Emboldened by their forceful rejection of military rule, members of South Korea’s political opposition moved on Wednesday to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, after his abrupt declaration of martial law failed spectacularly.

Several opposition parties, buoyed by thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the president, jointly submitted the impeachment motion, which could be put to a vote as early as Friday. While the parties represent an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, it remains unclear whether they will have the two-thirds vote needed to impeach.

Mr. Yoon’s surprise declaration of martial law on Tuesday night, the first attempt to impose military rule in more than four decades, incited chaos within one of America’s closest allies and evoked memories of the dictatorial regimes that ruled South Korea until the 1980s.

It was an audacious attempt by the president to break the gridlock in government — between a mostly progressive assembly and a conservative executive — that has hobbled his nearly three years in power.

But in the end, martial law lasted only six hours. It backfired when lawmakers scrambled past heavily armed troops who had attempted to cordon off the assembly building. The 190 members present, out of 300 total, voted unanimously to rescind military rule — including 18 members from the president’s own party.

Mr. Yoon’s location was not publicly known Wednesday night and he seemed increasingly isolated. Members of his own party had denounced the martial law declaration and voted to overturn it. South Korean news media reported that the defense minister and several top aides to the president, including his chief of staff, had resigned.

If two-thirds of the assembly votes to impeach Mr. Yoon, he would be suspended from office and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, a career civil servant, would become the interim president. The president’s fate would then go to the Constitutional Court, where the justices could uphold the impeachment and remove him from office, or reject it and reinstate him.

Opposition parties control 192 of the 300 assembly seats, just short of a two-thirds majority, so impeachment would require at least eight defections from Mr. Yoon’s own People Power Party, which holds 108 seats.

The imposition of military rule on Tuesday night was the shortest-lived and most bizarre martial law in ​the history of South Korea, which has had its share of coups and military rule before it became a vibrant democracy after military dictatorship ended in the late 1980s.

Among the enduring images from six hours of turmoil were the hundreds of paratroopers arriving by helicopter to secure the assembly — and the opposition lawmakers who climbed the walls of the building and barricaded themselves inside to be able to cast their vote against military rule.

Thousands of people took to the streets overnight, chanting “Impeach Yoon Suk Yeol!” and pushing against troops who tried to keep them out of the assembly.

A military decree had banned all political activities and civil gatherings, and declared that “all news media and publications are under the control of martial law command.” It warned that those who spread “fake news” could be arrested without a court warrant.

But the Korean media did not acquiesce. News organizations spanning the political spectrum, even right-leaning publications more aligned with Mr. Yoon and his conservative party, stood united in criticism of his actions and any efforts to limit a free press.

An editorial in Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea’s biggest daily newspapers which has often been friendly toward Mr. Yoon, called the president’s actions an international embarrassment. Mr. Yoon needed to answer to the public on how he intended to “take responsibility” for this situation, it added.

Before jumping into the presidential race in 2022 and winning by a razor-thin margin, Mr. Yoon was a political neophyte. He was a graft-busting, star prosecutor who helped imprison two former presidents, and was accustomed to a strictly top-down culture.

His victory was attributed to the public’s discontent with his predecessor, Moon Jae-in. From the start, he laid out big ambitions, seemingly staking his claim for a legacy as a change maker in a gridlocked political system.

He put South Korea back on a path toward embracing more nuclear power, mended ties with Japan and expanded military cooperation with the United States and Japan as he took a harder line against North Korea.

But domestically, little of his agenda was fruitful. His opponents won even greater control in the assembly in parliamentary elections this year. His government was accused of using criminal investigations to intimidate opposition leaders and crack down on news media he accused of spreading “fake news​.” ​

Mr. Yoon’s approval rating plummeted to around 20 percent as he repeatedly vetoed the opposition’s demands for independent investigations into allegations against his wife, Kim Keon Hee. The opposition stalled many of his bills and political appointments, imposed large changes on his budget proposals for next year, and pushed for the impeachment of his cabinet members, accusing them of corruption and abuse of power. At the same time, thousands of doctors went on strike for almost a year to resist his changes to the health care system.

Analysts expressed skepticism about Mr. Yoon’s future in politics.

Sung Deuk Hahm, a professor of political science at Kyonggi University, west of Seoul, said “the best option” for Mr. Yoon was to resign. “As tragic as it may seem, what happened overnight showed the resilience and durability of South Korean democracy,” he said.

Mr. Hahm, who has known Mr. Yoon since before his election, said the president appeared to grow increasingly despondent in recent months, particularly over escalating scandals surrounding him and his wife and the relentless political pressure from the opposition.

“Things have become too much for him,” ​Mr. Hahm said. “He became mentally unstable under political pressure.”

A former presidential aide to Mr. Yoon, who agreed to discuss the president’s leadership style on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Yoon was surrounded by a handful of aides, including former military generals, who were not used to second-guessing their boss’s decision. That small circle raised questions about how thoroughly Mr. Yoon had prepared for martial law, the aide said.

The aide added that as soon as he heard the declaration of martial law, he called contacts in Mr. Yoon’s office and other branches of the government. None of them had had advance knowledge of what was coming.

Even top leaders of Mr. Yoon’s party said they had learned of the declaration through the media. Kim Byung-joo, an opposition lawmaker and former general, told MBC Radio on Wednesday that when he called army generals near the border with North Korea, none of them knew what was happening.

Reporting was contributed by Minho Kim, Isabella Kwai, Christine Chung, Chang W. Lee, Daisuke Wakabayashi, Su-Hyun Lee and Qasim Nauman.

