More than a century ago, 110 black soldiers were convicted of murder, mutiny and other crimes during three military trials at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Nineteen were hanged, including thirteen on one day, December 11, 1917, in the military’s largest mass execution of American soldiers.

The soldiers’ families fought for decades to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November, they won a measure of justice when the Army Secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions, acknowledging that the soldiers were “mistreated because of their race and did not receive a fair trial.”

On Thursday, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed service members.

The new headstones recognize each soldier’s rank, unit and home state – a simple honor bestowed on every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous gravestones that only had their name and date of death written on them.

(The families of the other two who were hanged claimed their remains for private burial.)

The headstones were unveiled after an honor guard fired a three-gun salute, a bugler played “Taps” and officials presented the descendants with folded American flags and certificates declaring that the executed soldiers had been honorably discharged.

“Can you balance the scales by what we do?” Jason Holt, whose uncle, Pfc. Thomas C. Hawkins was among the first 13 soldiers hanged in 1917, he said at the ceremony. “I don’t know. But it’s an attempt. It’s an attempt to make things right.”

The soldiers were members of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, an all-black unit. They had been assigned to monitor the construction of a training camp for white soldiers in Houston.

White residents called them racial slurs and physically harassed them. After two black soldiers were beaten and violently arrested, a group of more than a hundred black soldiers, hearing rumors of additional threats, grabbed guns and marched into Houston, where violent clashes broke out on August 23, 1917.

Nineteen people were killed – including white police officers, soldiers and civilians and four black soldiers.

At their trials, the members of the 24th Infantry Regiment were represented by one officer who had some legal training but was not a lawyer. The court deliberated for only two days before sentencing the first 58 soldiers.

Less than 24 hours later, with no chance of appeal, the first thirteen soldiers were hanged from a hastily constructed gallows on the banks of Salado Creek, which runs through San Antonio. By September 1918, another 52 soldiers had been convicted and another six hanged.

Angela Holder, whose great uncle, Cpl. Jesse Moore, one of 13 soldiers hanged on Dec. 11, 1917, said stories about his service told by her great-aunt prompted her to research his military career. She heard, she said, that he had served in the Philippines.

“He served with pride and the fact that the headstone has now been restored is a recognition of who he was,” Ms Holder said. “He was a very proud soldier.”

In death, as in life, it is expensive to have famous people as your neighbors.

There is hardly any room left Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian cemetery in north London where Karl Marx, George Michael and George Eliot are buried, along with 170,000 other Londoners. The price of a grave to rest in valued peace? It starts at 25,000 British pounds, or $31,700.

Those costs received attention British media this week, after the historic site notified the public, it had begun adding new graves.

Many pointed out the capitalist irony of such a high price tag, suggesting that the high fee for a plot close to Karl Marx would make the so-called father of communism disappear. 'turn over in his grave.Marx's grave is a big draw for the cemetery, and visitors pay 10 pounds, or about $12, to explore the grounds.

“Cemeteries are quite expensive places to maintain,” said Ian Dungavell, the director of the charity that runs Highgate Cemetery, adding that shrinking space on the site has partly contributed to the high cost of being buried there. “We are still dealing with a very limited resource.”

(There was “no improvement,” he said, because we were near Marx. “That's just the price.”)

But the group's ostensibly capitalistic approach is part of an existential problem that other cemeteries, in Britain and elsewhere, also face: how can a cemetery continue to function when it's running out of space?

“We have a huge problem with the cemeteries.”

Cremations are popular in much of Britain surveys from the Cremation Association which shows that more than 70 percent of the deceased have chosen this method in the past twenty years. By comparison, about 59 percent of deaths in the US were cremated in 2022.

But even with a high cremation rate, Britain faces a shortage of graves in many areas. Some cemeteries in London are already running out of space, according to experts, and other cities are not far behind.

“Crisis is an appropriate word,” says Helen Frisby, historian and research fellow at the University of Bath. “We have a huge problem with the cemeteries.”

Legal authorities are reviewing current regulations surrounding funerals, but the addition of new plots at Highgate Cemetery would make it one of the few London burial authorities able to reuse graves. The practice could help cemeteries survive, experts say, as the idea of ​​”eternal burial” is challenged. European countries have adapted short-term plot rentals or grave recycling to tackle the crowds.

Legislation in 2022 gave Highgate Cemetery the power to take back old and unused graves, a process it has optimistically called “serious innovation.” Empty graves and graves where burials took place more than 75 years ago can be legally repurposed.

