It began with messages sent by Israel to radio stations and some cellphones in Beirut on Monday morning, warning of imminent military action.

“The I.D.F. will be moving against military bases,” an automated voice said, using the acronym for the Israel Defense Forces. “The I.D.F. don’t want to hurt you. If you are present in a building used by Hezbollah, you should leave.”

The alerts stoked alarm across the capital, the southern suburbs of which are dominated by Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. Parents rushed to schools to pick up their children. By early afternoon, lines of cars and motorbikes snaked out from fuel stations and down streets in the city as many residents fled, hoping to find refuge in Lebanon’s northern mountains. Others wandered the mostly empty aisles of grocery stores, their carts stacked with water bottles, bags of rice and jugs of oil, uncertainty hanging in the air.

All the while, news updates flashed across people’s phone screens detailing the more than 1,000 Israeli airstrikes pounding southern Lebanon. Worn by decades of conflicts, many believed they knew what was coming.

“It’s a war,” said Daher Amdi, 34, as he sat outside a mostly empty cafe, taking slow drags from a cigarette.

Residents in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, have grown increasingly on edge as Israel has stepped up its airstrikes against Hezbollah. With Monday’s strikes across southern Lebanon, the prospect of the escalating conflict enveloping Beirut suddenly became real.

The attacks were the deadliest in a single day in Lebanon since 2006, with hundreds of people killed and thousands injured, according to the Lebanon’s Health Ministry, mostly in the south of the country. And with both sides vowing to step up the conflict’s intensity, many residents, like Mr. Amdi, fear the city will soon be caught up in a full-on war.

Late Monday morning, Lebanon’s education ministry ordered the closure of some public and private schools, citing “security and military situations” that could endanger students. Outside of one school in east Beirut, dozens of secondary school students in light-blue polo shirts stood waiting to be picked up. Other, younger students hurried out of the building, many clutching their parents’ hands.

Joaelle Naser, 44, had come to pick up her three daughters, ages 6, 8 and 16. “I am scared, I’m scared,” Ms. Naser said, standing next to her two youngest, their neat ponytails held in place with fuzzy, rainbow-colored scrunchies. “I’m not prepared for if something happens.”

As the day dragged on, the extent of Israel’s deadly barrage became clearer. News outlets showed massive plumes of smoke hovering over villages across the south. People stared at their phones, watching the death toll tick up to 50, then 100, watching it double, triple — and then rise higher.

In Tariq El-Jdideh, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in Western Beirut, Habib Bazzi, 75, sat on a metal bench, his eyes closed, his face turned up toward the sun. Originally from Bint Jbeil, along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, Mr. Bazzi had been watching news channels on television since early Monday morning. He stepped outside, he said, to take a break from the seemingly endless destruction.

“I’m heartbroken,” Mr. Bazzi said. “What else can I say?”

In the City Center Mall just outside of Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut dominated by the Iran-backed Hezbollah, Mirna, 38, and her 14-year-old son roamed the aisles of the Carrefour grocery store. They pushed two large, deep blue shopping carts brimming with bags of sugar, lentils and rice.

A resident of Dahiya, Mirna, who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of retaliation, said that most of her neighbors had fled the neighborhood for relatives’ homes in other parts of the city or in northern Lebanon. Only three days before, Dahiya was rocked by an explosion that killed several senior Hezbollah commanders — a sign, she worried, of what was to come.

“I told my husband we should leave, we should definitely leave soon,” she said.

Nearby, Lama Abdul Sater stood behind the glass counter of a watch stand in the mall, neat lines of gold and silver bands in the case reflecting the fluorescent lights above. Her 10-year-old daughter, Manesa Tarshishi, stood next to her in a bright pink-and-blue sundress, fiddling with the zipper of her pencil case.

Tucked behind the counter was Ms. Sater’s large, navy handbag, holding her wallet and two passports. Before she left for work with Manesa, her husband advised her to take them just in case they had to suddenly evacuate the city. If there was bombardment so intense that they could not leave, he told her, they should stay at the mall — it was safer, he said.

“Death is very close, I’m worried it’s very near,” Ms. Sater said in a near whisper, so Manesa would not hear. But as certain as she was that war was coming, she did not know whether it was safer to leave or stay, or where she would go if they fled the city. “Any decision I make might not be the right decision, I’m not sure about anything,” she said.

Such impossible choices are familiar to many residents here. Even before the recent hostilities, Lebanon was deep in turmoil from a yearslong political and economic crisis that began in 2019 when the economy collapsed, taking the government along with it. The country’s current caretaker government has been unable to provide the most basic services since it came to power in 2020.

Against that backdrop, most Lebanese do not have an appetite for another big war.

