World

It has been six weeks since President Javier Milei took office in Argentina, and since then, gas prices have doubled, inflation has soared and the value of the national currency has plummeted.Such turmoil, he had warned, should be expected. Fixing decades of economic problems would first require more pain, he said.Yet on Wednesday, many Argentines took to the streets to show they have already had enough.Argentina’s largest labor unions called for a nationwide strike — including workers in transportation, construction, health care, food services, energy and banking — to protest Mr. Milei’s planned overhauls, arguing they would weaken protections for workers and the poor. Banks and many shops closed, doctors postponed surgeries, waste collection stopped and airlines canceled hundreds of flig...

Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong campaigner for democracy in Taiwan who spent over two decades in prison for his cause and later started a protest movement against a president from his former party, died on Jan. 15, his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island’s capital.The cause was complications of an operation to remove a liver tumor, said his wife, Chia-chiun Chen Shih.Mr. Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally broken up by the police and that is now viewed as a turning point in Taiwan’s journey from authoritarianism to democracy. When he stood trial over the confrontation, he smiled defiantly to the cameras, although his original teeth had been shattered years before under police torture, and delivered a groundbreaking argument for Taiwan’s independence from China, an...

The gift and the book itself are fictional. The 2021 film, directed by Pablo Larraín, is too, proceeding from the idea that where there’s a martyr there must be a monster. Elizabeth is a freeze-dried witch, Charles a snarling prig. Perhaps to avoid accusations of defamation, the filmmakers identify their story, in a prefatory caption, as “a fable from a true tragedy.”A fable and a tragedy I grant you: The famous outline of Diana’s story, if not its unknowable guts, is Grimm indeed.But the word “true” doesn’t belong anywhere near “Spencer.” No reputable history has suggested, for instance, that the princess ate a bowlful of pearls emancipated from a Flintstones-size necklace given to her by her unfaithful husband. Nor is she known to have hallucinated Boleyn, who urged her toward self-harm,...

Relatives and supporters of Israelis held hostage in Gaza started bonfires that partially blocked traffic on a major highway in Tel Aviv on Friday morning, in a sign of growing frustration over the government’s failure to bring the remaining hostages home.Police officers detained seven protesters who had “participated in disorderly conduct and unlawful behavior,” questioned and then released them, the police said in a statement. The police quickly cleared the highway and restored the flow of traffic before the start of the Israeli weekend.The Hostage and Missing Families Forum, the main group advocating for the hostages’ return, said it had not organized the protest that blocked the Ayalon Highway and did not condone it. Though there is broad-based support among Israelis for the Gaza campa...

The State Department said on Wednesday that Alejandro Giammattei, Guatemala’s president until a tumultuous transfer of power this week, was barred from entering the United States because of what officials said was information indicating that he had accepted bribes.The announcement signaled that the United States was moving quickly to support the anticorruption drive led by Guatemala’s new president, Bernardo Arévalo. Guatemala was recently engulfed in protests over attempts to prevent Mr. Arévalo from taking office, and Mr. Giammattei refused to appear at his successor’s inauguration on Monday.“No one, especially a public official, is above the law,” said Brian Nichols, the top State Department official for the Western Hemisphere.The Treasury Department also announced sanctions on Wednesda...

Hila Rotem Shoshani had invited her friend Emily Hand over for a sleepover in Kibbutz Be’eri, Israel. The girls, then 12 and 8, woke early the next morning, Oct. 7, to the sound of thundering booms — the start of the deadliest attack in the history of their country.For about six hours, Hila and Emily hid in the home’s safe room with Hila’s mother, Raaya Rotem, 54, as Hamas attackers overran the kibbutz. Then armed gunmen burst in with guns and knives and took the three out into a landscape of horror, past dead bodies and burning buildings, to a car. One of the attackers noticed Hila clutching a stuffed animal. He grabbed it and tossed it aside.“I had it in my hand the entire time. I didn’t notice,” Hila said on Friday in an interview in New York, before she spoke at a rally in support of t...