Eric Schmieman worked for 15 years on the modern engineering equivalent of the Great Pyramid — building a giant protective shield for a damaged reactor at Chernobyl that would protect the world from further fallout from the worst ever nuclear disaster.

The steel shell, slid into place over Reactor No. 4 on railroad tracks in 2016, is the world’s largest movable structure. It is as tall as a football field and weighs almost 40,000 tons. More than 45 countries and organizations spent almost $1.7 billion building it.

“We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen,” said Mr. Schmieman, 78, a retired civil engineer from Washington state who was a senior technical adviser on the project. “We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn’t consider acts of war.”

On Feb. 14, a drone with a high-explosive warhead that likely cost as little as $20,000 to produce punched a hole in the steel shell. Ukrainian officials said the Russians deliberately targeted the structure with a Shahed 136 drone. The Kremlin has denied responsibility.

While the initial fire was quickly put out, a waterproof membrane inside the insulation of the arch burned and smoldered for almost three weeks, said Artem Siryi, the head of the operations department for the structure, called the New Safe Confinement. Emergency workers in mountain-climbing equipment had to knock holes into the shield’s outer layer, hunting for the fire, and spray water inside a structure designed to stay dry to prevent corrosion, Ukrainian officials and international experts said.

On March 7, Ukraine declared the fire officially extinguished. But by that point, roughly half of the northern section of the shield had been damaged, Ukrainian officials said. The International Atomic Energy Agency said on March 13 that the fires and smoldering had caused “extensive damage, including to the northern side and to a lesser extent to the southern side of its roof,” according to an evaluation that Ukraine shared with the agency.

Radiation levels outside Chernobyl are still normal, the I.A.E.A. and Ukrainian nuclear regulators say. But it is unclear how the shield will be fixed, how much it will cost and how long it will take.

Repairs could take years, nuclear experts warn. That could delay a plan to dismantle the damaged reactor and safely dispose of the radioactive waste that was supposed to begin over the next five years. And there are risks that the steel shell starts corroding — or that the temporary “sarcophagus” Soviet engineers built around the reactor almost 40 years ago, which still sits within the shell, deteriorates further.

“The reason the international community spent so much money and time building this structure is because they know the scale of the threat radiologically inside,” said Shaun Burnie, a nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who visited the damaged reactor at Chernobyl after the drone attack.

“It’s an enormous intellectual achievement to build something that could protect Europe, Ukraine and the world from what’s inside,” he said. “And now the Russians have basically blown a hole in it, both physically and metaphorically.”

On Thursday, Greenpeace released a report saying the drone attack severely compromised plans for the damaged reactor and that the shell was no longer functioning as designed. Jan Vande Putte, a nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine, said the entire shell might have to be removed, dismantled and replaced — a view echoed by Mr. Schmieman and Mr. Siryi. The I.A.E.A. said the shell’s confinement function had been compromised and that the structure needed “extensive repair efforts.”

Both Russia and Ukraine have targeted one another’s energy infrastructure since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but both have also stopped short of launching major strikes at nuclear power plants.

On Wednesday, as part of negotiations on a potential cease-fire, President Trump suggested that the United States take over Ukraine’s electrical and nuclear power sites, arguing that this would help protect them.

Drones continue to fly over Chernobyl almost every night, Mr. Siryi said in an interview. “Their motor noise has become a familiar sound,” he added. Many were likely heading toward Kyiv, the country’s capital.

For people of a certain age, the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, after years of heightened fears of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, was the stuff of nightmares. It sent a plume of radioactive material into the air, caused a public health emergency across Europe and led many to question nuclear energy. The Soviets, who initially hid the extent of the disaster, hastily built the concrete-and-steel emergency “sarcophagus” to encase the damaged reactor. Authorities also set up a 1,000-square-mile “exclusion zone” where no one was allowed to live.

The explosion’s official death toll was 31. But many other people got sick or eventually died. Cancer rates, especially for thyroid cancer, increased in areas heavily exposed to radiation.

The sarcophagus, which has become increasingly unstable, was never meant to last. Figuring out how to replace it took decades.

