A Chinese military surveillance plane breached Japanese airspace off the country’s southwestern coast on Monday, marking what Japan’s defense ministry described as the first known incursion by China’s military into its territorial airspace.

According to a ministry official, a Chinese reconnaissance aircraft briefly entered Japanese territory near Nagasaki Prefecture around 11:30 a.m. on Monday. In response, Japan’s Self-Defense Force put fighter jets on high alert and issued a warning to the Chinese aircraft.

While Chinese planes frequently appear in international airspace around Japan, this incident represents the first confirmed entry of a military aircraft into Japan’s territorial airspace.

Over the past two decades, Japan has increasingly faced foreign aircraft encroachments. Last year, Japan’s Self-Defense Force scrambled fighter jets to intercept foreign planes on 669 occasions — more than three times the number of such responses two decades ago.

Of these 669 cases, 479 were in response to Chinese aircraft sightings, according to Japan’s Ministry of Defense.

The incursion took place a day before Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, is set to visit Beijing to hold talks with senior Chinese officials. The two sides are expected to discuss tense issues such as the status of Taiwan, the de facto independent island claimed by Beijing, and U.S. export controls of advanced technologies to China.

Military analysts suggest that Monday’s airspace violation could be a message from China challenging Japan’s delineation of its territorial border. China asserts control over a large continental shelf in the East China Sea, with its outer edge extending close to the Danjo Islands area, where the Chinese plane was spotted.

The airspace violation is the latest in a series of recent events heightening tensions between Japan and China.

Last week, a Chinese newscaster deviated from the script on a radio news program by Japan’s public broadcaster, asserting that the Senkaku Islands — controlled by Japan but claimed by China — are Chinese territory.

That same day, graffiti was discovered at the Yasukuni Shrine war-commemoration site in Tokyo using Chinese characters that appeared to read “toilet.”

Japanese officials summoned Chinese Embassy representatives to a meeting on Monday evening and urged them to prevent future incursions into Japanese airspace, according to a statement from Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The violence began with blasts that ripped through a military camp in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province late Sunday night, killing at least one soldier. Around the same time, armed men stormed into at least four police stations in the province, spraying bullets at officers and setting police vehicles on fire, local officials said.

By daybreak, militants had destroyed a bridge, bringing the major railway that runs across it to a halt. Then early Monday morning, the violence hit its apex when gunmen held up traffic on a major highway, shooting and killing nearly two dozen people.

Over a 24-hour period, the new wave of violence carried out by an armed separatist group has seized Baluchistan Province in southwestern Pakistan and left at least 38 people dead, worsening the country’s already deteriorating security situation.

The spate of coordinated attacks in Baluchistan began on Sunday, as the group, the Baluch Liberation Army, or B.L.A., announced that it was starting a new operation across the province. The B.L.A. is one of several insurgent groups that has demanded the province’s independence from the central government in Islamabad.

The deadliest single attack in the campaign so far unfolded in Musakhel, a district in Baluchistan, officials said, when armed men stopped traffic on a highway and demanded that passengers on buses and trucks show them their identity cards, officials said.

The gunmen forced some of the passengers out of the vehicles, and then shot and killed them, officials said. Nearly all of the victims were from Punjab Province, officials said, and the gunmen set at least 10 buses and trucks ablaze before fleeing the area.

Pakistani officials immediately condemned the attacks and instructed the authorities to carry out an investigation into them.

“No form of terrorism is acceptable in the country,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a statement. “Our fight against terrorism will continue until the complete elimination of the scourge.”

Some security experts and analysts say the coordinated attacks point to an intelligence failure by the country’s powerful military, which has long been the ultimate authority in the country. The Pakistani authorities have said in recent years that they had quelled the decades-old insurgency, but the recent attacks were a worrying sign that the B.L.A. has become more capable than ever before, analysts say.

