The world always watches the American presidential election. But this year, the stakes feel much higher – especially for parents around the globe who wonder if Donald Trump will make their children’s lives better or worse.

• Biden immigration plan: A federal judge strikes down a Biden administration policy that aimed to ease a path to citizenship for some unauthorized immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
• Foiled Trump assassination plot: The Justice Department unseals criminal charges in a thwarted Iranian plot to kill President-elect Donald Trump before this week’s presidential election. 
• Mozambique unrest: Thousands are protesting in Mozambique’s capital, and police are responding by firing tear gas and rubber bullets. The unrest was sparked by an October vote that will keep the ruling party in power amid allegations of rigging.
• Chinese plan for local economies: China has announced an $839 billion plan to help local governments refinance their mountains of debt in the latest push to rev up growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
• Israeli soccer fans attacked: Dutch authorities say young people on scooters attacked Israeli fans in hit-and-run assaults overnight after a soccer game in Amsterdam.

Read these news briefs.

Republican Donald Trump has twice defeated a seasoned female candidate for president of the United States. Women have ably led many other nations. Are American voters ready to send a woman to the Oval Office? 

The East-West identity divide did not fall with the Berlin Wall. Young east Germans today take a nostalgic pride in possessing Soviet-era items their parents and grandparents used.

California may be a reliably blue state, but it proved not to be monolithic this week. It gave Kamala Harris its full electoral count, but rolled back its support of progressive criminal justice candidates and policies.

Working-class voters abandoned Kamala Harris in droves. Democrats are fighting about what went wrong – and where to go from here.

Never underestimate the skill needed in saving a griffin, breaking a code, or searching for treasure. These books for young readers respect the smarts of their characters – and of the audience.

After 13 months of mass destruction, the war in Gaza has taken an unexpected turn for peace.

In a religious ruling, the most prominent Islamic scholar in the Palestinian enclave says Hamas failed to keep its fighters “away from the homes of defenceless [Palestinian] civilians” – or, in effect, it used innocent people as shields against Israeli attacks on Hamas positions purposely placed in or under civilian buildings.

“Human life is more precious to God than Mecca,” stated Professor Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the faculty of sharia and law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, in a six-page document.

The BBC, which reported on the religious edict, notes that Dr. Dayah cites Islamic principles that require Hamas to avoid “actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent.”

In the past, Dr. Dayah has been respected enough to mediate disputes between Islamist militant groups within Gaza. His edict, or fatwa, could now further undercut Hamas’ claim that much of its legitimacy rests on its obedience to Islam.

Since the group’s Oct. 7 attack last year on Israeli civilians, many in the Muslim world have debated how much Islamic law and international law regarding rules of war apply to the conflict in Gaza.

The Global Imams Council, for example, condemned the massacre of Israelis. The world’s largest and most moderate Muslim movement, Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia, urged “that religious inspiration – including the values of universal love and compassion, human fraternity, and justice – be brought to the forefront of public awareness at all times, to help resolve conflict.”

Dr. Dayah’s ruling echoes similar calls by Jewish scholars for the Israeli military to honor international and Jewish law by protecting Palestinian noncombatants in both Gaza and the West Bank.

The core of the differences between Israelis and Palestinians “is the ability and willingness to empathize with innocent victims on both sides,” wrote Singapore-based scholar James Dorsey after the Oct. 7 attack.

Such empathy is shared by the three Abrahamic faiths of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, wrote that all three faiths must contend with a dualism that claims there is not one reality but a grand conflict between two realities, good and evil. To end interfaith conflict, he said each faith must rely on its respective belief that every human being is created in the image of God.

“Can I see the image of God in one who is not in my image, whose color, culture, and creed are different from mine?” he asked in a 2015 speech. “That is the theological challenge, and it’s there in the Bible.”