An Indian drug company said late Wednesday that initial results from clinical trials involving nearly 26,000 subjects showed that a homegrown Indian vaccine was both safe and effective. The company, Bharat Biotech, said that its Covaxin vaccine had an initial efficacy rate of 81 percent. Covaxin had been approved by government officials in January and administered to millions of people before it had been publicly proved to be safe or effective. Many people in India, including frontline health care workers, had feared Covaxin could be ineffective or worse, slowing down New Delhi’s campaign to inoculate 1.3 billion people.

While the military’s inhumanity extends to many of the country’s roughly 55 million people, women have the most to lose from the generals’ resumption of full authority, after five years of sharing power with a civilian government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. There are no women in the Tatmadaw’s senior ranks, and its soldiers have systematically committed gang rape against women from ethnic minorities, according to investigations by the United Nations. In the generals’ worldview, women are often considered weak and impure. In elections last November, about 20 percent of candidates for the National League for Democracy, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, were women.

SEOUL, South Korea — A transgender woman who was expelled by the South Korean military last year after her gender-reassignment surgery has been found dead at her home south of Seoul, the police said on Thursday. The authorities said they were investigating the cause of death of the woman, Byeon Hee-su, 23, whose body was found on Wednesday at her home in the city of Cheongju by emergency responders. Ms. Byeon, who had been a staff sergeant in an army tank unit, was discharged from the military in January 2020 following her surgery. She became the first active-duty soldier in South Korea to be referred to such a panel because she had had a sex-change operation.

SEOUL, South Korea — A transgender woman who was expelled by the South Korean military last year after her gender-reassignment surgery has been found dead at her home south of Seoul, the police said on Thursday. The authorities said they were investigating the cause of death of the woman, Byeon Hee-su, 23, whose body was found on Wednesday at her home in the city of Cheongju by emergency responders. Ms. Byeon, who had been a staff sergeant in an army tank unit, was discharged from the military in January 2020 following her surgery. She became the first active-duty soldier in South Korea to be referred to such a panel because she had had a sex-change operation.

At least 38 people were killed in Myanmar on Wednesday, the biggest one-day toll in a worsening repression of anti-coup protests, the United Nations special representative for the country said. Wednesday’s developments came as the United States, which is president of the United Nations Security Council for March, scheduled a meeting on Friday to deal with the crisis in Myanmar, diplomats said. Myanmar has been thrown into turmoil since a military junta seized control on Feb. 1 and arrested the civilian leaders whose party, the National League for Democracy, had won an overwhelming victory in national elections. Security forces have used increasingly brutal means to crush the anti-coup protests.

Xi Jinping is sounding confident as he looks to secure China’s prosperity and power, saying that the country is entering a time of opportunity when “the East is rising and the West is declining.”Despite its success at home, China faces deep distrust in Washington and other Western capitals. Mr. Xi will unveil a blueprint for navigating China in the new global environment, during a session starting on Friday of the Communist Party-controlled legislature, the National People’s Congress. Dynamics: The congress is part of the party’s stagecraft to reinforce the view that Mr. Xi is essential to steering China through momentous changes.

Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo.A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family.

Since announcing his intentions to travel to the moon in 2023, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has fluctuated in his choice of desired companions.A businessman who made his fortune in Japanese retail fashion, Mr. Maezawa, 45, gained prominence in 2018 when Mr. Musk introduced him as the first private customer to pay a “very significant deposit” for a trip around the moon. That was when Mr. Maezawa first shared his plan to select five to eight of “Earth’s top artists” as fellow passengers on the rocket, which he booked out completely. On Wednesday, Mr. Maezawa said he would widen his search to include eight people around the world.

The instinctive reflex, in both the U.S. and Britain, has been to explain away New Zealand’s success at containing the pandemic as a function of its uniqueness: its remote island geography, its smaller landmass, its smaller population. But surely it has been, on some level, the decisions made by their respective governments that mean New Zealanders can safely eat at crowded food courts while many in the U.S. and Britain order delivery or dine on chilly sidewalks. It is funny how, almost a year later, Britain has turned slowly toward something not unlike the New Zealand model, introducing a tiered lockdown system and hotel quarantines for most incoming travelers. With the steady rollout of vaccines, we are clearly eager to wake from our socially distanced slumber: Britain has announced a timeline for reopening, indoor dining is returning to New York and social media is abuzz with people’s hopes to gather in crowds and hug one another again.

Xi Jinping has struck a confident posture as he looks to secure China’s prosperity and power in a post-Covid world, saying that the country is entering a time of opportunity when “the East is rising and the West is declining.”“The biggest source of chaos in the present-day world is the United States,” Mr. Xi said, a county official in northwest China recounted in a speech published last week on a government website. He quoted Mr. Xi as saying: “The United States is the biggest threat to our country’s development and security.”That warning, echoed in similar recent public comments by senior officials close to Mr. Xi, reinforces how he is seeking to balance confidence and caution as China strides ahead while other countries continue to grapple with the pandemic.