Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said on Monday that he would step down in the coming months, bowing to an angry electorate at a time of uncertain economic prospects and political infighting.

The announcement, which came amid a gridlocked Parliament, left Canada in political flux just as the incoming Trump administration has vowed to impose punishing tariffs on Canadian imports.

“It’s time for a reset,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters outside his residence on a frigid morning in Ottawa, the capital. Mr. Trudeau said that he had suspended Parliament until March 24 and that he would stay on as Liberal Party leader and prime minister until his replacement had been chosen through a nationwide party election.

“I truly feel that removing the contention around my own continued leadership is an opportunity to bring the temperature down,” he said.

Mr. Trudeau, 53, who rose to power nearly a decade ago and quickly became seen as a progressive icon, is the latest leader in the West to be swept aside by a mood of anti-incumbency, a backlash against immigration and anger at the lingering effects of a spike in inflation during the coronavirus pandemic. Although inflation in Canada has receded to below 2 percent, unemployment remains high, at above 6 percent.

General elections must be held by October, a timetable that Mr. Trudeau referred to on Monday.

“It’s become obvious to me with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” he said.

Mr. Trudeau has faced weeks of mounting pressure from inside his party’s ranks.

In December, Mr. Trudeau’s deputy prime minister and finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, abruptly stepped down, issuing a stinging rebuke of his leadership and stewardship of the country. Ms. Freeland, who had been a close ally of the prime minister, accused Mr. Trudeau of having engaged in “costly political gimmicks” and being ill-prepared to face the challenge posed by President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Her resignation incited a growing chorus of voices from Liberal parliamentarians asking him to step aside for the sake of the party, and let someone else lead the party in general elections.

Mr. Trudeau also had been under pressure from a resurgent Conservative Party, which in recent surveys has drawn a commanding double-digit lead over the Liberal Party. The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, posted a video on social media on Monday promoting an alternate vision of governing: “ax the tax,” referring to Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax, “build the homes,” “fix the budget” and “stop the crime.”

The upheaval comes as Canada is debating how best to deal with Mr. Trump’s pledge to impose tariffs that would upend a trade agreement among Canada, the United States and Mexico. (Mr. Trump has also threatened tariffs on Mexico and says he wants both countries to address the flow of drugs and undocumented migrants into the United States.)

Tariffs would be potentially ruinous for Canada’s economy, which is heavily dependent on exports, particularly of oil and automobiles. The United States and Canada are each other’s biggest trading partners.

Mr. Trudeau visited Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, in late November, and his government had been in talks to address the president-elect’s concerns about border security in hopes that he would reconsider his tariff threat.

The talks do not appear to have been fruitful. In early December, Mr. Trump mocked Mr. Trudeau in a social media post, describing the Canadian prime minister as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”

On Monday Mr. Trump responded to Mr. Trudeau’s resignation by again suggesting that Canada should become America’s “51st state,” saying on social media that if Canada merged with the U.S., taxes would decrease and there would be no tariffs.

Among possible replacements for Mr. Trudeau are Ms. Freeland, the former deputy prime minister and finance minister; Dominic LeBlanc, who became finance minister when Ms. Freeland resigned; Mélanie Joly, Canada’s top diplomat since 2021; and Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, who also led the Bank of England.

Mr. Trudeau, whose government has been hamstrung by its lack of a majority in Parliament, said on Monday that the legislative body had been “totally seized by obstruction, and filibustering and a total lack of productivity.”

In his comments in French, he painted an even starker picture of a Parliament that “no longer functions.”

The suspension of Parliament, a process known as prorogation, will give his party time to pick a new leader, which Mr. Trudeau said would be through a “robust, nationwide, competitive process.” A new and perhaps more popular leader could put the Liberals on firmer footing in the upcoming national election.

Suspending Parliament wipes out all pending legislation but does not affect the government’s day-to-day operations.

Mr. Trudeau spent a decade building a political brand around being a feminist, an environmentalist and an advocate for refugees and Indigenous people, pursuing the same message of change and hope as Barack Obama. But analysts say Mr. Trudeau’s brand, which appears antithetical to Mr. Trump’s, is no longer working for him.

“He caught a wave on his way in, and when you catch a wave, it can lift you up,” Darrell Bricker, a seasoned pollster and chief executive of Ipsos Public Affairs, said. “But on the other side, if you don’t get off, it will ground you.”

An Ipsos poll published in late December found that the Liberals trailed the Conservatives by 25 percentage points.

Although the next election must be held by October, a vote could be called or forced earlier.