French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.

France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.

It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.

The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.

President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.

Mr. Barnier is likely to remain as a caretaker until Mr. Macron names a new prime minister, but France faces weeks of instability, just as it did after the parliamentary vote. Mr. Macron will address the nation at 8 p.m. Thursday local time, according to the Elysée.

In 1962, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou was also forced to submit his resignation, but he was later reappointed by President Charles de Gaulle. The same clemency is unlikely to be shown to Mr. Barnier.

Mr. Barnier, a veteran center-right politician, is the most prominent victim yet of France’s polarized politics, unsettled by a middle class that is struggling, as elsewhere in the West.

The rapid fall seemed inevitable after Mr. Barnier used a constitutional tool to force through a budget proposal on Monday without the approval of Parliament’s lower house, where he does not hold a majority. Use of that tool always raises the hackles of France’s lawmakers.

But on Wednesday, it did far more, providing the glue for an unlikely alliance between the assembly’s leftist coalition and the nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally, which holds the most seats for a single party in the chamber.

Mr. Barnier’s budget proposal is now null and void. In what amounted to his farewell speech to the chamber on Wednesday, he said the no-confidence vote would “make everything more difficult, and more serious,” noting that without a new budget more households would be subject to taxes and others would see their taxes go up.

“We need to get beyond our divisions to support our country,” he added.

The downfall of Mr. Barnier and his cabinet was a victory for Ms. Le Pen, who has tried for years to project her growing political influence and to bring her party into the mainstream.

On Wednesday, before the vote, she lashed out at critics who had accused her of provoking instability. “To those who accuse me of choosing the politics of chaos with this no-confidence vote,” she said, “I say that chaos would have meant not rejecting this budget, this government, this collapse.”

It was she who insisted on pursuing the vote, ensuring his downfall. The left-wing alliance has been agitating for months to oust the government, arguing that together they had won the most seats in the snap election this summer and so deserved to lead. But it lacked the votes to topple the prime minister.

And before the vote, Ms. Le Pen refused the concessions that Mr. Barnier offered her on the budget. First, he jettisoned proposed electricity taxes. Then he promised not to cut back medication reimbursements. She had demanded both changes.

It was not enough for Ms. Le Pen. The budget, with its $60 billion in spending cuts and tax increases, remained “profoundly unjust to the French,” she said on Monday. Mr. Barnier had justified his proposed cuts and tax rises, saying the country needed to address its financial troubles. France’s annual deficit is projected to reach at least 6.1 percent of gross domestic product, twice the limit prescribed by the European Union. Its debt is 112 percent of G.D.P., nearly twice the limit.

Already, speculation about a possible successor to Mr. Barnier as prime minister has centered on politicians seen by the National Rally as more open to discussion, like the defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu.

Ms. Le Pen’s criticism of Mr. Barnier and his austerity plans for France seem to form part of a larger political strategy, according to critics and some independent analysts.

She has all but acknowledged that her real target is not Mr. Barnier, but the only man who wields more power: Mr. Macron, who has twice beaten her in presidential elections and is not permitted to run again. Some in her party and on the far left have been calling on him to resign for days.

Ms. Le Pen told journalists for Le Monde last week that, confronted with enough government instability, Mr. Macron “won’t have very much choice” but to resign.

Analysts and those around Mr. Macron say it is unlikely that he would do so. The president recently called the idea “political fiction.” But his position is weak, severely damaged by his decision last June to dissolve the Parliament and call a snap election. He called the vote partly to demonstrate that the National Rally’s support was limited — a calculation that has clearly backfired.

Ms. Le Pen has targeted the president as much as the prime minister in her remarks in recent days. It was Mr. Barnier’s budget, she told reporters on Monday, but it would have made the French pay for “the consequences of the incompetence of Emmanuel Macron during seven years of debt.”

“She really seems to want to put herself in a position of strength,” said Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist and emeritus professor at Sciences Po university in Paris. “She wants to trigger a presidential election.”

Mr. Macron has succeeded in bringing down chronically high French unemployment and he has boosted French growth, moderately. But he has also been unpopular for much of his presidency: Many French regard him as aloof and arrogant.

“Macron has lost all legitimacy,” said Mr. Grunberg. “He doesn’t exist, in a sense. He’s dead, politically.”

Mr. Macron has given no indication that he won’t finish his term, which ends in mid-2027. Ms. Le Pen, however, may be on an accelerated timeline, according to critics. She is scheduled to face a verdict in a wide-ranging criminal embezzlement case in March, which could render her ineligible to run for political office for five years. She and associates in the party are accused of misusing their European Parliament assistants by putting them to work on National Rally issues.

“The problem is Ms. Le Pen’s trial,” said Alain Minc, a political essayist, businessman and informal adviser to several French presidents.

“If she didn’t have that risk of being ineligible, her strategy would have been to remain moderate, to improve her image and wait for the presidential election,” he said. “What has dramatically changed her position is the risk of losing all her political capital in three months’ time.”

Catherine Porter and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

In Ukraine, they are known as the “Executed Renaissance,” pioneering literary artists whose lives were snuffed out by Stalin’s brutal purges in the 1930s.

Living together in an apartment building and embracing experimental art forms, these writers, poets and directors spearheaded a flourishing of Ukrainian culture and identity about a century ago.

But that golden age was short-lived. The Soviet regime soon began to surveil, arrest and ultimately execute about half of the writers in an effort to stifle Ukrainian culture. For decades, their works were banned and their legacy nearly erased.

