It is the final frontier for India’s most powerful leader in decades.

Narendra Modi has made it his mission during his decade as prime minister to turn a complex and diverse country of 1.4 billion people into a monolith dominated by his sweeping Hindu nationalist vision.

The news media, the national legislature, civil society, and sometimes even the courts – all are bent to his will. But one critical group of holdouts remains: some of India’s richest states, the engines of its rapid growth.

The future shape of the world’s largest democracy – and its economic trajectory – could rest on the power struggles that have emerged from it.

Mr Modi, who is well placed to win a third term in national elections due to start on April 19, is using an increasingly heavy hand in what his opponents call a dishonest attempt to oust the governments of the states where his party fails. check.

They accuse Modi’s government of delaying federal funding for major projects; of jailing or pursuing opposition leaders and protecting anyone who joins the prime minister’s party; of hindering the delivery of basic services; and of throwing state politics into chaos.

The tensions are tearing apart India’s delicate federal formula of power-sharing and political competition, the glue that holds the country together across 28 states and eight territories.

Regional leaders have described the behavior of the central government, which has more power than in federal systems like the United States, as that of a colonial overlord. In the south, the most developed and innovative part of India, officials have spoken of a “separate nation” for their region if “patterns of injustice” continue.

Mr. Modi and his lieutenants, in turn, have accused state leaders of harboring a “separatist mindset” and pursuing policies that could “break the nation.”

India’s move toward more centralized governance could hurt overall growth, analysts say, as such efforts have done in the past. Major national spending programs focus on fundamental development problems that the South largely solved decades ago. If that region’s freedom to make investments based on its own needs is restricted, the consequences could be far-reaching.

“It is ultimately self-defeating,” said PT Rajan, minister in the government of the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Mr. Modi offers a simple solution: that states ruled by parties other than his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, come on board.

He often uses car terminology for his pitch. Those states, he says, could benefit from what he calls a “dual-engine” government, with one party – his own – working in sync at both the national and state levels.

If they don’t comply, states will throw one wrench after another into their governments’ work, officials say, making it difficult for them to deliver on election promises. The BJP, which is ruthlessly expanding its base, is waiting in the wings.

Last month, the chief ministers of about six states staged a dramatic demonstration near the seat of federal power in New Delhi.

As posters reading “Our blood, our sweat, our taxes” hung behind them, they complained that Mr. Modi was using his outsized control over the distribution of revenues across India to entrench his party and hobble their own state governments .

At the same time, Mr. Modi was on a final tour of the country before announcing the election dates. In opposition states, he combined promises of billions of dollars in infrastructure and welfare projects with scathing criticism of local parties.

They are also destructive to him. They have repeatedly taken New Delhi-appointed governors, who serve largely ceremonial roles, to court over complaints that they slow down the work of elected governments.

“You are playing with fire,” said Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud. told the central government after the governor repeatedly blocked legislative work in the opposition-controlled state of Punjab. Will we remain a parliamentary democracy?

In Tamil Nadu, officials said they were struggling to expand a metro line in the capital Chennai because Modi’s government waited too long for New Delhi’s share of the funding.

In Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, the state government is suing the Modi government over what it says are arbitrary borrowing limits that have thrown the state budget into disarray and delayed payments.

In the western state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, Mr. Modi’s officials have splintered the state’s two largest parties through a combination of pressure from research firms and offers of incentives. Such ‘smash and grab’ politics, as critics have branded it, has paved the way for the BJP to emerge as the kingmaker in a coalition government.

In the Delhi capital region, the BJP appears determined to destroy a smaller party that came to power promising to improve basic services. The territory’s elected government has been stripped of key powers, and federal agencies have bogged down the party’s top leaders, Aam Aadmi, in corruption cases.

The party’s deputy leader and a key minister have been in prison for more than a year. On Thursday, in a dramatic overnight raid, government agents arrested Arvind Kejriwal, the party’s leader and Delhi’s chief minister, and charged him with financial crimes. He is the first serving prime minister to be arrested.

Delhi’s bitter political dispute is reflected in sewage overflows in parts of the city and long queues outside government hospitals.

Aam Aadmi tried to improve hospitals in part by relying on third-party contractors to input patient data. But the plan was caught in the crossfire between Mr. Modi’s officials and the territory’s elected government, and the contractors pulled staff from many hospitals after salaries were delayed for months.

“In their political fights, it is the public who suffers,” said Adit Kumar, a diabetic fabric salesman who recently waited with his wife outside a crowded hospital in New Delhi.

Saurabh Bhardwaj, an Aam Aadmi official in Delhi, said Mr. Modi’s intention was clear: to push the country toward one-party rule.

“You have reduced the work of the state government so much that people have started saying it is better to bring the BJP and only they can make that happen,” Mr Bhardwaj said. “That means the federal structure will collapse.”

The federal state’s biggest fault line pits the wealthier south against Modi’s support base in the north.

With the exception of a brief period in the state of Karnataka, when the BJP took control by orchestrating defections, the party has failed to win power in the five southern states.

Officials there say Mr. Modi is trying to stop them over their refusal to align with his brand of politics, including his party’s stoking of tensions between Hindus and Muslims and his attempt to use Hindi – which has not become mainstream in the south spoken – to change. a national language.

The resentment is heightened by complaints that the South gets proportionately less in return for the tax money it sends to New Delhi. Since the northern states have large populations and lag far behind in basic development, they receive a larger share of the revenue.

