The Supreme Court in Britain ruled on Wednesday that trans women do not fall within the legal definition of women under the country’s equality legislation.

The deputy president of the court, Lord Hodge, said in a summary of the decision: “The unanimous decision of this court is that ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex.”

The landmark judgment follows a yearslong legal battle over whether trans women can be regarded as female under the 2010 law, which aims to prevent discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality, race and other protected characteristics.

The decision was highly anticipated because it could have potentially far-reaching consequences for how the law is applied to single sex spaces, equal pay claims and maternity policies as well as to some of the rights available to transgender people in Britain.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Elation overcame Andrei Kuznechyk when he was freed in February after three years in a Belarus prison on charges of leading an “extremist organization,” the authoritarian government’s byword for his work as a web editor at the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Pangs of sadness soon followed. He said he realized, after being blindfolded, driven to the border and handed over in a deal orchestrated by Washington, that he may never return to his homeland, Belarus, again. When he reunited with his 5-year-old son, the boy did not remember him.

And after Mr. Kuznechyk, 47, arrived in Lithuania to live in exile, the president of the U.S.-funded news media outlet took him to buy new clothes (he had lost more than 30 pounds in prison) and relayed some difficult news: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty may close.

Mr. Kuznechyk had worked for more than a decade at the outlet, which began broadcasting in the early 1950s behind the Iron Curtain. The organization has long coped with challenges from authoritarian governments while reporting on human rights and corruption. Now, for the first time, the biggest threat is coming from Washington.

A month after his administration secured Mr. Kuznechyk’s release, President Trump issued an executive order demanding the dismantling of the outlet’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, through which Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty receives funding from Congress.

The news did not come entirely out of the blue for Mr. Kuznechyk. In his final days in prison in Belarus, he had seen a gloating state news broadcast reporting that Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s government-cutting czar, had called for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to be shut down.

In a post on X, Mr. Musk called the media outlet, which is now primarily online, “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves” and something that “nobody listens to.”

“Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy),” Mr. Musk wrote. “Hello??”

In prison, Mr. Kuznechyk said, he heard a similar message from the state — everyone has forgotten you, no one reads you, no one needs you. State propaganda dismissed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a fixture in Belarus dating to the Soviet era, as irrelevant and sinister.

Mr. Kuznechyk knew otherwise. In August 2020, when protests against the leader of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, swept through the capital, Minsk, after a presidential election widely condemned as rigged, the media outlet’s service in Belarusian recorded 24.8 million views on YouTube. It was big traffic in a nation of 9.1 million. Current Time, its 24-hour channel in Russian, Belarus’s second official language, received more than 86 million views in one week alone in that month.

Mr. Lukashenko, who has kept an iron grip on power for more than three decades, responded with an intense crackdown.

Security officials raided and sealed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s office in Minsk. Its journalists were arrested, with one snatched during a live broadcast.

The outlet was designated an extremist organization. Mr. Kuznechyk, though he worked an editing job without regular bylines or on-camera appearances, was apprehended on a bike ride. Another journalist from the outlet, Ihar Losik, is still in prison in Belarus, as is Ihar Karnei, a former contributor.

In the United States, the outlet ran into new trouble on March 14, when Mr. Trump issued the executive order.

The president tapped Kari Lake, the Republican former news anchor, as a senior adviser to oversee the dismantlement of the outlet’s parent organization. In a recent interview with Newsmax, she likened her task to killing a venomous snake with a shovel.

Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that he had tried to speak with Ms. Lake, and was ready to discuss accusations of bias and irrelevance, but that his efforts to secure a meeting had failed.

“If there was a conversation about ideology or about focus or about prioritization, we take our responsibility seriously,” he said. “Let’s have a good honest conversation about the size of the organization and what we do. But we haven’t even been afforded that courtesy and respect.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in federal court against its parent organization, arguing that it would be illegal for the Trump administration to subvert Congress and withhold the rest of the $142 million appropriated for the outlet this fiscal year.

A judge ruled in its favor, but the organization has still not received this month’s tranche of funding, which was supposed to arrive on April 1. As a result, Mr. Capus reluctantly has begun to furlough staff.

