The fire spread quickly after starting near the end of the plane’s cabin. But the captain, despite being informed of the escalating danger, did not announce an evacuation order on the intercom.

What followed was a chaotic scene of nearly 170 passengers shouting and pushing one another in panic, desperate to get off the plane and save their lives.

It was Tuesday night, at the airport in Busan, South Korea, with millions celebrating the Lunar New Year holiday. Some were headed to Hong Kong, on Air Busan Flight ABL391, which was running late. It was still on the ground minutes after its scheduled takeoff of 10:15 p.m., when passengers spotted a flame in the overhead bins in the plane’s rear left.

The incident happened barely a month after the worst aviation disaster on South Korean soil, and that tragedy, which involved another budget airline, probably would have been fresh on the minds of people onboard.

“Flames were coming out of the gaps between the overhead bin doors,” Shin Min-su, who was on the flight, told reporters later. “People were screaming trying to get out, but there was a line so they were stuck.”

Mr. Shin said he got up to try to put out the fire. But when he attempted to open the overhead bins, a flight attendant told him not to.

The cabin crew reported the situation to the captain, who shut off the plane’s hydraulic and fuel systems and, according to the airline, declared an emergency evacuation. But passengers got no word of this. The airline would say later, “there was no time for a separate announcement.”

“A lot of smoke filled up inside,” Jeong Yeong-jun, another passenger told KBS, a South Korean broadcaster. “From then on, the passengers just kept pushing forward, shouting around me, ‘Open the door, open the door!’”

Kim Dong-wan and other passengers told reporters that they had opened some of the plane’s doors on their own and jumped onto the slides, to escape. At least one of the emergency doors was opened by a flight attendant, Yonhap News Agency reported.

Air Busan did not provide a detailed accounting of the evacuation by Wednesday evening, but all 176 people on board — including 169 passengers, two pilots, four flight attendants and a flight engineer — survived. Three passengers sustained minor injuries from the evacuation process, while four flight attendants were briefly hospitalized after inhaling smoke, the airline said.

After escaping, some passengers began filming the scene and sharing videos with news organizations. The footage showed smoke billowing out of an emergency exit as passengers slid down the emergency slides, some rolling off onto the tarmac with no one helping them to land.

People yelled for their families. “We’re lucky we didn’t take off!” someone said.

Firefighters reached the scene minutes later, after the plane had emptied out. They focused on saving the plane’s wings because 35,000 pounds of fuel was stored there. The blaze was extinguished by 11:30 p.m., but the fuselage of the Airbus A321-200 jet was destroyed.

The lack of an announcement to passengers raises concerns about whether Air Busan’s crew had followed standard safety procedures, aviation experts said.

Kim In-gyu, the managing director of the Korea Aerospace University’s Flight Training Center, said that proper protocol required the captain to announce emergency procedures on the cabin’s intercom. He added that the flight attendants should typically guide passengers by using megaphones to give them clear, short commands.

“Ideally, the cabin crew would take charge of evacuating the aircraft,” said Keith Tonkin, an aviation expert and managing director of Aviation Projects in Brisbane, Australia. In a best-case scenario, “passengers would be following directions,” he said.

Mr. Kim added that the flight attendants should have first moved the passengers away from the fire. Then they should have gone down the slides first, helped passengers coming down and directed them away from the slides. Finally, he said, the airplane doors that were not emergency exits were supposed to be opened only by crew members.

In a statement, Air Busan, a subsidiary of Asiana Airlines, one of South Korea’s two main airlines, said its crew had followed protocol, and apologized to its customers. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.

On Wednesday, the transport ministry said that it had conducted a counterterrorism investigation and found that no prohibited items had been carried onto the aircraft.

Over the past few weeks, South Korean transport officials have been under pressure to overhaul the nation’s aviation safety standards. The crash on Dec. 29, in which a Jeju Air jet crashed at Muan International Airport, killed 179 people. Only two people onboard survived.

A safety inspection by the government found that seven South Korean airports altogether had concrete structures containing navigation devices near their runways, similar to the one in Muan — into which the Jeju Air jet crashed and which did not meet safety recommendations. The authorities also found that several budget airlines had failed to comply with safety checks.

Last week, the government ordered nine low-cost carriers to tighten safety measures that include reducing flight hours, improving pilot training and increasing the number of maintenance workers.

On Wednesday, one passenger from the Air Busan flight remained in the hospital. The airline canceled eight flights planned for Wednesday at the airport, known formally as Gimhae International Airport, but all other flights operated normally.

