Catherine, the Princess of Wales, announced on Monday that she had completed chemotherapy for her cancer, lifting a dark cloud from the British royal family after an anxious period in which she and her father-in-law, King Charles III, had both been stricken with serious illness.

Speaking in a video, Catherine said, “As the summer comes to an end, I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have finally completed my chemotherapy treatment.”

“Doing what I can to stay cancer free is now my focus,” she continued. “Although I have finished chemotherapy, my path to healing and full recovery is long and I must continue to take each day as it comes.”

Catherine said she looked forward to returning to work, and will undertake a light schedule of public events for the rest of the year. She is expected to attend a ceremony honoring those killed in war at the Cenotaph monument in November, one of the most somber dates on the royal calendar.

Kensington Palace, where Catherine and her husband, Prince William, have their offices, has not confirmed the nature of Catherine’s cancer.

Speaking in a video taped last month in Norfolk, she described her ordeal since being hospitalized in January.

“The last nine months have been incredibly tough for us as a family,” Catherine said. “Life as you know it can change in an instant, and we have had to find a way to navigate the stormy waters and road unknown.”

This is a developing story.

The hearing was meant to decide a prison sentence for a convicted rapist, Peter Nygard, the former Canadian fashion mogul. But for a woman who had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Nygard, being one of his victims had long made her life a prison.

The trauma caused by the attack in the late 1980s, when she was 21, irreparably stunted her life, the woman told a Toronto courtroom during Mr. Nygard’s two-day sentencing hearing that began in July and was postponed until Monday.

It shattered her career as a clothing designer and television presenter, caused debilitating health problems and left lasting psychological wounds, she said. “I live now still in a veil of sadness,” said the woman, whose identity is protected by a publication ban. “It breaks my heart to reflect upon the derailment of my entire life.”

After listening to statements from victims and from Mr. Nygard’s defense, a judge sentenced Mr. Nygard to 11 years in prison for sexually assaulting four women, one of whom was a teenager at the time of the attack.

Because of the time he has spent in custody since his arrest, Mr. Nygard has about seven years remaining in his sentence, and will be eligible for parole in about two years.

“Peter Nygard is a sexual predator,” said Justice Robert Goldstein of the Superior Court of Ontario, delivering his sentence before a full courtroom. “He is also a Canadian success story gone wrong.”

Mr. Nygard, 83, was brought into court in a wheelchair, an outgrown beard replacing his usually clean-shaven appearance. He wore a large puffer jacket, with a makeshift paper visor fastened to the lip of the hood to shield his light-sensitive eyes.

A jury convicted him in November of four counts of sexual assault, effectively closing the first chapter in the saga of his criminal proceedings in Canada and the United States.

He is also facing trials for sex crimes in Montreal and Winnipeg, followed by an expected extradition to New York, where he has been charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other crimes. His next trial is scheduled to start in January in Montreal.

Prosecutors in the Toronto trial argued that between the 1980s and 2005, Mr. Nygard lured four women, who were 16 to 28 years old at the time, to a bedroom suite during tours of his company’s downtown headquarters. He was acquitted of a sexual assault charge involving a fifth woman.

“This rape has tainted my life in many subversive ways,” said another victim, an actress. She told the court that the attack unraveled her career, mental health and relationships. “I did not live up to my full potential,” she said.

The sentencing was the coda to the staggering downfall of the Finnish-born executive, often touting his rags to riches story as a self-made Canadian immigrant who built a multinational women’s clothing brand, Nygard International, from scratch.

During his rise, he was crowned the “polyester king” in the Canadian media because he popularized a variety of the fabric. But Mr. Nygard developed allergies to the kind of polyester used in his jail linens, his lawyer Gerri Wiebe, told the court in July.

Ms. Wiebe submitted 17 reference letters written by former business associates, lawyers, a pastor and girlfriends of Mr. Nygard who vouched for his character and philanthropic work in breast cancer, the disease that afflicted his mother and sister.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Nygard used his flashy lifestyle and fame to lure women to his headquarters and assault them. He wielded his influence and “manufactured the opportunity to take whatever he wanted from these women,” said Neville Golwalla, a prosecutor.

During the trial, Mr. Nygard testified in his own defense that he largely did not remember the women and that the attacks they accused him of were not compatible with his character or his typical behavior.

