“I like punctuality, it’s a virtue I have learned to appreciate,” Pope Francis writes in the fifth chapter of his autobiography, to be published on Tuesday in 18 languages, adding that he considers it “a sign of good manners and respect, to arrive promptly.”

Unfortunately, as a newborn, Francis writes, he arrived a week late, necessitating a call to the doctor, who sat on his mother’s stomach and began to “to press and to ‘jump about’’’ to induce his birth.

“And so it was that I came into the world,” Francis writes.

“Hope: The Autobiography,” by Pope Francis — a 320-page compendium of the pope’s memories and musings on the major social and political issues of our times, including climate change, poverty, immigration, arms control and war — is billed by its English-language publisher, Random House, as an “historic publication” and “the first memoir to be published by a Pope.”

That is not technically true. That honor belongs to Pope Pius II’s 15th Century chronicles, “The Commentaries,” a 13-book account of his life that is considered a seminal text in Renaissance humanism.

Francis is also not the first pope to share his life story. As a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger wrote an autobiography which was published in 1997, eight years before he became Pope Benedict XVI, and both he and his predecessor, John Paul II, coauthored books with journalists that were personal reflections and not official papal documents.

But for readers, including the Roman Catholic faithful, “Hope” vividly recreates the colorful world where the young Jorge Mario Bergoglio grew up — a world that was a menagerie of migrants from various countries and colorful figures, including prostitutes, his “bag-lady” aunt, and other memorable family members.

People who watch Francis closely will recognize in the autobiography many of his views from his various encyclicals, his weekly addresses at the Vatican and speeches during his travels. “Hope,” however, draws a line from the childhood events and encounters that forged Francis’ thinking to the current day.

Francis’ unswerving support for migrants, he writes, derives from his own background as the son of Italian immigrants to Argentina. His abhorrence of war — “anyone who makes war is evil. God is peace,” he writes in “Hope” — finds root in the wartime experiences of his grandfather in World War I. “Nono described the horror, the pain, the fear, the absurd alienating pointlessness of the war,” he writes. A left-leaning biomedical pharmaceutical researcher he met before entering a seminary “taught me to think —­ by which I mean, to think about politics.”

There are many personal memories described in the book: As a young teacher teaching creative writing, Francis writes, his students nicknamed him “Carucha” or “Babyface.” He recalls that he once helped a nearly blind Jorge Luis Borges to shave. “He was an agnostic who recited the Lord’s Prayer every night because he had promised his mother he’d do so, and who would die with the last rites.”

Francis is no stranger to journalistic collaborations. A book on his life written from interviews he gave to the Argentine journalist Sergio Rubin was published when he was still Cardinal of Buenos Aires.

Since he became pope there have been several more: Francis wrote “Let Us Dream,” a first-person account exploring how crisis can be a positive catalyst for change, during the coronavirus pandemic, with his biographer Austen Ivereigh. The book made the New York Times best-seller list. Last year, “Life,” an anecdote-rich book written with Fabio Marchese Ragona, was published worldwide, and also made The Times’s list.

“Hope” was six years in the making and one of the publishing world’s best kept secrets. Originally, Francis had intended the autobiography to be published posthumously, but last summer, he changed his mind so that the publication would coincide with the 2025 Jubilee, the Catholic Church Holy Year that takes place every quarter century.

Mondadori, the Italian publisher, announced the book’s imminent release at last year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, stirring excitement, not least among Francis’ biographers.

An autobiography was an opportunity, said Mr. Iverneigh in an interview, “for Francis to go into episodes of his life, about which his biographers, including me,” had speculated, argued “and struggled sometimes to interpret.”

But while rich in anecdotes about Francis’ childhood in the Buenos Aires barrio, episodes Mr. Iverneigh described as “gems,” the book does not offer much insight into Francis’ later life other than that which is already “well-trodden material.”

For example, Francis says little about his years at the Vatican. His comment that the “reform of the Roman Curia was the most demanding, and for a long while there was the greatest resistance to change” does not offer any details about the struggles that were involved.

“The pope is the pope and it’s great to have his reflections repackaged for a mass audience,” said Mr. Iverneigh, who added that he believed the pope saw these books as “an evangelizing tool.” But, he added, “I was frankly disappointed” to find that most of the original material was relegated to his childhood years.

