Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles at targets in Ukraine on Saturday, killing at least one person in the capital Kyiv and injuring more than a dozen in what one official described as “terror on New Year’s Eve”.

Moscow’s second major missile attack in three days badly damaged a hotel south of Kyiv’s centre and a residential building in another district. A Japanese journalist was among the wounded and taken to hospital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Russia has been attacking vital infrastructure in Ukraine since October with barrages of missile and drones, causing sweeping power blackouts and other outages for millions of people as the cold weather bites.

“This time, Russia’s mass missile attack is deliberately targeting residential areas, not even our energy infrastructure,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter after the attack.

“War criminal Putin ‘celebrates’ New Year by killing people,” Kuleba said, calling for Russia to be deprived of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Reuters correspondents heard a series of loud explosions in Kyiv that came in two separate waves.

Army chief Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said air defences shot down 12 incoming cruise missiles, including six around Kyiv region, five in Zhytomyrskiy region and one in Khmeltnytskiy region.

The cruise missiles had been launched from Russian strategic bombers over the Caspian Sea hundreds of miles away and from land-based launchers, he said on Telegram.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets described the attack as “Terror on New Year’s Eve”.

“The terrorist country is congratulating the Ukrainian people with missiles. But we are indestructible and unconquerable. There is no fear, but the fury is rising. We will definitely win,” Lubinets said.

Kyiv’s mayor said 30% of consumers were without electricity in the capital due to the introduction of emergency blackouts, but residents had central heating and running water.

Other cities across Ukraine also came under fire. In the southern region of Mykolaiv, local governor Vitaliy Kim said on television that six people had been wounded.

In a separate post on Telegram, Kim said Russia had targeted civilians with the strikes, something Moscow has previously denied.

“According to today’s tendencies, the occupiers are striking not just critical (infrastructure) … in many cities (they are targeting) simply residential areas, hotels, garages, roads.”

In the western city of Khmelnytskyi, two people were wounded in a drone attack, Ukrainian presidential aide Kyrylo Tymoshenko said.

The official also reported a strike in the southern industrial city of Zaporizhzhia, which Tymoshenko said had damaged residential buildings.

Ukraine’s defence ministry responded on Telegram by saying: “With each new missile attack on civilian infrastructure, more and more Ukrainians are convinced of the need to fight until the complete collapse of Putin’s regime.”

Curfews ranging from 7 p.m. to midnight remained in place across Ukraine, making celebrations for the start of 2023 impossible in public spaces.

Several regional governors posted messages on social media warning residents not to break restrictions on New Year’s Eve, with some even warning that the police presence on city streets would be increased at night.

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A man checks in at a COVID-19 testing site in the international arrivals area of Los Angeles International Airport

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

• The US is considering testing airline wastewater for COVID-19 to track the virus.
• COVID-19 cases are surging among China’s 1.4 billion people after a three-year of strict lockdowns.
• Wastewater tests showed the presence of COVID-19 variants up to two weeks before people tested positive using nasal swabs.

The US is considering testing the contents of plane toilets on international flights for COVID-19 to track the virus and any potential new variants, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency told Reuters. 

The policy option is being studied as COVID-19 cases surge in China among its 1.4 billion people after a three-year of strict lockdowns.

More than 5,000 people are likely dying from COVID-19 in China each day, according to Airfinity, a health data company, Insider reported last week. 

Several countries have moved to enforce additional tests for travelers arriving from China. 

Three infectious disease experts told Reuters that testing wastewater collected on airplanes would be more effective at tracking the virus than testing travelers on entry. 

Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, told the news agency that mandatory testing has so far failed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and is “essential from a political standpoint” but not from a scientific one. 

Dr. Eric Topol, a genomics expert, and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, told Reuters that testing airline toilet water would offer a better idea of how the COVID-19 virus is mutating. 

This would also help combat China’s lack of COVID-19 data, Topol said. 

According to the South China Morning Post, the Malaysian government has announced that they will start screening toilet water on flights from China to track the virus. 

They will not, however, be testing travelers upon arrival to Malaysia.

Current evidence suggests that testing wastewater is more effective than COVID-19 tests in revealing infections, with researchers from San Diego finding that wastewater tests showed the presence of the Alpha, Delta, Epsilon, and Omicron variants up to two weeks before people tested positive using nasal swabs.

Jonathan Miller at City Hall Park in downtown Manhattan.