Mr. Kim, the aviation expert, said that it was fortunate that the fire had broken out before the plane took off.

“If the plane had been on time, if it were in flight,” he said, “it would have been a very serious situation.”

Three military-ruled countries have officially withdrawn from the West African regional alliance known as ECOWAS, the bloc said on Wednesday, defying pressure from the group to return the countries to civilian democratic rule.

The alliance, the Economic Community of West African States, offers its members visa-free travel, favorable trade tariffs and access to a $702 billion market for the region’s 400 million people. The three nations — Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — announced their intention to leave last year.

Negotiations between their leaders and the bloc then failed to reach an agreement that would keep them in. Instead, the three juntas are forging ahead with their own grouping, the Alliance of Sahelian States, A.E.S. by its French acronym, and have created a military force of 5,000 troops.

The three juntas presented their exit as essential for their sovereignty and portrayed the alliance as a neocolonialist force carrying out a foreign agenda.

“ECOWAS and the jihadists are the same,” Assimi Goïta, Mali’s president, said on Jan. 10, referring to the extremists who have destabilized a vast area of the Sahel, the arid belt that stretches coast to coast below the Sahara. “The only difference is that some carry weapons and others do not.”

Their withdrawal will weaken ECOWAS, which celebrates its 50th year this May and had 16 members at its founding. It will now have only 12: Mauritania left in 2000. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, though not the most populous or economically strong countries in the region, account for more than half the alliance’s 1.9 million square miles and 17 percent of its 400 million population.

The alliance said in a statement that it would leave the doors open for the juntas to return.

But analysts say that the three exiting countries stand to suffer the most, including through higher prices, shortages of food supplies and political isolation.

Niger shares a 1,000-mile border with Nigeria and relies on its much richer and populous neighbor for 80 percent of its trade. Relations have become strained in recent months: Niger has accused Nigeria, whose president is the current chair of ECOWAS, of supporting jihadist groups to attack it.

Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso account for half of the world’s terrorism-related deaths, and the region overtook the Middle East last year to become the global epicenter of terrorism, according to a recent report by Global Terrorism Index. Some of the military juntas used the insecurity as a justification for seizing power, even though attacks have increased under their rule.

ECOWAS responded to the coups with biting economic sanctions, and it has threatened a military intervention to restore civilian rule in Niger. But it was accused of having double standards for not punishing civilian leaders who cause political instability by postponing elections or changing their country’s constitutions to stay in power longer.

A wave of coups has hit Africa in recent years, with nine military takeovers from 2020 to 2023 — a number unseen in decades. Most of them have been in West Africa.

In Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the juntas refused to yield to ECOWAS’s demands to hand over power. The sanctions, which were backed by Britain, the European Union and the United States, were eventually lifted, and the alliance tried to push for dialogue with the three countries, but the juntas were not persuaded.

“They want to be let alone, not to be dictated how to run their countries or to be forced to hold elections,” Fahiraman Rodrigue Koné, the Sahel project manager at the Institute for Security Studies, a regional think tank, said in a telephone interview.

The three juntas have lately severed ties with some of their key traditional partners, ending military cooperation with France and the United States, and imposing new mining laws and taxes to maximize revenue from their ailing economies.

They have strengthened their cooperation with Russia, which provides them with weapons and mercenaries. And they have secured new contracts for China to run mining operations that were previously controlled by Western companies and to supply arms, according to local media outlets. Turkey, offering itself as an alternative, has also provided drones and mercenaries to Niger, state media said.

On Tuesday, protesters took to the streets in the three exiting countries’ capitals to celebrate the withdrawal. But analysts said that most people in these countries did not support the juntas’ decision to leave.

“Critical voices are suppressed,” said Gilles Yabi, the founder and executive director of the West Africa Citizen Think Tank.

Across the three countries, the human rights situation has sharply deteriorated, with thousands of civilians killed by the military and state-backed militias last year alone, according to rights groups.

But the Sahelian juntas have lately become somewhat less isolated. Ghana’s new president has appointed a special envoy to their new alliance, and Togo has signaled that it may apply for membership.

A watchdog group on Wednesday accused the Catholic Church in the Philippines of a culture of impunity, saying it had found scores of priests who had been accused of sexually abusing children and that many remain in active ministry.

The group, Bishop Accountability, said it had identified 82 priests and brothers with links to the Philippines who had been accused of abuse in recent decades. It said it compiled the list from reputable media reports, court records, church documents and other public sources.

