IHT Quick Read: April 22

NEWS Syrian opposition activists said Sunday that government forces had killed at least 80 people in a town south of Damascus, and then carried out mass arrests as the residents tried to bury the bodies. Hania Mourtada and Hala Droubi report from Beirut.

The two men suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings were armed with a small arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives when they first confronted the police early Friday, and were most likely planning more attacks, the authorities said Sunday. Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt report from Washington.

The case of a 5-year-old girl who was raped, tortured and nearly killed last week has shocked India, stirring memories of a gang rape on a medical student in December. Gardiner Harris reports from New Delhi.

With little fuss or political protest â€" or notice abroad â€" Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. Suzanne Daley reports from Copenhagen.

For a growing number of Italians, Beppe Grillo, the charismatic founder of the antiestablishment Five Star Movement, is the leader who best represents their desire for change and their anger toward political parties they believe are obstructing political reform. Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Rome.

The group Human Rights Watch released a report Monday accusing Myanmar’s government of ethnic cleansing for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims in the state of Rakhine, also known as Arakan, over the last year. Gerry Mullany reports from Hong Kong.

Chinese consumers’ shift toward larger and ever-more-numerous vehicles is not only driving up China’s oil import bill and contributing to pollution but is also fattening automakers’ profits â€" and manufacturers made clear over the weekend that they plan to infuse the market with large vehicles. Keith Bradsher reports from Shanghai.

The low price of carbon credits in Europe means the market is not doing its job: pushing polluters to reduce carbon emissions, which most climate scientists believe contribute to global warming. Stanley Reed and Mark Scott report from London.

EDUCATION In India, the proliferation of news media outlets, combined with concerns about the quality of reporters, has resulted in a great demand for top journalism school graduates. Gayatri Rangachari Shah reports from Mumbai.

ARTS Defining the difference between design and invention is a challenging exercise. Alice Rawsthorn writes from London.

SPORTS For the second year in a row, Formula One staged a Grand Prix in Bahrain against the backdrop of a social uprising, demonstrations and threats against the race by the anti-government opposition. For the second year in a row, Sebastian Vettel marched through the race to take victory as if nothing existed outside the racetrack in the desert sand. Brad Spurgeon reports from Sakhir, Bahrain.

Tottenham Hotspur rallied from a goal down against Manchester City and basically handed United the Premier League crown. Rob Hughes reports from London.

Report Says Myanmar Was Complicit in Anti-Muslim Violence

HONG KONG â€" The government of Myanmar, which has been trying to get in the good graces of the United States and other nations, is coming under new scrutiny for its treatment of a Muslim minority group.

The group Human Rights Watch released a report Monday accusing Myanmar’s government of ethnic cleansing for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims in the state of Rakhine, also known as Arakan, over the last year.

The report accuses the government of taking part in a systematic campaign of violence against the Rohingya, and said it was complicit in destroying mosques. It also says that the government has encouraged anti-Muslim violence by Buddhists in Rakhine, where many Rohingya have been forced from their land and have had to resettle elsewhere.

The human rights group says that government authorities had advance warning of an attack that took the lives of more than 70 Rohingya in October. The report says that the small number of police and soldiers dispatched to the scene actually assisted in the killings by disarming the Rohingya. It said that 28 children were hacked to death during the violence.

The report comes as the United States and Myanmar have been repairing their long-frayed ties, with President Obama traveling to the country in November, a visit that he used to welcome the new dialogue between the two countries while prodding the government to quicken its march toward democratic reform.

But Myanmar has struggled as it tries to adapt to a more open society with festering ethnic tensions just below the surface. Animosities between Muslims and Buddhists had been kept in check during the country’s five decades of military rule. But the tensions have exploded recently as greater freedom of expression has allowed Buddhists to vent their rage against Muslims.

The government of President Thein Sein has tried to encourage media outlets to tamp down on anti-Muslim vitriol in an effort to curb the violence, even banning publication of outlets that engage in such coverage and trying to have Rakhine-related news go through government censors.