The proposal will affect only about 500 graves in the cemetery for now, said Dr. Dungavell. Some grave owners were last recorded in the 1870s. Others were simply too difficult to trace, and the cemetery has spread the word by posting public notices about plots that will be reused. Owners of these graves have until July to object to their reuse.

For graves without objection, the existing remains will be buried deeper in the same spot and new burials will take place on top of them.

The idea is controversial, as was evident during a visit to the cemetery this week. Even on a cold day, visitors walked through tree-lined paths to admire epitaphs by artists, philosophers and beloved residents.

“For me it's a bit sacred,” said Thomas Swinburne, 57, who was visiting London from northeast England. 'The body is at rest. I wouldn't want my family members to be disturbed like that.”

“I wouldn't want to hide things.”

Built in 1839 on the edge of the city, Highgate is part of a group of Victorian cemeteries known as the 'Magnificent Seven'. As London's population boomed, private cemeteries were designed to solve overcrowding in existing churchyards.

Now it is almost full. Dr. Dungavell said his team had searched the cemetery maps for any gaps. In the past, they had dug up soil from existing graves to create new burial grounds, or narrowed existing paths to create more cremation sites. (They start at 5,000 pounds, or $6,300.) “I wouldn't want to overburden the place any further,” he said.

Other ideas he is exploring include shared vaults for those being cremated. The group is also on trust financing to help preserve nature at its location and make it more accessible to visitors.

But despite all efforts, the price tag for burial is still high.

“It's ironic that these very expensive graves are located close to one of our harshest critics of capitalism,” said Julie Rugg, a social policy researcher at the University of York. But, she said, the new system was a pragmatic response to the need to protect the site, and that the money would help towards its management.

Dr. Frisby said the cost of a grave at Highgate Cemetery was not typical for Britain, and graves usually cost thousands of pounds rather than tens of thousands. But there was a “social cachet” to being buried on such historic ground, she said.

“It is a very prestigious cemetery. It is able to recover those fees,” she said. “Most cemeteries can't do that.”

Some visitors to Highgate said it was time to think about different ways to lay loved ones to rest.

“When you run out of space, you have to think about new ways,” said Marlis Graf, 34, a tourist from Germany who visited Karl Marx's grave. “I'm actually a fan of eco-funerals, where we don't have gravestones or anything like that at all. Just trees.”

The decision to recycle a grave is ultimately a personal one, said Mackenzie Parker, 31, who was admiring gravestones with a friend. Her family are Roman Catholic and Ms Parker said she would have objected to her relative's grave being recycled on religious grounds.

But the request wouldn't have offended her, she said — the more opportunities the cemetery offered for people to share history, the better: “Their families can know they are in such a beautiful, ancient and protected place.”

For nearly 15 months, the bodies of fallen soldiers have steadily filled a military cemetery on a hill in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Now the old, unmarked graves of the dead in previous wars are being dug up to make way for the seemingly endless stream of dead since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

On Monday afternoon, half a dozen gravediggers took a break in the shadows, waiting for the last coffin to be buried at Lychakiv Cemetery. As they smoked cigarettes and shielded themselves from the sun, they lamented the devastation Russia had wrought. And they said they were bracing for more deaths as fighting intensified during Ukraine’s counter-offensive.

Fierce fighting is taking place on the front lines in the east and south of the country, with Ukraine reporting Monday that it had recaptured eight settlements during two weeks of “offensive action”. Hanna Malyar, Deputy Secretary of Defense, wrote on the Telegram messaging app that Ukrainian units had advanced about 7 miles and recaptured an area of ​​about 44 square miles to the south. Among the recaptured settlements, she said, was the village of Piatykhatky, which Russian reports over the weekend confirmed.

While the recapture of Piatykhatky, in the Zaporizhzhia region, is evidence that Ukrainian forces continue to advance, it is not a significant military breakthrough. Like the other villages that have been recaptured, this one is small – Piatykhatky translates to “five houses” – and claims to have come at the cost of Ukrainian lives and sophisticated Western equipment.

“The situation in the east is now difficult,” Ms Malyar wrote. “The enemy has gathered its forces and is conducting an active offensive in the direction of Lyman and Kupyan, trying to take the initiative away from us.” But she added: “Our troops act courageously against the superiority of the enemy in troops and resources and do not allow the enemy to advance.”

A British Defense Intelligence report on Sunday said both armies were suffering significant casualties of the current fighting, and military experts have said months of artillery duels and trench warfare are likely ahead.

Like the Ukrainians, the Russians have been secretive about the toll of the war. The Kremlin has not updated its official tally since September, when Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu said nearly 6,000 Russians had been killed. Experts considered that number to be low at the time.