The confinement structure at Chernobyl that Mr. Schmieman worked on was an engineering and construction feat, designed to protect the damaged reactor for 100 years. To minimize radiation exposure, the structure was built about one-third of a mile away from the damaged reactor, then moved into place. It is about 40 feet thick, with an outer and an inner shell that are both made of steel. The humidity level between the shells is kept below 40 percent to prevent corrosion.

The outer shell is the key to keeping out precipitation, Mr. Schmieman said. The inner shell is designed to keep the radioactive dust inside the structure, especially when the cranes already set up start taking apart the sarcophagus and the damaged reactor before safely disposing of the waste in smaller containers.

By the end of this year, specialists had aimed to finish the initial plan outlining the first dismantling stage. “Unfortunately, that’s no longer possible” because of the drone attack, Mr. Siryi said.

He said experts were evaluating how the shell could be fixed — and even if it could be. Workers would have to close the initial 540-square-foot hole from the drone. But they would also have to seal up the small holes created by workers trying to extinguish the fire. They would have to somehow repair the damaged membrane and insulation and any damaged internal structures. And they would have to reduce the humidity that resulted from hundreds of workers spraying high-powered hoses inside the structure.

Doing that where the confinement shell now sits is probably not possible, experts said, because workers would be exposed to high radiation levels from within. Moving the structure and then fixing it would also be challenging. What would protect the already unstable sarcophagus while that work was carried out?

“Full restoration of the facility is practically impossible,” Mr. Siryi said. “To bring it as close as possible to its original state — well, that would likely require hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Mr. Schmieman said repairing the structure, or building a new one, would be extremely costly. He suggested temporarily covering the holes — with something akin to duct tape — so the ventilation system inside could start reducing humidity. “Don’t immediately look for a quick, permanent solution for the large number of holes in the building, but look for a quick way to reduce corrosion,” he said.

One thing that might help, he said: drones. Largely because of the war, Ukraine has developed drone technology faster than almost any other country. Small drones — much smaller than the Shahed 136 that pierced the structure — could perhaps evaluate the damage inside the shell, and even help with fixing it.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contributed reporting.

Trump administration officials haven’t kept their disdain for Europe quiet. But the contempt seems to be even louder behind closed doors.

Europeans reacted with a mix of exasperation and anger to the publication of parts of a discussion between top-ranking Trump administration officials, carried out on the messaging app Signal. The discussion, about a planned strike on Yemen, was replete with comments that painted Europeans as geopolitical parasites, and was revealed on Monday in The Atlantic, whose editor was inadvertently included in the conversation.

“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again,” wrote Vice President JD Vance, asserting that the strikes would benefit Europe far more than the United States.

“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, later replied. “It’s PATHETIC.”

The exchange seemed to show real feelings and judgments — that the Europeans are mooching and that any American military action, no matter how clearly in American interests as well, should be somehow paid for by other beneficiaries.

A member of the chat identified as “SM,” and believed to be Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, suggested that both Egypt and “Europe” should compensate the United States for the operation. “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” SM wrote.

The apparent disregard by administration officials of security protocols by having such a discussion — which included operational details — on a consumer chat app, even an encrypted one, prompted concern that Russia and China could be listening in.

“Putin is now unemployed: No point in spying anymore,” Nathalie Loiseau, a member of the European Parliament, wrote on X, saying the leaks now came from the Americans themselves. “No point in crushing Ukraine anymore, Trump will take care of it.”

The commentary in the exchange is the latest blow to one of the world’s most storied alliances, which took generations to build and strengthen but which the Trump administration has managed to weaken in mere weeks.

“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top E.U. official. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”

The European Union is, in many ways, the antithesis of the principles that Mr. Trump and his colleagues are championing. The bloc is built around an embrace of international trade based on rules. It has been at the forefront of climate-related regulation and social media user protections.

Europe has been on alert ever since Mr. Vance delivered a speech at a security conference in Munich last month that questioned European values and its democracy and shocked European leaders. He followed that up by warning that Europe was at risk of “civilizational suicide.”