There are also serious concerns in the south that the redistribution of seats in parliament, once a long-delayed national census is finally conducted, will punish the south for its success in reducing birth rates, a key to its relative prosperity.

With its past investments in infrastructure, education and public health – the result of a unique mix of political, cultural and historical differences in the South – the region is better positioned to drive India’s ambition for high-end manufacturing. Modi’s politically driven approach could, his opponents say, undermine his ambitions to build India into a major economic power.

Federal Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman rejected claims that the revenue was unfairly distributed, saying the central government was releasing the states’ share “and on time”.

“We want every part of the country to prosper,” Mr. Modi said in Parliament after the protest by state leaders in New Delhi, casting himself as a strong proponent of “competitive, cooperative federalism.”

By putting pressure on state governments, analysts say, Modi is simply exploiting structural flaws in India’s constitution, which created a republic — a quasi-federal union of states — after the British left in 1947.

The Indian National Congress party, which ruled India unchallenged in the early decades after independence, abused the excessive constitutional powers given to the central government over budgetary matters to stem the rise of competitors.

However, from the late 1980s onwards, the decline of the Congress ushered in an era of coalition politics, with regional parties finding representation in New Delhi.

This was also the period when India opened its highly centralized economy to the free market. As growth ensued, the distribution of resources became subject to more pressure and pressure between the central and state governments.

“The rise of regional powers made the Center committed to certain principles,” said Kalaiyarasan A., assistant professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. “The 1990s were a golden age of federalism.”

Today, Mr. Modi is trying to reshape Indian federalism with his “dual engine.”

In opposition-held states, Mr. Modi has offered infrastructure and welfare projects, branded with his name or that of his office, to position himself as India’s sole engine of development and growth.

When embarking on joint projects, state parties face a political price: they will only get the money if they agree to the Modi branding.

And if they resist?

In 2022, Ms. Sitharaman, the finance minister, stopped at a store in the southern state of Telangana that was distributing rice rations as part of a joint program in which the central government provided most of the financing. Mr Modi’s photo was not shown there. Ms Sitharaman lashed out at state officials.

“This is the work our Prime Minister is doing for his people,” said Ms Sitharaman said. “Our people will come and install the Prime Minister’s photo, and you as a district administrator will ensure that it is not removed, that it is not torn, that it is not degraded.”

As she took the stage to perform in Carnegie Hall before 107 Korean War veterans, singer Kim Insoon thought of her father, an American soldier stationed in South Korea in the postwar decades whom she had never met or even seen.

“You are my fathers,” she told the soldiers in the audience before singing, “Father”, one of her Korean hits.

“For me, the United States has always been my father’s country,” Ms. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling that 2010 achievement. “It was also the first place where I wanted to show how successful I had become – without him and in spite of him.”

Born in 1957, Ms. Kim is better known as Insooni in South Korea, where she is a household name. For more than four decades, she has won fans from generation to generation with her passionate and powerful singing style and cross-genre performances. Fathered by a black American soldier, she also broke the racial barrier in a country that was deeply prejudiced against biracial people, especially those born to Korean women and African American soldiers.

Her enduring and groundbreaking presence in the South Korean pop scene has paved the way for future K-pop groups to globalize. multi-ethnic line-ups.

“Insooni overcame racial discrimination and became one of the few singers who are widely recognized as pop divas in South Korea,” says ethnomusicologist Kim Youngdae. “She helped introduce South Koreans to biracial singers and broke the idea that K-pop was only for Koreans and Korean singers.”

Thousands of biracial children have been born as a result of the security alliance between South Korea and the US. Their fathers were American GIs who fought in the Korean War in the 1950s or who protected South Korea from North Korean aggression in the postwar decades.

Most of their mothers worked in bars that catered to soldiers. Although South Korea depended on the dollars the women earned, society treated them and their biracial children with contempt. Many mothers gave up their children for adoption abroad, especially in the United States.

The children left behind often struggled while maintaining their biracial identity a secret if they could, in a society where until a decade ago schools taught children to be proud of South Korea’s racial “purity” and “homogeneity.”

“Every time they said that, I felt like I was being singled out,” Insooni said.

At school, boys pelted her with racist comments based on her skin color, said Kim Nam-sook, a former school friend, “but she was a star at school picnics when she sang and danced.”

Now that she’s a confident sixty-year-old, she’s started one Golden girls K-pop concert tour with three divas in their fifties.

But Insooni’s confidence turned to wariness as she discussed her childhood in Pocheon, a city near the border with North Korea. Topics she still found too sensitive to discuss in detail included her younger half-sister, whose father was also an American soldier. When she was young, she said, she hated it when people stared at her and asked her origins, wishing she were a nun. locked up in a monastery.

She said her mother had not worked in a bar and remembered her as a “strong” woman who took whatever odd work she could find, such as collecting firewood in the hills, to feed her family. Almost all she knew about her father was that he had a name similar to “Van Duren.”

The mother and daughter never spoke about him, she said. Insooni didn’t try to find him either, assuming he had his own family in the United States. Her mother, who died in 2005, never married. Due to the stigma attached to having biracial children, she lost contact with many of her family members. When young Insooni saw her mother crying, she did not ask why.

“We both knew going there that we were going to fall apart,” she said. “I learned it early on as a child: you have to do the best you can with the card you’re dealt, instead of staying down the rabbit hole and endlessly asking why. You can’t restore times gone by.”

