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The Indigenous Brazilian territory of Ituna-Itatá was established in 2011 for the protection of an isolated group that has never been contacted by outsiders or fully confirmed to exist. But despite its special status, it has become one of the most invaded Indigenous territories in Brazil since the election of the pro-development, anti-regulatory president, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2018 — becoming something of a poster board for the Amazon’s eventual demise.

William Langewiesche explores the process of defending these preserves from outside harm, and uses Ituna-Itatá, which has now been heavily deforested, as a grim illustration of the intractable forces destroying the Amazon through logging, ranching and mining.

In this long read, the consequences these industrial activities have on biodiversity and the global environment are explained, using the vantage point of Ituna-Itatá to show how the land-grabbing, which was approaching inexorably upriver along the Xingu, has been propelled by the economic boom that resulted from the construction near Altamira of a large hydroelectric dam.

Everything is connected — but can the chain of destruction be broken?

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Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Emma Kehlbeck, Parin Behrooz, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Jack D’Isidoro, Elena Hecht, Desiree Ibekwe, Tanya Pérez, Marion Lozano, Naomi Noury, Krish Seenivasan, Corey Schreppel, Margaret Willison, Kate Winslett and Tiana Young. Special thanks to Mike Benoist, Sam Dolnick, Laura Kim, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Blake Wilson and Ryan Wegner.

In a Russian-occupied village, five men went off to feed cattle. Their relatives and neighbors are wondering what happened to them.

HUSARIVKA, Ukraine — The cows wouldn’t stop screaming.

Russian soldiers had occupied this remote village in eastern Ukraine for about two weeks and were using a farm as a base. But the animals at the farm hadn’t been fed. Their incessant bleating was wearing on both occupiers and townspeople.

A group of five residents from Husarivka, an unassuming agricultural village of around 1,000 people, went to tend the cattle.

They were never heard from again.

“My two nephews disappeared. They went to feed the cows on the farm,” said Svitlana Tarusyna, 70. “They are gone, vanished.”

What transpired in Husarivka has all the horrifying elements of the more publicized incidents involving Russian brutality: indiscriminate killings, abuse and torture, taking place over the better part of a month.

Human rights workers around Kyiv, the capital, are gathering evidence of Russian atrocities, hoping to build the case for war crimes. But for the villagers here, the occupation’s legacy is not measured in mass killings, corpses or ruined buildings, but in the disappearances of friends and neighbors.

Though the residents are free of Russian occupation, questions about what exactly happened during those troubled days will linger for years to come.

The Russian soldiers were, for the most part, reserved after their arrival in Husarivka in the first days of March, residents said. But that quickly changed. They looted empty homes. Then they started stealing from the people who had stayed behind. It was around the time Ms. Tarusyna’s nephews and their colleagues disappeared that the occupation turned violent.

“At first, they were not wandering anywhere around at all,” said Yurii Doroshenko, 58, who is Husarivka’s de facto mayor, noting that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers were hunkered down at their headquarters — a collective farm — on the outskirts of the village. “Then, three or four days later, they started to sneak around, searching. It was around March 10 that they started to come into the houses.”

Wedged between rolling wheat fields, tracts of sunflowers and natural gas lines, Husarivka is about 60 miles southeast of Kharkiv, once Ukraine’s second-largest city. Its capture by the Russians was part of a broad advance westward that included troop movements from near Kharkiv and the more eastern city of Izium, where Russian and Ukrainian units are still locked in battle.

The Russian campaign stalled, and Ukrainian forces managed to rout Russian troops from the village in late March.

Husarivka is only about three miles from the front line and it continues to be shelled incessantly, much as it was when the Russians held the area. The power and water have been out since early last month and cell service is practically nonexistent, leaving the village all but isolated except for the humanitarian aid ferried in from surrounding towns.

In recent days, residents have slowly started to piece together what transpired in their enclave, emerging from their basement shelters between artillery strikes. But they have been left with more questions than answers, such as: Where are the five people who disappeared around March 16 after heading off to feed the cows?