“This is the peak of the critical phase of the insurgency,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, the director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, which monitors extremist violence and is based in Islamabad. He added that the recent violence demonstrated a higher degree of coordination and planning by the B.L.A. than in previous attacks. Pakistan military officials say that security forces responded to each of the attacks and killed at least 21 insurgents.

“Security forces and law enforcement agencies of Pakistan in step with the nation, remain determined to thwart attempts at sabotaging peace, stability and progress of Baluchistan,” according to a statement from the military’s media wing.

Terrorism across Pakistan has surged since United States troops withdrew from neighboring Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban seized power.

Since the Taliban takeover, some militant groups have found safe haven on Afghan soil while a Taliban-led crackdown on the Islamic State affiliate in the region has pushed its fighters into Pakistan.

During the Taliban’s first year back in power, the number of terrorist attacks across Pakistan rose by around 50 percent compared with the year before, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. Over the past two years, the number of violent attacks has continued to rise.

The violence has fueled tension between the Pakistani authorities and Taliban officials, who have denied offering support or protection to militant groups including Baluch separatists. It has also stoked concerns that the region could become a haven for international terrorist groups and that a wider conflict could break out in Pakistan’s border areas.

So far, the Pakistani authorities have been unable to quell the violence. American military support in the form of arms, intelligence, financing and more that once flowed freely into the country has dwindled since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Many militants are armed with advanced U.S.-made weapons and equipment that they seized after the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed, according to Pakistani authorities.

The Pakistani police have said they feel underequipped to handle the new wave of violence. Residents in areas affected say they are increasingly frustrated by the government’s response. Some have accused the country’s powerful military of being more focused on meddling in Pakistani politics than providing security.

Baluchistan, an arid province that stretches between the borders with Afghanistan and Iran and the Arabian Sea, has been the scene of much of the violence. The province, which is roughly the size of Germany, is resource rich but home to only about 12 million people.

The region is also the site of a Chinese-operated deepwater port in Gwadar, a key piece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Pakistan, which has been a vital source of foreign investment and also a target of militant anger.

Since Pakistan’s founding in 1947, the province has endured several insurgencies driven at least in part by exploitation of its resources, and in recent years, militants have targeted Chinese development projects in the region. In response, those groups and residents in Baluchistan have faced heavy state repression and human rights abuses, human rights groups say.

The B.L.A. has been among the most persistent insurgent groups. Founded in the early 2000s, the group appeared to have been significantly weakened by 2020 after years of counterinsurgency operations and rifts among separatist groups. But in recent years, it has roared back — a feat highlighted by the operation that began on Sunday.

“Our fight is against the occupying Pakistani military,” the Baluch Liberation Army said in a statement before the attacks. “If the police interfere, we will attack them as well.”

The announcement coincided with the 18th anniversary of the death of Nawab Akbar Bugti, an influential tribal leader in Baluchistan who took up arms against the federal government in 2005 and was killed by the Pakistani military a year later. His death injected new energy into to the insurgency in the region, analysts say.

The spate of attacks rattled residents of the province, many of whom were already on edge after the uptick in violence over the past three years.

“Last night’s attacks and the previous ones have shown that the militants are highly organized,” said Ishaq Hayyat, a resident of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province. “The attacks have really increased public fears — we’re concerned about our safety.”

Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting.

China will hold live-fire military drills near its border with Myanmar starting on Tuesday, fortifying its boundaries with a southern neighbor that has been engulfed in a civil war for more than three years.

China’s People’s Liberation Army’s Southern Theater Command said on Monday that it would conduct both land and air exercises in the southwestern province of Yunnan to test the “joint strike capabilities of theater troops and maintain security and stability in the border areas.” China conducted two similar drills in April.

The patrols, which will last until Thursday, come less than two weeks after China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, visited Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, and reaffirmed Beijing’s support for the ruling military junta, which seized power in a coup in 2021. Analysts say that despite Mr. Wang’s pledge of support, Beijing is using the drills to send a signal to the junta that it would like the military to return to Chinese-led peace talks with rebels and refrain from intensifying the conflict.

