For the better part of two decades, one name above all others inspired fear among ordinary Afghans: Sirajuddin Haqqani.

To many, Mr. Haqqani was a boogeyman, an angel of death with the power to determine who would live and who would die during the U.S.-led war. He deployed his ranks of Taliban suicide bombers, who rained carnage on American troops and Afghan civilians alike. A ghostlike kingpin of global jihad, with deep ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, he topped the United States’ most-wanted list in Afghanistan, with a $10 million bounty on his head.

But since the Americans’ frantic withdrawal in 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power, Mr. Haqqani has portrayed himself as something else altogether: A pragmatic statesman. A reliable diplomat. And a voice of relative moderation in a government steeped in religious extremism.

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For three years, there was one powerful, elusive figure I wanted to speak with in Afghanistan: Sirajuddin Haqqani.

During the U.S.-led war there, he was known as one of the Taliban’s most ruthless military strategists, deploying hundreds of suicide bombers and raining carnage on the capital, Kabul. He developed ties with terrorist groups across the region and built a mafia-like empire of illicit businesses.

After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in 2021, Mr. Haqqani became one of the most important figures in the government. But he remained a mystery; he had given only one interview to a Western journalist.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appeared to acknowledge on Thursday that North Korean troops had been deployed to Russia, commenting for the first time on the assessment of Western officials that the reclusive Asian country had joined Russia’s war effort against Ukraine.

“Images — that is something serious, if there are images they are a reflection of something,” he said, responding to a question about satellite images appearing to show North Korean troops in Russia.

His tongue-in-cheek response, at a conference of emerging-market economies that Russia is hosting, did not explicitly confirm or deny statements made Wednesday by the Pentagon, which said that North Korea had sent troops to Russia.

He was speaking hours after Russia’s lower house of Parliament ratified a mutual defense treaty with North Korea that Mr. Putin had signed with Kim Jong Un, the North’s leader, when Mr. Putin visited Pyongyang in June.

It was a rubber-stamp vote, but Mr. Putin used it to reaffirm Moscow’s ties to North Korea and send a signal that he was drawing in allies who would bolster his standoff with the West.

“Today, we ratified our treaty on strategic partnership which contains article four,” Mr. Putin continued. He was referring to a clause stipulating that should either nation be “put in a state of war by an armed invasion,” the other will “provide military and other assistance with all means in its possession without delay.”

“We have never doubted the fact that the North Korean leadership is very serious about their commitments to that, but it is up to us to decide what to do about implementing it,” he said.

On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III called the presence of North Korean troops in Russia “very, very serious,” though he said that what the soldiers were doing in Russia was “left to be seen.” He said there was no conclusive evidence that the North Korean troops were moving toward Ukraine.

Kyiv has said that up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers may be mobilized to fight alongside Russian soldiers. South Korea’s intelligence agency estimated that there are 3,000 North Korean soldiers on Russian soil at the moment, and their numbers were expected to swell to 10,000 by December. In a statement Thursday, Ukraine’s intelligence agency said the first North Korean troops had arrived in Russia’s western Kursk region, where Kyiv staged an incursion in August. The claims could not be independently verified.

In remarks earlier on Thursday, Mr. Putin claimed Russia could not be defeated on the battlefield.

“Our adversaries make no secret of their goal to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” Mr. Putin said before the assembled leaders. “I will say directly: These are illusionary calculations, made by those who do not know Russia’s history.”

The Russian president was speaking in Kazan on the final day of a summit, named BRICS after its members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Mr. Putin has sought to build the conference into a global counterweight to a wealthy West.

In his comments, Mr. Putin called the summit a success for a group committed to building a “more democratic, inclusive and multipolar world order.”

The event has been a relative public relations coup for Mr. Putin, whom the West has sought to isolate since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was attended by dozens of world leaders, including more than 20 heads of state. Mr. Putin said leaders of 30 countries, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — a NATO member — had expressed interest in joining the bloc.

The war in Ukraine has loomed over the three-day meeting, even though most of the leaders present did not emphasize it in their remarks and there was no progress toward a plan for peace. It barely figured in the official communiqué agreed to by all member states, which was more focused on the escalating crisis in the Middle East, condemning Western sanctions, and on calls to reform the global financial system.