Perhaps the most newsworthy snippet in the book is Francis’ recollections of his 2021 visit to Iraq, which were published as an excerpt in the Jesuit magazine America in December. Francis wrote that he had survived two foiled assassination attempts. The former governor of Nineveh later denied that any such incidents had occurred. The Times also published an excerpt from the autobiography in December, this one about there being faith in humor.

Gian Maria Vian, a former editor in chief of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, said that he appreciated the “many personal details” the book added to Francis’ biography, but that much had been written through “rose tinted glasses.”

Francis wrote the book with Mr. Musso, a former Mondadori publishing director who has recently founded an independent publishing house. The idea took shape in 2019 and work began a year later.

“I was honored by his trust,” Mr. Musso said. “I don’t think he wanted an autobiography to talk about himself, but using his memories, his stories, to speak of everyone and to everyone, even very difficult moments.”

Lebanon’s fractured Parliament named Nawaf Salam as prime minister on Monday, handing the country’s political reigns to the prominent diplomat and international jurist as Lebanon emerges from a devastating war and attempts to recover from a dire economic meltdown.

Mr. Salam was endorsed by a majority of lawmakers in the country’s 128-seat Parliament on Monday, after which Lebanon’s newly elected president, Joseph Aoun, asked him to form a government. Mr. Salam is currently serving as the head of the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ top court, and previously served as Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations.

The selection of Mr. Salam was widely seen as a major political blow to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political party that has served as the real power in Lebanon for decades. For much of that time, almost no major political decision could be made without Hezbollah’s backing.

But the vote on Monday offered a rebuke to that status quo, elevating Mr. Salam — whom Hezbollah opposed — and delivering a stunning defeat to the Hezbollah-backed candidate. For many, it underscored Lebanon’s new political reality: Since emerging from a 14-month war with Israel, Hezbollah no longer has an iron, unshakable grip on Lebanon’s state.

In just over two months, Israel assassinated the group’s top leaders. The war left billions of dollars in damages across the country. Hezbollah also lost its main ally in neighboring Syria, the dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was toppled by rebels last month. And its patron, Iran, is now on its back foot after its web of anti-Israel militias has unraveled. Those developments have opened a new political chapter in Lebanon, analysts say.

“The whole political dynamic has changed,” said Sami Nader, the director of the Political Sciences Institute at Saint Joseph University of Beirut. “It’s a total collapse of the old modus operandi.”

The Lebanese state is made up of a multitude of factions and sects that jockey for power and influence. For years, it has been controlled by a weak and ineffectual caretaker government. Hezbollah was both a part of that government and the dominant political and military force, effectively guiding almost all of the country’s major decisions.

In recent days, Lebanon’s shifting political sands have been laid bare in a flurry of political developments that have underscored just how much political ground Hezbollah has lost.

Last week, Lebanon’s Parliament elected Mr. Aoun as the country’s new president — overcoming more than two years of political gridlock that critics had attributed to Hezbollah. Then on Monday, Mr. Salam — whom Hezbollah had repeatedly blocked from becoming prime minister in recent years — gained the support of 85 members of the country’s 128-seat Parliament. The departing prime minister whom Hezbollah supported, Najib Mikati, secured only nine votes. Thirty-five ballots were cast blank.

After the vote, a senior Hezbollah lawmaker, Mohammad Raad, told reporters at a news conference that Hezbollah had “extended its hand” by supporting the election of Mr. Aoun, only to have its “hand cut” on Monday, according to local media reports.

The new government that is emerging in Lebanon also reflects the realignment of power dynamics across the Middle East, analysts say. The era of Iran’s sway over Lebanon appears to be over, they say, creating an opening for Gulf countries that had vied with Iran unsuccessfully in Lebanon for years.

Saudi Arabia and Western countries have thrown their support behind Mr. Salam and Mr. Aoun, and many within Lebanon hope that the new government they lead will bring an influx of funds from those countries as Lebanon grapples with a billions-dollar bill for reconstruction from the war between Hezbollah and Israel.

“The Arab countries are on board, there’s a possibility of Lebanon being welcomed back to the Arab family,” Mr. Nader said. “It’s an unbelievable change. You can feel the weakening of Iran.”