Mr. Doroshenko pointed to his frayed list of people who had disappeared or died, some from natural causes, during the occupation. The names and dates of death were written in blue ink.

“This is Yehor Shyrokin,” he said. “He was a foreman at the farm. Sergiy Krasnokutsky was working as a security guard. Olexandr Tarusyn was handing out the fodder. Olexandr Gavrysh was a tractor driver. Mykola Lozoviy was the Gazelle driver,” he said, referring to a transport truck.

Before the war, 1,060 people were registered as residents of Husarivka, Mr. Doroshenko noted on Thursday, as dark clouds rolled over his village and the thud of artillery echoed in the distance. Now most people have fled, and he estimated the number had shrunk to around 400.

In the days leading up to the disappearances, only one resident had been killed during the occupation. On March 8, Ukrainian forces tried to retake Husarivka, and during the fighting Sergiy Karachentsev, a driver, was killed, said Mr. Doroshenko. Some residents said he was fleeing to meet his wife in a neighboring town when Russian troops stopped his car and shot him.

“His car, an old Opel, is still there,” the village chief acknowledged.

As the occupiers settled into Husarivka and ransacked the homes, their interactions with residents became more frequent.

Oleksandr Khomenko, 43, a beekeeper, echoed the accounts of a half-dozen other residents: the Russian forces were undersupplied and demanded alcohol and food. One woman refused to give up her pig, so they went next door and shot the neighbors’ pig, the woman said.

They also took cellphones and other electronics, presumably to stop residents from contacting Ukrainian forces and providing information about the Russian troops’ location. Or so they could call home.

“We were holding on to our tablet for a long time,” Mr. Khomenko said. “The Russian soldier took me aside and said: ‘What’s more dear to you, your wife and kid or the tablet? I will take your tablet anyway, and you should only choose whether they will live or die.’”

He gave them the tablet.

Sometime during the second week of the occupation, several days after the power went out, the cows started to roar. Some of the Russians and their armored vehicles were holed up in a tractor garage by the cattle pens and had stopped people from working at the collective farm, called Husarivkse. As a result, the animals languished.

“There were over 1,000 cattle here,” said Anatoliy Isitchenko, 67, the deputy director of the agricultural company that ran the cluster of farm buildings.

“Here is what they did,” he said of the occupiers. “On this street next to the farm, they told the guys who worked there as machine operators and foremen to go and feed the livestock.”

The five men fed the cows and tended to their duties. But as they left, something on the farm exploded, residents recalled. Whether it was an artillery strike or an attempt at sabotage is unclear, but it seemed to contribute to their disappearance; Mr. Doroshenko stated that the Russians captured the men after the explosion. It is possible they were behind some type of attack on the Russian headquarters.

“They only got to the crossroad and were seized,” Mr. Doroshenko said.

Two other people near the farm also went missing that day, Mr. Doroshenko added. Roughly a week later, on March 24, a Russian sniper shot and killed Andriy Mashchenko as he rode home on his bicycle. He had been sheltering in a neighbor’s basement during an artillery barrage. He died on Peace Street.

Under heavy bombardment, the Russians retreated from Husarivka about two days later, and Ukrainian forces swept through afterward. The town’s casualty tally during the occupation: seven people missing, two killed by gunfire and at least two by shelling.

Evidence scattered around the town showed how artillery had ruled the day. Spent rockets lay in fields. Roofs were caved in. The rusted hulks of Russian vehicles were seemingly everywhere. In one armored personnel carrier, the corpse of what was presumed to be a Russian soldier remained, barely recognizable as someone’s son.

But as Ukrainian soldiers sifted through the battlefield wreckage after their victory, they found something on Petrusenko Street. It was in a backyard basement sealed shut by a rusted metal door.

“In this cellar the bodies were found,” said Olexiy, a chief investigator in the region who declined to provide his last name for security reasons. He gestured down into a soot-covered hole. “They were covered by car tires and burned,” he said.

“There is no way to tell the cause of their death,” he added, “We found three hands, two legs, three skulls.”