But the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres — on his first trip to Russia since April 2022, when the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was under siege — called for a “just peace” as he addressed a plenary session of BRICS members and aspirants, ahead of a one-on-one with Mr. Putin.

“We need peace in Ukraine — a just peace in line with the U.N. Charter, international law, and the General Assembly resolution,” Mr. Guterres said. Such a peace, he said, should be based on “the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of all states.”

His visit was condemned by Kyiv and by Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny.

“It was the third year of the war, and the UN Secretary-General was shaking hands with a murderer,” Ms. Navalnaya wrote on X, above a photo of Mr. Putin greeting Mr. Guterres.

In his comments on the possible deployment of North Korean troops, Mr. Putin shrugged off the prospect that it would constitute an escalation, saying the real escalation was U.S. meddling in Ukraine since 2013. He accused NATO soldiers, without providing evidence, of direct participation in the Ukraine war, saying that fighting alongside Ukrainian troops were “not mercenaries, but military personnel.”

Mr. Putin also spoke about his relationship with the United States, saying that he was open to seeing how it developed following the U.S. presidential election next month.

“If the United States is open to building normal relations with Russia, then we will do the same,” he said. “If they are open, then we will also be open. And if they don’t want it, that’s just fine.”

He said he believed the Republican candidate, former President Donald J. Trump, was “sincere” in “his desire to do everything to end the conflict in Ukraine.” He did not mention Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

This week, one of Turkey’s most powerful politicians made a surprising offer to the militant leader he has long branded a “baby killer” and “chief terrorist.”

If Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the main group fighting for greater autonomy for Turkey’s Kurdish minority, would come to Parliament, renounce militancy and disband his organization, the politician said, it could open a pathway to end his life sentence in a Turkish prison.

The offer by the politician, Devlet Bahceli, fell far short of a breakthrough in efforts to end decades of bloody conflict between the Turkish state and Mr. Ocalan’s group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. But it was one of several recent gestures suggesting a new openness in the Turkish government to the possibility of revived peace talks.

Then on Wednesday, the government blamed the P.K.K. for a deadly attack on a state-run aerospace company. The attack did not appear to derail the positive momentum.

Turkey has been trying to stamp out the P.K.K. since its founding as an underground militant organization in 1984. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the years since in P.K.K. guerrilla attacks and the Turkish military’s responses. Turkey and its Western allies consider the P.K.K. a terrorist organization.

Turkish authorities captured Mr. Ocalan in 1999 and sentenced him to life in prison, locking him up on an island in the Sea of Marmara where he was for many years the only prisoner. The government started peace talks with the P.K.K. in 2012, but negotiations collapsed in 2015, unleashing a new wave of violence that washed away any hopes for a truce.

That is why this month’s gestures, though small, have drawn such attention.

Throughout his political career, Mr. Bahceli, 76, has been a staunch Turkish nationalist so opposed to any concessions to the Kurdish minority that he once wielded a noose at campaign rallies to bolster his tough-on-terror image.

His Nationalist Movement Party is now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s largest coalition partner and has long followed a hard-right line, even refusing to sit next to lawmakers from the main pro-Kurdish party in the parliamentary chamber.

So when Parliament reconvened at the start of this month, Turks took note when Mr. Bahceli’s lawmakers took their seats next to their pro-Kurdish colleagues. They were even more surprised when Mr. Bahceli, who had often dismissed pro-Kurdish politicians as in cahoots with terrorists, walked over to shake their hands.

Making the offer to Mr. Ocalan during a speech to his party’s members on Monday, Mr. Bahceli said the prisoner could come to Parliament and “shout that terror is completely finished and the group is abolished,” referring to the P.K.K.

If he did that, Mr. Bahceli said, a legal pathway could open to end Mr. Ocalan’s incarceration.

The next day, Mr. Erdogan also called for peace, saying he hoped that the “window of opportunity” the governing coalition had opened would not be wasted.

“We want to build a Turkey with no terror and violence all together,” he said.

Then, before the attack on Wednesday, the government allowed Mr. Ocalan’s nephew to visit the jailed leader, his first visit from anyone outside the prison in more than three years.

The nephew, Omer Ocalan, who is also a Parliament member, shared a message from his uncle on social media after the visit. The message had a seemingly conciliatory tone, indicating his uncle’s interest in peace talks.