Leaked Pentagon documents published in April estimated Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action, while the Russians had suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, including up to 43,000 killed in action.

A team of often anonymous researchers inside and outside Russia, led by news organization Mediazona and Russia’s BBC News service, has compiled an independent census of confirmed deaths that is updated every two weeks. Last week, the to count surpassed 25,000 casualties, also considered an undercount. The team uses open source materials such as obituaries in local newspapers and cemetery visits for its census. Since the effort began last year, multiple regions in Russia have banned obituaries to camouflage the number.

The magnitude of the losses is being felt in communities such as the one in Lviv, evident in the growing number of military graves in large and small cemeteries across the country.

On Monday, two men who died hundreds of miles apart were buried next to each other. Bohdan Didukh, 34, was killed last week by a mine in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, where the first stages of Ukraine’s counter-offensive began. Three days later, Oleh Didukh, 52, died of a heart attack while serving in an air defense unit in the west of the country.

The men, who shared a surname but never knew each other in life, were united in death. They were honored side by side at a joint funeral in Lviv. Their families were overcome with grief as gravediggers shoveled dirt onto their coffins.

Incense hung in the air at the funeral service at a Greek Catholic church in the center of Lviv. The priest said he assumed the two were father and son because of their names and ages. Their families were joined by their pain, he said.

After the church ceremony, the coffins were loaded into vans and driven to the main square, where a single trumpeter played. The procession then proceeded to the cemetery.

Residents stopped along the route to pay their respects. A young girl stood beside her father, a small brown shopping bag in her hand, staring straight ahead as the coffins passed by. Some bystanders fell to their knees.

At the cemetery, Olena Didukh, the wife of Bohdan Didukh, fainted, overwhelmed by grief and the midday sun. Her sister stopped her and put her arm around her back. A stone’s throw away, Oleh Didukh’s family laid yellow and blue flowers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, on his grave.

Funerals for fallen soldiers have taken on a grim routine in Lviv. Since last year, soldiers killed in battle have been buried in seemingly countless funerals, such as the one in Lviv, in every corner of the country.

And it is not uncommon for several military funerals to be held in Lviv at the same time. One of the harsh realities of the Russian war is that even in a city far from active fighting, soldiers killed on the front lines are returned to their hometowns, sometimes in groups, and buried at the same time. It is considered an efficient way if the dead keep coming.

Along this hill on a clear afternoon, mourners tend to the graves of relatives buried here for weeks, months or more than a year.

Mariia Kovalska’s son, Ivan, was murdered nine months ago in Kramatorsk, in the eastern Donetsk region. He was 30 years old and his round face and blue eyes resembled his mother’s, she explained proudly.

“What’s It All For?” she asked, the pain clear in her voice. “The best of the best died. He graduated from college. He graduated cum laude. Why did he die?”

Kateryna Havrylenko, 50, who works for the city that maintains the graves, loaded soil onto a wheelbarrow. There are funerals here almost every day, she said.

“With the counter-offensive, many young men and women will be killed,” she said. “Words cannot express how difficult it is. Very, very difficult. Even if they are strangers, they are someone’s children, just like I have a child.”

At the beginning of the Russian war, there was a small group of freshly dug graves on a hill in part of the cemetery. Now nearly 500 soldiers are buried here in plots that fill half the hill, she said, with more to come.

In the upper part of the cemetery, city officials have begun excavating the unmarked graves of soldiers buried as far back as World War I. .

“It’s so hard to imagine – there were so few of them last summer,” said Ms. Havrylenko. “And now there are so many.” She added with a distant look, “How many will there be until the war is over?”

Reporting contributed by Neil MacFarquhar from stockholm, Cassandra Vinograd And Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London and Daria Mitiuk from Lviv, Ukraine.

Representative Garret Graves, Republican of Louisiana, was not elected to a leadership position in the House and does not serve as a powerful committee chair. But as consigliere to Speaker Kevin McCarthy — whom Mr. Graves has described as the GOP “assistant coach” — he has become a central player in every major legislative move in the House.

Most recently, that has meant taking the lead in uniting the fractious GOP conference behind a bill to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts and unraveling key elements of President Biden’s domestic agenda.

A former House staffer who was first elected to Congress in 2015, Mr Graves, 51, now has the unenviable task of rallying Republican members behind whatever deal Mr McCarthy can strike with Mr Biden to prevent a catastrophic default. He is the point of contact for the so-called Five Families within the House GOP, representing the full range of ideological positions within the party.

