Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has flung himself into British politics in recent weeks, using his social media platform X to attack and spread misinformation about Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other members of the Labour government.

In a series of vitriolic posts to his 211 million followers in recent days, Mr. Musk has falsely accused Mr. Starmer and other Labour Party lawmakers of enabling Britain’s so-called grooming gangs. The phrase refers to a decade-old scandal involving a series of child sex abuse cases in which girls were assaulted and raped by gangs of men in several towns and cities. Most of the perpetrators were of British Pakistani heritage.

Mr. Musk’s posts included multiple inaccuracies and treated a widely covered issue as if it had never been mentioned. But the posts nevertheless cast the spotlight back onto a painful child sexual exploitation scandal that troubled Britain and has long provoked heated debate on issues of race, immigration and abuse.

What was the grooming gangs scandal?

In 2011, The Times of London published a series of investigative articles on the sexual exploitation of girls by criminal gangs in England’s north and Midlands from 1997 onward. One detective at the time, chief inspector Alan Edwards, told the paper: “Everyone’s been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.” The cases came to be known as the “grooming gangs” scandal.

In 2014, the findings of a yearslong official investigation into such abuse in the northern English town of Rotherham set off a national reckoning. At least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were found to have been groomed for sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013, while the local authorities looked the other way for years. Similar gangs were also found to be operating in other towns and cities in England.

The grooming in Rotherham, population 257,000, tended to follow a similar pattern: the courting of the girls by young men in public places like town centers and shopping malls; the gradual introduction of alcohol and other drugs; then a sexual relationship with one man, who demanded that the girl prove her love by having sex with his friends.

The local government report found that victims and parents who asked for help were mostly let down by the police and social services. Some police officers were found to have referred to victims as “tarts” and to the girls’ abuse as a “lifestyle choice.”

The case was highly combustible because of the racial contrast between the victims, who in the Rotherham case were mostly white, and the perpetrators. Prosecutions in Oxford and the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012 for the abuse of dozens of girls included men of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghan heritage who received long prison terms.

What do we know about ethnicity and sexual abuse?

Experts say data on child sexual abuse should be treated with caution because many victims never come forward, or do so years afterward. Still, data on the ethnicity of child sexual abuse victims and perpetrators was released by the Labour government in November — the first of its kind published by any British government — showing that 83 percent of perpetrators convicted in 2023 were white and 7 percent were Asian, broadly in line with the country’s overall demographics. (In official U.K. statistics, “Asian” is a very broad term that can refer to people with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Chinese heritage, or from other parts of South Asia.)

Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor for the North West England region from 2011-2015, himself of Pakistani heritage, said in 2015: “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.”

He went on to say that South Asians were “disproportionately involved” in specific types of street grooming that were highlighted by the cases in Rotherham, Rochdale and elsewhere, although more common types of child sexual abuse nationally are predominantly carried out by white British men.

The racial element of these high-profile cases became a common right-wing talking point, even as experts noted that ethnicity is not a predictor of a propensity to abuse children, and widespread child abuse was long covered up in other communities and institutions including the Roman Catholic Church. The trope has also been weaponized by the far right, including by terrorists. The white supremacist who killed 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 carried a gun marked with the words “For Rotherham.”

When did Mr. Musk begin talking about this?

In October, Jess Phillips, a Labour lawmaker and minister for safeguarding, rejected a request from the local government in Oldham, a town near Manchester, for a national public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the area in the 2000s and 2010s. A 2022 report commissioned by the Labour mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, found that children were failed by the police and local authorities in Oldham between 2011 and 2014.

Ms. Phillips, who has spent much of her career fighting for women and victims of sexual violence, said the local council, the governing body for the town, should instead commission a local inquiry, as a number of other towns had done.

Her response was seized on last week by GB News, a hard-right network, which ran an online story headlined: “Labour REJECTS Oldham’s call for Government inquiry into grooming gangs scandal.”

A short time later, Mr. Musk weighed in, calling Ms. Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” and a “witch” who “deserves to be in prison,” and smearing Mr. Starmer as being complicit in the scandal.

The leader of Oldham Council, Arooj Shah, said in a statement that the council began setting up its inquiry in October. “We’re working closely with survivors and survivors’ families to ensure they don’t just have a voice, but will have a central role in developing this inquiry,” she said. “We expect terms of reference to be agreed in the coming months.”

What role did Keir Starmer play?

Mr. Musk has said that Mr. Starmer, who won a landslide election victory in July, “must go” and falsely claimed that Mr. Starmer was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”

Before entering politics in 2015, Mr. Starmer served as Britain’s chief prosecutor from 2008 to 2013, when the issue of grooming gangs erupted into the national spotlight.