The Liberal government under a new prime minister could be short-lived. And shortly after the new session begins, the Liberal government is likely to face a vote of confidence. It would likely lose such a vote, as it commands only a minority of the seats in Parliament and it has lost the support of all other parties. That would prompt a federal election.

The prime minister also has the power to dissolve Parliament at any time, which would also prompt an election.

Eliana Passentin delights in her house, which sits nearly 3,000 feet above sea level in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, with a view from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast. The dining room looks out over ancient Shiloh, the Israelites’ first capital in ancient times.

But Ms. Passentin would feel even better if the area was annexed by Israel.

Some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staffing choices have raised hopes among settlers that that could happen. Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s contentious choice for defense secretary, went to ancient Shiloh for an episode of his “Battle in the Holy Land” series on Fox Nation. Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick as the next ambassador to Jerusalem, has visited several times over the years and has argued that all of the West Bank belongs to Israel.

Nearly half a million settlers and roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. The Palestinians, and much of the world, have long envisioned the territory as part of a future independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, and consider the Jewish settlements to be illegal. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza, and with the prospect of a more sympathetic administration in Washington, settler leaders say they are confident that a Palestinian state is off the agenda.

They also hope that Israel will extend its sovereignty over parts, or all, of the territory through annexation — a step it has formally avoided since capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war amid opposition from much of the world.

“We want to live our lives in Israel,” Ms. Passentin said, adding, “I believe the new administration will support whatever Israel decides.”

The West Bank has grown increasingly volatile. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have risen sharply, while Israel has carried out a series of deadly raids and drone strikes targeting armed Palestinian militants that have chewed up streets and left many Palestinian civilians in fear.

Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of 2023, according to the United Nations. The Israeli authorities say that most were armed fighters, but at least some were uninvolved civilians. About 50 Israelis were killed by Palestinian assailants in the West Bank during the same period, 18 of them members of the security forces, according to U.N. data. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said it had thwarted more than a thousand attacks in 2024, including hundreds of shooting attacks.

On Monday, gunmen shot at a civilian bus and cars passing the Palestinian village of Al-Funduq in the northern West Bank, killing at least three Israelis — a police investigator and two women from a nearby settlement — in what the Israeli authorities described as a terrorist attack.

Some settlers express a wariness of Mr. Trump born of experience. He has not articulated clear plans for the region, other than a vague aim of bringing peace. But they nonetheless believe that the new administration will go along with the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — the most right-wing in Israel’s history.

“Trump’s team was here, they saw the reality, and for me, that’s a total relief,” said Yisrael Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs the settlements around ancient Shiloh, including the adjacent settlement of Shilo. He is also the chairman of the umbrella council representing the rest of the settlements.

Mr. Ganz recently took Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s nominee for interior secretary, on a tour in the area. “I see the people he chose,” Mr. Ganz said of the president-elect.

Support for a two-state solution has been waning for years among Israel’s Jewish majority, and since the Oct. 7 attack, many Israelis fear that a Palestinian state would endanger their country. A recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis think Palestinians have no right to a state of their own.

But in his public statements, Mr. Ganz has avoided explicitly telling Mr. Trump what to do. To sound less provocative, instead of sovereignty, he uses vaguer terms like “changing the reality” in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, which the Israeli government considers disputed, not occupied, territory.

During his first term, Mr. Trump showered Israel with diplomatic gifts, including moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and recognizing the contested city as Israel’s capital. Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, reversed four decades of U.S. policy by stating that settlements did not violate international law. (Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the traditional U.S. position in 2024, saying the American government considers settlements to be “inconsistent with international law,” in line with most countries.)

Mr. Trump’s administration also floated a peace plan that strongly favored Israel, discarding the longtime goal of granting the Palestinians a viable state with its capital in Jerusalem.

The proposal, which Mr. Trump called the “deal of the century,” called for Israeli annexation of about 30 percent of the West Bank, including its current settlements, and a disjointed Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders and many settlers, who preferred continued ambiguity over what they saw as a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian territory that would leave many settlements as isolated enclaves.

Adding to the settlers’ wariness, the idea of Israeli annexation was abruptly dumped by both Mr. Trump and Israel’s leaders in favor of forging diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, a process known as the Abraham Accords. The Trump administration is expected to try to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia, which would most likely require some kind of Israeli acceptance of a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The settlers are far from homogenous. They include secular, middle-class Israelis seeking affordable housing as well as religious ideologues who believe settling the land is part of a Messianic plan ordained by God.