A culture flourished along the central Peruvian coast from about A.D. 900 to 1500. Called the Chancay, they left behind a wealth of cultural remains, including intricate tattoos that are preserved to this day on the skin of mummified individuals.

New details of these tattoos that were previously hidden to the naked eye, including finely traced lines, were described in a study published on Monday. After illuminating the mummies with laser-stimulated fluorescence, or L.S.F., an imaging tool that until now had never been applied to tattoos, scientists discovered lines 0.1 to 0.2 millimeters wide, narrower than work produced by most modern tattoo needles.

“We were shocked by just how fine the tattoo lines were in our L.S.F. images,” said Michael Pittman, an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an author of the new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an email. “We immediately knew that what we were seeing was special.”

The mummies featured in the new study had been buried at the Cerro Colorado cemetery, and were rediscovered in 1981. Their tattoos are roughly 1,000 years old and display ornate geometric designs, reminiscent of scales or vines, as well as an amorphous animal with a curled tail.

The Chancay have long been known for high levels of craftsmanship across their material culture, and left elaborate markings in far more than their tattoos, said Aaron Deter-Wolf, a prehistoric archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology who specializes in ancient tattoos and was not involved in the study.

Dr. Pittman, a dinosaur paleobiologist, has spent more than a decade probing fossils with laser-stimulated fluorescence. This noninvasive tool exposes specimens to high-powered lasers, producing a fluorescent glow that sometimes reveals subtle features, like soft tissues. In recent years, Dr. Pittman’s team has started exploring the archaeological applications of the technique.

“We expect L.S.F. to work on other ancient tattoos from different cultures around the world and have plans to continue this imaging work to uncover similarly exciting discoveries,” Dr. Pittman said. “Hopefully we can push back the complexity of ancient tattoos even further back in time.”

Mr. Deter-Wolf was not convinced that the study demonstrated clear advantages of L.S.F. over other techniques for scrutinizing ancient tattoos, such as multispectral imaging. “This is a cool additional tool in our kit, but it’s not groundbreaking,” he said.

He also had concerns about some of the study’s conclusions. Dr. Pittman’s team suggested in the study that the tattoo patterns were made from punctures by a fine instrument, like a cactus needle or sharpened animal bone. Mr. Deter-Wolf believes that most tattoos examined in the study were made with incisions, not punctures.

“A painter uses different paintbrushes to achieve different results,” Mr. Deter-Wolf said. “Tattooists have done that same thing for thousands of years, so depending on the tool that they’re using, you will get a different physical signature as a result.”

Dr. Pittman stood by his team’s conclusion that the tattoos were made by puncture. “The unique thinness of our tattoo lines among published Chancay tattoos suggests a needle-based production (puncture tattooing) is more reasonable,” he said in an email.

Pinning down the methods that tattooists used is an important step in interpreting the meaning of body art to past societies. A range of techniques were used across cultures, and the process of making body art was often imbued with ritual significance.

For instance, Ötzi, a 5,300-year old “Iceman” with the oldest known body art on a mummy, may have been inked primarily for therapeutic reasons, rather than just aesthetics. While it’s natural to wonder why the Chancay took such pains with their work, their motivations remain a mystery.

“These are not purely artistic expressions,” Mr. Deter-Wolf said. “They are very culturally loaded.” The tattoo is the tip of the iceberg, he noted, but “there’s this whole cultural framework that underlies it.”.

After innocent-looking cargo shipments began catching fire at airports and warehouses in Germany, Britain and Poland over the summer, there was little doubt in Washington and Europe that Russia was behind the sabotage.

But in August, White House officials became increasingly alarmed by secretly obtained intelligence suggesting Moscow had a far larger plan in mind: bringing the war in Ukraine to American shores.

The question was how to send a warning to the one man who could stop it: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In a series of Situation Room briefings, President Biden’s top aides reviewed details of conversations among top officials of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence arm, who were describing shipments of consumer products that burst into flames — in one case, a small electronic massager — as a test run.

Once the Russians understood how the packages made it past air-cargo screening systems, and how long they took to ship, the next step appeared to be sending them on planes bound for the United States and Canada, where they would trigger fires once they were unloaded.

