Category: Latest News

The Supreme Court announced on Sunday that it would issue at least one decision on Monday, a strong signal that it would rule then on former President Donald J. Trump’s eligibility for Colorado’s primary ballot.

The announcement said Monday’s opinion or opinions would be posted online starting at 10 a.m. “The court will not take the bench,” it said.

The court’s usual practice, though one suspended during the pandemic, is to announce decisions in argued cases from the bench. The justices had not been scheduled to return to the courtroom until March 15.

The timing of the court’s actions may have been influenced by the electoral calendar. In urging the justices to intervene in the case, the Colorado Republican Party had asked them to act before the looming Super Tuesday primaries this week, which include Colorado.

The ruling is likely to resolve not only whether Mr. Trump may appear on the Colorado primary ballot but also whether he is eligible to run in the general election. Indeed, the decision will almost certainly apply to any other state where Mr. Trump’s eligibility to run has been challenged.

Not since Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, has the Supreme Court assumed such a direct role in a presidential contest.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that Mr. Trump is ineligible to seek or hold office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted after the Civil War and prohibits people who swore to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection from holding office.

After Mr. Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 3 to hear his appeal, the justices have moved with considerable speed to resolve the issue. They granted review just two days after the filing and scheduled arguments for about a month later.

Based on questioning at the oral argument, Mr. Trump is likely to prevail.

The court is also considering a second case concerning Mr. Trump, on whether he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That has moved more slowly than the Colorado case.

The justices took 16 days after Mr. Trump’s emergency application regarding immunity to schedule arguments for seven weeks later, in the week of April 22. The court kept the trial, which had once been scheduled for March 4, on hold in the meantime.

If the court issues its decision in the Colorado case on Monday, it will have acted within a month of hearing arguments. If it follows that pace on the immunity case, a decision could land in late May. And if Mr. Trump loses, pretrial proceedings would resume and the trial itself might start, barring other hurdles, in late September.

A lot of climate discussion revolves around time. Lines rise across charts predicting the next century. Scientists set deadlines for the coming decades. Each month seems to bring news of a new heat record. The sense that time is running out can be heady.

As the Earth warms, natural wonders — coral reefs, glaciers, archipelagos — are at risk of damage and disappearance. This has motivated some travelers to engage in “last-chance tourism,” visiting places threatened by climate change before it’s too late.

“For thousands of years, humans have raced to be the first to scale a peak, cross a frontier, or document a new species or landscape,” Paige McClanahan writes in a piece for The Times. “Now, in some cases, we’re racing to be the last.”

A vanishing glacier

One such destination is the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in the French Alps, where thousands of people go each year to ski. (Early tourists included Mary Shelley and Mark Twain.)

The glacier, like many others, is melting rapidly. A new, higher lift opened recently to stay closer to the retreating ice. And a study published in the journal Science last year found that around half of the world’s glaciers will have melted by the end of this century, even if nations stick to the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

“For someone who doesn’t know how it used to be, it’s a beautiful scene,” a visitor to the glacier told Paige. “But when you know the difference, it really is sad.”

Pros and cons

There is some evidence that visiting an ecosystem threatened by climate change could lead people to become more aware of their impact on the environment.

In a 2020 survey conducted by researchers at the Mer de Glace, 80 percent of visitors said that they would try to learn more about how to protect the environment, and 77 percent said they would reduce their water and energy consumption.

Some tourist spots have leaned into education. In Peru, officials renamed a trek to the Pastoruri glacier “La Ruta del Cambio Climático,” or “The Route of Climate Change.” And at the Mer de Glace, an exhibit about climate change — called the Glaciorium — is set to open later this year.

There are some, however, who question of the value of last-chance tourism. Visiting fragile environments can do more harm than good.

