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      U Tin Oo, Embattled Pro-Democracy Leader in Myanmar, Dies at 97

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      Once one of his country’s most powerful figures, he helped found its main opposition party. “I had to face up to the harm I did to people when I served in the army,” he said.U Tin Oo, a former Burmese armed forces chief and minister of defense who turned against his country’s repressive government to become a leader of the pro-democracy movement there, died on Saturday in Yangon, Myanmar. He was 97.His personal assistant, U Myint Oo, confirmed his death, in a hospital. He said that Mr. Tin Oo had a weak heart and died of kidney failure and pulmonary edema.Once one of the most powerful figures in what is now Myanmar, Mr. Tin Oo founded the National League for Democracy, the country’s main opposition party, with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi during a violent failed pro-democracy uprising in 1988.Three years later, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel Peace Prize while under house arrest. She is again in detention, and it was not clear whether she had been informed of Mr. Tin Oo’s death.Mr. Tin Oo stood with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi outside her home in Yangon in 1996.Stuart Isett/Associated Press“Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would be deeply saddened to hear of his passing, as she has lost a trusted confidant,” Mr. Myint Oo said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Voting Ends in India, Modi Awaits a Verdict on His 10 Years in Power

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      While a newly united opposition seemed to gain some traction, it faced an uphill task in unseating a deeply entrenched prime minister.Voting in India’s general election, a six-week-long referendum on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decade in power, came to a close on Saturday as much of the country’s populous north was gripped by a deadly heat wave.Results will be tallied and announced on Tuesday.Mr. Modi, his power deeply entrenched, is seen as likely to win a third consecutive term as prime minister, which would make him only the second leader in India’s nearly 75 years as a republic to achieve that feat.But a newly united opposition has put up a fight, rallying against Mr. Modi’s divisive politics and management of India’s deeply unequal economic growth. The country will now wait to see whether the opposition was able to accomplish its goal of significantly cutting into the sizable majority in Parliament held by Mr. Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.The election, held in phases over a month and a half, is the largest democratic exercise in the world, with more than 950 million eligible voters. The last stretch of the campaigning drew large rallies even as northern India baked under an intense heat wave, with temperatures frequently exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit, or more than 43 degrees Celsius.At least 19 poll workers have died from heat strokes or other health complications resulting from the heat in recent days.Elections in a parliamentary system like India’s are usually fought seat by seat, with a candidate’s fate determined by local economic and social factors. But the B.J.P. made its campaign for the 543-seat Parliament into a presidential-style referendum, putting the focus almost entirely on Mr. Modi and his leadership. The party hoped that Mr. Modi’s deep popularity would help it overcome a growing anti-incumbent sentiment 10 years into the B.J.P.’s rule.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      South Africa Is Not a Metaphor

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      If you want to understand why the party that liberated South Africa from white rule lost its parliamentary majority in the election this week, you need to look no further than Beauty Mzingeli’s living room. The first time she cast a ballot, she could hardly sleep the night before.“We were queuing by 4 in the morning,” she told me at her home in Khayelitsha, a township in the flatlands outside Cape Town. “We couldn’t believe that we were free, that finally our voices were going to be heard.”That was 30 years ago, in the election in which she was one of millions of South Africans who voted the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, into power, ushering in a new, multiracial democracy.Nelson Mandela on the campaign trail, 1994.David Turnley/Corbis, via Getty ImagesBut at noon on Wednesday, Election Day, as I settled onto a sofa in her tidy bungalow, she confessed that she had not yet made up her mind about voting — she might, for the first time, she told me, cast a ballot for another party. Or maybe she might do the unthinkable and not vote at all.“Politicians promise us everything,” she sighed. “But they don’t deliver. Why should I give them my vote?” More

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      Warnings of Election Meddling by China Never Reached the Prime Minister

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      A watchdog agency found roadblocks to the flow of information both within the spy agency and the public service.It can be a bit difficult to keep tabs on the various inquiries and examinations into foreign interference in Canadian elections, particularly by China.The embassy of China in Ottawa. Several inquiries are looking into possible election meddling by the country.Ian Austen/The New York TimesOttawa’s latest growth industry was largely created by a series of leaks of highly classified intelligence that first appeared in The Globe and Mail, and then Global News, that described attempts by the Chinese government to meddle in the last two elections with the goal of returning the Liberals to power, if again with a minority government.First was a report from a group of senior civil servants that found that while China, Russia and Iran had tried to subvert the 2019 and 2021 federal votes, their efforts had failed.Next, David Johnston, the former governor general, looked at the body of evidence that produced the leak. Mr. Johnston stepped down before finishing his inquiry after the opposition argued that his close ties to the Trudeau family meant that his assessment would not be independent. But, in a preliminary report, he concluded that foreign powers were “undoubtedly attempting to influence candidates and voters in Canada.” But Mr. Johnston added that, after looking at everything, he found that “several leaked materials that raised legitimate questions turn out to have been misconstrued in some media reports, presumably because of the lack of this context.”At the end of March, a committee of Parliamentarians who had been cleared to review classified intelligence turned over its election interference report to the government. The censored, public version of its findings has yet to be released.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Announces $34.8 Million Fund-Raising Haul After Guilty Verdict

