Donald Trump knew – and approved. That’s what Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said in a Manhattan courtroom Monday.

Mr. Cohen testified in Mr. Trump’s New York hush money trial that his actions to suppress stories about alleged infidelities of the then-candidate before the 2016 election were done at Mr. Trump’s direction. The point was to help the Trump campaign, Mr. Cohen testified, not to prevent embarrassment for the Trump family.

In saying so, Mr. Cohen – who once called himself the former president’s “designated thug” – clicked the last brick into place in the structure of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s argument. He has charged Mr. Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Over four weeks of testimony, prosecutors have carefully built a portrait of Mr. Trump as someone who hates bad publicity, is averse to putting orders in writing, and is detail-oriented to a fault. Their goal: make jurors believe Mr. Trump must have been involved in the “catch-and-kill” of porn star Stormy Daniels’ account of their alleged affair.

But they have not offered testimony that tied Mr. Trump directly to the scheme used to pay Ms. Daniels – until now. 

“What I was doing ... I was doing at the direction and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cohen said on the witness stand Monday.

Did Cohen tell the truth?

Mr. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the Stormy Daniels case. His lawyers have said that he had no connection to the actual hush money payments.

Sarah Yenesel/Reuters

Former President Donald Trump sits at the defendant's table before his criminal trial at New York State Supreme Court in New York, May 13, 2024. Mr. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump attorneys also say the former president was mostly worried about the reaction of his wife, Melania, to Ms. Daniels’ story, as well as other stories suppressed by National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and Mr. Cohen as part of an alleged “catch-and-kill” scheme.

Mr. Cohen could be a troublesome witness for the prosecution as well. He has a recent criminal past, with convictions on campaign finance abuses, tax evasion, and other charges. He can be loud and combative, as former White House communications director Hope Hicks and other former Trump officials have already testified. He has taunted Mr. Trump on social media. Last week he posted a TikTok video in which he wore a shirt depicting the former president behind bars.

Last week, prosecution lawyers admitted to Justice Juan Merchan that they have little control over Mr. Cohen’s behavior. 

But in some ways, his character might actually help the case against Mr. Trump. 

Mr. Cohen made the initial $130,000 hush money payment to Ms. Daniels in late October 2016. He was eventually repaid by a series of checks from the Trump Organization and Mr. Trump’s personal account.

Some Trump allies have suggested that Mr. Cohen paid the $130,000 out of the goodness of his heart, without Mr. Trump’s knowledge. Ms. Hicks, in her testimony, scoffed at that notion.

Doing so “would be out of character for Michael,” she said.

Where the hush money payment came from

During his Monday testimony, Mr. Cohen described the scramble within the Trump Organization to come up with the $130,000 in the first place.

The Trump fixer was worried that Ms. Daniels was becoming impatient and that she would go ahead and make her story public elsewhere. He discussed the problem with Trump Organization finance chief Alan Weisselberg. They thought perhaps they could give away a golf membership at a Trump club to raise money, or solicit early payment for an event at Mar-a-Lago.

Those ideas were vetoed, since they would inevitably associate the name “Trump” with the payment.

Mr. Cohen says he asked if Mr. Weisselberg would front the money. The finance chief, currently incarcerated for perjury, demurred, saying he was paying for his grandchildren’s schooling.

Mr. Cohen decided that he would have to pay the money, and obtained a home equity line of credit to finance it. He told Mr. Trump, who said “good ... good,” according to Mr. Cohen’s testimony. Mr. Trump assured him he would be paid back.

Was Trump worried about Melania?

Mr. Trump’s former fixer was also adamant that the point of the payoff was to hide the story from the media prior to the upcoming election – not to keep the peace in Mr. Trump’s household.

He testified that at one point he asked Mr. Trump, “How are things going to go upstairs?” This referred to the fact that the Trump penthouse in Trump Tower was higher than their office space.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Cohen not to worry about that. 

“He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign,” Mr. Cohen testified. 