Insooni’s formal education ended in high school. She and her mother then lived in Dongducheon, a city north of Seoul with a large American military base. One day, a singer who performed for American soldiers came to her neighborhood to recruit biracial backup dancers.

“I hated that city and this was my way out,” she said.

Insooni debuted in 1978 as the only biracial member of the “Hey sisters”, one of the most popular girl groups at the time. She said TV producers made her cover her head to hide her Afro. In 1983 she released her first solo hit: ‘Every night”, still a karaoke favorite for Koreans.

A breakdown followed. Ignored by television, she performed in nightclubs and amusement parks.

But her time in the entertainment world helped shape her artistic identity, as she honed her live performance skills and versatility, learning to sing and communicate with children, the elderly and anyone else who came to hear her.

“I don’t say to my audience, ‘This is the kind of song I sing, so listen to them,’” she said. “I say, ‘Tell me what kind of song you like and I’ll practice it and sing it to you next time.’”

She was constantly preparing for her comeback on TV. Whenever she watched a TV music show, she would imagine herself there and practice “songs I would sing, dresses I would wear, and gestures I would make.” Her chance came when the national broadcaster KBS gave her weekly ‘Open concert” to a multi-generational audience in 1993. Since then, she has been a sought-after singer.

Although she did not have as many original hits as some other top singers, Insooni often adopted songs from others, such as “Goose’s dream” and made them nationally popular, reviewers said. She continued to reinvent herself, taking on everything from disco and ballads to R&B and soul, collaborating with a young rapper in “My friend.”

“Many singers faded away as they grew older, but Insooni’s popularity only increased in her later years, with her status as a singer rising with songs that appealed to the entire generational spectrum,” said Kim Hak-seon, a music critic.

South Koreans say Insooni’s songs — such as “Goose’s Dream,” which begins “I had a dream” — and her positive onstage demeanor resonate with them in part because of the difficulties she has faced.

“You come to her songs for the first time and feel like you want to hug her,” said Lee Hee-boon, 67, a fan. “But in the end you feel encouraged.”

Insooni, who married a South Korean university professor, gave birth to her only child, a daughter, in the United States in 1995, making her a U.S. citizen, she said. She feared that if her child looked like her, she would face the same discrimination she did.

Today, South Korea is becoming increasingly multi-ethnic. One in ten weddings is bi-ethnic, as men in rural areas marry women from poorer countries in Asia. The farms and small factories cannot run without migrant workers from abroad.

One of South Korea’s most popular rappers – Yoon Mi-rae, or Natasha Shanta Reid – sings about her biracial identity. K-pop groups love NewJeans have biracial or foreign members as their markets globalize.

Insooni welcomed the change, but questioned whether the country was embracing multiculturalism “from the heart” and not out of economic needs.

In 2013 she founded Tuition Fee Free Hae Millschool for multicultural children in Hongcheon, east of Seoul, after learning that a majority of biracial children were still not attending high school, decades after her own school life ended so early.

During the recent interview at school, students on campus rushed to hug her.

“You can tell me things that you can’t even tell your mom and dad, because I’m one of you,” she told children at an entrance ceremony this month.

Insooni sometimes questions her decision not to look for her father. She once told South Korean military officers that if they were sent abroad, they should never do what American soldiers did in Korea decades ago: “spread seeds for which you cannot take responsibility.”

“At Carnegie Hall, I thought there might be a chance, however slim, that some American veterans might have left children like me behind in Korea,” she said. “If they did that, I wanted to tell them to take the burden off their heads. Whether they are successful or not, kids like me have all tried to make the most of our lives in our own way.”

A rainbow haze swirls across India, where raucous laughter rings out as friends and strangers shower each other with fistfuls of pigmented powder. Holi is a Hindu tradition, an annual celebration of spring. In 2024, crimson, emerald, indigo and saffron clouds will hover over the country on March 25 for one of the most vibrant, joyful and colorful festivals.

‘Playing Holi’, as the Indians say, is an age-old tradition that has spread far beyond the borders of India. Here’s what you need to know about the festival.

The party starts at sunset.

Holi (pronounced ‘holy’), also known as the ‘festival of colours’, begins on the evening of the full moon during the Hindu calendar month of Phalguna, which falls around February or March. It starts with lighting bonfires. People gather around the flames to sing, dance and pray for an evening ritual called Holika Dahan, which reenacts the demise of a Hindu mythical demon, Holika. All kinds of things are thrown into the fire, such as wood, leaves and food, in a symbolic purification of evil and the triumph of good.

From Delhi, Archie Singhal, 24, visits her family in Gujarat the day before Holi, when the fire is lit in the evening. The next morning, she prepares for the bursts of powder, called gulal, by applying oil to her body so that the colors don’t stick to her skin. She puts on old clothes that she likes to throw away.

Why the colours?

Holi’s roots lie in Hindu mythology. The god Krishna, cursed by a blue-skinned demon, complained to his mother, asking why his love interest Radha is honest when he is not. His mother, Yashoda, playfully suggests that he paint Radha’s face in whatever colors he wants. So Krishna puts color on her to make them look alike.

Holi is partly a celebration of the love between Krishna and Radha that looks beyond differences. Nowadays, some of the gulal used during Holi is synthetic. But the colors traditionally come from natural ingredients, such as dried flowers, turmeric, dried leaves, grapes, berries, beetroot and tea.

“There is an air of freedom,” said Ms. Singhal, adding that she does not hesitate to throw colors on her younger brother, parents, aunts, uncles and neighbors.

Everyone participates.