Some people travel to Antarctica because they fear it is being destroyed. But, as Sara Clemence highlighted in a piece in The Atlantic last year, travel there requires a lot of fuel, while visitors can introduce disease and damage wildlife. And research by Karla Boluk, an academic from the University of Waterloo, found that a majority of last-chance tourists to two sites in Canada were unwilling to pay extra to offset the carbon footprint of their trip.

“There’s an ethical paradox of last-chance tourism,” Boluk told The Times, “and it involves the moral question of whether travelers acknowledge and respond to the harm they promote.”

Read Paige’s full story here.

THE LATEST NEWS

2024 Election

THE SUNDAY DEBATE

Should Michigan’s protest vote worry Biden?

Yes. That 100,000 Michigan voters vented their discontent with Biden, many over his handling of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, is a problem for him. “The Biden campaign has to deal with how the president’s policy could impact his re-election effort,” USA Today’s Sara Pequeño writes.

No. There are more moderates who agree with Biden’s policies than there are progressives who disagree with him. “It would be a mistake to think that shifting his policy to the left would be a net gain for him,” John Halpin writes for CNN.

Hidden history: Alderney, a windswept island in the English Channel, feels like a remote haven. During World War II, it was a site of Nazi atrocities.

Thank you very much: As a boy in Pakistan, Airaj Jilani idolized Elvis. Decades later in the U.S., he still has his passion — and his impeccable impersonation.

Vows: Their corporate speak turned into a language of love.

Lives Lived: Nancy Wallace helped transform the Bronx River from a watery graveyard for automobiles and appliances into an urban greenbelt for New York City. She died at 93.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

The A.I. industry continues to boom, and to poke at our anxieties. In late 2022, I spoke with the pioneering researcher Yejin Choi, who works on developing common sense and ethical reasoning in A.I.

Can you explain what “common sense” means in the context of teaching it to A.I.?

It’s the unspoken, implicit knowledge that you and I have. It’s so obvious that we often don’t talk about it. You and I know birds can fly, and we know penguins generally cannot. So A.I. researchers thought, we can code this up: Birds usually fly, except for penguins. But in fact, newborn baby birds cannot fly, birds covered in oil cannot fly. The point being, exceptions are not exceptional, and you and I can think of them even though nobody told us. It’s not so easy for A.I.

What’s most exciting to you right now about your work in A.I.?

I’m excited about value pluralism. Another way to put it is that there’s no universal truth. A lot of people feel uncomfortable about this. As scientists, we’re trained to be very precise and strive for one truth. Now I’m thinking, well, there’s no universal truth — can birds fly or not? Moral rules: There must be some moral truth. Don’t kill people, for example. But what if it’s a mercy killing? Then what?

How could you possibly teach A.I. to make moral decisions when almost every rule or truth has exceptions?

A.I. should learn exactly that: There are cases that are more clean-cut, and then there are cases that are more discretionary. Instead of making binary, clean-cut decisions, it should sometimes make decisions based on This looks really bad. Or you have your position, but it understands that, well, half the country thinks otherwise.

Read more of the interview here.

BOOKS

New fiction: “Wandering Stars,” the follow-up to Tommy Orange’s “There There,” follows the descendants of a massacre on Native Americans over a century and a half. Our review calls it a towering achievement.

Our editors’ picks: In “The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels,” readers sift through texts, emails and more to discover the story behind a series of occult deaths.

Times best sellers: “The Chaos Agent,” the 13th book in Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, is new this week on the hardcover fiction best-seller list.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Check in on your emotional well-being.

Clean your dog’s bed.

Feel safer with a smart security device.

THE WEEK AHEAD

What to Watch For

• North Dakota holds Republican caucuses tomorrow.

• Then it’s Super Tuesday. Sixteen states have primary elections or caucuses, including California, where Representatives Katie Porter and Adam Schiff are competing for a Senate seat.

• Biden will make the State of the Union address on Thursday.

• International Women’s Day is Friday.

• Congress’s deadline to avert a government shutdown is Friday.

• Trump is scheduled to host Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, at Mar-a-Lago on Friday.

