An effort by the head of Austria’s Freedom Party to form a coalition government collapsed on Wednesday, ending, for now, his chances of leading the country’s first far-right national government since World War II.

The Freedom Party’s leader, Herbert Kickl, and the conservative Austrian People’s Party failed to reach an agreement on forming a coalition, leaving the country without a government or a clear answer about what happens next.

Mr. Kickl’s party won 29 percent of the vote when Austrians went to the polls in September. But four months after that vote and numerous rounds of negotiations, Austrian politicians have been unable to form a government.

Initially, three centrist parties tried to form a coalition that would have kept the far-right Freedom Party out of government. That effort failed earlier this year, when liberal and conservative parties, including the People’s Party, could not make a deal.

The most recent talks between the People’s Party and the Freedom Party collapsed on Wednesday over policy disagreements on migration and national security. Mr. Kickl’s party sought to control the Interior Ministry to help push its anti-immigrant agenda. But the People’s Party balked, fearing that foreign intelligence agencies would cease cooperating with the ministry, which also controls Austria’s intelligence agency, if it was seen to be too far right.

“Herbert Kickl got the most votes, but that doesn’t justify his taking all the power,” said Christian Stocker, the chair of the People’s Party, after the talks collapsed.

It remains unclear what will come next. Austria’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, said on Wednesday that he would speak with political leaders to seek a way forward.

“Liberal democracy thrives on compromise, on balancing different interests,” Mr. Van der Bellen said. “This is the only way a society can remain stable and be successful in the long term.”

Two smaller parties — the liberal NEOS and SPÖ, a social democrat party, which were part of earlier talks — have signaled their willingness to try to create a government with the conservatives, but Mr. Van der Bellen could also decide to try to form a caretaker government to lead the country until early elections are held.

That option would benefit Mr. Kickl and the Freedom Party, whose popularity has increased since last year’s election, according to polls.

For years, officials in the Czech Republic had pushed a dam project to protect a river south of Prague, and the critically endangered species living in it. But the project, hamstrung by land negotiations, stalled.

In the meantime, a group of chisel-toothed mammals — renowned for their engineering skills and work ethic, and unencumbered by bureaucracy — decided to take on the task. The beavers of Prague simply built dams themselves.

The rodents’ fast work saved the local authorities some 1.2 million euros, according to a news release from the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic, a government agency responsible for conservation across the country. “Nature took its course,” Bohumil Fišer, the head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, where the revitalization project was planned, said in the statement. The beavers, he added, had created the ideal environmental conditions “practically overnight.”

The project, on a former army site on the Klabava, a river about 40 miles southwest of Prague, the Czech capital, was drafted in 2018 and had a building permit, but had been delayed for years by negotiations over the land, which had been used as a military training grounds, Agence France-Presse reported on Tuesday. Officials had hoped to build a barrier to protect the river and its population of critically endangered crayfish from sediment and acidic water spilling over from two nearby ponds, A.F.P. reported.

The beavers began working before the excavators could even break ground. It was not immediately clear specifically when the dams were built and how long it took to build them.

The new wetland created by the dams covers nearly five acres, the conservation group said. It is twice as large as the area that the humans had planned, Agence France-Presse reported. “It’s full service,” Mr. Fišer told A.F.P. “Beavers are absolutely fantastic and when they are in an area where they can’t cause damage, they do a brilliant job.”

Despite their remarkable ability to construct dams, beavers often draw the ire of landowners and farmers for destroying trees, eating crops and flooding roads and fields. But in thinning a tree canopy, the rodents can often help to diversify an ecosystem by allowing in sunlight in so that other plant species can thrive, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota.

“They’re fundamentally changing the way water and life moves through that landscape,” she said.

To build a dam, the beavers, whose weight as adults can range from about 40 to 80 pounds, begin by piling small stones across a river or stream, packing those stones in with mud, and repeating the process to construct a pond, which they then expand to become a wetland, Dr. Fairfax said.

They are motivated by their fear of predators: Beavers are adept swimmers and can hold their breath underwater for 15 minutes. On land, their ungainly waddle makes them easy prey. “They’re basically a big chicken nugget for predators,” which include bears, mountain lions and wolves, she said.

