Like many of the millions of tourists who visit Paris, Nick and Suzie Trivisonno, of Charlotte, N.C., would usually catch at least a glimpse of Notre-Dame on their frequent visits to town. Often, the Trivisonnos, who are Catholics, would go to the cathedral and pray — for family, friends and peace.

On Saturday, they were back in Paris to offer a prayer for Notre-Dame itself.

The centuries-old cathedral, badly damaged by fire in April 2019, reopened on Saturday with an official ceremony, after a restoration carried out by roughly 2,000 workers. They labored on what President Emmanuel Macron of France has called “the most beautiful construction site of the century,” in an effort funded with about $900 million in donations from around the world. The Trivisonnos were among those who donated.

They were moved to contribute after watching, horrified, as a live video feed showed the mainstay of European history, culture and faith engulfed in flames and teetering on the brink of oblivion.​

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trivisonno, 77, and Mrs. Trivisonno, 72, were taking coffee and croissants on the ground floor of the Hotel Regina Louvre on the right bank of the Seine. They were still buzzing from the night before, when they had attended a special meal for donors at the Tour d’Argent, the fine-dining establishment in the Fifth Arrondissement that dates to the 16th century. They were served plates of poached lobster and duck. But the main course was the view of Notre-Dame through the big windows.

The cathedral is still partly clad in spindly scaffolding; the restoration job will not be fully done for years. But there, dramatically lit against the night sky, the cathedral seemed to announce to the donors, and the world, that it had recovered.

“I don’t think there was a closed mouth,” Mrs. Trivisonno said. “The jaws were dropping.”

After the French, Americans were the second-largest donors to the Notre-Dame project, offering an estimated $62 million to the cause, said Michel Picaud, president of Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris, a nonprofit group that helped lead the international fund-raising push. Mr. Picaud said some 45,000 American donors gave to the charity alone, with many other Americans donating to similar groups.

That generosity was a testament to the enduring hold that France has on American hearts. Some people chipped in a few dollars. Others gave millions, including the Starr Foundation, of New York, and the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Foundation, of West Palm Beach, Fla.

In an interview, the Trivisonnos declined to disclose exactly how much they contributed. But on the website of the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris, Mr. Trivisonno noted that they gave enough to be recognized at the “Quasimodo’s Circle” level, which means a gift of at least $10,000.

“It’s always held a very special place in our hearts,” Mrs. Trivisonno said. “It’s been kind of like a cornerstone for everything that’s important to us.”

The outpouring of American largess for Notre-Dame is part of a centuries-old tradition of mutual aid between the two countries that has survived many famous quarrels. It began with Louis XVI’s contributions to the American Revolution. In the 20th century, the United States pumped billions into France to help rebuild the country after World War II.

Neither gift was purely altruistic. Louis XVI opened his purse to the American rebels to weaken the British, France’s great 18th-century rival, while the Americans, according to a Central Intelligence Agency memo made public in 2004, hoped that huge cash injections into France in the latter half of the 1940s would help quell intense postwar labor unrest fueled by French communists, and encourage the idea of “salvation beyond revolution.”

The Trivisonnos’ altruism was far less complicated. Neither has blood ties to France. They simply fell in love with the place.

He grew up lower-middle class in Brooklyn. She grew up on a farm in New Mexico. He first saw Notre-Dame in 1964, after talking his parents into letting him come on a trip to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. She first saw Notre-Dame a few years later, when her parents, who had been working for the U.S. Foreign Service in Uttar Pradesh, India, stopped in the French capital on their way home.

They were married in 2000, and over the years, France continued to beckon. They are not alone. With 100 million international tourist arrivals last year alone, France, according to United Nations figures, is the most visited country in the world. The United States sends its backpackers, gourmands, art lovers, “Emily in Paris” fans and a group that travel planners often refer to as HNWIs, or high-net-worth individuals.

The Trivisonnos, who are retired, fall into the latter group. Mr. Trivisonno made his living in finance, and as a chairman and chief executive of a provider of marketing information for consumer packaged goods companies. She was a classical clarinetist by training, but also had a long career in the business world.

Both of them, in recent years, have fallen hard for the pleasures of Burgundy, both the region and the prized (and often expensive) wine. Both are members of the Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the worldwide organization of devoted Burgundy fans, and many of their recent trips to France have been to the storied region. There, on the small farms and in the homes of winemakers, Mrs. Trivisonno said, their conversations often run on gestures and bonhomie when their limited French runs out.

“We’ve become fluent in French,” Mrs. Trivisonno said, with a chuckle. “We just can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

Mr. Trivisonno, who formerly served in the U.S. Army Reserve, noted that the bodies of thousands of U.S. soldiers are buried in French soil. Such, he said, are the strong and tangible roots of the friendship.