While the main concern was cargo planes, sometimes passenger planes take smaller packages in spare space in their cargo holds.

“The risk of catastrophic error was clear,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said in a recent interview, “that these could catch fire in a fully loaded aircraft.”

In August, Mr. Mayorkas placed new screening restrictions on cargo being shipped into the United States. In October, when the warnings resurged, he quietly pressed the top executives of the largest airlines flying into the United States to accelerate their steps to prevent a midair disaster. Some of those precautions became public at the time; others did not.

But behind the scenes, White House officials were struggling to understand whether Mr. Putin had ordered or was aware of the plot — or if he had been kept in the dark. And a major effort was begun to warn him to end it.

Reaching for a playbook first developed in October 2022 — when the United States believed Russia was considering detonating a nuclear weapon in Ukraine — Mr. Biden dispatched his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, to send a series of warnings to Mr. Putin’s top aides. As one senior official recounted, many paths were needed to ensure the message reached Putin’s ears, and sank in.

The core of the warning was that if the sabotage led to mass casualties in the air or on the ground, the United States would hold Russia responsible for “enabling terrorism.” Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Burns did not specify what that response would be, but made clear it would take the shadow war between Washington and Moscow to new levels.

That shadow war continues, every day, as Russia turns to sabotage in hopes of breaking NATO’s will to support Ukraine, without setting off a full war with the NATO alliance.

It has redefined life in Europe, ending the sense of security that came along with the post-Cold War world. There is now an hour-by-hour search for saboteurs — at airports, seaports and undersea, as well as on the streets of major cities like Berlin, Tallinn and London.

But in this case the warning got through to Mr. Putin, the officials said in describing the secret exchanges with the Kremlin for the first time. And they appear to have had their intended effect: The rash of fires in Europe have ceased, at least for now. But it is unclear whether Mr. Putin ordered a halt, or for how long. And it is possible, officials say, that Russia is using the time to build better, stealthier devices.

Plausible deniability?

The effort to get to Mr. Putin was described by five senior officials interviewed over the past three weeks and who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive national security threat. In recent days, as the administration prepares to leave office in a week, some of the details of the tense interchanges with the Kremlin have only just been declassified.

While the officials said their effort to avert the worst was successful, it clearly left several of them shaken. As they leave office, they are concerned that Russia’s military, angry at the embarrassing and sometimes deadly Ukrainian attacks around Kursk and other targets inside Russian territory, is now determined to bring the conflict to European and American territory. But they want to do it using techniques that would not risk an all-out conflict with NATO.

The Russians may well have considered the operation a natural — and, in their mind, proportionate — reaction to the Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil, which have been at least partly dependent on U.S.-supplied weapons, including missiles.

To this day the U.S. officials do not know if Mr. Putin ordered the operation, whether he knew about it or whether he only learned of it because of the American warnings.

Several officials said they suspected the plot could have been the work of G.R.U. officers who were responding to general orders to increase the pressure on the United States and its NATO allies. That would be consistent, they said, with past efforts to create plausible deniability for Mr. Putin should the operation go badly.

The incident demonstrated that Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin maintained indirect channels of communication, even though they have not spoken since the Russian attack on Ukraine began in February 2022.

That freeze on direct conversations between Washington and Moscow appears about to end: President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Putin “wants to meet, and we’re setting it up,” though the Kremlin insists there has been no formal conversation. Mr. Trump and his aides are cagey on the question of whether the two men have already talked. They have not said if the conversations will be limited to the Ukraine war or will also include the other elements of the hostile relationship between Washington and Moscow: a brewing nuclear arms race, Russia’s future in Syria and the accelerating shadow war with the West.

News of the air cargo operations seeped out of Europe this summer, and The Wall Street Journal reported in early November that intelligence officials believed Russia’s ultimate goal was to expand the operations to the United States and Canada.

But this account is the first to describe how Mr. Biden’s aides determined that unless they intervened with Mr. Putin directly, the events could lead to a calamity: even an unintended one, if a plane was delayed by bad weather, or the saboteurs got the timing wrong.

“It was a powerful example,” Mr. Mayorkas said, “of the convergence of national security and homeland security.”

