Few signs of life can be seen along the highway in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. Nearly every shop lining the road is shuttered and the sidewalks empty. The red-and-white painted barriers of some Lebanese army checkpoints are vacant, abandoned by the soldiers guarding them. Even the road is mostly quiet — save the occasional car racing out of the valley.

Scattered along the way are remnants of the Israeli airstrikes that have pummeled the area in recent days. Where factories, stores and houses once stood, there are piles of cinder blocks, twisted pieces of metal and shards of glass. Emerald green shrubbery is coated in dull gray dust, and power lines — yanked from their metal posts in the blasts — dangle over the road, swaying with the breeze.

“Every strike feels closer and closer and closer. You don’t know where to hide, where to escape,” said Mariam Saleh, 23, who was visiting relatives in the Bekaa Valley village of Britel when the strikes began this week.

The bombardments across the Bekaa Valley are part of the more than 1,000 airstrikes that Israel has launched against Lebanon since Monday in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese military group. The campaign is one of the most intense in contemporary warfare, experts say, and led to the deadliest day in Lebanon in decades.

So far, about 700 people have been killed and over 100,000 others forced to flee their homes because of the strikes.

While the heaviest bombardment has been in the south, Israel has also struck across the Bekaa Valley, a patchwork of farmland, wineries, olive groves and villages nestled between Lebanon’s two mountain ranges. At least 160 people have been killed in Bekaa over the past week, according to the local authorities.

The strikes have decimated pockets of the valley, one of Lebanon’s poorest regions, where Hezbollah holds immense sway and has a significant support base. Thousands of residents have fled the area since the strikes began on Monday, seeking shelter in relatives’ homes in the capital, Beirut, or crowding into hotels on its outskirts. By Wednesday, nearly all of the hotels in Chtoura — a major town on the western edge of Bekaa — were fully booked.

Two New York Times reporters and a photographer visited the Bekaa Valley this week on a two-day trip. The Hezbollah authorities allowed entry to the region on the condition that Hezbollah members could accompany the reporting team and could restrict its movements.

Hezbollah did not listen to interviews with local residents and had no say over what would be published. While the trip revealed the bombardment’s civilian toll, it did little to illuminate how much the strikes had damaged Hezbollah’s military activities, including its fighters and their capabilities, with Hezbollah keeping any such damage from view.

While thousands have fled the region, hundreds have also flooded into the valley’s medical centers, threatening to overwhelm health care workers, hospital administers say.

The Dar Al Amal University Hospital in Douris — two miles southwest of Baalbek, a city that has been frequently targeted in the Israeli airstrikes — received around 100 patients wounded in the strikes between Tuesday and Wednesday night, according to the director of the hospital, Dr. Elie Maubard. Around 40 of those patients were children, he said.

In the pediatric ward of the hospital, Sabrin Sharaf, 46, sat at the foot of one bed where her 9-year-old daughter, Zainab, lay unconscious under a dark green blanket, her long brown hair held back by a surgical hairnet.

When strikes began to rain down on the valley on Monday night, Ms. Sharaf gathered Zainab and her five other children in their kitchen. The room was the farthest in the house from the main road and, she hoped, it would be the safest.

But around 9 p.m. that night, she and her children were suddenly thrown to one side of the room — landing in a pile under shards of tiles and pieces of stone. Choking back dust, Ms. Sharaf took stock of her children: She saw her 11-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son climbing out of the rubble. She spotted her 6-year-old twins, crying for help, alive. But she could not see Zainab.

“Zuzu! Zuzu! Where are you, Zuzu?” she recalled screaming, using her pet name for her daughter. After her 14-year-old son found Zainab under the rubble, they rushed her to the hospital in a neighbor’s car. Zainab has not regained consciousness since.

Standing nearby in the pediatric ward, Ali Rawad Hamzi, 41, said he had lost four of his nieces and nephews when an airstrike leveled their house on Tuesday night. His 16-year-old daughter lost both her eyes in the strike. His 7-year-old son, Hussain, who had been playing with his cousins, survived. He lay in a bed in front of Mr. Hamzi, his right eye swollen shut and jagged lines of blood etched across his face.

“He survived by a miracle,” Mr. Hamzi said in a hushed tone, gazing over at his son.

The sudden onslaught of destruction and mass displacement stunned many across Bekaa, which had been largely spared from the tit-for-tat strikes between Hezbollah and Israel over the past 11 months.

It has also brought the deep sectarian and tribal divides in the region to the forefront. Bekaa has long served as one of Hezbollah’s most fertile recruiting grounds as young men with few job prospects have joined the Shia movement to take part in its fight against Israel and in turn have received access to its extensive social welfare system of schools, hospitals and clinics.

But it is also home to many Lebanese Christians and Sunni Muslims who are less likely to have benefited from Hezbollah’s social safety net or to support its cause — and have now found themselves trapped in the group’s escalating conflict.

“Of course, I don’t want this war, I have children,” said Abdo Akiki, 55, a Christian who lives in Douris Village in Bekaa and whose 3-year-old daughter, Tala, had been seriously wounded after his house was struck on Monday night. “But what can we do, it’s up to them to decide,” he added, referring to Hezbollah.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Akiki sat next to his daughter in Rayak Hospital in the valley, gently stroking her hair between the beep-beep-beep of a heart-rate monitor. When she seemed to drift off to sleep, he lifted his palm — only for her to cry out and reach her small hand toward him. He leaned forward, placing his forehead against her and cradling her head in his hand. As he comforted her, he could hear the thundering roars of airstrikes in the distance.

Tala was always his most boisterous child, her father said, who played rough with the boys next door and loved sitting on his lap whenever he drove around the village. Looking at her in the hospital bed, the decisions he made the night his house was struck played over and over in his head.

When he first heard the airstrikes, he tried convincing his wife, Souad, that they should leave, but she was sitting on the floor with their 1-year-old daughter, paralyzed with fear. He tried telling her to try standing on the count of three: One. Two. Three. But she would not move.