On April 15, 2019, the Trivisonnos were on a plane watching the Masters golf tournament on their cellphones when the coverage was interrupted by the footage of Notre-Dame on fire. It gutted them. Later, Mr. Trivisonno said, they received a solicitation in the mail that asked them to donate to the rebuilding effort.

After their contribution, they were invited, with other U.S. donors, to dine at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington. Mr. Trivisonno eventually became a board member of the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris group.

At breakfast on Saturday, they said they were waiting for further instructions for attending the evening’s reopening ceremony, to which they had also been invited. The French organizers seemed to be doing some last-minute improvising around matters of protocol and timing, due to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s late announcement that he planned to attend, and a weather forecast that was calling for rain.

As a young man, Mr. Trivisonno had studied for a career in the priesthood before moving into the secular world of business. He said that with Mr. Trump’s planned attendance, the event on Saturday seemed to have taken on more of a political than a spiritual tone.

He said he was more excited about the inaugural Mass on Sunday morning. “The dignitaries are going to be gone,” he said. “Trump is going to be gone. We’re going to get to be parishioners.”

Early in Russia’s war against Ukraine, Mykola Kulichenko endured an ordeal. He was abducted as a civilian, survived a Russian execution attempt by a stroke of luck and then climbed out of his own grave by pushing through the dirt heaped above him.

His brothers died beside him, but Mr. Kulichenko had turned his head at the last moment and a bullet passed through his cheek, leaving a hole but not causing life-threatening wounds.

His case elicited widespread shock and sympathy in Ukraine — but it did not shield him from Ukraine’s mobilization system. He received a draft summons in October.

Mr. Kulichenko has used his second lease on life to care for his elderly father and return to raising ducks and chickens on a farm in northern Ukraine. But he said he still has trouble sleeping, as he flashes back to being shot and buried alive then finding his way home with his body covered in bruises and his cheek bleeding and tremendously swollen.

Given the trauma of his ordeal, he doesn’t think he should be drafted into the army. “It was very hard to climb out of my grave,” he said.

“What would it change if I go” to the trenches now, he said, claiming that his presence would have no impact on the fighting. “I would take my life to the front and leave it there, for nothing.”

The summons of Mr. Kulichenko, who is 35, underscores the unpredictable and lopsided mobilization system in Ukraine that leans heavily on recruiting older men.

The policies have drawn criticism from the Biden administration, which has said Ukraine should expand its draft to younger men aged 18 to 25, who are now exempt, to defend hundreds of miles of front line. The need for soldiers is now more acute than the need for weapons, American officials have said.

Ukrainian officials say they cannot draft men in their late teens and early 20s without risking demographic shortfalls in the future, and they have pushed back against the American criticism.

“Ukraine cannot be expected to compensate for delays in logistics or hesitation in support with the youth of our men,” Dmytro Lytvyn, a communications adviser to the president, wrote recently in a post on X. It was another swipe at the pace of Western weapons support, which Ukraine views as tepid and overly cautious.

Mr. Kulichenko’s experience also points to the difficulty Ukraine has had in calibrating the rules governing draft exemptions. He became eligible for recruitment after rule changes last spring eliminated some exemptions for hardship, including for those caring for ailing relatives.

Like a game of Whac-a-Mole, each change knocks out some who enjoyed exemptions while adding others who had not — with civilians left to argue over which hardship was more deserving.

The changes to the law were intended to crack down on draft dodgers who abused the mobilization system by claiming hardship when little actually existed, a practice abetted by corruption in the draft operation.

With the loopholes supposedly plugged, recruitment officials stepped up the draft through the summer. Ukraine does not disclose figures, but military analysts have said an initially promising flow of recruits for the army has since tapered off. Fewer men are entering basic training, and many of them are old or in poor health, military commanders say.

Ukraine plans to draft an additional 160,000 men in the “near future,” the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksandr Lytvynenko told Parliament late last month. This number would restore units to 85 percent of their full strength, he said.

But reaching deeper into the pool of older men risks filling the ranks with less motivated and healthy soldiers. Even now, none of the brigades in combat are fully staffed, said Maj. Maksym Zhorin, a commander in the 3rd Assault Brigade. Of the new soldiers turning up, he said, “the quality of personnel has significantly deteriorated recently.”

Ukraine, meanwhile, is falling back at two locations on the front inside the country, in the eastern Donbas region and near the town of Kupiansk in northeastern Ukraine, and it has lost about half of the territory captured in an incursion into the Kursk region of Russia in August.

“We are truly on the verge of a military catastrophe,” Yevhen Dykyi, a military veteran and commentator on the war for Ukrainian media, told radio NV. It is not because of mistakes by the army, he said, but because of the failure to draft enough soldiers.

But aggressive mobilization efforts, mostly aimed at older men in rural areas, have led to a backlash in society. Women have blocked roads to prevent recruitment officials from searching for draft dodgers in some western Ukrainian villages.