The bodies have yet to be identified, he said. Residents of Husarivka believe the three had been part of the group of five who disappeared. Images provided to The New York Times clearly showed that a rubber work boot was melted to the foot of one leg.

But hauntingly, no one knows for sure what happened to the five men. Many of the cows they went to feed ended up being killed by the shelling.

A Kentucky man who was fired days after he had a panic attack at his workplace over an unwanted birthday party was awarded $450,000 by a jury last month for lost wages and emotional distress.

The man, Kevin Berling, had been working at a medical laboratory, Gravity Diagnostics in Covington, Ky., for about 10 months when he asked the office manager not to throw him a birthday party because he had an anxiety disorder, according to a lawsuit filed in Kentucky’s Kenton County Circuit Court.

Mr. Berling’s lawyer, Tony Bucher, said the party had been planned by other employees while the office manager was away and that the situation had quickly spiraled out of control.

Mr. Berling had a panic attack after he learned about the planned lunchtime celebration, which was to have included birthday wishes from colleagues and a banner decorating the break room. Mr. Berling chose to spend his lunch break in his car instead.

The next day, Mr. Berling had a panic attack in a meeting with two supervisors who confronted him about his “somber behavior,” Mr. Bucher said. He was fired three days later in an email that suggested that Mr. Berling posed a threat to his co-workers’ safety.

In a court filing, the company said it had fired Mr. Berling because he was “violent” in the meeting and had scared the supervisors, who sent him home for the day, took his key fob and told security personnel that he was not allowed to return.

A month after the meeting, in September 2019, Mr. Berling sued the company for disability discrimination.

After a two-day trial, a jury reached a verdict on March 31, concluding that Mr. Berling had experienced an adverse employment action because of a disability. Jurors awarded him $150,000 in lost wages and benefits and $300,000 for suffering, embarrassment and loss of self-esteem.

The judge in the case has not yet entered a judgment regarding the verdict, which was reported by LINK nky, a local news website.

John Maley, a lawyer for Gravity Diagnostics, said on Saturday that the company would file post-trial motions challenging the verdict on legal grounds and asserting that one juror had violated court orders about obtaining information outside the trial.

Mr. Maley said that the case had not met the standard for a disability claim because Mr. Berling had never disclosed his anxiety disorder to the company and had not met the legal threshold to qualify as having a disability.

Mr. Maley said that the company had the right to fire Mr. Berling — a lab technician whose employment status was at-will, meaning he could be fired for any legal reason — because he had clenched his fists, his face had turned red and he had ordered his supervisors to be quiet in the meeting, scaring them.

“They were absolutely in fear of physical harm during that moment,” Julie Brazil, the founder and chief operating officer of Gravity Diagnostics, said on Saturday. “They both are still shaken about it today.”

Mr. Bucher said that the reaction the company had described was Mr. Berling’s effort to calm himself during a panic attack after one of the supervisors had criticized his reaction to the party.

Mr. Berling asked them to stop talking and used physical coping techniques, including a move that Mr. Bucher described as having his fists closed but “up around his chest, sort of closed in, almost hugging himself.”

Mr. Berling was sent home for the rest of the workday and for the next day. At home a couple of hours after the meeting, he texted one of the supervisors to apologize for his panic attack, according to the complaint.

Before that week, Mr. Bucher said, Mr. Berling had received “outstanding” monthly reviews. The company said that he had never received a negative review, nor had he been disciplined, according to court documents.

Mr. Berling is happy in his new job at a school, Mr. Bucher said, and though his panic attacks increased in frequency after that week in 2019, they have gradually diminished.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorder in the United States, and they affect an estimated 40 million adults in the country each year, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

Bisma Anwar, a mental health counselor for the therapy app Talkspace, said in an email that it was a good idea for people who experience anxiety disorders and panic attacks to discuss those issues with a supervisor at work who could be a source of support when the employee is struggling.

Ms. Anwar said anxiety on the job could be a result of workload as well as social pressures.