Myanmar, a country of about 55 million long fractured by ethnic divisions, has been thrown into fresh chaos as the military resumed control. Thousands have been killed and tens of thousands detained by the junta, which has been accused of committing atrocities and killing civilians by bombarding the country with airstrikes.

The junta’s violence has led to the emergence of a resistance movement made up of both civilians from Myanmar’s urban areas who had become rebels and battle-hardened insurgents in the border regions who have been fighting for autonomy for decades. Together, they control about two-thirds of the country, mostly along its frontiers, while the military government holds the major cities located in the central lowlands of the Irrawaddy Valley.

Resistance forces have been on the offensive for months, putting the junta on the back foot outside its strongholds. Mounting losses in troops and territory led the junta to impose a mandatory draft earlier this year.

China has been growing uneasy about the conflict, which has drawn closer to its borders, disrupting trade and raising concerns about the safety of Chinese nationals. Earlier this month, rebel forces overran a regional military base less than 100 miles from the Chinese border.

Myanmar “plays a crucial role in the development of China’s southwestern economy and national security,” said Song Zhongping, an independent defense analyst based in Beijing and a former Chinese military officer. “China is very concerned about peace and stability in the region, and even more concerned about the security of our borders.”

At stake are China’s investments in Myanmar, including multibillion-dollar plans to build an economic corridor from southwestern China to the Indian Ocean so that Chinese trade can bypass the Strait of Malacca, a high-traffic waterway near Malaysia. In July, anti-junta rebels captured a Chinese-backed nickel-mining project in the north about 160 miles from Mandalay.

China’s strategy in Myanmar has been to play both sides, said Jason Tower, the Myanmar director at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan research organization funded by the U.S. Congress. China cultivates economic, military and diplomatic ties with the junta while providing weapons and other supplies to rebel groups along the border, he said.

China used that influence to call for negotiations last December between the junta and rebel groups near the border called the Three Brotherhood Alliance. Talks collapsed in May, Mr. Tower said.

The junta has been frustrated by Chinese aid to the rebels, sending supporters to protest Beijing outside the Chinese Embassy in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital and its largest city, Mr. Tower said.

Earlier this month, after the regional military base fell, the junta leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, said that rebels were receiving arms, including drones and short-range missiles, from “foreign countries.” Though he did not name China, he said some arms and ammunition were coming from factories across the border with China. China is also a major supplier of weapons to the junta.

China needs to hedge because it is unclear who will ultimately hold power in Myanmar, said Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.

“Beijing wants stability and influence. They aren’t particularly wedded to any one party or approach, it seems to me,” Mr. Chong said.

During Mr. Wang’s visit to Myanmar, he said he hoped that Myanmar would protect Chinese citizens and projects in the country, maintain stability along the border, and work with China on cracking down on cross-border crimes.

In China’s view, the junta appears too weak to consolidate power, and the rebels too disparate to form a unity government, Mr. Tower said.

China is probably concerned that the junta may step up airstrikes on rebels near the Chinese border, where the regime has virtually no presence on the ground. “If the junta wants to recover some of the territory it lost, it will resort to using heavy airstrikes in the border areas,” Mr. Tower said. “That is a sensitive issue for China.”

Olivia Wang contributed reporting.

One of Venezuela’s top election officials, in a declaration sure to jolt the crisis-weary nation, said in an interview that he had no proof that Venezuela’s authoritarian president won last month’s election.

Since the July 28 vote, governments around the world have expressed skepticism, and even outright disbelief, over President Nicolás Maduro’s claim to victory. But the statement by Juan Carlos Delpino — an opposition-member of the government body that announced Mr. Maduro’s win — represents the first major criticism from inside the electoral system.

Speaking on the record to a reporter for the first time since the vote, Mr. Delpino said he “had not received any evidence” that Mr. Maduro actually won a majority of the vote.