“It’s not the time for this war,” said Bilal Borjawi, 37. He used to run a tourism agency, he said, but over the last year his business had sputtered to a halt, with many clients worried about the security situation. Now, he said, he works as a security guard making about $300 a month — nothing compared with the $20,000 a month he used to rake in when he had his agency.

“We cannot afford more pressure than we already feel right now,” Mr. Borjawi said.

Still, as they have throughout the decades of civil strife, war, economic downturns and political crises, Lebanese in the city have endured.

At a Total Energies gas station in the Mazra neighborhood of West Beirut, drivers honked their horns, impatient to fill their tanks with fuel. Farid, a driver in his 30s who said he lives nearby, was filling up his car as his family prepared to leave for eastern Lebanon.

“My family is really panicked, they’re crying and scared,” he said, pulling crisp $20 bills from his worn, leather wallet to hand to the station attendant. “I keep trying to calm them down, saying they aren’t going to attack, they won’t bomb us here, but honestly I don’t know.”

Later Monday night, the city’s fears were realized. About 6:30 p.m., news of another strike flashed across television screens. This time, the target was in Beirut.

When the Ukrainian army hit a crisis of recruitment earlier this year amid rising losses on the battlefield, one of the most popular cultural personalities in the country stepped up and enlisted.

“At some point it became uncomfortable not to join up,” said Serhiy Zhadan, in an interview at a military base in July.

A beloved poet, novelist, lyricist and rock star in Ukraine, Mr. Zhadan, 50, joined a local National Guard brigade in his home city of Kharkiv in May and started a two-month stint in boot camp. By summer he was serving in an engineering unit on the second line of defense.

Many of his friends were already fighting, he said of his decision to enlist. “This feeling that someone is fighting for you, instead of you, while you are also able to join, was also important.”

Although he said he did not intend to set an example, Mr. Zhadan’s decision to join the army resonated with many, across generations and with lovers of both his words and music.

He can fill a sports hall or a Kyiv theater for poetry readings, as he did on occasions this summer, and his rock band was acclaimed for delivering the best set at the Atlas music festival, Ukraine’s largest, in July. Proceeds of his performances go toward buying medical supplies and other equipment for the soldiers.

His commanders and friends in the Khartia National Guard Brigade were happy for the morale boost and publicity his presence has brought. He has long been a supporter and fund-raiser for the brigade, and even gave it its name, which means Charter, when volunteers from Kharkiv formed it in 2022.

But his commanders are also conscious of the responsibility to keep such a national icon safe. A Russian war blogger has announced a $5,000 price on his head. Mr. Zhadan said that he was not getting special treatment, but that in breaks in his training, soldiers and instructors would ask him for selfies.

Poets have held a special place in Soviet society and its aftermath, trusted as dissidents under a brutal totalitarian system, and as moral and cultural guides in the chaotic transition after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In his work, Mr. Zhadan has searched for meaning for what he calls the last Soviet generation, people like himself who grew up in the Soviet Union and came of age as Ukraine gained its independence, participated in years of rallies and democracy protests, and are now fighting a war.

His fans, whether of his poetry, music or both, turn to him for cultural sustenance.

“We all need food for our souls,” said Bohdan Beniuk, director of the Theater on Podil in Kyiv, as he introduced Mr. Zhadan at a poetry reading in July.

His rock concerts with his band Zhadan i Sobaky (Zhadan and the Dogs) have brought him additional popularity, especially with younger people. His songs, a mixture of punk and jazz, which he writes the lyrics for and the band sets to music, are anarchic, full of profanities and odes to drugs, alcohol and rock ‘n’ roll. But they’re also about love and freedom.

His body of written work — poetry and prose spanning more than three decades, chronicling his own evolution and that of his generation — has made him one of the most important contemporary literary figures in the country. Significantly, he is a poet from eastern Ukraine, and he has given voice to the people from the borderland provinces of the Donbas, which are now largely occupied by Russian forces and claimed by President Vladimir V. Putin as part of Russia.

“He’s a great poet,” said Tamara Hundorova, a professor at the Institute of Literature at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard Universities, who last year proposed Mr. Zhadan for the Nobel Prize in Literature. “He’s a true poet but he’s also a citizen, he’s very engaged in this very difficult time.”

Professor Hundorova, among other academics, credits Mr. Zhadan with helping revitalize the Ukrainian language, not least with his use of slang and swear words, and contributing to a cultural renaissance, picking up the mantle of Ukrainian futurist poets of the 1920s, who flourished in Kharkiv but were cut short by the purges under Stalin.