If the relationship between the United States and Europe were merely transactional, it would be relatively easy for Europeans to just spend more on the military and give Mr. Trump some sort of victory, said François Heisbourg, a French analyst and former defense official.

But in Mr. Vance’s speech attacking European democracy in Munich, let alone in the newly public exchange, the distaste for Europe is about more than transactions.

“Vance was quite clear: We don’t share the same values,” Mr. Heisbourg said.

He and others, like Anna Sauerbrey, the foreign editor of Die Zeit, noted that the explicit demand for payment, rather than just political and military support, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, was new. And it ignored the fact that “the U.S. depends on global trade,” she said, and that “France, Britain and the Netherlands have deployed ships to the region” for the same purpose. The Americans, she said, “are constantly overlooking European efforts.”

China, for example, gets most of its oil imports through the Strait of Hormuz and does much of its export trade with Europe through the same sea route. But no one is asking China to pay, Ms. Tocci noted.

For months, Washington has been sending barbed statements and actions Europe’s way.

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, even as European leaders warn that they will defend territorial integrity. Usha Vance, Mr. Vance’s wife, and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, are visiting the island this week, uninvited, its government says, and to an agitated response.

Mr. Trump has also repeatedly warned that Europe must pay much more for its own defense, threatening not to come to the aid of nations that do not pay up sufficiently, and has pivoted sharply away from Ukraine. He has simultaneously rolled out plans to slap hefty tariffs on Europe and argued that the European Union was created to “screw” America.

Christel Schaldemose, a Danish politician who is a center-left member of the European Parliament, said the way the U.S. has been talking about the E.U. in general lately is “not helping.”

“Could we start talking to each other as allies and not enemies?” she said.

Even as European leaders try to maintain the friendship, they are racing to try to bolster their defense expenditures, cognizant that it would be nearly impossible to replace American military capabilities overnight.

They are meeting on Thursday in Paris to discuss Ukraine, and NATO foreign ministers meet early next month to discuss progress.

They are also scrambling to strike a trade deal with the United States, with the E.U. trade commissioner headed to Washington on Tuesday to talk with his American counterparts.

But with America’s increasingly hostile attitude toward Europe, the continent’s officials are contemplating a future where the prized relationship stretching across the Atlantic, a foundation upon which decades of relative peace and prosperity have been built, might never be the same.

“The international order is undergoing changes of a magnitude not seen since 1945,” Kaja Kallas, the top E.U. diplomat, said last week, echoing a line from the bloc’s defense preparedness plan, which is meant to help Europe to become more militarily independent.

Splintering from the United States is an expensive prospect. The E.U. has already unveiled an initiative that could be worth 800 billion euros, about $865 billion, to help European nations achieve desired military spending levels.

Still, the group chat leak underscores why a divorce may be necessary: The United States is not the reliable ally it once was, either rhetorically or practically.

It is highly unusual and possibly illegal for sensitive military plans to be discussed on a messaging app, rather than by a more secure means of communication.

That disregard for normal security procedures will “cause allies to be very reluctant to share analysis and intelligence,” said Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. forces in Europe. Barring major change, people “will assume America can’t be trusted.”

The Israeli police questioned a Palestinian director of an Oscar-winning documentary on Tuesday, according to the authorities and his lawyer, after witnesses reported that Israeli settlers attacked him near his home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The police were holding Hamdan Ballal, 37, one of the directors of the film, “No Other Land,” and two other Palestinians on suspicion of hurling stones at Israeli vehicles and injuring a settler — accusations they all deny, according to Leah Tsemel, a lawyer representing the detainees.

One settler, a minor, was also detained, but he was released for medical treatment and would be questioned later, according to the Israeli police.

The details of the episode are not entirely clear. But Palestinian witnesses and a group of American activists on the scene said that before he was arrested, Mr. Ballal was set upon as a group of assailants, many of whom were masked, attacked his home village of Susya.

The episode drew attention to rising settler violence in the West Bank. During the past year, Jewish extremists have thrown rocks at Palestinians, set cars on fire and defaced homes. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded more than 1,000 incidents of settler violence in 2024.