Neither the electoral body nor Mr. Maduro has released tallies to support assertions that the president won re-election, while the opposition has published receipts from thousands of voting machines that show its candidate, Edmundo González, won an overwhelming majority.

In declaring Mr. Maduro the winner without evidence, the country’s election body “failed the country,” Mr. Delpino said. “I am ashamed, and I ask the Venezuelan people for forgiveness. Because the entire plan that was woven — to hold elections accepted by all — was not achieved.”

Mr. Delpino, a lawyer and one of two opposition-aligned members of Venezuela’s electoral council, spoke from hiding, afraid of government backlash. In recent weeks Mr. Maduro’s security forces have rounded up anyone who appears to doubt his claim to another six years in power, and many Venezuelans are fearful that his forces are crossing borders to go after enemies.

The National Electoral Council, known in Venezuela as the C.N.E., is the five-member body charged with deciding the framework of elections, as well as receiving and announcing results. These duties make it enormously powerful.

When the country’s legislature selected Mr. Delpino as a member of the council last August, many in Venezuela saw it as an attempt to give it a veneer of balance and legitimacy.

At the time, Mr. Delpino was living in the United States, and he returned to Venezuela to serve on the council out of “great levels of commitment” to the democratic process, he said.

Most in the country believed that the council was controlled by Mr. Maduro. But Mr. Delpino, a longtime member of an opposition party called Democratic Action, said he agreed to join out of a belief that the “electoral route” was the avenue for change.

A spokeswoman for the National Electoral Council did not respond to a request for comment.

The other opposition-aligned member of the council is Aime Nogal, who has not spoken publicly since the election and, unlike Mr. Delpino, has appeared at events held by the electoral body.

Reached for comment, Ms. Nogal said she was not granting any interviews.

The July vote pitted Mr. Maduro, whose socialist-inspired movement has been in power for 25 years, against Edmundo González, a previously little-known diplomat who had the backing of a popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

Just hours after polls closed on Election Day, the electoral council president — Elvis Amoroso, a longtime member of Mr. Maduro’s party — proclaimed Mr. Maduro the winner, with just over half of the vote.

That very evening, Mr. Delpino decided to stop participating in the council, he said, and he did not appear at a news conference announcing Mr. Maduro’s victory.

While Mr. Amoroso has yet to produce documentation proving that Mr. Maduro won, the opposition gathered the printed tallies of more than 25,000 voting machines on July 28.

Those 25,000 receipts — representing more than 80 percent of all machines used on Election Day — showed Mr. González had won 67 percent of the vote. In recent weeks the opposition has posted those receipts on its website.

Mr. Delpino declined to say whether he had the voting data received by the government.

But in a message he said he planned to post on X after his interview with The Times, Mr. Delpino cited a long list of irregularities that led him to “a loss of confidence in the integrity of the process and in the announced results.”

These irregularities, he wrote, include:

• The National Electoral Council’s refusal to release machine-by-machine results.

• Claims by election witnesses that they were kicked out of polling stations as the stations closed, making it impossible for them to oversee the final moments of the vote.

• An interruption in the electronic transmission of results from voting machines to the council’s data hub. (This could create an opening to tamper with the data.)

• The “worrying lack” of council meetings in the months before the vote, resulting in Mr. Amoroso making “unilateral” decisions about the process. This made it difficult for Mr. Delpino to push back against policies that tilted the election in Mr. Maduro’s favor, like barriers to registration abroad.

On the morning of the vote, Mr. Delpino awoke with optimism, he said in the interview, and he was at the electoral council’s headquarters in Caracas by 6 a.m. But by the end of the day, when he realized Mr. Amoroso was going to announce an “irreversible” victory for Mr. Maduro without proof, he went home, he said, rather than participate in the announcement.

Since the day of the vote, Diosdado Cabello, one of Mr. Maduro’s most powerful allies and the vice president of their party, has accused Mr. Delpino of being part of a “little group of terrorists” who hacked the electoral system in an attempt to rig a win for Mr. González.