While in that role, Mr. Starmer oversaw the prosecution of a grooming gang in Rochdale, made up of mostly men of South Asian heritage. At a news conference on Monday, Mr. Starmer called child sexual exploitation “utterly sick” and said that too many victims had been let down “by perverse ideas about community relations or by the idea that institutions must be protected above all else.”

He added: “When I was chief prosecutor for five years, I tackled this head on because I could see what was happening. When I left office, we had the highest number of child sexual abuse cases being prosecuted on record.”

Mr. Starmer and his colleague at the Crown Prosecution Service, Mr. Afzal, were praised in a 2013 parliamentary report published under a previous Conservative-led government. “Mr. Starmer has striven to improve the treatment of victims of sexual assault within the criminal justice system throughout his term,” the report said, adding that his “response should provide a model to the other agencies involved in tackling localized grooming.”

What has happened since the abuse cases first emerged?

The issue of grooming gangs has been the subject of numerous local and national investigations and reports in Britain since the early 2010s.

Beginning in 2015, a widespread public inquiry funded by the government held more than 300 days of hearings. Ultimately, it carried out 15 investigations, including into networks of abusers and abuse in schools and church settings.

A February 2022 report found that child sexual exploitation by organized networks remained a major issue nationally. The final report in October 2022 set out 20 recommendations for protecting children but the then-Conservative government did not act on them. In a statement this week, the Home Office said it was “working at pace” to implement them.

Prof. Alexis Jay, who led both this national review and the 2014 Rotherham inquiry, said, “We’ve had enough of inquiries, consultations and discussions — especially for the victims and survivors who’ve had the courage to come forward.”

Syria’s main airport handled its first international flights on Tuesday since the fall of the government of former President Bashar al-Assad last month, as the new leaders press to reassert a semblance of normalcy in the war-weary country.

One Qatar Airways plane landed following a direct flight from Doha to the Syrian capital, Damascus. Jordan’s Civil Aviation Authority announced that it had also sent an initial flight to Damascus on Tuesday morning as a “message of support” to its northern neighbor, the first trip there by its national carrier in 13 years.

Another flight affiliated with Syria’s national carrier took off on Tuesday for the United Arab Emirates carrying 145 passengers, according to Syrian state media. Video shared by Syrian media showed people on board waving Syrian flags and singing nationalist songs.

Syria’s new Islamist leaders have pledged to convene a committee to draft an inclusive constitution for the country. They have urged civil servants to return to work to get the machinery of government up and running, and they insist that Syria no longer poses any threat to its neighbors.

But the country remains under a host of international sanctions imposed during the regime of Mr. al-Assad. And the new interim government is run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which many countries have blacklisted as a terrorist group for its erstwhile ties to Al Qaeda, although it broke with the group several years ago.

Western leaders have responded to the new administration with a mix of optimism and caution, fearing that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham could impose Islamist rule on the country or generate a new wave of domestic turmoil. They have called for an inclusive political transition.

“Europe will support, but Europe will not be a patron of new Islamist structures,” said Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, during a visit to Damascus last week.

The sanctions are one of the greatest obstacles for Syria’s new administration as it tries to chart a path forward. As soon as Mr. al-Assad fled the country in December, one of the first requests of Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the rebel coalition that overthrew the government, was for the United States and others to begin easing restrictions.

On Monday, the Biden administration lifted some restrictions on humanitarian aid to Syria. Still, it kept strict sanctions in place, a reflection of how Western governments are carefully calibrating their approach to the new leaders.

Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, Syria’s new foreign minister, welcomed the Biden administration’s decision to loosen the restrictions. Mr. al-Shibani and other newly minted Syrian officials have been on a regional tour to soothe Arab states that have been wary of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s rise, including the United Arab Emirates.

At a news conference in Jordan on Tuesday after a meeting with Ayman Safadi, the Jordanian foreign minister, he called for the remaining sanctions to be lifted immediately, arguing that Mr. al-Assad’s downfall had removed any reason to keep them in place.

“Those economic sanctions are now being wielded against the Syrian people, even as the reason they were imposed is no more,” Mr. al-Shibani said. “They should have been canceled as soon as the previous regime was toppled.”

Syria and Jordan agreed to establish a joint commission to tackle security affairs along their shared border, Mr. Safadi said. Jordan has long expressed concerns about the smuggling of weapons and drugs from Syrian territory, particularly captagon, an illegal stimulant that was illicitly trafficked by close associates of Mr. al-Assad.