Born in August 1974, the son of a Soviet army officer, Mr. Zhadan grew up in a village southeast of Kharkiv, near the Russian border, and went to high school in the nearby town of Starobilsk. The town, where his father is buried, has been under Russian occupation since 2022.

He studied philology at the H.S. Skovoroda Kharkiv National Pedagogical University in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city and its former capital, and has since made his home there. After graduating, he worked as a researcher at the Kharkiv Literary Museum and joined a collective of young writers.

His mother’s younger sister, Oleksandra Kovalova, a poet and translator, who was prominent in the Ukrainian national liberation movement in Kharkiv, was a formative influence. She took him to political rallies, introduced him to literary and artistic circles in Kharkiv, and helped him publish his first volume of poetry.

He burst on the literary scene at age 17, “baring his soul boldly,” in 1991, the year that Ukraine gained independence, Ms. Hundorova, the professor, said in an interview.

Ahead of the times, he was the first to explore the symbolism of losing the country, the Soviet Union, that he had grown up in, and seeing his parents’ world, and all the certainties of the communist system, collapse — and along with it, the authority of the older generation. His generation, he depicted as homeless and nihilistic, in constant migration.

Later in adulthood, he experienced a homecoming, explored in his 2010 novel “Voroshilovgrad,” rediscovering a deep connection to the “high sky” and “black earth” of the land and a feeling of loyalty and belonging to the neglected, postindustrial regions of the east.

The novel, whose title references a Soviet-era name for the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, was prescient, revealing the deep ties Ukrainians felt for their homeland. His poetry was too. He published poems about war coming to the region a full two years before Russia began its military interference to annex the Crimean Peninsula and its staging of a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

The full-scale invasion in 2022, when Russian troops came close to capturing the city of Kharkiv, robbed him of words at first, he said.

“The stress was so enormous, it took your breath away,” he said. But the need to write returned after a few months. He remains prolific, dwelling on pain, death and separation, and the importance of recording it all.

In recent poems translated from the Ukrainian by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps, he wrote:

They didn’t tell you the most important thing.

They didn’t warn you that death is limited

By the silence that comes with it.

He returned to the theme in another poem:

The only rule — grow roots,

Break through.

The only chance — reach out for a branch, grab hold of a voice.

There is nothing else.

No one will remember you for your silence.

No one but you can name the rivers nearby.

On a morning in July driving with an engineering team near the front line, he expressed great rage against the Russian occupation of the eastern provinces of Ukraine.

He said he had friends living under Russian occupation, who became trapped and unable to leave. Some have been detained, some have been killed and their property seized, and a classmate even ended up fighting and dying on the Russian side, he said.

“In the east, the war cuts through every family,” he said.

Yet he remains confident Ukraine will prevail.

“It will be a long process, but I think at the end of this process we will see a return to our borders,” he said.

For the Russians, he predicted great turmoil. “With this war, they started a very serious and irreversible, internal destruction,” he said. “I think we are witnessing this colossus crumbling.”

Vladyslav Golovin contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Two of the front-runners in Sri Lanka’s presidential election were the sons of former presidents. A third contender, the incumbent, was the nephew and political heir of yet another president.

But when Anura Kumara Dissanayake arrived at the election commission office late Sunday to accept his victory in the vote, he cut a different figure, his sleeves rolled up and his beige shirt tucked into simple blue jeans.

His sweep to power is the biggest jolt to Sri Lanka’s political landscape in decades — an emphatic rejection of the political elite that had long ruled the island nation. He rode a wave of discontent that crested in 2022 with a popular uprising over an economic collapse and continued until the first presidential election since then.

Mr. Dissanayake, 55, offered his broad leftist coalition as the best hope for a different political culture. He cast it as an alternative for a country with an aspiring middle class that is hungry for competent economic leadership that the old political system, rife with nepotism and corruption, did not provide.

His personal story resonated: The son of a farmer and a homemaker, he worked as a tutor, sold cigarettes on trains and hawked vegetables in his village market before committing to politics. He vowed to clean up the patronage networks that had enriched a small elite while the fortunes of the majority stagnated and then plummeted as the country’s economy disintegrated.

“They think that the family power they have obtained from ruling the country for a long time will bring them victory,” Mr. Dissanayake said at one of his final rallies. “It is the people’s power that will definitely win.”

His government faces a hard road ahead. The country’s economy, while stabilized after the long fuel and food lines of two years ago, continues to suffer from deep structural flaws: too much spending, and too little taxation and revenue. And there are no easy fixes.

Austerity measures have added to the suffering of the poor, with a quarter of the country’s population of 23 million below the poverty line. Corruption and patronage won’t be easily rooted out. The ethnic prejudices that led to a 26-year civil war remain largely unaddressed.

