A few weeks before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, a senior White House official visited eastern Lebanon for a sightseeing trip that doubled as a dramatic political statement.

The official, Amos Hochstein, one of President Biden’s most trusted national security advisers, toured the ancient ruins of Baalbek in an area well known as a stronghold of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group sponsored by Iran.

Wearing white pants and a golf shirt, and with no security entourage, Mr. Hochstein marveled at the artifacts and snapped photos of the onetime Roman city’s crumbling stone walls and columns. Keeping watch from a distance were several muscular men in black T-shirts — presumed Hezbollah militiamen.

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Primed to celebrate victory but left explaining why his party finished third, the leader of France’s hard-right National Rally blamed Sunday’s surprise election result on the “caricature” of his party as extremist. That “disinformation,” he said, handed victory to “formations of the extreme left.”

The speech to glum supporters on election night by Jordan Bardella, leader of the nationalist party formerly known as the National Front, captured a Europe-wide trend: intense political polarization in which each side denounces the other as “extremist.”

Europe is far from what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm termed the “age of extremes” in the 20th century, when the continent succumbed to the twin extremist ideologies of fascism and communism. There are no violent street battles in Berlin, Paris or Vienna as there were before and sometimes after World War II between rival camps, or urban terror campaigns like those in the 1970s and ’80s by the would-be left-wing revolutionaries of Germany’s Red Army Faction and France’s Direct Action.

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From under a parking lot in the center of Berlin, a team of archaeologists unearthed ancient human skeletons of nearly 4,000 forgotten dead from a bygone church cemetery paved over by a former Communist regime.

That was nearly two decades ago. In that time, scientists plumbed information from inside bones — some older than 1160 — and in between ancient teeth. They made startling discoveries, including that the city was inhabited nearly a century earlier than believed.

But bones hold only so many secrets. With much of the research on these earliest Berliners complete, the remains of 100 medieval and early modern babies, children and adults have now been returned to the heart of the city. They will rest in state in a museum, Petri Berlin, at the same place where they had been ignominiously blacktopped over.

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Rwanda does not have to repay the hundreds of millions of pounds it received from Britain as part of a contentious policy aimed at sending migrants on a one-way flight to the Central African nation, two senior Rwandan government officials say.

Rwanda’s president had previously suggested that such money could be returned.

As part of the deal, Britain was set to give Rwanda as much as about half a billion pounds in development funding in exchange for taking in the migrants. Britain’s independent public spending watchdog said in early March that the country had already paid Rwanda £220 million, about $280 million, even though no asylum seekers had been deported to the African nation.

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It was 1922, two years before the last time the Olympics were held in Paris. On a warm August day, about 20,000 people came to Pershing Stadium to watch 77 athletes in track and field, including a team from the United States. There was a parade of nations. There were world records. There were 27 journalists and news coverage around the world.

And at the start, a 38-year-old woman named Alice Milliat welcomed the world to Paris. She was the founder of the International Women’s Sports Federation, known in her native France as the Fédération Sportive Féminine International.

Every competitor that day was a woman.

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It started with an old double-decker bus.

About 20 years ago, a group of friends who had met while following the Dutch soccer team around the world decided over beers that it would be fun to buy an old bus. They would paint it orange, the Dutch national color. They would outfit it with a bar and some very strong loudspeakers, and then they would take it on the road to watch their team.

But the bus is no longer just a bus. In the years since it first hit the road, it has morphed into something else: an internationally recognized grand marshal to a parade of tens of thousands of orange-clad Dutch fans who sing, chant and skip from left to right in unison on their way to the stadium every time and everywhere the national team plays.

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The line outside the Venezuelan Consulate in Madrid stretched down the block. Pregnant women, families with small children, older people and those with disabilities arrived as early as 4 a.m. — five hours before the office opened — trying to register to vote in Venezuela’s highly anticipated presidential election.

Adriana Rodríguez, 47, who left Venezuela in 2018, showed up at 8 a.m., two days in a row. Both times, she waited four hours before reaching the front of the line, only to be turned away, she said, always with the same explanation: “They could not register any more people.”

With Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, trailing badly in polls ahead of the July 28 vote, the government has imposed stringent rules making registering to vote nearly impossible for millions of Venezuelans living abroad, including in the United States, Spain and Latin American countries.

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