After the Trump victory, Mr. Cohen hoped to be offered a plum job in Washington. But it wasn’t forthcoming. 

“It was more about my ego than anything else,” he said to the jury Monday. 

He did get his money back, however. Prior to the inauguration, Mr. Cohen met with the president-elect and Mr. Weisselberg in Trump Tower, he said. They discussed how he would be reimbursed: over 12 months, with the $130,000 doubled to account for the taxes he would have to pay on it, since it would be income. A bonus and money to repay an online polling firm were also added to the total.

Mr. Weisselberg showed Mr. Trump his handwritten notes that outlined the scheme, according to Mr. Cohen. 

Mr. Trump approved it. He said it was going to be “one heck of a ride” in Washington, his former fixer testified in court.

Firas Makdesi/Reuters

Workers clear rubble after an Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building killed several senior Iranian officers, in Damascus, Syria, April 2, 2024.

For Israel’s targeting officers, it was just another day at the office.

As they had done scores of times in recent years, with little discernible pushback from Iran, the Israelis ordered a targeted assassination against enemy personnel abroad.

In this case, it was a strike April 1 in Damascus, Syria, which killed several senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals who were key to running Iran’s regional “Axis of Resistance” operations against Israel.

But that strike destroyed an Iranian consular building, and so triggered an unexpected and unprecedented response from Tehran two weeks later – a barrage of more than 300 missiles and drones, launched directly from Iranian soil at Israel, the scale of which by all accounts took the Israelis by surprise.

Nearly all the projectiles were shot down April 14 by Israel, as well as the United States and Jordan. And Israel’s own limited response, reportedly taking out an Iranian air defense system in central Iran April 19, ended the latest escalatory spiral.

But Israel’s first-ever direct kinetic exchange with Iran has yielded lessons for Israel, analysts say, even as the Jewish state simultaneously wages war in Gaza – sparked by Iran’s “Axis” ally Hamas’ invasion of Israel last Oct. 7 – and faces a much more formidable Iran-backed enemy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

“We got used to the fact that, if Iran wants to carry out an attack against Israel, it would either be through the use of proxies, or through Syria, or through terrorist attack,” says Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at The Institute for National Security Studies and The Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Amir Cohen/Reuters

Israeli military personnel load a truck with the apparent remains of an Iranian ballistic missile after it was found in the desert near the southern city of Arad, Israel, April 26, 2024.

For years, he says, Israel assumed that only one scenario – an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities – would spark a direct Iranian retaliation. And since Oct. 7, even though Iran-backed militias from Yemen to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon have increased exchanges with Israel, Iran made clear it did not want a wider war.

“For the first time we see another possibility coming from Iran,” says Dr. Zimmt, a former adviser on Iran to the Israel Defense Forces.

Khamenei’s leadership

Iran’s unprecedented reaction is also causing a reevaluation of the “willingness to take risks” by Iran’s leadership, helmed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“We have to reconsider whether Khamenei – especially today, as he ages, is perhaps getting weaker, is perhaps surrounded by more hard-liners, is thinking more and more about his legacy – is the same cautious leader we used to know for decades,” adds Dr. Zimmt.

If Mr. Khamenei, he says, “was ready to take this risk, by launching more than 300 missiles and drones, which is certainly not a symbolic reaction,” then Israelis are now bearing in mind “whether we should expect that in other areas, for example the nuclear strategy of Iran.”

Iran’s April barrage “doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran is going to be a different country from now on, that Khamenei is going to be a different kind of leader from now on,” Dr. Zimmt adds. “But it’s certainly added some doubts about the strategies and policies of Iran as we knew them, until now.”

Taking fully eight days before commenting on Iran’s strike, which some critics derided as a “failure” for its lack of impact in Israel, Mr. Khamenei praised Iran’s military forces for mounting a barrage that “infuriated” Israel and its allies, and encouraged commanders to “learn from the enemy.”

The Iranian strike – which included the largest single drone attack in history – came after months in which Iran appeared to take little direct action to repulse an increasingly brazen Israeli campaign of targeting Iranian and “Axis” assets across the region.

