Jérôme Bayle had spent seven nights on a major French highway, leading a group of aggrieved farmers in protest, when the prime minister arrived, dressed in his Parisian blue suit and tie, to thank them for “making France proud” and announced he would meet their demands.

Before camera flashes and outstretched microphones, Mr. Bayle told Prime Minister Gabriel Attal that he had seen the standoff as a match between two teams — the revolting farmers, led by Mr. Bayle, and the government, led by Mr. Attal.

“I don’t like losing,” said Mr. Bayle, dressed decidedly more casually, with a baseball hat on his head, turned backward. The thick crowd around him chuckled. It was clear his team had won.

Mr. Bayle, 42, a former professional rugby player, is widely credited with sparking a national protest movement of farmers that this week brought their grievances to the capital, blocking highways into Paris, despite fresh pledges on Tuesday from Mr. Attal to shield them from “unfair competition.”

Unsatisfied, the farmers say they will continue the disruptions to call attention to what they call the insufferable hardships of growing food to feed the French nation.

He deftly defended his country in Europe’s largest ground war in decades, stalling Russia’s invasion and then pushing it back with everything at hand: natural barriers like rivers, aging weapons and lethal drones, trickery and elements of surprise.

But the fate of Ukraine’s top commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, now appears to be hanging by a thread — not over his standing in the army, where he is well regarded, but over tensions with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The president’s frustrations have mounted since it became clear in the fall that Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive, a push that started with high hopes for Ukraine and its backers, had failed. The fighting has since bogged down in bloody, static trench warfare.

Should Mr. Zelensky dismiss the general, it could create a host of problems for him both in the war and at home. Although Mr. Zelensky embodies his country’s resistance to Russian aggression to many of his supporters abroad, the general is widely hailed as a hero in Ukraine.

His portrait hangs in coffee shops and bars. Online, he is the subject of countless patriotic memes. Public opinion polls over the fall showed his popularity exceeded Mr. Zelensky’s — a reason, analysts and opposition politicians have said, for the men’s increasingly strained relationship, though the general has never voiced political ambitions.

Military analysts have credited the general with preparing the army in the weeks and days before the invasion, even as Mr. Zelensky’s government publicly downplayed the odds of a Russian attack. General Zaluzhny oversaw not only the defense of the capital, Kyiv, but also the campaigns that thwarted the initial invasion and retook hundreds of square miles.

Almost two years of political gridlock. Decision-making paralyzed. Rising tension in a place where peace remains fragile even after the end of decades of sectarian strife.

There are few places where the impact of Britain’s exit from the European Union has been felt more sharply than in Northern Ireland.

But on Wednesday there were rising hopes that one of Brexit’s most poisoned legacies has been eased — at least for now — by a new plan that should bring the territory’s political parties back into government.

In a dry, 76-page document published on Wednesday — coincidentally the four-year anniversary of Brexit coming into effect — the British government laid out the details of the deal it has struck with the Democratic Unionist Party, or D.U.P., to end its boycott of the power-sharing assembly in Belfast.

Crucially, the government said it would reduce checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Britain, addressing the biggest source of tension within the D.U.P., whose mainly Protestant supporters want to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Unionists had argued that the post-Brexit imposition of customs checks on goods arriving by sea from Britain had driven a wedge between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K.

After days of sharply criticizing the U.N. agency charged with assisting Palestinian civilians, donor countries signaled on Wednesday that they would continue to support the organization under the right conditions and stressed its essential role in delivering lifesaving aid as widespread starvation and disease loom in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.

At least 12 countries, including the United States and Germany, the two biggest donors, have temporarily suspended funding after the Israeli government circulated allegations that employees of the group, known as UNRWA, participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, stressed on Wednesday that the funding pause for the agency was temporary and praised the agency’s work, comments that suggested an appetite could exist among donors to resolve the funding crisis.

“We know that this agency provides lifesaving services under incredibly challenging circumstances in Gaza and it contributes to regional stability and security,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday afternoon.

“For this reason, and for the sake of millions of Palestinian civilians who depend on UNRWA’s services, it is vital that the U.N. take quick and decisive action to hold accountable anyone guilty of heinous actions and to strengthen oversight of UNRWA’s operations and begin to restore donor confidence.”