(The month before the election, Mr. Delpino had criticized Mr. Amoroso’s management of the election council to a local news outlet, Efecto Cocuyo, helping to spotlight him as a target for the governing party.)

The United States has recognized Mr. González as the winner of the election, and even the governments of Colombia and Brazil — run by left-leaning leaders like Mr. Maduro — have expressed “grave doubts” that Mr. Maduro won.

All have called on Mr. Maduro and the National Electoral Council to release results by polling stations.

Two independent panels that observed the election in Venezuela, one from the United Nations and another from the Carter Center, have said it did not meet the minimum standards for a democratic vote.

If Mr. Maduro is inaugurated again in January, it will extend his movement’s time in power into its third decade. Under the president and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the oil-rich country has experienced an extraordinary economic decline, with mismanagement, corruption and U.S. sanctions eviscerating the economy.

Mr. Maduro is under investigation by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity and is wanted by the United States on drug trafficking charges.

Since the vote, some Venezuelans have pressured Mr. Delpino to speak out and criticized him for taking weeks to do so. He said he was coming forward now out of a commitment to transparency.

In the years that Mr. Chávez and then Mr. Maduro consolidated control, some in the opposition have pushed for a military coup or foreign intervention.

But Mr. Delpino said that despite all he had seen in recent weeks, he thought elections were the answer to better future. “I believe even today that the answer for Venezuela is democratic,” he said.

“The answer is electoral. With another protagonist in the C.N.E., of course,” — a reference to Mr. Amoroso — “but I believe in that electoral solution.”

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.

Russia launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Ukraine on Monday, killing at least three people, the Ukrainian authorities said, with explosions rocking major cities, including the capital, Kyiv. Energy infrastructure was also targeted in the attacks, officials said.

“The attack of the enemy strike drones continues. Stay in shelters,” the Ukrainian Air Force said in one of a series of Telegram posts issued as different cities were hit.

In addition to Kyiv, the country’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, and the western city of Lviv were also hit. Air raid alerts sounded in many places. “There are six Tu-22M3 aircraft in the air,” another air force message on social media said, referring to Russian bombers that can launch missiles.

The strikes came a day after a barrage of attacks on the eastern city of Kramatorsk. A member of a Reuters news agency team, a British safety adviser, was killed in the city when a missile struck the hotel where he was staying, Reuters said. Two Reuters journalists were also wounded in the strike.

Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Kursk region of Russia on Aug. 6, seeking to shift the dynamics of the war, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had pledged a decisive response. It was not clear whether the attacks on Monday signaled part of that retaliation or whether Moscow was seeking to increase the pace of its military gains this year in the east of the country.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine said that 15 of the country’s 24 regions had been hit in what he called a “massive Russian attack” using cruise missiles, drones and other weapons. “There are wounded and dead,” he said, adding that Russia had also targeted the energy sector.

The Ukrainian minister of energy, Herman Halushchenko, told local news media that the attack had been a continuation of long-running strikes on energy infrastructure, causing emergency blackouts. “The enemy is not abandoning its plans to deprive Ukrainians of electricity,” he said.

Efforts to cripple Ukraine’s power grid began in the fall of 2022 and intensified in March of this year with strikes on power plants. Earlier attacks had aimed largely at transformer stations. By last month, nearly all Ukraine’s thermal power plants and a third of hydroelectric power stations had been destroyed.

Ukraine, which is ramping up production of an arsenal of domestically made, long-range exploding drones, has retaliated by blowing up fuel tanks and oil refineries in Russia.

Russia has been attacking Ukrainian cities with missiles and drones every few days in addition to daily barrages of artillery, mortar fire and missiles in areas near the front lines. On July 8, a missile slammed into Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, which is in Kyiv, putting it out of action without killing any children. On the same day, attacks across the capital killed more than 30 people.