Human Rights Watch said that after the violence in Rakhine, it sent staff members to investigate, and they conducted more than 100 interviews with Rohingya and others to get first-hand accounts of the violence. It said that during the attacks by Buddhists, one soldier told a Rohingya man who pleaded for protection, “The only thing you can do is pray to save your lives.”

Burmese officials could not be reached for comment on the group’s assertions.

As the United States has strengthened ties with Myanmar, formerly called Burma, it has also repeatedly cautioned that the government has to improve its record on human rights. But progress on that front has been repeatedly tested by the fierce and longstanding ethnic and religious tensions in the country.

“What this report reveals is that in October, just weeks before President Obama’s visit to Burma, the Burmese authorities were engaged in ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in Arakan state,” Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Asia, said in an e-mail. “This should make it abundantly clear that the U.S. cannot just rely on fine words from Burma’s leaders but they need to insist on clear actions to hold accountable those involved with these crimes.”

In China, the Shared Grief of Losing a Single Child Like Lu Lingzi

BEIJING â€" In a dignified letter, the parents of Lu Lingzi, the 23-year-old Chinese student killed in the Boston Marathon attack, asked people to remember their daughter by helping “make the world a better place,” as she had wanted to.

They are grieving and devastated, wrote the couple from Shenyang in northeast China, but please, “Continue moving forward,” they wrote in the open letter published in Chinese media and on the Web site of BU Today, the news site of Boston University, where Ms. Lu was studying.

Ms. Lu’s parents didn’t mention a very special sorrow - the daughter they lost was their only child. But over the weekend in China, news media reports about that were multiplying, perhaps also prompted by an earthquake in Sichuan Province on Saturday. Many single children were lost during a previous earthquake in 2008 in Sichuan, which left about 90,000 people dead or missing.

The mention of Ms. Lu’s singleton status often came in passing, or just in a headline, without going into detail in the text. The mentions came even in media that is tightly aligned with the Communist Party and state, such as the Communist Youth League’s news Web site, news.youth.cn. It’s a subject that is discussed in China, but remains politically sensitive, since it’s the direct result of the state’s “one child policy,” which began around 1980 and limited many families to one child.

There’s even a word for this special pain here: “shidu,” or “lose single.”

There are over 100 million single children in China, Xinhua, the state-run news agency, reported in February, the direct result of state population policies. That translates into over 200 million parents of single children.

Up until 2012, there were “at least” one million families in China that had lost their only child, Xinhua wrote in a separate report carried by the Jinghua Times. About 76,000 families are added to the sad roster each year, it said.

That report was working from a far higher figure of the number of singletons in China: 190 million. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy, but statistics in China often vary widely and may be unclear.

Increasingly, these families are being referred to in China as a “vulnerable social group,” since children are often the main source of income for parents in their old age. The parents face being plunged into poverty.

They are slowly banding together and asking for more - more support from society and bigger pensions, or special financial support in their old age that recognizes their situation. They have a Web site, called “The Lost Singleton People’s Family.”

Last year, dozens gathered in Beijing to petition the central government for policies that would acknowledge their special position, and offer more financial support. The state has indicated it may do that, but has been slow to react, they say.

In a report dated Saturday, on the Web site of the People’s Consultative Web, which is tied to a political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the requests for more social and financial support for the families were spelled out.

Speaking of just one city, Meishan in Sichuan Province, “there are more and more families that have lost their only child and this group has already become a new group that is in difficulty,” the report said, going on to advise the government to spend more on them and offer better social services.

On the Web site for the parents who have lost their only child, the latest post, dated two days ago, addressed the family planning officials who have for decades implemented the one-child policy. Saying they had lost their only son, the person, whose identity was protected by a sign-in system, wrote: “Family planning officials, are you paying attention to those who have lost their only child?” It continued: “If this system continues, no matter if you are an official or an ordinary person, who can guarantee to you that if something happens to your child or grandchild you won’t join the group of those who have lost single children?”