But in the hills around Shilo and the neighboring settlement of Eli in the central West Bank, the mission of Jewish settlement expansion is clear. Alongside official government-approved settlements, outposts have been built in recent decades without official permits. Some have been retroactively authorized by Israel and have come to resemble the more established neighborhoods.

Ms. Passentin, a mother of eight, came to Israel as a child from San Francisco. She and her husband, David, lived for 10 years in a trailer, then in a tent, helping to establish outposts, before settling in Hayovel, a satellite of Eli, parts of which are still unauthorized after years of court battles over the ownership and status of the land.

As the Binyamin Council’s international relations director, she has accompanied some of Mr. Trump’s close circle on tours and hosted Mr. Hegseth in her home.

One immediate request of the Trump administration from settler leaders is to cancel sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on more than 30 individuals and organizations accused of violence against Palestinians and destruction or seizure of Palestinian property.

Settler leaders like Mr. Ganz say they do not condone the violence, some of which is directed at Israeli forces who come to remove illegal settlement structures. But they say that it is a police matter and that it is a fraction of the anti-settler violence perpetrated by Palestinians.

For all of the enthusiasm in settler circles surrounding Mr. Trump’s election, expectations of what he will actually do once in office are tempered.

Citing an adage that marriage is often better the second time around, Aaron Katsof, a winemaker in Esh Kodesh, a hilltop outpost perched above Shilo, between the Palestinian villages of Qusra and Duma, said of a second Trump term: “You don’t come with the lovey-dovey infatuation of high school sweethearts. But you come with a lot more experience and maturity.” Esh Kodesh still lacks Israeli government authorization and permits for permanent housing.

Rivka Amar, 19, who is nine months pregnant, moved in the fall to Alei Ayin, a tiny outpost between Esh Kodesh and Qusra. She and her husband live in a lone quick-build home there, accompanied only by some young men who sleep in a tent, in what was open land.

Ms. Amar had been lunching at the Merlot Cafe in Shilo with her friend Rina Kohen, 18, who lives on a settler farm in the northern West Bank with her brother and 150 head of cattle. The idea, she said, was for a few settlers to control as much land as possible, to keep territory away from Palestinians.

“If I’m not there, my enemy will be there,” Ms. Amar said.

But, she said, she keeps her focus on the tasks at the hand, not on political shifts in Israel or the United States.

“I don’t wake up in the morning thinking of Biden or Trump,” she said, “but of where to graze the goats.”

A fresh injection of about 150 foreign officers arrived in Haiti this weekend to bolster an international security force charged with taking on the powerful and well-armed gangs that have inflicted so much misery on the country for months.

But if the past is any guide this latest infusion is unlikely to make much of a difference.

Back-to-back massacres that killed more than 350 people, followed by a Christmas Eve assault on Haiti’s largest public hospital have underscored the Haitian government’s increasing lack of control over the nation’s deepening crisis.

A news conference to announce the reopening of a public hospital that had been closed for nine months because of gang violence came under another gang attack, killing two reporters and a police officer.

More than two dozen journalists caught in the ambush were trapped for two hours triaging seven wounded colleagues before they were rescued. They ripped their own clothing to fashion tourniquets and used tampons to stanch the bleeding because, witnesses said, the few doctors at the hospital ran for their lives. Reporters escaped by climbing a rear wall.

“There was blood all over the floor and on our clothes,” said Jephte Bazil, a reporter with an online news outlet, Machann Zen Haïti, adding that the hospital had nothing “available to treat the victims.”

The hospital shooting followed two massacres in separate parts of the country that killed more than 350 people and have shined a harsh spotlight on the failures and shortcomings of local authorities and an international security force deployed to protect innocent civilians.

One of the massacres unfolded last month in an impoverished, sprawling, gang-controlled Port-au-Prince neighborhood where a lack of any police presence meant that for three days older people were dismembered and thrown to the sea without the authorities finding out. At least 207 people were killed between Dec. 6 and Dec. 11, according to the United Nations.

At about the same time, another three-day killing spree took place 70 miles north in Petite Rivière. Community leaders say 150 people were killed as gang members and vigilante groups attacked one another.

The violence is part of a relentless string of bloodshed that has befallen Haiti in the last two months, exposing the fragility of its interim government, raising concerns about the viability of a U.S.-brokered security mission and leaving a planned transition to elections and more stable leadership on the verge of collapse.

With President-elect Donald J. Trump about to assume the reins of an international deployment that has been criticized as ineffective and underfunded, the future of Haiti has never seemed so bleak.

Justice Minister Patrick Pelissier said he believed the 150 soldiers, mostly from Guatemala, should help turn the tide. He stressed that some gang-controlled areas had been retaken and that the government is tending to displaced people.