Until now.

In the face of Russia’s invasion, the story of the Executed Renaissance has been given new resonance as many Ukrainians seek to reclaim their cultural heritage. The lives of the writers are being told in a musical, a feature movie and a memoir. There is even a fashion line themed around them, with sweatshirts riddled with bullet holes to symbolize their killings.

“It’s a big trend,” said Yaryna Tsymbal, the author of “Our Twenties,” an anthology of Ukrainian literature from the 1920s. She said the demand for projects about the artists came “from everywhere: publishing houses, magazines, theaters.”

For months, his country was battered by escalating Israeli bombardment, while behind the scenes, the United States and Gulf countries courted him diplomatically. It was a secretive, two-pronged approach meant to pressure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to abandon his most important regional alliance with Hezbollah and Iran.

The overtures to Mr. al-Assad were the product of what Israel and its allies saw as a rare but risky opportunity — with Iran’s regional network fracturing under Israeli attack, they hoped to force Iran’s most important partner out of the alliance, according to former U.S. officials, two European diplomats and four Israeli officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Now, those regional ambitions may be derailed by a far smaller and long-discounted force: Resurgent rebels have launched a surprisingly successful attack in Syria, exploiting in part the strain Israel has put on the alliance that helped Mr. al-Assad maintain power through more than a decade of uprising and civil war. In a matter of days, the rebels seized most of the country’s large city of Aleppo, and challenged Mr. al-Assad’s grip on the country’s northwest.

Despite his traditional partners being so weakened, regional experts and diplomats expect that Mr. al-Assad will now be even more reluctant to abandon Iran and its allies, who are still his best bet for fighting, yet again, for his regime’s survival.

Syria is at the center of today’s regional power struggles because of the critical land corridor it provides for Iran to Hezbollah, Tehran’s most important regional ally, in Lebanon. Severing this pipeline for weapons, supplies and people is critical to Israel — and defending it is just as critical to Iran.

Israel, with the support of the United States, was eager to take advantage of its campaign against Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. After Israel killed key leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas and depleted their weapons stockpiles, there were signs that Israel’s approach was working. Iran’s bellicose rhetoric toward the United States and Israel had given way to signals that it wanted less confrontation. Russia, another key ally of Mr. al-Assad’s, has been ensnared in Ukraine, emboldening Israel and U.S. regional allies to pressure Moscow and Mr. al-Assad into rethinking the alliance.

But the attack on Aleppo has jolted Iran and Russia into issuing new vows to come to Mr. al-Assad’s aid, suggesting that the alliance will defy the attempts to unravel it.

Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and a former White House and State Department official, said the long-term regional efforts, which aimed to gradually compel Mr. al-Assad to shift, now look unlikely without his showing a willingness to “make a hard break with Iran.”

“How could he do that under the current circumstances?” he said. “Iran is now more essential to his staying in power than perhaps ever.”

Before the rebel advance, Israel had for weeks been escalating its attacks on Syria, striking everywhere from the capital to the ancient desert city of Palmyra, in what it says were operations targeting Iran, Hezbollah and their allies. Israeli commandos have raided secret military sites, the aim of which, one of the senior Israeli officials said, was to demonstrate that Israel would not tolerate any further weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon.

But that approach had a major flaw, analysts said: Even with its intensified operations, Israel had not managed to shut down the supply line from Iran to Hezbollah, involving hundreds of miles of porous borders, secret tunnels, smuggling rings and militant groups.

“There is no way just by carrying out airstrikes that they can defeat the Iranians in Syria,” said Haid Haid, a fellow at Chatham House in London who focuses on Syria. “The Israelis can inflict damage. They can reduce the flows. They can make it more difficult. But they cannot stop it completely, and they know that.”

That is why Israel’s military push has been underpinned by diplomatic efforts, mediated by Washington and Gulf Arab leaders, who are also eager to undermine Iranian influence in the region. Eight current and former Western and regional diplomats and Israeli officials shared with The New York Times details of different proposals made to Syria.

Mediators focused on promises of Gulf economic aid, they said, and the withdrawal of hundreds of U.S. troops deployed in northeastern Syria since 2014. They also floated plans to lift or reduce crippling U.S. sanctions against the Syrian regime — though withdrawing some sanctions requires a vote in U.S. Congress, and previous efforts to persuade senators to abandon the bipartisan legislation have failed.

“They have been making offers to Assad: Your ally Iran is getting weak, so let us in,” said Malik al-Abdeh, the founder of the consultancy Conflict Media Solutions and a longtime mediator in Syria. “But getting Assad to do that would require a much more dramatic shift in the balance of power.”

Efforts by the Gulf nations, particularly the United Arab Emirates, to try to lure Mr. al-Assad away from his regional allies are not new, officials said. A European, a regional and a former U.S. official told The Times that the previously established back channels for negotiations, hosted or mediated by Gulf officials, in particular the United Arab Emirates, are being utilized again.

But regional diplomats and experts warn that continued Israeli bombardment to try to lure Mr. al-Assad away from Iran at a time when he faces a renewed insurgency risks escalating violence that could unleash chaos with fallout beyond Syria.

Syria is now territorially divided among Mr. al-Assad, Islamist militants, U.S.-backed Kurdish groups and Turkish-backed rebels. Unsettling that precarious equilibrium could embolden other groups to attack al-Assad-held territory, potentially rekindling the civil war and causing a new outpouring of refugees or a resurgence of jihadist groups, similar to the rise of the Islamic State in 2014.