In an interview, Mr. Graves expressed some optimism about talks between Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Biden. But he blamed the president and Democrats for the stalemate, ignoring the fact that it is Republicans who have caused the current impasse by refusing to agree to raise the debt limit without major cuts. He accused the White House of “trying to have a public relations battle” over the debt limit, even though Republicans have been waging one of their own for months.

Mr Biden says he will not negotiate with Republicans about raising the debt limit, and his aides reject their claim that the debt’s current path poses a significant threat to economic growth.

But with a deadline for a possible default looming as early as June 1, Mr Graves said four broad areas of negotiation have emerged for a possible budget deal: covering federal spending, recovering unused funds earmarked for the Covid emergency, imposing stricter work requirements for federal benefits and expediting permitting for energy projects.

Mr. Graves spoke to The New York Times after a morning of dinner-hopping in his district, an established tradition that he says puts him in touch with his constituents’ concerns and that he values ​​more than any poll.

The interview has been slightly edited and shortened for clarity.

House Republicans once said they wanted to balance the budget in 10 years and review the annual budget process. Now you outline some possible cuts, but they are far from a total rethinking of the way we finance government. Is this a capitulation?

From the perspective of Negotiation 101, you start with areas where you have a common ground agreement or understanding. It helps to build trust. I never said those would be the four things we would agree on. That’s the beginning.

There is no capitulation. The president has not proposed anything that could get through the House or Senate. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, hasn’t put anything on the floor, period. The only thing that really matters now is our bill.

For many fiscally conservative Republicans, some of whom reflexively opposed raising the debt limit, it was probably going as far as they were willing to pass your bill. What are you doing to manage expectations for a possible deal with the White House that is much more modest than what they expect, or are ultimately willing to vote for?

It’s hard to say because I can’t tell you what the deal looks like. The four things we would agree on – that’s certainly not the full list of things we expect.

Number two, I don’t want to sit here negotiating with you. I can’t speak for the president, but go back and read some of his comments about the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, when he agreed to negotiate with Republicans. If he can just recapture that mindset, then we can pull this off. Fairly quickly. The things we just suggested, why not agree with that?

How do you think this will end?

[Laughter.]

I am confident that if there is goodwill on the part of the White House, it can be done within 48 hours. I do think it will take some change in the White House’s attitude to try and fight a PR battle. We can pull this off, and we can do it without causing a bloodbath.

Conversely, if they’re going to try – and I think they’ve softened up a little bit – but if they’re trying to continue this PR campaign and “we’re not going to negotiate”, this isn’t going to end well.

How concerned are House Republicans about actually defaulting? Is it a real fear, or is it seen as a loaded political talking point?

I haven’t heard anyone say they’re scared, and I haven’t heard anyone say, “Hey, I want to default.”

… Except for former President Donald J. Trump, who said in a CNN town hall earlier this week that Republicans should default the country if they can’t get acceptable cuts.

Well, I didn’t look at that at all. I read a headline; I really don’t know exactly what he said or the context in which he said it. On our part, behind closed doors, in front of microphones, I haven’t heard anyone say, “Hey, I want to default.” I think there are good intentions on our side.

But there is no question that it was a strategic decision by the White House and the Democrats to try and trigger the crisis by getting as close to the backstop as possible. That’s why there were 97 days with no communication, that’s why they said they wouldn’t negotiate. Those were tactics to create the crisis, and they believed it would give them more leverage in the negotiations.

The problem they created themselves is that if there is a defect, they own it 100 percent.

(A White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded, “House Republicans admit they are single-handedly holding millions of jobs, retirement accounts and businesses hostage unless they get a growing list of extreme ransom demands.” He added: “President Biden demands nothing in return for avoiding default.”)

What do you want to get out of these talks with the White House?

Something to raise the debt ceiling. But something else that’s an absolute priority is something that will really bend the curve. The trajectory we are now following is absolutely unsustainable. It is a punishment for children and grandchildren.

How did you get into this role of the appointed convener of the so-called five families within the Republican conference?

I found the speaker’s race embarrassing. Watching the House of Representatives not be able to actually take the reins and start working on priority issues. No one asked me to do anything, but I started having conversations with different people. Fast forward, we’ll all get through that and McCarthy said, “Hey, what do you want?”

I said, “I want you to be a good speaker.” He came back and said, ‘The groups of people you’ve gathered shouldn’t just disappear. That must continue and contribute to the functionality of the home.” That’s how it evolved.

I don’t want to mislead you and tell you that everything is perfect and everything is going well. But looking at points on the board just proves that this model works.

Has it changed your opinion of some of the more extreme members you work with?

I didn’t think incredibly highly of Rep. Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, who went into it. He is now one of my best friends.