Even in a frequently fogbound port city along the Atlantic Ocean, the billowing clouds of steam rising from Canada’s largest oil refinery over Saint John, New Brunswick, are impossible to miss.

On a ridge overlooking the refinery sit six enormous tanks, each containing one million barrels of crude oil. Letters painted in dark blue spell “Irving,” the family whose businesses dominate not only Saint John, but most of New Brunswick.

The larger of the Irvings’ two local paper mills looms above the Saint John River like a medieval fortress. Irving-owned railway tracks crisscross the city, linking smaller factories owned by the family to ports under Irving control. Irving-owned building-supply stores and gas stations dot the streets in this city of 78,000 people, where park signs honor Irving contributions to their upkeep.

The trainer paced the grounds of a mountain enclave in southwestern Syria, shouting at dozens of new recruits as they drilled sprints between barricades made from old car tires.

“You have to practice as if it’s real,” screamed the instructor, Fadi Azam. “Want me to start shooting at you instead to make it real?” he said, lifting his rifle and firing a few rounds away from the group, the paw-paw-paw of gunfire echoing across the valley on a brisk morning recently.

“You are lions, lions!” Mr. Azam yelled at the recruits, some of the tens of thousands of fighters from Syria’s Druse religious minority whose powerful militias control the rugged province of Sweida, southwest of the capital, Damascus. Sweida is the heartland of the Druse — a strategically important region bordering Jordan and near Israel — and these fighters stand to play a small but essential role in Syria’s future.

As the Islamist rebels who ousted the dictator Bashar al-Assad in December set up a new government, they are seeking to fold disparate militias including this one, which sprung up during Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, into a single national force. A unified military is crucial to securing control over the entire country and establishing stability, but that goal has proved elusive.

Since January, several of the strongest Druse militias had been in talks with the government about their conditions for joining the new army. They were skeptical over the interim president’s pledges to protect the rights of Syria’s many religious and ethnic minorities.

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The travel agency offered tours aimed solely at men, and that was enough to attract the attention of the police enforcing new Russian laws that restrict the rights of gay people.

One night in December, officers stormed the apartment of the agency’s owner and tied him up, he later told a court.

“Fifteen people came to my place at night,” said the owner, Andrei Kotov. “They were beating me in the face, kicking me and leaving bruises.” His comments were reported by Russian media and confirmed by his lawyer.

Mr. Kotov said the officers pressured him to “confess” that he was running a travel agency aimed at gay people, which he denied. The officers kept beating him, he said, and told him: “No trips for gays.”

A few weeks later, Mr. Kotov, then 48, was found dead in his prison cell. Prison officials told his mother that he cut himself with a razor, said his lawyer, Leysan Mannapova. The circumstances of his death could not be independently determined, and Russian officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Kotov’s death reflects an increasingly harsh crackdown in Russia on the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people that has accelerated since the start of the war in Ukraine. President Vladimir V. Putin has portrayed the new restrictions — and the war — as part of a broader battle to maintain “Russian traditional values.”

In November 2023, the Russian Supreme Court designated the “international L.G.B.T.Q. movement” as an “extremist organization” on par with the likes of Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Under laws targeting extremist groups, gay rights activists, their lawyers or others involved in efforts to support L.G.B.T.Q. people could face jail sentences of six to 10 years.

That has led to a wave of repression against L.G.B.T.Q. people and groups, with the police raiding gay night clubs and investigators targeting ordinary Russians, according to members of the community and groups like Human Rights Watch.

At least 12 criminal inquiries on the L.G.B.T.Q. extremism charges were initiated last year, according to the Russian prisoner rights advocacy group OVD-Info.

Denis Olyenik, executive director of Coming Out, which helps L.G.B.T.Q. people in Russia, said the authorities’ pressure had initially focused on rights groups and activists.

“Now, the crackdown is reaching out to ordinary people, clubs, parties — it affected the community that previously would even distance itself from rights advocacy,” he said.

Homosexuality was decriminalized Russia in 1993, inspiring a vibrant gay scene that included celebrities openly talking about their sexuality and the establishment of gay clubs. Tatu, a pop group whose two female members pretended to be a lesbian couple, kissing between songs, was even picked by state-owned television to represent Russia at international contests.

But in 2013, Mr. Putin opened a salvo against gay people when he signed a bill outlawing the dissemination of what it described as “gay propaganda” — which includes material that makes “nontraditional relations attractive” — to minors. In 2022, Russia introduced fines for promoting “gay propaganda.”

Then came the 2023 court ruling that led to the current crackdown.

After Mr. Kotov, the travel agent, was arrested, he was also charged with producing images of child sexual abuse, but his lawyer was not able to review case materials on that charge.

During his arraignment hearing in December, an investigator told the court, without giving further details, that images on Mr. Kotov’s phone proved that he committed a crime “aimed against the constitutional order and security of the state.”

A few weeks later, Mr. Kotov was dead.

Just two days earlier, a psychological evaluation for Mr. Kotov did not show any suicidal tendencies, said Ms. Mannapova, his lawyer.

Mr. Kotov’s mother has asked the prosecutors to go ahead with his case posthumously so that he could be cleared of the allegations against him, his lawyer said.

“It was utterly unclear to him how arranging trips for men can be considered setting up an extremist group,” she said.

The night after the Supreme Court outlawed the L.G.B.T.Q. movement in 2023, Sergei Artyomov, a 36-year-old gay man from Moscow, said he and his friends were targeted in a police raid at a Moscow nightclub. The officers blocked off the exits, made patrons stand against a wall and then wrote down their ID details, he said.