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign announced that he had raised $34.8 million in the wake of his felony conviction, shattering online records for Republicans and an early sign of the extent to which the base was rallying behind him.The campaign said in a statement that nearly 30 percent of the donors who gave online were new to the party’s online donating platform, WinRed, giving the former president an invaluable infusion of new contributions to tap in the coming months. The Trump campaign said the haul was double its previous best day ever on WinRed. And the one-day haul was nearly 10 times the $4 million Mr. Trump raised when his mug shot was released in 2023, after his booking in Atlanta for his indictment there.The figures will not be verifiable until the campaign committees and WinRed make their filings with the Federal Election Commission in the following months.Cash has been one of President Biden’s advantages so far in the race. His campaign has been advertising in key battleground states since Mr. Trump emerged as the Republican nominee while Mr. Trump has been absent from the airwaves. The post-conviction money will help Mr. Trump close the gap with the Democratic incumbent.The one-day haul was even greater than the $26 million that the Biden campaign had announced four years ago in the 24 hours after he had named Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential pick.“From just minutes after the sham trial verdict was announced, our digital fund-raising system was overwhelmed with support, and despite temporary delays online because of the amount of traffic, President Trump raised $34.8 million dollars from small-dollar donors,” said Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, in a joint statement. “President Trump and our campaign are immensely grateful from this outpouring of support from patriots across our country.” In April, Mr. Trump’s operation, working in concert with the Republican National Committee, announced that it had raised $76.2 million, beating for the first time what Mr. Biden’s shared operations with the Democratic National Committee, brought in — $51 million.The conviction appeared to be driving Democratic donations, as well, though to a much lesser extent.ActBlue, which processes online contributions for Democrats, registered three of its four biggest hours of donations in all of 2024 on Thursday evening in the wake of the conviction, topping out near $1.3 million in a single hour, according to its online ticker. More

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      I.M.F. Is Upbeat on China’s Growth but Questions Industrial Policy

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      Surging exports and factory investment are buoying China’s output, but the housing market faces serious troubles and industrial policies may hurt other countries.Responding to China’s surging exports and extensive investments in new factories, the International Monetary Fund made sizable increases on Wednesday in how much it believes China’s economy will grow this year and next.The I.M.F. now estimates that China will grow 5 percent this year and 4.5 percent in 2025. That is 0.4 percentage points more for each year compared with the fund’s predictions just six weeks ago.China’s gross domestic output expanded 5.2 percent last year as the economy rebounded following nearly three years of stringent pandemic policies that included numerous municipal lockdowns and mandatory quarantines. Many economists, including at the I.M.F., had anticipated that growth would falter this year because of a severe contraction of China’s housing market and a slowdown in domestic spending.Yet while property prices continued to fall and retail sales grew sluggishly, China’s economy powered ahead instead in the first three months of this year, expanding at an annual rate of about 6.6 percent because of booming exports and strong factory investments.The Chinese government is taking steps to address the housing crash, but it faces enormous challenges. Years of overbuilding have resulted in four million new but unsold apartments and, by one conservative estimate, as many as 10 million that developers have sold but not finished building.Many owners of vacant apartments now find themselves facing years of hefty mortgage payments but little chance the apartments will appreciate significantly in value.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Haiti Names New Prime Minister to Try to Lead Country Out of Crisis

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      Garry Conille is taking on the office just ahead of the arrival of a Kenyan-led international police force charged with helping restore order to the violence-torn nation.An experienced international aid official, Garry Conille, was unanimously appointed prime minister of Haiti by a Presidential Transition Council on Tuesday, which tasked him with leading the country out of its current crisis until elections for a new president can be held.Mr. Conille will take on his new role just as a U.N.-backed security mission led by Kenyan police is scheduled to begin operations in the violence-torn Caribbean nation, which is battling to restore political stability and tackle armed gangs who control large parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince.Fluent in English, French and Creole, Mr. Conille’s credentials include a 25-year career working for the United Nations and other aid agencies. He also briefly led Haiti as prime minister over a decade ago during another period of crisis following the devastating 2010 earthquake.But Mr. Conille has spent many of the last few years outside the country, and his perhaps rusty domestic political skills are sure to be tested by the highly volatile situation he will encounter as prime minister.He will not, however, have to face any political battles with Haiti’s fractious Parliament, which has sat vacant for months because of the country’s inability to hold elections amid the violence and turmoil.“He is a safe choice to appease the international community, but he’s also spent the last two decades working mostly outside Haiti in the U.N. system,” said Jake Johnston, a Haiti expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Georgia’s Ruling Party Secures a Contentious Foreign-Agent Law

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      The Parliament, controlled by the Georgian Dream party, overrode a presidential veto of a bill critics say could undermine the country’s efforts to join the European Union.Georgia’s Parliament gave final approval on Tuesday to a contentious bill that has plunged the country into a political crisis and threatened to derail the pro-Western aspirations of many Georgians in favor of closer ties with Russia.The law will require nongovernmental groups and media organizations that receive at least 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as organizations “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The country’s justice ministry will be given broad powers to monitor compliance. Violations could result in fines equivalent to more than $9,000.The passage of the bill is likely to represent a pivotal moment for Georgia, which has been one of the most pro-Western states to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. The bill has already unsteadied Georgia’s relationship with the United States and the European Union, and it could upset the fragile geopolitics of the Caucasus, a volatile region where the interests of Russia, Turkey, Iran and the West have long come into conflict.The bill has also set off night after night of protests in the capital, Tbilisi, that have often descended into clashes with the police. Dozens of protesters have been beaten and arrested as the police used pepper spray, tear gas and fists to disperse them.Lawmakers from the ruling Georgian Dream party on Tuesday voted to override a veto of the bill that was announced on May 18 by President Salome Zourabichvili. Ms. Zourabichvili has been among the most vocal opponents of the law, but her veto was largely symbolic, because the government easily had the votes in Parliament to pass it with a simple majority.President Salome Zourabichvili, center, has been a vocal opponent of the law, but her veto was largely symbolic.Vano Shlamov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More