The Czech dam is not the first time the rodents have assisted in building a wetland. Beavers in California have helped to restore a floodplain about 30 miles northeast of Sacramento. In that case, the beavers’ work also helped local officials save money. “All they had to do was let the beavers be there,” Dr. Fairfax said. In other cases, beavers often did work that went unacknowledged. “We sort of have a blindness for beavers,” she said, noting that they were often considered a nuisance because of their alarming size and capacity to rapidly change the landscape.

“They’re powerful, they’re big, and they’re elusive,” Dr. Fairfax said, noting that, despite the beavers’ engineering prowess, they presented a challenge for conservation groups when planning restoration projects.

“Oftentimes we don’t want to allow the beavers to make the choices, because it’s hard to plan around that uncertainty; it’s hard to turn over control to a giant water rodent,” she said. “But that’s when beavers are at their best.”

Trump and Putin discussed ending the war in Ukraine

President Trump said yesterday that he had a “highly productive” call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, characterizing it as the beginning of a negotiation to end the war in Ukraine.

Afterward, Trump said he spoke with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. For Putin, the talk was a major milestone, marking the collapse of Western efforts to isolate him diplomatically over the invasion of Ukraine.

Trump did not say how Ukraine’s interests would factor into the negotiations. But hours before the phone call, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said at a NATO meeting in Brussels that it was “unrealistic” for Ukraine to expect a peace deal that would restore its pre-2014 borders. Trump, he added, does not support Ukraine’s membership in NATO as part of a realistic peace plan.

Background: Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed a pro-Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine before carrying out a full-scale invasion in 2022. Russia now occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine.

Modi hopes to keep India off Trump’s target list

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to try to ease any potential friction between the U.S. and India when he meets with President Trump today in Washington. Modi has spoken of a warm relationship with the president, but Trump can be a fickle friend.

A pair of glaring issues could complicate Modi’s goals: trade and immigration. Modi “will be trying to show Trump that he is cooperating on his fixation on tariffs and illegal immigration,” Mujib Mashal, our South Asia bureau chief, told me. “Trump has singled out India as one of the main abusers of tariffs that enjoys a trade deficit with the U.S., mentioning India in the same breath as China.”

India’s trade surplus with the U.S. is growing, and Modi could offer lower duties on U.S. goods like bourbon and pecans, which are produced mainly in Republican states.

Deportations: India is also the largest source of illegal immigration to the U.S. outside of Latin America. Modi’s government has made clear it will cooperate with Trump’s deportation effort, even as it caused an uproar in India last week.

Venezuela is helping fuel violence in Colombia

In northeast Colombia, 54,000 people fled their homes, and at least 80 people died in a matter of days this month, as two rebel groups fought for territory.

The violence has its roots in disputes over land and drug money, but diplomats, analysts and Colombia’s president say there is a new factor at play. One of the rebel groups, the National Liberation Army, or ELN, has found refuge in neighboring Venezuela, which is being used as a base to unleash a new wave of destruction in Colombia.

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The new season of “The White Lotus,” a series about wealthy tourists in a skewed paradise, takes place on the resort island of Koh Samui in Thailand. Crowds have flocked to the locations of seasons past, and this year is no different: With a wave of visitors set to arrive, the roughly 68,000 residents of the island are about to get familiar with the “White Lotus” effect.

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How do we fall (and stay) in love?

For Valentine’s Day, the “Modern Love” podcast asked readers to share the moments they knew they were falling in love. Their stories spanned decades and regions.

The team also revisited one of the most iconic stories they have ever published: Mandy Len Catron’s piece about the 36 questions that can help us fall in love. Mandy joined the podcast to provide an update on her romance and to read her essay, which starts on a bridge at midnight, “staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.”

Listen to the podcast and read Mandy’s original essay here.

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The warnings, on thousands of products sold in California, are stark.

“Use of the following products,” one label says, “will expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

Now, new research shows the warnings may be working.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that California’s right-to-know law, which requires companies to warn people about harmful chemicals in their products, has swayed many companies to stop using those chemicals altogether.

As it turns out, companies don’t want to sell a product that carries a big cancer warning label, said Dr. Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and an author of the study.

Combine that with the threat of lawsuits and reputational costs, as well as companies just wanting to do the right thing for health, and “it becomes a great motivator for change,” she said.

California maintains a list of about 900 chemicals known to cause cancer and other health effects. Under the 1986 right-to-know law, also known as Prop 65, products that could expose people to harmful amounts of those chemicals must carry warning labels.