President Trump has taken a softer stance on settler violence, canceling sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against individuals accused of carrying out violent acts against Palestinians. On Tuesday, a confirmation hearing for Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel and an outspoken supporter of settlement building, is set to begin.

The two sides provided different accounts about how the episode began. In a statement, the Israeli military said “several terrorists” had hurled stones at Israeli vehicles, igniting a violent confrontation in which Israelis and Palestinians threw rocks at one another.

Nasser Nawaja, a fieldworker for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem who lives in Susya, and other Palestinians said the confrontation began after the town’s residents had sought to drive away Israeli shepherds herding livestock on land claimed by the village. The group of masked Israelis soon joined the others on the outskirts of the village, where they attacked two Palestinian homes, they said.

Two American activists with a group that provides protection in areas vulnerable to settler violence, Josh Kimelman and Joseph Kaplan Weinger, said they responded to distress calls from Palestinians. The attackers also surrounded their car, smashing it with stones, they said. They were just a few minutes’ walk from Mr. Ballal’s house at the time, Mr. Kimelman said.

Ms. Tsemel, the detainees’ lawyer, said that she had spoken with her clients by phone. She said that Mr. Ballal told her that an Israeli assailant punched him, knocking him over, and continued to beat him while he lay on the ground.

Mr. Ballal said he received some medical treatment at an Israeli military facility before being held handcuffed and blindfolded on the floor of a detention center, according to Ms. Tsemel.

Basel Adra, another director of the documentary, said that he was also at the scene. He shared video footage that he said he had filmed of a blindfolded man he identified as Mr. Ballal being marched by Israeli forces to waiting vehicles. Mr. Adra said Israeli soldiers and police officers on the scene did little to stop the masked Israeli assailants, even as they sought to disperse the Palestinians. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the claims.

Mr. Ballal was among four directors — the others were Mr. Adra, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — in a Palestinian-Israeli collective that received the Academy Award for best documentary this month. The film documents the demolition of West Bank residents’ homes in or near the villages of Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces claiming the area for a live-fire military training ground.

After enduring repeated attacks, Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank, including from Mr. Hamdan’s village, took their case to the Israeli Supreme Court at the end of 2023, arguing that Israeli security authorities were not protecting them from attacks, and that as a result, some villagers had fled their homes.

In a ruling, the court expressed concern over Israel’s failure to protect them and said the government — including the Israeli military — must protect Palestinians against future attacks “even in the complicated circumstances of this period.”

The White House said Tuesday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to cease fighting in the Black Sea and halt strikes on energy facilities. It would be the first significant step toward the full cease-fire the Trump Administration had been pushing, but it still would fall short of that goal.

The agreements came after three days of intense negotiations in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, during which delegations from Ukraine and Russia met separately with U.S. mediators. Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, confirmed the agreements in a message posted on social media. There was no immediate reaction from Russia.

The White House released two different statements saying it had separately struck deals with Ukraine and Russia on the maritime and energy attacks. The statements added that Washington, Kyiv and Moscow welcomed the involvement of third countries in “supporting the implementation of the energy and maritime agreements.”

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Ukrainian and U.S. officials on Tuesday held a second session of negotiations in Saudi Arabia to discuss a possible limited cease-fire, a day after Russian and American delegations held similar discussions that lasted more than 12 hours.

Kyiv and Moscow have been holding separate U.S.-mediated talks in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to discuss a temporary moratorium on strikes on energy sites, as well as a cease-fire in the Black Sea, a vital route for both nations to export commodities — in what could be a crucial step toward a full cessation of hostilities in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Ukraine held its first session of talks on Sunday, followed by Russia on Monday. A Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said talks continued on Tuesday morning, and Ukrainian news media said they had ended after about one hour. The discussions have been aimed at finding common ground between Kyiv and Moscow, but both sides have cautioned against expecting an imminent deal.

What’s on the agenda

The meetings in Riyadh were expected to focus on the details of a tentative agreement between Russia and Ukraine to temporarily halt strikes on energy infrastructure.

But Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said on Tuesday that the sides mostly discussed the safety of shipping in the Black Sea and the restoration of a grain deal agreed to in 2022 that allowed millions of tons of Ukrainian grain to be exported. Mr. Lavrov said that Russia was in favor of restoring the grain deal, but only if unspecified Russian demands were met.

Serhii Leshchenko, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, said in a text message that U.S.-Ukraine talks on Sunday had focused on ports and infrastructure in the Black Sea. He said that the security of Ukrainian ports in Odesa, Mykolaiv and Kherson was discussed. Only the Odesa ports are currently operational, although they are regularly struck by Russian drones and missiles. The ports in Mykolaiv and Kherson are shut down because of the proximity of the front line.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said on Tuesday that the Russian government was studying the results of the meeting between Russian and American delegations. He called the talks “technical” and said that the results would not be made public.

President Volodymyr Zelensky had said that Ukraine would prepare a list of infrastructure that could be included in the cease-fire agreement. He added that a third party would have to monitor the cease-fire and suggested that the United States could do so.

Steven Witkoff, whom President Trump has tapped to be his personal envoy to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, has said that the ultimate goal of the talks is a 30-day full cease-fire that would allow time for negotiations on a permanent truce.

But the path toward such a truce has been shaky. Moscow continues to insist on maximalist positions, including about asserting territorial control and ensuring Ukraine never joins NATO. The Ukrainian government has repeatedly said that it will not concede to the Kremlin’s demands and has accused Mr. Putin of stalling for time.

The Russian delegation

The Russian negotiators are led by Grigory B. Karasin, a senior Russian diplomat and lawmaker, and Sergey O. Beseda, an adviser to the head of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the country’s domestic intelligence agency.

Mr. Karasin described the talks as “creative,” the Russian news agency Interfax reported.

While Mr. Karasin has been involved in sensitive foreign policy talks before, Mr. Beseda’s choice came as a surprise to some.

Mr. Beseda was head of the F.S.B. department responsible for international intelligence operations. He has been described by Russian news outlets as one of the main sources of intelligence that convinced Mr. Putin in 2022 that there was pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine and that a brisk invasion could easily dismantle the government in Kyiv.

In 2023, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, called Mr. Beseda a “very problematic person” for Ukraine who “has done a lot of evil.”

The Ukrainian delegation

Mr. Umerov is leading the Ukrainian delegation in Riyadh, along with Pavlo Palisa, a top military adviser to Mr. Zelensky.

Both Mr. Umerov and Mr. Palisa are members of the Ukrainian delegation for peace talks that Mr. Zelensky appointed this month, a group led by his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. Mr. Umerov was a key negotiator for Ukraine in peace talks with Russian diplomats in the early months of the war.

Ukrinform, the state news agency, said the Ukrainian team included deputy foreign and energy ministers, along with Mr. Zelensky’s top diplomatic adviser.

Moscow’s position

Last week, Mr. Putin told Mr. Trump in a telephone conversation that Russia would agree to a temporary truce only if Ukraine stopped mobilizing soldiers, training troops or importing weapons for the duration of any pause in fighting.

Mr. Putin also demanded the complete halt of foreign military aid and intelligence to Kyiv, calling it “the key condition for preventing an escalation of the conflict and making progress toward its resolution through political and diplomatic means,” according to the Kremlin’s readout of the call.

The White House said that military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine would continue despite the Kremlin’s demands. But the Trump administration has been less clear on Moscow’s calls for territorial concessions.

Mr. Witkoff echoed a Kremlin talking point on Sunday when he tried to legitimize the staged referendums that the Russian occupation forces held in parts of Ukraine to justify the annexation of those territories taken by military force. “There is a view within the country of Russia that these are Russian territories,” Mr. Witkoff told Fox News.

Fundamentally, Russia’s position regarding the conflict has remained the same. The Kremlin says it wants to “eliminate the root causes of the crisis” — essentially demanding that Ukraine capitulate.

Kyiv’s position

Ukraine had previously agreed to an unconditional 30-day truce to cease all combat operations, at the urging of the Trump administration. But after Moscow said that it would support only a partial cease-fire on energy infrastructure, Mr. Zelensky spoke with Mr. Trump and agreed to the limited truce.