“The state has not collapsed,” Mr. Pelissier said. “The state is there. The state is working.”

But many experts believe Haiti is a failing state, with various factions of the interim government embroiled in political bickering with no apparent strategy for tackling the worsening violence and providing a path to elections, which were supposed to be held this year.

“Political disputes translate into violence,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The gangs are very aware of when is the right moment to shift from defensive mode to offensive mode. They flex their muscles when they need to.”

The gang attacks have also drawn attention to the weakness of the U.S.-backed Multinational Security Support mission, a detachment of several hundred mostly Kenyan police officers that began arriving in Haiti last June.

The mission was supposed to have up to 2,500 officers, but with little international financing, the force numbers far less and lacks the staffing to tackle the many gang-entrenched areas.

Several experts said the Christmas Eve killings gave a sense that the government was inept. The event announcing the hospital’s reopening was held in a gang stronghold, with virtually no security. Even as people came under attack, the police took at least an hour to respond, though their headquarters are nearby.

The country’s heath minister, Dr. Duckenson Lorthe Blema, who was sick and running late, believes he was the intended target.

“I am not crazy — I wanted to do well, and it went badly,” Dr. Blema, who was fired in the aftermath of the attack, said in an interview. “It turned into a fiasco. The scapegoat is me.”

Dr. Blema insisted that he had asked for police deployments at the event and did not know why there was so little protection. He defended the hospital’s dearth of supplies, saying he had intended to open the facility “gradually” as an outpatient clinic, which would not have been for treating gunshot wounds.

The justice minister acknowledged that there was no coordination between the ministry of health and the police, nor was a proper security assessment done in advance.

“Neighborhoods are controlled by gangs, and the police are working to recover them,” he said, noting that while the crisis is severe in the capital and the rural Artibonite Valley, much of the country was operating normally.

Haiti’s descent into chaos was largely triggered by the assassination in July 2021 of its last elected president, Jovenel Moïse. Gangs earning income from illegal checkpoints, extortion and kidnappings used the political vacuum to expand their territories.

With no elected national leaders, the country is ruled by a transitional council made up of rival political parties, with an interim presidency rotating among its members.

The latest surge in violence began Nov. 11, when the council replaced the prime minister, and gangs took advantage of the political upheaval to fire on U.S. commercial aircraft and escalate their brutality. Haiti’s main airport has been closed since.

More than 5,300 people were killed in Haiti last year and the total number of people forced to flee their homes now exceeds 700,000, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Gang checkpoints and ambushes have disrupted food supplies and the nonprofit group Mercy Corp, estimates that nearly 5 million people — half the country’s population — are facing severe food insecurity.

The new prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, in his only news conference since taking office nearly two months ago, announced pay increases for police officers and said he was committed to restoring the rule of law.

The prime minister and members of the presidential council declined to comment for this article.

In a New Year’s Day speech, the president of the council, Leslie Voltaire, insisted that elections would still take place this year, but likened the current situation to war. A police spokesman said he had no comment.

The commander of the Kenyan-led mission, Godfrey Otunge, who also did not respond to requests for comment, has complained that the mission’s successes have not been sufficiently touted.

In a recent message posted online, he said “the future of Haiti is bright.”

The U.S. State Department, which has committed $600 million for the Kenya mission, defended its record, noting that a recent operation with the police led to the death of a high-profile gang member.

Two police stations recently reopened and the Kenyan mission now has a permanent presence near the main port, which has long been controlled by gangs, the State Department said.

The U.S. government sent several shipments of materials in December, the agency said.

But absent significantly greater outside help, experts say Haiti’s worsening trajectory is unlikely to be reversed.

“The Haitian government is really not clear on what they are doing,” said Sophie Rutenbar, a visiting scholar at New York University, who helped run United Nations operations in Haiti until 2023. “Unfortunately right now they are faced with not good choices and worse choices.”

Some of the injured journalists blamed gangs — and the government — for a debacle that cost precious lives.

“If the state had taken its responsibilities, none of this would have happened,” said Velondie Miracle, who was shot seven times in the leg, temple and mouth. “The state is a legal force and should not give bandits access to places where the state cannot respond.”

André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

In a chilly auditorium in Afghanistan, heaps of freshly mined green emeralds glowed under bright table lamps as bearded gemstone dealers inspected them for purity and quality.

An auctioneer asked for bids on the first lot, which weighed 256 carats. With that, the Taliban’s weekly gemstone auction was underway.

These sales, in the emerald-rich Panjshir Province of eastern Afghanistan, are part of an effort by the Taliban government to cash in on the country’s vast mineral and gemstone potential.