Mr. al-Shibani pledged that the new Syrian government would end captagon smuggling, which analysts say put immense profits into the coffers of senior officials in Mr. al-Assad’s government.

The threat of smuggling “shall not return and we are ready to cooperate intensively on this matter,” Mr. al-Shibani said.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far-right who built a half-century career on rants of barely disguised racism, antisemitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, has died. He was 96.

His death was confirmed on X by Jordan Bardella, the current president of the party Mr. Le Pen founded. In a statement to the news agency Agence-France Presse, Mr. Le Pen’s family said that he died on Tuesday at a hospital in Garches, west of Paris.

In April 2024, with Mr. Le Pen in frail health after suffering a second heart attack within a year, a French court granted his daughters legal guardianship, giving them the right to make decisions in his name.

An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.

Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.

But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.

By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2024 the National Rally backed Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.

Political analysts said voters in successively increasing numbers had embraced Ms. Le Pen’s right-wing messages that sought to exploit economic insecurity among the middle classes and resentment toward immigrants, themes pushed for years by her father.

Trying to soften some of the toxic rhetoric of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, Ms. Le Pen offered to accede to civil unions for same-sex couples, to accept unconditional abortions and withdraw the death penalty from her platform. And she publicly rejected Mr. Le Pen’s antisemitism.

Ms. Le Pen announced the party’s name change, to the National Rally, in 2018, although it decided to keep its logo of a red, white and blue flame. The rebranding was a further effort to move away from the policies associated with her father, who remained a longtime member of the European Parliament.Mr. Le Pen would have none of his daughter’s reforms. In 2016, he founded and became president of the Jeanne Committees, named after Joan of Arc, a new far-right political party that embodied his longstanding ideologies.

He insisted that “the races are unequal,” that anyone with AIDS was “a kind of leper” and that “Jews have conspired to rule the world.” He called America “a mongrel nation,” dismissed Hitler’s gas chambers as “a detail” of history and said that the wartime Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane.”

In fact, 76,000 Jews in France were deported to death camps during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944, with collaboration by France’s Vichy government. Only 2,500 survived. In 1944, a Nazi convoy rolled into the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and rounded up and massacred 642 residents in the worst atrocity of the war in France. Thousands more civilians were killed by the German Army as the war neared an end.

Millions were repulsed by Mr. Le Pen’s statements. He was challenged by historians, denounced across the French political spectrum, including by mainstream conservatives, and convicted at least seven times of inciting racial hatred or distorting the historical record.

But with his daughter’s successes, many analysts have come to recognize the influence of some of Mr. Le Pen’s views, especially on immigration. He always had a strong core of followers, particularly in the country’s south. His prominence reflected not only the shock waves of his oratory but also a political drift to the right in France and other parts of Europe during economic downturns and periods of rising inflation, crime and unemployment, as fears rose with the influx of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.

Mr. Le Pen’s most notable success in presidential races came in 2002, when he defeated the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, in the initial round of voting, then came in second in the general election, trounced by the incumbent, President Jacques Chirac. But he won nearly 18 percent of the ballots.

His supporters were hardly a mass of antisemitic neo-fascists; many were just blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, unemployed young people and others facing bleak futures in a nation whose tight job markets, underperforming schools, housing shortages and glib politicians had left them frustrated and angry.

Mr. Le Pen had been a street fighter in his youth, and as the receding hair turned frosty he kept the pugnacious look of a brawler: the burly shoulders and jutting chin, the narrow eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles, a grim mouth for the bad news and raised fists to deliver it forcefully. But the voice had range: needling, charming, whispering, condemning.

He first appeared on the political scene in 1956, winning a National Assembly seat as a member of the anti-tax movement led by Pierre Poujade. From 1972, when he forged an alliance of extremist groups and founded his National Front party, to 2011, when he retired, he was the acknowledged leader of the far right in French politics, and his vociferous, sometimes violent followers were the principal opposition to the nation’s mainstream conservatives.

His platform flowed from a central idea — that France was in need of purification because it had strayed from its Gallic and Roman Catholic roots in what he called “the natural order, which is family, homeland, teaching and respect for the living world.” He thus opposed the European Union, all income taxes, the immigration of “foreigners,” particularly Arabs and Muslims, and same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion.

Mr. Le Pen championed law and order, calling for the restoration of the guillotine and 200,000 new prison cells, a strong national defense, traditional culture and the ascendancy of “common” folk. He proposed isolating anyone with H.I.V. and contended that France’s news media were corrupt and that “elite” politicians were “on the payroll of Jewish organizations.”