While Iranian hard-liners complained noisily about Iran’s toothless reaction until mid-April, it was similar muted Iranian reactions that appear to have lulled Israeli forces into a sense of complacency about the cumulative impact of their targeted assassinations.

“Israel has operated with a lot of freedom in Syria for a long time, and it’s done similar acts before, but of course this one is very different because it was in a consular compound,” says Mairav Zonszein, the senior analyst for Israel of the International Crisis Group. “So there was clearly a failure of intelligence and of the political echelon to understand the ramifications of that move.”

Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency/Reuters

An anti-Israel billboard with a picture of Iranian missiles is seen in a street in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024.

Israel now “understands much more clearly” that striking anything that Iran considers Iranian territory is a “red line,” which is likely to be taken into account by Israel “next time,” she says.

Iran’s strike itself was also “far greater in scope than [Israeli officials] anticipated, the numbers and munitions used,” says Ms. Zonszein. “Everybody is learning from that situation – what the ability of Iran is to attack, what the ability of Israel and some of its allies is to defend.”

Nuclear threat is main concern

Still, she says that bigger questions remain about “how Israel is going to recalibrate itself toward Iran” and its allies – especially Hezbollah.

On top of that, despite Iran’s conventional weapons barrage, “the major concern for Israel [on Iran] is the nuclear threat,” says Ms. Zonszein. “And the major threat that is not nuclear is from Hezbollah in Lebanon, because they have very high numbers of missiles and rockets, some of them precision-guided, and they live next door.”

Indeed, Iranian officials and pundits have reveled in Iran’s hand in creating the strategic dilemmas faced by Israel, especially since Oct. 7, when the Hamas attack from Gaza into Israel left 1,200 dead, 250 people taken hostage, and a nation still coping with trauma. Israel’s military response in Gaza has yet to destroy Hamas or its leadership – two key war aims – but it has left more than 34,000 Palestinians dead and swaths of the enclave reduced to rubble.

Soon after the Iranian attack – which Iran claims to have resulted in a “new order” in the region – the hard-line Iranian newspaper Vatan-e Emrouz published a front-page photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, with the one-word headline, “Desperate.”

“At the end of the day, I don’t think Israel would refrain from attacking Iranian assets in Syria, or anywhere else,” though it is likely to refrain from targeting diplomatic compounds and overtly targeting Iranians inside Iran, to avoid triggering a similar Iranian barrage, says Dr. Zimmt at The Institute for National Security Studies.

“This will certainly play a role in future Israeli decisions, but not to the point that Israel will not do that anymore,” he says.

Nathan Howard/Reuters

President Joe Biden speaks about the protests on college campuses amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, during brief remarks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, May 2, 2024.

Of all the challenges President Joe Biden faces, one stands out today as particularly knotty: the war in Gaza and the United States’ role as Israel’s chief foreign backer. 

President Biden’s deeply held support for the Jewish state, seven months after a major assault by Gaza-based Hamas terrorists, is being tested like never before. After pausing a shipment of bombs to Israel, Mr. Biden has threatened to cut some weapons deliveries altogether if the Israelis follow through on a full-scale military operation in Rafah. Residents are fleeing the southern Gaza city, considered Hamas’ last redoubt, but some 700,000 people reportedly remain – many of them displaced Palestinians. 

Mr. Biden’s threat has alarmed supporters of Israel across the U.S. political spectrum, including in a Democratic Party already riven by the war. On the left, pro-Palestinian protesters hound the president in public with cries of “Genocide Joe” and have disrupted college campuses across the country for months amid what Mr. Biden calls a “ferocious surge” in antisemitism. 

With graduation season now in full swing and university leaders cracking down, pro-Palestinian encampments are dwindling. Over the weekend, some commencements saw protests – including a walkout at Duke University as vocally pro-Israel comedian Jerry Seinfeld received an honorary degree – though reports of disruptions were limited. Still, the Democratic convention this summer in Chicago may be fertile ground for a resurgence of unrest.