Mysterious fires and cable cuts

For the first two years of the war, Russia seemed determined to keep the conflict within Ukraine’s boundaries. Its missiles never strayed into NATO territory. On the one evening when it appeared a missile may have crossed the border into Poland and killed two farmers, Mr. Biden was awakened for fear the two countries were about to stumble into open conflict. To Washington’s relief, it was a false alarm; the awry shot came from the Ukrainians.

That changed in 2024. Cases of sabotage, and suspected sabotage, appeared everywhere: hard-to-explain fires at warehouses, sometimes linked to companies supporting the arming of Ukraine; GPS “spoofing” that paralyzed the navigation systems of shipping and flights across Europe; cuts in undersea fiber-optic cables in which the dragging anchors from Russia’s “shadow fleet” of barges seemed culpable.

Washington helped intelligence officials in Berlin uncover an assassination plot against the chief executive of Germany’s leading arms maker, Rheinmetall. The company is a leading producer of the artillery shells that Ukraine desperately needs.

But when an incendiary device triggered an fire in late July at a DHL cargo facility in Leipzig, the former East German university town, it prompted an immediate investigation. Thomas Haldenwang, the chief of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, later told the German Parliament that the country had barely averted a plane crash, but he gave no details.

The package had been postmarked from Lithuania, as was another one that went off in Birmingham, England. A third burst into flames at a Polish courier firm.

Inside the White House, the biggest concern came in the form of intelligence about conversations among the G.R.U. American officials will not discuss how they got access to the conversations. But they confirmed the content: The three incendiaries were intended to scope out how DHL and other packages flow, so that the ignition of a highly flammable magnesium-based material could be precisely timed to catch fire.

The conversations indicated that the next step was to get them on planes to the United States and Canada. But the fear that coursed through Situation Room discussions was that an unintended delay — from weather or airplanes circling because of heavy traffic — could mean that the devices went off in midair.

From Washington to Moscow, a warning

In August, the C.I.A. and others concluded that the incendiary devices that went off in Leipzig, Birmingham and Poland were actually part of a “field test” by the G.R.U., as it tried to understand what path packages follow on their way through Europe. The packages were sent from Vilnius, Lithuania, where the Russians retain a significant intelligence presence.

Associates of Mr. Sullivan’s recall him being highly focused on the risk of the attacks in this period, though he said nothing publicly about it. But the conversations among the G.R.U. officials left little doubt where this was headed. One senior official involved in the discussions said it became clear they had to get a message to Mr. Putin, because he was the only one in the Russian system capable of ordering the operation to end. But getting to him meant sending the message through multiple paths.

Mr. Sullivan quietly started a series of calls with his Russian counterpart, Yuriy Ushakov, beginning by noting the Rheinmetall plot. Not surprisingly, Mr. Ushakov denied that Russia was involved — much as Russian officials had denied, in October 2022, that they had been planning for the use of a tactical nuclear weapon.

Then, speaking a bit elliptically about how the United States knew, Mr. Sullivan told Mr. Ushakov that the administration believed that the incendiary devices were also Russia’s responsibility — and that they had put civilian lives in danger. The big concern was the risk of mass casualties, he said, if the packages went off on a cargo plane or a passenger plane.

Mr. Burns, the C.I.A. director who served as American ambassador to Russia two decades ago and is the official who knows Mr. Putin best, made essentially the same case to his intelligence equivalent, Sergey Naryshkin, who runs the S.V.R., and Alexander Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., the two most powerful of the Russian intelligence agencies. The thinking was that all of them had regular access to Mr. Putin.

The U.S. officials were careful not to say that the intent of the operation was to bring down an airplane; in fact the devices appeared to be designed to go off on the ground. But the risk of an in-air accident seemed high.

While the immediate crisis was averted, Mr. Biden’s aides acknowledge that the incident revealed a larger problem: that as the war grinds on to its third anniversary, the risks are spilling into new arenas, and taking on new dimensions.

“As big as a Ukraine cease-fire would be it’s far from everything,” said Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations who has written extensively on what an end to the war might look like

The sabotage, he said, “is all part, of a larger pattern.”

“Russia has turned into a revolutionary actor,” he said. “Russia has turned into a country seeking to undermine the international order. And the real question is: Can a Trump administration do something about that?”