Even for the Lebanese, it can be hard to say where it all went wrong for their tiny, beautiful country.

Certainly it was long before early Tuesday morning, when Israeli troops marched into southern Lebanon. Long before Friday, when Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the revered and reviled Hezbollah leader who had a chokehold on the country’s politics and security for years.

And long before last October, when Hezbollah and Israel began trading airstrikes and rocket fire across the border, bringing the war in Gaza to Lebanon’s green, fertile south.

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Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, told a rights group on Tuesday that his imprisonment had set a “dangerous precedent” for arresting journalists and criminalizing activities that were essential to the work of investigative journalists — his first public statement since being released from a British prison in June.

“I want to be totally clear: I am not free today because the system worked,” he said as he gave evidence to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights at the Council of Europe, a rights organization in Strasbourg, France. “I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.”

Mr. Assange, 53, has been a polarizing figure since revealing state secrets in the 2010s — either hailed as a hero for publishing documents in the public interest and therefore deserving of the same First Amendment protections afforded to investigative journalists, or viewed as a criminal who put American national security at risk and aided Russian election interference.

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Claudia Sheinbaum took office on Tuesday, the first woman and Jewish person to lead Mexico in the country’s more than 200-year history as an independent nation.

“For the first time, we women have arrived to lead the destinies of our beautiful nation,” Ms. Sheinbaum said during her inauguration ceremony on Tuesday. “And I say we arrived because I do not arrive alone. We all arrived.”

Thousands packed into Mexico City’s main square on Tuesday afternoon to wait for Ms. Sheinbaum to address supporters.

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It’s been three weeks since the restaurant, Home Kitchen, opened its doors and Mimi Mohamed is pretty sure she knows the lemon tart recipe by heart. But just in case, a small notebook where she has carefully written out the ingredients is propped up at the back of the steel counter: 18 lemons; 420 grams of butter; 900 grams of sugar; 24 eggs.

The recipe is from Adam Simmonds, a celebrated Michelin star-winning chef. Novices like Ms. Mohamed are not usually found in his kitchens, but this new, upscale dining venture is not usual. Almost every member of the 19-person team has been homeless.

“The crew downstairs in the kitchen, they make so many mistakes, but that’s OK,” Mr. Simmonds said with a laugh. “We accept that and we learn from it.”

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For nearly three years, the mining town of Vuhledar has underpinned Ukraine’s defense of its southern Donbas region, the industrial heart of the country that has become a tableau of desolation and destruction.

Now the town, its rows of stark Soviet-style apartment blocks battered by the full force of Moscow’s arsenal, is falling to Russian troops who have been grinding their way across the region in recent months, Ukrainian soldiers said.

On Monday, Russian forces moved into part of Vuhledar for the first time, hanging a flag over a ruined building, according to combat footage released by Russian forces and verified by military analysts. By Tuesday night, Ukrainian soldiers said the town was almost fully under Russian control. Combat footage showed the Russians in every corner of the city, according to the DeepState group analysts mapping the battlefield.

Kaue Garcia and Ryan O’Neill had owned a sports team for no more than six months when they decided the time was right to shake things up. What they needed more than anything else, they felt, was a drag queen.

They were not entirely sure what the reaction would be. Keighley Cougars, the English club they had bought almost as an act of mercy, was not an obvious place to start pushing boundaries.

Keighley is an old textile town, surrounded by the windswept moors of Yorkshire’s Brontë Country. The scars of postindustrial decay remain livid here: spectacular scenery that houses some of the most deprived areas in England. And the Cougars play Rugby League, an especially brutal iteration of a famously bruising discipline.

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In his first appearance before France’s fractured lower house of Parliament, Prime Minister Michel Barnier pleaded on Tuesday with lawmakers to work with his government on tackling the country’s most pressing issues, first and foremost a looming budget crisis.

Over roughly 90 minutes, Mr. Barnier laid out a road map for his fragile government with many vague promises, including slashing government spending and temporarily raising taxes on the country’s biggest and most profitable companies and on its wealthiest citizens.

Mr. Barnier, a veteran right-wing politician who was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron last month, must contend with a lower house of Parliament dominated by three main blocs but with no clear majority.

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