Short of cash as well as personnel and equipment for its war against Russia, Ukraine’s government says it has cobbled together financing to last several months without long-stalled aid from the United States and Europe. But further delays would trigger an all-but-certain economic crisis, officials and analysts say.

Government workers might not get paid or lose their jobs. Retirees, already living close to a subsistence level, could slip deeper into poverty if their pensions are not topped up to keep pace with inflation. Museums and theaters — as well as government research institutes and universities — could be forced to shut their doors.

Restaurants, department stores and a host of other businesses currently remain open in Ukrainian cities away from the front line. But without enough financial aid, the ripple effects would quickly be felt across the economy, as the government runs out of cash to support a wide range of people and institutions.

Along with artillery shells, missiles and drones, Russia’s war in Ukraine is fought in the economies of both countries. Western sanctions are intended to curb Moscow’s resources, and Western aid is aimed at sustaining Ukraine. An economic crisis in Ukraine could severely undermine its ability to successfully fight the war, experts say.

“It’s the economy that wins wars,” said Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukrainian program at Chatham House, a London-based research group.

European Union leaders meet in Brussels on Thursday, hoping to approve a landmark multibillion euro fund for Ukraine that will help keep the country afloat for the next four years, no matter what happens on the battlefield, or in the U.S. Congress threatening to cut support.

The only thing standing in their way is Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. Again.

A compromise with Mr. Orban, who has demanded an annual veto on the spending, has remained elusive, meaning that the unanimity required for such a deal among the 27 E.U. states still seems out of reach. If Mr. Orban continues to stand in the way, E.U. leaders have made clear they are ready do whatever is necessary to support Ukraine and are prepared to work around him — or even to punish him.

Yet even if the remaining 26 leaders are not forced to go ahead without Mr. Orban, a larger problem is now firmly front and center: What will the E.U. do about its Hungary problem?

For a small country that accounts for just 1 percent of the bloc’s economic output, Hungary has been a big headache.

It has been at loggerheads with the E.U. for years over its transgressions against E.U. norms and values pertaining to the rule of law. And it has consistently slowed, shaved or stymied a range of European ambitions, including some sanctions against Russia as well as Sweden’s bid to enter NATO.

Russia and Ukraine announced the exchange of hundreds of prisoners of war on Wednesday, resuming the carefully choreographed trading of captives only a week after Moscow accused Kyiv of shooting down a Russian military transport plane that it said was carrying dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war on their way to be exchanged.

The cause of the crash, which occurred in Russia’s Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine last week, remains unknown. Ukrainian officials have neither confirmed nor denied responsibility, have called for an international investigation and said that the Russians had offered no conclusive evidence that prisoners were on the flight.

After the crash, families of Ukrainian prisoners worried publicly that the episode might imperil one of the few diplomatic channels left between the two countries, making it less likely that they would see their loved ones again.

But the process of exchanging prisoners, while at times slowed down, has endured even during the most trying moments of a war that has stretched on for nearly two years.

The trade on Wednesday was the 50th exchange between the two nations since the war began, and more than 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have returned home, according to Ukrainian officials. While Russia has not disclosed a total number, at least 1,200 soldiers have been returned, according to statements by the country’s officials.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who announced the trade in a statement on social media, said 207 soldiers and civilians had been returned. The returnees range in age from 20 to 61.

One recent morning in Huwara, a Palestinian man maneuvered a front-end loader back and forth, clearing rocks and rubble that Israel Defense Forces soldiers had piled into a roadblock. Four young soldiers looked on, fingers tensed on triggers, as the machine’s claws heaved shattered masonry from clutching mud. A crowd of approving Palestinian onlookers gathered.

The barrier, put in place to prevent access to a main street that has been a battleground over the past year, has infuriated the 7,000 inhabitants of this town in the northern West Bank, who are now accustomed to eking out survival as Israeli forces close stores and control their every movement. The mayor, Moin Damidi, told me that Huwara has become a ghost town. Surrounded by Israeli settlements and traversed by the major north-south highway, it has also become a center of violence. “The greater the pressure, the bigger the explosion,” he said.

Jihad Odeh, a city official, pointed at the soldiers. They opened and closed the road 10 times in the past year, he said. “The roadblock is for the settlers, to make them feel comfortable on our main street.”