Crystal Cox/Insider

• Jonathan Miller is a real-estate appraiser who’s published monthly housing reports for 27 years.
• Everyone from The Wall Street Journal to The East Hampton Star quotes his data and analyses.
• Here’s how Miller, who doesn’t think the housing market is going to crash, became a beacon of trust.

On a hot July day seven years ago, Jonathan Miller took his 29-foot Hydra-Sports powerboat out into the Long Island Sound off the coast of Connecticut. 

The boat smelled like sea salt from his recent lobster-fishing trip. The water in the estuary was clear and calm. Miller and his wife, Cheryl, were enjoying the sunshine when his iPhone rang. 

The call was from a journalist at an international paper asking for Miller’s comment on the US housing market for a story. 

“I didn’t even tell them I was on a boat, just that I didn’t have my laptop handy if they needed numbers, he said. 

This, Miller said, was one of the strangest places he has ever answered a call from a journalist. 

But for those who know Miller, it’s not strange at all. 

The 62-year-old founder of the real-estate-appraisal and data firm Miller Samuel is probably the most-quoted man in real estate, with some 2,469 news citations, according to the database LexisNexis. After all, he releases monthly and quarterly housing-sales and rental reports on behalf of Douglas Elliman in 14 different markets across the country — and has done so for the last 27 years.

Miller in his office in 2006. He says he’s obsessed with using data to tell stories, and that is often done using graphs like the one behind him.

Adam Rountree/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Especially now, when relatively high mortgage rates, rapidly declining demand, and even scarily dipping home prices are battering the market, Miller has steered the public through it all and provided accurate information so that both industry veterans and regular people can understand what the heck is going on with residential real estate — and make important life decisions accordingly. His nontraditional background — he’s an appraiser, not an economist — puts him in a unique position to translate what can be a jargon-filled and opaque topic for the masses. 

He’s ready for the challenge.

Impartiality is crucial to Miller’s success

Miller is a polymath: he has guided Floridians through understanding how Miami could adjust and profit off of the influx of New York-based buyers in 2020; he’s predicted how a downtown Manhattan office-turned-condo building could cause a surplus of residences for sale that will push down sales prices in the area for years to come; and in the spring, he explained the impact of the ultra-luxury market on real estate in the bougie ski destination of Aspen, Colorado. 

—Jonathan Miller (@jonathanmiller) December 15, 2022

 

His most relevant hot take right now isn’t even that hot: Miller opposes the idea that the US housing market will crash now the way it did during the Great Recession. Like many of his peers, he argues that there are too few properties on the market compared to those seeking homes for that to happen, and that the market varies too much locally. 

‘When things are bad, I say they’re bad’

His honesty has not always been welcome. 

In the years that preceded the Great Recession, he said, he had to start requiring mortgage-broker clients working for banks to pay his company before the appraisal because so many refused to pay if they did not get the valuation they wanted. 

In order to attract and keep business, other appraisers would assess properties higher than their actual value in New York City, he said. One time, he even saw a luxury condo appraised at $15 million over its actual value. 

“We weren’t morally flexible,” he said. “And that made us a pariah for mortgage brokers.” 

So Miller Samuel had to pivot away from relying so heavily on institutional players, which had made up 75% of its business. He instead started catering to individuals who needed appraisals, like private lawyers or co-op boards, to keep the company from going under, Miller said. 

A New York City residential complex in 2009, after the market crashed, as Miller warned it would. The economic crisis halted billions in construction throughout the city.

Spencer Platt/Staff/Getty Images

But days after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in 2008, the tide changed.

“All of a sudden, our company was seen as genius because we never lost our mind,” he said. 

His candor over the last 36 years has helped him rise to a vaunted position in a crowded field of experts, including Redfin’s Daryl Fairweather and the National Association of Realtors’ Lawrence Yun, who are both economists. 

Those in the field respect him, from his best friend, the Chicago realtor Garry Vallo, to Phil Crawford of the “Voice of Appraisal” podcast. Friends say celebrities like NBC’s beloved weatherman Al Roker and the “Shark Tank” millionaire mogul Barbara Corcoran call on him for his appraisal expertise. 

“I’m proud that I’m not an economist,” Miller, who feels that not being tied to a larger corporation helps him remain objective, said. “When things are bad, I say they’re bad. And when things are good, I say they’re good. The good means more because I said when things were bad.” 