The centuries-old Hindu festival eschews the religious, social, caste and political divisions that underlie India’s often sectarian society. Hindu or not, anyone can get splashed with brightly colored dust, or even eggs and beer.

Some participate in worship called puja, where prayers are offered to the gods. For others, Holi is a celebration of community. The festival involves everyone, including innocent passers-by.

“People forget their misunderstandings or enmities on this occasion and become friends again,” says Ratikanta Singh, 63, who sometimes writes about Holi in Assam, northeastern India.

There’s a party.

When not busy with Gulal, friends, families and neighbors partake in a buffet of traditional dishes and drinks. They include gujiya, dumpling-like fried sweets filled with dried fruits and nuts; dahi vada, fried lentil fritters served with yogurt; and kanji, a traditional drink made by fermenting carrots in water and spices.

Some celebrate Holi with thandai, a light green mixture of milk, rose petals, cardamom, almonds, fennel seeds and other ingredients. For thousands of years, the drink was sometimes laced with bhang, or crushed marijuana leaves, adding to the atmosphere of revelry.

Holi has ancient roots.

Holi has been documented in Hindu texts for centuries. The tradition is observed by people young and old, especially in Northern India and Nepal, where the mythology behind the festival originates.

Holi also marks the harvesting of crops with the arrival of spring in India, where more than half the population lives in rural areas.

Traditions vary across India.

Holi celebrations are as diverse as the Indian subcontinent. They are particularly wild in northern India, considered the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna, where celebrations can last more than a week.

In Mathura, a northern city where Krishna is said to have been born, people recreate a Hindu myth in which Krishna visits Radha to romance her, and her cowherd friends, taking offense at his advances, drive him away with sticks.

In the eastern state of Odisha, people hold a day-long festival called Dola Purnima. Large processions of people carrying lavishly decorated carriages with idols of Hindu gods on their shoulders form a large part of the festivities there. The processions are full of drum beats, songs, colorful powder and flower petals being thrown into the air.

In southern India, where Holi is not as widely celebrated, many temples perform religious rituals. In the Kudumbi tribal community, in the southwest, temples cut areca palms and transport their trunks to the shrine in a ritual symbolizing the victory of good over evil.

It’s not just in India.

Holi is celebrated all over the world, wherever the Indian diaspora has gone. More than 32 million Indians and people of Indian descent live abroad, most of them in the United States, where the Indian government estimates its population is 4.4 million. It is also widely enjoyed in countries as diverse as Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, Great Britain and other parts of Europe.

Holi is known as Phagwah in the Indian communities of the Caribbean, including India Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.

The festival has also been used by the Indian government to project soft power and reshape its image as part of its “Incredible India‘tourism campaign.

About Holi, “the world is a global village,” said Shubham Sachdeva, 29, from an eastern Delhi suburb, adding that his friends in the United States celebrated Holi with their housemates, whether they were Indian or not. “All this brings the world closer together.”

The Australian letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. To register to receive it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a Melbourne-based reporter.

Recently, some 32 years into my career as a veteran aviator, I experienced air travel as if for the very first time: the flight of angels, of billionaires, of dreams. (It was still in the coach class.)

On a recent reporting trip to New Zealand, I arranged to spend the weekend with an old friend who now lives near Havelock, a town of about 600 people at the top of the country’s South Island, about 50 miles south of west of Wellington, where I traveled from.

With the Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands in the way, the easiest option was to take a domestic flight – one of hundreds that fly across the country every day.

Flying domestically in New Zealand is only marginally stricter than boarding a bus. If you don’t have luggage to check in, you can walk through the airport half an hour before your flight departs. No one will check your ID at any point and you don’t even have to show your boarding pass to go through security, which usually takes a minute or two, with no limit on liquids. At some smaller airports there is no security at all.

To reach Havelock, I booked a seat on a flight operated not by Air New Zealand, the national carrier, but by Sounds Air, one of the country’s much smaller ‘regional airlines’ of about half a dozen.

Leaving Sounds Air from Wellington bypasses security checks altogether. Your ticket to ride is little more than a reusable piece of green laminated paper that says ‘Boarding Pass to Blenheim’. Checking a bag? They hurl it into the back of the nine-seat plane. And don’t bother going to the carousel upon arrival. It will be handed to you when you get out.

The lack of hassle is entirely intentional, with some frequent flyers buying 10-way tickets for regular cross-strait flights, says Andrew Crawford, the airline’s chief executive.

“That’s our point of difference,” he said. “This is what people like.”

The airline was founded in 1986, with a single nine-seat Cessna Caravan taking people to the Marlborough Sounds. It now has ten aircraft – the largest of their aircraft seats twelve – and transports around 120,000 people a year, mostly on routes where there is no alternative to road.

Some passengers are commuters. Others are tourists. And then there are those who live in rural areas and need specialist medical care in larger cities. “If you have to have cancer treatment or day surgery, things like that,” he said. “That’s a big part of our business.”

These small airlines play a crucial role in helping New Zealanders get around in a country that has an extremely limited rail network and where many people live far from essential services.

But it was the flight itself that captivated me.

Under normal circumstances, elbow to elbow with strangers, the majesty of flying is somewhat displaced by the discomfort of sitting in a pressurized metal tube, and it’s easy to forget that you’re thousands of feet in the air. (Some people prefer to forget that.)

But at about 7,000 feet, low and slow enough that we could see wind turbines and steep hills unfolding before us, as if flying in a dream, the miracle of flight seemed unusual… miraculous.