He was arrested in Winnipeg in December 2020 and has been in custody for almost four years, contributing to an overall decline in his health, according to his lawyers, who in court filings said that Mr. Nygard had lost 30 pounds, developed insomnia and was bedridden.

Mr. Nygard testified during the trial to being obsessed with health throughout his career and influencing people in his circle to do the same, even offering cash incentives to employees who quit drinking or smoking.

Concerns about his health — and Mr. Nygard’s claim that attending the sentencing in person rather than virtually would kill him — have contributed to slowing his legal proceedings.

Delays were also caused by Mr. Nygard’s twice replacing his legal team, after the lawyers requested to withdraw from the case over ethical concerns.

The reasons behind their requests are protected by client confidentiality rules, though Brian Greenspan, one of Canada’s best known defense lawyers, who represented Mr. Nygard in the Toronto trial, told the court that their relationship became adversarial.

Justice Goldstein appeared to lose patience with the sentencing delays. “There will also be no adjournments relating to Mr. Nygard’s health unless he is in a coma,” Justice Goldstein said at a June court appearance. He drew attention to the extra care that court staff have afforded him throughout the trial, including special meals and transportation to court from his infirmary unit bed at a Toronto jail.

“Mr. Nygard received privileges and consideration that no other person that I have ever dealt with has received,” Justice Goldstein said.

Russian forces have captured two villages in eastern Ukraine and are now pressing to encircle Ukrainian soldiers at two locations along the frontline, according to an analysis of the battlefield on Monday.

The two villages, Nevelske and Vodiane, were captured by Russian troops on Sunday, according to DeepState, a group of analysts mapping the battlefield. DeepState’s analysis is based on sources in the Ukrainian military and open-source data like satellite imagery and photos and video posted on social media.

Russian forces have been expanding the territory they control around a key objective in the region, the strategic city of Pokrovsk, which has been strengthened in recent days by Ukrainian reinforcements, the analysis shows.

Now, Russia appears to be trying to cut off Ukrainian forces with pincer movements in two areas — to the south of Pokrovsk and in a pocket of Ukrainian-held territory near the town of Vuhledar, another strategically important site.

Control of those areas would allow Russian forces to broaden their lines of approach toward Pokrovsk, a logistics and transit hub that has been a focal point of the war in recent months, experts say.

“They are trying to strengthen their flanks in this way” along the main axis of attack toward Pokrovsk, said Mykhailo Samus, deputy director at the Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies in Ukraine, an independent institution. “Their route to Pokrovsk depends on those flanks.”

The Ukrainian military and Russia have not commented on the status of the villages that DeepState reported had been captured on Sunday.

The last significant movement directly toward Pokrovsk came more than a week ago, with the capture of the town of Novohrodivka. The map produced by DeepState shows the town, southeast of Pokrovsk, to be in Russian hands, although the Ukrainian General Staff has yet to confirm its loss.

Russian forces advanced toward Pokrovsk last month and maintained a focus on capturing the city even after Ukraine launched a surprise incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. Battlefield maps from DeepState and the Finland-based Black Bird Group, which tracks developments in the conflict, indicate that the advance into Kursk stalled about a week ago.

The intense fighting that has taken place along the front has coincided with a deadly month for civilians in Ukraine, who have increasingly come under nightly attacks on cities by missiles and drones.

The United Nations reported that August was the second deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians in a year, with at least 184 killed and 856 injured.

Still, morale was lifted across the country by news of the surprise operation in the Kursk region. In that operation, Ukraine took numerous Russian prisoners of war, reportedly achieving parity in the number of prisoners of war held by Russia for the first time since the conflict began. Ukraine has claimed to have taken almost 600 Russian prisoners of war in the offensive, but those numbers have not been independently verified.

Some were swapped in a prisoner exchange last month. Russia and Ukraine exchanged 115 prisoners each in a trade in which the United Arab Emirates acted as an intermediary. Ukraine said that some of the prisoners it released had been captured in the Kursk region.

On Sunday, Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, said in a television interview that Russian prisoners would no longer be allowed to call their relatives back home, though they would be allowed to write to them. Mr. Lubinets said the rule change on phone usage was a response to Russian forces executing surrendering Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield.

Ukraine has said that Russia has barred Ukrainian prisoners from contacting their families from captivity.