Last week, the Trump administration set out onerous new requirements for the outlet to receive its money, including demands that the organization says would violate a U.S. law protecting the outlet’s editorial independence. In response, the outlet filed a new court request for emergency relief.

Because the news outlet is classified as a nonprofit, it in theory can receive private donations. Some European officials have floated the idea of stepping in to save the outlet. But Mr. Capus said those proposals were still hypothetical and may come too late.

“We desperately don’t want to have even an hour where we have to go silent,” Mr. Capus said, citing a duty to the outlet’s weekly audience of 47 million.

He has struggled to make sense of the cognitive dissonance as the Trump administration went to what he called heroic lengths to help free Mr. Kuznechyk while simultaneously eviscerating his employer.

On a recent day, Mr. Capus arrived at the organization’s headquarters in Prague to find that officials in Washington had cut the satellite feed carrying Current Time, a joint project with Voice of America. Current Time reaches its audience in Russian primarily online, receiving 2.4 billion views across social media in 2024. But the cutoff still hurt.

Mr. Kuznechyk said he could not understand why Washington would shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at a time when Belarus and its patron Russia have curtailed freedoms to a degree unseen since the Soviet era.

“Why make this gift” to authoritarians, he asked. “What will the world be like next?”

Started in the early days of the Cold War, what was known as Radio Free Europe in the Warsaw Pact countries and Radio Liberty in the Soviet Union was conceived by Washington as a “surrogate free press.” Beamed in over shortwave radio, it would show, through reporting, talk shows and cultural offerings in local languages, what the media would be like if the country were democratic and free. In Belarus, for example, listeners in the 1980s tuned in to figure out what was really happening after the nearby Chernobyl nuclear accident, which Soviet authorities initially covered up.

Today, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still focuses on places where media freedom is absent or threatened, reaching 23 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as Iran and Afghanistan, in 27 languages.

The outlet often undertakes investigative journalism in places where local media are too fearful, state-dominated or underfunded to do similar work.

In Iran, it posts on women’s rights protests in Persian to 4.6 million followers on Instagram. In Central Asia, its journalism reaches millions and exposes high-level corruption. In Ukraine, its reports have revealed the perpetrators of war crimes and the secret foreign real estate holdings of top officials. And in Russia, its cultural streaming platform, Votvot, is hosting documentaries, stand-up comedy and musical performances by people targeted or exiled by Moscow.

Zakir Magomedov, the editor of the unit covering the North Caucasus region in Russia, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, leads a team out of Prague. Like many of the organization’s journalists, he cannot go back home if it disappears.

“It cost me the loss of my family,” Mr. Magomedov said.

Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist who was jailed in Russia for more than nine months before her release last year in a prisoner swap, keeps in touch with the families of imprisoned journalists from the outlet.

“What am I going to tell them next time?” she asked.

Mr. Kuznechyk refuses to believe it will cease to exist.

“It doesn’t fit into my idea of the world,” he said. “It just cannot be — at the peak of repression against journalists, at the peak of the threat to freedom of information, which we now see is a very fragile notion.”

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, this week will become the latest in a line of European leaders to flock to Washington with the goal of currying favor and improving relations with President Trump.

But Ms. Meloni’s trip has stirred more hopes — and fears — than the visits of some earlier European leaders to the White House because of the unique position she holds on the continent.

Her right-wing background has long positioned her as a potential ally of Mr. Trump’s, and she was invited to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration, unlike other European leaders. Those credentials have helped stoke speculation that Ms. Meloni could visit the White House with an Italy-first approach, looking to strike deals for her country and threatening to undermine European unity.

But many diplomats and officials push back on such concerns, in part because Ms. Meloni has made a name for herself in recent months as a collaborative player on the European stage.

To Ms. Meloni’s fans, this is a moment ripe with opportunity. To others, it is an important test of whether she can use her affinity with Mr. Trump to help Italy, and Europe.

“Italy will find out how much it can claim a special relationship with the United States,” said Giovanni Orsina, the head of the political science department at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.