The wind whistled past the cabin and I could see into the cockpit, over the solo pilot’s shoulder and through the windshield. When we reached land through the vineyards the region is known for, the grapes were almost visible on the vine. It wasn’t hard to imagine myself as an early aviator, and I had trouble keeping a grin off my face.

All in all, I told my waiting host, it was an experience somewhere between driving a minivan and traveling on a private jet.

Here are the stories of the week.

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The US accused Apple of a monopoly

The Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against tech giant Apple. The lawsuit – which includes 16 states and the District of Columbia – is the federal government’s biggest challenge to Apple’s reach and influence.

The government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws with practices designed to keep customers dependent on their iPhones and less likely to switch to a competing device. By tightly controlling the user experience on iPhones and other devices, Apple has created an uneven playing field, where critics grant its own products and services access to core features that competitors are denied.

It argued that the tech giant was preventing other companies from offering applications that compete with Apple products such as its digital wallet – which could reduce the value of the iPhone. It also said Apple’s policies hurt consumers and smaller businesses that compete with its services, and said its practices resulted in “higher prices and less innovation.”

Reply: Apple has said its control over technology makes iPhones more secure than other smartphones.

What’s next: It is unclear what consequences the lawsuit – which will likely drag on for years – would have for consumers.

Details: The lawsuit asks the court to restrain Apple from engaging in practices such as blocking cloud streaming apps and undermining messaging on smartphone operating systems.

Go deeper: Here’s the lawsuit.

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The Indian opposition is facing problems

Just weeks before a crucial election, the head of one of India’s leading opposition parties, the Aam Aadmi Party, was arrested yesterday on what his supporters said were fraudulent charges. That same day, the Indian National Congress – the main opposition party – said it had lost access to most of its major bank accounts.

Critics said the measures were aimed at disadvantaging Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rivals. As the vote approaches, opposition figures say they are facing a wave of problems from the government, including Modi’s unleashing of major investigative agencies against them while protecting those who switch to his side.

To vote: It lasts six weeks and starts on April 19.

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The Dodgers fired Ohtani’s interpreter

The Los Angeles Dodgers fired Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter after the baseball star’s representatives accused the employee, Ippei Mizuhara, of using Ohtani’s money to place bets with a bookmaker under federal investigation.

Details are murky. Ohtani’s representatives called him a “victim of a massive theft,” and a Major League Baseball official said Ohtani, a Japanese slugger, currently faces no disciplinary action.

Background: Ohtani and Mizuhara were closer than most players and their interpreters. For much of the past seven years, they were rarely seen apart.

MORE TOP NEWS

A century ago, two famous black academics hosted a dinner party to introduce the brightest talents from Harlem’s cultural scene to white publishers and professors from powerful institutions. That party set in motion the relationships that would become the Harlem Renaissance.

We reconstructed the key evening based on old letters and other archive material.

Lives lived: Richard C. Higgins, one of the last survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor, died at the age of 102.

Conversation starters

Have a healthier relationship with your phone

It may be impossible to unplug the power cord. Here you will find a guide to using your devices in a way that suits you.

Follow your urges. Being aware of the desire to pick up your phone or open social media can wake up the part of your brain that regulates self-control and help you curb bad habits.

Stop using while on the road. Using devices while on the go (on the way to a meeting, taking a child to school) can keep us from being involved in our lives.

Schedule small breaks. Put tech breaks on your calendar. It may feel strange to plan something like “taking a phone-free walk,” said one expert, but that shouldn’t happen if it’s a priority.

Control your environment. Don’t rely solely on willpower. Adjust your environment to keep your phone away: set an alarm clock, delete social media apps, or ask a family member to remind you to put the phone down.

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To dream: Nigo, the Japanese streetwear designer, has built a minimalist seaside retreat. Look.

A suicide bombing outside a bank in southern Afghanistan left people dead on Thursday At least 20 people have been implicated, including several members of the Taliban, according to hospital staff, in a bloody reminder of the terrorist threats that have persisted in the country since the end of the US-led war.

The attack took place around 8:30 a.m., when a bomber detonated explosives in front of a New Kabul Bank branch in Kandahar City, the capital of Kandahar province, according to Taliban officials. The blast appeared to have targeted Taliban members who had gathered at the bank to collect their salaries, witnesses and hospital staff said.

About 50 others were injured, according to a doctor and a nurse at Mirwais Regional Hospital in Kandahar city, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

Taliban officials, who disputed the higher death toll, said three people were killed and a dozen others injured in the blast.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Taliban officials at the Interior Ministry said their initial investigation indicated that an Islamic State affiliate in the region — the Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K — was behind the blast.

The government “condemns this attack and assures the people that the perpetrators of this attack will be identified, arrested and handed over to judicial centers as soon as possible,” it said. a statement from the ministry published on X.

Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban movement and home to the government’s supreme leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. The explosion seemed to send a message that even Taliban soldiers at the heart of the group were not safe.

Although overall security in the country has improved since the US-led war ended in August 2021 and the Taliban took control, there have been sporadic attacks across Afghanistan, mainly targeting Taliban security forces and the Hazara ethnic minority .

The Islamic State affiliate in the region has claimed responsibility for many of the attacks. Since seizing power, Taliban security forces have waged a brutal campaign to eliminate ISIS-K. The Taliban killed at least eight of the group’s leaders last year and pushed many other ISIS-K fighters into neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. officials.