A gunman killed three Israelis at a sensitive border crossing between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Sunday, according to the Israeli military.

The attack comes amid a surge of violence in the West Bank since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel prompted the war in Gaza, and at a delicate moment for the relationship between Israel and neighboring Jordan.

The gunman arrived at the Israeli-controlled part of the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan in a truck on Sunday and opened fire on Israeli security forces, the military said in a statement. The military did not identify the gunman, who was killed at the scene. The three victims were forklift operators who worked at the crossing, according to the Israel Airports Authority.

Jordan’s Interior Ministry said an initial investigation identified the gunman as Maher al-Jazi, a Jordanian citizen from the southern part of the desert kingdom. The early findings determined the gunman acted alone, the ministry said.

The crossing, near the West Bank city of Jericho, is the main pathway for most Palestinians in the occupied territory to travel abroad and for the transport of commercial goods between Jordan and the West Bank. It has also served as an entry point for some aid being delivered to the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel described the gunman as “an abhorrent terrorist” and extended his condolences to the families of the victims.

It was not immediately clear how the gunman managed to take a weapon into the Israeli-controlled part of the crossing. The Israel Airports Authority said in a statement that the Allenby Bridge was closed, as were two land crossings between Israel and Jordan.

The motive of the attacker was not immediately clear. Hamas — which has called on people in Jordan to escalate protests and violence against Israel — praised the attack but did not take credit for it.

The Interior Ministry said “relevant parties” were coordinating to repatriate the body of the attacker for burial in Jordan.

Jordan, whose population is heavily made up of people of Palestinian origin, has been the site of large protests over the war in Gaza since the fighting there began in October. But the country is a close U.S. ally that has a peace treaty with Israel, putting it in a tricky position as it navigates the fallout from the war.

Jordan recalled its ambassador to Israel in November and has repeatedly condemned Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. King Abdullah II of Jordan has been among the key figures pushing for a cease-fire in the enclave.

At the same time, the kingdom has maintained its delicate peace treaty with Israel and continues to coordinate with Israeli officials on matters like security and the economy. In April, Jordan helped intercept Iranian missiles and drones during tit-for-tat attacks between Iran and Israel — a move that Israeli officials welcomed and some Palestinians denounced.

The Allenby Bridge crossing has been the scene of earlier violence. In 2014, Israeli soldiers fatally shot a Jordanian judge of Palestinian origin at the crossing, heightening tensions between the neighboring nations.

Last year a Jordanian member of Parliament was charged in a Jordanian court with trying to smuggle weapons through the crossing into the West Bank, according to The Associated Press.

Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 after capturing it from Jordan during the Arab-Israeli war that year.

Violence there has risen sharply since the Hamas-led attack on Israel last October set off the war in Gaza. According to the United Nations, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 600 people in the West Bank since then. Some of those killed were claimed as members by militant groups in the occupied territory, but others appear to have been civilians.

The shooting at the crossing on Sunday came just days after Israel appeared to withdraw from the West Bank city of Jenin following a 10-day raid. The operation, which Israel’s military said was part of an effort to crack down on Palestinian armed groups and combat rising attacks against Israelis, left behind a trail of destruction.

The Israeli military said it had killed 14 militants during the operation, while the health ministry of the Palestinian Authority, which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, said 21 people had been killed.

Separately, Aysenur Eygi, an American-Turkish woman, was killed at a protest in the Nablus region of the West Bank on Friday. Her family on Saturday demanded that President Biden and other senior U.S. leaders order an independent investigation to “ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” saying that an Israeli inquiry was not adequate.

The Israeli military has said that soldiers “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity” who threw stones at Israeli forces. Witnesses on the scene did not deny that some protesters had hurled rocks at Israeli troops but said the clashes had finished by the time Ms. Eygi was shot.

Palestinian officials have said they hope Ms. Eygi’s death will make the U.S. government pay greater attention to the plight of Palestinians.

“Perhaps Biden and the United States will look and see what’s happening here — that there’s an oppressed people,” Ghassan Daghlas, the Nablus governor for the Palestinian Authority, said in an interview late on Saturday.

Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.

Elected last year on promises to accelerate a shift out of Russia’s orbit of influence and into the European Union, the government of Montenegro recently nominated a curious candidate as its ambassador in Moscow — a Russian citizen.