As the night wore on, the sounds of the thuds grew louder, closer. Mr. Akiki stopped trying to coax his wife into the car. Even if they did leave now, he thought, he wouldn’t know where to go. “How do you escape when there’s bombing behind you and bombing in front of you?” he said.

Around 10 p.m., the back wall of his house came crashing down — burying Tala under a pile of rubble, only a corner of the red blanket she slept with peeking out. She suffered a head injury and two days later — though she was alert and able to be carried by her father — was still struggling to fully recover, her doctors said.

“I was about to lose my daughter, I was about to lose my whole family,” Mr. Akiki said. “What are we getting from this war?”

The elite power brokers of Japan’s governing party appeared to take public sentiment into account on Friday when they chose Shigeru Ishiba, 67, to become the next prime minister of Japan.

Mr. Ishiba, a former defense minister who has long been popular with rank-and-file members of the Liberal Democratic Party but less favored by parliamentary lawmakers, had run for the party leadership four times before finally attaining victory.

In a runoff with Sanae Takaichi, Mr. Ishiba, who is known for his plainspoken opinions and keen interest in military equipment, defeated Ms. Takaichi 215 to 194 in voting at the party’s headquarters in Tokyo. He will take over as prime minister next Tuesday, replacing Fumio Kishida.

Mr. Kishida, who presided over an expansion of Japan’s defense budget and a rapprochement with South Korea during his three years as prime minister, announced in August that he would resign after months of low approval ratings related to public dissatisfaction with inflation and his handling of a series of political finance scandals.

Hinting at the public’s loss of trust in the party, Mr. Ishiba said in his acceptance speech that he wanted to return to an L.D.P. “that can hold free and open discussions,” and would be “fair and impartial” and “humble.”

While past leadership contests have been staid affairs with a sense of preordination, Friday’s party election held genuine drama. Ms. Takaichi, who would have been Japan’s first female prime minister, pulled ahead in the first round of voting, in which both lawmakers and rank-and-file dues-paying members were represented. But Mr. Ishiba, a somewhat anti-establishment candidate who has criticized previous administrations, was able to round up the lawmakers needed to clinch the final vote.

It was the most hotly contested race in years, with a total of nine candidates vying for the leadership. The contenders included two women, as well as three former foreign ministers, and two rivals in their 40s, a novelty in a party long ruled by aging men.

The political factions that dominated the party until recently had been dissolved in an effort to persuade voters that patronage would not dictate the party’s choices, making the race harder than usual to handicap.

The Liberal Democratic Party has governed Japan for all but four years since 1955. Despite dissatisfaction over inflation, a slowing economy, labor shortages and the growing pressures of an aging population, voters have shown little inclination to vote the party out of power. In policy pronouncements, the candidates did not offer hugely different visions of how they would govern.

Earlier in the campaign, polls seemed to favor Shinjiro Koizumi, 43, a former environment minister and the son of Junichiro Koizumi, a retired prime minister. He would have been Japan’s youngest prime minister, but the governing party lawmakers did not seem ready for a generational change.

Mr. Ishiba, a former defense and agricultural minister, comes from a rural constituency. He was first elected in 1986, when he was 29, at that time the youngest member of the House of Representatives.

Analysts said that because Ms. Takaichi, a right-leaning disciple of the slain former prime minister Shinzo Abe, might have driven more independent voters to the opposition, Mr. Ishiba appeared a safer choice to lawmakers worried about keeping their jobs in any coming general election. In remarks on Friday night, Mr. Ishiba declined to say when he might call such an election.

The largest opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, this week elected Yoshihiko Noda, a former prime minister and a right-of-center moderate, as their leader. “L.D.P. lawmakers understand they need to balance against” the opposition, said Shigenobu Tamura, an independent political analyst who formerly worked for the Liberal Democrats.

During Mr. Ishiba’s leadership campaign, he said he would push for rural revitalization as well as eventually phase out the country’s nuclear power plants, many of which have been mothballed since a 2011 earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear meltdown.

He offered few prescriptions for how to improve Japan’s economy or address its demographic challenges, with close to a third of the population now over 65. In remarks after his election, he promised to extend a “new capitalism,” invoking a phrase that Mr. Kishida often used but never defined precisely.

Mr. Ishiba, who has spoken about the need to engage China, also said during the campaign that he would like to form an Asian version of NATO to ensure regional security. He said he wanted to renegotiate Japan’s alliance with the United States to make it more “equal.”

Political analysts said it would be difficult to alter an alliance that has been built up since the end of World War II, and which offers Japan growing military collaboration as well as protection from rising regional threats.

“He wanted to present himself as a more independent or autonomous leader who can negotiate with the United States, but this is a kind of rhetoric,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a political scientist at Hosei University in Tokyo. “I don’t think he can make a big difference in the relationship between the U.S. and Japan.”

Mr. Ishiba’s skepticism about that alliance makes him an outlier among Japanese leaders. Mr. Ishiba believes “it’s an asymmetric alliance,” said Tobias Harris, founder and principal of Japan Foresight Risk Advisory, a consultancy in Washington.

Depending on the outcome of the U.S. election, Mr. Ishiba’s views could prove contentious. Donald J. Trump, if re-elected, might revive complaints he had during his first term, when he criticized allies like Japan for not doing their share, as he saw it, to defend themselves.

Mr. Ishiba “is someone who is going to speak up and talk directly to the United States,” Mr. Harris said. “And what that means if you get a second Trump administration is anyone’s guess, because you have two leaders, both of whom think the alliance is entirely unfair but for different reasons.”

Some women’s rights advocates were relieved that Ms. Takaichi did not become Japan’s first woman prime minister. Her election “would give an impression that Japan made a step forward” in gender equality, said Momoko Nojo, founder of No Youth No Japan, a youth advocacy group. “But in reality, she is very conservative and would try to maintain values such as the patriarchal system.”

Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Seoul.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is set to meet with former President Donald J. Trump on Friday as concerns mount in Kyiv that a second Trump administration could spell the end of American support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

The meeting, which is scheduled to take place at Trump Tower in Manhattan, will be the first in-person encounter between the two men since 2019.

Mr. Zelensky is nearing the end of a nearly weeklong visit to the United States during which he has made appeals for increased financial and military aid to President Biden; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee; and bipartisan groups of lawmakers.

Convincing American officials to sustain aid to Ukraine has become more complicated as fighting on the Ukrainian battlefield stretches further into its third year and much of the world’s attention is now focused on the conflicts in the Middle East.

Although Mr. Biden pledged on Thursday to increase military aid for Ukraine, he stopped short of authorizing Kyiv to fire Western-made long-range missiles into Russia, something the Ukrainians have long pleaded for.

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Persuading Mr. Trump to continue supporting Ukraine if he is re-elected might prove even more arduous. At several public events, the Republican candidate has vowed to end the war quickly, even if that means having Ukraine cede large swaths of territory to Russia.

“Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now,” Mr. Trump said during a campaign event in North Carolina on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump has also long been skeptical about providing financial and military aid to Ukraine, saying that the contributions were draining American resources, a stance that the Republican Party has largely echoed.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, did not meet with Mr. Zelensky during his visit to Capitol Hill on Thursday, and he demanded this week that Ukraine fire its ambassador to the United States, accusing her of meddling in American election affairs.

Yet some Ukrainian analysts say that Mr. Trump is a wild card when it comes to foreign policy, and that his potential return would not necessarily be bad news for Ukraine.

“There is a certain level of unpredictability about Trump,” Sergiy Solodkyy, the first deputy director of the New Europe Center, a Kyiv-based foreign policy think tank, said in an interview this summer. “He may say something publicly and act differently when he’s in power.”

Mr. Solodkyy noted that after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Mr. Trump reversed President Barack Obama’s policy of not providing weapons to Ukraine. He also approved a decision to send Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine, which proved useful at the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

He also pointed out that Mr. Trump soft-pedaled his opposition to additional American aid to Ukraine earlier this year, prompting some Republican members of Congress to vote in favor of the military package after months of holding back.

Analysts say Ukraine has been developing strategies to appeal to Mr. Trump’s key stated interests, such as shoring up the American economy.

Oleksandr Kraeiv, the head of the North America Program at Ukrainian Prism, a research institute, said that emphasizing the economic benefits for American arms manufacturers could resonate with Mr. Trump.

“We need to be practical and less ideologized,” Mr. Kraeiv said.

The two sides of Libya’s political divide have agreed on a new leader for the country’s central bank — a settlement that officials hope will end months of escalating tensions that had raised fears that Libya could once again be sliding toward armed conflict.

The standoff over control of the Central Bank of Libya, which is key to distributing the country’s vast oil wealth, had led officials on one side to block oil exports for weeks and prompted the bank’s governor to flee the country.

The two sides announced on Thursday that they had agreed to appoint Naji Issa, a senior central bank official, as the bank’s new governor. They also agreed to form a new board of directors, an apparent attempt at preventing a repeat of what critics had said was the previous governor’s tendency to concentrate power in his own hands, with little transparency.

In the wake of the agreement, officials in eastern Libya also committed to lifting the oil blockade, according to the United Nations mission in Libya, which had convened talks to end the crisis.

Yet some bumps may still remain: Hadi al-Saghir, who represented the eastern-based Libyan Parliament in the negotiations, said in an interview on Thursday that it would not move forward with the deal until the ousted governor receives a guarantee that he can return safely to the country.

Libya has been mired in political deadlock, chaos and violence since 2011, when rebels overthrew the country’s longtime dictator, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, during the Arab Spring protests. In recent years, the country has been split between rival parallel governments in its east and west, a division that led to an all-out civil war until 2020.

Efforts to hold new elections have been fruitless, with most Libyan officials unwilling to relinquish power or access to Libya’s oil revenues.

Yet the country had experienced several years of relative stasis, with no major eruptions of violence or political conflicts, until August, when western Libyan leaders moved to seize control of the bank by force.

The bank, which funds both governments, maintains the currency, distributes oil revenues and pays salaries to Libya’s many civil servants, had been one of the few institutions that spanned the east-west divide, giving it some protection from political disputes. But tensions over matters like public spending were growing between the longtime governor, Sadik al-Kabir, and the head of the western government, Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeiba.

The clash culminated in armed men showing up at the bank to oust Mr. al-Kabir from his office in August.

The bank quickly lost access to international financial institutions, and experts said the Libyan currency and the country’s access to imports would soon suffer without a resolution. Inflation rose, and oil exports fell sharply amid the blockade, affecting world oil prices and Libyan revenues.

It was such damage, analysts and diplomats said, that eventually pushed the two sides to strike a deal.

The banking system was also frozen for Libyan citizens, many of whom could already only withdraw money from A.T.M.s rarely, and only after waiting in long lines. Most Libyans with jobs work in the public sector, and their salaries would have gone unpaid if the central bank remained incapacitated.

The dispute over the bank’s leadership “has seriously threatened Libya’s financial and economic stability, fragile security and livelihood of all Libyans,” Stephanie Khoury, the United Nations mission’s acting head, said at a signing ceremony for the agreement on Thursday.

When the South Korean spy met with Kim Jong-il, he declined the late North Korean leader’s offer of a toast, citing a promise to his mother that he would never drink.

But the undercover agent, masquerading as a businessman, vowed to break his abstinence when the two Koreas reunified, until recently an overriding policy goal of the leaders of both countries.

Park Chae-so, the spy, amused Mr. Kim when the North Korean dictator gave him a bottle of blueberry wine as a parting gift. He asked for another.

“Mr. Chairman, don’t we Koreans say one is one too few?” he said.

Mr. Park’s 1997 meeting with Mr. Kim, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, lasted only 35 minutes. But it was a​ coup for South Korea’s intelligence community: He was its only known undercover agent to penetrate the security cloaking the world’s most secretive regime and finagle an audience with its enigmatic leader.