For decades, temporary covers — from majoritarian ethnic nationalism to the economic boost from heavy spending at the end of the civil war — papered over anger at “the decadence of this political elite,” said Nirmal Dewasiri, a professor of history at the University of Colombo, in Sri Lanka’s capital.

The economic collapse two years ago, Dr. Dewasiri added, awakened the country to how deep and structural the political rot was.

Now, with Mr. Dissanayake’s victory, “it’s a very unique situation,” Dr. Dewasiri said. The two traditional political camps “have sort of broken down.”

Power in Sri Lanka long alternated between two dominant parties until one of them, the center-right United National Party, entrenched itself in the 1970s and ruled for 17 years.

The party’s consolidation of power and crackdown on dissenting voices helped lead to violent insurrections — the three-decade Tamil insurgency in the north, and repeated violent Communist insurrections in the south. New coalitions and networks formed in an effort to topple the U.N.P.

Another reality was also emerging. While established politics long relied on rural patronage, the country was developing a new urban and semi-urban middle class that was looking beyond party structures for a path to prosperity.

The Rajapaksa family stepped into this moment of churn, tapping into the nationalism of the majority Buddhist Sinhalese population to rule for 10 years under its patriarch, Mahinda Rajapaksa. When his tenure ran its course, a second Rajapaksa brother, Gotabaya, ascended to power in 2019 with a campaign intended to appeal to the urban middle class.

He pitched himself as a technocratic “nonpolitician” who was at once an insider and an outsider, a former army officer who was returning from living in the United States. As a candidate he held a series of symposiums around the country where professionals would offer solutions to problems.

But Sri Lanka’s economic crisis and the resulting protests that forced out Mr. Rajapaksa provided an opening for other political forces that had spent years organizing.

“Many of the things that we would have been speaking about in the past I think began to make sense to people — that, primarily, the problem in the country stems from the political culture, corruption, nepotism, the patronage system,” Harini Amarasuriya, an academic and activist who is a senior leader of Mr. Dissanayake’s alliance, said in an interview before the vote.

On Tuesday, Dr. Amarasuriya was appointed as Sri Lanka’s new prime minister. While she is the third woman to hold the post, women’s representation in Parliament still remains just 5 percent. The two previous female prime ministers both came from a political dynasty.

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the Marxist party that Mr. Dissanayake helped lead to power as part of a broader coalition, is drastically different today than when he joined it as a student leader in the 1980s.

Thousands were killed in violence between J.V.P. insurgents and Sri Lankan government forces. Mr. Dissanayake’s own family home was burned, and the family was forced to live in a relative’s kitchen. A cousin his parents had raised almost as a sibling to Mr. Dissanayake was shot dead not far from him. He kept this news from his family for a decade, he said; they kept a vigil and visited temples to pray for his return.

In Sinhalese Buddhist culture, families keep a horoscope that, based on planetary alignments, predicts their child’s future. Past leaders, particularly the Rajapaksas, emphasized astrology in political life. When Mr. Dissanayake was asked in a recent interview whether his horoscope had predicted his rise, he was blunt.

“In 1989, our house was burned. My horoscope got burned with it, and I haven’t made a new horoscope since then. I don’t believe in horoscopes,” he said. “My parents didn’t have big dreams — their world wasn’t that big. The biggest hope my mother had for me was the teaching profession. That was their world.”

The J.V.P. spent decades trying to distance itself from the violence and radical communism of its past. With the stigma not yet fully gone, Mr. Dissanayake ran under the name of his coalition, the National People’s Power. Though the coalition retained the J.V.P. at its core, it brought in academics and activists like Dr. Amarasuriya who had none of the old political baggage and could better articulate an alternative vision.

The alliance vowed to change the political culture within existing frameworks. It reached out to young people and women who had long been on the political margins. It ensured “a feminist sensitivity” by putting female voices in its leadership and mobilizing female voters, Dr. Amarasuriya said.

Two years before, it had been young people and women who spilled into the streets as the economy cratered.

“Although the husband might bring the money, the women felt the brunt more because they run the kitchen,” said Hiranthi Boralessa, 59, a teacher in the southern district of Galle.

She had been married to a J.V.P. leader for over three decades but had only now gotten directly involved in political organizing.

Her husband, Dharmawardhana Munasinghe, 69, a retired reacher, was part of the earliest leadership of the J.V.P. His detention at an army camp, and his cat-and-mouse game with the authorities for nearly a decade after, complicated their young romance. Their wedding had to wait for a decade, and it eventually happened at a small, hushed ceremony in Colombo.