That ignited a spat between the government and the separately elected president, who was appalled at the idea of a Russian, a dual citizen of Montenegro who has been vocal in his support for the Kremlin, representing the country in Moscow.

“I invited him for an interview and quickly realized what was going on,” recalled Montenegro’s president, Jakov Milatovic, whose limited powers include the approval of ambassadorial appointments.

Deciding that the nominee for the Moscow job was out of step with Montenegro’s commitments as a member of NATO, which include supporting Ukraine’s military, he asked the government to find someone more suitable.

The tiff underlined a growing rift between Mr. Milatovic and the government of Prime Minister Milojko Spajic that has cast a shadow over Montenegro’s efforts to join the European Union and curb the influence of pro-Russian political forces.

Tugged for decades between East and West, the former Yugoslav republic — coveted by both NATO and Moscow for its deep bays on the Mediterranean — had seemed set on a clear path away from Russia after it joined the Atlantic alliance in 2017.

And when voters elected Mr. Milatovic and then gave the most votes in a legislative election to his allies in Europe Now, a party headed by Mr. Spajic, the two men were firmly united behind the goals of joining Europe and rooting out the corruption and crime that had long bedeviled the country.

Today, Mr. Milatovic has split from Europe Now. He accuses a coalition government — led by Mr. Spajic but dependent on support from Kremlin-friendly legislators — of sinking back into the patronage politics it promised to eradicate and bowing to the interests of Russia and Serbia at the expense of Montenegro’s links with Europe.

The rift highlights the difficulty of building a stable, Western-style democracy in a fragile Balkan country rent by rival ethnic, religious and geopolitical loyalties.

“It is definitely more difficult than everybody expected,” Mr. Milatovic said in an interview in Podgorica, the capital.

Mr. Spajic’s allies have accused Mr. Milatovic of undermining the elected government. He is “trampling his promises to be the president for all Montenegrins,” read a statement issued by Europe Now.

Asked for comment about Mr. Milatovic’s accusations, Mr. Spajic’s office said the prime minister was unavailable for interviews.

Addled by corruption, Montenegro under its previous leader, Milo Djukanovic, had become a haven for drug traffickers and cigarette smugglers.

Montenegro’s membership in NATO — which was fiercely opposed by many of the country’s ethnic Serbs, including several now in the government — closed the last significant gap in the Atlantic alliance’s control of the northern Mediterranean coastline. It also ended hopes long cherished by Moscow of gaining a foothold there for its military.

Montenegro’s continued membership in the alliance is not in doubt, but, according to the president, many of the promises made before last year’s elections are.

Clear evidence of that, he said, was a resolution passed by Parliament in July stating that a Nazi puppet state in neighboring Croatia during World War II committed genocide at its Jasenovac concentration camp. The bill in Montenegro was pushed by ethnic Serbs angered by a United Nations commemoration of a genocide by Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s.

“Nobody is denying what happened at Jasenovac,” the president said. But, he added, the resolution, had only served “the tiny party political interests of very few people” while enraging Croatia, which is a member of the European Union and thus able to stall Montenegro’s entry into the bloc.

The resolution was pushed through by the speaker of Parliament, Andrija Mandic, a Kremlin-friendly ethnic Serb politician who has taken on an influential role in the government.

In 2019, Mr. Mandic was convicted of working with Russian intelligence operatives on a botched 2016 coup attempt aimed at derailing Montenegro’s entry into NATO. In July, Mr. Mandic was acquitted by a higher court.

Croatia denounced the genocide-related resolution as “unacceptable, inappropriate and unnecessary” and out of line with Montenegro’s desire to join the European Union.

In a written response to questions, Mr. Mandic said the resolution had “received strong support” from the American ambassador and in no way obstructed Montenegro’s European aspirations, a view he blamed on “some ill-intentioned people from our country.” A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Podgorica said Mr. Mandic’s claim of American support was not true.

The dispute with Croatia overshadowed what, just a few weeks earlier, had been an important signal from Brussels that Montenegro was making progress. The European Union in June gave a thumbs-up to the country’s moves to align its judiciary and fundamental rights with European Union standards. This still left many more hurdles to cross before membership but was hailed by the United States Embassy in Podgorica as “a milestone” that “deserves celebration.”