“Isolation is ongoing,” it said, referring to Mr. Ocalan’s inability to communicate with anyone outside the prison. “If conditions develop, I have the theoretical and practical power to pull this process from the grounds of conflict and violence to the grounds of law and politics.”

Of course, wanting peace is much easier than hammering out the terms to end a long, bitter conflict. And the threat of continued violence was made clear by the attack on the aerospace company, which killed five people, just hours after the prison visit.

The two attackers who carried it out, a man and a woman, were also killed. The government said they were P.K.K. members.

But the attack has not deterred the government, Mehmet Ali Kulat, a pollster based in the capital, Ankara, said in an interview. Turkish officials had been working on new ways to address the P.K.K. issue for a few months and were prepared for such setbacks.

“Although this attack showed that the process should be handled more carefully, I believe it will not have an entirely negative effect,” he said.

Tuncer Bakirhan, the co-chair of Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party, said in an interview that despite the recent gestures, the government had not reached out to discuss the possibility of new talks.

His party was interested in talking, he said, but many details needed to be worked out.

Turkey would need to allow Mr. Ocalan to communicate with the P.K.K. and his other followers, he said, as well as defining what it would offer the P.K.K. in exchange for disarmament.

“Why should the organization lay down its arms? What steps would Turkey take for those arms to be laid down?” he said. “Those questions are out there and still unanswered.”

Despite their gestures, Turkey’s leaders have not publicly called for peace talks or expressed any willingness to negotiate or grant concessions.

Some Turkish analysts have speculated that the government’s recent moves could be a maneuver by Mr. Erdogan to win Kurdish support for a constitutional change that would allow him to run for president again when his current, third term ends in 2028.

Other regional and domestic dynamics are also encouraging the government to take a new look at its conflict with the P.K.K., said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund, a research group.

Conflicts elsewhere in the Middle East have encouraged Turkey’s leaders to try to ensure stability at home, he said. And there is speculation that the United States could withdraw its forces from northeastern Syria, leaving the American allied P.K.K. affiliate there vulnerable.

Turkey’s military has also seriously degraded the P.K.K.’s military capabilities, potentially making the group more open to negotiations.

Kurdish political activists in Turkey over the years have put forward many demands, including outright separatism, autonomy within a federal system inside Turkey and greater freedoms to express Kurdish culture and use the Kurdish language.

Some of those goals may be more achievable now than they were in the past, Mr. Unluhisarcikli said.

“If they focus on cultural rights, they might be able to get somewhere,” he said. “But if the Kurdish political movement starts with federalism, that is a deal breaker.”

Once a picturesque Israeli mountain resort with panoramic views into Lebanon, Metula is now off limits to civilians. Under fire for months from Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles, every other house has by now been damaged or lies in ruins. Over the past year of fighting, it has been one of the hardest-hit places in Israel.

More than a century old and a storied symbol of early pioneering Zionism, Metula, a pastoral border community and Israel’s northernmost town, juts upward like a finger into Lebanon, which surrounds it on three sides. The roughly 2,500 residents of Metula were officially evacuated a year ago, for the first time since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Now, even as Israeli ground forces pursue Hezbollah’s fighters in southern Lebanon, Metula’s future is in question.

Thirty percent of the evacuees do not intend to return, whatever the outcome of the war, according to the town’s mayor, David Azulai. Those who have gone for good, he says, include many of the families with young children.

“We call it an enclave — encircled to the north, east and west by Lebanon,” he said, adding that up to 90 percent of the houses were exposed, within direct line of sight from the Lebanese villages across the border. One of them, Kafr Kila, is less than a half-mile away as the crow flies.

“There are neighborhoods even we don’t go to,” he said, referring to the two dozen or so members of Metula’s armed civil response team who have stayed behind to guard the town, along with a couple of essential council workers and an influx of soldiers.

On a recent weekday in mid-October, less than two weeks after Israel began its invasion of southern Lebanon, the Israeli military allowed a small group of journalists access to Metula, inside what it has declared a closed military zone, for a rare glimpse of the damage and the challenges facing the town. Military officials accompanied the group most of the time but few restrictions were imposed.

Riding up the winding road to Metula from the mostly abandoned city of Kiryat Shmona, Mr. Azulai cautioned against fastening seatbelts to allow for a quicker exit in the event of a rocket attack. His assault rifle lay against a passenger seat.