Israel needs a strong central government in Syria to carry out its plan to pressure Mr. al-Assad and cut off supply routes from Iran to Lebanon, two of the Israeli officials said. Israel and the United States are continuing their efforts, but the chances of success for this plan appear to have diminished even further, they said.

Israel had also been pressing for assistance from Moscow, arguably Mr. al-Assad’s most important military ally. He is in turn critical to Russia because of the warm water port he allows it to operate on Syria’s coast.

Moscow had made gestures about limiting Iranian influence, the two European diplomats said, by increasing patrols in southern Syria near the Israeli border, ostensibly blocking Iranian-backed groups from operating there. Most regional experts saw this as futile: Iranian-aligned forces still operate along Syria’s southern border.

Russia and Iran have a complicated relationship, competing for resources in Syria. But Russia is also dependent on Iran for cheap drone technology for its war in Ukraine and for help with military operations to support Mr. al-Assad, a role ever more critical as he comes under renewed rebel pressure.

“Russia knows that without Iranian boots on the ground, it would have to be theirs,” said Mr. al-Abdeh.

Mr. al-Assad is not only dependent on Iran and Hezbollah militarily, but also financially.

The oil Iran provides Syria in defiance of international sanctions not only supports the formal economy but also the black market networks that many regime figures profit from, regional experts said. Many military leaders and militias aligned with Mr. al-Assad are deeply involved in the lucrative production of the stimulant Captagon, a booming drug trade facilitated by networks linked to Hezbollah and Iranian-backed groups.

These illicit and secretive networks, diplomats said, make it hard for Gulf Arab states to simply entice Mr. al-Assad’s government with aid and reconstruction funds.

Even if he still wanted to try to disentangle these patronage and security networks, Mr. al-Assad may be unable to, said Emile Hokayem, the director for regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“He probably doesn’t know that well who in his first and second circle is in the pockets of Iran — or the Russians,” he said. “That’s one thing we don’t fully understand, which is Iran’s coercive power within these structures. Iran is still embedded in a lot of security agencies and militias, and it can threaten the edifice from within.”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

On the final day of perhaps his final trip overseas as commander in chief, President Biden celebrated his foreign policy agenda by turning to a piece of infrastructure at the heart of his identity: a train.

It was not the Amtrak train Mr. Biden rode frequently as a senator or chose as the setting for the kickoff of his first presidential campaign nearly four decades ago. Mr. Biden instead toured a section of an 800-mile railway project in Angola that his administration hopes will be the key to expanding U.S. economic influence in Africa, a continent rich with critical minerals.

“I’m coming back to ride on the train from end to end,” Mr. Biden told President João Lourenço of Angola during a round table with African leaders in the port city of Lobito. “We’re not just laying tracks. We’re laying the groundwork for a better future for our people.”

Mr. Biden was spotlighting what is known as the Lobito Corridor, a railway project that his aides say is the proof behind the president’s commitment to be “all in on Africa’s future,” amid growing concern the United States has neglected the continent over the years and allowed China to gain economic dominance in the region.

The project, funded in part by the United States, runs from Angola’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to Lobito, which sits on the Atlantic Ocean. Mr. Biden has said it will help connect Angola’s economy to nearby markets, including in Zambia. But it is also a means to expand U.S. access to a region rich with critical minerals, like copper and cobalt, used to make batteries for various products, including cellphones and electric vehicles.

Once the railway is complete, it would mean minerals could be more easily shipped to the United States, allowing the country to make progress on its goal of diversifying its supply chains.

But despite Mr. Biden’s victory lap on Wednesday, the United States is still facing an uphill climb when it comes to competing with China for access to critical minerals in the continent, according to foreign policy analysts.

Beijing helped Angola rebuild after a devastating civil war that ended in 2002, and since then, Angola has accumulated more than $42 billion in Chinese debt, more than any other African nation. And while Mr. Biden hopes the new rail line expands access to critical minerals, China currently has firm control over critical minerals in Congo.

Chinese-based mining companies own or have a major stake in most cobalt-producing sites in Congo, which produced 76 percent of the world’s supply of the metal last year. The last large American-owned mining company pulled out of Congo in 2020, just as the electric vehicle revolution was taking off.

“We have never leveraged our economic commercial power the way other nations have,” said Tibor P. Nagy Jr., who was appointed by President Bill Clinton twice to serve as an ambassador in Africa and then by the Trump administration to serve as assistant secretary of state for African affairs. He said “the Biden administration talked a really good game,” but “they have not delivered.”

Mr. Biden has said the railway project would not only diversify the economies of African nations, but also entice manufacturers to build factories along the railway because they can use it to transport goods. As the president traveled to Lobito on Wednesday, his administration announced $560 million in new funding for infrastructure projects along the railway, bringing total U.S. investments by the administration for the project to $4 billion.

The project will also encourage more investment into the region from the private sector, according to the White House. Mr. Biden’s administration is helping to fund the project with federal grants and direct loans that his aides say do not have the kind of high interest rates offered by their Chinese counterparts, which have left African nations crippled with debt, according to the White House.

Edu Xiong, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Luanda, the capital of Angola, has countered that few on the ground in Angola have yet to actually feel the economic benefits of the Lobito Corridor.

It is unclear when African nations will be able to reap the full benefits of the project. A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss specific details of the Lobito Corridor, said the rail line in Angola would not be complete until “next year-ish.” Construction of the rail line in Zambia will then begin.

Still, African leaders meeting with Mr. Biden on Wednesday praised the project as a means for benefiting their local economies.