Mr. Munasinghe said that in all the decades after the party distanced itself from the violence, it had remained a marginal player in Galle. But he said the landscape changed entirely after the 2022 protest movement, with the local cells of the two main parties discredited over the economic collapse and hated for years of impunity for local abuses.

He said that Mr. Dissanayake’s pragmatism and discipline had achieved what older generations of leftist leaders could not.

“I’m not a wizard or a magician — I am a normal citizen of this country,” Mr. Dissanayake said on Monday after taking the oath of office in a low-key ceremony in Colombo. “My main task now is to absorb my skills and collect my knowledge to lead this country. It is my responsibility to be a part of that collective intervention.”

Swaths of southern Lebanon are smoldering ruins. Highways are clogged with thousands fleeing the possibility of an even bigger war between Israel and Hezbollah. As towns and villages prepared for funerals on Tuesday, Lebanon was just beginning to grapple with the fallout from its deadliest day in decades.

A vast wave of Israeli airstrikes on Monday targeting parts of the country where Hezbollah holds sway killed hundreds of people and plunged Lebanon into a deep state of uncertainty over what Israel would do next, how deeply the militia had been damaged and what sort of response its remaining forces could muster.

Israel said it had hit more than 1,000 sites, mostly in southern and eastern Lebanon, aimed at the fighters and military infrastructure of Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and militia it has been fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border for 11 months. At least 558 people were killed in the strikes, including 94 women and 50 children, Lebanon’s health minister told reporters on Tuesday.

That toll marked a terrible milestone for Lebanon: Monday was the country’s deadliest day since its 15-year civil war, which ended in 1990.

“The victims of a strike by the Israeli enemy on the village of Arnoun. Targeted in their homes!” read text over a photo shared on social media of three women killed in one of the strikes.

The death toll given by the health ministry did not differentiate between fighters and civilians, and the strikes overwhelmingly hit parts of the country where Hezbollah dominates, suggesting that Israel had struck another fierce blow to the group. That capped a week in which Israel also blew up electronic devices distributed by Hezbollah, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, and assassinated a group of its military leaders in an airstrike near Beirut.

Some experts on Hezbollah suggested that Israel’s recent attacks had largely debilitated the group, leaving its membership in disarray.

“They have no options,” said Hilal Khashan, a professor of political science at the American University of Beirut and the author of a book on Hezbollah. “Israel disabled Hezbollah.”

The attacks since last Tuesday have hit both Hezbollah’s leadership and its fighters hard while severely disrupting their ability to communicate and coordinate large-scale retaliation against Israel, he said.

“Now Hezbollah is headless,” Mr. Khashan said. “Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s leadership, so the rank and file are astray.”

Other experts acknowledged the severity of the blows but were more cautious about writing the group off so quickly, citing its large weapons stockpiles and history of adapting to confront Israel’s much more high-tech military.

Hezbollah was formed with Iranian help in the 1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. In the years since, it has grown into a significant political player in Lebanon and the country’s most powerful military force while sending fighters to help other Iran-backed forces in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Israel, the United States and other countries consider it a terrorist organization.

Hezbollah launched cross-border attacks on Israel after the start of the war in Gaza last October in solidarity with Hamas, which is also backed by Iran. Israel responded by striking Hezbollah sites in Lebanon, but for many months, both sides made efforts to keep their battle mostly confined to the border area.

Last week, Israeli leaders sharply escalated its attacks on the group, saying that removing it from the border zone was the only way that the tens of thousands of Israelis who have fled their homes in the area could return home.

A diplomat with knowledge of the talks aimed at containing the violence, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the news media, said Israel was demanding that Hezbollah agree to a cease-fire along the Lebanon-Israel border regardless of what happens in the war in Gaza and move its forces and arms away from the frontier.

Joseph Daher, who teaches at Lausanne University in Switzerland and wrote a book about Hezbollah, said Israel has greatly increased the pressure but that Hezbollah was unlikely to agree to its demands.

“It puts pressure politically and socially on Hezbollah, but will it make Hezbollah separate the Gaza front from the Lebanese front? I don’t think so,” he said. “Nor will it get Hezbollah to withdraw its military capacities from the border area.”

So far, at least, Hezbollah does not appear to have changed its strategy of trying to avoid a total war that could cause deep damage to the movement and to Lebanon, Mr. Daher said.

“We are already in a form of war, but they don’t want a total war with Israel,” he said. “This is why they are maintaining a calculated and to some extent moderated reaction, although intensifying their attacks against Israel, as seen this weekend.”

He was the first minister to be charged with corruption in Singapore in nearly 50 years. For months, he had vowed to clear his name.

