palestinians, especially in Tulkarm and the northern city of Jenin, were trapped in their homes for days while bulldozers ripped up streets in what the Israeli military said was an effort to unearth improvised explosives planted by armed groups.

In Tubas on Wednesday, Harith al-Hasani, a 33-year-old resident, said that Israeli forces had stormed the city during the early morning hours before “clashes erupted and we started hearing explosions.” Israeli aircraft and drones buzzed in the city’s skies, and soldiers also were “walking around on foot,” Mr. al-Hasani said.

“Usually they move around in their vehicles,” he said.

Mr. al-Hasani said that Israeli forces had closed roads with earthen barriers and were interrogating young men in the streets and raiding people’s homes.

Wafa, the news agency, said that Israeli forces had closed all entrances to Tubas and were inspecting ambulances before allowing them to enter a local hospital.

The Israeli military said it could not immediately comment on the reports, but later said its troops had exchanged gunfire with militants in Tubas, arrested some of them and dismantled a car bomb.

Since Oct. 7, raids have been a near-daily reality for the nearly three million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Israeli officials have described the raids as necessary to combat rising Palestinian militancy, particularly a spate of attempted bombings, over the past few weeks. Israeli officials have said that more than 150 attacks against Israelis have emanated from the Jenin and Tulkarm areas in the past year.

Liam Stack and Thomas Fuller contributed reporting.