Pope Francis made a surprise public appearance on Sunday, the first time the leader of the Catholic Church has been seen in public since leaving hospital two week ago.

Francis greeted crowds at the Vatican and seemed to be in good spirits. He was seated in a wheelchair and wearing what appeared to be a nasal cannula aiding his breathing.

The 88-year-old pontiff spent five weeks in hospital with pneumonia in February and March. According to his medical team, the pope came close to death during the illness.

Francis appeared in better health than when he was last seen in public, which was two weeks shortly before he was released from Rome’s Gemelli Hospital. At that time, he struggled to speak and raise his arms, but managed to wave to people and gave a thumbs up from a balcony.

On Sunday, the pope appeared to move his arms around with more ease. His voice was still weak, but stronger than two weeks ago.

The pope’s appearance had not been previously announced.

Crowds of worshippers gathered at Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square on Sunday when the pope made his short appearance after a mass dedicated to the sick.

When the smiling pontiff was wheeled in, those there cheered wildly.

The Vatican said that the pope went to confession in St Peter’s Basilica on Sunday morning and gathered in before greeting the pilgrims and the faithful in the square.

Francis was admitted to Gemelli Hospital on February 14, initially suffering from a severe respiratory infection. He was subsequently diagnosed with a polymicrobial infection, which evolved to pneumonia in both lungs.

He was discharged on March 23 and was expected to convalesce at Casa Santa Marta, his residence in the Vatican. His doctors said in a news conference at the time that he would need to recuperate for at least two months to allow his body time to fully heal.

The prolonged hospital stay marked the biggest health crisis Francis has experienced since he was elected as pope in 2013.

His doctors told reporters that there were “two very critical episodes in which the Holy Father’s life was in danger” during the 38 days he was hospitalized.

A 17-year-old Palestinian boy died following “likely prolonged malnutrition” in an Israeli prison, according to an autopsy carried out by an Israeli pathologist.

The teenager, Walid Khalid Ahmad, is the first minor to have died in Israeli custody since the conflict between Hamas and Israel started in October 2023, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS).

He died in Israel’s Megiddo Prison on March 22, according to his family and a joint statement by the PPS and the Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs.

Ahmad was arrested on September 30 last year in his home in Silwad, a Palestinian town northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. His father Khalid said that he was detained based on alleged offenses between 2020 and 2023 that included throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.

The autopsy report described signs of severe weight and muscle loss, including loss of muscle mass at the temples, a sunken appearance at the abdomen and “almost absent muscle mass or subcutaneous fat on trunk and extremities.”

“Autopsy findings suggest that Walid suffered from extreme, likely prolonged malnutrition as observed by his deeply cachectic state and complaints of inadequate food intake since at least December 2024,” it said. “It needs to be noted that malnutrition increases the risk of infectious complications including severe sepsis,” it added.

At least 63 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank have so far died in Israeli detention since the start of the latest conflict, the PPS said, including at least 40 from Gaza.

“As in any case of the death of a prisoner, an investigative team was appointed to examine the incident. Upon completion of the investigation its findings will be forwarded to the authorized authorities,” it said.

‘The painful truth’

The family was allowed to attend several court hearings in the case, which were held remotely by video conference calls, he said.

The family was informed of his death on March 24, two days after he died, Khalid said, adding that days later, he received a phone call from the medical team that conducted the autopsy, who told him “the painful truth” behind his son’s death.

An avid athlete, Ahmad did not suffer from any known illnesses before his detention, his father said, pointing to his treatment in custody as the cause of his son’s death.

“Walid was a young man with great values,” Khalid said. “What happened was unexpected.”

The Commission on Detainees’ Affairs and the PPS said Walid’s death was “proof of the horrific level of abuse faced by detainees inside Israeli occupation prisons, including hundreds of children.”

Israel has ramped up arrests in the occupied West Bank since the latest war began, PPS said, with some 15,700 arrests so far recorded by its count.

Iran’s president has fired one of his deputies for taking what he described as a “lavish” recreational trip to Antarctica.

President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the removal of Shahram Dabiri from his position as vice president of parliamentary affairs in a decree on Saturday, describing the trip as both extravagant and indefensible.

“In a government that seeks to follow the values of the first Shia Imam (Imam Ali), and amidst significant economic pressures on our people, the lavish travels of government officials, even when personally financed, are indefensible,” Pezeshkian wrote.

The president added that Dabiri’s long-standing work in government should not preclude him from committing to what he called “honesty, justice, and the promises we made to the people,” according to the state news agency IRNA.

Dabiri denied wrongdoing but said he accepted the president’s decision.

Pezeshkian also said Dabiri’s actions contradict the principles of “simple living” that he says all officials should adhere to, especially during economic challenges.

Iran’s economy has been strained for years in part by US sanctions imposed in response to Tehran’s nuclear program.

Last week, the Iranian currency dropped to a record low of 1,039,000 rial to the US dollar, according to Reuters, citing data from Bonbast.com.

Government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani was quoted by IRNA as saying that the president’s decision to fire Dabiri shows that “he has no pact of brotherhood with anyone, and his only criteria are efficacy, justice, honesty, and public interest.”

Editor’s Note: Join Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, April 6 at 8pmET/PT as he examines the long history of the conservative movement’s struggle to roll back government in “The War on Government: A Fareed Zakaria Special”.

When Donald Trump announced that he was creating the Department of Government Efficiency, I welcomed the initiative. Streamlining the federal government by having outsiders take a look was an excellent idea. And Elon Musk’s stated objective, to cut the budget by $2 trillion, while ambitious, would be a useful yardstick.