But the group, which is hostile to the Taliban and says it does not adhere to true Sharia law, remains a threat in Afghanistan. The country has also launched large-scale attacks in Pakistan over the past two years, raising concerns that the region is becoming a hotbed of international terrorism.

Hameedullah Sherzad, 40, said he was sleeping in his house next to the bank in Kandahar City on Thursday when his apartment building suddenly shook, waking him. He ran outside and saw Taliban police rushing to the bank and others loading mutilated bodies into the back of their pickup trucks.

“People were bloodied and lying on the back of the vehicles,” he said. When more police vehicles arrived, Mr. Sherzad said, he helped carry four bodies and eight other injured people to hospital.

Dastagir Wafaiee, 24, a local resident, said he was also woken up by the sound of the explosion. He rushed to the roof of his apartment building and saw Taliban vehicles racing toward the scene.

As Taliban police loaded the dead and wounded into their vehicles, others collected the victims’ clothes and shoes and swept up shards of broken glass, Mr. Wafaiee said.

A photo of the aftermath of the attack circulating in Taliban WhatsApp groups and seen by The New York Times shows shattered windows on the bank’s second floor and streaks of blood staining the ground outside the bank’s entrance.

Immediately after the explosion, Taliban officials tried to downplay the severity of the attack and allay concerns that it represented a security lapse by their intelligence and military forces.

“The condition of the injured is not serious; they have superficial injuries,” Inamullah Samangani, director of information and culture of Kandahar province, said in a statement. “The situation is under control.”

Yaqoob Akbary And Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

India’s main opposition party accused national authorities on Thursday of crippling its political activities by blocking the party’s access to its bank accounts, in what it described as a heavy-handed response to a tax dispute just weeks before the crucial general election.

Officials from the party, the Indian National Congress, said eight of 11 main accounts in four banks had been frozen and there was no clear indication when the party would regain access to the money.

“We cannot support our employees; we cannot support our candidates,” Indian National Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said at a news conference in New Delhi. ‘Our leaders cannot fly. Forget flying, they can’t take a train.”

“Our ability to fight elections has been damaged,” he said.

Campaigning is underway for the six-week elections that start on April 19 and will determine the next prime minister for the world’s most populous democracy. To run election campaigns from the Himalayas to India’s southern coasts, political groups are spending billions of dollars in what is seen as one of the most expensive elections in the world.

Under Indian law, political groups are exempt from paying income tax on their private and corporate funding, but must declare their income to tax authorities every year. The current dispute concerns how severely the Indian National Congress should be punished for past irregularities.

Last month, the country’s income tax department, which is controlled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, froze the Congress party’s accounts on allegations that it had been 45 days late in filing tax returns on its cash contributions for the 2017 financial year. 2018. The department also took from the party bank accounts Of the $16 million he said was owed in fines, $2 million was owed.

The Congress party has acknowledged that it filed tax returns late, but says the fine should be in the thousands of dollars instead of the millions.

Last week, a Delhi high court refused to interfere with the tax authorities’ order, saying it could not prevent authorities from freezing the party’s accounts.

In recent years, opposition groups have accused Mr. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of establishing a virtual monopoly on political financing. They accuse Modi of using his office’s powers to enrich his party and dry up funding for competitors.

Congress party leaders said freezing the accounts so close to elections was a political move aimed at paralyzing India’s main opposition group and pushing the country towards one-party rule.

“The idea that India is a democracy is a lie,” Gandhi said.

Mr Modi’s officials rejected the claims, describing them as a desperate attempt by a political opposition struggling in an election campaign that is likely to return the BJP to power.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, a ruling party leader, said the tax exemption for any political group would remain valid only if the group declared any contributions to national tax authorities on time.

“In total desperation over the impending defeat, the Congress party at the highest level today tried to create an alibi,” Prasad said on Thursday.

The issue of political financing has exploded in India in recent weeks. The country’s highest court recently forced the government-owned State Bank of India to release a list of all those who had made anonymous political donations through a financing mechanism known as ‘electoral bonds’. helping those in power.

Mr Modi’s party received the largest amount of the funds, more than ten times what went to the Indian National Congress.

The news

A feared former general won Indonesia’s presidential election last month, according to official results released on Wednesday that confirmed unofficial forecasts.

That candidate, Prabowo Subianto, who is now Indonesia’s defense minister, received 58.6 percent of the vote. according to the final count by the General Election Commission.

The result means that Mr Prabowo, who was on a visa blacklist by the United States for about 20 years over human rights abuses, won the election outright and avoided a runoff with the second candidate.

Although the official count is over, the process of officially declaring Mr Prabowo president-elect could be a lengthy one. His opponents – Anies Baswedan, who received 24.9 percent of the vote, and Ganjar Pranowo, who received 16.5 percent – have said they plan to challenge the result.

They accuse the outgoing president, Joko Widodo, of improperly influencing the election and claim widespread irregularities occurred during the February 14 election. They provided no evidence of election day impropriety, but said they did have evidence to prove their claims in court.

Mr. Prabowo’s representatives reject these claims, noting that almost every poll before the election showed him as the frontrunner.

Why it matters

For many observers and critics, the elections have tarnished Indonesia’s hard-won reputation as a vibrant democracy.

At the heart of their dissatisfaction are Mr Joko’s actions before the election and the way he used state resources to support Mr Prabowo, whom he defeated in the previous two elections. Mr. Joko exerted his influence, they say, on a court that changed a law allowing his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to run as Mr. Prabowo’s running mate. Then, they say, Mr. Joko violated norms by campaigning for the duo and ordering social benefits that helped their candidacy.