On Tuesday, in a surprise twist, the prosecution dropped the charges of corruption, and S. Iswaran, the former transport minister, pleaded guilty to lesser offenses: four charges of obtaining valuable items as a public servant and one charge of obstructing justice. It was not clear whether a plea deal had been reached.

In January, Mr. Iswaran was slapped with 35 counts of wrongdoing, including accepting bribes — such as tickets to the play “Hamilton,” soccer games in England and the Formula 1 race in Singapore — that were valued at 403,000 Singapore dollars ($312,000). Most of those dealings involved the property tycoon Ong Beng Seng, who has not been charged in the case.

The case stunned many Singaporeans, who had long believed that their politicians were incorruptible in part because of their high salaries. Singapore has consistently been lauded for its lack of graft. It was the fifth-least-corrupt country in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2023, the only Asian country in the top 10.

It was also seen as a black mark on the governing People’s Action Party, which has been in power for more than six decades and projected a scrupulous image. Mr. Iswaran was a senior figure in the party and was best known for his role in bringing the glitzy Formula 1 race to Singapore.

Mr. Iswaran is set to be sentenced on Oct. 3.

At the start of the trial on Tuesday, prosecutors sought a prison term of six to seven months. In court on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Tai Wei Shyong said Mr. Iswaran was “more than a passive acceptor” of the gifts. Not punishing such acts, Mr. Tai said, would send a signal that these acts can be tolerated, according to The Straits Times, the main newspaper in Singapore.

Mr. Tai asked for a custodial sentence — meaning a prison term — because of Mr. Iswaran’s former position as a minister and the potential damage to the public interest.

Mr. Iswaran’s case was the latest in a slew of bad press for the Singapore government. It came months after Singapore’s speaker of Parliament resigned after an extramarital affair with a fellow lawmaker, and the real estate dealings of two ministers stirred controversy.

Singapore does not allow civil servants or politicians to ask for gifts or favors. Any person who accepts a gift that is valued at $38 or more would have to pay its value to the government. The affluent city-state pays its ministers some of the highest salaries in the world, calling it a measure to prevent corruption.

Mr. Iswaran’s lawyer, Davinder Singh, argued that Mr. Iswaran should not spend more than eight weeks in prison. He said his client’s acts did not have an impact on the reputation of the government. By charging its own minister, the government was sending the strongest signal that it was upholding its longstanding commitment to integrity, Mr. Singh said, according to The Straits Times.

Mr. Singh said that there was no abuse of power in office and that Mr. Iswaran’s actions were never “about the money.” He pointed out that Mr. Iswaran had returned some of the gifts he received and voluntarily returned the salary he received as a minister and his allowance as a member of Parliament.

Mr. Singh argued that Mr. Iswaran’s culpability was low because he received the gifts in the context of his friendship with Mr. Ong and David Lum, managing director of a Singapore-based construction company, without any “premeditation or sophistication involved.”

It was just a regular practice, but the players were excited to get on the soccer field. They divided into teams and chose from an array of bibs that all bore the same message: “Women Win.”

Just being on the field was a revolutionary act for some of these girls and women — migrants from Myanmar, or Burma, in Thailand — because they were defying cultural norms by playing a sport. On that recent Monday evening, it was a place to forget for a little while the civil war that has ravaged their native land and the worries about life in their adopted home as refugees or undocumented migrants.

The coach blew a whistle, and the match began. Some of the women moved the ball deftly past others. Cheering their friends on from the sidelines, others screamed in Burmese, “The ball is here!”

There has long been a sizable Burmese community here in the city of Mae Sot, a trade hub in western Thailand. But since the Myanmar military seized power in a coup in February 2021, that population has swelled and transformed Mae Sot, as people fled the military dictatorship’s campaign of bombings and torture.

Nyein Pyae Sone Naing, 37, is one of them. She was an assistant manager for the soccer federation in Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, but never played because her parents forbade her to do sports. After the junta took control, she was one of many peaceful protesters charged with incitement. She fled to the jungles, where for a while she was a medic for an armed rebel group. She moved to Mae Sot in 2022 and signed up for soccer this July.

Her first time was a disaster. Each time the ball flew in her direction, she dodged it. Asked to run for the ball, she shouted back, “No!” The outing left her so sore that she had to take painkillers.

Ms. Nyein Pyae Sone Naing said she was inspired by her 16-year-old son, who played with her that first time in a mixed game. “Now, he sees me as his hero and says I can do anything,” she said. She returned the following week.

The Monday practices are run by a decade-old nonprofit called PlayOnside. One of its goals is to foster communication between migrant children from Myanmar and the local Thai population of Mae Sot.