On Monday, a Russian attack damaged an apartment building in the city of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, the city’s mayor, Ihor Polishchuk, posted on social media. He later said that one person had been killed. A 69-year-old man also died in the Dnipropetrovsk region of southern Ukraine, according to the governor, ​​Serhii Lysak, while the governor of the Zaporizhzhia region, Ivan Fedorov, said that a man had died in an attack there.

The Ukrainian casualty reports could not be confirmed independently and the Russian Defense Ministry, which typically remains silent about attacks it conducts against cities and other civilian targets in Ukraine, said nothing on its own Telegram channel.

More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its full scale invasion in February, 2022, according to United Nations data.

The war has also been deadly for news personnel. On Sunday, Reuters identified the security adviser who was killed in the hotel as Ryan Evans, without providing more information. A Reuters article said that Mr. Evans, 38, was a former soldier who had been working with the news agency since 2022.

On Monday, the Ukrainian authorities were struggling to cope with infrastructure problems apparently related to the air attacks. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, reported power and water outages in some parts of the city, and the head of the regional administration in Lviv, Maksym Kozytskyi, also reported power outages.

English fox hunters have tried, for years, to push back against a nearly 20-year-old ban on their beloved sport.

The centuries-old tradition of using packs of dogs to chase and kill foxes — or any wild mammals — became illegal in England in 2005, after a long parliamentary struggle driven by campaigners and lawmakers who opposed it on animal welfare grounds.

So far, the law has stood, and fox hunting remains hugely unpopular among the general public: 80 percent of people in Britain think it should remain illegal, according to YouGov, a polling company.

Now, a pro-hunting activist has a new plan of attack.

Ed Swales, the activist, founded Hunting Kind, a lobby group that aims to protect hunting with dogs and other forms of hunting, in early 2022. He wants to use Britain’s Equality Act — which protects people from discrimination because of their age, race, sexuality or religion, among other things — to classify a pro-hunting stance as a protected belief.

That would put it in the same legal category as atheism, pacifism, ethical veganism, and, ironically, a moral opposition to fox hunting.

“If he’s ‘anti-hunt,’ well, you can be ‘hunt,’” Mr. Swales said. “It’s just the same law.”

Mr. Swales, 55, said he was preparing to bring a series of anti-discrimination lawsuits in the hope of setting a legal precedent that could, eventually, help reverse the fox-hunting ban.

“We’ve been doing this for millennia,” he said. Hunting is “literally part of our cultural heritage.”

Hunting itself is not illegal in England. Shooting deer, rabbits, duck and some other animals is allowed during hunting seasons, with permission from the landowner and a gun license.

But the hunting community is bracing for an anticipated challenge by Britain’s new Labour government, which pledged to ban trail hunting — where dogs follow a deliberately laid scent trail, usually of fox urine, instead of a real fox — in its election platform.

The British Hound Sports Association, which promotes and governs hunting with dogs in the U.K., says that by simulating traditional fox hunting, trail hunting allows the community to continue “to support the sport they love” despite the ban.

But animal rights activists say trail hunting can be a smoke screen for illegal fox hunting, because trails frequently run through land where foxes live, and foxhounds cannot always tell the difference between a fox and an artificial scent.

Last year, Chief Superintendent Matt Longman, England’s police lead on fox hunting, said that illegal hunting was “still common practice,” with trail hunts frequently taking place in natural fox habitats.

“Foxes often end up getting caught and killed by the dogs regardless,” said Josh Milburn, a lecturer in political philosophy at Loughborough University who studies animal rights.

Late last month, Mr. Swales sent out a survey to fellow hunters to try to find potential discrimination cases. He said many shared instances of verbal abuse or intimidation during recent hunting excursions. And this year, two venues canceled events for trail hunting groups after campaigns from anti-hunting activists. “They got told, ‘We are canceling you because we got so much pressure from the anti-hunt brigade,’” Mr. Swales said.