“There was no level playing field, which is fundamental to elections,” said Rohana Hettiarachchi, president of the Asian Network for Free Elections, an alliance of independent election watchdogs.

Mr Joko has denied the allegations of wrongdoing and said presidents are allowed to campaign and take sides as long as they do not use state facilities. When he made these comments, Mr Prabowo was at his side.

Mr. Prabowo’s record has long upset many in the country. He was dismissed from the army after being found responsible for the kidnapping of student activists; he has questioned the need for democracy; and he is known for his violent temper and erratic behavior. During the campaign, Mr Prabowo emphasized his commitment to democracy.

What’s next

Legal experts say Mr Ganjar and Mr Anies are unlikely to have any success in court if they go ahead with their plan to seek legal intervention. The Constitutional Court, which hears such cases, has never ruled in favor of claimants challenging election results. For example, it rejected Mr Prabowo’s claims in 2019, when he lost the election to Mr Joko.

Barring any legal setbacks, Mr Prabowo is expected to be formally declared president-elect in the coming weeks. He will take office after Mr Joko’s term ends in October.

Vietnam’s President Vo Van Thuong has resigned after violating Communist Party rules, state media reported on Wednesday. He is the second president to resign in just over a year. The reports did not provide details of his alleged misconduct.

Although the president is part of a leadership collective – which also includes the leader of the Communist Party, the prime minister and parliament – ​​that governs Vietnam, his position is ceremonial. In recent years, power has largely been consolidated in the hands of party leader Nguyen Phu Trong.

Still, Mr. Thuong’s resignation is likely to upset many officials within a one-party system that prides itself on unity and stability. And it could be a sign of an internal power struggle for Vietnam’s future – Mr Thuong, 53, was the youngest president in recent history and seen as a potential successor to Mr Trong, who is 79 and in poor health and recommended him for the job.

“The mere fact that two presidents have resigned within two years is not a positive sign for a country often praised for its political stability,” said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting scholar at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a research organization in Singapore. He said Mr Thuong’s resignation marked an “intensifying” period of power struggles within the Communist Party ahead of the next leadership transition in 2026.

The Vietnamese Communist Party has ruled the country for almost fifty years since reunification. In 2021, Mr Trong was reappointed as general secretary for an unprecedented third five-year term as party leaders failed to agree on his successor.

Vietnam is often praised for striking a delicate balance between the United States and China. During his short tenure, Mr. Thuong met many foreign leaders — including President Biden and President Xi Jinping of China — as the world’s superpowers courted Vietnam, home to one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. But the upheaval could deter foreign investors, who have flocked to Vietnam in recent years in the belief that the country offered a stable political environment.

On Wednesday, Vietnam’s state news channels reported that Mr Thuong had asked to resign after the Central Inspection Commission found he had violated rules for party members. It did not specify what those rules were, but the party has often used such language to indicate corruption.

“Thuong’s violations and shortcomings have created bad public opinion, tarnishing the reputation of the party, the state and him personally,” said a report by Dan Tri, a state-run online publication. The report was reproduced verbatim by other state news outlets.

Mr Thuong’s resignation comes amid a years-long anti-corruption campaign that has led to the downfall of many top officials, including his predecessor.

Earlier this month, several top officials in Quang Ngai province were arrested on bribery charges, fueling rumors that Mr Thuong could soon be in trouble. That’s because he was party secretary of that south-central region from August 2011 to April 2014.

Speculation about Thuong’s demise intensified in recent days after a state visit to Vietnam by the Dutch royal family, scheduled for next week, was suddenly postponed.

The sweeping anti-corruption effort was launched in 2016 by Mr Trong, the head of the Communist Party. He said bribery could threaten the survival of the Communist Party, and vowed to root out “evil roots” and cleanse the party. Vietnam ranks 83rd out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index, behind China and Cuba.

Thousands of them party members at all levels have been dismissed from government, dismissed from the party or imprisoned, although many have wondered whether some of these targets were political purges within a closed political system.

The campaign has expanded to the highest levels of party leadership in recent years. Mr Thuong’s predecessor, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, resigned in January 2023. His departure came after authorities said two deputy prime ministers and three ministers had “committed violations” over two scandals surrounding the distribution of Covid test kits and the repatriation of Vietnamese. during the pandemic. In March 2023, Mr Thuong became president.

Several analysts have said the campaign’s results have been mixed. Although red tape and bribery appear to have decreased, there is also a delay in decision-making. Officials have been hesitant to approve business permits for fear of becoming embroiled in a possible investigation. About 40,000 civil servants have resigned since 2020, weakening the bureaucracy.

Mr Giang said it was likely that Mr Thuong was forced to resign over corruption allegations.

“Ultimately, the forced resignations of two presidents send a clear message: no one is safe,” he said.

In 2019, Hong Kong erupted in the most stunning display of public anger toward Beijing in decades. Protesters broke into and vandalized the legislature. They bought full-page advertisements in international newspapers criticizing the government. Lawmakers threw unsavory objects during meetings to protest unpopular bills.

In the years since, China has launched an extensive crackdown on Hong Kong to crush opposition. Beijing directly imposed a national security law on the city in 2020 that gave authorities a powerful tool to round up critics, including a prominent pro-democracy media mogul.

So when Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing lawmakers passed a new security law on Tuesday that expanded the authorities’ power even further, there was virtually no opposition in the vote. The most outspoken pro-democracy activists and lawmakers are now in prison or in self-imposed exile.