It’s been a long fight to the top fueled by ‘piss and vinegar’

Miller was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1960. He described his dad as a “serial entrepreneur,” who worked as a real-estate developer, the owner of the largest McDonald’s franchise in the world, and the proprietor of a French cooking school. 

“I always admired that because the man was not afraid to take on new worlds,” Miller said. “His passion was the climb. When he succeeded, he lost interest. It ended up making me a conservative entrepreneur.” 

Miller studied business and hotel management at Michigan State, where he met his future wife and business partner, Cheryl, greasing donut trays in the wee hours of the morning at a campus bakery. 

After graduation, the couple moved to Chicago. Miller took a job as a realtor at a local Century 21 Realty shop, where he quickly became the No. 2 broker on his team. Vallo, who he met on the job, was No. 1.

Even at that time, Miller was a data visionary and computer whiz, Vallo told Insider.

“When we would do market analysis on a property, I knew at that point that he really knew his information,” Vallo said. “He was the one who could analyze the data better than me and the other guys.” 

The young couple visited New York in 1985 and fell in love with the fast pace. They returned to Illinois, quit their jobs, and moved to the Big Apple two weeks later. 

Jonathan and Cheryl Miller at Rockefeller Center, not far from where they rented an apartment that overlooked Central Park in the 1980s.

Courtesy of Jonathan Miller

They promptly joined a real-estate company as guides who showed properties to potential buyers or renters. 

Those early days in New York, Miller’s boss said he was “all piss and vinegar” — ambitious, serious, and passionate. 

He was promoted to sales director just six months into the job.

A database that launched a thousand reports

Data and real-estate obsessed, Miller decided to become an appraiser to close what he saw as a gaping lack of available information about the value of New York City buildings and homes. With sparse listing data and public records, the true value of properties in New York City was opaque. 

To clear it up, Miller fanatically went to work. His parents gave him, his sister, and his wife the money to start an appraisal company a year and a half after he arrived in NYC. Miller and his sister, channeling their dad and with their parent’s support, ran the day-to-day operations at the firm, which they called Miller Samuel, along with their spouses.

Miller’s first boss in New York City described him as ambitious. He is now one of the most well-known appraisers and US housing experts around.

Chip East/Reuters

Big on tech, Miller Samuel created an innovative real-estate database of property information. Using a Scantron similar to a standardized fill-in-the-dot test form, they gathered data during property inspections that they input into their proprietary software. That data enabled them to broadly assess what made New York City homes valuable. 

Their early efforts made them the first to quantify how much certain property attributes, such as a view of Central Park or the number of bedrooms in a particular condo building, were worth on the market. Today, Miller Samuel has replaced Scantrons with iPods, iPhones, and a CoreLogic appraisal software called A La Mode. 

Miller saw the story in the data. He made graphs and charts to visually communicate what the numbers meant.

In 1994, Miller struck a deal that made him the unofficial Manhattan real-estate data master. The then-local brokerage Douglas Elliman enlisted him to put together monthly and quarterly rental- and sales-market reports.

As Elliman grew to become the sixth-largest brokerage in the country by transaction volume with 7,000 agents from the Hamptons to California, Miller expanded his scope, too. He can rattle off the median sales price in Rancho Santa Fe, California, or the market share of bidding wars in Miami, Florida.

Cheryl Miller, far left, and Jonathan Miller, center, and with their four sons on vacation in Paris in 2009.

Courtesy of Jonathan Miller

Miller Samuel’s business success paved the way for a life filled with family. The Millers settled in the leafy NYC suburb of Darien, Connecticut, and had four boys between 1989 and 1998. They now have two grandchildren and two more on the way. 

Cheryl is not the face of the business in the way that Miller is, but she’s been just as much his partner in business as in life, Vallo said. 

“If there’s ever been somebody that I’ve met, that has been a match that was made in heaven, it would be Jonathan and Cheryl,” Vallo said. “Cheryl is the glue.”

The ‘king of free’ is out to cut through the crap

Miller’s profile really grew in the years after the Great Recession.  

Constantly called upon to make sense of falling home prices, rising foreclosure rates, and how it all happened, the internet was paramount to building his following as he shared thoughts. Today, 8,500 people subscribe to his weekly blog “Housing Notes,” which he started writing in 2015. 

He joined Twitter in 2007, and now has 20,500 followers hanging onto his commentary, including industry giants, public figures, reporters, and economists like former President Barack Obama, the swaggering urbanist Richard Florida, and New York City’s former head of housing, Vicki Been. 