Since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban say they have signed deals with scores of investors to mine gemstones, gold, copper, iron and other valuable minerals, like chromite. These buried treasures offer a potentially lucrative lifeline for a feeble economy.

China has led the way in investments under its Belt and Road Initiative, an aggressive effort to spread Chinese influence worldwide. Russian and Iranian investors have also signed mining licenses, filling the void left by the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021.

The U.S. government estimates that at least $1 trillion in mineral deposits lie beneath Afghanistan’s rugged landscape. The country is rich in copper, gold, zinc, chromite, cobalt, lithium and industrial minerals, as well as in precious and semiprecious gemstones like emeralds, rubies, sapphires, garnets and lapis lazuli.

Afghanistan also holds a trove of rare earth elements, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a U.S. agency that will close this year. Such elements are used in an array of modern technology, like mobile phones, laptops and electric vehicles.

The Taliban are trying to do what the United States could not during its 20-year occupation. The U.S. government spent nearly a billion dollars to develop mining projects in Afghanistan, but “tangible progress was negligible and not sustained,” the special inspector general concluded in a report published in January 2023.

Many of the hurdles from that time could still apply: a lack of security, poor infrastructure, corruption, inconsistent government policies and regulations, and frequent turnover of government officials.

The Taliban are nonetheless giving it a shot, desperate for revenue after Afghanistan’s precipitous loss of aid with the U.S. withdrawal.

During the war, the United States provided roughly $143 billion in development and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, propping up the U.S.-aligned government. Since 2021, the United States has given $2.6 billion in such aid, delivered by a private contractor in shrink-wrapped cash bundles on flights to Kabul, according to the special inspector general.

The Afghan economy has shrunk by 26 percent over the past two years, the World Bank reported in April. The sharp decline in international aid, the bank said, has left Afghanistan “without any internal engines of growth.”

On top of that, the Taliban’s ban on opium production has cost farmers $1.3 billion in income, or 8 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, the World Bank said. The ban has led to the loss of 450,000 jobs and reduced land under poppy cultivation by 95 percent, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported.

Mining could help replace poppies as a steady revenue stream. Turkey and Qatar, along with China and Iran, have invested in iron, copper, gold and cement mines. Uzbek companies have signed deals to extract oil in northern Afghanistan, according to the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.

The Taliban are already collecting tax from emerald sales.

Under the previous government, the emerald trade was a corrupt free-for-all. Warlords and politically connected dealers dominated the trade, and tax collection was haphazard at best.

But as the Taliban government has instituted the weekly emerald auctions, it has controlled and taxed all sales. Dealers who buy emeralds at the auctions do not receive the gems until they pay the 10 percent levy.

The Taliban are taxing other precious stones as well, including rubies and sapphires.

Rahmatullah Sharifi, a gemstone dealer who bought two sets of emeralds at the auction, said he didn’t mind paying the tax.

“The government needs the money to develop the country,” he said. “The question is: Will they spend it on helping the Afghan people?”

In Panjshir Province, where most Afghan emeralds are mined, the government has issued 560 emerald licenses to foreign and Afghan investors, said Hamayoon Afghan, a spokesman for the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.

The ministry has also granted licenses to mine rubies in Panjshir and Kabul Provinces, Mr. Afghan said, and plans are underway for emerald and precious stone licenses in three other provinces.

But many new licenses are for mines that have yet to open. And many existing mines are hobbled by poor infrastructure and a dearth of experienced engineers and technical experts.

Mr. Afghan conceded that the country needed more engineers and technicians. Foreign investors bring in experienced experts, he said, and they are obligated under licenses to employ Afghans and teach them technical and engineering skills.

Most of the emeralds bought at the weekly auctions are resold to foreign buyers, dealers said. Among the dealers buying emeralds one day in November was Haji Ghazi, who sells gemstones from a tiny cell-like room within a darkened warren of shops in downtown Kabul.

Two days after the auction, Mr. Ghazi bolted his shop’s door, closed the curtains and unlocked an ancient safe. He withdrew several caches of emeralds and rubies, each one wrapped in a plain white sheet of paper.

Mr. Ghazi’s largest set of emeralds was worth perhaps $250,000, he said. He estimated that a much smaller cache of bright rubies was worth $20,000.

In a corner, Mr. Ghazi had piled heavy chunks of rock bearing thick blue veins of lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone. Much of the world’s supply of lapis is mined in northern Afghanistan.