“The political commitment of all engaged people in the materialization of this project is a milestone,” Mr. Lourenço said at the round table inside a food processing factory after Mr. Biden finished touring the yellow shipping containers, giant cranes and railway cars at the Lobito Port Terminal.

Speaking to the leaders at the round table, President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia said the project would help more than the countries along the route of the railway.

“Not just us — it’s good for Africa,” he said. “I must say, this project is a huge opportunity.”

But some Angolan officials were concerned that the investment into the railway would be siphoned off by corruption, and not make its way to the working class.

“Lobito Corridor is a very big project. It’s important. But we want transparency, accountability,” said Olívio Nkilumbo, a parliamentarian with the opposition UNITA party in Angola. “Where is the transparency and accountability? It’s a big problem.”

Despite Mr. Biden’s commitments, some foreign policy experts still questioned how enduring the White House’s focus on Africa would be. Mr. Biden’s trip to the continent, his last announced trip overseas, came with just weeks left in his presidency after multiple delays. The trip was also overshadowed by his decision to pardon his son, Hunter Biden, of tax and gun convictions.

The Trump campaign did not answer questions about what strategy President-elect Donald J. Trump would pursue on the continent. But J. Peter Pham, an Africa policy expert who worked in the first Trump administration, has said the Lobito project was likely to appeal to Mr. Trump.

In the final moments of perhaps his final round table with foreign leaders overseas, Mr. Biden appeared tired at times.

While some of the African leaders spoke in the hot room, the 82-year-old occasionally put his head down in his hand and closed his eyes before popping up to turn to his peers.

But he said his love for trains would bring him back to the continent in the future, even though he will no longer be president.

Mr. Biden recalled that when President Abraham Lincoln retired, he said he wanted to take a ride on the transcontinental railroad.

“I want to take a trip on this rail line, if I can,” Mr. Biden said.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington.

Prosecutors in Iran have agreed to allow Narges Mohammadi, the jailed activist and Nobel laureate, to leave prison for 21 days to recover from surgery, her foundation said on Wednesday.

For weeks, Ms. Mohammadi’s lawyers have petitioned for her to be given the necessary recovery time and medical attention after an operation on her leg to remove a lesion that was suspected of being cancerous. The Narges Foundation is urging, based on doctors’ recommendations, that she be given at least three months outside prison, where they say overcrowding and unsanitary conditions are endangering her recovery.

“A 21-day suspension of Narges Mohammadi’s sentence is inadequate,” the foundation said in a statement. “After over a decade of imprisonment, Narges requires specialized medical care in a safe, sanitary environment — a basic human right.”

Ms. Mohammadi, 52, is serving a sentence in a Tehran prison after being convicted of “spreading anti-state propaganda” for her criticism of Iran’s government and its laws curtailing women’s rights. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.

Her health has suffered during her incarceration, including multiple heart attacks in 2022, the foundation said. Ms. Mohammadi’s husband, Taghi Rahmani, who lives in France with the couple’s two children, said in October that the Iranian government had withheld medical treatment for her for months.

“She has a problem with her digestive system, and lumps were found in her breasts,” he told The New York Times in a telephone interview. “But she was taken to the hospital five months later than the time of her initial request.”

She had also been denied any visitors and phone calls, Mr. Rahmani added.

Mr. Rahmani, reached by phone on Wednesday, said that he and their twin children were elated by the news of Ms. Mohammadi’s release, but their demand was that she be freed for good. He said their children had spoken to their mother for the first time in nearly three years, and that it was a very emotional conversation.

“I spoke to her briefly; she is in great spirits but she needs to stay out of prison to receive adequate medical care,” Mr. Rahmani said. “We are happy, but 21 days is not enough; she must be released permanently.”

A video showed Ms. Mohammadi arriving home on Wednesday in an ambulance on a stretcher, with her leg in a cast and, in defiance of the hijab law, wearing a sleeveless floral dress with her hair uncovered. She shouts: “Hello, freedom! Freedom is our right. Long live freedom,” and the motto of the women’s uprising, “Women, life, freedom!”

When Ms. Mohammadi returns to prison, her sentence will be extended 21 days to account for her absence, according to her foundation. It and her family had lobbied for a “medical furlough,” which would have counted toward her prison term.

An activist for three decades, Ms. Mohammadi was just 19 when Iran’s morality police detained her for wearing an orange coat, she wrote in her acceptance speech for the Peace Prize. Her children accepted the prize on her behalf while Ms Mohammadi was held in Tehran’s Evin prison.

She has been arrested 13 times and convicted five times, with additional cases opened against her while she was in prison. Even from prison, Ms. Mohammadi was a key figure in the mobilization of the 2022 antigovernment protests that swept through Iranian cities. She encouraged civil disobedience during the movement, which became one of the country’s largest-ever uprisings, led by women and girls demanding an end to the Islamic Republic’s clerical rule.

Ms. Mohammadi has also led weekly workshops for the women in prison with her.

As her health deteriorated last month, two of her fellow prisoners — Motahareh Goonei, a student activist; and Vida Rabbani, a journalist — went on hunger strike to protest what they said was a denial of care for Ms. Mohammadi. Ms. Rabbani wrote a letter from prison to alert activists and lobby groups about Ms. Mohammadi’s worsening health, describing how the authorities had neglected her surgical wounds, according to news media reports.

Six days ago, on her twin children’s 18th birthday, Ms. Mohammadi issued a statement from prison addressed to them.