Some experts said that the planned discrimination lawsuits were a distraction from the debate over animal rights, which hunters with dogs have already lost in the court of public opinion. “In making this argument that fox hunters are the persecuted group, they’re trying, I think, to shift the conversation from talking about foxes to talking about people,” Dr. Milburn said.

Others questioned the idea that those who hunt with dogs — a community that has traditionally included some of Britain’s wealthiest landowners — needed special protection.

“Here we have an argument being made that in fact some of the most privileged in our society should also be protected on the basis of their shared activity chasing and killing a terrified wild animal,” Edie Bowles, the executive director of the Animal Law Foundation, a legal research charity, wrote in an email.

Several lawyers and academics who study discrimination said Mr. Swales’s argument might have some success, but the bar would be high. Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, a protected characteristic must “be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint” and it must “not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

“The test requires that the belief be genuinely held and that it be sufficiently cogent and weighty and coherent,” said Colm O’Cinneide, a professor of constitutional and human rights law at University College London. A mere political opinion would not pass muster, he said: “There needs to be some sort of belief structure or framework.”

Experts said that a protected belief could be easier to argue than trying to define hunters as a minority ethnic group — like Sikhs, Roma or Jews — which Mr. Swales has also proposed.

Speaking at a public event in late July, he claimed that his advisers had told him that “the qualifications of an ethnic group, there are five of them — we hit every one, straight in the bull’s-eye,” which he reiterated in interviews with The New York Times.

“The legal assessment is that we would qualify for both categories,” he said on Thursday.

But he has since backed off from the idea of starting with the minority group argument, saying his team would prepare protected belief arguments instead. “Pick the lowest hanging fruit first,” he said, paraphrasing his legal team.

Hunters have already tried, and failed, to argue that bans infringe upon their rights.

In 2007, a belief in fox hunting was explicitly denied protection in Scotland’s courts, where a judge found that “a person’s belief in his right to engage in an activity which he carries on for pleasure or recreation, however fervent or passionate,” did not compare to protected beliefs or religion, and therefore would not be covered under human rights law.

And in 2009, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that the ban on fox hunting with dogs did not violate human rights.

“If hunting can be shown to be more than a recreational activity, perhaps as part of a belief system in human supremacy over animals or human dominion over the earth, then a protected belief system could work,” Dr. John Adenitire, who teaches animal rights law at Queen Mary, University of London, wrote in an email.

For Mr. Swales, it is now or never.

His push comes after years of stewing about restrictions on hunting — without, he says, enough of a fight back from the hunting community.

“All we do is sit here and talk about it and drink sherry and bemoan and bewail our situation,” he said. “And nobody actually does anything.”

A search and rescue operation was underway Monday morning after a major fire broke out in a mixed-use building in east London, the London Fire Brigade said in a statement. Fire officials said that at least 100 people were evacuated.

The cause of the fire is still unknown, the fire officials said, but 225 firefighters responded to the blaze in 40 fire trucks, and firefighters were called to the scene at 2:44 a.m. on Monday.

The London Ambulance Service wrote on X that it took two people to the hospital.

The building, which was both residential and commercial, “has a number of fire safety issues known to London Fire Brigade,” the officials said.

The building in Dagenham, an area in far east London, had external “noncompliant cladding,” a planning permission application from 2023 shows. It was covered in scaffolding; architects had applied to replace the cladding on the fifth and sixth floors.

To many, that description will recall the devastating 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower, an apartment building across the British capital in west London, which left 72 people dead in the country’s deadliest fire in more than a century.

The fire at Grenfell Tower spread rapidly because of flammable exterior cladding and insulation, which was illegal in many countries because of the fire danger it posed.

In 2017, an independent review found that British construction regulations were “not fit for purpose,” and had allowed dangerous latitude for cutting corners in a culture of “doing things cheaply.”

A separate report in 2019, which was harshly critical of the brigade, found that some of the people in the Grenfell building would have survived if the firefighters and emergency operators had not told them to stay put.

The final inquiry into the Grenfell fire will be published next Wednesday.

This is a developing story.