At least 350,000 Burmese now live in Mae Sot, a third of whom arrived after the coup, according to the Joint Action Committee for Burmese Affairs. The Mae Sot government puts its total population at roughly 175,000, suggesting that many Burmese are here illegally.

A community that was largely migrant workers from Myanmar is now an assortment of activists, teachers, filmmakers and celebrities. In restaurants and cafes, one often hears more Burmese than Thai in this dusty border town that is quickly filling up with safe houses.

For the migrants, life here is a constant state of waiting. Waiting to hear back on asylum offers. Waiting to see if they can ever go back to a democratic Myanmar. There is anxiety and paranoia about being spied on by the junta.

PlayOnside tries to help with this too, and offers group therapy of sorts. After practice that Monday, 50 girls and women, ranging in age from 13 to 45, sat in a circle. It was time for “women’s talks,” and the theme that day was, “Bad day, not bad life.”

“Today, I had a job interview. Since I’m an ethnic minority, I was worried because I’m not very good at speaking Burmese. I don’t speak English well either,” a petite woman said in Burmese.

“Everyone living here is constantly dealing with stress and struggling to get by,” a woman in a red jersey said. “That’s why I came here with the determination to survive and make this place a place of solace for myself.”

For those fleeing the war in Myanmar, living in Mae Sot can be both a haven and a hazard. Thailand has sheltered about 90,000 refugees from Myanmar across nine refugee camps since the mid-1980s, but has also pushed back thousands of the recent arrivals, according to Human Rights Watch.

Ei Ei Aung said when she first moved to Mae Sot in 2022, she was lonely, jobless and lived in fear of the Thai police.

“When I play football, I forget about the stress,” said Ms. Ei Ei Aung, 41, who represented Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-biggest city, in the Under-14 division. “I also realized that I’m not the only one with trauma and stress when I see my friends here.”

Initially, it was hard for PlayOnside to recruit women to play. Schools with migrant populations would send only male students.

“What about the girls?” Javier Almagro, the Spanish co-founder of PlayOnside, said he asked the principals.

Finally, in 2017, PlayOnside started with seven or eight female players.

They turned up in pants, worried about exposing their legs. Now, all of them wear shorts. The women’s biggest obstacles were often their parents.

“When I was younger, they restricted me, and I even got beaten for playing,” said Thone Darin Han, 23. “I used to be jealous of my brother. My parents never stopped him from playing because he’s a boy.”

Fah Sai, 24, was raised in a refugee camp where men’s soccer tournaments were organized.

“When I was in high school, I was told I couldn’t join because I’m a girl,” she said. “They believed soccer was a sport for men, saying it was too tough for girls.”

Ms. Fah Sai, an ethnic Karen whose parents are from Myanmar’s Kayin State, plays for Girls On Fire, a team made up of women from refugee camps in Thailand. Unlike more recent arrivals from Myanmar, she has lived in Thailand since she was born in 2000 in a refugee camp in Tak Province, where her family fled a long-running conflict between Karen rebel groups and Myanmar’s military.

Many of her teammates are not allowed to leave their camps unless they get permission from the Thai authorities.

Often, they also need clearance from male figures in their families.

“We can’t just change women’s minds — we need to focus on men’s perspectives as well,” said Pyae Sone, the PlayOnside coach.

His group started offering free transportation for the women and set up soccer sessions for their children, who play at the same time as their mothers.

In November 2022, Daen Kajeechiwa, a founder of PlayOnside who now has his own training program, raised money to start a women’s tournament. This summer five teams played in a league for the first time.

During the second week of the Borderland Women’s League, a crowd of supporters banged on tin cans and cheered on the teams.

On that Saturday evening, Ms. Fah Sai’s Girls on Fire was pitted against Amicizia, Mr. Daen’s team.

As the matches ended after dark, a birthday cake appeared: It was Mr. Daen’s birthday. There was dancing and cheering.

Then it was time to leave. The men were waiting to play.

President Biden will be under increasing pressure this week to loosen restrictions on Ukraine’s use of weapons when global leaders converge on the United Nations for their annual gathering.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will also come with what he calls a victory plan for Mr. Biden to examine, and key European leaders are already pushing hard for Mr. Biden to allow him to use longer-range weapons supplied by NATO countries to hit farther inside Russia, to strike bases from which Russian planes and missiles attack Kyiv with relative impunity.

The push comes as Ukraine is slowly losing ground to mass Russian assaults in the eastern Donbas region and Russia continues to pound Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, including electricity and heating plants, from a safe distance as winter is approaching.

Mr. Biden has been reluctant to give permission, careful as he has been since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 not to escalate the war and risk a direct conflict between Moscow and the NATO alliance. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia already blames NATO for the war and has made threats of retaliation, including frequent veiled references to his nuclear arsenal. But he has not retaliated militarily against the West even as NATO countries have gradually increased the quantity and quality of their arms supplies to Kyiv.