Almost a year ago, a Palestinian militant shot and killed two settlers as they drove through Huwara. In response, settlers swarmed down from the adjacent hilltop settlement of Yitzhar. They burned cars, businesses and homes, killing at least one Palestinian and injuring many more. The I.D.F., nominally responsible for keeping order, did not prevent the riot, and in the aftermath many right-wing politicians celebrated it. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, called for Huwara to be “wiped out,” and not by lawless settlers — “the state of Israel should do it,” he said.

In Huwara, Israeli soldiers are seen as the settlers’ army. Smotrich, under a coalition deal struck in early 2023 with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, oversees the administration of settler affairs in the West Bank. He himself lives in the West Bank, in a settlement called Kedumim, a 15-minute drive from Huwara. Israel’s minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is also a settler who lives in a suburb of Hebron.

Hundreds of tourists were stranded near Machu Picchu, Peru’s most-visited site, over the weekend after demonstrators blocked railway and bus routes to the site and shut down local shops and restaurants in Aguas Calientes, the gateway to Machu Picchu, in the country’s Cuzco region. Some visitors posted videos on social media pleading for help. The police evacuated about 700 tourists on Saturday. Many left without seeing the site.

The protesters had taken to the streets on Thursday to demand the government rescind a contract that allows a company to sell tickets to Machu Picchu for the first time. Tickets had previously been sold through the office of culture in Cuzco, which is controlled by the regional government.

Protesters agreed to a 24-hour “truce” on Tuesday to take part in talks with government officials. While Machu Picchu is officially open, train service to Aguas Calientes and buses that take tourists to the citadel remain suspended. The U.S. Embassy advised travelers who want to try to reach the site by other means to make sure they take enough food and any medicine they might need.

Machu Picchu, believed to be a 15th-century getaway for Incan royalty, received some 2.2 million visitors last year, below prepandemic levels of 4.6 million. Peru has been trying to encourage tourists to visit other ancient sites in part to prevent overcrowding, which UNESCO has warned could damage parts of its structure.

Who is protesting and why are they angry?

Protesters include tour operators, guides, activists and residents in the region of Cuzco. They are opposed to a private company profiting from sales of tickets to Machu Picchu and claim that the company, Joinnus, an events marketing platform, was chosen to administer the sales last year through a corrupt deal with the culture minister, Leslie Urteaga, which she denies.

Elvis La Torre, the mayor of Aguas Calientes, said that the government did not consult local authorities or residents about the new online system.

Just a day after he was sentenced to a decade in prison, former Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan on Wednesday was ordered jailed for 14 years in a separate case, dealing him another heavy blow in his bitter feud with the country’s powerful military.

The new sentence, handed down eight days before a scheduled national election in which Mr. Khan’s party has been battered by a widening crackdown, came in a case involving state gifts. His wife, Bushra Bibi, also received a 14-year sentence. Both have denied any wrongdoing.

In announcing the verdict at the high-security prison where Mr. Khan, 71, has been held for months, the judge also said that the former prime minister and his wife would be barred from holding office for 10 years.

Mr. Khan questioned the fairness and impartiality of the trial during the hearing on Wednesday. He asked the judge: “Why are you in a hurry to announce the verdict? I have not even recorded my final statement.” Mr. Khan then exited the courtroom, and the judge announced the sentence in his absence.

His lawyers said they would appeal the verdict. They have also said they will appeal the 10-year sentence that Mr. Khan received on Tuesday, in a case involving state secrets.

“These cases are not trials; this is a drama,” Syed Ali Zafar, a senior legal aide to Mr. Khan, told reporters. “The Constitution and the law have been violated; there is no doubt that this punishment will be suspended soon.”

The most popular political party in Thailand won its following last year, and the ire of the conservative establishment, by campaigning to end military rule and to weaken the draconian law that prohibits criticism of the country’s monarchy.

But on Wednesday the Move Forward Party and its push for change were dealt a severe blow. Thailand’s Constitutional Court ruled that the party’s proposal to scale back the royal defamation law violated the Constitution because it was an attempt to overthrow the monarchy. It ordered Move Forward to stop all activities related to amending the law.