He insisted that he was not a racist, fascist or antisemite, though he shared the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, drew followers from reactionary elements and spoke often and crudely of racial characteristics. Some of his earliest colleagues in the National Front had been collaborators with the Nazis during the war.

A French court in 1987 convicted Mr. Le Pen of Holocaust denial for saying that Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” in history. He repeated the comment a decade later, and was convicted by a German court. In 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011, he was convicted of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In 2012, he was convicted of condoning war crimes for saying, in a 2005 newspaper interview, that “the German occupation was not especially inhumane.” His numerous convictions resulted in many heavy fines but no jail time.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, a seaside village in Brittany, to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Hervé. His father, a fisherman, was killed when his boat was blown up by a mine in 1942. His mother was a seamstress of local ancestry. The boy was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Vannes and a lycée at Lorient.

Mr. Le Pen earned a law degree at the University of Paris, where he was active in right-wing politics, joined street brawls against Communist students and was repeatedly arrested. He claimed to have lost his left eye in an election brawl, but it was only damaged; he lost its vision later through illness.

As a Foreign Legion paratrooper in Indochina in 1954, Mr. Le Pen fought against the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Later, as an intelligence officer in Algeria during its war of independence, he was accused of torturing members of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale. He was not prosecuted and denied the allegations of witnesses, but lost lawsuits against publications that cited them.

Mr. Le Pen became one of the youngest members of the National Assembly in 1956, but after campaigning against France’s withdrawal from Algeria, he lost the seat in 1962, when the colony achieved independence.

In 1960, he married Pierrette Lalanne. Besides Marine, they had two other daughters, Marie-Caroline and Yann, and were divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Paschos. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

His family’s Paris apartment was destroyed by a bomb in 1976, but no one was home, no one was seriously injured and the crime was never solved, although there was speculation that Mr. Le Pen had been targeted by political enemies. His right-wing ideas stirred such heavy opposition that more than one million people took part in street rallies against him. In 1977, he unexpectedly inherited $7 million and a castle near Paris after the death of Hubert Lambert, a political supporter. Mr. Le Pen also had homes in Paris and his hometown, La Trinité-sur-Mer.

He ran for president in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002 and 2007. Except for his surprising showing in 2002, when he received 16.9 percent of the votes and forced a runoff in a second round that raised his total to 17.8 percent of the ballots, the results were not remarkable.

But his daughter, Marine, matched his best performance on her first try. She had played down criticism of Jews but attacked Muslim immigrants for supposedly failing to assimilate French values.

In a 2018 memoir, “Son of the Nation,” the first of a prospective two volumes (from his birth to his becoming a founder of the National Front in 1972), Mr. Le Pen defended the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and accused the wartime general and later president, Charles de Gaulle, of “helping make France small.” It was a best seller in France.

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.

The business owners arrived one by one, but all were united in their mission on a chilly December morning: Salvage anything from the pulverized market in this hillside city in southern Lebanon.

A photo studio operator and his son trudged through debris and twisted metal to recover dust-coated negatives and camera lenses. A clothes shop proprietor dragged a garbage bag holding leggings, retrieved from under mangled rebar. And an optical store owner stood atop crushed concrete slabs that were once the rooftop of his business’s building.

“Everything is gone,” said Raed Mokaled, 58, who, along with the eyeglasses business, co-owned a gold and watches store in the same building with his brother. “An orange ball of fire took out everything.”

Israel conducted intense air raids and then began a ground invasion into south Lebanon in late September to retaliate against Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group that had been attacking it in solidarity with Hamas after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks on Israel. A fragile 60-day truce, signed in November, has suspended the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

In the city of Nabatieh, which shares its name with the surrounding governorate where Hezbollah largely held sway, Israeli strikes obliterated the historic market on Oct. 12, at the height of the war. Another strike hit the nearby municipal building a few days later, killing at least 16 people, including the city’s mayor, according to Lebanese officials.

Israel said it had attacked Hezbollah targets in the area, but its claim could not be independently confirmed. Amnesty International said it did not find any evidence of a military target at the city’s headquarters.

The strikes across the governorate, which borders both Israel and Syria, have left behind scenes of desolation and ruin that many Lebanese say are unlike any they have seen. A World Bank report estimated the Nabatieh governorate incurred $1.5 billion in economic losses during the war with Israel.

On a recent morning, two weeks after the cease-fire, reporters with The New York Times arrived in the market as residents and business owners came to survey and deal with the wreckage. One by one, they said, they drove across rutted and bombed-out roads to arrive at the centuries-old market they fondly called the souk. Once a bustling center for vendors and shoppers from across Lebanon, it was now a shell of its glorious past.

