MELBOURNE, Australia — Two volunteer firefighters died on Thursday night while battling ferocious blazes in the region surrounding Sydney, prompting Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, to say he would cut short a family vacation to Hawaii that had enraged constituents.

The firefighters, Geoffrey Keaton, 32, and Andrew O’Dwyer, 36, had been among a convoy trying to fend off wildfires southwest of Sydney when their truck hit a tree and rolled over, killing them and injuring three other passengers, the authorities said. They were the first firefighter deaths in a fire season that has overwhelmed the largely volunteer brigades battling the blazes.

“This is an absolutely devastating event in what has already been an incredibly difficult day and fire season,” the New South Wales Rural Fire Service said in a statement released on Friday. Both men were fathers to young children. “Our hearts are breaking,” the service’s association president, Brian McDonough, said in a statement.

The deaths come as more than 100 out-of-control wildfires, stoked by extreme heat and strong winds, continue to rage in New South Wales. The state government has declared a state of emergency, and the smog reaches as far as Melbourne, where it blanketed the city. Catastrophic fire conditions have also been forecast in South Australia, where temperatures reached nearly 122 degrees yesterday, and asphalt roads have begun to melt in the record-breaking heat.

Speaking on local radio on Friday morning, he added that, “if it was possible not to be where I was this week, well, maybe. But this had been arranged some time ago and that’s just how it was.”

“The government can’t see through the smoke that’s clouding our cities, our towns and our regions,” Mr. Albanese told reporters on Thursday. “These fires,” he added, “are not business as usual.”

Sharon Ellicott, the chief executive of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service Association, which represents volunteer firefighters, said that the association had historically been opposed to compensating volunteer firefighters, because it could damage the service’s ethos.

But, she added, “we’re really in unprecedented times.”

In addition to the two firefighters who died, five others were injured in a nearby blaze, with three of them taken to the hospital suffering serious burns on Thursday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

ROME — The Italian police on Thursday arrested more than 330 people, including politicians, lawyers, accountants and a local police chief, in one of the most extensive law enforcement operations ever against the crime syndicate known as ’Ndrangheta.

Some 3,000 officers made pre-dawn arrests in twelve Italian regions, as well as in Switzerland, Germany and Bulgaria, officials said. ’Ndrangheta has spread far beyond its historic base in the southern region of Calabria, surpassing the Cosa Nostra, based in Sicily, to become Italy’s most powerful mafia group. The group controls much of Europe’s cocaine trade, European officials say.

Nicola Gratteri, the anti-mafia prosecutor who coordinated the operation, described Thursday’s crackdown as “the biggest operation after the Palermo maxi trial,” a reference to a sweep in 1984 that led to a landmark trial against some 450 Sicilian mafia members. That case severely weakened the Cosa Nostra, but its decline permitted the Calabrian syndicate to grow more powerful.

Thursday’s operation “completely dismembered the top ranks of the Mancuso family,” the long-established ’Ndrangheta clan operating in the city of Vibo Valentia, with links to the United States, Mr. Gratteri said.

The family had infiltrated local politics and public administration, as well as the local economy, he said. The police blitz had been scheduled for Friday but was hastily brought forward a day when investigators discovered that someone had tipped off the mobsters and their associates to the impending arrests.

“Can you imagine what it means to move 3,000 men in the space of 24 hours?” Mr. Gratteri asked reporters in Catanzaro, Calabria, where he is chief prosecutor. “It’s something crazy. But we had to move crazily.”

The police arrested Luigi Mancuso, whom officials described as the head of the clan, along with dozens of others believed to have ties to the ’Ndrangheta. They also arrested a lawyer and former member of the Italian Parliament from former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party; the president of the Calabrian mayor’s association, a former member of the Democratic Party’s national assembly, and an array of civil servants and other white-collar professionals accused of working with the mob.

They face a variety of charges, including murder, extortion, usury, money laundering, drug trafficking, corruption, and belonging to a criminal syndicate.

The police also seized property and cash valued at 15 million euros, or about $16.7 million.

The Mancuso clan had dominated the area of Vibo Valentia since the 1970s, and had been “marked by prosecutors” in the past, said Enzo Ciconte, an expert in organized crime. But Thursday’s operation “could be the final blow,” he said in an interview.

Claudio Cordova, the editor of the online Calabria newspaper Il Dispaccio and the author of a recent book about links between the ’Ndrangheta and Freemasonry, said the operation had struck one of Calabria’s most powerful clans, and had exposed their links “with politicians and professionals.”

“Rinascita” means rebirth, referring to “the rebirth of the territory,” Mr. Gratteri explained in a telephone interview. “Scott,” he said, was added in memory of Scott W. Sieben, an agent with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration who “worked with us on many missions,” when he was based in Rome, from 2008 to 2013, and who died in 2015, after returning to the United States.

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Good morning.

We’re covering developments in Malta’s high-profile murder case, recent soccer diplomacy in the Middle East, and the best photos of the 2010s.