The visit unquestionably comes a time of high stakes: The 27-nation European Union relies on the United States as its most important trading partner, and Mr. Trump’s trade war threatens to upend that. Mr. Trump’s threats of imposing punishing tariffs, beyond those already in place, could dent demand for everything from Chianti to chemicals — and the European economy hangs in the balance, as leaders try to persuade Mr. Trump to relent.

“She will play a facilitator,” between the European Commission and the United States, Italy’s minister for enterprises, Adolfo Urso, said in an interview. He added that Ms. Meloni could count not only on a long-established bilateral relationship between Italy and the United States, but also on “a personal relationship that was consolidated between Meloni and Trump.”

Top-level European Union officials have struggled to meet with their American counterparts. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has not been able to speak with President Trump since he retook office, despite trying.

National leaders have had better luck, at least in winning an audience. France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s leader Keir Starmer and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin have all met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

Many see Ms. Meloni’s trip as a continuation of those efforts.

“Any outreach to the U.S. is welcome,” Arianna Podesta, the European Commission’s deputy chief spokeswoman, told reporters on Monday about Ms. Meloni’s trip, adding later that the trip was also “closely coordinated.”

Still, Ms. Meloni’s visit has caused unease in some quarters. French Industry Minister Marc Ferracci told a French broadcaster that there was a risk that the visit could break the continent’s unity. In Brussels and in Italy, opponents have said that Ms. Meloni’s visit to Washington will reveal how loyal she is to Europe, at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies continue to portray Europe’s leadership as feckless.

“This is the moment of truth for our prime minister,” Italy’s former development minister and opposition politician Carlo Calenda said in a statement. “We will see whether she is a leader that keeps the European front united, or if she will give in to the flattery of the US president.”

For weeks, Mr. Trump’s actions — threatening widespread tariffs and tilting toward Russia — have increasingly strained Ms. Meloni’s delicate balancing act.

A nationalist conservative, she has called Elon Musk a friend and received praise from Mr. Trump, who has called her a “wonderful woman.” And she has often sought to have it both ways, nurturing bilateral ties with Mr. Trump while preserving Italy’s role within a united E.U.

But every new step by Mr. Trump has highlighted her attempts not to strongly take a side. Although she has been a strong supporter of Ukraine, she did not, like other European leaders, rebuke Mr. Trump after his dressing down of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. She also spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February, and called for the E.U. not to escalate or retaliate on tariffs, and she has continued that mantra even after Mr. Trump threw the world into a tailspin with wide-ranging tariffs.

On the other hand, she has often fallen in line with the rest of Europe at crucial moments. When European nations voted to impose counter tariffs in response to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum levies, for instance, only Hungary opposed the move. Italy joined the 25 other member states in supporting retaliation. (Europe has since walked back those retaliative tariffs, at least temporarily, in response to Mr. Trump’s decision to hit “pause” on some tariffs for 90 days to allow time for negotiations.)

Ms. Meloni also has said that Mr. Trump’s tariffs were “wrong,” and, in the run-up to her trip, she did not signal any intention to obtain special carve outs for Italy.

“Europe’s industrial supply chains are now intertwined,” Mr. Urso, her minister for enterprises, said. “We certainly do not want to divide Europe.”

European officials are currently trying to push their American counterparts to negotiate. Officials are offering economic carrots, including the possibility of cutting tariffs on cars and other industrial goods and ramping up European purchases of natural gas, while also threatening to retaliate if no deal can be reached.

Even those who are skeptical of Ms. Meloni have pointed out that she has good reason to toe the European line in Washington on Thursday: Italy may be a large economy, but the E.U. as a whole is more powerful in winning concessions when it is united.

“It is an important moment for Italy,” Mr. Orsina, the analyst, said. “And it may be an important one for Europe, too.”

As for Ms. Meloni, she seems to be under no illusions about the import of her meeting with Mr. Trump.

“I am feeling no pressure for my next two days,” Ms. Meloni joked on Tuesday afternoon as she spoke at an awards ceremony in Rome. “We will do our best,” she said, adding: “I am aware of what I represent, and I am aware of what I am defending.”