Critics had long mocked the measure, saying the warnings were so ubiquitous — affixed to cookware, faux leather jackets, even baked goods — that they had become largely meaningless in the eyes of shoppers. But the latest study found that companies, more than consumers, may be most influenced by the warnings.

To assess the law’s effect, researchers carried out interviews at 32 global manufacturers and retailers that sell clothing, personal-care, cleaning, and a range of home products. Almost 80 percent of interviewees said Prop 65 had prompted them to reformulate their products.

Companies can avoid the warning labels if they reduce the level of any Prop 65 chemicals below a “safe harbor” threshold.

A similar share of companies said they looked to Prop 65 to determine which chemicals to avoid. And 63 percent said the law had prompted them to also reformulate products they sold outside California.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study.

No other state has a law quite like Prop. 65, requiring warnings on such a wide range of products about cancer or reproductive harm. New York enacted a more limited law in 2020 that requires manufacturers to disclose certain chemicals in children’s products and that bans the use of certain chemicals by 2023. Other states have laws geared toward disclosure of ingredients on labels.

California, meanwhile, is pushing ahead. A 2018 change to Prop 65 has meant products are starting to carry even more specific labels. Some food and beverage cans, for example, may carry labels that warn that they “have linings containing bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical known to the State of California to cause harm to the female reproductive system.”

The latest research is part of a larger effort to analyze Prop 65’s effect on people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. In a study published last year, researchers at the Silent Spring Institute and UC Berkeley found that in the years after certain chemicals were listed under the law, levels of those chemicals in people’s bodies decreased both in California and nationwide.

That research came with a caveat, however. In some examples where levels of a listed chemical decreased, a close substitute to that chemical, potentially with similar harmful effects, increased. Prop 65 has no mechanism to check the safety of alternative chemicals.

It suggested that stronger policies were needed at both the federal and state levels to study and regulate the thousands of chemicals on the market, Dr. Schwarzman said. “This is so much bigger than the individual consumer and what we choose off-the-shelf,” she said.

Two Australian medical workers caught on video making threats against Israeli patients have set off an uproar in a country where there has been a spate of antisemitic attacks in recent weeks.

“I won’t treat them,” one of the workers, wearing medical scrubs and a hijab, is heard saying in the video. “I’ll kill them.”

Discussing Israeli patients who had come to the hospital near Sydney, a co-worker, also dressed in scrubs, can be seen ominously running a finger across his neck

The workers appeared to be speaking from inside a medical facility. Neither has been identified publicly by officials.

Australian officials have been quick to denounce the comments captured on the video, which went viral after a pro-Israel content creator posted it online.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday called the threats “sickening and shameful.” He said the two workers, identified as employees of Bankstown Hospital, had been suspended. He also said in a statement that they had been referred to the police for a criminal investigation.

That the country’s prime minister felt it necessary to comment on the video speaks to the high-level concern set off by a recent explosion in antisemitic speech and attacks. Australia has been hit with a rash of antisemitic attacks in recent weeks, including incidents where a synagogue was defaced with red swastikas and a day care facility was set ablaze.

There have been no reports of major casualties, but the violence represents a dramatic escalation of tensions reverberating from the war in Gaza, which has also spurred Islamophobic episodes in Australia.

In November, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, an umbrella organization that has been tracking and documenting reports of antisemitism since 1990, reported a 316 percent increase in the number of incidents from October 2023 — when the war in Gaza began — to September 2024, compared with the previous twelve months.

The video of the two hospital workers, which was viewed by The New York Times, was recorded by Max Veifer and uploaded to his social media accounts, where other posts consist of videos of people discussing their views on Israel.

The video of the two workers had been edited, and used emojis to bleep out words.

Although one of the workers appears in the video to suggest that he may have harmed patients, health officials said that an examination of the hospital’s records had so far turned up nothing suspicious.

“We have already taken steps to review the safety of the hospital concerned in this matter, and we have identified nothing that indicates the hospital is unsafe,” the New South Wales health secretary, Susan Pearce, said in her own video.

Ryan Park, the state’s health minister, called the workers’ comments “an act of bastardry” and said “those people, subject to that investigation, will not ever be working for New South Wales Health again,”

Mr. Park and Ms. Pearce both offered apologies.

“I want to assure the Jewish community today that they have my utmost sorrow,” Mr. Park said, “but more importantly, my utmost energy, dedication and time, along with the secretary, to reassure them that our hospitals will continue to provide them high quality, safe care every time and anytime they present.”