Men have slipped across the borders to Europe to avoid the draft, sometimes swimming across rivers. Others simply remain at home, lest they get picked up at a checkpoint or other location.

Parliament has been considering a partial swing of the pendulum back — introducing several overhauls to reduce draft evasion and desertion by restoring exemptions and granting draftees more choice in how they serve. Men are now sometimes allowed to choose or change the units in which they serve, for example.

An amendment passed in Parliament in a first reading on Nov. 20 would grant deferments to civilians whom the Russians had arrested earlier in the war and to those who lost close relatives in the fighting.

If signed into law, Mr. Kulichenko could qualify on both points, though under current rules he is still eligible for the draft.

The issue of whether war injuries should merit an exemption from future service has been a divisive one in Ukraine. Men have returned to serve after suffering more grievous injuries than Mr. Kulichenko. Some have voluntarily returned to service even after their legs or arms were amputated. Such dedication is praised by Ukrainians who view their lives and homes depending on holding back Russian soldiers.

Russians arrested Mr. Kulichenko and his two brothers in March 2022 in their hometown, Dovzhyk, north of Kyiv. The dynamic in the war was the opposite of today — the Russians were retreating from northern Ukraine. The brothers were suspected of planting or helping to plant a roadside bomb that killed several Russian officers, Mr. Kulichenko said. He denied any role in the incident.

The brothers were held for three days in an abandoned sawmill where they were interrogated and severely beaten. With the Ukrainian Army approaching, Mr. Kulichenko said, the Russians decided to shoot the brothers to eliminate evidence of the torture. His ordeal was reported at the time by The Wall Street Journal and later taken up in a war crimes prosecution in Ukraine, in which Russian soldiers were tried in absentia.

Russians loaded the brothers in a truck, drove them into the forest, lined them up beside the grave and opened fire. A bullet passed through Mr. Kulichenko’s cheek and he fell to the ground. He lay still as the soldiers piled on dirt, then clambered out after they left.

The draft summons arrived in October. He said he understands the army “lacks people and that is why they take everyone.”

He has not responded to the letter by appearing at a draft board, and said he does not intend to. He does not want to fight in the war, given what happened to him, he said.

“I didn’t get over it,” he said.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

South Korea’s government was paralyzed Sunday, mired in a new constitutional crisis after President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea clung to his office, but his own party’s leader suggested that he had already been ousted from power.

Mr. Yoon has barely been seen in public since his ill-fated decision last week to declare martial law. Meanwhile, Han Dong-hoon, the chairman of Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party, or P.P.P., has presented himself as the government’s decision maker and said the president is no longer running the country.

The trouble is that South Korea’s Constitution doesn’t allow for anyone to replace the president unless he resigns or is impeached.

Mr. Yoon’s office did not comment on Mr. Han’s statement. But Mr. Yoon “has not and by law, cannot, cede power to anyone” except through resignation, impeachment or election, said a senior government source familiar with the discussions inside Mr. Yoon’s office. Mr. Yoon exercised his role as president on Sunday by accepting the resignation of his home minister, Lee Sang-min.

Opposition groups immediately complained that Mr. Han was overreaching: trying to use the power vacuum created by Mr. Yoon’s ill-fated imposition of martial law and the ensuing turmoil to establish himself as the top leader in the governing camp.

“We have a situation where the president cannot make decisions, he cannot give guidelines, he cannot give orders,” said Kang Won-taek, a professor of political science at Seoul National University. “Although we have a president, we are in a state of anarchy.”

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For years after coming out as transgender, Ling’er, an aspiring influencer in eastern China, struggled from heartbreak to heartbreak. Her family refused to accept her. When she tried to find an interim job to support herself, employers would not hire her.

And when her parents sent her to a hospital to try to change her gender identity, she was held there for three months, despite her repeated protests. She was forced to undergo treatment that included multiple rounds of electroshock therapy.

So when she later sued the hospital for subjecting her to unnecessary and unwanted treatment, she was not optimistic. Then the seemingly unthinkable happened: A court accepted her complaint, in China’s first known lawsuit over so-called conversion therapy involving a transgender person. And the hospital agreed in October to pay her a sizable settlement.

“To me, this is a win. With this money, I can start my new life, and start my own business,” said Ling’er, 28. “I can live my own life.”

The case is a rare bright spot in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in China. Ling’er’s lawsuit was covered sympathetically by some mainstream Chinese news outlets, even as overall coverage of L.G.B.T.Q. issues has diminished. That her lawsuit was accepted at all was a hard-won victory, her supporters said, in a country with no laws protecting L.G.B.T.Q. people.