Readers of real-estate news around the world have especially appreciated his straight talking. A Google search of his name yields over 5,000 news results from broadsheets like the The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to local newspapers like The East Hampton Star. In Miller’s office on West 38th Street, he has scores of framed newspaper clippings that bear his quotes. 

Miller in Manhattan in 2022.

Crystal Cox/Insider

But unlike many who have gained a large following, particularly on social media, he has done most of his online work for free — he even did his early work for Douglas Elliman gratis until 2008. He’s done it this way, he said, so no one could say he was doing it for anything other than advertising the facts.

He has done this so often that Cheryl coined a nickname for him: “the king of free.” 

Miller also teaches at Columbia University; has served as an expert witness in New York, Illinois, and California; and advised economic boards for New York state and New York City. 

Today, there’s much more data than there was when he started Miller Samuel, but also a lot more “crap,” Miller said. An analyst now, he said, must be a curator who sorts through data without catering to a cause. 

There’s a reason Miller always picks up the phone — even in the middle of the Long Island Sound — and it goes back to getting the truth out. 

“It’s in my best interest to have the world have a proper take on the market,” he said. “That’s the long-term goal.”

Ryan Serhant, Mauricio Umansky, and Mary Fitzgerald.

Crystal Cox/Business Insider, The Agency, Aria Askari

• Many well-known real-estate agents, from Mauricio Umansky to Mary Fitzgerald, share similar habits.
• From caffeinating to streamlining their time, top agents have told Insider their tips for success.
• We’ve rounded up five habits that are easiest for everyday people to carry over in their own lives.

What does a typical day as a real-estate agent look like? Most of the country’s all-star brokers will say such a thing doesn’t exist, but what’s clear is that many of the pros at the top of their game share a handful of similar daily habits. 

Insider scoured the archives to glean what some of the best, from Ryan Serhant and Kirsten Jordan in New York to Mauricio Umansky and Mary Fitzgerald in Los Angeles, do on the daily to get ahead. 

Whether you’re an up-and-coming agent or just an ambitious professional, read on to live like the pros. 

They caffeinate

Nest Seekers agent Erin Sykes, whose listings and sales totaled $150 million 2021, starts her day in Florida with two nitro cold brews on an empty stomach, for the extra jolt of energy. 

Austin, Texas-based agent Kumara Wilcoxon with Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty has a morning Earl Grey tea with almond milk, though that comes after two large glasses of lemon water and a celery juice. The morning ritual has helped her sell over $1 billion in her career.

And Mary Fitzgerald, the Los Angeles agent who stars on “Selling Sunset” and sells multi-million dollar mansions with The Oppenheim Group, can’t get moving without at least two cups of coffee — she’s a self-avowed non-morning person.

They stay on top of their fitness

Franes Kat zen, a Douglas Elliman agent who specializes in luxury condo sales in New York City and sold $340 million last year, is a former ballerina and stays in shape by taking dance classes at Upper West Side studio Steps on Broadway three times a week. 

Fellow New York-based Douglas Elliman agent Lisa Simonsen also had a former career in fitness. As such, the agent who sold more than $100 million in 2022 makes sure she works out in her building’s gym, usually on a spin bike, every morning.

McKenzie Ryan hanging out at the gym.

McKenzie Ryan

Former Junior Olympian and real-estate wunderkind McKenzie Ryan used to compete on the national level in rhythmic gymnastics. Now with Elliman in New York City, she said she employs similar discipline. 

“With my background, I need to be physically conditioned. Working out is half mental, half physical,” she told Insider in 2021, when she sold over $34 million. “And I do a ton of my business strategy when I’m working out.” She also does 1,000 crunches a night.

They check the markets, and the news, first thing

Ryan Serhant wakes up at 4:30 a.m. every day not because he likes it, but “because my career depends on it,” he said. The extra-early start time allows him to scan the news and catch up on anything he needs to know before the markets open. It’s a proven strategy: He’s sold over $5 billion in real estate in his career.

In Los Angeles, The Agency’s Mauricio Umansky, who sold $298 million in 2021 and stars on Netflix’s “Buying Beverly Hills,” tunes into Bloomberg, Fox, and CNN to get apprised of what’s going on. 

“I like to hear all the perspectives. I love to see how they report on the same story from a completely different point of view. It’s quite entertaining,” he said. 

