Serhiy Hnezdilov spent Saturday night in a cease-fire that wasn’t. Fighting for Ukraine in the eastern Donetsk region, he said he could hear explosions throughout the night, despite the Kremlin’s promise of a truce for Easter.

Mr. Hnezdilov, 24, said Ukrainian soldiers were told to report to their superiors all violations of the cease-fire, which was abruptly declared by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Saturday afternoon and later agreed to halfheartedly by skeptical Ukrainian officials. In addition, Mr. Hnezdilov said, some planned Ukrainian military operations had been put on hold.

“I don’t even know how to assess this so-called cease-fire,” said Mr. Hnezdilov, whose 56th Mariupol Brigade is fighting near the town of Chasiv Yar. “To me, it was just words from Putin like, ‘We won’t shoot,’ but they are shooting,” he said in an interview on Sunday, adding: “Every so-called cease-fire with the Russians gets violated by the Russians immediately.”

The truce, announced as lasting 30 hours, appeared to be a gambit by Mr. Putin to show the United States that Russia was serious about peace.

On Friday, the Trump administration indicated that if it could not make progress in ending the war, it would walk away. What that meant was unclear. Would the United States stop leading peace negotiations, yet continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and military intelligence? Or would Washington wash its hands of the war and abandon Ukraine?

Without U.S. help, Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting is tenuous. As the military aid initially authorized under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. slows to a trickle, Ukraine has been able to win more military help from Europe. But it also depends on the United States for essential military intelligence and targeting data, and for the Patriot missiles used in its air defenses.

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Ten years ago, when former President Barack Obama and other leaders reached a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program, Saudi Arabia was dismayed.

Saudi officials called it a “weak deal” that had only emboldened the kingdom’s regional rival, Iran. They cheered when President Trump withdrew from the agreement a few years later.

Now, as a second Trump administration negotiates with Iran on a deal that might have very similar contours to the previous one, the view from Saudi Arabia looks quite different.

The kingdom’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement recently saying that it hoped the talks, mediated by neighboring Oman, would enhance “peace in the region and the world.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even dispatched his brother, the defense minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, to Tehran, where he was received warmly by Iranian officials dressed in military regalia. He then hand-delivered a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a man whom Prince Mohammed once derided as making “Hitler look good.”

What changed? Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran have warmed over the past decade. As important, Saudi Arabia is in the middle of an economic diversification program intended to transform the kingdom from being overly dependent on oil into a business, technology and tourism hub. The prospect of Iranian drones and missiles flying over Saudi Arabia because of regional tensions poses a serious threat to that plan.

Pope Francis on Sunday blessed tens of thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for Easter Mass, his weak, raspy voice a reminder of his frailty less than a month after being discharged from a lengthy hospital stay for life-threatening pneumonia.

A roar erupted from the crowd in the square when the pope appeared in a wheelchair on a balcony at St. Peter’s Basilica and raised a hand in greeting.

“Dear brothers and sisters, happy Easter,” the pope said. Then he waited as Archbishop Diego Ravelli, a Vatican aide delivered the “Urbi et Orbi,” a papal address delivered at Easter and Christmas.

After the address, Francis blessed those present, then waved. The crowds gathered in the square cheered, and called out, “Viva il papa,” or “Long live the pope.”

Before his appearance, the pope met “for a few minutes” with Vice President JD Vance, who was spending the Easter weekend in Rome, according to the Vatican.

When Francis was discharged from the hospital on March 23, his doctors advised him to take it easy for at least two months as he convalesced — and to steer clear of crowds and situations where he could be exposed to germs. His doctor said Francis had almost died in the hospital, where he spent five weeks being treated for pneumonia and other complications.

When Thierno Agne was a student casting about for a lucrative career, he told his agriculture professor he was considering growing strawberries in Senegal.

“You will fail,” he remembered the professor warning.

He didn’t listen, and now, at 36, Mr. Agne runs one of the biggest strawberry farms in the country.

He had not even wanted to be a farmer. He had started his higher education by studying law. But then, he shocked his family by switching to agriculture when he realized there were already more law graduates in Senegal than there were jobs available.

Still, despite the glut of legal graduates, his shift in focus was an unusual move for an ambitious young man in a country where farming is seen as a job for old, uneducated or poor people.

Mr. Agne has shown, however, that farming can be a profession that requires education, commands as much respect and remuneration as a lawyer, and demands as much innovation as any high-tech entrepreneur is expected to show.

On a recent morning at his farm just outside Dakar, the capital, Mr. Agne quietly trod the rows of vibrant strawberry plants, checking how his delicate crop was doing.

The children died one after the other. Twelve acutely malnourished infants living in one corner of Sudan’s war-ravaged capital, Khartoum.

Abdo, an 18-month-old boy, had been rushed to a clinic by his mother as he was dying. His ribs protruded from his withered body. The next day, a doctor laid him out on a blanket with a teddy bear motif, his eyes closed.

Like the other 11 children, Abdo starved to death in the weeks after President Trump froze all U.S. foreign assistance, said local aid workers and a doctor. American-funded soup kitchens in Sudan, including the one near Abdo’s house, had been the only lifelines for tens of thousands of people besieged by fighting.

Bombs were falling. Gunfire was everywhere. Then, as the American money dried up, hundreds of soup kitchens closed in a matter of days.

“It was catastrophic,” said Duaa Tariq, an aid worker.

The stark consequences of Mr. Trump’s slashing of U.S. aid are evident in few places as clearly as in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has set off a staggering humanitarian catastrophe and left 25 million people — more than half of the country’s population — acutely hungry.

When Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared last Sunday on Quebec’s most popular talk show, “Tout le Monde en Parle,” the most consequential question may not have been about President Trump or tariffs. Instead, it was probably when the host asked him what he “knew or liked about” Canada’s French-speaking province.

“A singer? A city? A feature? A cheese? Anything?” the host, Guy Lepage, suggested, in French, as Mr. Carney laughed but gave no clear answer.

Winning over voters in Quebec has usually, in great part, meant winning hearts by speaking French, grasping the province’s history and appreciating its culture. That was never going to be easy for Mr. Carney, a political novice whose appeals to Québécois voters have been marked by his faltering French and a series of gaffes that have raised doubts about his basic knowledge of Quebec, the country’s second-most-populous province.

Until a few months ago, the Bloc Québécois — a party that runs candidates for the federal Parliament in Quebec but that supports independence for the province — appeared headed for a big victory that would have considerably hurt Mr. Carney’s chances of winning the April 28 federal election. But Mr. Carney and his Liberal Party now have a huge lead in the polls in Quebec.

The abrupt reversal is another sign of how Mr. Trump’s tariffs and aggressive threats of annexation have upended Canada’s elections. Most Canadians regard Mr. Carney, a former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England who has never before run for office, as the most capable candidate to deal with the American president, polls show. Even many hardcore supporters of the Bloc Québécois are now considering Mr. Carney and are cutting him some slack for his lack of connection to Quebec.

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