There are so many unfamiliar faces, cardinals are wearing name tags. The Vatican guesthouse for out-of-towners coming to choose the next pope is overbooked. Daily Vatican meetings have taken on the feel of theological speed-dating sessions. “The cardinals don’t know each other so well,” said Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Sweden, who has spent recent days…
George Simion, a right-wing nationalist who has promised to “Make Romania Great Again,” won the first round of his country’s presidential election on Sunday, bucking the recent trend of voters punishing candidates seen as friendly to President Trump. With more than 98 percent of the votes cast inside Romania counted, Mr. Simion was far ahead…
The Trump factor is shaping global politics, one election at a time — just not necessarily to the president’s taste. In major votes in Canada and Australia over the past two weeks, centrists saw their fortunes revived, while parties that had borrowed from the MAGA playbook lost out. President Trump has been back in power…
Lockered Gahs, known unofficially as Bud, was a 20-year-old soldier in the U.S. Army who had been fighting for a year when he and his unit first entered the Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich in 1945. His unit — the 42nd Infantry Division — had seen harrowing combat since it began fighting in France….
Albanese cruised to re-election in Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pulled off a stunning landslide victory on Saturday to clinch a second term as Australia’s leader. The global turmoil caused by President Trump’s policies made the U.S. leader a factor throughout the election, and anti-Trump sentiment appears to have helped deliver the center-left Albanese the…
Sudanese paramilitary forces targeted an airport, a warehouse and several civilian facilities in the eastern city of Port Sudan on the Red Sea, setting off “scattered explosions,” according to a spokesman from Sudan’s military. A Sudanese army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Nabil Abdullah, said in a statement on Sunday that “the enemy” — a reference to…
When Pope Francis visited Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2014, he crisscrossed the traditional birthplace of Jesus in a white popemobile manufactured especially for his visit. Now, the vehicle is being transformed into a mobile health clinic to treat ill and wounded Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip — an initiative that Pope…
Only about half a million people live in Malta, the tiny set of islands in the Mediterranean that make up one of Europe’s smallest countries. Yet a Maltese citizen could soon be elected pope. Cardinal Mario Grech, 68, the former bishop of a Maltese island, Gozo, has emerged as a candidate for pope because of…
Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline of France cooed at babies on Sunday at a church in the Monti neighborhood of Rome. Cardinal Peter Erdo of Hungary asked for prayers for fellow cardinals at a church near the Colosseum. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo of Congo joined priests from across the globe behind the altar of a church in western…
It has been more than 60 days since Israel ordered a halt to all humanitarian aid entering Gaza — no food, fuel or even medicine. As the phone calls pour in, Muneer Alboursh, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry, is running out of answers. The longer Israel’s total siege of the enclave grinds on,…
