China launched military exercises pressing in on Taiwan on Tuesday, in what Beijing said was a warning to the island-democracy’s president, Lai Ching-te, after he called China a “foreign hostile force.”

Chinese land, navy, air and missile forces would “approach close” to Taiwan and practice “seizure of overall control, strikes on sea and land targets, and the blockade and control of key areas and lanes” at sea, Senior Col. Shi Yi, a spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army command that oversees Taiwan, said in a statement issued on Chinese state-run media.

Sometimes, China’s military does not spell out why it holds drills. This time, officials and state media reports were clear: “This is firm punishment for the Lai Ching-te administration’s rampant ‘pro-independence’ provocations,” Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for the Chinese government’s office on Taiwanese affairs, said in a statement.

Ms. Zhu singled out a speech by Mr. Lai on March 13 in which he described China as a “foreign hostile force” and laid out 17 measures that Mr. Lai said would combat deepening Chinese subversion and spying in Taiwan. Those included restoring military tribunals for cases against military personnel who spy, and strengthening oversight of cultural, political and religious exchanges with China. Beijing says that Taiwan is its territory, and that it will eventually absorb the island, by force if Chinese leaders deem that necessary.

But despite Beijing’s fiery language, it was unclear how long the exercises would last, or how close they would approach Taiwan. Military analysts said the exercises appeared intended to intimidate Taiwan, without tipping over into a wider confrontation or crisis. Mr. Lai and his Democratic Progressive Party deny that Taiwan is a part of China — a key premise of Beijing’s claim that the island is its territory — and officials in Beijing have already vehemently denounced Mr. Lai’s recent speech.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said that by early Tuesday morning, 19 Chinese military vessels were operating around the main island of Taiwan, and China’s Shandong aircraft carrier had moved toward it. Taiwan’s premier, Cho Jung-tai, told journalists that the island’s forces were closely monitoring the Chinese military.

“This time, the political symbolism stands out more,” Su Tzu-yun, a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, an organization in Taipei supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, said of China’s latest exercises. “It’s trying to get in closer to Taiwan to exert more psychological pressure.”

While, publicly, China has linked the exercises to Mr. Lai’s comments, Mr. Su and other experts said, China’s leaders also appeared to be sending an implicit message to the Trump administration. Mr. Lai has sought to maintain U.S. support for Taiwan during President Trump’s term, including by promising to raise its military spending to more than 3 percent of the island’s economic output this year.

“The publicity around the exercise likely also has the U.S. in mind — they want to persuade the Trump administration that Lai is a troublemaker and to deter the U.S. from maintaining high levels of support to Taiwan,” said Amanda Hsiao, an analyst for the Eurasia Group who monitors Chinese foreign policy and China-Taiwan tensions.

The exercises came days after the U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, visited Tokyo to discuss strengthening military ties with Japan. Mr. Hegseth said there that the Trump administration would focus on countering Chinese power, including its efforts to squeeze Taiwan.

“America is committed to sustaining robust, ready and credible deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait,” Mr. Hegseth said in a news conference with Japan’s defense minister, Gen Nakatani. Mr. Hegseth has also issued internal guidelines in the Pentagon that say U.S. forces must focus on deterring China from trying to seize Taiwan by force, the Washington Post reported.

Still, China may not have an appetite right now for extended military exercises that may deepen the divisions between the Trump administration and China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi is already squaring off with Mr. Trump over additional U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods that were imposed last month, with possibly more tariffs to come this week. The official Chinese statements about the latest exercises did not mention the United States.

“China is definitely interested in not showing weakness,” Wen-Ti Sung, a researcher in Taiwan and a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said of Mr. Xi’s approach to the Trump administration. “But China will respond with just enough firmness to make sure that an off ramp for it still remains.”

Taiwan’s share market indicated that for now the island’s investors were not too worried about China’s menacing military steps. Taipei’s stock exchange rose on Tuesday morning, after the People’s Liberation Army had announced the exercises.

Around sunset during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, something remarkable happens in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka. The streets in this city of more than 10 million people, known for its hectic bustle and choking traffic, turn quiet and empty.

But for political parties, which know well the persuasive powers of full bellies, sunset is their high time.