What to Cook This Week

In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein suggests making Eric Kim’s five-ingredient peanut butter noodles, which she calls “a Parmesan-tossed classic in the making.” Her other suggestions include an orange-glazed baked salmon, a one-pan crispy chicken and chickpeas and a cheesy and spicy black bean bake.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

An unpublished investigation by the main United Nations agency for Palestinian affairs accuses Israel of abusing hundreds of Gazans captured during the war with Hamas, according to a copy of the report reviewed by The New York Times.

The report was compiled by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that is itself at the center of an investigation after accusations that at least 30 of its 13,000 employees participated in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. The authors of the report allege that the detainees, including at least 1,000 civilians later released without charge, were held at three military sites inside Israel.

The report said the detainees included males and females whose ages ranged from 6 to 82. Some, the report said, died in detention.

The document includes accounts from detainees who said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.

The draft document describes “a range of ill-treatment that Gazans of all ages, abilities and backgrounds have reported facing in makeshift detention facilities in Israel.” Such treatment, the report concluded, “was used to extract information or confessions, to intimidate and humiliate, and to punish.”

The report is based on interviews with more than 100 of the 1,002 detainees who were released back to Gaza by mid-February. The document estimates that 3,000 other Gazans remain in Israeli detention without access to lawyers. Its findings echo those of several Israeli and Palestinian rights groups, as well as separate investigations by two U.N. special rapporteurs, all of whom allege similar abuses inside Israeli detention centers.

The Times was unable to corroborate the entirety of the allegations in the report. But parts of it match the testimony of former Gazan detainees interviewed by The Times.

One such detainee, Fadi Bakr, 25, a Gazan law student who provided documentary evidence that he had been detained in Israel, told The New York Times that he was brutally beaten throughout his detention at three makeshift Israeli military sites.

Mr. Bakr said that he was captured in Gaza City on Jan. 5 and released in early February. He said that while he was held at a detention site near Beersheba, in southern Israel, he was beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine as a result.

Mr. Bakr also told The Times that guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled. Mr. Bakr said he was released after the military appeared satisfied that he had no links to Hamas.

Israel has said that the detentions were necessary to find and interrogate Hamas members after the group’s attack on southern Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 people and led to the abduction of some 250 others, according to the Israeli authorities. Israel says that hundreds of Hamas members have been captured.

Presented with the findings listed in a draft of the report, the Israeli military said in a statement that some detainees had died in detention, including those who had pre-existing illnesses and wounds, without giving more details, and said that every death was being investigated by the military police. The military said that all mistreatment was “absolutely prohibited” and strongly denied any allegation of sexual abuse, adding that all “concrete complaints regarding inappropriate behavior are forwarded to the relevant authorities for review.”

The statement by the Israel Defense Forces said that medical care was readily available for all detainees and that mistreatment of detainees “violates I.D.F. values.”

The military said that its soldiers acted “in accordance with Israeli and international law in order to protect the rights of the detainees.” It also said that it played music at only a “low volume,” to prevent detainees from conferring before interrogations.

The UNRWA researchers interviewed more than 100 detainees who were released without charge through the Kerem Shalom crossing point on the Gazan border. Their findings were then shared with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The rights office declined to comment. UNRWA confirmed the existence of the report but said that its wording had not been finalized for publication.

The agency’s role in its creation is likely to heighten scrutiny of the report’s conclusions. Israel has long charged that the agency operates under Hamas’s influence, indoctrinates Gazans with anti-Israel propaganda, and turned a blind eye to Hamas military activity — all claims that UNRWA denies.

Israel says that at least 30 UNRWA employees played an active role in the Hamas-led attack on Israel or its aftermath, an accusation that prompted nearly 20 countries and institutions to suspend their funding, putting the agency’s future in doubt. UNRWA fired several of the employees and another branch of the United Nations opened an independent investigation.