The men were local priests or those from abroad who were accused of abuse in the Philippines, or Filipino clerics who served at home before facing accusations overseas. But not one priest has been convicted of sexual abuse in the Philippines, the group said, citing Bishop Buenaventura Famadico. The country has the third-highest number of Catholics in the world, about 85 million, after Brazil and Mexico.

It was the latest sign that the Catholic Church’s global abuse scandal is still ricocheting, this time in Asia, a region that the Vatican is eyeing for growth. Pope Francis has ordered clergy to report allegations of abuse and cover-up, saying every diocese must have a system that allows the public to submit reports easily.

“He sent them forth to really change things up,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of Bishop Accountability. “None of this is evident in the Philippines.”

She added that her group’s list almost certainly did not cover all abuse because it often goes unreported. The group was established in Boston in 2003, and has compiled similar lists of priests publicly accused of abuse in the United States, Argentina, Chile and Ireland.

At a news conference in Quezon City, Ms. Doyle talked about six priests and displayed their pictures.

One of them was the Rev. Jose Belcina, who was charged by prosecutors in the city of Cebu in 2006 with rape and child abuse. The church removed him from his parish and made him undergo “a process of spirituality,” Ms. Doyle said.

But when the police tried to arrest Father Belcina they could not find him. According to Ms. Doyle’s group, when a journalist asked the spokesman of the Archdiocese of Cebu about Father Belcina’s location, he responded that he was not the priest’s custodian.

Father Belcina denied the charges, which were later dropped by the accuser over reasons of “reconciliation and peace.” The priest was then reassigned to another parish in the province in 2008. He remains in active ministry.

The Archdiocese of Cebu did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the cases of Belcina and other priests listed by Bishop Accountability.

“We hear about these cases because the victims were courageous enough to go to law enforcement. The church is never the source of information. Never,” Ms. Doyle said.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines said it has established the Office for the Safeguarding of Minors in response to Rome’s mandate. Every diocese is also now required to establish its own Office for the Safeguarding of Minors and Vulnerable Adults, which is under the bishops’ supervision.

“The C.B.C.P. has no direct authority as a conference to conduct such investigations. As a conference of bishops, we merely build a consensus among ourselves about common policies to be adopted,” said its president, Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David.

He added that only Rome, represented by the Nuncio, has direct disciplinary authority over individual bishops.

“As long as the problem is contained within the Church, there is no justice,” Ms. Doyle said. “The Church cannot self-police when it comes to abuse.”

For two summers during high school, instead of joining her classmates at the beach, Noura Ghazoui had an internship at the town hall of her hometown, Borghetto Santo Spirito, on the Ligurian coast.

But when she tried to apply for a job there at age 19, she found herself ineligible because, like hundreds of thousands of children born to immigrants in Italy, she could not get Italian citizenship.

“I feel Italian, I think in Italian, I dream in Italian,” Ms. Ghazoui said in Ligurian-accented Italian. “But I am not recognized in my country.”

For generations, European countries have used mostly bloodlines to determine citizenship. The United States was an exception in the West as one of the last countries to grant citizenship unconditionally to virtually anyone born there.

President Trump’s order seeking to end birthright citizenship for the American-born children of undocumented immigrants, which a judge temporarily blocked last week, would bring the United States one step closer to Italy and other European countries.

But rising numbers of migrants in the United States and Europe have set off debates on both sides of the Atlantic over whether the systems for bestowing citizenship need to be updated in some way, either moderated or stiffened.

Each approach — known by the Latin terms “jus sanguinis,” or right of blood, and “jus soli,” or right of soil — has its critics, and increasingly, countries have sought to rebalance the two.

Since the 1980s, Britain and Ireland (as well as Australia and New Zealand), which still had unconditional birthright citizenship, have moved in a direction similar to that Mr. Trump has chosen, limiting it.

But others, like Germany, have gone the other way, making it easier for people born to immigrants to gain citizenship. The shift, supporters say, nodded to the changing realities of a country where one in four people now comes from an immigrant background.

“Citizenship is a politically contested issue,” said Maarten Vink, the co-director of the Global Citizenship Observatory. “When it changes it reflects the outcome of a political struggle.”

A Tug of War in Europe

In Europe, bloodline citizenship has helped maintain ties with citizens who leave the country, and their descendants. But most countries in Europe also offer some form of birthright citizenship, though usually with tough restrictions.

In Europe, citizenship has at times been mixed with dangerous concepts of racism and ethnic purity, especially in colonial times and during the Nazi era, when Hitler’s regime stripped Jews of their citizenship before killing them.

Today support for limiting access to citizenship for immigrants, as well as securing borders, is not found only on the far right. But the arguments have been harnessed by some of the continent’s extreme right-wing forces, who speak of a need to preserve cultural and ethnic identity.

