Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg on March 18, 1936, to a family steeped in the politics of the Afrikaners, descendants of the Dutch and Huguenot settlers who arrived in southern Africa in the 17th century. His father, Jan de Klerk, a headmaster, became a cabinet member under three prime ministers and president of the senate. His uncle, Hans Strijdom, a vehement advocate of apartheid, was prime minister in the 1950s.

His grandfather, also named Willem, was a proud Afrikaner, having been arrested on treason charges by the British before becoming a minister and founding member of the National Party.

“Politics,” Mr. de Klerk wrote in his autobiography, “was in my blood.”

Trained as an attorney at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, Mr. de Klerk became a member of P.W. Botha’s cabinet and of B.J. Vorster’s administration before that. He sometimes sided with racial hard-liners within his party, and he was one of the cabinet ministers who went to Mr. Botha in 1986 and demanded that Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha be ordered to recant a prediction that South Africa might one day have a Black president.

In his book “Move Your Shadow,” Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times, recalled asking Mr. de Klerk, then a young cabinet member, about the death in police custody of a white man accused of sympathizing with the A.N.C. Mr. de Klerk told of being angry upon learning of the death. Why? “I knew how it would be used against us,” he said.

The crisis began in late August, when growing groups of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, began massing at the borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, shepherded there by Belarus. That movement has now become much larger, with at least 4,000 or more men, women and children trapped in the freezing cold, without proper shelter or toilets, between Belarus and its neighbors.

Both Poland and Lithuania declared states of emergency and fortified their borders, while Belarusian forces have in some cases aided the migrants in breaking through. The border regions have been shut to journalists and aid workers, but upsetting videos and pictures of the migrants facing barbed wire have been distributed, often by Belarus itself.

On Wednesday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called Mr. Lukashenko’s tactics a “cynical power play” and said that blackmail must not be allowed to succeed. In Washington the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, met President Biden and emerged to say that what was transpiring on the Belarus border is “a hybrid attack, not a migration crisis.”

Wednesday’s joint U.S.-China declaration says that both countries will “accelerate the transition to a global net zero economy,” referring to the goal of net zero emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas. It also calls on both countries to strengthen their emissions plan.

In addition, China agreed to “phase down” coal consumption during its 15th Five Year Plan, which starts in 2026.

However, the agreement did not extract any new pledges from China about when it will stop spewing ever-larger amounts of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere and instead begin to reverse course.

China has said it will stop increasing its greenhouse gas emissions before 2030, which it often refers to as the date they will “peak.” But in Wednesday’s agreement, China did not specify exactly when that would occur, and American officials have been pushing their counterparts to set a clear, earlier date.

Mr. Kerry on Wednesday said the two countries discussed the issue many times, and insisted that the new agreement pushed China in the direction of bending the curve of emissions downward soon.

Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based environmental group, said the agreement was “good news.” But, he said, “If we are to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, we urgently need to see commitments to cooperate translate into bolder climate targets and credible delivery.”

One person I interviewed for this newsletter was Anne Kandilis, director of Springfield WORKS/Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council. She’s supporting a state bill that would experiment with redirecting the state’s earned-income tax credit to counteract the fall from the benefits cliff, topping up families’ resources so they don’t decline when adults in the household increase their earnings. “We’ve made it really simple,” she said. “We just want to plug a gap.”

Plugging gaps is a great idea, but it’s not enough. If all you do is keep people at the same level of resources when their income rises, meaning they keep none of the extra money they earn, they’re facing an effective marginal “tax rate” of 100 percent. They’re stuck on a plateau. (Contrast that with the current top federal tax rate of 37 percent.)

A plateau is better than a cliff, but it still severely discourages work, says Alexander Ruder, an organizer of the Atlanta Fed’s conference who is a principal adviser on the bank’s community and economic development team.

Ruder mentions another big problem: If you’re a low-paid nursing assistant who’s receiving government benefits, work-force-development people might encourage you to train to become a licensed practical nurse, the next rung on that career ladder. But a licensed practical nurse without benefits may wind up with fewer resources than a nursing assistant with benefits. For many people, the benefits cliff effectively yanks away the career ladder that is presented as the way out of poverty. One answer is to train to become a registered nurse, which is a better-paying job than licensed practical nurse, but that’s more ambition than many people can realistically handle.

Barr, of the South Carolina Center for Fathers and Families, says one way to avoid the poverty trap created by the benefits cliff is earlier intervention: Teach teenagers about their career options so they can get the training and education they need before they have children to take care of. “When you put on weight it’s hard to use wings,” he told me. “Fly while you can.”

Elsewhere

A bit of good news on the labor front: While the number of jobs in the United States in October remained down 2.8 percent from February 2020, the aggregate number of hours worked was down only 1.7 percent, according to data released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s because the average number of hours that working people work per week has gone up. Here’s a statistic you don’t see every day: The aggregate number of hours worked per week in October was 49 million hours higher than it would have been if the number of working hours had fallen as much as the number of jobs. “Today’s labor supply may be inadequate,” James Paulsen, chief investment strategist for the Leuthold Group, wrote last month, “but it is also remarkably healthy compared to history!”