According to the report, the detainees included individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, intellectual disabilities and cancer. The report said that many had been captured from northern Gaza as they sheltered in hospitals and schools or as they tried to flee south. Others were Gazans with permits to work in Israel who were stranded and later detained in Israel after the war started.

Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions and had been attacked by military dogs. Many of the details match accounts given directly to The New York Times by recently released detainees.

Both male and female detainees reported incidents of sexual abuse, the report said. Some male detainees said they were beaten on their genitals, the report said. Some women said they experienced “inappropriate touching during searches and as a form of harassment while blindfolded,” according to the report. It added that some reported having to strip in front of male soldiers during searches and were prevented from covering themselves up.

Rights lawyers say that locating the detainees in the Israeli system is difficult, and they describe the situation as a form of incommunicado detention. Under legislation passed since the start of the war, detainees captured in Gaza do not have the right to see a lawyer for up to 180 days.

Lawyers from HaMoked, an Israeli rights group, said that they had managed to briefly reach some detained Gazans by phone, almost by chance, after calling a military base in Jerusalem and asking if the detainees happened to be at the base.

Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Rafah, Gaza; Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel; and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.

Like many African American professors, I teach at a predominantly white institution (Wheaton College) and live in the largely white small city where it’s located, outside Chicago. I have not experienced serious acts of discrimination, but that doesn’t make life simple.

When people think about the difficulty of being Black in largely white spaces in America, they tend to picture overt racism. But many of us who are in the minority at universities encounter a different kind of problem related to our race that may go unnoticed by those in the majority culture. At Wheaton, I am faced with the daily reality of my strangeness, like being a peacock in a flock of wild turkeys. The peacock is interesting and adds some color, but the fact that it is not native to the area is clear to all.

While diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have their flaws in content and implementation, one of their unsung values is that they can help reduce this kind of strain on Black faculty members and students on majority-white campuses; more diversity can help ease our sense of not belonging.

Despite the ongoing hysteria around diversity and hiring in higher education, Black faculty members are shockingly uncommon — only 6 percent of professors in this country in 2021. We face obstacles inside and outside the classroom. Black faculty members at largely white schools can be subjects of scrutiny based on assumptions that our race rather than our talent won us our positions. At academic conferences, I have been told directly that I got my job because I was Black.

On campus, I walk into the classroom knowing that for many of my white students, I may be the first Black authority figure they have encountered. Their church leaders, high school teachers and mayors are likely to have been white. Because of this, I rarely have the luxury of being myself. Black faculty members in my position become Black people consolidated, correcting misconceptions and putting away stereotypes one class at a time. When traumatic racial events flash across the national landscape, students of color look to us hoping that we might address a gnawing pain that is ignored in their other classes. All of this is part of the well-known and still underappreciated invisible labor that faculty members of color provide.

Beyond work, tasks that seem simple for the majority culture become quests that involve connecting to an underground network of other Black veterans of the community. Want a haircut for your son or braids for your daughter? It may be necessary to leave town to find the right barbershop or salon. In need of a place of worship that is not monocultural and cut off from the concerns of the community that shaped you? You may have to journey to the closest major city to locate such a congregation. If nothing for you is near you, it is easy to conclude that your town was and is designed for someone else.

I have always valued having ethnic diversity among my friends. That can be hard to find when I am the diversity. My kids, for example, are guaranteed to pop up on nearly every candid shot on social media from school, sports or neighborhood events. My wife and I want to recruit people to those spaces so that our kids can have a multiethnic friend group, but we are wary of the risks of becoming mascots.

I remember taking my youngest daughter to her soccer game at a vast town park filled with a multitude of tiny bodies with dreams of World Cup glory. During a break in the action, I looked across the eight or so matches taking place. Parents filled the sidelines, but as far as I could tell, I was the only Black person in attendance. I suddenly felt unspeakably lonely as I remembered similar experiences at all my kids’ school events and trips around the city.