Mr. Ghazi sells most of his gemstones to buyers from the United Arab Emirates, India, Iran and Thailand. He said he missed the days, before the Taliban takeover, when the occupation brought eager buyers from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Australia.

In an adjacent shop, Azizullah Niyazi switched on a desk lamp to illuminate a collection of lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires and emeralds spread across a small table. He was still awaiting his first customer of the morning.

Mr. Niyazi said sales were not as robust as during the 13 years he was allowed to sell gemstones one day a week from a small shop on a U.S. coalition military base. His profits soared as soldiers and civilian contractors lined up to buy gemstones every Friday — and they rarely haggled over prices, unlike Afghan or Arab buyers, he said. He paid a 7 percent tax on his profits, he said.

These days, Mr. Niyazi must travel to increase sales: He said he had opened a shop in China, where he made regular visits. In Kabul, he sells to buyers from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, as well as from Pakistan, Iran and a handful of other countries.

He has few Afghan customers.

“Not many Afghans can afford to pay $1,000 or $2,000 for a stone to make a ring,” he said with a shrug.

Safiullah Padshah, Yaqoob Akbary and Najim Rahim contributed reporting.

Five months after storming across the border into the Kursk region of southern Russia, Ukrainian forces were making a renewed push on Monday to drive deeper into Russia, even as they appear to have lost a strategic town in eastern Ukraine.

While the scale of the renewed Ukrainian offensive in Kursk remains unclear, both Russian and Ukrainian officials reported heavy fighting on Sunday night. Combat footage geolocated by military analysts indicated that Ukraine was trying to break through Russian defenses in at least three directions.

It is the first significant attempt by Ukrainian troops to advance in Kursk since the original incursion in August. Since then, Russia has regained roughly half of the territory it lost.

At the same time, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed on Monday that its forces had seized control of Kurakhove, an important but shattered industrial town, further closing in on Ukrainian forces in the southern Donbas region after more than two months of withering bombardments and heavy fighting.

The Ukrainian military command in the east did not comment on the Russian claim that Kurakhove had fallen. Soldiers fighting in the area, and a local Ukrainian military official, said when reached by phone that while there were pockets of resistance in the factories on the outskirts, the town was essentially lost. They requested anonymity to discuss sensitive military information.

In a statement, the Kremlin said its defense minister, Andrei Belousov, had congratulated the Russian soldiers for capturing the town on Monday,

As Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect talks on Monday for a cease-fire and hostage release deal, Hamas representatives indicated that the group had approved an Israeli list of 34 hostages to be released in the first stage of an agreement, conveying a sense of momentum.

But the Israeli government quickly dampened any notion that Hamas’s acceptance of the list constituted a significant breakthrough toward ending the war in Gaza.

Here’s what we know about the list of hostages and the state of the talks, after months of false starts and failed rounds.

What Hamas is saying

A Hamas representative briefed on the negotiations told The New York Times on Monday that if a deal is reached, Hamas agrees to release the 34 hostages whose names appear on a list that Israel provided via mediators. The representative spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are being held in secrecy.

The United States has long been pushing for a deal and is trying to facilitate one with the help of Qatar and Egypt, the two main countries mediating between Israel and Hamas.

The Reuters news agency reported on Sunday night that Hamas had approved the list presented by Israel. The report cited an unnamed Hamas official who added that any hostage deal was contingent upon Israel agreeing to a timetable for withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent cease-fire, in line with Hamas’s longstanding demands.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has refused to openly declare any willingness to end the war, vowing to eradicate Hamas as a military force and governing power in Gaza.

Roughly 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza out of some 250 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 that prompted the war. At least a third of the captives are presumed to be dead, according to Israel.

A weeklong truce in November 2023 allowed for the release of 105 hostages in exchange for some 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israel. Only a few hostages have been rescued alive by Israeli forces, and the bodies of dozens of others have been recovered. Israeli soldiers accidentally killed three hostages whom they misidentified as fighters.

Subsequent efforts to reach a cease-fire have faltered amid gaps in the two sides’ demands, with each side blaming the other for thwarting efforts to reach a deal.

What Israel says

Israel sent the original list of hostages to be released in the first phase of any deal to the mediators in July 2024, according to a statement released on Monday by Mr. Netanyahu’s office.

But the list has since been updated because three of those who originally appeared on it — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American-Israeli dual citizen, and two Israeli women, Carmel Gat and Eden Yerushalmi — were killed by their captors in late August. The newer version of the list was published by the BBC on Monday, and Mr. Netanyahu’s office appeared to confirm its authenticity.