Until then, Mr. Kim was so reclusive that even his own people had heard his voice only once, in 1992, when he shouted one sentence into the microphone while inspecting a military parade: “Glory to the heroic soldiers of the People’s Army.”

But Mr. Park was impressed with Mr. Kim’s speaking style.

“There was a flow — and not a single repetition,” Mr. Park, 70, said of his conversation with the supreme leader.

Mr. Park’s identity and his meeting with Mr. Kim, who ruled North Korea from 1994 to 2011, were exposed in a political scandal in 1998, turning him into a celebrated — but former — spy in the South.

These days, the ex-spy is a cautious but vivid storyteller, and this account is based on his version of events, which have inspired a book about his life and a movie, “The Spy Gone North.” While parts of his story have been corroborated by officials and associates, neither North Korea nor his former spy agency has officially commented on his work.

Mr. Park visited North Korea more than a dozen times, convincing North Korean officials that he could get them badly needed cash, including by helping them sell porcelain and other ancient North Korean artifacts abroad.

He said that whenever he was there, he folded his clothes — and left a couple strands of hair in his bag — in such a way that he would know whether his belongings were searched while he was away from his hotel. When the searching stopped, he knew he had gained the trust of his minders.

A senior North Korean official once put a gun to his head when he refused to cooperate with a plan to have him sleep with a North Korean woman and have a baby in the North, he said during an interview in Cheongju, where he lives, one of a few conversations he had in Cheongju and in Seoul with The New York Times. Mr. Park was told that Mr. Kim had already named the prospective baby: Tongil, or “Unification.”

“Whenever I visited the North, I knew my life was on the line,” Mr. Park said. “When the plane took off from Pyongyang and was up in the air, I could breathe again, relieved that I had survived another trip.”

A son of a farming family in Cheongju, south of Seoul, Mr. Park was an army major in 1990 when he was recruited by the Defense Intelligence Command. He began creating a new reputation as part of a carefully choreographed plan to eventually have him infiltrate North Korea. He borrowed money, squandering it in real estate deals gone wrong, and often got into trouble with superiors. He added a few criminal records to his file.

Three years later, in 1993, he was tapped by the country’s top intelligence service, the Agency for National Security Planning, just as North Korea’s clandestine nuclear program ​had turned into an international crisis.

By this time, he was known among his friends and former military colleagues — and hopefully among the North Korean spies in the South who would check up on his background — as a disgruntled former military intelligence officer, heavily indebted and dabbling in various private business enterprises.

For agents spying on North Korea, the famine there in the 1990s created rare opportunities. The North’s elites traveled to China to trade and earn badly needed cash. There, they met South Korean businessmen, some of them undercover agents who piggybacked on business deals to meet North Korean officials and establish an intelligence-gathering foothold.

Mr. Park had his first breakthrough when he learned that one of North Korea’s biggest players in such deals was a nephew of Jang Song-thaek, Mr. Kim’s brother-in-law and at the time one of the country’s most powerful figures.

To get the nephew in trouble with his Chinese creditors, Mr. Park arranged for a shipment of walnuts and pine nuts to be confiscated at a South Korean port. He then gave the nephew $160,000 to pay off his debt, and the grateful Jang family began pulling strings for Mr. Park and doors started to open.

One of his new contacts, Ri Chol, a North Korean Workers’ Party trade official, later introduced him in turn to a senior official from the Ministry of State Security, the North’s secret police, in Beijing. After learning that the security official had a son and daughter about to get married, Mr. Park delighted him with a pair of expensive watches as a wedding gift.

Such episodes convinced him that money talked among the elites of the impoverished North.

“My mission was to penetrate as deep inside the Pyongyang leadership as possible to learn what they were thinking,” Mr. Park said. “If I had any success, it was because I figured out their taste for money.”

As his contacts expanded up the hierarchy, the scrutiny increased. No matter how good his cover story, Mr. Park’s North Korean contacts would have known that anyone doing business with them was at least being watched by South Korean intelligence.

North Korean officials once showed him photos of his mother working at a garden and his two daughters going to school in South Korea. The message: Don’t betray us or else.

By the time Mr. Park met Mr. Kim, he had already crafted a lucrative business deal for North Korea that involved bringing a film crew to the North to shoot South Korean TV commercials. Mr. Park said Mr. Kim personally had blessed this proposal.

Surprisingly, the leader also asked Mr. Park to “read his face,” having heard from his aides that Mr. Park practiced the Asian art of fortunetelling based on facial features.

But Mr. Kim also had a more serious plan for Mr. Park.

North Korea wanted him to help with its scheme to block Kim Dae-jung, the longtime opposition leader in the South, from winning its 1997 presidential election. Pyongyang instead wanted the South led by a less-experienced conservative leader.

At home, Mr. Park’s spy agency also did not want Kim Dae-jung, a former dissident whom it once attempted to assassinate, to win the election either. His agency and North Korea, sworn enemies of each other, both plotted separate smear campaigns designed to depict Kim Dae-jung as an untrustworthy communist.

Mr. Park personally opposed such interference. He tipped off aides to Kim Dae-jung so they could prepare against such plots, while urging North Koreans to embrace an opposition victory.

After the opposition leader won the presidency, Mr. Park’s bosses at the spy agency went to prison for illegally meddling in the election. Before they did, they leaked classified intelligence reports that mentioned an undercover agent code-named “Black Venus” who had met Mr. Kim in Pyongyang. There was enough detail for journalists to figure out who Black Venus was.

Mr. Park was preparing for a trip to North Korea in 1998 when South Korean media identified him as Black Venus. His agency discharged him with a $224,000 bonus.

“I had no regrets,” Mr. Park said. “I could not let an enemy country interfere with an election in my country.”

He then made a second fateful decision.