Iftar parties, where the faithful break their fast, were closely watched through the end of Ramadan last week for what direction Bangladesh could take after the overthrow of its authoritarian leader last summer.

Who was attending which party? Who was seated next to whom? In Bangladesh’s political vacuum, the answers to those questions offered clues to how new alliances could form and even the direction of changing geopolitical winds.

To gauge the political temperature, we got ourselves invited to one.

It was hosted at a rooftop restaurant by Gono Odhikar Parishad, a small party born of an earlier wave of student protests in 2018, before the one last year that toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The party had made arrangements for 600 people, and 900 showed up. Plates of fried snacks and sweets were passed around. Waiters kept the yogurt drinks flowing.

There was one thing no one seemed to have thought about: How do you get hundreds of people who have not eaten or hydrated for 15 hours to the top floor? Definitely not by climbing eight flights of stairs.

The crowd, teeming in the tiny lobby painted like van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” tried to squeeze into one elevator with a capacity of 18 people.

The elevator’s operator — which remains a thing in this part of the world — had a difficult job. A gentle man with a beard dyed red, he sat on a plastic stool by the buttons. He loaded every trip with the precision of a shopkeeper weighing grapes, offloading bodies one by one until the elevator was no longer over capacity.

At the top, the restaurant heaved with people.

Dozens of tables were marked RESERVED FOR POLITICAL PARTIES or RESERVED FOR JOURNALISTS. It was mostly men, with a sprinkling of women.

Sangeeta Huq, a leader of the young party’s youth division, said she had attended five iftar parties in the first two weeks of Ramadan.

“Each wing, each division of our own party has an iftar party — youth wing, labor wing, human rights wing,” she said.

From the podium in front of her, speech after speech was directed less at the fasting guests and more at the couple dozen cameras. The theme was clear: The country needed an election.

The timing of that election is at the heart of a political divide. Some want it right away. Others want reforms first, to avoid a repeat of past rigged votes.

Dominating the news, and naturally the chatter at iftar parties, was the unease between Bangladesh’s military and the student-driven interim government.

The students are increasingly suspicious of the army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman. Some think that the general, a relative of Ms. Hasina, the ousted prime minister, is trying to open space for a revival of her deposed party.

Others suspect that the army chief is pressing for early elections because he has cut a deal with Ms. Hasina’s longtime opposition, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or B.N.P.

Leaders of that party, on the other hand, suspect that the students are using their sway over the government, and on the streets, to delay the election in order to buy time and organize as a political force themselves.

Another big topic in Dhaka was where India — the giant neighbor that long supported Ms. Hasina and has now given her shelter — stood in all the political jostling.

New Delhi broadly pinned Ms. Hasina’s downfall on what it called a conspiracy between the B.N.P. and Jamaat-e-Islami, the main Islamist party, painting them both as extremist.

But in a sign of changing times, Indian diplomats showed up at iftar gatherings for both parties.

“Very busy time,” said Mia Golam Parwar, Jamaat’s general secretary, whose schedule during Ramadan revolved around iftar parties. “We feel like this is our high time.”

He boasted that 39 diplomatic missions had been represented at Jamaat’s iftar party.

Just around the corner from Gono Odhikar’s rooftop event, a local branch of the B.N.P. was hosting its own iftar party under a tent in a schoolyard.

People sat at round tables as biryani boxes and soda cans were unloaded from a truck. A loudspeaker on the main road blared the names of the dozens of dignitaries in attendance.

When the local B.N.P. leader, Ariful Islam Arif, took his turn at the mic on a crowded stage decked out in flowers, he got emotional.

“I missed this for seven years because I was in jail,” he said.

Saif Hasnat contributed reporting.

The Israeli military said early Tuesday that it had conducted a strike on the southern outskirts of Beirut, the second attack near Lebanon’s capital in less than a week.

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire in November, raising hopes that Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades could be over. But the recent strikes have prompted fears that the truce could unravel.

The Israeli military said the latest strike, in the Dahiya area in Beirut’s southern suburbs, had targeted a Hezbollah operative who had directed and assisted Hamas in planning a “significant and imminent” attack against Israel.

Israel acted to eliminate the operative because he posed an “immediate threat,” the military said on social media. It added that the Dahiya area was a key stronghold for Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and political party backed by Iran.