In this latest round of talks, Israel has demanded information from Hamas about which hostages remain alive. Without that, Israeli officials say, there can be no agreement on how many Palestinian prisoners Israel would be willing to release in exchange for them.

“As yet, Israel has not received any confirmation or comment by Hamas regarding the status of the hostages appearing on the list,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in its statement, adding, “Israel will continue to act relentlessly for the return of all of our hostages.”

The Hamas representative who spoke to The Times said the group would not give Israel details on the status of the 34 hostages on the list without getting some things in return.

The list includes 10 women, five of them soldiers; 11 older male hostages aged between 50 and 85; two young children who Hamas previously said had been killed in an Israeli airstrike, but whose deaths have not been confirmed by the Israeli authorities; and other male hostages whose release Israel considers urgent.

In addition to Israel’s demand for information on the status of the hostages, other sticking points remain in the negotiations, according to Israeli and Hamas officials. An Israeli official familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly, said on Monday that the talks were progressing and that the sides were closer than they have been in a while. But the official cautioned that they have also been at a similar point before.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Monday went on trial in Paris over accusations that his 2007 campaign received illegal financing from the Libyan government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

The trial, which is scheduled to last three months, is far from the first for Mr. Sarkozy, 69, a conservative politician who led France from 2007 to 2012. But it represents one of the most serious legal threats to the French politician since he left office.

Just last month, Mr. Sarkozy exhausted his final appeal in a separate corruption and influence peddling case, making him the first former French president sentenced to actual detention, though he will serve his time under house arrest with an electronic bracelet.

But of all the legal cases against Mr. Sarkozy, the Libya one is probably the most sprawling, convoluted and explosive. It involves accusations that his campaign illegally accepted significant funding from Colonel Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who was killed by opposition fighters in 2011.

Mr. Sarkozy, who no longer holds public office but retains some political influence, has denied wrongdoing but could face up to 10 years in prison and be fined nearly $400,000.

Here is what you need to know about the case.

What is the trial about?

Mr. Sarkozy is facing charges of illegal campaign financing, criminal conspiracy, concealing the misappropriation of public funds and passive corruption (a charge that applies to people suspected of receiving money or favors).

The case against him involves a web of political and financial ties between Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers, officials who were part of Colonel Qaddafi’s government, and businessmen or bankers who acted as intermediaries.

Twelve other people were also ordered to stand trial on similar charges.

“Our thesis is that of a corruption pact,” Jean-François Bohnert, France’s top financial prosecutor, told RMC radio on Monday, adding that there was proof that 6 million euros, about $6.2 million today, had transited from Libyan coffers to France.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Sarkozy and his allies had sought financing from Libya, in violation of election funding rules, and that the Libyan government had promised to provide it. In return, they said, it wanted economic deals, diplomatic recognition and possibly assistance from France in rescinding an arrest warrant against a top Libyan official.

Mr. Sarkozy visited Libya shortly after he was elected, then welcomed Colonel Qaddafi for a widely-criticized state visit, where the Libyan strongman memorably pitched his Bedouin-style tent in a Paris garden.

How did the case start?

In 2011, as Libya was roiled by fighting between the army and rebels, Colonel Qaddafi’s son said in a media interview that Mr. Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign had taken Libyan money.

Then, in 2012, the investigative news website Mediapart published a document, presented as a note by Libya’s secret services, that mentioned a deal to fund Mr. Sarkozy’s campaign with up to 50 million euros. That same year, as part of a separate investigation, Ziad Takieddine, a French-Lebanese businessman, made a similar allegation.

In 2013, prosecutors opened an investigation. It lasted a decade and involved over 20 countries, 50 police raids and 70 volumes of case files.

How has Mr. Sarkozy responded?

Mr. Sarkozy, who muttered angrily under his breath in the courtroom on Monday as prosecutors made their case, has repeatedly and strenuously denied any wrongdoing.

He says the accusations were driven mostly by allies of Colonel Qaddafi seeking revenge. Under his leadership, France played a prominent role in the NATO-led campaign of airstrikes that ultimately led to the toppling of Colonel Qaddafi and his death at the hands of Libyan rebels.

There have been conflicting accounts about the sequence of events and the amounts of money involved, and some of the defendants have shifted their versions of what happened.

Mr. Sarkozy’s legal team has seized on the vagaries and gray areas of the investigation, which didn’t clearly establish a total amount believed to have been sent by Libya or spent by the campaign.

“Sometimes it’s in euros, sometimes in dollars, sometimes in dinars, sometimes 2 million, 3 million, 50 million, 400 million,” Christophe Ingrain, Mr. Sarkozy’s lawyer, told RTL radio on Sunday. “This isn’t serious.”