I was drawn to the outskirts of Cairo by the colossal complex in the desert — a towering site that arose over decades, built at unimaginable expense, with precisely cut stones sourced from local quarries; a set of buildings whose construction, plagued by extraordinary challenges, spanned the reigns of several rulers; a collective cultural testament, the largest of its kind, teeming with royal history.

No, I’m not referring to Giza’s famous pyramids. I came to see the Grand Egyptian Museum.

There is perhaps no institution on earth whose opening has been as wildly anticipated, or as mind-bogglingly delayed, as the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo. Its construction has been such a fiasco — mired by funding lapses, logistical hurdles, a pandemic, nearby wars, revolutions (yes, plural) — that it begs comparison to that of the pyramids that lie just over a mile away on the Giza Plateau.

(The 4,600-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza, built from around 2.3 million stone blocks and without the use of wheels, pulleys or iron tools, took about 25 years to build, by some estimates. So far, the Grand Egyptian Museum has taken more than 20.)

Planned openings have come and gone since 2012. (Even The Times got it wrong; our list of 52 Places to Go in 2020 prematurely referred to the “fancy new digs for King Tut and company.”) In time, frustrations bubbled over for would-be visitors, many of whom had planned vacations around the new museum. “I have canceled two trips to Cairo because of anticipated opening dates and then delays,” one traveler wrote on the museum’s Instagram page this year. “I have wanted to visit since I was a child and the promise of the museum and constant delays is ruining that experience for so many people.”

Another wrote: “We’ll all be dead longer than King Tut himself by the time this place is open!”

The wait is now over. Well, mostly.

When I visited in mid-February, much of the museum was open: 11 of the 12 main exhibition galleries, along with the cavernous entrance hall and a broad staircase strewn with dozens of artifacts.

But arguably the museum’s biggest draw, the Tutankhamen galleries, which will showcase more than 5,000 artifacts from the boy king’s tomb, remained closed. (For now, Tutankhamen’s gold funeral mask, among the most iconic archaeological artifacts in the world, is still on display at the old Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square.) Also inaccessible was a separate annex that will showcase two royal boats discovered near the Great Pyramid in 1954.

Those portions of the museum are expected to open this summer, with an official ceremony scheduled for July 3. (You might take that date with a grain or two of salt.)

Still, even the museum’s incomplete offerings — along with the building itself and its billion-dollar views — are staggering.

Entering the main hall, I was struck by both the scale of the structure and the textural allure of its surfaces.

Just inside the pyramidal entryway (the motifs aren’t exactly subtle), I was greeted by one of the museum’s many showstoppers: a 3,200-year-old statue of Ramses II, widely regarded as the most powerful of ancient Egypt’s pharaohs, that stands more than 30 feet tall and weighs more than 80 tons. The red-granite figure has a fabled modern history: It was found — lying on its side, broken into six pieces — by an Italian Egyptologist in 1820; in 1954 it was installed at a traffic circle in downtown Cairo, where it stood for half a century before being painstakingly transported to the new museum site in 2006.

From the atrium I ascended the Grand Staircase — first via a long escalator and then again on foot, having returned to the bottom, for a closer look at the dozens of large-scale statues, columns and sarcophagi that line the ascent.

Atop the stairs was another breathtaking surprise: an unobstructed view of the Giza pyramids, perfectly framed in a set of floor-to-ceiling windows.

I stood before the windows, helplessly transfixed, for the better part of an hour. If there’s a better man-made view on the planet, I’ve yet to take it in.

From the top of the stairs I entered the first of the museum’s 12 main galleries, which are organized both chronologically and by theme, spanning from prehistory to the Roman era.

Summarizing the exhibition halls would be a thankless task — and besides, the joy of visiting any vast museum is uncovering the peculiar selection of items that stands out to you alone. A few highlights cling to me like burrs: The dizzying display of blue ushabti, the figurines left as servants for the dead. An immense mummified crocodile. A 3,100-year-old wig made from braided human hair.

The wig in particular dragged the ancient world to the fore, bridging what at many museums feels like an unbridgeable divide. Leave it to a delicate human feature, quietly preserved for thousands of years, to bring the past to life.