He reconnected with Mr. Ri, the North Korean trade official, and worked as a freelancing agent for inter-Korean projects — a genuine businessman this time. In 2005, he and Mr. Ri arranged the filming of a Samsung cellphone commercial in Shanghai, the first of its kind, that featured two female celebrity entertainers from both Koreas.

After the political mood changed in South Korea with the conservatives taking back power in 2008, his old agency caught up with him. In 2010, agency officials arrested Mr. Park on charges of illegally contacting North Koreans and sharing sensitive military data with them. Mr. Park argued that none of it was secret, but he was sentenced to six years in solitary confinement.

Since he was freed in 2016, he has not had a formal job.

Although Mr. Park has no plans to reconnect with his North Korean contacts, he often wonders if they might reach out to him as he had helped them hide money abroad when he was a spy.

“They need my help to access the money,” he said.

Austria heads to the polls on Sunday for a pivotal parliamentary election that could reshape the nation’s political landscape. The vote is being closely watched because it could lead to a government headed by a far-right chancellor, a first since the end of World War II.

Far-right parties have gained some momentum across Europe, including in Austria, where the Freedom Party is leading in the polls. Here’s what to know about the election.

• Why does this election matter?

• Who is running and who is likely to win?

• What are the main issues?

• How does voting work in Austria?

• When will we know the results?

Why does this election matter?

Austria’s Parliament, or Nationalrat, will be elected on the heels of a European Union parliamentary election that saw far-right parties making gains across the 27-member alliance. Austria’s nationalist, anti-immigration Freedom Party came in first in the country, with 25.4 percent of the votes, and preliminary polling suggests the group may be even more successful in the country’s general election. The Freedom Party has been in government three times since 1990. In 1999, Europeans reacted with horror, swiftly imposing diplomatic sanctions on Austria.

But the reaction from across the continent was more muted in 2017 when Sebastian Kurz, a conservative chancellor, formed a government with the Freedom Party. By that time, all of Europe had shifted more toward the right, with both Hungary and Poland run by leaders from right-wing parties.

Who is running and who is likely to win?

The far-right Freedom Party is leading the polls, followed most closely by the conservative Austrian People’s Party and the center-left Social Democratic Party.

Donatienne Ruy, a Europe, Russia and Eurasia fellow at the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, described the Freedom Party as “far-right, populist, anti-immigration, euroskeptic and pro-Russia.” It was founded by a former Nazi officer and was ejected from government in 2019 following a major corruption scandal. It has since recovered and is running on a slogan of “Fortress Austria, Fortress for Freedom.”

Freedom Party leaders presented a campaign platform that prioritized deportation and decreasing asylum applications.

The Freedom Party may have a ceiling on the number of supporters, said Reinhard Heinisch, a political scientist and professor of Austrian politics at the University of Salzburg in Austria. “It’s a very popular party with a third of the population, and it’s extremely unpopular with the other two-thirds,” he said, adding that many Austrians would refuse to support the far-right party at all costs.

Several other smaller parties, such as the Greens, are lower in the polls but could divide votes among people who do not support the Freedom Party.

What are the main issues?

Though inflation rates have greatly eased over the last several months, cost of living remains a major factor in this election.

“There is a sense of exhaustion around when things are going to change because of inflation,” Ms. Ruy said. “Energy prices are quite high and I think people are looking for something that’s going to feel different regardless of how distasteful some of those parties can be.”

Russia’s war with Ukraine and its effect on Austria’s economy is feeding political discontent within the country. Austria remains dependent on Russian natural gas and oil. Before the war, Russia was an important market for Austrian products; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 caused inflation to jump to threefold, although it has since dropped below 3 percent.

While other parties have distanced themselves from Moscow, the Freedom Party has done the opposite, said Mr. Heinisch. The party is making the case that severing ties with Russia was a mistake, and that European and American elites are forcing Austrians to support economic sanctions that hurt their country.

Immigration is another central issue in this election. In the 1990s, Austria saw an enormous influx of migrants from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and far-right groups have continued to champion anti-immigrant stances since.

A series of Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna were canceled after a terrorist plot was foiled in August. One of the suspects was reportedly an 18-year-old Iraqi citizen, the others Austrian, and the cancellation led to national debate about immigration and safety, Mr. Heinisch said.

An anti-establishment mood has permeated much of Europe, including Austria, resulting in the rise of some far-right parties, experts said.

How does voting work in Austria?

Parliament’s 183 members are elected to five-year terms by a popular vote in the electoral districts of Austria’s nine states.

The council is elected by proportional representation, meaning seats are allocated based on the percentage of the vote each party garners. Votes are cast for a specific party, and then voters are able to indicate preference for a particular candidate within that party.

Individual parties must receive at least 4 percent of the votes for representation in Parliament; the leader of the largest party elected to it is typically appointed chancellor.

Austrians will cast paper ballots at schools, churches and other polling places. The results are tallied locally with representatives of the competing parties present; the results are then reported to the interior ministry.

When will we know the results?

Votes are usually tallied quickly on the same day, with exception of mail-in ballots, which can be slightly delayed. The ministry announces official preliminary results after voting ends but the final count will not be certified or announced until after mail-in ballots are counted a day or two later.

But depending on the results, it may could take weeks, if not months, for the new government to form a coalition government with other elected parties.

Melissa Eddy and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

Pope Francis was due to meet on Friday with 15 people who were sexually abused by members of the clergy in Belgium, a largely Roman Catholic country where the church has been plagued by a history of scandal.

Unlike his trip to the Asia Pacific region two weeks ago, when adoring crowds and lively Catholic communities welcomed Francis, the pope’s three-day visit to Belgium has stirred anger and criticism over the church’s response to sexual abuse by priests.

“One hour for 15 people? It’s not really listening,” said Marc De Bosscher, 63, who was sexually abused by a priest in his church outside Brussels in the 1970s, when he was 11 and 12. “It’s some window dressing.”

In his speech to the Belgian authorities on Friday morning, the pope addressed the scandal of abuse of minors with forceful terms. “The church must be ashamed” and “ask for forgiveness,” he said, but also try to solve this situation. “This is our shame and our humiliation,” Francis said.