Under French law, though, prosecutors do not have to prove that a corrupt deal was fully carried out to secure a conviction — only that one was agreed upon.

Mr. Sarkozy’s official records for the 2007 campaign indicated that he spent over €21 million, and any off-the-book financing from Libya would have enabled him to skirt France’s strict spending cap for presidential campaigns.

Has Mr. Sarkozy been convicted before?

Yes, twice. Mr. Sarkozy has faced multiple accusations of financial impropriety since he left office, although that has done little to dent his popularity with the base of his conservative party or to prevent his memoirs from flying off the shelves.

In 2021, he was convicted of trying to obtain information from a judge about a court case against him.

Mr. Sarkozy has exhausted his appeal options in that case, but he will not be incarcerated. Instead, he will serve one year under house arrest with an electronic bracelet, although a judge has not yet ruled on the practical details.

Mr. Sarkozy was also convicted in 2021 to a year of house arrest for illegally financing his unsuccessful 2012 re-election campaign, which wildly exceeded France’s spending limits. An appeals court last year upheld the conviction but halved his sentence, and that case is still going through the appeals process.

Other cases against Mr. Sarkozy have been dropped, including one in which he was accused of manipulating the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune into financing his 2007 campaign.

And some cases are still being investigated, including an offshoot of the Libya case. In 2023, Mr. Sarkozy was placed under formal investigation on charges of witness tampering, after allegations that his allies pressured Mr. Takieddine, the French-Lebanese businessman, into retracting his accusations.

Pope Francis on Monday appointed Sister Simona Brambilla to head the Vatican office that oversees religious orders for both men and women — including more than a quarter of the world’s priests — making her the first woman to reach the No. 1 position in an office in the Holy See.

The choice reflects Francis’ avowed aim to give women greater leadership roles in the Roman Catholic Church. He has named several women to high-ranking positions, including the director of the Vatican museums. Sister Brambilla is the first prefect of a department of the Roman Curia, as the central administration of the church is known.

“This is very good news,” said Anne-Marie Pelletier, a theologian who has also written a book about women and the church. “It’s something completely new,” and shows what can be done in the church. “For me it’s a really important moment.”

But alongside Sister Brambilla, Francis named Cardinal Angel Fernandez Artime as pro-prefect, or co-leader, of the department. It wasn’t immediately clear how the two would share responsibilities, and some critics saw the co-appointment as diluting Sister Brambilla’s effective role.

“For a woman to be appointed as prefect would be great news, if it weren’t for the fact that she has been flanked by someone, it’s like assigning a custodian who can control her,” said Lucetta Scaraffia, a church historian and feminist, who said that in this context, the appointment was “window dressing.”

Sister Brambilla will lead the department — its official title is Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life — that promotes and oversees religious orders of men and women, though the vast majority are for women. According to Vatican statistics published last year, some 128,500 priests — more than 25 percent of the world’s total — belonged to orders like the Jesuits or Franciscans as of 2022, as well as fewer than 50,000 brothers. The number of women in religious orders totaled 599,228 in 2022. The department also oversees many lay movements.

Before 2019, all the members of the Vatican department had been men, but both religious sisters and some bishops had long complained about the absence of women in decision-making positions in an office with operations that could directly affect their lives. In 2019, Francis appointed seven women as members of the department. In 2022, he released a new constitution reforming the Roman Curia that made it possible for laypeople, including women, to become prefects. In 2023, Sister Brambilla was chosen as secretary of the department. She is taking over from Brazilian Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, 77, who was named in 2011.

Sister Brambilla, 59, was born in Monza, near Milan. She was a professional nurse before becoming a Consolata Missionary, and has a doctorate in psychology. She led her religious order as superior from 2011 to 2023.

Critics accuse Francis of dragging his heels when it comes to appointing women to top decision-making positions in the church, but he has done more than his predecessors. Just 10 years ago, only two women held top positions in the Curia. Now there are around a dozen. According to Vatican News, from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of women working at the Vatican rose to 23.4 percent from 19.2 percent.

For the first time, two years ago Francis allowed women to vote at a meeting of bishops that sought to map the future of the church. While the role of women in the church was among the most-discussed topics at that meeting, which ended in October, the question of whether women could be ordained as deacons remained open.

“It’s definitely a positive shift at the Vatican,” Kate McElwee, the executive director of Women’s Ordination Conference, said of Sister Brambilla’s appointment. However, she too was perplexed about the role of the pro-prefect. “It just proves that there’s still some kinks to work out and hoops that women have to go through to assume these positions at the Vatican,” she said.