When I felt out of place as a Black undergrad on the largely white campus of Sewanee, the University of the South, I could go to Houston Roberson’s office. He was the first African American person to earn tenure at the school.

Dr. Roberson’s specialty was race, religion and the Black church, with an emphasis on the civil rights movement. I had always been enthralled by the Black church’s role in the civil rights movement — which made his presence on campus feel like a minor miracle. He made Black excellence in white spaces real, showing me that I could gain an education and not lose something vital about who I was in the process.

If I had told him of my plan to become a professor, would he have warned me that I was entering a building not designed for me and that I would be considered ungrateful for pointing out the flaws in the architecture?

The efforts of D.E.I. programs on campus can help with these necessary renovations. Being intentional about increasing the numbers of minorities on campus does not get in the way of academic excellence. It can help rid students and faculty members of obstacles that get in the way of our flourishing.

A 2021 study showed that “having a professor of the same race or ethnicity predicted higher G.P.A.s for students, which in turn predicted higher graduation rates.” This does not surprise me. It wasn’t simply that I did well in Dr. Roberson’s courses. The content of his class showed me that my intellect could be deployed to benefit oppressed people. He helped give purpose to the effort involved in obtaining a degree.

This is why I stay. Colleges and universities are places where young people are finding themselves socially, intellectually and morally. I know, in particular, how hard it can be for Black students to go through that process in circumstances that are unfamiliar and disorienting.

I want to believe that there is room enough and charity enough for everyone on campus to thrive together.

Rescue workers in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa pulled the bodies of a mother and baby from the rubble of an apartment building on Sunday, bringing the death toll in a Russian attack two days ago to 10. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said delays by the country’s allies in supplying air defenses had contributed to the deaths.

The denunciation by Mr. Zelensky appeared to reflect frustration that Ukraine’s capacity to resist Moscow’s military campaign and protect its own citizens has been undermined by the failure of the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a multibillion-dollar military aid package.

The drone hit the building overnight on Friday and since then emergency workers have been picking through rubble. Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, was a key initial target of Moscow’s full-scale invasion two years ago and in recent months Russian forces have frequently targeted the city with drone strikes, often launched from Crimea. This weekend’s attack, however, has caused particular outrage among Ukrainians.

Rescue workers said that the mother and baby were found together. “The mother tried to cover her 8-month-old child,” said a statement by the State Emergency Service posted on the Telegram social messaging service. “They were found in a tight embrace.”

A 3-year-old girl was among eight people who had been injured, Mr. Zelensky said in an overnight speech, in which he said that Ukrainian civilians were more vulnerable because the country’s armed forces lacked air defenses that could shoot down the Shahed drones that Iran has supplied to Moscow.

“The world has enough missile defense systems, systems to protect against Shahed drones and missiles. And delaying the supply of weapons to Ukraine, missile defense systems to protect our people, leads, unfortunately, to such losses,” he said. He did not refer specifically to U.S. aid, but the country is by far Ukraine’s biggest overall military donor.

“When lives are lost, and partners are simply playing internal political games or disputes that limit our defense, it’s impossible to understand. It’s unacceptable,” Mr. Zelensky said.

More than 10,000 civilians have been killed in the last two years, according to U.N. data, the vast majority by explosions rather than gunfire. Air-raid alerts have become a fact of life for many Ukrainians and the country has come to rely on air defenses supplied by the United States and other NATO allies.

But a U.S. bill that includes $60.1 billion in military aid for the government in Kyiv, including for air defenses, has for months languished in the House, stalled by opposition from some Republicans and from former President Donald J. Trump, who is the likely Republican nominee for president.

Since the full-scale invasion began, Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly pressed the country’s allies for more weaponry, often using strong language that at times has irked some leaders in NATO countries. He has argued that Ukraine’s defense against Moscow is central to all of Europe’s security as well as to democratic values more broadly.