“My dear Ali and Kiana, we stand with the people and we are from the people,” she wrote. “Oppression, this shameful phenomena, is detrimental for life and humans, and we live under the hardest oppression of all, a religious authoritarianism.”

The Nobel Committee urged the Iranian authorities to “permanently end” Ms. Mohammadi’s imprisonment and ensure that she receives the proper medical treatment.

The offer was as enticing as it was unexpected for a relative political newcomer. Three years ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Mélanie Joly to become foreign affairs minister, among the most prestigious and highest profile portfolios in Canada’s cabinet.

But Ms. Joly, who at the time held a significantly less influential ministerial role, turned him down flat.

Her refusal wasn’t because of the fact that she lacked foreign policy experience. She said no because she feared that the travel involved in the globe-trotting job would force her to abandon her yearslong quest to conceive a child through in vitro fertilization.

But Canada’s leader refused to give up.

Mr. Trudeau offered to make whatever arrangements necessary to maintain Ms. Joly’s treatment anywhere in the world. “‘If you become pregnant,’” she remembers him telling her, “‘it would be a fantastic message you would send to the world.’”

After consulting her husband, parents and siblings, Ms. Joly relented, becoming Canada’s top diplomat.

Like her counterparts around the world, Ms. Joly has since had to grapple with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Then there are the diplomatic stresses specific to Canada.

She is still trying to heal a rift with China that developed after that country jailed two Canadians in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Chinese executive at the request of the United States.

Now she’s at the center of Canada’s greatest diplomatic crisis in recent years: accusations that the government of India and its diplomats worked with criminal gangs to intimidate and even murder Canadian citizens who are supporters of a separate Sikh state.

And the return of President-elect Donald J. Trump, and his threat to impose large tariffs on Canadian goods, poses so many diplomatic, economic and immigration issues that Mr. Trudeau has revived a cabinet committee on U.S. relations that includes Ms. Joly.

Her handling of all these challenges has brought Ms. Joly, 45, both praise and criticism.

But what is less open to debate: The high-profile job has placed her among the likely successors to Mr. Trudeau, whose political popularity has cratered over the past year.

Like all members of Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, Ms. Joly is publicly supportive of the prime minister. But other members of the Liberal Party have urged him to resign to let a new voice lead the party into elections that must be held by next October.

Mr. Trudeau has rebuffed these calls to quit as party leader, which would also mean resigning as prime minister. But speculation in the Canadian news media about who his successor will be — whenever that time comes — invariably includes Ms. Joly.

“I’ve known Trudeau for a long, long time, and he has my hundred percent support — period,” she said. “But the middle class is hurting, and Canadians expect us to be there for them.”

She added: “We need to be able to adapt.”

After graduating from law school, Ms. Joly landed a position at Stikeman Elliott, one of Canada’s largest law firms.

“I didn’t like it — period,” she said. “I was a litigator and I love, I love, being able to debate. But at the end of the day, I was debating for money and I wanted to have more impact on my community.”

Before quitting the law, Ms. Joly submitted a letter in 2007 to La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, condemning a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment then sweeping much of Quebec. Immigration, she wrote, “is not just a necessity, but an enrichment.”

After a brief stint in television journalism, Ms. Joly moved into public relations. Among her clients was a scion of the Bronfman family, which made its fortune with Seagram’s whisky, during the heir’s unsuccessful bid to buy the Montreal Canadiens hockey team.

That sort of work raised Ms. Joly’s profile to the point where she launched a bid in 2013 to become mayor of Montreal, her hometown, running on an anti-corruption platform. Despite zero political experience, she finished second.

Through her fund-raising for the arts, Ms. Joly met Alexandre Trudeau, a filmmaker, author and brother of Justin Trudeau. He invited her into a group that led his brother’s successful bid for the leadership of the Liberals in 2013.

Two years later, Ms. Joly was not only a newly minted member of Parliament, representing a district in Montreal, but also part of Mr. Trudeau’s first, gender-balanced cabinet. Her open and friendly manner fit with the new prime minister’s promise of a “sunny ways” approach to governing.

Her first position was also high profile: the minister responsible for cultural matters. But a deal she struck with Netflix to invest in Canadian film productions created outrage in Quebec because it included no commitments to French language programming. She was soon demoted to tourism minister and then held a series of other minor posts.

Ms. Joly had studied international law as a graduate student at Oxford but never practiced it. If she had been harboring an interest in global affairs as a lawmaker, she never made it public and was largely focused on domestic policy issues before accepting the foreign minister role.

Within a month of her promotion, there was another life-changing event: She was pregnant.

“So the two main dreams of my life were happening at the same time,” Ms. Joly said in her modest walk-up apartment in Montreal’s bohemian Plateau neighborhood. “When you’re pregnant, you feel empowered. I felt empowered.”

But before she even had much time to settle into her demanding new job, she suffered a miscarriage. She has continued with her I.V.F. treatments since, including meeting with physicians as she travels the world.

“There is a second room that is still under construction that could be ready for a baby,” she said, gesturing to the other side of the apartment, before briefly losing her composure and excusing herself for a moment.

From her first day on the job, Ms. Joly faced the same fundamental issue that has confronted all her predecessors: defining a place in the world for a middle-sized power with a relatively large economy, huge landmass and relatively small military.

Ms. Joly’s answer is what she calls “pragmatic diplomacy,” which includes the idea that “we need to work with countries that we don’t see eye-to-eye with.”

Ms. Joly recently said that the government’s previous experience with Mr. Trump, as well as its efforts to develop relationships with members of his new administration, have made it something of a model of how to deal with his White House.