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After a car bomb in 2017 killed a Maltese journalist tackling corruption, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s chief of staff told reporters that it was a hit job by the Italian mafia. That was untrue, and the chief of staff himself, who resigned last month, now stands accused of trying to help a businessman accused of contracting the murder flee the country on a yacht.

As evidence mounts of potential misdeeds by the prime minister’s staff, our Moscow bureau chief writes, even longtime supporters of his political party “are coming around to the view that corrupt ties between business and politics and the culture of impunity they engendered are what killed the journalist.”

This week’s Club World Cup in Qatar is a dry run of sorts for the 2022 World Cup. It’s also a reminder, our Cairo bureau chief writes, of how soccer has become a conduit for politics in the Persian Gulf.

Photo editors at The Times have pored over images of moments both fresh and faded to tell the story of the 2010s, a decade of seemingly ceaseless upheaval.

What we’re reading: New York magazine’s examination of this year’s internet archetypes (VSCO girl, wife guy…). Katie Rosman, a Styles reporter, says she loves the story “even if I don’t understand many of its sentences.”

“If there were creatures on Uranus — and I don’t think there are — seasonal affective disorder would be a lifetime thing,” the planetary scientist Heidi Hammel told The Times.

BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, praised the Chinese gambling hub of Macau on Friday for its patriotism and delivered a veiled rebuke to nearby Hong Kong that Beijing would not allow challenges to its sovereignty or the interference of “external forces.”

Mr. Xi spoke on the 20th anniversary of the return of Macau to Chinese rule, a significant event for Beijing as it wrangles with protests in nearby Hong Kong that have evolved into the most direct challenge to Communist Party rule in decades.

The handover of Macau, the former Portuguese colony, in 1999 took place two years after Britain ceded sovereignty of Hong Kong. In the years since, the two cities have functioned as semiautonomous territories with greater economic and political freedoms — up to a limit, Mr. Xi made clear.

Mr. Xi’s remarks amounted to a warning for Hong Kong, where protests and clashes with the police have convulsed the city since June. Macau, he said, provided “a gorgeous chapter” in the history of the arrangement China calls “one country, two systems” by demonstrating its fealty to the central authority in Beijing.

“The long-term prosperity and stability of Macau will, with firm determination, never be shaken by temporary twists and turns,” he said in televised remarks at the East Asian Games Dome, an indoor stadium near Macau’s glittering casino hub, the Cotai Strip.

He warned that “external forces” sought to challenge China’s governance of the two territories. Officials have blamed the United States, Britain and others in the West for fomenting the unrest in Hong Kong as a way to undermine China.

“The will of the Chinese government and the Chinese people to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests is as firm as a rock,” he said. “We will never allow any external forces to interfere in Hong Kong and Macau affairs.”

Mr. Xi’s speech capped a three-day visit surrounding Friday’s anniversary and the swearing in of a new government for the territory. The new chief executive, Ho Iat Seng, who was elected in October by an unanimous vote of an electoral committee, returned the praise for Mr. Xi and the central government, saying Chinese rule was the foundation of Macau’s fortune.

“The great motherland will always strongly back Macau,” Mr. Ho said.

The pomp and circumstance surrounding the anniversary underscored the heavy symbolism China invests in Macau and Hong Kong: territories that it feels were humiliatingly carved off by Western imperial powers and only returned to their rightful place in the motherland under the rule of the Communist Party. Mr. Xi referred to the instability and criminality that consumed Macau in the years before the handover, adding, “Macau has become one of the world’s safest cities.”

In the days leading up to the anniversary, state television and newspapers lavished coverage on the territory, citing the rising prosperity of the city’s 670,000 residents, the stewardship of the city’s leadership and most of all, Macau’s loyalty to the Communist Party state in Beijing. The comparative discord in Hong Kong always seemed to hover over the preparations.

The coverage also sought to deliver a message to Taiwan, the self-governing democracy China claims as its territory. Mr. Xi has sought to entice the island into unification with the mainland with a promise of a similar “one country, two systems” political arrangement, but the idea is largely unpopular in Taiwan.

Mr. Xi, accompanied during his visit by his wife, Peng Liyuan, a former popular singer, visited government offices and schools and viewed an exhibition at a middle school about “patriotic education” in Macau, which means using textbooks produced in the mainland under strict Communist Party supervision. On Thursday, he also met with commanders and officers of the Macau Security Forces inside the East Asian Games Dome.

The coverage verged on hagiography. “When I shook Grandpa Xi’s hand, I felt the warmth in his hand,” a young boy said after his school visit, using a respectful diminutive to describe the leader. “Because my hands were cold, the moment when I held Grandpa Xi’s hand, I felt Grandpa’s Xi warmth pass through my body at once.”

During a gala dinner on Thursday, Mr. Xi praised Macau repeatedly. He cited new efforts to build new housing, a pressing problem in the tiny, crowded territory only 12 miles square, and the passage of national security laws that made subversion against the Chinese state a crime. Hong Kong failed to adopt a similar law after mass protests in 2003 and has yet to take up the issue again, much to Beijing’s frustration.

Mr. Xi also implicitly criticized the turmoil in Hong Kong.

