The Pope sets off again

A 71-year-old man who has had an operation, says the Vatican, not a sick man. Last month, a routine scan found a tumour; surgeons removed the lower lobe of Leo XIV’s right lung, and the cancer had not spread. This Friday, he takes off for twelve days: Uruguay, without a pope for forty years; Francis’s Argentina, where Javier Milei awaits Leo “with immense joy”; then Peru, his twenty years as priest and bishop. In all three countries, he will meet survivors of clerical abuse.

548 signatures

In Sacramento, Gavin Newsom signed 548 commutations with one stroke: life without parole for every death row inmate in California, a quarter of the country’s, in a state that has not executed anyone since 2006. “A system incapable of being applied fairly”, writes the Democratic governor, a likely candidate in 2028.

A Rafale over Évreux

Above Normandy, on Thursday around 9.30 am, a Rafale and a Mirage 2000 escorted a Dublin-Rome Airbus to the Évreux air base: 157 people on board, a bomb threat, bomb disposal teams for nothing. At least 27 flights were targeted during the day, and four more on Friday over France, by anonymous emails, with no evidence pointing to Russia or Iran. A pope who sets off again, a governor who grants mercy, a plane that lands: which of the three took the most courage?