The potential looms for a schism in U.S.-Israeli relations, if Israel launches a major invasion of Rafah and Mr. Biden follows through on cuts to military aid. Among the president’s most devoted pro-Israel Democratic allies, the frustration is palpable. 

Ryan Sun/AP

A pro-Palestinian demonstrator holds a flag in front of a police line after protesters were told to disperse at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where a commencement ceremony for graduates from Pomona College was being held, May 12, 2024.

Mr. Biden “already doesn’t have great [poll] numbers on being a strong leader, and when you look like you’re giving in to protesters, you reinforce that sense of weakness – and that’s deeply problematic,” says the leader of a Jewish Democratic organization who asked to withhold his name so he could speak candidly. “This is a great lesson on how to alienate everyone.”

In political terms, the problem for Mr. Biden – locked in a tight reelection race with presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump – isn’t necessarily the Israel-Hamas war itself as a driver of votes. Polls show, in fact, that the war ranks relatively low on the list of voter concerns, even among young voters, who prioritize issues such as jobs, inflation, housing, and health care. 

But the news and social media have been awash with chaotic images of campus protests – including the takeover and subsequent police clearing of a building at Columbia University. Nearly 3,000 demonstrators have been arrested across the country.

“The optics are not good; people don’t like disorder,” says presidential historian George Edwards, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University. “They see disorder, and don’t understand what these college students are doing – camping on campus, not studying. Remember, the typical voter didn’t go to college.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration is struggling to help a difficult ally. In two TV interviews Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken strongly criticized Israel’s behavior in Gaza, where some 35,000 people have died in the war, according to local authorities. The war began last Oct. 7 when Hamas-led militants raided southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages. 

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Secretary Blinken decried “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians,” and called on Israel to devise a “credible plan” to mitigate civilian casualties before going into Rafah. 

Mr. Blinken also acknowledged a Biden administration report to Congress on Friday that found the use of U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza likely violated international law, but added that the evidence was incomplete. 

A cease-fire and return of hostages would be the best way for Mr. Biden to silence his critics, analysts say, but negotiations have proceeded in fits and starts. And Israel’s expected assault on Rafah has cooled expressions of optimism. 

Mr. Biden has faced criticism, too, for being slow to respond to the campus protests. He finally spoke out May 2 in brief White House remarks, underscoring the right to free speech but insisting that “order must prevail.” 

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with families of the hostages taken in the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, outside a hotel in Tel Aviv, Israel, May 1, 2024.

The president also delivered a longer address last week in the U.S. Capitol at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony, speaking emotionally about the killing of 6 million Jews during World War II – a stain on history that Mr. Biden says made him a committed Zionist. 

That devotion has buttressed Mr. Biden’s steadfast support for Israel since the Oct. 7 attack – which many call that nation’s 9/11 – even as his relationship with the Jewish state, under conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shows unusual strain. 

For American Jewish leaders, it’s also a time of great stress amid spiking antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. They say expressing support for the Jewish people isn’t tricky at all. 

“That’s what the president realizes,” says Ted Deutch, CEO of the nonpartisan American Jewish Committee (AJC) and a former Democratic member of Congress. “He realizes that it’s not difficult to acknowledge the fear and anxiety that the community is feeling.” 

Many of the protesters, especially on college campuses, Mr. Deutch says, are marching “not in support of peace but in support of the terrorists who committed atrocities on 10/7.” According to AJC data, he says, nearly half of American Jews have changed their behavior so as not to be identifiably Jewish. 

Still, divisions within the Democratic Party over the handling of Gaza – personified on the left by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish – have complicated life for Mr. Biden, especially in an election year. 

Senator Sanders has made headlines suggesting Gaza could be “Biden’s Vietnam,” an inauspicious comparison to the election of 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson opted not to run for reelection, saddling his successor, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with an unpopular war. Republican Richard Nixon narrowly beat him. 

