David Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history, with his work winning a Pulitzer and capturing Hollywood’s attention. A new book examines Pope Pius XII’s role in the Holocaust.

Over the last few decades, Mr. Kertzer has turned the inquisitive tables on the church. Using the Vatican’s own archives, the soft-spoken Brown University professor and trustee at the American Academy in Rome has become arguably the most effective excavator of the Vatican’s hidden sins, especially those leading up to and during World War II.

The son of a rabbi who participated in the liberation of Rome as an Army chaplain, Mr. Kertzer grew up in a home that had taken in a foster child whose family was murdered in Auschwitz.

On Feb. 24, as Russian troops poured into Ukraine on Day 1 of the invasion, an employee of a yacht management company sent an email to the captain of the Amadea, a $325 million superyacht: “Importance: High.”

At Imperial Yachts, no detail is too small to sweat. Based in Monaco, with a staff of about 100 — plus 1,200 to 1,500 crew members aboard yachts — the company caters to oligarchs whose fortunes turn on the decisions of President Vladimir V. Putin. Imperial Yachts and its Moscow-born founder, Evgeniy Kochman, have prospered by fulfilling their clients’ desires to own massive luxury ships.

Imperial’s rise has benefited an array of businesses across Europe, including German shipbuilders, Italian carpenters, French interior design firms and Spanish marinas, which together employ thousands of people. Imperial Yachts is at the center of what is essentially an oligarch-industrial complex, overseeing the flow of billions of dollars from politically connected Russians to that network of companies, according to interviews, court documents and intelligence reports.

The Baltic Sea port has silos to store plenty of grain, railway lines to transport it there from Ukraine, where it has been trapped by the war, and a deep harbor ready for ships that can take it to Egypt, Yemen and other countries in desperate need of food.

“Starvation is near,

Belarus controls the railway lines offering the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain out of Ukraine to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.

Suddenly, five low-flying helicopters thrummed overhead, some firing weapons and drawing gunfire in return. Villagers ran for their lives. But there was nowhere to escape: The helicopters were dropping soldiers on the town’s outskirts to block all the exits.

The foreigners, according to diplomats, officials and human rights groups, belonged to the Russian paramilitary group known as Wagner.

However, using satellite imagery, The New York Times identified the sites of at least two mass graves, which matched the witnesses’ descriptions of where captives were executed and buried.

About $38 billion earmarked for Poland from a coronavirus recovery fund had been blocked over judicial disputes. But relations with the bloc improved over Poland’s strong stance against Russia.

In a major concession to the Polish government, the European Union’s executive arm on Wednesday opened the door for the disbursement of billions of dollars in aid to Poland that had been blocked during a standoff over judicial independence in the country.

“The approval of this plan is linked to clear commitments by Poland on the independence of the judiciary, which will need to be fulfilled before any actual payment can be made,”

After generations of stability in nuclear arms control, a warning to Russia from President Biden shows how old norms are eroding.

“We currently see no indication that Russia has intent to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, though Russia’s occasional rhetoric to rattle the nuclear saber is itself dangerous and extremely irresponsible,” Mr. Biden wrote in a guest opinion essay in The New York Times. “Let me be clear: Any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict on any scale would be completely unacceptable to us as well as the rest of the world and would entail severe consequences.”

With the Biden administration stepping up the flow of conventional weapons to Ukraine and tensions with Russia high, a senior administration official conceded that “right now it’s almost impossible to imagine” how the talks might resume before the last treaty expires in early 2026.

Coronavirus infections surged in South Africa in recent months despite research suggesting that about 98 percent of the population had some antibodies from vaccination, previous infection, or both.

But though the vast majority of the South African population had antibodies against the virus, many still became infected in the latest virus wave, which began in April and was driven by BA.4 and BA.5, new subvariants of Omicron.

New daily deaths also rose

The Biden administration said on Wednesday it would cut in half the amount it charges companies to build wind and solar projects on federal lands, a move designed to encourage development of renewable energy.

“Clean energy projects on public lands have an important role to play in reducing our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and lowering costs for families,”

The new policy would cut those costs by about 50 percent,

As the United States moved to ship ever more advanced weapon systems to Ukraine to aid it in its fight to thwart Russia’s eastern offensive, Moscow said the latest move by President Biden threatened to escalate the war in dangerous ways.

the most powerful provided since the start of the war — was the United States “deliberately and painstakingly pouring gasoline on the fire.”

“What it boils down to is we’re going to probably give Ukraine the most limited of the options as far as range,” Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the retired supreme allied commander for Europe, said at a virtual security event on Wednesday, referring to the rocket system. “That’s unfortunate.”

The book, “A Trail of Crab Tracks,” explores the birth of independent Cameroon in the 1960s and its subsequent descent into civil war. Nganang, 52, wanted to get the details just right, from the experience of guerrilla fighters in the jungle to the names of plants and local rivers.“I was very careful,” Nganang said last month as a torrential spring rain fell outside his New Jersey home. “I didn’t want an older person to read it and say, ‘Come on, my son. It’s not right!’” His laughter, like a thunderclap, filled the room.

“The government was declaring war and cracking down on Anglophone protests,” he says. “They hadn’t started killing yet.”