“Social anxiety can also get triggered in the workplace when interacting with managers and co-workers becomes expected,” Ms. Anwar said. “If an employee is uncomfortable and feels anxious by having a birthday party in their honor or taking part in a celebration for others, then they should be allowed to opt out from it.”

JERUSALEM — Israeli police stopped Muslim worshipers from entering the Aqsa Mosque compound early Sunday morning and brief clashes broke out in nearby side streets, two days after violence erupted at the holy site.

The police, seeking to prevent contact between Muslims and Jews who had entered the compound, confined Muslims who were already inside it to a central part of the site. They provided Jewish worshipers with a police escort as they walked around the perimeter of the site, known as the Temple Mount to Jews, which was the location of an ancient temple considered the holiest place in Judaism.

Earlier, Palestinians had gathered near the entrance used by non-Muslims to enter the site, blocking part of the route that is usually used by Jews to discreetly pray near where the ancient Jewish temple stood.

Clashes later broke out in the side streets around the mosque compound, as police used batons and sound grenades to force back Muslims who were trying to enter. Palestinians shouted, “With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice for Al Aqsa.”

Tensions are often high at the complex in Jerusalem’s Old City, which is sacred to both Islam and Judaism. But they are particularly tense at the moment because of a rare overlap between Ramadan and Passover, which has prompted more Muslims and Jews to enter the site than usual.

Muslims consider efforts by some Jewish activists to pray furtively at the site to be a provocation, because they violate the longstanding Israeli policy of allowing Jews to visit but not pray. They also fear that Jewish prayer there will give momentum to campaigns by small extremist groups to build a new Jewish temple at the site.

Many Muslims have also been angered by recent efforts by extremist Jews to enter the compound with young goats to make a Passover sacrifice. The police said last week that they had arrested some activists who were planning such a sacrifice.

On Friday, Israeli riot police, firing rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades, stormed the main mosque on the compound to detain hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom had been throwing stones at them. More than 150 people were injured.

The recent clashes have followed a wave of Palestinian attacks on Israelis and deadly Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank.

Similar clashes at the mosque last year contributed to the outbreak of an 11-day war between Israel and militants in Gaza led by Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the strip.

This year, however, both Israel and Hamas have signaled that they are not seeking an escalation. Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas official, said on Saturday that both sides had conveyed through Qatari officials that they did not want a new conflagration.

Klay Thompson was splashing 3-pointers. Draymond Green was making stops and deftly finding open cutters. Stephen Curry drew several defenders any time he touched the ball.

The threesome who redefined basketball en route to winning a series of championships with the Golden State Warriors reunited in the playoffs on Saturday for the first time since 2019. And as in many games of that era, the high-octane Warriors were dominant, defeating the Denver Nuggets in the opener of their first-round playoff matchup, 123-107.

In a surprise move, Curry began the game on the bench. In his place, Coach Steve Kerr started the third-year guard Jordan Poole, who is having a career year. The move appeared to be aimed at keeping Curry on a strict minutes limit. This was his first game since March 16, when he injured his left foot against the Boston Celtics.

The swap paid off. Poole was exceptional in his first career playoff game, scoring 30 points — a game high — on 9 for 13 shooting, electrifying the Chase Center crowd in San Francisco.

The last time Curry came off the bench during the playoffs was May 1, 2018, the second game of the Western Conference semifinals against the New Orleans Pelicans, when he was coming off a knee injury. Saturday against Denver was only the third playoff game of Curry’s career in which he played but didn’t start.

He entered the contest about halfway through the first quarter to a loud ovation. Almost immediately, Curry made his presence felt, finding Thompson for an open 3-pointer from the corner and sneaking a pass between two defenders to an open Green for a dunk. Otherwise, he struggled, shooting 5 for 13 from the field for 16 points.

Thompson, meanwhile, looked like the player he was before he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee during the 2019 N.B.A. finals. He moved swiftly to find open looks for himself, en route to five 3-pointers and 19 points overall.