Finland’s new president, Alexander Stubb, joined the chorus for longer-range weapons in an interview with The New York Times, while Jens Stoltenberg, in his last days as NATO secretary general, has all but done the same, while noting diplomatically that each country must decide for itself.

Mr. Stubb, who will speak for all the Nordic countries at the U.N. General Assembly, was blunt.

“I call upon our allies in the global West, including the United States, to allow Ukraine to fight without one hand tied behind its back and to lift those restrictions,” he said in a wide-ranging interview on Thursday from Helsinki. “We need to continue to support Ukraine, starting with finance, starting with ammunition, starting with vehicles, and also with allowing Ukraine to use weapons as itself pleases, as long as it’s in self-defense and within the framework of international rules.”

Mr. Stoltenberg has been unusually outspoken as he prepares to leave office at the end of the month. “I fully understand the desire from Ukraine to have as few restrictions as possible,” he said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN. “There are less restrictions now than just some months ago,” he said, “and that’s the right thing to do,” because “this is a war of aggression” and “according to international law, self-defense is legal.”

Ukraine, he said, “has the right for self-defense and that includes striking legitimate military targets on the territory of the aggressor, Russia.” And NATO countries, he went on, “have the right to provide the weapons that they are using to do so without us becoming a party to the conflict.”

Both Mr. Stubb and Mr. Stoltenberg noted that various allied “red lines” had already been crossed, with the provision to Ukraine of Leopard II battle tanks, Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles, longer-range artillery and even American-made F-16 fighter jets. All were subject to fierce debates over whether they would prompt Mr. Putin to escalate the fight and even use nuclear weapons.

The new prime minister of Britain, Keir Starmer, has also pushed Mr. Biden to allow the use of these longer-range weapons, like Storm Shadow and Scalp, its French version, to hit bases farther into Russia from where Mr. Putin launches attacks.

Adm. Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said last week that attacks deep inside Russia were legal, because “to weaken the enemy that attacks you, you not only fight the arrows that come your way but also attack the archer.” Still, he said, nations providing weapons can demand “certain limitations” in their use, “because they feel responsible for those weapons.”

Mr. Stubb, whose country joined NATO only in response to the war and shares a long border with Russia, has few illusions about what he considers NATO’s need to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine. “Russia is an imperial power that has expansion in its DNA,” he said.

“So what we need to do is to convince Putin that there’s no point for him to continue this war, and I think Putin needs to lose both the war and the peace, because the only thing that he understands is power,” Mr. Stubb said.

“The key is to allow Ukraine to fight this war without any kind of restrictions, and everything after that is secondary,” Mr. Stubb said. “The more we allow Ukraine to act, the sooner we will achieve peace negotiations.” Then the West must provide Kyiv with security guarantees leading to membership in both NATO and the European Union, he said.

Mr. Stoltenberg agreed. “By giving Ukraine more weapons, we can make Putin realize he cannot get what he wants by force and make it so costly that he will have to accept Ukraine has a sovereign, democratic right to persist as a sovereign, democratic country,” he said in a speech last week in Brussels to the German Marshall Fund. “The paradox is that the more weapons for Ukraine we are able to deliver, the more likely it is that we can reach a peace and end to the war. And the more credible our long-term military support, the sooner the war will end.”

Given raging global conflicts, including in the Middle East and Africa, the United Nations must re-engage in true peacekeeping, Mr. Stubb said. To that end, in New York, he said he would propose an expansion of the U.N. Security Council to include five new permanent members, one from Latin America, two from Asia and two from Africa, coupled with 10 rotating members and an elimination of the single-country veto, “which makes the Security Council dysfunctional,” he said. He would also propose that a member country “in blatant violation of the U.N. Charter and international law, such as Russia is right now in Ukraine,” should be suspended by a vote of the General Assembly.

Serious changes to the Security Council have proved impossible in the past, given the veto, he concedes, but he insists that the crisis demands new thinking. The veto might be replaced by weighted voting, he said, but it was crucial to include members of the so-called Global South, developing countries largely left out of post-1945 international institutions.

Those countries may see hypocrisy in the criticism of Russia and the support for Israel in Gaza, he said. “But my argument to our friends in the Global South, who are sometimes justifiably expressing doubts about Western double standards, is to say that this war in Ukraine sets the scene for how other nation-states can behave in the rest of the world,” he said. “If we now allow Russian imperialism to take place, we will see this happening elsewhere in the world, and that’s why I think this is a key struggle for all of us.”