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Sanders doubled down on the Vietnam comparison, saying, “I think a lot of people are very disappointed. ... It’s hurting [Mr. Biden] politically.” Still, the Vermont senator noted that he’s still “strongly supporting” the president on domestic issues. 

Conservative political analyst Henry Olsen sees in Mr. Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza a longstanding tendency to aim for the “center” of his party, wherever that may be at the time. 

“He’s doing what he’s done throughout his career, which is to look at both sides within a Democratic Party divide and try to occupy the middle,” says Mr. Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.  

“To that extent, he’s not satisfying anybody,” he continues. “But he’s not driving anybody irrevocably away, either – and that might be the best he can expect.”

At first glance, this could be any industrial factory. Workers wearing protective gloves assemble control panels and heating plates amid the relentless whirring of machinery. Giant yellow robot arms swing back and forth, lining trays with tiny metal parts.

But there is a reason that each year thousands of visitors from every continent come to this mountainous Basque landscape to study factories like this one. This is the home of the Mondragon Corp., the world’s largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives. 

Copreci, which makes parts for home appliances, is one of 81 Mondragon cooperatives, ranging from manufacturing to finance and retail. By the end of the day, this floor alone will churn out 30,000 gas valves, destined for stoves worldwide.

Yet it is also churning out a radically different vision of capitalism.

For young people especially, capitalism brings to mind wealth inequality, cost-of-living crises, and environmental collapse. More than half the respondents of the global Edelman Trust Barometer survey from 2022 said that capitalism does more harm than good in the world.

The Mondragon Corp. sees itself as a third way, not as an alternative to capitalism, but as an alternative way of doing capitalism – one that can build trust, not widen divisions.

“The purpose of what we’re doing here is not the machinery or the production process,” says Amaia Salbide, president of Copreci, on a visit to the factory floor. “Those are tools to reach a higher goal of social transformation.” 

Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor

Amaia Salbide speaks with plant manager Ander Jausoro on the factory floor of one of Copreci's industrial plants, in Aretxabaleta, Spain, April 22, 2024.

In a traditional capitalist system, decision-making power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few top executives and shareholders. In contrast, Mondragon’s nearly 70,000 members, ranging from floor workers to top executives, are co-owners of their businesses. They have voting power at general assemblies, where they weigh in on company strategy and policy. The income disparity between the highest- and lowest-paid employees in Mondragon’s cooperatives is capped at a ratio of 6-to-1, compared with a typical ratio of 344-to-1 in the United States. (It’s typically 77-to-1 in Spain.)

As the saying around here goes, Mondragon does not create rich people, but rich societies. That means prioritizing quality of life for the employees who live and work in the towns dotting these forested hills rather than maximizing profit for investors.

“I think of it as a sort of attractive form of capitalism,” says Nick Romeo, author of “The Alternative: How To Build a Just Economy.” “One that works more effectively for more people but retains some of the benefits of markets and efficiency and competition.”

No one is rich, no one is poor

Hugo Montalvo knows he could make more money as a sales manager at a regular multinational company. But he wouldn’t trade his middle-class status or the small town where he is raising his two children.

At the end of a day’s work, Mr. Montalvo often finds those on the assembly line picking up their children from the same schools as top managers and gathering at the same tables at local bars. The base pay for a Mondragon worker is on average 40% higher than Spain’s minimum wage.

“Here, no one is rich,” says Mr. Montalvo, who works for Ecenarro, a Mondragon cooperative in the automotive sector based in Bergara, a short drive through the valley from the town of Mondragón. “But no one is poor either. We’re all in that middle range, earning decent salaries.”

Mondragon Corp.

The city of Arrasate-Mondragón is seen from a distance in this photo taken in 2013. Mondragon's cooperatives dot this mountainous region, and the corporation has opened subsidiaries around the world.

Solidarity permeates the business model. To become a member of a cooperative, a worker invests €17,000 ($18,400), normally bit by bit over time. As for company profit, 60% is reinvested in the business, 30% goes to employees as capital, and 10% is for the local community. At the end of each year, Mondragon reviews each cooperative’s earnings, and companies in better financial positions contribute to those that are struggling.