But DOGE began its work not by taking on the most logical targets if you were really looking for waste, fraud and abuse – places like Medicare and the Defense Department with their gigantic budgets. No, its first major target was a tiny agency most Americans had probably never heard of. The US Agency for International Development, whose total budget, around $40 billion, was less than 1% of federal spending. DOGE went after it with a brutality and glee that was stunning. Musk called it a “criminal organization.” Government officials who had spent years in foreign countries providing assistance to the poor were summarily fired and asked to return home. Medical and nutrition programs were cut off, with the likely consequence that, by some calculations, millions would get sick or starve.

What could explain this cruelty directed at people and programs that in budgetary terms were insignificant? DOGE seemed to understand the central challenge the right faces in its war on government. The real money is in the large programs that the public supports. So DOGE began its war by choosing a broadly unpopular item of government spending – on foreigners.

Musk and Trump delighted in listing all the fraud that they found, even though none of the projects they listed have shown any evidence of large-scale corruption. They were simply programs they knew many Americans would not want to fund – especially when they were mischaracterized.

DOGE did take on Social Security, but in a rather strange way. It claimed to find millions of dead people on its rolls. The implication was that these people were still getting payments. Actually,all they appear to have found were old personnel files in which dead people’s names had not been deleted – much like your rolodex or contact folder probably still has the names of people who are deceased. Almost none appear to be getting benefits. But again, it was a revealing strategy. Rather than talk seriously about changing Social Security – by means testing benefits or raising the retirement age – DOGE was promising that it could save billions by just cleaning up the personnel files.

Of course it’s possible to find savings in Washington. Former Vice President Al Gore’s Reinventing Government Commission saved the federal government around $140 billion dollars. But it worked in a manner that was almost the opposite of DOGE. It partnered with the agencies to identify redundancies, worked with Congress to change laws, and used a scalpel to trim fat. DOGE, on the other hand, has been doing mass firings without much consultation, so much so that its large-scale IRS firings could result in significantly lower tax revenues collected – which would raise the deficit.

DOGE has also been firing masses of workers. But the federal bureaucracy is small compared with other rich countries and is about the same size as it was 50 years ago.

It’s worth remembering where the money is. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other mandatory spending like veterans’ benefits – along with defense spending and interest payments – make up around 85% of the budget. Much of this is efficient check writing, which doesn’t require much bureaucracy. The Department of Defense could be massively reformed, as the Trump administration has begun to do a little bit. But why does it have four air forces – the Army’s, Navy’s, Marines’, and Air Force itself?

If DOGE approached the problem as one does in the private sector, it would recognize there are two components to any deficit – how much you spend and how much you take in, in this case through taxes. America’s bloated national debt has a great deal to do with a series of tax cuts that began in the Reagan administration. By one estimate from a progressive think tank, the Bush and Trump tax cuts alone have added $10 trillion to the debt and account for 57% of the increase in America’s debt-to-GDP ratio since 2001. Bear in mind, that compared to other rich countries, the United States still has close to the lowest tax revenues as a percent of its GDP.

In that context, the simplest way for DOGE to achieve maximum success would be to recommend that the Trump tax cuts be allowed to lapse as they will under law, which would then reduce the debt by about $4.5 trillion over the next 10 years, vastly more than any plan the GOP seems willing to go through with to cut spending. That would take America back to the tax rates under former President Barack Obama, when the stock market more than doubled, and America grew faster than almost every European country. And it would put the US on a much more stable debt trajectory.

But don’t hold your breath on that happening. Far more likely, DOGE will announce some new stunning finding, something like software duplication in the Environmental Protection Agency, which might save the federal government $100 million – or .001% of the 2025 budget.

Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian American teenager and wounded two others in the occupied West Bank on Sunday, according to Palestinian officials.

Ramallah Gov. Laila Ghannam said a 14-year-old Palestinian American boy was shot dead by Israeli troops in the village of Turmusaya. Two other Palestinian American boys, ages 14 and 15, were injured in the incident, according to Turmusaya Mayor Lafi Shalabi.

The Israeli military said its soldiers opened fire during a counterterrorism operation in Turmusaya when they saw three “terrorists who hurled rocks toward the highway, thus endangering civilians driving.”

The soldiers killed one and hit the other two, the military said.

The military shared a blurry video purportedly showing the incident, in which three barely visible figures appear. It said it would continue operating in the West Bank “to protect the residents in the area.”

The injured boys were shot in the abdomen, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

One severely injured boy and another with minor wounds were taken to a hospital in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority health ministry said.

The killing or detention of American citizens in occupied Palestinian territories by Israelis and concerns about a lack of accountability date back years. In 2003, American activist Rachel Corrie, 23, was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to block it from razing Palestinian homes in Gaza. Nine years later, an Israeli civil court ruled her death an accident.

In February last year, Florida-born US citizen Mohammed Khdour, 17, was killed by Israeli forces who shot him in the head while he was in his car. The teenager was taking the car out during a study break, snacking on chocolate waffles, posing for Instagram.

Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank have intensified since late January following the launch of an expanded military campaign there almost immediately after the Gaza ceasefire began. Since then, roughly 40,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

The Israeli military says it is targeting Palestinian militant groups who have mounted attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians, but Palestinians and human rights groups say the expanded assault is increasingly indiscriminate – killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure in a manner consistent with collective punishment. In late February, Israel deployed tanks to the occupied West Bank for the first time in two decades.

This is a developing story and will be updated.