Iconic shops, like the decades-old sweets store, were wiped out. Collapsed walls, shattered glass and twisted steel lay everywhere. Instead of the fragrant herbs and fresh produce that many people once sought in the market,a smoky and charred smell still swirled in the air.

Mannequins perched atop the mound of rubble and wires. Receipts, CDs and tattered sneakers littered the scorched pavements.

“This is a catastrophe,” said Niran Ali, 58, while standing amid the wreckage.

For 16 years, she co-owned a children’s clothing shop in the market and used it to support her family of four. Now, almost everything — about $100,000 in goods, she said — was gone.

“The destruction is painful to look at,” she said. “Our only hope is with God.”

Just across the street, Abed Al Raouf Farhat, 34, inspected the damage to his father’s photo studio. The strikes hadn’t entirely crumbled the building, but left it marred with deep cracks, exposed beams and a leaking roof. Inside, thick dust coated everything: the damaged photocopier, the cameras, the wooden photo frames.

Mr. Farhat’s father, Hamzah, opened the Amal Photo Studio Lab in 1982. Since then, generations of families across Nabatieh had been coming to take wedding and graduation photos. The elder Mr. Farhat, who is 65, also trained young photographers — including his own son, who has since gone to work as a photographer and videographer across the Middle East and Africa.

With the damage from the latest strikes, Mr. Farhat said, an establishment that was a symbol of community and collective memory has become a grim reminder of the war’s heavy toll. “Everything is gone,” Mr. Farhat said. “But my dad and Nabatieh are still standing, and he will start again from zero.”

The photo studio’s story — and the larger market’s — is closely intertwined with the city’s tumultuous past. Israel attacked Nabatieh in 1974 and 1978 and occupied it for three years beginning in 1982 following its invasion of southern Lebanon in retaliation for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s shelling of northern Israel. It also bombarded Nabatieh in 1993, 1996 and during the monthlong 2006 war as it clashed with Hezbollah in the region.

Hezbollah is a dominant force in Nabatieh, which has a majority Shiite population, though the group doesn’t have unanimous public backing. In several streets across the city, images of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader assassinated by Israel in September, are pasted on walls and electricity poles.

When Israel attacked the market in 2006, business owners said the Iran-backed group gave them some money to rebuild. This time — with Hezbollah weakened, its military abilities and infrastructure degraded and its ally in Syria deposed — no one had approached them to make assessments or lend support, several business owners said.

Hezbollah announced in late December that it had a program to rebuild the southern villages pummeled by Israeli raids. Hezbollah officials said priority would be given to families whose homes were completely or partly destroyed, but didn’t say when or if businesses would get financial support.

Hezbollah also said the task of reconstruction was a national one and that the state — over which it holds significant power — also had a responsibility to help citizens rebuild.

“Every few years, we lose everything,” said Khalil Tarhini, 67, whose lingerie and underwear shop was flattened. When his shop was damaged in 2006, Hezbollah, he said, gave him $18,000 in compensation — a fraction of the more than $100,000 he lost, he said. He had to sell his property to rebuild the business, he said.

“We will be back, but it will take a while,” Mr. Tarhini said as he stared at bulldozers clearing debris where his shop once stood.

For now, the slow and grueling process of rebuilding has begun. Across Nabatieh, advertisements and signs in Arabic declare, “We will rebuild together,” or, “It will come back better.”

Hassan Jamal Sabboury and his family returned to the city from the capital, Beirut, hours after the cease-fire took effect in late November.

What he found, he said, brought him to tears. The gas station and carwash, which his grandfather first built decades ago, were gone. His apartment down the street, which he had outfitted with plush, cream-colored furniture, was ravaged.

But the strikes didn’t hit the fuel tanks underground, he said, allowing him the chance to restart somewhere.

“We are staying strong and resilient,” he said as he managed workers moving debris and mixing cement. He hoped the gas station would reopen in a month.

Mr. Mokaled, who ran the glasses business, was not so lucky.

When he and his family returned to the market, they realized they had lost goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Glasses, eyewear repair kits and gold cleaning equipment were wrecked. Out of 1,200 watches in the store, they were able to recover just over 100, he said. His home was also hit in a strike, and he was now staying in a one-bedroom guesthouse.

Despite an overwhelming sense of disbelief, he said, he had no choice but to rebuild. He and his brother have rented another store and plan to restart the optical business on a smaller scale.

“Life has to go on,” he said, his face pale and drawn. “If you stop, that means you are dead.”