When she starts her day at home, Sykes always has the TV running in the background to stay apprised of all of the happenings that could affect her markets. “When there’s breaking news, you have to be available right then to do the commentary for the different channels,” said Sykes, who is also an economist. “I’ve done commentary from everywhere: from hotel rooms, from my car, from client’s homes, from my home, and from studios.”

They go the extra mile for their clients

Tal Alexander, who left Douglas Elliman to found a firm called Official with his brother Oren, entertains clients in his elite condo building: 432 Park Avenue near Manhattan’s Central Park.  He stores special meat from butchers, as well as a wine collection, so he always has something special on hand. Together the Alexanders have sold over $1 billion in real estate.

Tal Alexander, left, and Oren Alexander.

Tal Alexander/Facebook

Leave your own party? Sure, if you’re Simonsen. A double-booked schedule isn’t uncommon in Simonsen’s line of work, where agents have to accommodate buyers’ limited windows to view homes for sale. As Charlie McDonald, her team’s operations lead, explained, “Lisa’s clients’ time is very valuable. They’ll give us the smallest window of time that they can see something, and we have to get them in.”

Serhant gets a new SUV every year “just to update it,” though he said he makes sure his car and clothes are never nicer than his clients’. “The client comes first. And I always want them to feel special,” he said.

They maximize their time with tech and stay self-disciplined

To make the most of her day, Miami agent Dina Goldentayer makes sure she’s taking the most efficient mode of transportation around the Magic City. That might mean hopping in the golf cart to cruise around to listing appointments on the Venetian Islands, having her driver take her across town, or even arriving at a meeting by helicopter. The Douglas Elliman agent knows what she has to do to succeed: She was the top-selling agent in Miami in 2021 with $750 million in transactions.

Dina Goldentayer overlooking the Miami skyline.

Dina Goldentayer

Aaron Kirman, who sells palatial properties with Christie’s in Los Angeles and stars on CNBC’s “Listing Impossible,” developed a new tool called Estate Dynamics that uses artificial intelligence to find people who might be interested in purchasing one of the houses he’s selling. The tool then tracks their online behaviors — like their search history and posts on social media — to target them with ads for properties that fit their wants. The goal is to help agents, like himself, close deals more quickly and efficiently. Not that he needs the help: Kirman sold over $725 million in 2020.

Eat an indulgent lunch? Not Kirsten Jordan. The one-time “Million Dollar Listing New York” star and Douglas Elliman agent with over $500 million in career sales always makes time for a meal, eschewing quick fixes like protein bars, but makes it a point not to linger too long. 

She’s too eager to get back to work.

Among them are 132 men and eight women.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin devoted his annual New Year’s address on Saturday to rallying the Russian people behind his troops fighting in Ukraine and pledging victory over Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” and a West supposedly intent on “destroying Russia”.

In a stern and combative recorded video message, broadcast on national television, Putin cast the war – which he calls a “special military operation” – as a near-existential fight for the future of Russia.

Its soldiers, he said, were fighting for “our motherland, truth and justice … so that Russia’s security can be guaranteed”.

For months, the Kremlin presented the conflict as a limited campaign that would not affect most Russians’ lives.

But the speech, delivered in front of grim-faced soldiers in combat uniform, put the war squarely centre-stage, telling families gathered for the year’s main celebration that the months ahead would require support and sacrifice from everyone.

The message was being broadcast into millions of homes on state TV just before the clocks struck midnight in each of Russia’s 11 time zones, as families tucked into a festive meal and exchanged gifts.

As the war drags into its 11th month with no end in sight, the Kremlin has slowly put society on more of a war footing – calling up more than 300,000 reservists, often in chaotic fashion, retooling an economy hurt by a barrage of Western sanctions and saying publicly that the conflict may be long.

Moscow was unprepared for the staunch resistance and the billions of dollars in Western weapons that have turned the tide in Ukraine’s favour, and Russian troops have been forced out of more than half the territory they took in the war’s first weeks.

In the nine-minute address – the longest of his 22 years in power – Putin targeted those opposed to the conflict, a personal crusade that now defines his tenure and Russia’s relations with the world.

The past year, he said, had “put a lot of things in their place – clearly separating courage and heroism from betrayal and cowardice”.

In a rejection of Kyiv’s calls for Russian troops to leave as a precursor to negotiations, Putin said Russia was “defending our people and our historical territory”.

He also accused the West of lying to Russia and of provoking Moscow to launch its military campaign.

“The West lied about peace,” Putin said. “It was preparing for aggression … and now they are cynically using Ukraine and its people to weaken and split Russia.