But, to the dismay of Western diplomats, sniping has only intensified between Mr. Milatovic, an Oxford-educated economist, and Mr. Spajic, a former investment banker. Their previous alliance has been shattered by sharp differences over the inclusion in the government of prominent pro-Russian and pro-Serbia politicians and what the president sees as the government’s stacking of the public broadcaster, state-owned enterprises and other entities with political loyalists.

Patronage politics had saddled Montenegro with a bloated government, Mr. Milatovic said. Despite having only about 600,000 people, Montenegro, he added, now has 32 cabinet members, 54 state secretaries, or deputy ministers, and seven deputy prime ministers.

Mr. Milatovic also said Mr. Spajic had undermined trust by failing to explain truthfully his relationship with Do Kwon, the head of a failed crypto business that collapsed in 2022. Mr. Kwon was jailed last year in Montenegro, where he had fled.

A document filed in a New York court by the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of its case against Mr. Kwon’s company, lists Mr. Spajic as an early investor in the business. In an interview last year, Mr. Spajic denied having any interest in Mr. Kwon’s venture, saying he had only invested money with him on behalf of an investment fund he was working for in Singapore.

Montenegro’s political problems, and the difficulties of reducing Russian influence, became clear after an election in June 2023. Europe Now finished first, but performed worse than expected following revelations of ties between Mr. Spajic and Mr. Kwon.

To forge a parliamentary majority, Europe Now reached out to pro-Russian legislators, including Mr. Mandic and his allies.

Mr. Mandic has curbed his public enthusiasm for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and, in return for entering Mr. Spajic’s government, signed off on a coalition agreement pledging support for NATO membership and “accelerated” entry into the European Union.

His actions since, however, have undermined those pledges, notably the resolution on Croatia, and critics say he is pulling the strings of government.

“The real prime minister of Montenegro now is Mandic, not Spajic,” said Dritan Abazovic, a former prime minister who led an anti-corruption effort.

Mr. Spajic “is not a friend of Putin,” Mr. Abazovic said, “but he is really dependent” on Mr. Mandic and his allies to stay on as prime minister.

Asked about this, Mr. Mandic said Montenegro had “entered a phase of dialogue and compromise, and this has proved very beneficial for our entire society.”

Mr. Milatovic said he was “shocked” by Mr. Mandic’s influence.

“Europe Now is the driving force of the parliamentary majority in terms of numbers, but in terms of the intellectual guidance and rhetoric,” he said, “it seems that somebody else is behind the wheel.”

Alisa Dogramadzieva contributed reporting.

Banners of Pope Francis had been unfurled across Dili, the capital of East Timor, its streets scrubbed and its walls freshly painted. Hundreds of thousands of people were expected to try to catch a glimpse of the man, who arrived on Monday. But in some corners of the city, the excitement had turned into misery.

Joana Fraga Ximenes stared at rubble in the district of Bidau that had been her home and a street stall, from which she sold sundries. Earlier this year, she said, the authorities had given her three days to move because the pope was going to be driven down her street. Eventually, they sent bulldozers.

“Why do we have to hide the poverty?” Ms. Ximenes, 42, said over the weekend. “This is reality. The pope is not coming to see good things in Timor-Leste. The pope is here to see our real lives.”

Francis’s two-day visit, the third stop on his Asia-Pacific tour, is a momentous occasion for East Timor, or Timor-Leste as it is known in Portuguese, one of two official languages. Nearly all of the 1.3 million people here are Catholic. The church played an important part in East Timor’s struggle for independence, but that history has been stained by its clergy abuse scandal. One of the heroes of the independence cause, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, has been accused of sexually abusing children decades ago.

In a speech to government officials and civil society on Monday night, Francis said, “We are called to do everything possible to prevent every kind of abuse and guarantee a healthy and peaceful childhood for all young people.” He did not mention Bishop Belo or the church’s role in other abuse scandals.

East Timor is one of the world’s youngest nations — it became a sovereign state in 2002, after decades of occupation by Indonesia — and one of its poorest. More than two-fifths of its people live in poverty, and a large majority depend on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods. This is why critics are sharply questioning the stagecraft involved in welcoming the pope.