The arrival of the Grand Egyptian Museum establishes a trio of must-see museums in and around Cairo. In Tahrir Square stands the oldest: the Egyptian Museum, a beautiful Beaux-Arts building that for more than a century has showcased one of the world’s great collections of antiquities. (Largely unmodernized, the museum has transferred, and will continue transferring, many of its most prized items to Giza, prompting concerns about its future.)

Also in the mix is the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, another landmark that fully opened in 2021 and whose main draw is its haunting collection of royal mummies.

All three are worthy of extended visits.

But in many respects the Grand Egyptian Museum now stands alone. Billed as the largest archaeological museum in the world, as well as the largest museum devoted to a single civilization, it was initially proposed by Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s longtime authoritarian president, who announced his plans for a new flagship institution in 1992. A ceremonial foundation stone was laid 10 years later, and the Dublin-based firm Heneghan Peng Architects won a competition to design the building in 2003. Construction began in 2005.

Then came the long series of spectacular setbacks: the 2008 global economic crisis, the Arab Spring (and the subsequent decimation of Egypt’s tourism industry), the Covid-19 pandemic, and wars in Gaza and Sudan. Over time, excitement for the museum was eclipsed by coverage of its postponement.

But I doubt the epic delays will get the spotlight for much longer.

If my experience is any indication, then all it takes to overlook the long wait is a leisurely stroll through the museum’s timeless collection — and an extended gaze from the top of its staircase.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.

Trump escalated a feud with Harvard

After freezing $2.2 billion in funding to Harvard University, President Trump turned up the pressure yesterday and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

The fight between the Trump administration and the nation’s oldest and most elite university was headed for a showdown that could affect other U.S. institutions.

Harvard has rejected the administration’s demands that it make changes to the university’s policies and programs related to diversity hiring and the tolerance of anti-Israel protests.

Details: With an endowment of $50 billion, Harvard is uniquely positioned to withstand the funding freeze. The university’s strong refusal of Trump’s demands has injected energy into other universities fearful of the president’s wrath.

Ripple effects: Columbia University, which has faced criticism for not striking a more defiant stand, showed signs of adopting a tougher tone yesterday. The new acting president pledged that the university would not allow the government to “require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy.”

For more: Critics say that the Trump administration’s demands are an attack on academic freedom. Here’s what to know about Trump’s targeting of universities.

More on Trump

Scenes from Ukraine, where a truce seems far away

Two of our reporters and a photographer traveled to Sumy, a city in northern Ukraine, a day after Russian airstrikes hit a central neighborhood on Palm Sunday, killing 34 people. They witnessed another Russian attack on Monday.

The Palm Sunday attack has become an argument that peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv are failing. In Sumy, the attack has set off preparation for a possible new Russian ground assault in the region.

The feeling in Sumy “is of fear, ceaseless tension and frayed nerves,” our reporters wrote. For residents, there are no signs of a cease-fire.

Autopsies showed some Gaza medics were shot in the head

The paramedics and rescue workers killed in an Israeli shooting in Gaza last month died mainly from gunshots to the head or chest, according to autopsy reports obtained by The Times.

The autopsy reports said that 11 of the men had gunshot wounds and that most had been shot multiple times. Three others had shrapnel wounds. Israel’s military said it was investigating.

Related: An Israeli strike killed a security guard and wounded 10 patients at a field hospital in southern Gaza, the hospital’s director said.

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The small Finnish city of Rovaniemi has branded itself as “the Official Hometown of Santa Claus,” with a tourist season that runs from October to March. Local residents are anything but jolly, with many complaining of out-of-control development.

Our reporter traveled to the city, where tourism brings in more than 400 million euros a year. “The people who benefit are happy,” a man in a red suit and a long white beard told him. “Those who don’t — they’re jealous.”

Lives lived: Elsa Honig Fine, an art historian who published textbooks on Black and female artists, died at 94.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

The fight over Van Gogh’s roots

Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris, is where Vincent Van Gogh spent his final days. There, art experts in 2020 identified some gnarled tree roots on a hillside as those depicted in his final painting “Tree Roots.” There has been strife in the village ever since.

The owners of a property near the roots have been locked in a fight with the municipality, which has claimed part of their land for a historic site. The knotty dispute has unsettled residents just as the new tourism season heats up.