The week at a glance...Europe

Paris

President under pressure: Less than a week after beleaguered President François Hollande delivered an hourlong television address laying out new tax policies aimed at the rich, his former budget minister confessed to having maintained a secret Swiss bank account for years. Jérôme Cahuzac, who resigned last month after an official probe triggered by an investigative news report in December, had previously denied the charges. “I was caught in a spiral of lies and I took the wrong path,” he said this week, apologizing to Hollande and the French people “for the damage I’ve caused.” Hollande said Cahuzac had committed “an unpardonable mistake and an outrage to the republic,” but was soon on the defensive himself as allegations surfaced that he might have known of Cahuzac’s guilt for months.

Rome

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Papal humility: Pope Francis riled some traditionalists last week by washing and kissing the feet of two women, one of them a Muslim, at a juvenile detention facility in Rome. For centuries, popes have washed the feet of 12 pilgrims at St. Peter’s on Maundy Thursday, in a symbolic echo of the humble act Jesus performed on his 12 disciples—who were all men. Francis’s decision to celebrate the Maundy Mass outside the Vatican and to include two women was seen as a further sign of his desire to break with tradition. Francis has also declined to wear the more ostentatious papal vestments and to move into the opulent papal apartments.

Berlin

Wartime bomb defused: Residents were evacuated, trains diverted, and flights briefly suspended this week as police experts defused a 220-pound bomb left over from World War II. The Soviet ordnance was found at a construction site near Berlin’s main train station, which is located in a relatively sparsely inhabited quarter close to the former dividing line between East and West Berlin. Such finds remain relatively common in Germany, where the Allies dropped vast quantities of ordnance in the final years of the war. Experts believe that as many as 3,000 bombs are still buried under Berlin alone.