Hundreds of people like Ms. Ximenes have been forcibly evicted, residents and activists said, to ensure that there are fewer eyesores along the pontiff’s route. The government is spending $12 million on the visit, three times as much as it spends per year on efforts to increase food production. (The official currency is the U.S. dollar.)

“I don’t think the pope himself will agree with this budget,” said Josh Trindade, a former government adviser.

President Jose Ramos-Horta denied that the government was evicting people because of the papal visit. He said those people were squatters and unauthorized street vendors.

“They were the ones who were asked to leave repeatedly. Many left, and there was compensation always,” he said in an interview.

But an April 4 letter from the Ministry of Public Works to communities like Ms. Ximenes’s described the matter as urgent because of the pope’s impending visit.

“When he comes and visits a country, he wants to see the struggles, but they are trying to hide the faces of the people,” said Pedrito Vieira, the national coordinator of the Land Network, a human rights group.

Marquita Catarina da Silva, 45, said she had received no compensation after her shop was demolished in Bidau. “I told them: ‘The pope is not visiting this place, he’s going to the stadium. Why are you demolishing it?’”

A Tainted Hero

Clergy abuse has also cast a shadow over the pope’s visit. Last week, the Timor-Leste NGO Forum, an umbrella organization of 400 nonprofit and civil society groups, wrote an open letter to Francis, asking him to “encourage the leaders and the people of Timor-Leste to take more effective measures to prevent sexual abuse.”

One prominent offender was Richard Daschbach, an American missionary in East Timor who admitted abusing children for decades. He was defrocked by the Vatican and, in 2021, convicted and sentenced in East Timor to 12 years in prison.

But the most infamous case here involves Bishop Belo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 along with Mr. Ramos-Horta for trying to peacefully resolve the conflict with Indonesia. The Nobel committee said the bishop had risked his life to protect Timorese people.

In 2022, the Vatican acknowledged that it had, in 2020, imposed “disciplinary restrictions” on Bishop Belo, who had been forbidden to have “contact with minors.” That public admission was made a day after a Dutch magazine, De Groene Amsterdammer, published an explicit account of abuse by two of the bishop’s alleged victims.

The church said it had investigated allegations that Bishop Belo had raped and abused teenage boys decades ago in East Timor. It is unclear where the bishop is.

Francis has apologized repeatedly for the church’s global sex abuse scandal and ordered clergy to report allegations of sexual abuse. Last year, he told The Associated Press that the allegations against Bishop Belo had to be out in the open, but that the church had a different way of handling matters like these in the past.

Asked whether he thought the pope should talk about Bishop Belo during his visit, Mr. Ramos-Horta said the matter had “already been addressed years ago by the Vatican.” He said any restitution had already been made between the church and the victims, who he said did not want to bring their cases to court.

“Bishop Belo is still very much revered by the majority of the people because of his role in the past, a lot of courage in sheltering people, protecting people,” Mr. Ramos-Horta said.

In the wake of the news about Bishop Belo, many Timorese people were angry — but the fury was directed at the alleged victims. A journalist who tried to pursue the allegations received death threats, according to Mr. Trindade, the former government adviser.

“When a child is raped in a devoutly Catholic country, and the predator is both a bishop and national hero, survivors will feel especially helpless and intimidated into staying silent,” Anne Barrett Doyle, a co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks allegations of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergy worldwide, said in a statement.

A Dominant Church

Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, just as it became free of colonial rule by Portugal. During the decades of Indonesian occupation, 200,000 people are estimated to have died from hunger, disease and political violence. The church offered protection to many people who were on the run. That period catalyzed a surge in conversions to Catholicism.

The last time East Timor hosted a pontiff was in 1989, when Pope John Paul II arrived in the occupied territory and admonished Indonesia to respect human rights there. Many Timorese believe his visit helped put their country in the international spotlight and was a pivotal moment in their quest for independence.

Today, the church still plays an outsized role in society and politics. The government budget includes millions of dollars for the country’s three Catholic dioceses. Household disputes are typically resolved first in the church.

On Sunday, adults and children lined the streets of Dili rehearsing a welcome song for Francis. Government workers were still putting the final touches on decorative structures. A horde of people surrounded a pickup truck selling Francis memorabilia.