Golden State was able to flummox Denver’s Nikola Jokic, the favorite to win the Most Valuable Player Award, which would be his second. The Warriors constantly forced Jokic into difficult shots and frustrated him with a steady stream of double teams. They also attempted to tire him out defensively by setting up possessions with him as the primary defender on the ballhandler.

By the time the fourth quarter came around, Jokic looked exhausted. He finished with 25 points, 10 rebounds and 6 assists.

The playoff opener was a return to the postseason spotlight for the core Golden State players who won championships in 2015, 2017 and 2018. Curry, Green, Thompson and Andre Iguodala are the top four leaders in franchise history for postseason games played. But this was the first time, in large part because of injuries, that the Warriors had made the playoffs since 2019, when the team lost in the finals to the Toronto Raptors in six games. The only time all four of them played in the same game this year was on Jan. 9, Thompson’s first game back after missing two seasons with leg injuries. Green started that game only briefly, to support Thompson, before sitting the rest of the night.

Both teams had significant injury issues during the season. Green missed more than two months of the regular season for Golden State with a back injury. For Denver, Michael Porter Jr. and Jamal Murray missed most or all of the season.

This was Denver’s fourth straight year making the playoffs; the team has made it out of the first round each of the past three seasons.

The Nuggets will attempt to tie the seven-game series at one game apiece on Monday.

SEOUL — North Korea has carried out its 12th missile test of the year, launching what appeared to be a pair of short-range projectiles off its east coast, South Korea’s military said on Sunday.

The two missiles were fired from Hamhung, a city on the North’s east coast, at 6 p.m. Saturday, the military said. They flew 68 miles, it said.

Earlier Sunday, the North Korean state media said that Kim Jong-un, the country’s leader, had supervised the launching of a “new​-type​ tactical guided weapon,” giving no date or location for the test. It said the test would help the North improve its “efficiency in the operation of tactical nukes.”

Though the missiles seemed to be considerably less powerful than others the North has recently tested, the launch Saturday came at a moment of relatively high tension.

Friday was an important state holiday in North Korea, and the United States had sent an aircraft carrier to the region days earlier amid concern that Mr. Kim might mark the occasion with a major weapon test, perhaps even one involving a nuclear device.

Also, the United States and South Korea are set to begin annual joint military exercises on Monday. The drills consist largely of computer simulations and are said to be defensive in nature. But North Korea has condemned all of the two allies’ joint exercises as rehearsals for invasion and has often responded to them with weapon tests.

During former President Donald J. Trump’s administration, when the American leader and Mr. Kim were engaged in direct talks, the United States and South Korea began canceling or scaling back some of their joint military drills in hopes of adding momentum to the diplomatic efforts. But South Korea’s president-elect, Yoon Suk-yeol, who takes office next month, has vowed to expand the drills, saying they are needed to help deter North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile threats.

It was not immediately clear what type of missile the North had tested on Saturday. In the past, it has used the “new​-type​ guided tactical weapon” language to refer to the short-range ballistic missiles ​known as KN-23 or KN-24. Those are among a variety of missiles ​North Korea has been testing since 2019 to improve its ability to fire short-range conventional or nuclear warheads at South Korea, Japan and the American military bases in the region.

In photos released by ​the North Korean state media on Sunday, the missile said to have been fired on Saturday resembled the KN-23.

The launch came days after the American aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln had arrived in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. No specific reason was given for the deployment, but the carrier group was sent there amid concern that Mr. Kim might order a nuclear or intercontinental ballistic missile test around Friday — the 110th anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il-sung, Mr. Kim’s grandfather.

Instead, the holiday, North Korea’s biggest, was celebrated with large rallies, fireworks and cultural performances, but without a weapon test or a military parade.

Analysts have warned that more weapon tests are sure to come. North Korea has carried out an unusually high number of missile tests this year. The most recent, on March 24, was of the most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile it has yet launched, ending a yearslong, self-imposed moratorium on such tests.

Mr. Kim has vowed to double down on his nuclear and missile development programs since 2019, when his direct engagement with Mr. Trump ended with no agreement on rolling back his nuclear weapon program or lifting the international sanctions imposed on the North in response to it.