Macau’s government and “people from all walks of life are well aware that ‘if the family lives in harmony, all affairs will prosper,’” he said referring to Macau’s official status and using a familiar Chinese aphorism. “And amiability leads to harmony, stressing unity and consultation, not internal friction.”

The central government also offered several new benefits to Macau. One was an increase in the daily limit for remittances from Macau to the mainland to $11,400 from $7,100. The new limit in Macau would match that set for Hong Kong. It had been kept lower because of concerns about money laundering linked to the gambling industry. The Chinese state-run broadcaster, CCTV, also announced that its all-sports channel would begin broadcasting in the territory.

Security around Mr. Xi’s visit was intense. The authorities suspended service on a newly opened elevated light rail in Taipa — only days after it opened — and border guards turned away a number of journalists and others as they tried to enter the territory from Hong Kong, presumably because they wanted to ensure a protest-free celebration.

Claire Fu in Beijing and Elaine Yu in Hong Kong contributed reporting.

MOSCOW — Shooting erupted near the fortresslike headquarters of Russia’s Federal Security Service in central Moscow on Thursday evening, the spy agency reported in a series of statements that also said one of its agents had been killed.

The agency, known by its Russian acronym F.S.B., said an “unknown person opened fire” near the headquarters and had been “neutralized.” The assailant’s identity and motive were not immediately clear.

The Izvestia news site said that Thursday’s shooting broke out in the reception area of the headquarters, known as the Lubyanka, and that up to three people had been killed, at least some of them F.S.B. employees. The Interfax news agency quoted the Health Ministry as saying five people were wounded in the shooting and had been “provided with medical aid.”

The shooting was highly unusual for a heavily guarded area that is home to the vast headquarters of the F.S.B. — the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B. — as well as to many other government buildings.

The area around the building was quickly cordoned off by police officers.

The shooting happened on the same day that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a former K.G.B. agent, gave his annual televised news conference and hailed Russia’s political stability.

The mayhem came more than a year after an October 2018 bomb attack by a Russian teenager on an F.S.B. office in the northern city of Arkhangelsk. The bombing triggered a nationwide crackdown by the security forces on anyone suspected of harboring hostility toward the F.S.B.

MACAU — When Macau, the Portuguese colony turned Chinese gambling hub, got a new chief executive in October, the vote by an electoral committee was unanimous. He ran unopposed. No one took to the streets in protest.

When young activists applied for permission to demonstrate in support of the protest movement in nearby Hong Kong, the authorities said no — four times. When a few dozen showed up anyway in Macau’s historic center in August, the police arrested seven of them.

Macau today, like Hong Kong, is a political experiment that began in the late 1990s, when China reclaimed both territories from Western colonial powers and promised that civil liberties could coexist with its brand of authoritarian rule. Now, as Hong Kong’s political unrest continues, China’s ruling Communist Party has become increasingly explicit about how much it will tolerate under that formula — and holds Macau up as a shining example of obedience.

“The most important thing is to implement and safeguard the central government’s full control,” Li Zhanshu, the third highest-ranking official in China, who presides over policy for both territories, said in a speech about Macau in Beijing this month.

Compared to Hong Kong, Macau has more readily accepted Beijing’s ultimate authority on matters of national policy under the “one country, two systems” formula applied to both of them. And for the most part, the city’s 670,000 residents have gone along with it, either co-opted or coerced by the mainland.

“After 20 years in Macau, it is difficult to find the clear lines between the two systems,” said Sou Ka Hou, one of 33 deputies in Macau’s Legislative Assembly and, at 28, a leader of a new generation of democratic opposition.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, arrived in Macau on Wednesday for a three-day visit to mark the 20th anniversary of the territory’s “return to the motherland” in 1999, after more than four centuries of Portuguese rule. His visit, touted in China’s state media, carries the implicit message that satrapy has its rewards.

“As we used to say, good boys get candy,” said Larry So Man-yum, a retired professor of social work at Macau Polytechnic Institute who is now a gambling addiction counselor. “Macau is a good boy.”

For China’s leaders, Macau offers the answer to seditious obstinacy in Hong Kong, 40 miles to the east, where protests that began in June over a bill that would have allowed extradition to the mainland have evolved into a campaign against police violence and the Communist Party’s steady encroachment on the city’s liberties.

Most important, Macau’s political leaders have adopted laws that curb dissent, including one in 2009 that made subversion against the Chinese state a crime. In Hong Kong, similar legislation was derailed by protests in 2003 but remains an overriding priority for the party.

As Hong Kong has seethed, the authorities in Macau have stepped up efforts to quash any hint of dissent, fearing that their neighbor’s upheaval could spread.

On the mainland, the anniversary has occasioned tributes to Macau’s transformation under “one country, two systems.” The state television network, CCTV, broadcast a series of glowing documentaries. Air China’s in-flight magazine devoted 50 pages to it.

Gambling is prone to economic cycles, though, and in Macau it is also vulnerable to anti-corruption campaigns in China that target high-rolling officials. Casinos have struggled in recent months, almost certainly because the tumult in Hong Kong has cut into the number of visitors.