In recent days, Ukrainian officials have set out red lines going into negotiations: Kyiv will never accept Russian sovereignty over occupied Ukrainian territory; it will not agree to be blocked from joining NATO or to reduce the size of its army; and it must have security guarantees as part of any peace settlement.

Many Ukrainian officials and analysts have expressed doubt that even a limited cease-fire would hold for long, noting that previous truces between Moscow and Kyiv were routinely violated, with each side blaming the other.

“I do not believe in a cease-fire. We’ve been through this before,” Kostyantyn Yeliseyev, a veteran diplomat and former Ukrainian deputy foreign minister who took part in cease-fire negotiations in 2014 and 2015, said in an interview.

What’s next?

Mr. Witkoff said on Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg News that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin were “likely” to meet in Saudi Arabia within weeks. American officials will also probably continue talks with their Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in the Middle East to discuss details of a limited truce.

But the foundations of the diplomatic process have been wobbly, analysts said, with Moscow and Kyiv ready to continue fighting.

“Both sides still believe that they can continue the war regardless of the American position,” said Dmitry Kuznets, a military analyst with the Russian news outlet Meduza, which operates from Latvia after being outlawed by the Kremlin.

He added, “Moscow’s and Kyiv’s visions of what an agreement could look like are still infinitely far from each other.”

Maria Varenikova and Minho Kim contributed reporting.

Kristine Carroll plopped herself down in the only shade on the beach — a triangle cast by the makeshift lifeguard station — and slathered sunscreen all over her freckled skin.

Squinting at the scorching midday sun, she glanced over at her 8-year-old daughter, Zoe, who had already plunged into the blue-green water without hesitation. “She’s a water baby,” Ms. Carroll said.

The Pacific Ocean, which gives Sydney, Australia, its iconic coastline and some of the world’s most enviable beaches, was almost 50 miles away. A pod of pelicans cruised past and coots waded nearby, with not a sea gull in sight. A sign cheekily warned of wave heights of 2 millimeters — less than a tenth of an inch.

This is Pondi Beach.

No, not Bondi, the glistening backdrop of reality television, the stuff of backpackers’ daydreams and ground zero of the Australian church of surf and sand — but Pondi, as locals have taken to calling humble, man-made Penrith Beach.

Created on one stretch of a lagoon at a former quarry at the foot of the Blue Mountains that mark the Sydney area’s western edge, Pondi, pronounced Pond-eye, isn’t exactly postcard-worthy like the eponymous Bondi Beach. But it has become a welcome haven for those who live an hour or more inland from the coast and pay hefty tolls to get there.

Like many cities, the fringes of Sydney’s urban sprawl are made up of working-class families, newly arrived immigrants and those pushed out further and further from downtown by rising housing prices. In Penrith and nearby areas, that also means living with temperatures that can be 30 degrees Fahrenheit higher than near the coast, a disparity exacerbated by climate change. In 2020, Penrith was briefly the hottest place on earth, when the mercury topped 120 degrees.

The beach opened for a second season in December and so far has cost the state government about $2.7 million. At just over half a mile long, it is as long as Bondi Beach.

On a recent Sunday, when a heat warning was in effect with highs of 95 degrees, children gleefully splashed about at Pondi with snorkels or pool floats in the shape of crocodiles and unicorns. Some families tossed about a rugby ball, while others cooked up a feast of prawns, sausages and a whole roast chicken. A couple of girls lay out on their stomachs for a tan.

Ms. Carroll, 46, a lifelong Penrith resident who works as an education coordinator in a nearby prison, has never had air conditioning at home. The previous night, she said, she drove around in her car just for the air conditioning, because it was too hot in her house.

Having a beach close to her home for her family to cool off, rather than having to spend a full day trekking out to the coast — paying steep prices for tolls, parking and food — has been a major help, particularly in a cost-of-living crisis she said has stretched her finances. By her accounting, that day’s outing would only cost her the gas for a 12-minute drive and a 50-cent McDonald’s ice cream for her daughter on their way home.