Many accounts of clerical sexual abuse in Belgium have emerged over recent decades, and the issue exploded in 2010 when the then-bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, admitted having sexually abused his nephew for over a decade. The police started an investigation. More than a decade later, however, no one has been charged. The bishop was allowed to resign without punishment, and Francis defrocked him only this year. In the meantime, hundreds of other cases of clerical abuse and Church inaction have surfaced.

One man who is due to meet with the pope on Friday said in an interview on Thursday that during his time as a student at a Catholic school in Flanders, he and many other children at the school were raped by priests, or by other students who had themselves been raped by priests.

The scale of the sexual abuse was widely known by the school’s leadership, said the man, now 57, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject, adding that once a monk even walked in on him being raped and did not intervene.

The man’s best friend, who was routinely sexually abused by priests, later killed himself, he said.

As for meeting with the pope, he said he didn’t expect much. He called on the church to offer funding for psychological counseling to survivors of sexual abuse, many of whom cannot afford it. He also called on the Vatican to stop protecting priests who committed crimes, and said the church protected abusers far more than it looked after survivors.

Public outrage in Belgium resurfaced last year after the release of a documentary series, called “Godforsaken,” on clerical abuse. The country’s Parliament opened an investigation into the subject, and this week it opened a second inquiry focused on possible shortcomings of the police investigation that began over a decade ago.

Before the pope’s visit, Ingrid Schildermans, the documentary’s director, said that she had received many angry calls from abuse survivors.

“For them, it’s very hard that the pope will be received as a superstar,” she said. “To them, he is the leader of a criminal organization with a system of abuse.”

Ms. Schildermans said many felt that the church continued to play down the wreckage that the abuse had brought to their lives, such as when Francis said this month that we “should not forget the many children and teenagers whose dignity was violated.”

“They say, ‘We did not have our dignity violated — we were brutally raped for sometimes more than 10 years, and we still can’t go to the toilet without bleeding,’” Ms. Schildermans said of the survivors.

The issue of sexual abuse has roiled the church for decades, and thousands of cases of assault and cover-ups have emerged across the world. Pope Francis has pledged “zero tolerance” for offenders, and took unprecedented measures to address the issue, but critics say that these steps do not go far enough.

Belgian abuse survivors wrote an open letter to Francis this month, and while they praised him for acknowledging “this disaster” throughout his tenure, they said that more needed to be done.

“The church cannot at the same time condemn homosexuality or abortion and not exclude from its ranks — without waiting for a verdict from human justice — every author of perverse and abject acts which have shattered, often to the point of their death, the lives of so many abused children,” they wrote.

Rik Devillé, a retired Belgian priest who has documented instances of sexual abuse in the church for three decades, said in an interview that the pope’s meeting with people who were sexual abused by priests and clergy was an insufficient acknowledgment of the pain that decades of abuse had inflicted.

“Real recognition and financial compensation so that these victims can continue to live in a dignified way, that’s what’s needed,” he said.

The pope’s trip to Belgium was arranged to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the country’s two Christian universities, U.C. Louvain and the Catholic University of Leuven, known as KU Leuven, where he will meet with refugees.

He is also set to visit Collège Saint-Michel, a Jesuit school in Brussels, where some of the survivors who wrote the open letter were abused. The trip, which began in Luxembourg, will conclude with a Mass on Sunday at a stadium in Brussels.

Luc Sels, the rector of KU Leuven, said he understood criticism that the pope was meeting with too few people who had been sexually abused, but that the format would allow the pope to have individual conversations with them.

“Will the conversations be enough? Of course not,” Mr. Sels said. “The loss of trust in the institution of the church is such that it will take many more years before we find some peace.”

Wearing a T-shirt with a protest slogan.

Scrawling pro-democracy graffiti on public bus seats.

Criticizing Xi Jinping on social media.

Three men in Hong Kong were sentenced to prison last week for these acts of protest, which in another era probably would have drawn little notice — showing the power of a newly expanded national security law aimed at muzzling dissent.

The rulings, rendered over two days by a judge whom Hong Kong’s leader handpicked, highlight the political transformation that has taken place here.

A financial center and a city accustomed to freedom of political expression, Hong Kong now more closely resembles mainland China, where criticism of the ruling Communist Party is rarely, if ever, tolerated.

China agreed to preserve Hong Kong’s “lifestyle” for 50 years after the territory’s return to Beijing from British colonial rule in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” formula. But demands for greater democracy, culminating in antigovernment demonstrations that engulfed the city in 2019, led to a political crackdown that has eliminated virtually all public opposition to Beijing. A once freewheeling news media has also been silenced. Two editors who led the now-defunct Stand News were the first journalists in decades to be convicted of sedition.

“We are still in the midst of the national security reordering of the civic space in Hong Kong,” said Thomas Kellogg, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law. “Public debate and discussion is a shadow of its former self, and the government will continue to use its national security tool kit to police what people say and write.”

First Convictions Under New National Security Legislation

The three men were the first to be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, which was passed in March at the behest of Beijing by a legislature lacking any opposition lawmakers. The legislation had previously been shelved for two decades because of fierce local opposition.

Sometimes referred to as Article 23, the ordinance augments an existing national security law imposed by China in 2020 in response to the protests a year earlier. At least 303 people have been arrested, and 176 individuals and five companies charged, under both laws, according to Hong Kong’s Security Bureau.

The Safeguarding National Security Ordinance targets political crimes like treason and insurrection, imposing penalties that include life imprisonment. It also covers offenses such as “external interference” and theft of state secrets.

The three were all convicted under a part of the ordinance targeting sedition, which the law describes as “hatred, contempt or disaffection” for China and the Hong Kong government. It replaced a colonial-era anti-sedition law by increasing penalties to as much as seven years in prison, up from two. If the person “colludes with an external force” the sentence can be as long as 10 years.