Ukrainian military commanders have also said that a lack of ammunition and artillery had made it harder to resist Russian battlefield advances, not least around the city of Avdiivka in the eastern Donetsk region, which fell to Russian forces last month.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which began last June, failed to achieve its objectives and since then Moscow has gradually regained the initiative in the war, taking small chunks of territory amid intense fighting. Military experts say that Ukraine could face a difficult year on the battlefield, particularly if a lack of military aid forces it to ration ammunition severely.

Pakistan’s newly elected Parliament approved Shehbaz Sharif as prime minister on Sunday, ushering in his second term in that role and capping weeks of upheaval — as well as setting into motion a government facing economic and political challenges that are likely to leave the country in turmoil for years to come.

His selection also brings to a crossroads the role of Pakistan’s powerful military, which has long been seen as an invisible hand guiding the country’s politics and has previously engineered its election results. Analysts say that public confidence in Mr. Sharif’s government is low.

“The government is being seen as foredoomed,” said Talat Hussain, a political analyst based in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

Mr. Sharif secured 201 votes in the national assembly, while his closest rival, Omar Ayub, a supporter of the imprisoned former prime minister Imran Khan, got 92.

Before the voting began, Mr. Sharif arrived in the main hall accompanied by his older brother, Nawaz, who was also elected as a member of the national assembly. The two brothers sat together in the front row, a reminder that the elder Sharif, himself a three-time prime minister, remains influential and is likely to wield power behind the scenes.

The proceedings started with a loud protest in support of Mr. Khan. Several Khan supporters sat in front of the speaker’s dais to chant slogans; many others waved pictures of Mr. Khan, as they, too, shouted slogans in support of the cricket star turned politician.

Mr. Sharif’s party, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, which he leads with his family and which is currently the military’s preferred party, did not win the most seats in the national elections that Pakistan held a month ago. That honor went to candidates aligned with a party led by Mr. Khan, which the military had sought to sideline.

Despite that upset — a searing rebuke to the military — the P.M.L.N. was able to cobble together a coalition with other major parties to lead the government.

Yet Mr. Sharif’s government will face lingering doubts over its legitimacy after mounting accusations that the military tampered with the vote count in dozens of races to tilt them in favor of his party and away from Mr. Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf.

Najam Sethi, a prominent Pakistani political analyst, said the longevity of the Sharif coalition government depended on support from the military chief.

“As things stand, the military leadership and the coalition parties have no option but to stick together because both stand to lose if one falters. As long as Gen. Asim Munir is army chief, the Shehbaz-led government will survive bouts of instability,” Mr. Sethi said.

Another challenge: The country’s economy has teetered on the brink of collapse for years, with inflation reaching a record high last spring. A bailout from the International Monetary Fund has kept the economy afloat, but that program is set to expire this month, and the new government will need to secure another long-term I.M.F. plan.

Any possible deal — which Aqdas Afzal, an economist based in Karachi, said would need to be “in the neighborhood” of $6 billion to $8 billion — will most likely require new austerity measures that could stoke public frustration.

In Parliament, leaders of Mr. Khan’s party have also promised to serve as a powerful opposition — and possible spoiler.

“Our priority will be to get our leaders released and bring them to the Parliament,” Mr. Ayub said, referring to Mr. Khan and Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a former foreign minister, who is also imprisoned.

The party’s supporters, energized by election success, may also take to the streets to press the government to release Mr. Khan, who is serving multiple sentences on charges that include leaking state secrets. Mr. Khan has vowed to appeal those convictions, which he says are politically motivated, and his party has promised legal challenges to some of the election results.

The new prime minister, speaking after Sunday’s vote, said the country faced huge challenges but also had opportunities. Noting that the economy remained the key challenge, he vowed to bring in investment and create a business-friendly environment.

Mr. Sharif, whose first term as prime minister came after lawmakers ousted Mr. Khan in a no-confidence vote in April 2022, is known for efficient management. He oversaw several big infrastructure projects as the chief minister of Punjab, the country’s largest province.

