In a potential softening of the bruising trade war between China and the United States, Beijing said on Friday that it was considering holding talks with the Trump administration after repeated attempts by senior U.S. officials to start negotiations.

China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement that China was “evaluating” the U.S. offer to talk, but it said Beijing’s position remained consistent: It will only engage in negotiations if Washington cancels its tariffs on Chinese goods first.

“If the United States does not correct its wrong unilateral tariff measures, it means that the United States has no sincerity at all and will further damage the mutual trust between the two sides,” the ministry said.

China’s signaling about its willingness to talk comes as the tariffs appear to have already taken a toll on Chinese producers. An official report on manufacturing activity in April showed that factories in China had experienced their sharpest monthly slowdown in more than a year.

The two countries have been sparring since President Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese goods to a minimum of 145 percent last month, while omitting China from a 90-day pause on his tariffs that he granted to all other countries. China has responded with its own sky-high tariffs on U.S. goods, while blocking some American companies from doing business in China and restricting exports of critical minerals that U.S. manufacturers rely on to make things like semiconductors, drones and cars.

The clash, which has doubled as a battle of wills between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has shaken global markets and accelerated a decoupling of the world’s two largest economies.

Armed convoys are rumbling toward Pakistan’s border with India. Fighter jets are slicing across the sky. Television screens are filled with warnings of impending conflict. National leaders are vowing a decisive response to any military action.

But beneath Pakistan’s drumbeat of defiant declarations as tensions erupt with India, a weary Pakistani public sees war as the last thing the country needs.

The gap between official talk and civilian exhaustion reveals a country grappling with deeper fragilities. Economic hardship and political resignation course through everyday life.

On university campuses and in living rooms, conversations are less about battles and borders and more about inflation, unemployment, a political system that feels unrepresentative and a future clouded by uncertainty.

“It makes me feel uneasy,” said Tehseen Zahra, 21, a university student in Islamabad, the capital, a week after a terrorist attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir inflamed the longstanding enmity between India and Pakistan.

“I get that leaders want to show strength,” she added. “But talking about war feels like too much. We already have too many problems. We need peace, not more trouble.”

For betting types, the conventional wisdom says not to put your money on a pope from the United States.

Yet one American some Vatican watchers say could scrape together enough votes is Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, a Chicago-born polyglot who is viewed as a churchman who transcends borders. He served for two decades in Peru, where he became a bishop and a naturalized citizen, then rose to lead his international religious order. He now holds one of the most influential Vatican posts.

As ideological camps tussle over whether to continue Pope Francis’ inclusive agenda or return to a conservative doctrinal path, supporters of Cardinal Prevost pitch him as a balanced alternative among the papabili, as likely candidates for the papacy are known.

The Rev. Michele Falcone, 46, a priest in the Order of St. Augustine previously led by Cardinal Prevost, described his mentor and friend as the “dignified middle of the road.”

The cardinal resembles Francis in his commitment to the poor and migrants and to meeting people where they are. He told the Vatican’s official news website last year that “the bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom.” Rather, he said, a church leader is “called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them.”

Cardinal Prevost, appointed by Francis in 2023 to run the Vatican office that selects and manages bishops globally, has spent much of his life outside the United States. Ordained in 1982 at age 27, he received a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. In Peru, he was a missionary, parish priest, teacher and bishop. As the Augustinians’ leader, he visited orders around the world, and speaks Spanish and Italian.

When the Archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, received his cardinal’s red hat on Oct. 5, 2019, his day ended with a Mass celebrated in the square of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, a neighborhood in central Rome where he found his direction as a teenager and later served as a priest.

“My life, or rather life itself, is always made up of so many pieces that have shaped us and are part of me,” Cardinal Zuppi, now 69, said during his homily that evening. “Today I can see, and I believe we all see it, the joy of being together as a piece of our common life, exactly the opposite of individualism.”

Many of those gathered to wish him well during that Mass knew him from his days as a teenage volunteer for the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic charity known for working with the poor, for interreligious dialogue and for mediating international conflicts.

After he became a priest, he went on to become a vicar at the basilica and for years, he was a spiritual leader of the Community of Sant’Egidio, which prays at Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Now he is among the cardinals frequently mentioned by Vatican watchers as a contender to be pope. As a priest and a bishop he embraced a pastoral vision of ministry similar to Francis’, and he would be expected to continue his approach if elected.

For many Romans, Cardinal Zuppi is known as “Don Matteo” — the name of a crime-solving priest on Italian TV.