Hezbollah made no immediate comment on the strikes on its semiofficial page on Telegram, a social media platform.

On Friday, the Israeli military launched airstrikes in the same area, and ordered residents in a densely populated neighborhood to evacuate. The attack was hours after rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanese territory.

Hezbollah denied any involvement in that attack on Israel and said it remained committed to the cease-fire. The Israeli military said it had targeted a site that stored Hezbollah’s drones.

Also on Friday, at least three people were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israeli positions, in solidarity with its Palestinian ally, after Hamas led an attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, igniting the war in Gaza. The fighting escalated into full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.

Last year, Marine Le Pen spoke menacingly of the possible fallout from her trial on embezzlement charges. “Tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people will see themselves deprived of their candidate for the presidency.”

After a court disqualified her on Monday from running for public office for five years, those millions of French voters are adrift and angry. France is a democracy governed by the rule of law, as the verdict demonstrated. But it is unclear how far its troubled Fifth Republic can resist an inevitable gale of political protest before the 2027 election.

Unlike President Trump, who met with convictions, indictments and criminal cases on the way to his election last year, possibly even benefiting from perceived persecution, Ms. Le Pen could find no political path past the verdict of the French legal system.

“The independence of our justice system and the separation of powers stand at the heart of our democracy,” said Valérie Hayer, a centrist lawmaker in the European Parliament. “Nobody is above the law.”

That view is certain to come under sustained attack in a global environment where questioning of the legitimacy of legal systems has become frequent — across Europe, but particularly in Mr. Trump’s United States. Mr. Trump has called for the impeachment of judges who rule against him and called them “lunatics.”

“When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents,” Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s billionaire aide, said after the verdict.

European societies, given their history, are sensitive to the revival of far-right movements. France, like Germany, has a visceral memory of how fragile democratic institutions are and how once the rule of law goes, the way is open to dictatorial power.

“After Ms. Le Pen, the next direct target of a big political battle is going to be the rule of law,” said Alain Duhamel, a prominent political scientist. “There will be accusations that this is a government of judges, attacks on our highest court, not just from the National Rally but the center right,” he said, naming Ms. Le Pen’s party.

But, he added, “French magistrates are resolutely independent.”

Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s carefully groomed protégé, pronounced French democracy dead, killed by the court. It is not; and to Mr. Bardella will no doubt fall the task of leading the anti-immigrant party into the election, unless Ms. Le Pen’s appeal overturns her ban in time.

At 29, he is young to aspire to the highest office, but he has demonstrated broad appeal and a near-unflappable command of detail. Just how he disentangles his ambitions from Ms. Le Pen’s remains to be seen. Up to now, they have avoided conflict.

Across Europe, the far right leaped on the court’s decision.

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s hard-right deputy prime minister, said those “who are afraid of voters’ judgment” often seek reassurance from courts’ judgment. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, said that he stood with Ms. Le Pen.

In Moscow, Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said, “More and more European capitals have opted for the violation of democratic norms.”

Of course, critiques of democracy from President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia are hardly persuasive. But in this case they overlap significantly with those of the U.S. vice president, JD Vance, who in February attacked European states for trying to stifle the far right in the name of saving democracy.

Ms. Le Pen, like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for European democratic failure. The fact is, however, she was convicted, after prolonged investigation and on detailed evidence, of embezzling millions of dollars of European Union funds to pay party staff members with money intended for aides to European lawmakers.

Over the past decade, Ms. Le Pen led a campaign of “de-demonization,” shifting her National Rally party from its fascist antisemitic roots to an anti-immigrant mainstream party that has more seats in the National Assembly than any other.

She could now direct the party to make trouble.

The most direct means would be to overturn the centrist government of Prime Minister François Bayrou by supporting a no-confidence motion this year, in effect saying to the French people that they should be the judges and issue their verdict in a parliamentary election.

A major swing to the National Rally would not open the way for Ms. Le Pen to become president, but it would be a powerful statement.

If there is a parliamentary election, which can be held after June, Ms. Le Pen could not defend her current seat, but nothing would prevent her from becoming prime minister if the National Rally won big.

“The tribunal demonstrated its political will, not legal but political,” said Wallerand de Saint-Just, a former party treasurer who was also convicted.