Israel and Hezbollah, the heavily armed Lebanese Shiite group backed by Iran, last fought a war in 2006, which was followed by about 17 years of a mostly tense quiet along the frontier.

But residents of the Israeli border communities say they had long lived with a sense of foreboding.

They say they knew they were being watched, having seen people they suspected of being Hezbollah operatives coming up to the border fence and monitoring them. And for years, they had been complaining of strange digging sounds in the night. In 2018, the Israeli military said it had exposed several Hezbollah tunnels running under the border, including at least one leading to Metula from the village of Kafr Kila.

The fear of being overrun came into terrifying focus on Oct. 7 last year, with the Hamas-led assault against southern Israel that the Israeli authorities say killed about 1,200 people, and that prompted the war in Gaza. More than 42,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to health officials there.

On Oct. 8 of last year, in solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah began firing on Israeli positions, and then communities, setting off an exchange of cross-border rocket and missile fire and displacing tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border.

Breaking the equation, Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah last month, blowing up hundreds of pagers held by the group’s operatives before killing the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and other top commanders, then sending in ground forces on Sept. 30.

Israel’s stated war goals in Lebanon are to degrade Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, particularly in the area along the border, so that the 60,000 residents evacuated from northern Israel can safely return to their homes.

There is no telling how long that may take, whether through fighting or diplomacy. Since the ground invasion, rockets, mortar shells and drones launched from Hezbollah’s new lines farther north have largely replaced the rain of antitank missiles fired at Metula from the nearby Lebanese villages. The extra distance allows for an additional few seconds’ early warning time and more interceptions, the mayor said, but Israel’s air defense systems are not hermetic.

During the less than two-hour visit, incoming rocket alert sirens sounded twice in Metula, sending everyone running for cover. According to the military, Hezbollah fired at least 16 projectiles at Israel’s northern hill country during that period, and two failed launches landed in Lebanon.

Part of a rocket fired this month remained stuck in the smashed outer wall of a home that, according to Mr. Azulai, had already been hit twice by antitank missiles three and four months ago. Another rocket had crashed through the roof of another home four days before the visit, he said, leaving a gaping porthole in the kitchen ceiling.

The streets of the town were deserted. A yellow school bus stop and orange recycling bins were reminders of the old life there.

Asked what it will take to get at least some residents to return home, Mr. Azulai replied: removing the threat of antitank missile fire, neutralizing all of the tunnels in the area and eliminating all danger of infiltration.

Present-day Metula had its start in 1896, when about 60 families moved onto land purchased by Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, a staunchly Zionist philanthropist, from a Lebanese landowner, displacing the Druse tenant farmers who were its previous inhabitants. At first, the town was considered part of Lebanon. In the 1920s, Metula was included within the boundaries of the British Mandate for Palestine, and later, Israel, though some of its farmland remained in Lebanon.

Its location has made it both a bridge and a target. Even before Israel’s previous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and during its subsequent 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, Metula was the main crossing point in the so-called Good Fence, the porous border that Lebanese civilians were permitted to cross daily to seek medical care or to work in Israel. Hezbollah was founded in the 1980s, with help from Iran, to fight that occupation, which ended in 2000.

Lior Bez, a member of the civil response team, is a third-generation farmer in Metula. His grandfather, from Russia, arrived in 1924 and became a local commander of the Notrim, a Jewish paramilitary police force set up by the British authorities in the 1930s to guard Jewish settlements, Mr. Bez said. His grandfather, he added, kept a weapons cache at home for the Haganah, the pre-state Zionist underground.

Mr. Bez’s family runs a heritage center and a bed-and-breakfast in the town. Deeply connected to the land, he said Metula before the war was an intimate community where “everyone knows everyone.”

His mother has been living all year in a hotel in Tiberias, an hour’s drive south. Other relatives are serving in combat units in Gaza and Lebanon.

“Finally, we feel a change,” he said, expressing a relief felt by many residents of northern Israel over the military action against Hezbollah. Like many there, he said he hoped Israel would “be strong enough to enforce the new reality across the border” — meaning the removal of the immediate threats from Hezbollah — even after the war.

In a small “war room” in Metula’s modest council building, staff members constantly monitor screens for signs of hostile activity in the Lebanese villages across the border, alerting the military when they see suspicious movements.

Video footage viewed in the war room showed four antitank missiles being fired within a minute from one of the villages, all hitting one abandoned house in Metula. The antitank missiles pierce the outer wall, then explode inside.

