PARIS — Members of the militant Basque separatist group ETA killed a French police officer in a shootout near Paris on Tuesday night, the French authorities said Wednesday.

PYAPON, Myanmar — In the dried mud of the Irrawaddy Delta, workers are welding together the final pieces of a natural-gas pipeline that the country’s ruling generals say will keep the lights on in Yangon, Myanmar’s main city, after years of debilitating blackouts.

DAKAR, Senegal — The acting president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, dissolved his cabinet on Wednesday in the strongest assertion yet of his authority over a country where his rule has been challenged.

LAHORE, Pakistan — Five young American Muslims detained in Pakistan last December on suspicion of seeking to join jihadists in Afghanistan were formally charged Wednesday, in a case that added to fears that Westerners might be increasingly be turning to Islamist-inspired terrorism.

FRANKFURT — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, adopting a harsher tone toward Greece than the one expressed by some other European leaders, said Wednesday that Europe needed better rules to police its members and tacitly endorsed a proposal to eject wayward countries from the group of countries that use the euro.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban have begun waging a campaign of intimidation in Marja that some local Afghan leaders worry has jeopardized the success of an American-led offensive there meant as an early test of a revised military approach in Afghanistan.

ROME — As hundreds of new allegations of sexual abuse surface in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday that he hoped a forthcoming letter dealing with one part of the scandal in Ireland would help “repentance, healing and renewal.”

JERUSALEM — Israeli officials said Wednesday that efforts were under way to calm tensions with the Obama administration and come up with a formula to defuse a diplomatic crisis over building in contested East Jerusalem.

WASHINGTON — A strike by an unmanned drone last week killed a senior Qaeda commander who had played a significant role in planning the killing of Central Intelligence Agency operatives in late December at a base in Afghanistan, according to American officials.

DUBLIN — The besieged leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland said Wednesday he was “ashamed” of the role he had played decades ago in handling accusations of child sex abuse against a priest who went on to sexually assault scores of children, and hinted that he might bow to calls for his resignation.

PARIS — Across Europe, from profligate Greece to newly strait-laced Ireland, countries are promising deep, painful cuts in public spending even as they face the likelihood of a new recession.

JUST off the Astor Court in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s sprawling Asian collections, an unobtrusive door is cut into a white wall, a door most patrons probably never notice. But behind it, up a narrow staircase leading into the oldest part of the museum, one of the newest and most innovative practices in the fields of sculptural conservation and scholarship has been taking shape.

A science museum is a kind of experiment. It demands the most elaborate equipment: Imax theaters, NASA space vehicles, collections of living creatures, digital planetarium projectors, fossilized bones. Into this mix are thrust tens of thousands of living human beings: children on holiday, weary or eager parents, devoted teachers, passionate aficionados and casual passers-by. And the experimenters watch, test, change, hoping. ...

An evening based on Schubert’s “Winterreise” seems an unlikely antidepressant. But Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duffy and Dave Malloy give this gloomy song cycle an amusing theatrical makeover in “Three Pianos” at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church.

“The Grants are getting a divorce,” Ian Kleier says after studying the gossip pages at the kitchen table of his Park Avenue apartment. His wife, Michele, is not surprised. “I had my suspicions,” she says, and starts to list the warning signs while scrambling eggs for “the girls,” the couple’s trio of white Maltese. Ian cuts her off. “It’s not a pretty divorce, and I think you should jump right on top of it.”

BOSTON

Plantation owner by day; regal ghost by night. It’s not a pitch for a bizarre comic-book hero — it’s the Saturday schedule for David Pittsinger, who may need some super-powered vocal cords to pull it off.

Finland is pretty hot at the moment, musically speaking. Where nonspecialists once began and ended their lists of great Finnish composers with Sibelius, now Einojuhani Rautavaara, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho are creating some of the most inventive and compelling works being written anywhere.

TWO months ago, a dozen teenage girls with no formal photography experience were given professional cameras and told to document their world growing up in New York City. Right away, the results were startling.

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa.

THE Grumman F9F Cougar had seen better days, some of them flying in Navy fighter squadrons in the 1950s. But then it was retired and ended up spending years in a park in New Jersey as perhaps the world’s coolest jungle gym.

It’s easy to imagine Larry Keigwin choreographing a Beyoncé video, even if you didn’t know he got his start as a backup dancer on Club MTV. Please don’t mistake that for faint praise (who doesn’t love her “Single Ladies”?), only a nod to this witty stylist’s pop sensibilities.

Quick, look around the office. Do people appear to be staring into their iPhones with a bit more intensity than just a few weeks ago? Remember how information technology administrators blocked all the fantasy-baseball Web sites in years past?

Last year, 92 million people bought things online using credit cards, debit cards and services like PayPal and Google Checkout. Millions of others paid bills and wired money electronically from bank accounts with just a few clicks.

Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes.

The word “apps,” of course, is short for applications, which means programs. But until 2007, nobody used the term apps except the people who wrote them — programmers. It wasn’t until the iPhone came along that apps became shorthand used by normal people.

When Gmail

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?

PARIS — European public broadcasters are calling on lawmakers to make it easier to offer their programming over the Internet, saying cumbersome copyright practices restrict their ability to develop new digital services and prolong the fragmentation of the European television landscape.

Federal regulators on Tuesday made public the details of their ambitious policy to encourage the spread of high-speed Internet access. But their 376-page proposal, the National Broadband Plan, was met with a chorus of questions, even from the staunchest advocates of its goals.

Seton Hall dismissed Bobby Gonzalez on Wednesday, ending his tumultuous four-year tenure as men’s basketball coach a day after an ignominious first-round loss in the National Invitation Tournament and the arrest of a player who had been kicked off the team.

It is one of those days when perspective seems ready to run off the rails, as helpless as the poor guy going 65 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike on a day when the 90 m.p.h. pack is in a particularly foul mood. Yes, actual humans were professing to feel badly that the poor, disrespected Masters would be sullied by Tiger Woods’s return. The whining about N.C.A.A. seeds and matchups was almost deafening.

The N.B.A. board of governors on Wednesday unanimously approved Michael Jordan’s purchase of the money-losing Charlotte Bobcats for $275 million from Robert L. Johnson.

NEWARK — As the N.H.L. moved to fast track its proposed rule against blind-side checks to the head for possible passage this season, the man whose actions fueled the effort, the Penguins’ Matt Cooke, sat unfazed in his dressing-room stall at the Prudential Center on Wednesday.

HOUSTON — When Tom Penders was approached to become the University of Houston men’s basketball coach six years ago, he bolted to the nearest elevator.

LONDON — The lights were still on, but Chelsea was out of the Champions League by the time its owner, Roman Abramovich, walked across the grass toward the locker rooms.

An outpouring of support from peers, sponsors and officials greeted the announcement by Tiger Woods that his self-imposed exile from golf would end at the Masters in April — a first step in a return to normalcy on the competitive side of his life.

In a span of nine days, the Jets released Thomas Jones, a veteran running back coming off his most productive season, and signed LaDainian Tomlinson, a veteran running back coming off his least productive season.

As a basketball player, Michael Jordan ruthlessly exploited his opponents’ weaknesses. As a businessman, he is now trying to exploit the financially troubled sports world by buying the money-losing Charlotte Bobcats of the National Basketball Association for about $25 million less than they sold for in 2002.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kelsey Griffin’s escape, which she had been diagramming in her mind for three years, came close to fruition during her junior season at Nebraska.

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — After 60 losses, there is not much dignity left for the Nets to lose. But Terrence Williams is trying to protect whatever shreds that remain.