Not so, said a host of centrist politicians, who have made their pride in the French legal system clear as Mr. Trump attacks a supposedly “weaponized” American judiciary.

“Madame Le Pen, whether elected or a candidate, is a French citizen,” said Sacha Houlié, a center-left lawmaker. “The law of the Republic applies.”

France’s far-right leader was barred from running for office

Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, was found guilty of embezzlement yesterday and disqualified from running for public office for five years.

The verdict set off a crisis that could lead to new political turmoil in France. It effectively knocked Le Pen, France’s most popular politician, according to the polls, out of the 2027 presidential election.

The decision infuriated Le Pen, an anti-immigrant, nationalist politician who has already mounted three failed presidential bids. She claimed that the ruling was a “political” attempt to thwart her and vowed to fight back despite slim chances of legal success. “I’m not going to submit to a democratic denial so easily,” she said angrily.

Context: The court ruled that Le Pen played a “central role” in an illegal scheme to use millions of euros of European Parliament funds for party expenses from 2004 to 2016. Le Pen was a member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2017.

Analysis: Millions of Le Pen supporters are now adrift and angry, our Paris bureau chief, Roger Cohen, writes. France could see a gale of political protests, as well as an attack from the global far right.

Reactions: Across Europe, hard-right leaders sharply criticized the court’s decision. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, posted “Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine!”) on social media.

Stocks plunged as new Trump tariffs loomed

World markets tumbled yesterday as investors braced for President Trump’s new round of tariffs that would affect the U.S.’s biggest trading partners. Trump has promised to overhaul the global trading system and plans to unveil tomorrow what he is calling “reciprocal tariffs” that would match the import taxes and other policies that other countries impose on American exports.

Trump has taken to calling April 2, when the tariffs are supposed to go into effect, “Liberation Day,” arguing that their imposition will end years during which other countries have been “ripping us off.” The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said yesterday that there would be “no exemptions at this time” as some foreign nations tried to negotiate a last-minute reprieve. On Thursday, a separate 25 percent tariff is set to be imposed on all cars and car parts that are shipped into the U.S.

Asian markets tumbled, with the Nikkei 225 index in Japan falling into a correction. The S&P 500 recorded its worst month since 2022. European stocks slumped.

Mixed messages: A White House trade adviser said that tariffs would raise about $6 trillion over the next decade. But experts say that using tariffs to increase revenue conflicts with the administration’s goal of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. This is why.

At home: The tariffs are expected to raise the cost of cars, electronics and other products that American consumers buy from overseas. But Trump and his aides are betting they can convince Americans to swallow higher prices. It could backfire.

Myanmar’s military slowed aid to a rebel city

As the death toll from the earthquake rose to more than 2,000 people, help was just starting to trickle in yesterday to the remote city of Sagaing in Myanmar, where monasteries and apartments were razed. Over 80 percent of the city was destroyed in the quake that hit Friday, residents said.

The military has been battling rebel forces for control of Sagaing since it seized power in a coup four years ago. Doctors said they had been blocked from entering, and volunteers said their rescue efforts were stopped. The authorities also closed a vital bridge because of safety concerns, further isolating the area.

Thailand: The Bangkok building razed by the quake employed men and women who had found love at work. Despite glimmers of hope, many yesterday were still beneath the rubble.

The Atlantique 2 plane of the French Navy was designed to hunt submarines and other enemy craft, but now one aircraft’s goal is to observe — and to be seen observing. The plane is part of a NATO program aimed at suspected Russian sabotage in the Baltic Sea.

A reporter and a photographer spent 14 hours aboard the plane. Read about it here.

Lives lived: Joe Harris, thought to be the oldest World War II U.S. paratrooper, died at 108.

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A quest to find joy and then bring it home

Finland has topped the World Happiness Report for the past eight years, owed in part to its welfare state, a closeness with nature and three million saunas. One anxious American, Britta Lokting, went to Helsinki to see if she could bring some of that joy home with her.

Lokting sampled local food, confessed emotions to the trees and plunged into cold waters. On her return to America, she still found happiness to be a luxury. But maybe the answer wasn’t to recreate a dopamine rush, she writes, but something altogether more simple.

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