“A lot of people turn up their noses at it, but, mate, it’s free. They think it’s the bogan knockoff of Bondi Beach,” she said, using derogatory Australian slang for an uncouth person, historically associated with Sydney’s western suburbs.

Zoe said she had been to “actual Bondi” on a recent weekend for a cousin’s swim meet. She liked it but said the saltiness of the ocean water left her with red splotches on her skin.

“I like how soft the sand is. In Bondi, the sand was too hot,” she said, burrowing her toes into the pale Pondi sand.

After playing in the water, Elhadi Dahia and his three children — ages 6, 4 and 1 ½ — had walked up a grassy slope to two food trucks. The older two polished off hot dogs and a potato snack, and began pleading for ice cream. The youngest was in a swim diaper with the words “Fish are friends” on it.

A native of Darfur in landlocked western Sudan, Mr. Dahia said he only knows how to “donkey swim,” having grown up swimming in rivers that flooded after rain. He said that he arrived in Australia more than a decade ago as a refugee and that he has enrolled his children in swimming lessons for a true Australian upbringing.

They were late for swim class that day and decided instead to go to Pondi, which his neighbor had been raving about for weeks. Mr. Dahia, 38, said he was pleasantly surprised and said he’d probably be back before long.

Diana Harvey said she was skeptical of Penrith Beach before she decided to check it out on a whim on a recent weekday afternoon.

She needed a break from her duties as a full-time caregiver for her autistic adult son, which keeps her at home most days, and hadn’t been to a beach all summer — a travesty for many Australians who consider swimming a birthright.

“I was basically brought up in the water,” said Ms. Harvey, 52, recalling that her family would spend three hours driving to and from a beach in the summers growing up. “We are all water people here.”

She had popped by Pondi in the waning days of summer thinking she would take a quick, 20-minute dip but ended up swimming for two hours, the Blue Mountains majestically stretching beyond and an expansive azure sky reflecting in the serene waters.

Some residents have wondered if a beach so far inland would essentially be a glorified swamp, and there have been brief closures over water quality concerns. Pondi’s opening week in 2023 was marred by tragedy when a man who floated on a paddle board with his young children beyond the swimming area drowned.

Still, more than 200,000 people visited the beach in its first season, according to the state government.

On a recent weekend morning, Barbara Dunn’s family was first in line before the gates for the beach opened at 10 a.m. Her 6-year-old daughter Rhythm was sticking her head out of their car’s back window in excitement.

“Where we’re from in New Zealand, we’d call this a lake,” Ms. Dunn, 45, said. “It does the job. You get wet, right?”

Rhythm bounded through the sand with her plastic pail filled with tools for building sand castles. For the next six hours, as the hot sun peaked overhead then began heading for the mountains, as the crowds filled in then thinned out, she tirelessly swam, played in the sand, rolled around in the river grass.

“She won’t want to go home,” Ms. Dunn said with a sigh.

Two days after a coalition of conservatives won Germany’s federal election last month, the governor of Bavaria took to Instagram to say the parties were “ready for political change” and posted a group picture of the likely future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, with five other leaders.

But the photo seemed to suggest that a changed Germany will look remarkably like the country of old: It shows six white middle-aged white men sitting around a table of snacks. The only apparent concession to modern sensibilities was that half of the men are not wearing neckties.

Three-and-a-half years after Angela Merkel, the only woman to serve as chancellor, retired, German national politics seem to be backsliding when it comes to gender parity. The new German Parliament, which met for the first time on Tuesday, has always been more male and less diverse than the population it represents, but the new one will be even more male and — compared with the society as a whole — less diverse than the one before it.

Only 32 percent of the 630 new lawmakers are women, a drop from 35 percent when the last Parliament was formed in 2021.

In a country where society has appeared at times reluctant to turn away from traditional gender roles, the number of women in the highest elected body has been stagnating since 2013, when it hit a high of 36 percent. The president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, pointed to this statistic during a speech at a recent Women’s Day celebration.

“When our democracy has a problem with women, then our country has a problem with democracy,” Mr. Steinmeier said. He noted that even if every elected woman from all of the country’s parties voted together as a bloc, they would not reach the one-third minority needed to block changes to the Constitution.

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