No one was arrested, but Mr. Artyomov, who used to work as a TV producer, said the experience rattled him. He said that he had already been thinking about leaving Russia as he wanted to live as an openly gay man, and that the raid strengthened his resolve.

“I knew things would only get worse,” he said. “There is no gray area anymore. They call you an enemy of the people, and that’s it.”

He left just before Christmas for Spain, where he said he was granted asylum.

The Kremlin-driven anti-gay campaign has been whipped up by vigilante groups as well as local officials and state media.

In the remote eastern Siberian city of Yakutia, Pryany Yakutsk, a popular media channel on Telegram, raised alarm over the holidays about “debauchery and corruption of men happening under the very nose of law enforcement and the officials in Yakutsk.”

It published two grainy photos from a nightclub party depicting what appeared to be bare-breasted women, one of them on a naked man. The message on the Telegram channel said the party featured what it called “transvestite performers” from Thailand.

A court later fined the club 250,000 rubles, or about $2,800, for violating public order since its patrons were “in a state of undress that insults human dignity and promotes nontraditional sexual relations.”

Russian Community, a nationalist group that styles itself as social vigilantes, has also posted photos and videos from police raids. Last year, the group posted video of a raid on an L.G.B.T.Q. nightclub in the city of Orenburg that showed several young people lying on the floor, face down, being arrested.

A criminal case was later brought against the club’s owner, manager and art director, who are still awaiting trial.

State media has also been bombarding Russians with messaging about the virtues of heterosexual families with children. Earlier this year, Mr. Putin issued an order for his government to come up with a strategy to promote families with multiple children.

Since the Kremlin introduced the first anti-gay bill in 2013, the number of Russians who think gay people should not have the same rights as others has increased from 47 to 62 percent, according to the independent pollster Levada.

Young Russians are still far more accepting of L.G.B.T.Q. people than older ones, opinion polls show, but have also heard constant denunciations of them in the media over the past year.

“That torrent of gay and trans hatred that keeps pouring out from all media is going to have consequences,” said Tatyana Vinnichenko, a veteran L.G.B.T.Q. activist living in exile in Lithuania.

The trans community has been a particular target of the authorities, with the adoption of a law in 2023 banning trans health care and changing gender identifiers in official documents.

The latest round of repressions has spurred a silent exodus of gay and trans people from Russia, activists say.

But Tahir, a 25-year-old gay man who asked that his family name be withheld for fear of criminal prosecution, said he had no intention of leaving.

“I definitely know that things will get worse,” he said. “But I don’t want to leave. This country is mine as much as it is for others.”

People of Italian descent have for decades been able to dig through their family trees, find an Italian ancestor and apply for citizenship to Italy, securing a powerful passport that allows them to enter more countries without a visa than travelers of almost any other nationality.

But so many have tried to claim the benefit that their applications have congested Italy’s courts, consulates and municipal offices, grinding other work to a near halt.

The government has had enough.

Fewer people of Italian descent will now be able to obtain citizenship after the government narrowed eligibility only to those with Italian parents or grandparents.

The decree, announced on Friday and effective immediately, strips away a provision that had allowed all comers to seek citizenship if they could prove — often through a lengthy and laborious process — that they had an Italian ancestor who was alive after the country was formed in 1861.

Antonio Tajani, the Italian foreign minister, said the stricter regulations followed “years of abuses” by people who had few ties to the country and only coveted its passport.

Italy has granted citizenship in recent years to a surging number of South Americans, Mr. Tajani said, suggesting that many new Italians mainly hoped to travel around Europe or to the United States. “Being an Italian citizen is a serious thing,” he said at a news conference. “It’s not a game to get a passport in your pocket to go shopping in Miami.”

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The idea of getting her eldest child a smartphone had long felt inevitable, said Daisy Greenwell. But by early last year, when her daughter was 8 years old, it filled her with dread. When she talked to other parents, “everyone universally said, ‘Yes, it’s a nightmare, but you’ve got no choice,’” recalled Ms. Greenwell, 41.

She decided to test that. A friend, Clare Fernyhough, had shared her concerns about the addictive qualities of smartphones and the impact of social media on mental health, so they created a WhatsApp group to strategize. Then Ms. Greenwell, who lives in rural Suffolk, in the east of England, posted her thoughts on Instagram.

“What if we could switch the social norm so that in our school, our town, our country, it was an odd choice to make to give your child a smartphone at 11,” she wrote. “What if we could hold off until they’re 14, or 16?” She added a link to the WhatsApp group.

The post went viral. Within 24 hours the group was oversubscribed with parents clamoring to join. Today, more than 124,000 parents of children in more than 13,000 British schools have signed a pact created by Smartphone Free Childhood, the charity set up by Ms. Greenwell, her husband, Joe Ryrie, and Ms. Fernyhough. It reads: “Acting in the best interests of my child and our community, I will wait until at least the end of Year 9 before getting them a smartphone.” (Year 9 is equivalent to the American eighth grade.)

The movement aligns with a broader shift in attitudes in Britain, as evidence mounts of the harms posed to developing brains by smartphone addiction and algorithm-powered social media. In one survey last year the majority of respondents — 69 percent — felt social media negatively affected children under 15. Nearly half of parents said they struggled to limit the time children spent on phones.

Meanwhile the police and intelligence services have warned of a torrent of extreme and violent content reaching children online, a trend examined in the hit TV show Adolescence, in which a schoolboy is accused of murder after being exposed to online misogyny. It became Britain’s most watched show, and on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with its creators in Downing Street, telling them he had watched it with his son and daughter. But he also said: “This isn’t a challenge politicians can simply legislate for.”

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