“Just as we’ve received in the past, now it’s our turn to give,” says Mr. Montalvo.

Back in 2013, he was working for Fagor Electrodoméstico, a Mondragon cooperative that at the time was Spain’s leading home appliance company. When the company went bankrupt in the aftermath of the financial crisis, his job and initial investment disappeared.

Within two weeks, he was transferred to Ecenarro, and Mondragon covered his membership fee. Of the almost 2,000 people who lost their jobs at Fagor, 95% were relocated within the Mondragon network. During the pandemic, workers came to collective agreements to avoid job losses, including salary reductions.

“The success of the economy can be seen broadly speaking in terms of people’s own experiences of prosperity and economic security,” says Martin Wolf, author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” “Is it rising? Do they expect it to rise for their children? ... Do they feel they are treated fairly by the people in charge?”

When the answers are yes, he says, people are much more likely to trust the economic system. Workers here say that without first building trust, the Mondragon experiment would not have survived.

Mondragon’s economic tightrope

Mondragon traces its roots to the aftermath of Spain’s civil war. In 1941, a young Basque priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta arrived in the town of Arrasate-Mondragón. Amid deep social divisions and a devastated economy, he established a technical school and organized study circles to promote cooperativism and solidarity among local youth. With his help, 11 students enrolled in long-distance engineering courses.

In 1955, five of these students formed the now-defunct Fagor Electrodoméstico, the first Mondragon cooperative. Over time, Mondragon expanded its businesses, which today range from a credit cooperative to a well-known supermarket chain. Mondragon University, also a cooperative, enrolls thousands of students.

Courtesy of Copreci

A woman works on the factory floor of Copreci, in Aretxabaleta, Spain, March 2022.

On a recent Sunday evening, children played freely in Mondragón’s historic square and winding alleys. The bustling town stands in stark contrast to other villages across the north of Spain, once thriving industrial hubs. Between 2008 and 2015, The Basque Country’s industrial sector lost 64,000 jobs as companies moved their manufacturing abroad and others shut down.

“The cooperative is a creator of wellness, so it has to exist for decades and decades,” says Ander Etxeberria, who leads Mondragon’s cooperative outreach program.

Yet Mondragon, too, walks the tightrope between its people-oriented model and the pressures of global competition. When a group of cooperative workers from San Francisco’s Arizmendi Bakery – named after the Basque priest – arrived at Mondragon wearing T-shirts that read “Fire the bosses,” Mr. Etxeberria recalls holding back a smile. For the sake of business efficiency, most operational decisions are made by managers in a standard hierarchical structure.

Critics note that Mondragon’s international subsidiaries in countries from Mexico to China to Turkey are not cooperatives, despite early efforts to export the model. Even in Spain, not all workers at Mondragon are cooperative members.

Mr. Etxeberria acknowledges that Mondragon is not immune to contradictions, adding that the cooperatives tend to be more pragmatic than idealistic. That can cause friction.

“When you come in from the bottom, you barely have any power at all,” says an engineer at the technology research cooperative Ikerlan who asked not to share his name, sitting outside near the church where Arizmendiarrieta is buried. He says Mondragon’s business model is going to have to evolve as global competition grows even tighter. Still, he says, one thing is for sure.

“This town has life and lungs thanks to the initiative.”

Ever since Miss Marple picked up her knitting needles, sleuths of a certain age have been genteelly wrangling killers while being ignored by the young folks. But “The Thursday Murder Club” has helped launch a trend of golden-age detectives not seen since Jessica Fletcher last parked her bike in Cabot Cove, Maine.

While catching killers rather than putting together jigsaw puzzles has become the hot new hobby for fictional retirees, these books are also showing people in their 70s and 80s as vibrant, brave, and clever. 

The “Thursday Murder Club” series, by Richard Osman, about a quartet of septuagenarian sleuths, has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Oscar-winners Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley and former James Bond Pierce Brosnan have all signed in to the Coopers Chase Retirement Village to star in the movie version.