In contrast to his brother Nawaz, who was prime minister for three terms and has fallen out with the country’s generals several times, Mr. Sharif has been deferential toward the military. In his previous term as prime minister, the military further entrenched its role in the government and increased its influence over policy-making.

In June 2021, Mr. Sharif approved the creation of a government council intended to attract foreign investment, a move widely seen as an effort by the military to have a more direct say in economic policies. The army chief, General Munir, is a member of that body, the Special Investment Facilitation Council.

Mr. Sharif also approved a policy under which the country’s intelligence agency was given the power to approve or deny government officials’ appointments and postings. That has amplified its pervasive sway over not only politics but also the civil service, analysts say.

In the wake of the election upset, analysts say the military’s future role is an open question. But most agree that a weak civilian government will make it easier for the generals to reassert their control and wield an even heavier hand politically if they choose.

“Civil-military relations in Pakistan — including relations between the military and society — will not be, cannot be, the same as they had been,” said Adil Najam, a professor of international affairs at Boston University. “What they will become is what is on the minds of every political player in Pakistan and has to be topmost on the minds of the top brass of Pakistan’s military, too.”

When Aleksei A. Navalny was alive, the Kremlin sought to portray him as an inconsequential figure unworthy of attention, even as the Russian authorities vilified and attacked him with a viciousness that suggested the opposite.

In death, little appears to have changed.

President Vladimir V. Putin has not said a word in public about Mr. Navalny in the two weeks since the opposition campaigner’s death at age 47 in an Arctic prison.

Russian state television has been almost equally silent. Coverage has been limited to a short statement by the prison authorities the day of Mr. Navalny’s death, plus a few fleeting television commentaries by state propagandists to deflect blame and tarnish his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who has announced that she will carry on her husband’s work.

And on Friday, as thousands gathered in the Russian capital for Mr. Navalny’s funeral, cheering his name, official Moscow acted as if the remembrance was a nonevent. State news ignored it altogether. When asked that morning if the Kremlin could comment on Mr. Navalny as a political figure, Mr. Putin’s spokesman responded, “It cannot.”

Referring to Mr. Navalny, Sam Greene, a professor of Russian politics at King’s College London, said, “Part of the approach from the Kremlin was to not give him any more oxygen than absolutely necessary, or if it was possible, to give him no oxygen at all.”

Mr. Putin for years refused to say Mr. Navalny’s name. State television almost never mentioned him. The authorities barred him from running for president in the 2018 election and largely thwarted him from engaging in the Western-style democratic retail politics he wanted to see in Russia.

Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist who is now a research fellow at Princeton University, called the Kremlin’s strategy one of “strategic omission.”

By removing Mr. Navalny from official public life, the Kremlin signaled that he was not a legitimate alternative politician, but rather an extremist, a terrorist or an enemy of the state, operating outside the bounds of the nation’s orchestrated politics, Mr. Yudin said.

“The way they create a perception of politics in Russia is that whatever is absent from official discourse is irrelevant, because it has no chance to materialize anyway,” Mr. Yudin said. “If you aren’t talked about on TV, you don’t exist.”

At the same time, Russia’s coercive apparatus went after Mr. Navalny with an increasing ferocity, poisoning him with a nerve agent in 2020, imprisoning him in inhumane conditions and ultimately sending him to a remote former gulag facility above the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he was maligned in a film, attacked with green dye and subjected to a multitude of criminal cases, all while being demonized as Western puppet.

“There was simply nothing to be gained by the Kremlin from having him mentioned on television, but that doesn’t mean that Navalny couldn’t smolder in the underbrush,” Professor Greene said. “And what they were concerned about was this fire spreading.”

Even without the power of television, Mr. Navalny managed to make a name for himself in Russia using the internet — and that continued to be the way millions of Russians followed news of his death and funeral.