“If there’s a country in the world that understands the United States, it’s Canada,” Ms. Joly said this month at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru. “That’s why there are so many delegations, so many countries, coming to see us.”

Under Ms. Joly, Canada did try to work with India, if unsuccessfully, before ultimately expelling six diplomats.

While relations with China have slid further following intelligence leaks indicating that it attempted to interfere in Canadian elections, Ms. Joly went to Beijing in July to meet her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.

“There’s that movement — which I am profoundly against — which is if you don’t engage with countries, you’re sending a message that you’re strong,” she said. “I think that to be strong is to be able to have the tough conversations.”

Not everyone agrees.

Lawrence Herman, a fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute, a policy group, wrote in The Globe and Mail newspaper that the trip to Beijing was “one of the most ill-conceived and self-defeating Canadian foreign-policy initiatives in recent memory.” By traveling to China, he wrote, Ms. Joly “makes Canada look like a supplicant.”

But Ms. Joly insists diplomacy is no different than any other part of life.

“For me, international relations is, first, about human connections and, second, it’s about being able to understand the different interests at stake,” she said. “What I’ve learned through my professional life is how to look at very complex situations and make them simple for people.”

While there are already skeptical voices about the prospects of her still-hypothetical leadership campaign, Ms. Joly has encountered similar doubts before.

“It’s been the story of my life, you know, being underestimated,” she said.

Syrian rebels battled pro-government forces on Wednesday on the outskirts of Hama, a major city in western Syria that has become the latest target of the surprise offensive launched by opposition fighters last week, according to both sides.

The rebels have rapidly expanded the territory under their control in northwestern Syria, intensifying pressure on the country’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad. Led by the extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebels now control all of Idlib Province and most of Aleppo Province. That includes much of the city of Aleppo, an economic engine of the country.

Now the rebels have set their sights on Hama, which has been a focal point of past revolts brutally suppressed by the country’s rulers. Capturing Hama would jeopardize the supply route used by Iran, a staunch Assad ally, to move arms bound for another ally, the militant group Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

Forces loyal to Mr. al-Assad have mobilized to beat back the rebel advance. But allies that the government has long turned to for support are now distracted and weakened — Russia by its war in Ukraine, and Iran and Hezbollah by the regionwide conflict with Israel.

Taking advantage of the moment, anti-Assad forces based in northwestern Syria have been expanding their offensive and fueling clashes elsewhere in the country, including in the strategic northeast, adding to the president’s troubles.

In a sign of the crisis’s urgency, Mr. al-Assad ordered salaries for his forces increased by half, Syria’s state news agency said on Wednesday. His army is filled with poorly paid conscripts, a fact that analysts said helped explain why many troops around Aleppo simply fled when the rebels arrived last week.

On Wednesday, the rebel command said that its fighters had captured several towns and villages just outside Hama, the regional capital, as well as a Syrian military base on its outskirts. That came hours after the rebels said that their fighters had control of Al-Mujanzarat Military Academy, one of the government’s largest bases, east of the city.

Neither side’s claims could be independently verified.

Hama’s history would make it a substantial and symbolic prize for the rebels. The city was the site of a massacre in 1982, when government forces under the rule of Mr. al-Assad’s father, President Hafez al-Assad, moved to crush an Islamist-led revolt.

As many as 30,000 people were killed when the elder Mr. al-Assad sent troops into the city in a nearly monthlong assault; the total death toll was never confirmed. That was the last time Syrians rose up against their autocratic government until 2011, when widespread protests drew a forceful crackdown from the younger Mr. al-Assad, and ignited the current civil war.

From 2020 until last week, the conflict had been largely frozen in place. Now, the once-static map of rebel- and government-held territory is shifting quickly as each side advances and retreats around Hama.

Syria’s state news agency reported on Tuesday that a large number of reinforcements had arrived in Hama to help repel the rebels. On Wednesday, it said pro-Assad forces were hitting the rebels with artillery fire and missiles in the countryside north of the city, killing at least 300 and shooting down at least 25 drones.

The director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said in an interview with French television on Wednesday that government forces had managed to push the rebels back from the city.

At the same time, Syrian and Russian warplanes were striking rebel-held territory, Syrian state media reported, citing the military. A photojournalist working for the German news agency DPA, Anas Al-Kharboutli, was killed in an airstrike in the countryside north of Hama on Wednesday morning, according to a statement from the company.

The renewed conflict was creating opportunities for other players — and generating upheaval — elsewhere in Syria’s complex battlefield.

As the rebel offensive spread, forces aligned with Mr. al-Assad from northeastern Syria, near the border with Iraq, headed to Damascus, leaving a cluster of seven villages they had occupied along the east bank of the Euphrates River. That allowed the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish fighters who have for years allied with the United States to battle the Islamic State, to move in, according to a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The official said that the takeover of the villages touched off a brief confrontation on Friday between Syrian government troops and U.S. troops. After Syrian government troops fired on a local American base, U.S. forces returned fire in what the official described as a series of self-defense strikes.

The official, as well as the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, said that the clash had not escalated. But the events in the area underscored how the rebel offensive was shaking up the battlefield.

Kurdish forces were also clashing in northern Aleppo Province with yet another player in Syria’s conflict: rebel factions backed by Turkey. Those factions represent a different strand of opposition groups from the coalition mounting the current rebel offensive. Turkey regards the Kurds as a dangerous separatist group. The fighting there killed 12 members of Turkish-backed groups, according to a Wednesday update from the Observatory.