Finally released and expelled from the country, Nganang emerged with a deeper commitment to his overarching project: an examination of Cameroon’s national identity, and how it has held within it the seeds of both great promise and disappointment.

Instead, Mr. Smith will be hosting an international anti-monarchy conference, and explaining why he thinks Britain should get rid of its royals.

urging Britons to “make Elizabeth the last” monarch.

“I certainly don’t view her with any kind of admiration,” he said, drinking a coffee in the town of Reading, west of London, where he now lives. “There is no achievement in what she’s done.”

India has contributed little to climate change: Home to 18 percent of the world’s population, it has emitted just 3 percent of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

It is happening right now: Over the past three months, a heat wave has devastated North India and neighboring Pakistan. Temperatures surpassed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It is so hot that overheated birds fell out of the sky in Gurgaon, India, and a historic bridge in northern Pakistan collapsed after melting snow and ice at a glacial lake released a torrent of water.

Indians have responded by staying indoors as much as possible, particularly during the afternoon hours. The government has encouraged this, pushing schools to close early and businesses to shift work schedules. The measures have kept down deaths — with fewer than 100 recorded so far, an improvement from heat waves years ago that killed thousands.

When the sirens warning of incoming rockets split the skies, Israel’s national blood bank moves into high alert to keep the nation’s blood supply safe. The heavy machinery for blood processing, plasma freezers and centrifuges are transferred to a basement bomb shelter, a cumbersome operation that takes 10 to 12 hours.

By the end of the year, the blood bank will be relocated to a bright, state-of-the-art subterranean facility built to withstand chemical, biological and conventional weapons, including a direct hit from a large missile, as well as earthquakes and cyberattacks.

“It will save the lives of our loved ones, our frontline workers and our soldiers in times of routine emergencies and conflict,”

President Yoon Suk-yeol’s governing party won​ 12 of the 17 races for big-city mayors and provincial governors

The results on Wednesday were a decisive victory for Mr. Yoon, who won the presidential race by a razor-thin margin in March and was inaugurated just three weeks ago. Although this week’s elections were only held at the local level, the results were seen as an early referendum on Mr. Yoon’s performance as leader.

The election​ results were a stunning setback for the Democratic Party. During the last local elections four years ago, it won 14 of the same 17 races for leaders of big cities and provinces.

In emails to workers at SpaceX and Tesla, Mr. Musk said they were required to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office.

“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,” Mr. Musk said. “That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

The issue has become more fraught as coronavirus vaccinations have increased and an abatement of the pandemic seemed to be near. Some companies began saying they expected workers to return to the office. Still, plans have continued to fluctuate. Apple last month suspended its requirement that employees return to the office in May for at least three days a week because of a resurgence of Covid-19 cases. Airbnb recently told its employees that they never had to return to the office.

The Biden administration said on Wednesday that it would pursue negotiations to strengthen trade and technology ties with Taiwan, a move that is aimed at countering China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific region and one that is likely to rankle Beijing.

The talks with Taiwan will cover many of the same issues as the framework, like digital trade ways to reduce red tape for importers and exporters. U.S. officials said the talks, the first of which will be held in Washington at the end of June, would focus on a variety of issues, including opening up trade in agriculture and aligning technological standards.

Several topics of the discussion are clearly aimed at addressing mutual complaints over Chinese trade practices.

“This, too, is a decision we have made that ensures Ukraine’s security with the most modern equipment,”

The speed and scale of weapons donations to Ukraine has been a persistent source of criticism for Mr. Scholz both from Ukraine and from inside Germany, even as he has spoken of breaking with decades of pacifist policy.

In addition, Germany has taken in 168 “especially severely wounded” Ukrainian soldiers for medical treatment, Mr. Scholz said.

It all starts with a whistle, said Vladislav Goncharenko, a Ukrainian army sergeant, describing the relentless Russian shelling.“You lie in a trench,’’ he said, waiting in an ambulance packed with other wounded soldiers. “There are very loud explosions. You want to get deeper into the ground. And you have shrapnel whistling above you, like flies.”

The momentum Ukraine generated after pushing Russian forces back from Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, has given way in the East to weeks of give-and-take over villages, heavy shelling — and a stream of Ukrainian dead and wounded from the battlefields.

“Those people who said that the war would end very soon, that we have already won, that we will celebrate in April, said a dangerous thing,” Ukraine’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov, told Ukrainian media this week.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday it is acquiring more than 4 million 8-ounce bottles and 380,000 pounds of infant formula from Australia to be delivered to the United States by next week to address the ongoing baby formula shortage gripping the nation.

Operation Fly Formula,

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that Bubs Australia could export infant formula. It is expected to export enough powdered formula to produce 27.5 million 8-ounce bottles in the U.S.

A federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of multiple Air Force service members seeking protections against punishment by the military after they were denied religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine. 

The filing alleges that the Department of Defense is violating the First Amendment rights of the service members by imposing a vaccine mandate that "substantially burdens" free exercise of religion, despite granting hundreds of administrative and medical exemptions.

"At a time of instability and ever-increasing threats around the world, you’d think the Pentagon would want every service member at their post. But instead, military leaders are forcing tens of thousands of our bravest out of the service because they’ve chosen to live according to their faith,"