Mr. Navalny’s online presence undermined the Kremlin’s suggestions about his irrelevance. In 2021, he amassed more than 100 million viewers for his exposé of a secret palace built for Mr. Putin on the Black Sea, leaving little doubt about the opposition leader’s latent power.

Mr. Navalny maintained his stature as the face of the opposition even from prison, communicating through written messages that his team published as social media posts and through courtroom speeches that his team turned into YouTube videos.

Mr. Yudin, the Princeton sociologist, said, “Russian politics had narrowed down a long time ago to a kind of standoff between two men, between Putin and Navalny.”

“That was absolutely clear to any honest observer of Russian politics,” he added.

But not according to Russian television.

Vyacheslav Nikonov, grandson of the Stalin-era foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, briefly announced Mr. Navalny’s death on Russia’s flagship station, Channel One.

Mr. Nikonov, a pro-Kremlin member of the Russian Parliament, interrupted his political talk show to read the statement by the prison authorities and to say that the cause of death, according to preliminary medical information, was a detached blood clot.

He quickly returned to praising the Russian military’s progress in Ukraine, quoting a famous war cry by his grandfather before handing the broadcast over to the news. There, Mr. Navalny’s death was buried as story No. 8 — after a segment about one of the state war correspondents personally delivering drones to Russian soldiers at the front.

Over the subsequent hours and days, Russian state channels gave attention to Mr. Navalny’s death only in a few quick commentaries, while spawning a few bizarre conspiracy theories.

Margarita Simonyan, head of the state news network RT, said on one talk show that the timing of the death raised “big questions” because Mr. Navalny’s wife was attending the annual Munich Security Conference at the time and made a statement “without her mascara even running.”

“It shows me that at a minimum this woman didn’t love her husband that much but very much loves power and everything it entails,” Ms. Simonyan said.

She and other propagandists suggested that the West had organized Mr. Navalny’s death to overshadow the impact of Mr. Putin’s recent interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. They did not explain how the West could arrange for Mr. Navalny’s death while he was in Russian custody.

They argued that Mr. Navalny’s death was the last thing the Kremlin would want, given that it provided another impetus for the West to pressure Russia.

“What could be better for whipping up accusatory pathos than the sudden death of the main critic of the Kremlin, as the deceased was called in the European press?” the state news commentator Dmitry Kiselyov asked on his show.

After the initial news cycle, state television channels went silent, keeping Mr. Navalny’s death and the unanswered questions about it largely under the radar, even as his face stared out from the covers of newspapers and magazines around the world.

In a poll by the independent Levada Center released on Friday, 21 percent of Russians said that they had not heard about Mr. Navalny’s death, and another 54 percent said that they had heard something, but only in vague terms.

Separately, Kremlin-aligned online trolls sprang into action to amplify criticism of Ms. Navalnaya after she announced that she would take up her husband’s mantle.

Research by Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous volunteers who monitor Russian troll activity, and by the London-based nonprofit Reset, which focuses on democracy and technology, described a coordinated campaign to smear her online, including by promoting doctored photographs and making spurious allegations about “boyfriends.”

That approach by the Russian authorities continued during Mr. Navalny’s funeral on Friday.

State television almost entirely ignored the event, while Kremlin-friendly online outlets and social media accounts engaged in countermessaging aimed at Russian-speaking audiences.

The pro-government Telegram channel Readovka tried to raise doubts about the size of the crowd. It suggested that Mr. Navalny was being used by the West, because “jokes in English” were being made by mourners.

While Mr. Putin refuses to say Mr. Navalny’s name to avoid giving him status, “the trolls have no status” and thus cannot bestow an elevated profile by mentioning him, said Abbas Gallyamov, a Kremlin speechwriter turned political consultant. He dismissed Moscow’s attempts to trivialize Mr. Navalny.

“He was a threat, of course,” said Mr. Gallyamov, who is now living in Israel. “Navalny was the only opposition politician who was able to bring people out into the streets.”