With the beginning of cease-fire talks in the war between Russia and Ukraine, life has become riskier for Ukrainian civilians, according to a tally of civilian deaths by the United Nations and analysts reviewing recent Russian strikes.

Since the talks began in February, Russian missile and drone strikes and fighting along the front line have killed far more civilians than over the same period a year ago, U.N. officials said in a presentation for diplomats in New York this week. In the first 24 days of April, for example, 848 civilians were killed or wounded, a 46 percent increase over the same period last year, the U.N. said.

At the same time, Russia has been targeting cities more intensively — just last month hitting a playground, pedestrians on a crowded sidewalk and an apartment building — an analysis of recent strikes show. In the fighting on the ground, Russia opened a new offensive in the north, east and south, Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said on April 9.

On March 11, Ukraine launched on Moscow its largest drone assault of the entire war — the morning of the day it agreed to a cease-fire. The barrage killed three people and wounded 18 others in the Russian capital and nearby, the Russian authorities said.

Overall, the first months of this year coinciding with the Trump administration’s peace talks have clocked in as far deadlier than the same period last year, according to the United Nations.

Israeli fighter jets struck near the presidential palace in Damascus, the Syrian capital, early Friday, in what Israel’s leaders said was a message to President Ahmed al-Sharaa that they are willing to attack deep inside his country after a recent wave of sectarian violence.

In recent days, more than 100 people have died in clashes involving multiple parties — Sunni Muslim extremists not fully under the government’s control, forces of the new government and militiamen from the country’s Druse minority.

The Druse practice a secretive religion with its roots in Islam, and some of those living in Syria have ties to the Druse community in Israel.

Defense Minister Israel Katz called the strikes “a clear warning” and said that when Mr. al-Sharaa “wakes up and sees the results of the strike of Israeli Air Force jets, he will understand well that Israel is determined to prevent any harm to the Druse in Syria.”

In an earlier statement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Katz said, “We will not allow a movement of forces from south of Damascus and any danger to the Druse community.”

The strike on Friday was the second time since the violence erupted this week that Israel had intervened militarily inside Syria on behalf of the Druse.

Nigel Farage’s insurgent anti-immigration party, Reform U.K., scored a significant, if razor-thin, victory Friday in a parliamentary special election in the northwest of England. The result served notice that Mr. Farage, a populist fixture and close ally of President Trump, is again a rising force in British politics.

Reform’s candidate, Sarah Pochin, won by just six votes over her Labour Party opponent, Karen Shore, in Runcorn and Helsby, seizing what had been a safe seat for Labour until the incumbent, Mike Amesbury, was forced to resign after being convicted of assault for punching one of his constituents.

On a night of high drama, the outcome — the tightest in such an election in modern history — was so close that the vote had to be recounted, delaying the declaration of the result for hours.

But the victory, by 12,645 votes to 12,639, was the start of what could be an impressive show of strength by Reform in mayoral and local council elections held Thursday across England.

More than 1,600 municipal seats are up for grabs, and polls suggest that Reform could win at least 300 of them.

If Reform’s gains are borne out as the ballots are counted throughout Friday, it would deliver a jolt to British politics, potentially accelerating the country’s shift toward a more polarized, multiparty system.

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The comedian and actor Russell Brand appeared before a London court on Friday on multiple charges of sexual assault, including two counts of rape.

His 14-minute appearance at the court, Westminster Magistrates’, was the first, largely procedural step in what are likely to be lengthy criminal proceedings. It came a month after British prosecutors charged Mr. Brand with one count of rape, one of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and another of indecent assault.

As the brief hearing began, Mr. Brand, 49, stood inside a plexiglass box in the courtroom, wearing a shirt opened to show his chest and holding a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses. Mr. Brand confirmed his name, date of birth and British address, then listened, without showing any visible emotion, to details of the charges.

Suki Dhadda, the lead lawyer for the prosecution, said that one woman had accused Mr. Brand of raping her in a hotel room during a British Labour Party conference in 1999. Ms. Dhabba said that another woman had accused Mr. Brand of orally raping her in a bathroom stall at a party.

Another woman, Ms. Dhabba said, accused Mr. Brand of kissing her without her consent while grabbing her breasts and buttocks. The final charge concerned a woman who said Mr. Brand had tried to pull her into a bathroom.

Mr. Brand has denied all of the charges. In a video posted to his social media accounts in April, he said that he had “never engaged in nonconsensual activity” and that he looked forward to defending himself in court.