The week at a glance...Europe

Belfast, U.K.

Historic reconciliation: In a profound gesture of peace in Northern Ireland, Queen Elizabeth shook hands this week with a former Irish Republican Army commander. Martin McGuinness, now a deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, was the IRA’s chief of staff in 1979 when the group blew up the yacht of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the queen’s cousin, killing him and two children. “It’s a huge act of reconciliation,” said Peter Sheridan, head of the charity Co-operation Ireland, which hosted the event at a Belfast theater. After a four-decade conflict that killed more than 3,500 people, the IRA abandoned its effort to win Northern Irish independence from Britain and disarmed in 2005.

Athens

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Worst job in Europe: Greece’s new government has named a replacement finance minister after the first pick bowed out because of health problems. Yannis Stournaras, 55, is an economics professor who has served in other technocratic governments and helped negotiate Greece’s entry into the euro in the 1990s. “He was the best choice from a shrinking group of people that were willing to take the post,” a Greek official told The Wall Street Journal. “Stournaras knows he will become quite unpopular, quite fast, but he is not a politician, so he doesn’t have to think about the political cost.” To meet bailout terms, Stournaras will have to make $14 billion in budget cuts in a country already reeling from unpopular austerity measures.