Homes that the mayor said were hit by heavier, Iranian-made Falaq rockets have had their roofs stripped down to skeleton-like rafters, with the blast causing damage to about 15 more houses nearby. On a tour of the town, the mayor took reporters into one house, now partly turned to rubble, that belonged to a collector of antique musical instruments. Some, including an organ, appeared to remain intact; others were destroyed.

In the garden of another ruined house, a row of spindly trees was bejeweled with ripe, red pomegranates. In the next yard, black oranges hung from scorched branches.

Mr. Azulai said his house had been damaged some, but in any case, he said, he was now living in the protected council building.

As he spoke, the wail of a siren rose and filled the air. Moments later, as he crouched in the porch way of a half-ravaged house, the boom of an intercepted rocket reverberated overhead.

When Lucy Letby, a former nurse in a neonatal unit at a hospital in northern England, was found guilty last year of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others, Britain reacted with horror. She was convicted of attempting to murder another baby in a retrial of one charge earlier this year.

The prosecution told the jury in the two trials that she had harmed babies through a macabre range of attacks: injecting them with air, overfeeding them with milk, infusing air into their gastrointestinal tracts and poisoning them with insulin.

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Lucy Letby, a former neonatal nurse who was convicted of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of seven others, was refused permission to appeal one of her convictions on Thursday.

The ruling was the latest blow to Ms. Letby’s attempts to appeal her multiple convictions, even as a growing number of statisticians and medical experts have questioned the reliability of the evidence used by the prosecution.

Ms. Letby, 34, who has always maintained her innocence, is serving 15 life sentences after she was found guilty of harming babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England between 2015 and 2016.

During two trials, the prosecution told the jury that she had harmed babies through a macabre range of attacks: injecting them with air, overfeeding them with milk, infusing air into their gastrointestinal tracts and poisoning them with insulin.

The first trial concluded in August 2023, when Ms. Letby was found guilty of seven counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder, two of which involved one baby. In May, she was denied an attempt to appeal those convictions. She was then convicted of attempting to murder another baby in a retrial of one charge in July this year.

Thursday’s hearing in London focused on that single attempted murder conviction, for a child known as Baby K. Lawyers for Ms. Letby said that the retrial should never have gone ahead because the intense commentary following her earlier convictions meant she could not have a fair trial.

“It’s an exceptional case with exceptional media interest,” said Ben Myers, a lawyer for Ms. Letby. He argued that the “intense hostility and the saturation” of media coverage, including public comments on her guilt from the police, prosecutors and witnesses, had prejudiced her retrial.

But prosecutors countered that Mr. Myers’s approach was misguided and would establish a problematic principle that would allow anyone convicted of a notorious crime to avoid being tried or retried for additional offenses.

Nick Johnson, a lawyer for the prosecution, argued that public comments made by the police after the first trial were accurate. “What was said by the police in the aftermath of the convictions of the first trial was reasonable,” Mr. Johnson said. “It accurately and moderately described the horrendous offenses of which this applicant had been convicted.”

The three judges at the hearing denied Ms. Letby’s bid for a full appeal. Judge William Davis, one of the three, acknowledged that the former nurse’s case “is very well known to most people in the country,” but rejected her lawyer’s argument that she could not have a fair trial.

He reminded those present in the courtroom that Thursday’s hearing had a narrow focus, saying that the other convictions or any public discussion were not relevant to the decision.

Ms. Letby had already been denied appeals in the other seven murder and seven attempted murder counts for which she is serving life sentences. She appeared by video link from the high-security prison where she is being held, wearing a green dress and looking down through much of the hearing as she listened to the legal arguments.

Last month Ms. Letby appointed a new defense lawyer, Mark McDonald, who plans to apply to Britain’s Criminal Cases Review Commission, the official body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice in the country, and the one remaining way for her other criminal convictions to be revisited.

“I can tell you now, if I was innocent and in prison, I’d rather be in the U.S. than the U.K.,” said Mr. McDonald. “It is so difficult to overturn a conviction in this country, it is almost impossible.”

Mr. McDonald said that in his application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission he would focus on the reliability of the evidence presented by the prosecution, rather than claiming that Ms. Letby’s original defense was insufficient, and plans to submit the case within weeks.