Pleading Guilty to Slogans

The first man sentenced last week was Chu Kai-pong, 27, arrested in June at a subway station for wearing a T-shirt that said, “Free Hong Kong” in English and “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times,” a popular protest slogan, in Chinese. Mr. Chu pleaded guilty and received a 14-month prison sentence from Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai-tak, one of more than two dozen judges believed to have been selected by Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee to handle national security cases.

Shortly after Mr. Chu’s ruling, Judge So sentenced Chung Man-kit to 10 months in jail for scrawling “seditious” graffiti on public bus seats between March and April. Mr. Chung, 29, pleaded guilty to writing slogans such as “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” and “Hong Kong independence, the only way out.” Mr. Chung told the police investigating his case that he wrote the slogans believing he had the right to criticize the government because of free speech protections.

The day after Mr. Chung’s sentencing, Au Kin-wai, 58, pleaded guilty to “knowingly publishing publications that had a seditious intention” on social media. Mr. Au, who had no more than 20 online followers, got a 14-month sentence for his crime, which included hundreds of antigovernment posts on Facebook, YouTube and X.

Mr. Kellogg said, outside of vandalism, the three men’s offenses would not be considered “legally actionable in most other, rights-respecting jurisdictions” because they would be deemed acceptable political speech.

Setting an Example

Judge So and the Hong Kong government said the men’s actions were aimed at stirring hatred and contempt for the authorities, and that their convictions needed to deter others.

“If the law does not intervene early and individual inciting behaviors are condoned, the cumulative effect will eventually cause society to fall into chaos again,” Judge So said in Mr. Chu’s ruling.

The Hong Kong government said in a statement that the convictions showed that “clear lines” had been drawn between “unlawful seditious acts and expressions, and lawful constructive criticisms under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.”

Legal experts, however, said any criticism of the government could now be considered risky.

“The authorities,” said Eva Pils, a professor in international human rights law at FAU Nuremberg, Germany, “have constructed a tight net to catch everyone.”

For the first time in the three years since it staged a coup, the military in Myanmar has offered a major concession to the country’s opposition forces, calling on them to heal the nation’s rifts through “party politics” and prepare for the coming elections.

During the 8 p.m. news broadcast on Thursday, the junta proposed that armed resistance groups lay down their weapons, form political parties and participate in elections overseen by the military. Until now, the junta has consistently rebuffed calls from the international community to start talks with the resistance forces.

Thursday’s proposal echoed a similar one made by the former military leader, Than Shwe, just before the 2010 elections, the first time in two decades that people in Myanmar were allowed to vote. That signaled the military’s first effort to transition toward a semi-civilian government, though it failed to fully meet democratic standards.

Several commanders of the rebel forces, ethnic armies, and the shadow civilian government quickly rejected the offer, which came as resistance forces appeared close to capturing Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city. That would be a major victory for them.

The opposition forces now control large areas along Myanmar’s borders and in the mountainous regions, while the military retains control over the major cities and lowlands in the central Irrawaddy Valley.

The military is widely detested in Myanmar and has struggled to keep a determined opposition at bay. It is fighting both well-trained ethnic armies on the borderlands, which have battled the army for decades, and also the People’s Defense Forces, made of up civilians who took up arms after the coup.

“The state lost a large number of human resources, infrastructures, lives and property of the people due to the fact some individuals and organizations chose to resort to armed terrorism and armed struggle line without solving political problems through political ways,” the State Administration Council, the official name of the junta, said in a statement.

Myanmar’s turmoil has been a challenge for China, which is the biggest investor in the country and shares a border with it. Beijing has expressed support for the junta, but it has also engaged in talks with ethnic armed groups in northern Myanmar.

In August, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, traveled to Myanmar to urge the country’s army chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, to pursue political reconciliation and hold elections. The junta has said it will stage elections in 2025, but international observers and many Burmese people do not believe that the vote would be free and fair.

During a meeting with Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, in China in June, Mr. Wang said that merely holding elections was not enough, according to a senior Burmese official who accompanied Mr. Thein Sein to China. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose details of the meeting to the news media.

According to the official, Mr. Wang also called on the military to hold talks with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader who was ousted from power. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is currently serving a 27-year prison term on charges that the international community have said are trumped up.

“The reason they made this announcement is to appease China,” Ye Myo Hein, a visiting senior expert for the Myanmar program at the United States Institute of Peace, said in a Facebook post.

Opposition leaders shared that skepticism. “The question that needs to be asked is, who exactly failed to resolve the political issues through political means?” said Nay Phone Lat, the spokesman for the National Unity Government, the pro-democracy government that operates in exile.

“Stop repeatedly showing us the same old worn-out record,” said Padoh Saw Taw Nee, the spokesman for the Karen National Union, one of Myanmar’s most dominant rebel groups, said by telephone. “It’s a waste of time.”

He called on the military to step away from politics, to accept the drafting of a new Constitution to establish a federal union and to be accountable for all war crimes committed.

Soe Thu Ya Zaw, commander of the Mandalay People’s Defense Forces, wrote in a Facebook post that he thought the offer was deceptive. “It’s like hanging a goat’s head but selling dog meat.”

Many reserved their vitriol for Gen. Min Aung Hlaing. “There’s no point in talking about peace with someone like Hitler,” said Ko Saung Kha, commander of the Bamar People’s Liberation Army.

After months of constant pressure and grinding, bloody advances, Russian forces are pressing up against multiple strongholds along more than 100 miles of the jagged front in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine. For Ukraine, losing any of those important defensive positions could significantly alter the contours of the fight for control of the region, long coveted by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Despite staggering casualties, Russian forces are mounting armored assaults and sending waves of infantry on foot, motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles to attack Ukrainian positions from Chasiv Yar in the north to the southern stronghold of Vuhledar, which is at risk of being encircled, according to Ukrainian soldiers and combat footage.

With attacks across cratered fields, the Russians are racing to seize territory before the fall strips the foliage they use for cover and the rains turn fertile farmland into bog.