While some authors play with ageism tropes to deadly effect – see Deanna Raybourn’s “Killers of a Certain Age” (no really, you should read it) – others like Mr. Osman take on diagnoses like Alzheimer’s while writing fully realized characters who maintain their agency and humanity. Or, think of Walter Mosley’s masterful telling of a cantankerous 91-year-old suffering from dementia in “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.” With the help of an experimental drug, Ptolemy lives his last days with the vigor of a younger man and a memory to match, which helps him piece together his nephew’s murder.

Sometimes writers paint heroes grappling with mental health diagnoses, like the aforementioned memory loss, or with physical limitations. And they also amplify traits like experience, intelligence, and mental resolve – the flip side to physical decline. This offers readers new ways to view aging, experts say.

Carsten Koall/picture-alliance/dpa/AP/File

Richard Osman, English author, television presenter, and producer, poses at a get-together for the launch of his book, “The Thursday Murder Club,” in Berlin, in June 2022.

“These are the conversations about the incredible heterogeneity of old age,” says Erin Lamb, associate professor of bioethics in the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. She studies and teaches about aging. Dr. Lamb says that what is important to understand is that while many people choose to ignore older people and lean into stereotypes that portray them as invisible, that isn’t true of older people’s reality.

“We grow more and more diverse as we grow older, because of our life experiences, and so all of these [stories] that begin to get to the complexity or begin to ask new questions, at least we’re treating older people like they are people,” Dr. Lamb says.

In 2019, the British media forum Gransnet did a survey on ageism in fiction of more than 1,000 women over 40 years old. More than half said they felt older women in fiction had clichéd roles, and almost half of them said that there weren’t enough books about middle-aged or older women. These same women reported that they felt insulted by tropes of older female characters being baffled by technology, especially since some 75% of those surveyed used technology to purchase the books they read. They wanted to see older women working, more active, and going places that they would like to travel. A majority of those surveyed read for enjoyment.

When feminist writer Betty Friedan wrote “The Fountain of Age” in 1993, she did a survey of images of older people that she did and didn’t see in magazines. The images she saw were invariably of age – and older people themselves – as a problem.

Ms. Friedan wrote, “On the one hand, despite continued reports of advances in our life expectancy, there was a curious absence – in effect, a blackout – of images of people over sixty-five, especially older women, doing, or even selling, anything at all in the mass media. On the other hand, there was an increasing obsession with the problem of age and how to avoid it personally, through diet, exercise, chemical formulas, plastic surgery, moisturizing creams, psychological defenses, and outright denial – as early and as long as possible.”

In Robert Thorogood’s “The Marlow Murder Club” series, he turns the trope of people feebly wasting away in nursing homes on its head with a witty protagonist, Judith Potts. Judith is a 78-year-old crossword puzzle specialist who occasionally skinny-dips in the Thames. Her neighbor is murdered, and she uses her unrelenting curiosity to find his killer. She recruits a vicar’s wife and a dog walker as part of her team. The novel, which inspired a TV series coming to PBS’s “Masterpiece,” was followed by “Death Comes to Marlow” and “The Queen of Poisons.” Mr. Thorogood, interviewed via a video call from his home in Marlow, England, says that the next book will be out in early 2025.

“We have lots of men who solve murder mystery crimes. It would be exciting for me to have a woman lead up a murder mystery,” Mr. Thorogood says of his initial thoughts during the creative process.

He envisioned something in the realm of Miss Marple. His inspiration for Judith and her gang of crime solvers? His grandma, Betty, and his great-aunts, all of whom lived colorful lives. (Although one aunt, Jess, wouldn’t let him put vegetables of the same color next to each other on his dinner plate.)

“They were these amazing, really inspirational, bright women,” he says. “They were cleverer than their husbands, but the husbands had status and went off and had jobs and they wore suits,” Mr. Thorogood continues. His answer was an older, independently wealthy, single sleuth who would outsmart the men and had no interest in ever getting married.