“It’s a blessing for the pope to visit Timor-Leste,” said Fernanda de Jesus, 39, who bought a hat with a picture of Francis emblazoned on it. “Although this is the second pope visit, we never felt it as an independent country. This time, it is different.”

Hitu Carvalho de Jesus contributed reporting.

About 150 years ago, Swedish researchers dug up dozens of human skulls and remains from graveyards across Finland and took them to Sweden to study their racial characteristics as part of an effort that they said was to understand how the Nordic region had been populated.

On Sunday, 42 of those skulls were returned and reinterred in Palkane, a small community in Finland about 80 miles northwest of Helsinki, the capital, where residents hailed their homecoming as the righting of a historical wrong.

“They are our own people, even if they lived hundreds of years ago,” Pauliina Pikka, a local official, said in an interview before the ceremony. “They deserve, now, to come back here. They deserve to get rest.”

The skulls were taken in the summer of 1873 by three researchers working for the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, who dug up graves in four communities in Finland. They returned to Sweden with human remains from the exhumations and measured and studied them. For decades until 2015, human remains taken by researchers were housed in various Swedish institutions before being returned to Karolinska.

Since then, the university has been researching the origins of some of the remains and repatriating them.

On Sunday, under clear blue skies and balmy temperatures, residents of Palkane gathered to watch the return of the skulls to the church — which has been in ruins for centuries — from which they had been taken in 1873.

As a military band played, the skulls arrived in a horse-drawn carriage driven by people in old-fashioned clothing. Four men carried each coffin before lowering it into a grave. Some community members cast dirt and sand over the graves.

“People feel that they are participating in something meaningful,” said Marketta Pyysalo, the cultural coordinator for Palkane. “This is a handshake with the past.”

Most of the skulls brought back to Palkane were probably buried between the 1500s and the 1800s, said Ulla Moilanen, an archaeologist at the University of Turku. But their identities remain unknown, and she hopes to analyze DNA samples she had taken from the skulls to find out more about them.

“When we find out more about these people, their lives, they really become part of history, not just as skulls, but as human beings,” she said.

Hanna-Liisa Anttila, 90, whose family is from elsewhere in Finland and who came to the ceremony dressed in a national costume, said it was possible the ancestors of her husband, who is from Palkane, might be among the taken skulls.

She said the remains’ removal was a “desecration” of the graves.

The Swedish researchers who exhumed the graves wondered whether Finns were a different race from Swedes, noting that the Finnish language is more closely related to Estonian and Hungarian than Swedish, and believed that an examination of the skulls would answer their questions.

For many people in Finland, those questions about whether they are a different race sounded a lot like an effort to prove that they were an inferior one.

“They kind of wanted to put us down and thought maybe that they could do whatever they like with our skulls and remains,” Ms. Pikka said, “that those people weren’t important.”

Many said the research on the Finnish skulls made them think of eugenics, which was used to justify atrocities including the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, segregation in the United States and the forced sterilization of people in Sweden and Finland and other Nordic nations, and countries including the United States.

“Research developed down this rabbit hole of physical measurements to try to prove the superiority of one race over another,” said Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, a professor of Scandinavian and comparative literature at University College London.

“It had a huge international following,” added Dr. Stougaard-Nielsen, who chaired a 2021 seminar titled “The Legacy of Eugenics in Scandinavia.”

In 1921, Sweden’s Parliament established the State Institute for Racial Biology, where scientists tried to prove differences among races and track what they saw as the “degeneration” of Sweden’s gene pool. Researchers also performed medical experiments on the Sami, who are indigenous to the region, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

In 2019, the Karolinska Institute apologized “unreservedly” for the 1873 grave exhumations, which were conducted by Gustaf Retzius, a leader in the field of “racial science,” and his colleagues. (An activist group had requested the repatriation a year earlier.)

Today, the institute said, the exhumation methods would be “unethical or illegal.”

“It wasn’t a crime then, because there was no real jurisdiction,” said Maria Josephson, a historian of science and medicine at Karolinska who works on archives and repatriations.

But, she said, “I think they also knew when they did it that they were in the absolute outskirts of what was a reasonable and morally OK thing to do.”

For now, Palkane residents are grateful that their ancestors are, finally, allowed to rest again.

“People are pleased to see their bodies made whole again,” said Jari Kemppainen, the local vicar before the ceremony, “in their home soil and in their home cemetery.”