MYANMAR: Two months into anti-coup protests, the military is attacking not only protesters in main cities but ethnic minority civilians in remote jungle areas. The escalation in Karen state includes attacks on civilian targets, with casualties, and the threat of all-out civil war—latest from my colleague Angela Lu Fulton.

Cultures of despair aren’t new, but the pandemic emphasizes their grip on us. Portugal is one of the latest European countries to try to legislate euthanasia, and also one of the hardest hit with COVID-19 deaths. It’s a strange time for the governing center-left Socialist Party to push physician-assisted, state-sanctioned suicide. 

BANGLADESH: Relief workers estimate the massive fire at the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar on Monday destroyed 17,000 temporary shelters and facilities—including food, water, and sanitation sites—and has left anywhere from 45,000 to 70,000 people again homeless in one of the world’s largest refugee camps.

JAMAICA today became the first country in the Caribbean to receive coronavirus vaccines via the global COVAX program.

Esmaeil Falahati is no stranger to police raids. Plainclothes intelligence agents arrested the Muslim convert to Christianity in 2015 while he was leading a house church service in Iran in the garden of a fellow believer. The agents flattened to the ground the home’s owner and put a gun to his throat. They arrested Falahati and five others, searching his home and seizing his Bibles and other belongings.

SYRIA: This week marks the 10th anniversary of the war in Syria, which erupted out of Arab Spring protests that President Bashar Assad responded to with bloody military assaults. Children are the biggest casualties in a war that sparked the rise of terror groups like Islamic State (ISIS): A UNICEF study finds more than 12,000 children have been killed in the decade of conflict, and more than 2.5 million are out of school, many of them for years.

The bodies lay in the streets of Axum for days, pockmarked with gunshot wounds. At night the residents of Ethiopia’s holiest city listened, horrified, as hyenas fed on the corpses. For many, these were people they knew.

Rumors surfaced in early December of a massacre at Axum’s Church of St. Mary of Zion, but the government blocked reporters from the embattled Tigray region. Only after authorities lifted a blackout on phone and internet communication in February could they confirm the true horror: 800 people killed in and around the church in one weekend (Nov. 28).