He took that to his publisher, and “Marlow Murders” was born. 

The process was the complete opposite for Deanna Raybourn. Her “Killers of a Certain Age” transports readers to foreign countries with four 60-year-old retired assassins, whose former employer is trying to kill them. While they don’t have the physical strength of their youth, they have experience, wisdom, and a lifetime of spy craft to fall back on.

“The whole thing started with my publisher,” Ms. Raybourn says in a phone interview. From high up in the company, the question was asked: Why don’t they lean into older women doing cool things?

“They were sitting around having a chat and they said, ‘OK, who could we get to write a book like that?’ And everybody at the table said my name at the same time,” she laughs.

Ms. Raybourn, author of the Veronica Speedwell mysteries, agreed to write the novel on two conditions: The women needed to be assassins, and the book needed to be set in contemporary times, as opposed to a period piece. Ms. Raybourn credits publishers being hungry for more books like hers to a cultural shift brought on by everyday older people who have forced society to alter its view of them.

“I think that we’re pushing the needle because of that,” Ms. Raybourn says. People take better care of themselves, which has created a new picture about older people, and that more vigorous portrait has been amplified by the media, she says.

“Now we’re saying, ‘Let’s not just show somebody being healthy and vibrant and active in their 60s, 70s, and 80s and beyond, let’s show a broader picture of that,’” Ms. Raybourn says.

Reuters/Ramadan Abed

Palestinians who fled Rafah in southern Gaza ahead of a threatened Israeli military assault, in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, May 6, 2024.

By almost any measure from the battlefields of the world’s major current wars, the global rules for protecting innocent civilians in conflict seem to be losing their force. Russia pounded more than 30 towns and villages over the weekend, opening a new front in northeastern Ukraine. A year-old civil war in Sudan has displaced 8.2 million people.

On Friday, the Biden administration reported to Congress that Israel has likely violated international humanitarian law in its military response to the Oct. 7 attack, during which Hamas militants killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages. The report documents the use of weapons supplied by the United States in Israeli strikes against civilian targets and aid workers during its seven-month war in Gaza. It also indicates a failure to protect innocent Palestinians from attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and mistreatment of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The report marks a rare rebuke of a strategic ally. But in its finer detail, it also captures how individual countries and the international community are learning to adapt the rules for protecting civilians to the evolving nature of war and those who fight it. It describes efforts Israeli forces have taken to minimize civilian harm while pursuing an enemy shielding itself within residential buildings, schools, and hospitals. It cites military and civilian investigations of alleged war crimes.

The report also chronicles how other recipients of U.S. weaponry such as Colombia, Kenya, and Nigeria are working to instill in their militaries respect for civilian command and protection of civilians. Those efforts are not exceptions. “The notion that wars are ruled exclusively by chaos and disorder hardly reflects today’s empirical reality,” wrote Ezequiel Heffes, director of Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, in Just Security during the height of Ethiopia’s civil war in 2022.

One reason for this, Dr. Heffes noted, is a growing trend among civil society groups, academics, and international peacemakers to educate states and nonstate actors like terrorist groups and guerrilla movements in international laws to protect civilians. That work involves promoting human safety by cultivating empathy among belligerents. As the International Committee of the Red Cross noted in March, sowing respect for international law requires preserving “the humanity of the enemy.”

Turki bin Abdullah Al Mahmoud, director of the Human Rights Department at the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a mediator in peace talks between Israel and Hamas, agreed. “The more skill, the more knowledge, the more information, and the more background about the conflict itself the mediator has, the longer-term solution we can reach,” he told a recent seminar hosted by Georgetown University.

“As full of holes as it is, the rules-based order is the best model we’ve come up with, civilizationally, to reduce widespread war and conflict,” wrote H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, in Foreign Policy magazine. The Biden report has drawn criticism for being both too harsh and too soft at a time of growing concern of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza. But its sober balance fits a global trend in setting justice and protection for innocent people on a foundation of understanding rather than condemnation.