“We have never allowed this, and never will allow anybody to do this to us.”

Kyiv and the West reject Putin’s oft-repeated allegation that the Western NATO alliance planned to use Ukraine as a platform to threaten Russia, and say he launched a baseless war of aggression in a bid to seize territory and install a regime more to his liking.

Although Russia has not made any major battlefield gains in the past six months, Putin promised ultimate victory.

“Together, we will overcome all difficulties and preserve our country’s greatness and independence,” he said.

“We will triumph, for our families and for Russia.”

Former Pope Benedict, the first pontiff in 600 years to resign and a standard bearer for conservatives who yearned for a more traditional Church, died on Saturday, ending an extraordinary period in which two men wearing white lived in the Vatican.

Benedict, 95, died in a former monastery where he had lived since his shock resignation in 2013.

Bells tolled in Rome as news of his death, which followed a rapid decline in his health over Christmas, spread to the faithful on an unusually warm winter’s day. Many went to pray in St. Peter’s Square on hearing the news.

“Now we will only have one pope. I must say that Pope Ratzinger was a charismatic pope, humble but above all a great theologian,” said French tourist Emilie Gaillard, using Benedict’s family name.

The Vatican said his body would lie in state from Monday in St. Peter’s Basilica and that Pope Francis will preside at his funeral on Thursday morning in the same square where Benedict, who was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said the funeral Mass for his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, in 2005.

“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said.

“Following the desire of the Pope Emeritus, the funeral will take place in a sign of simplicity,” Bruni said, adding that the service would be “solemn and sober”.

The Vatican has painstakingly elaborate rituals for what happens after a reigning pope dies but no publicly known ones for a former pope – one of the many complications created by Benedict’s resignation.

Pope Francis disclosed on Wednesday that his predecessor was “very sick”. Bruni said Benedict had received last rites, once known as Extreme Unction and now called “the anointing of the sick”, on the same day.

Leaders were swift in sending their condolences for Benedict, who was the first German pope in 1,000 years.

“We mourn the death of our Bavarian Pope,” said Markus Soeder, premier of Benedict’s home state. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Twitter that the world had lost “a formative figure of the Catholic Church”.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hailed Benedict as “a great man who history will not forget”, while Polish President Andrzej Duda called him “one of the greatest theologians of the 20th and 21st centuries”.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Benedict had “worked with all his soul and intelligence for a more fraternal world”.

Britain’s King Charles said he remembered his meeting with Benedict with fondness and noted “his constant efforts to promote peace and goodwill to all people, and to strengthen the relationship between the global Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church.”

For nearly 25 years, as Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was the powerful head of the Vatican’s doctrinal office, then known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and considered one of the Church’s greatest theologians.

In that role, he crushed dissent by Liberation Theologians, saying they were mixing Marxist thought and Christianity.

He was elected pope on April 19, 2005 to succeed the widely popular John Paul, who had reigned for 27 years. Cardinals chose him from among their number seeking continuity and what one called “a safe pair of hands”.

Child abuse scandals hounded most of his papacy but he is credited with jump-starting the process to discipline or defrock predator priests after a more lax attitude under his predecessor.

But Benedict himself acknowledged that he was a weak administrator, saying he showed a “lack of resolve in governing and decision taking” during his eight-year papacy which was marked by missteps, particularly in relations with Islam and Judaism.

The year before his resignation was dominated by the “Vatileaks” scandal, in which private papal documents appeared in the media, exposing a dysfunctional Vatican riven with internal strife, corruption and feuding.

He announced he was resigning in Latin at a routine meeting of cardinals. Many had no idea what he had said and it took time before the news sank in. He himself said he was no longer strong enough to lead the Church due to his “advanced age”.

After his resignation he installed himself in a converted convent on the Vatican grounds and chose the title “pope emeritus”.

Although he said he would remain “hidden from the world” in his retirement, Benedict sometimes caused controversy and spread confusion through his writings and interviews.

Although he rarely appeared in public, Catholic conservatives looked to the former pope as their standard bearer and some ultra-traditionalists even refused to acknowledge Francis as a legitimate pontiff.

They have criticised Francis for his more welcoming approach to members of the LGBTQ+ community and to Catholics who divorced and remarried outside the Church, saying both were undermining traditional values.

Despite the difficulties that emerged from having two men wearing white in the Vatican, Francis developed a warm relationship with Benedict, and said it was like having a grandfather living in the house.

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