Bangladeshis are reeling from one of the most violent weeks in their country’s recent history. At the center of the chaos are young people striving to be heard.

• French train attacks: France’s high-speed rail network is hit with widespread and “criminal” acts of vandalism including arson attacks, disrupting travel only hours before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. 
• Bombers near Alaska: U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says that Russian and Chinese bombers flew together for the first time in international airspace off the coast of Alaska.
• Mexican cartel arrests: The U.S. Justice Department says Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of another infamous cartel leader, have been arrested in Texas.
• Clearing homeless encampments: California Gov. Gavin Newsom orders state agencies to start removing homeless encampments on state land.

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CEO Elon Musk has blazed many trails, including weighing in on politics, in contrast with many executives’ desire to avoid snares this election year. 

Violence can tear apart a community. But in Pennsylvania’s Butler County, many residents are focused on recovery and care for affected families after the near-assassination of former President Donald Trump.

As Venezuelans prepare for the July 28 presidential election, the historically divided opposition is garnering sky-high support, prompting sitting President Nicolás Maduro to grasp at power in blatant ways. 

U.S. basketball star LeBron James first played in an Olympics 20 years ago, after his rookie year in the NBA. Paris will bookend that by being his last run for gold. What will his legacy be? 

Three months ago, Edmundo González Urrutia was still what he had always been – a soft-spoken and little-known career diplomat who, by his own admission, harbored no political ambitions. Yet on Sunday in Venezuela, he represents the hopes of voters seeking to end more than a quarter century of repressive autocratic rule.

Mr. González typifies more than just the possibility of a change in government. Polls show him winning by as much as 40% against incumbent President Nicolás Maduro. His improbable rise offers a study in how societies recover their ideals of freedom and democracy through humility and civic agency.

“Our commitment is to rebuild Venezuela ... so that political adversaries see each other as adversaries and not as enemies,” he told Le Monde. “My government will be one of reconstruction. Not one of vengeance.” 

Mr. González is a stand-in for the more popular and longtime opposition leader María Corina Machado. She was banned from holding public office for 15 years after winning a primary election last October with 93% of the vote. In March, Ms. Machado and other opposition leaders rallied behind Mr. González as her proxy.

That consensus marks a shift in how Venezuelans may emerge from a prolonged period marked by corruption, economic decline, and erosion of democratic principles under Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, the late leftist populist Hugo Chávez.

“Political leaders have put the good of the country before everything else and abandoned their ambitions in favor of a candidate who didn’t want to be one,” wrote José Toro Hardy, a Venezuelan economist, in Le Monde.

Ms. Machado and like-minded opponents once saw foreign intervention as critical to change. She gradually came to see that the real source of democratic renewal was in defusing the fear, division, and false patronage that autocracies depend on. “We have learned wonderful lessons,” she said in a TED Talk in 2011. “The first lesson is that we need collective empowerment to face fear and division. We went from disbelief to being [too] worried to protest, to activism.” 

Though banned from running for office or even sleeping in hotels or eating in restaurants, she has campaigned across the country without interruption – not just to promote Mr. González, but to strengthen a sense among ordinary Venezuelans that freedom is based on individual dignity and self-worth. While she shies away from expressing her faith in public, she has characterized that message as a “spiritual fight.”

Venezuela, wrote the writer and poet Pedro Varguillas Vielma in the magazine Nacla, is “a country in tatters, held together by its people.” If voters reject Mr. Maduro on Sunday, few see him leaving peacefully. That does not unsettle Mr. González and Ms. Machado. “Our strength is in redemption and unity,” she posted on the social platform X recently.  In one of the most troubled corners of Latin America, the light of democratic virtue is breaking through.