Chow Hang Tung was a human rights lawyer who represented other activists on trial for national security violations until her own arrest in 2021.

Now, she says, she had no choice but to “become a columnist,” writing open letters from prison, which were then posted online by her friends. She has that too has filed various legal appealswhere she wrote statements by hand for the court because she did not have access to a computer or the internet.

Recently, Ms. Chow has focused on Hong Kong’s new security lawsaying that officials tried to attribute the turbulence it had experienced to ordinary people and vague “foreign forces.”

She faces multiple charges, including some under the 2020 National Security Law, related to her role in organizing a candlelight vigil to commemorate the victims of Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown .

Being in prison hasn’t stopped her from speaking out. Mrs. Chow has tried to use her many courtroom appearances as a platform from which we can criticize Beijing, including for its long-term repression of the Tiananmen Mothers, a group representing the victims of the massacre.

Ted Hui was known as a confrontational lawmaker.

In 2020, he threw a stinking rotting plant on the floor of the legislative chamber to protest a bill that would make it a crime to disrespect the Chinese national anthem. At street rallies he used his megaphone to warn riot police not to hurt demonstrators; one officer responded by shooting pepper spray in Mr. Hui’s eyes.

Mr. Hui was arrested in 2020 and charged with unlawful assembly and other charges. He managed to flee to Copenhagen with the help of two Danish politicians, and was later joined by his family.

Initially, authorities blocked his family’s bank accounts. But they later withdrew due to a protest, and Mr. Hui was able to get his family’s savings back.

Mr Hui is one of about a dozen high-profile pro-democracy activists considered “hidden” by authorities. The new security law now bans any attempt to help “hidden people” gain access to their belongings or property.

“Hong Kongers should be prepared to expect that what happened to me could become part of the daily lives of ordinary residents,” he said in a telephone interview from Adelaide, Australia, where he and his family have settled.

Claudia Mo, veteran parliamentarian, in prison

Claudia Mo was one of 47 pro-democracy leaders charged with “conspiracy to commit subversion” after taking part in an unofficial primary election.

Prosecutors cited television interviews and WhatsApp messages with journalists from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times as proof against her. Ms Mo has been behind bars for more than three years and is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty.

According to a former legislator who visits Ms. Mo in prison, she has studied French and taught English to fellow inmates, including the finer details of figures of speech such as “tell me about it” and “over the moon.”

Ms. Mo, a former journalist, was known as a moderate in the pro-democracy camp. When masked young protesters stormed the Legislative Council with makeshift battering rams in 2019, Ms. Mo was among a number of veteran politicians who urged protesters to stop.

“Please ask if it’s worth it,” she told one protester. “Think of your mother.”

Jimmy Lai, media mogul, in prison

Jimmy Lai, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most outspoken critics, is on trial on national security charges.

For years, Chinese state media have labeled him a “CIA agent.” Prosecutors have portrayed him as the master conspirator behind the 2019 protests that roiled Hong Kong. Mr Lai has pleaded not guilty.

Mr Lai, who was born on the mainland and moved to Hong Kong at the age of 12, made his fortune through clothing. But after the Tiananmen massacre, Mr. Lai became a publisher and launched the Apple Daily newspaper in 1995, which became a platform for pro-democracy voices.

After Beijing imposed the 2020 security law, authorities raided the offices of Apple Daily and arrested Mr. Lai. The newspaper was forced to close in 2021 after several top editors and writers and a senior executive from Mr Lai’s media group were also charged with “conspiracy to commit collusion” with foreign forces. Those former employees did pleaded guilty.

“I believe that by delivering information in the media you are actually delivering freedom,” Mr Lai said in a 2020 interview with The Times.

Nathan Law, activist, in exile in London

Nathan Law was a student leader in the 2014 protests known as the Umbrella Movement, which called for freer elections. He became the city’s youngest elected lawmaker at the age of 23, but was soon disqualified. And in 2017, he was jailed on charges of inciting the 2014 street protests.

Mr Law escaped from Hong Kong shortly before the security law was passed and was granted asylum in Britain in 2021.

He is now one of the most prominent young Hong Kong activists abroad, often testifying before American and European lawmakers.

He recently organized Hong Kong March, a month-long cultural festival with film screenings, calligraphy classes and fairs in various cities across England. He is the founder of Hong Kong Umbrella Community, a non-profit organization focused on the Hong Kong diaspora.

“I think having independent cultural work is crucial to preserving our identity, history and sense of community,” he said in a telephone interview. “While we will undoubtedly be less connected to those in Hong Kong, we can at least be more connected to those abroad.”

Anna Kwok, activist, in exile in Washington, DC

Anna Kwok, a Washington activist, is one of 13 foreign dissidents that the Hong Kong government has placed a bounty of about $130,000 on and vowed to pursue “for life.” (The others include Mr Law and Mr Hui.)

She had helped educate the protesters remotely in 2019 hundreds of thousands of dollars anonymously as part of a crowdfunding campaign to pay for front-page newspaper advertisements criticize the government.

She later became executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council and urged the US government to ban John Lee, Hong Kong’s leader, from attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco in November. She traveled to the summit to protest the presence of Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader.

In a telephone interview, Ms. Kwok said she was discouraged that the new security law had been passed without objection or protest. She worried that future generations would forget that many of the city’s residents had once fought hard for democracy.

“No matter how unfree the environment is, we can still keep our minds free,” she said. “And that is the freedom we must preserve.”