“We must stop migratory flows,” Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally in France, said earlier this month. “Many French people, including even some who are of immigrant descent, no longer recognize France and no longer recognize the country they grew up in.”

Mr. Bardella’s party wants to abolish law that allows the children of foreigners born in the country to apply for citizenship at 18, as long as they meet minimal residency requirements.

While citizenship has often been described as a vehicle for belonging, it has also been a powerful means of exclusion, said Dimitry Kochenov, a professor at the Central European University and the author of the book “Citizenship.”

“Citizenship has been used by the state in order to denigrate certain groups,” Mr. Kochenov said.

The Italian Example

In previous centuries, a much poorer Italy was a country from which millions of citizens emigrated abroad, mostly to the Americas, in search of a better life. Generous bloodline citizenship rules helped Italy maintain a link with the diaspora.

Even today churches and town halls around Italy are clogged with requests from Argentines, Brazilians and Americans who have the right to claim citizenship through distant Italian ancestry. (Most recently, President Javier Milei of Argentina obtained Italian citizenship.)

But Italy has in recent decades turned from a land where people emigrate into one that also receives large numbers of immigrants. And while Italy has changed, its citizenship law has not.

Italy does not grant citizenship to the children of immigrants who have legal status in the country. The Italian-born children of immigrants can only apply for citizenship once they turn 18; they have one year to apply and must prove they have lived in the Italy the whole time.

That ruled out Ms. Ghazoui, who spent part of her childhood in Morocco, where her parents are from. Now, 34, an employee at a company providing naval supplies, she has an Italian husband and an Italian child, and applied for citizenship based on protracted residency in the country.

“I am the only one in the house who is not Italian and not recognized,” she said.

While the public health-care system in Italy makes no distinction between citizens and noncitizens, second-generation children of immigrants face numerous hurdles. About 600,000 children born to immigrants study in Italian schools. They have often known no other country than Italy, but with no claim to citizenship, their lives are complicated.

Many cannot travel around Europe on school trips, and have to miss school o renew their residence permits. They also say they are constantly reminded that they are different from their classmates. Many Italian-born adults are in the same situation.

“Precariousness becomes the basis of your life,” said Sonny Olumati, 38, a dancer and choreographer who was born in Rome to Nigerian parents and still does not have Italian citizenship. “You create a sense of non-belonging.”

Italy’s leaders support the law as it currently stands. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a hard-line conservative whose Brothers of Italy party has post-Fascist roots, has said that “Italy has a great citizenship law.”

Tying the citizenship of children to that of their parents is convenient, Ms. Meloni argues, in case the immigrants return to their countries/ She also said that she had higher priorities than changing the citizenship law.

Despite the government’s position, grass-roots associations proposed a referendum that would reduce the period of uninterrupted residence in Italy needed to become an Italian citizen to five years from 10. The vote is set to happen in the spring.

“This law does no longer represent the real Italy,” said Alba Lala, 27, the secretary of CoNNGI, a group that represents new Italian generations. “It’s completely outdated.”

Birthright in a Modern Age?

Some critics say much the same about unconditional birthright citizenship.

About 20 percent of countries use it, most in North and South America. The United States and Canada inherited the law from Britain, but birthright citizenship also fulfilled an important role in the newly independent countries as a way to constitute a nation.

Like those who favor bloodline citizenship, birthright advocates say it promotes social cohesion, but for a different reason — because no child is left out.

In the United States, the 14th Amendment allowed men and women of African descent to become citizens, and millions of children of Irish, German and other European immigrants became citizens as well.

But unconditional birthright citizenship remains an exception.

“In a world of massive migration and irregular migration, unconditional ius soli is an anachronism,” said Christian Joppke, a professor of sociology at the University of Bern.

Still, some argue that the Trump’ administration is not setting out to modernize a law but instead is trying to redefine the nation itself.

“It rejects the idea of America as a nation of immigrants,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration and citizenship expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.

Even under the current rules in the United States, birthright citizenship is not absolute. They exclude, for instance, the children of diplomats born in the United States. And children of American citizens born abroad maintain an automatic right to American citizenship — in effect bloodline citizenry.

Citizenship by descent “is a really good way to connect with people who live outside the borders of a state,” said Mr. Vink. “But if you want to ensure you are also being inclusive within the borders of a state, you have to also have territorial birthright.”

Otherwise, he said, countries would have millions in their population who are not citizens.

“In a democracy,” he said, “that is not a good principle.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin, and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.