While some Kurdish fighters who had held parts of Aleppo Province left for the northeast when the rebels arrived and took most of the city of Aleppo, others remained in a few Kurdish-dominated neighborhoods of the city, setting the stage for more conflict, according to rebel troops in Aleppo and the Observatory.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels, reiterated the U.S. commitment to combating the Islamic State, or ISIS, which rose to rule an extremist ministate in Syria and Iraq in the mid-2010s.

The United States and its allies have “enduring security interests in Syria — particularly the interest in making sure that ISIS doesn’t resurrect and doesn’t come back,” Mr. Blinken said. “So our own engagement and presence remains important.”

Russia and the Syrian government, however, consider the rebels the paramount security threat, and the Kremlin reiterated its continued solidarity with Mr. al-Assad.

“We strongly support the efforts of the Syrian authorities to counter terrorist groups and restore constitutional order,” Maria V. Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement, echoing Mr. al-Assad’s longstanding contention that the Syrian rebels were terrorists. (The United States also considers the group leading the current rebel offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, to be a terrorist organization, though other factions opposed to Mr. al-Assad are more moderate.)

On Wednesday, the Syrian military said that Russia had helped secure safe passage for government forces who had been besieged at the Assad Military Engineering Academy in Aleppo. It said in a statement that “joint Syrian-Russian military-political coordination” had helped lift the rebel siege, but did not specify whether Moscow had intervened on the ground or mediated the troops’ exit.

There was no immediate comment from the Russian Defense Ministry about the events at the academy, and it was unclear whether the academy was now fully under rebel control.

Reporting was contributed by Muhammad Haj Kadour, Eric Schmitt, Rania Khaled, Lara Jakes and Jacob Roubai.

Six Israeli hostages whose bodies were found in Gaza over the summer were probably shot dead by their Hamas captors in February, around the same time that an Israeli airstrike hit near the underground tunnel where they were being held, the Israeli military said on Wednesday.

Later on Wednesday night, the Israeli government said that its forces had recovered the body of another hostage, Itay Svirsky, 38, in Gaza. Mr. Svirsky was abducted from Be’eri, a small village near the Gaza border, during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza. Both his parents were killed during the assault.

The two announcements added fuel to an already anguished debate in Israel over whether the country’s military campaign in Gaza is endangering the return of the remaining 100 captives held there, at least some of whom are presumed dead.

The Israeli military said its investigators and pathologists could not definitively determine how the group of six hostages had been killed, as their bodies were recovered six months after they were killed. Israeli troops found the bodies with “signs of gunfire” on them in the southern city of Khan Younis in August. The hostages were killed in February, around the same time that Israeli fighter jets targeted a Hamas site in Khan Younis, according to the military.

It was only later that Israeli officials learned the bombardment had hit, at most, 220 yards from where the six hostages were being held, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said in a televised news conference.

“We were supposed to bring them home alive, and we failed in our mission,” Admiral Hagari said.

The airstrike ultimately killed the hostages’ Hamas guards, most likely by asphyxiation, said an Israeli military official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity to comply with protocol.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it was “highly probable” that the hostages’ deaths “were related to the strike,” which may have prompted their captors to shoot them. But the Hamas guards’ deaths appeared to raise the possibility that the airstrike might have killed the six hostages either way.

Admiral Hagari said it was impossible to determine whether the hostages were killed from gunfire or as a consequence of the strike. But the military believed the former scenario was more likely, he said, rather than one in which other militants later shot the hostages’ bodies.

The six hostages were mostly older people taken from their homes during the Hamas-led attack. They were: Avraham Munder, 79; Haim Peri, 80; Yoram Metzger, 80; and Alexander Dancyg, 75, from the tiny kibbutz of Nir Oz; and Nadav Popplewell, 51; and Yagev Buchshtab, 35, from a nearby community, Nirim.

Hamas and its allies took 251 people captive during the Oct. 7 assault, which killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians. After over a year of war, hostages remain in Gaza despite Israel’s efforts to free them by force and an internationally backed push for a cease-fire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

Talks have been deadlocked for months, as both Israel and Hamas have set seemingly irreconcilable conditions for a postwar settlement.

Mr. Netanyahu argues that ramping up Israeli “military pressure” on Hamas will ultimately compel the Palestinian militants to come to an agreement. But at least some of the hostages have been mistakenly killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, including three soldiers.

The Israeli military has since tightened its criteria for authorizing airstrikes, such as sometimes mandating the approval of a special intelligence directorate working on the hostage issue, the statement said. That may require intelligence indicating that an area is clear of hostages, the Israeli military official told reporters.

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has flattened huge chunks of its cities and killed over 44,000 people, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The Israeli military says it has “eliminated” 17,000 militants.

The families of the remaining hostages fear that each additional day in Gaza further threatens their loved ones’ lives. At least 37 of the remaining hostages are already presumed dead by the Israeli government; the bodies of another 37 have been retrieved by Israeli soldiers.

“The investigation is yet more evidence that military pressure leads to the killing of hostages,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement on Wednesday. “The military inquiry, as well as numerous other events, shows the absolute urgency of bringing all of our people back.”

The death of Mr. Svirsky — the hostage whose body was recovered on Wednesday in Gaza — had been announced in January. Palestinian militants had held him alongside Noa Argamani, who was freed in an Israeli rescue operation in June, and Yossi Sharabi.

“Dear Itay: During our time together in captivity, we imagined a thousand scenarios in which we returned back to Israel,” Ms. Argamani wrote on social media. “We never thought you would come back like this, as a corpse.”