Even with both armies exhausted, the battles across the east remain as deadly as at any point in the war, according to Ukrainian soldiers and Western officials.

On each of two days last week, the Ukrainian military reported more than 200 clashes between the two sides — the highest such numbers in many months, according to DeepState, a group of analysts that maps the battlefield.

At a location near the front where injured soldiers are treated, the steady influx of the wounded last weekend testified to the intensity of the fight. In just 24 hours, small crews of medics treated more than 70 soldiers.

Sergeant Valeria, a 23-year-old combat medic, ticked off a list of the traumatic injuries the wounded have sustained, including severe head injuries and burns covering more than 20 percent of their bodies.

As bleary-eyed fighters slumped against a wall listening to the screams of a soldier injured in fighting around Vuhledar, she said that in the grim calculus of her vocation, screams were a positive sign.

“The most important thing about someone who’s screaming is that they’re breathing,” she said.

Sergeant Valeria, like other soldiers interviewed on the front, asked only to be identified by a first name or call sign in accordance with military protocol. The New York Times was given access to medics and soldiers at the facility under the condition that its location not be disclosed.

As the battles rage at home, President Volodymyr Zelensky is in the United States this week on a diplomatic mission that he portrays as no less urgent.

He spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday and was scheduled to meet with President Biden on Thursday, where he was expected to plead, again, for the ability to strike deeper into Russian territory using Western-supplied missiles. Without that, he says, it will be harder to continue to bring the war home to Russia — the only way, he believes, that Moscow can be brought to the negotiating table.

Mr. Biden has been reluctant to approve such deep strikes, fearing confrontation with Russia. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin said that he planned to lower the threshold for his country’s use of nuclear weapons, an escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts to deter the United States from expanding its military aid to Ukraine.

Along the eastern front line, the Ukrainian soldiers interviewed this month spoke of exhaustion and of securing one area only to see another come under threat. The territory that they are protecting, the remaining unoccupied sections of Donetsk, is part of the Donbas region, what was once the industrial heartland of Ukraine.

The cities and towns under assault are of strategic importance for different reasons, including their use as hubs to move soldiers and supplies, and their elevated positions. It is unclear how robust Ukraine’s next line of defense is beyond those places.

The Russians have, however, failed to turn some past advances into rapid breakthroughs. They are also paying a steep price in troops and equipment for every mile they gain.

The Ukrainians have held the Russians at bay for months outside the ruined hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, but just 20 miles to the south, the Russians are advancing in bloody urban battles now raging inside Toretsk.

Just south of there, the Russian advance toward the city of Pokrovsk over the past seven months has created a bulge some 22 miles deep and 15 miles wide, altering the geometry of the front in complicated ways.

Pokrovsk, a critical rail and road hub, is the last major city before the wide-open plains leading to the Dnipro region, home to the third-largest city in Ukraine and vital to its economic health.

Ukrainian soldiers have halted the direct advance on Pokrovsk, for the moment, but the Russians are close, fortifying their positions about five miles to the east.

The city itself is under daily bombardment. All the highway overpasses have been destroyed, so the authorities are urging the 15,000 people who remain to use winding dirt roads to leave while they can.

“It’s very scary,” Kateryna Kandybko, a 34-year-old mother of two children, said in an interview on the outskirts. Her family is packed and ready to run, but is holding on for now. “We don’t really want to leave at all. But we definitely don’t want to live under the Russian flag.”

In the surrounding farmland, the burning of unharvested fields of sunflowers, set alight by shelling, illuminates the night sky.

“Take a look around,” said Serhii, a 45-year-old trucker, as he raced to haul thousands of pigs from a large farm under bombardment in the border area. “Despite this being a rural area, there are no birds, no animals — not even stray dogs or cats. Everyone’s stressed, people and animals alike.” He asked that his family name not be used for their safety.

Ginseng, the call-sign of a 44-year-old master sergeant in charge of an artillery unit with the 68th Jaeger Brigade protecting Pokrovsk’s southern flank, said that Ukrainian forces had stabilized the line but that the fight remained a “nightmare.”

He pointed to a shotgun near the entrance of his bunker, which he said was the best defense against small Russian attack drones when electronic jamming equipment fails.

“They fly in waves: One shows up, then 15-20 minutes later, another,” he said.

His small band of soldiers manning a Soviet-designed howitzer emerge from the bunker only when they have a target sent in by their own surveillance drone operators.

Even if they can hold their lines, Ginseng fears Pokrovsk is doomed.

“They’ll level it,” he said. “I’ve seen so many cities wiped out — it’s overwhelming.”

The area directly south of Pokrovsk is perhaps the most volatile part of the front at the moment. The front line there has become an increasingly jagged arc as the Russians push the Ukrainians back in pockets.

About halfway to Vuhledar, 60 miles to the south, the towering smokestacks of a battered power plant in Kurakhove stand idle over another smashed town that used to be home to some 20,000 people. But black smoke rising over nearby villages is clearly visible across the flat plains, marking the Russian advance.

The Ukrainian 46th Air Mobile Brigade, which is responsible for part of the defense of the area around Kurakhove, said in public statements that two recent attacks featured nearly 100 tanks, armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles.

The Russian attacks were met with a blizzard of Ukrainian drones and artillery fire and the soldiers of the 46th said they managed to repel both assaults. But they do not expect the Russians to let up.

And in Vuhledar — a former mining town strategically located at the intersection of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions — the Russians are also gaining ground, advancing around the city from the northeast. They recently drove the Ukrainians from two mines that had served as key bases, soldiers said, raising the risk that a city that had been the site of some of Russia’s most devastating losses in this war could now fall.

“They still haven’t taken Vuhledar to this day,” said Dmytro, a 41-year-old senior lieutenant with the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which has led the defense of the city for two years without a break. But he is worried.

“If they manage to get past the mines,” he said, “they’ll surround Vuhledar.” For now, he said, the soldiers in the city “are just hanging on.”

Liubov Sholudko and Olha Konovalova contributed reporting from eastern Ukraine.