As China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has overseen a crackdown on civil society, many L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups have been forced to shut down, and Pride celebrations have been canceled. Nationalist influencers have attacked L.G.B.T.Q. activism as a hostile foreign force. People have been punished for displaying rainbow flags.

It is unclear whether the payout to Ling’er will have any effect on preventing future cases of conversion therapy, a practice that has been widely discredited by medical experts. The hospital pressed for the exact terms of the settlement to be confidential, and it has not acknowledged wrongdoing.

Ling’er was initially reluctant even to file the lawsuit. “Sexual minorities in China have no guarantees,” she said. “How could you possibly protect your rights?”

She was ultimately convinced by a group of L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, in China and overseas, with whom she had connected online and who helped her find lawyers. It was a support network that she could not have imagined finding in her rural, mountainous hometown in China’s Hebei Province.

Ling’er, who is using a chosen name, had known since childhood that she preferred spending time with girls, and she realized while studying at a vocational school that she was transgender. She eventually began taking estrogen and dressing in women’s clothing. But when she came out to her parents in 2021, during a visit home, they said she was disgracing their family.

In 2022, Ling’er agreed to her parents’ requests to see a psychiatrist at a hospital in the nearby city of Qinhuangdao, hoping it would appease them.

She explained to doctors at Qinhuangdao Jiulongshan Hospital that she did not think there was anything wrong with her gender identity, and that it was her parents who could not accept her. She acknowledged feeling anxious and depressed, but not to a serious extent. Hospital staff noted that she seemed clearheaded and spoke at a normal pace, medical and legal records show.

Even so, she was diagnosed with anxiety and “ego-dystonic sexual orientation.” The term, which has generally referred to people who are unhappy with their sexual orientation, was dropped from the World Health Organization’s official list of medical conditions in 2019, due to concerns that it contributed to discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people and had been used as justification for conversion therapy.

Over Ling’er’s protests, her mother had her involuntarily hospitalized.

She remained in hospital for 97 days, despite repeatedly pleading to leave. She was given psychiatric medication and subjected to seven rounds of modified electroconvulsive therapy.

The doctors did not explicitly say that the electric shocks were intended to change her gender identity, Ling’er said, but they urged her to cut her hair short and wear men’s clothing, and they made clear that they believed her transgender identity was wrong.

“The doctors didn’t listen to anything I said,” she said. “They thought I was sick, so I was sick.”

Medical and private institutions offering “conversion therapy” are common in China, according to activists, because the stigma against transgender people is widespread.

The Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 2001, but it retained the ego-dystonic diagnosis, and it also continues to classify transgender individuals as having a mental illness. People are allowed to change their legal genders, but only if they undergo gender-affirming surgery and notify their families.

In two landmark lawsuits — one concluded in 2014 and another in 2017 — judges ordered clinics to compensate the plaintiffs, gay men who had been subjected to conversion therapy, noting that their rights had been violated. But previous court rulings are not binding precedents in Chinese law.

The authorities’ continued classification of transgender people as mentally ill also makes it harder to build a legal case, said Chen Junmi, an L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist in the United States who helped Ling’er bring her lawsuit.

When Ling’er was finally released from the hospital, she returned home to find that her parents had thrown away her clothes and makeup. At first, she tried to live as a man. But in September last year, she decided to cut off her family and leave home.

For months, she drifted from city to city. She was turned away when she tried to find work as a waitress or caterer and at times slept on the street. Seeking solace, she connected with L.G.B.T.Q. communities online, including Mx. Chen. In July, she sued the hospital. (Her lawyers also suggested suing her parents, but Ling’er said she could not bring herself to do that.)

The hospital denied any wrongdoing, arguing that Chinese law allows people with mental disorders to be hospitalized against their will with their families’ consent, if they cannot consent on their own. The hospital could not be reached for comment.

The hospital initially offered only one-quarter of the 80,000 yuan, or $11,000, that Ling’er had sought. But after months of negotiations, they reached a settlement that Ling’er said would allow her to start her own shop or street food stall, and to begin saving for gender-affirming surgery. She is now renting an apartment in the city of Tianjin, and she dreams of becoming an entertainer, playing instruments or chatting with viewers on livestream apps.

Ling’er said she thought she had won a favorable outcome in part because the judge overseeing the negotiations had been sympathetic to her.

“Her attitude toward me was, ‘You are you, no one can change you,’” Ling’er said. “If all Chinese parents could be like that, our community’s problems could be resolved very easily.”

Mx. Chen, the activist, said that Chinese society has become more accepting of L.G.B.T.Q. people. That has created room to keep pushing for change, even if explicit activism has largely been shut down.

“I think the government is learning too,” Mx. Chen said.

Ling’er said she hoped to see legal protections for, and education about, diverse gender identities.

“My own strength is far from enough,” she said. “We need all sisters to stand up and work together to improve the situation of transgender people in China.”

Siyi Zhao contributed research.