The verdict, in effect, lays out explicitly that the royal defamation law is sacrosanct for Thailand’s conservative establishment, a nexus of royalists, military officials and wealthy elites. Their motives were already clear last year, when they moved quickly to block Move Forward’s leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, from becoming prime minister, pushed the party into the opposition even though it won the general election and installed a coalition of allies into power.

Wednesday’s ruling leaves Move Forward vulnerable to more legal challenges, which could pave the way for its eventual disbandment. It could also set the stage for a showdown between Thailand’s progressive opposition and the establishment. Move Forward and its supporters argue that the royal defamation law — known as Article 112 — needs to be amended because it is being used as a political weapon, while the establishment says that any change to the law could lead to abolishing the monarchy altogether.

These faultlines were exposed in 2020 when tens of thousands of people took to the streets after the Constitutional Court disbanded the Future Forward Party, the predecessor of Move Forward. Protesters called for checks on the king’s power, breaking a social taboo in a country where the monarch has always been revered.

The court ruled that the pledge to change the law made by Mr. Pita and Move Forward during last year’s election campaign was a move designed to overthrow Thailand’s political system “with the king as a head of state.”

When the African National Congress suspended former President Jacob Zuma this week, a top party official portrayed him as a traitor to the ongoing struggle for Black prosperity in South Africa and a symbol of corruption that the organization is looking to move past.

But to Vincent Mthembu, a longtime A.N.C. activist on the local level, Mr. Zuma was the only hope for the party, which has governed South Africa for 30 years, and the country.

“He is the people’s president,” Mr. Mthembu, who owns a construction business in Johannesburg, said on Tuesday. “Whatever that he was doing was enriching Black people.”

Many countries seem to have their Donald J. Trumps these days — brash, populist leaders who, no matter how many corruption allegations or legal troubles they face, attract fiercely loyal supporters.

Mr. Zuma, 81, a former president of both the party and the republic, might well fill that role in South Africa.

Mr. Zuma provoked the A.N.C. suspension by openly campaigning for a competing political party, with critical national and provincial elections just months away. The A.N.C.’s unprecedented move to sideline him will test the enduring popularity and pull of a former freedom fighter who easily won two presidential elections but resigned under pressure six years ago.

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What comes to mind when you hear the word “K-pop”? Is it the global boy band phenomenon BTS, wearing studded jackets and dancing in perfect sync? Or the girl group Blackpink, performing at Coachella in trendy fashions and perfectly curled hair?

How about an “independent music collective” of casually dressed people, crowded around a mixing board in a one-room studio, across the street from a Seoul restaurant specializing in fried chicken?

“Give me some more bass,” said Omega Sapien, a vocalist with electric-green hair and grills, swaying his hips and grunting to the beat. The studio was cluttered with art, vinyl records, dumbbells and other odds and ends. Another singer lay prone nearby, nursing a bad hangover.

For Balming Tiger, this is daily life as an alternative K-pop band. Their music, a fusion of diverse genres from electro to hip-hop, is funky and edgy. Their look, unkempt and grungy, is far from the professional styling of the groups that most of the world associates with K-pop.

But they claim that label, too. K-pop is any music that comes out of South Korea, according to Omega Sapien. “Everything in that realm is K-pop,” he said.

Four mothers sat quietly in the nursing room around midnight, breastfeeding their newborn babies. As one mother nodded off, her eyelids heavy after giving birth less than two weeks earlier, a nurse came in and whisked her baby away. The exhausted new mom returned to her private room to sleep.

Sleep is just one of the luxuries provided by South Korea’s postpartum care centers.

The country may have the world’s lowest birthrate, but it is also home to perhaps some of its best postpartum care. At centers like St. Park, a small, boutique postpartum center, or joriwon, in Seoul, new moms are pampered for a few weeks after giving birth and treated to hotel-like accommodations.

Fresh meals are delivered three times a day, and there are facials, massages and child-care classes. Nurses watch over the babies around the clock.

New moms are summoned from their rooms only when it is time to breastfeed in the communal nursing room, where they are watched by the nurses. Women who choose not to breastfeed are free to spend their time focused on healing. (The babies are kept in the nursery throughout the day, though mothers can request their newborns be sent to their rooms at any time.)

Staying at a joriwon can cost from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the length of stay, which is often 21 days, the amount of time it takes for a woman’s body to heal after childbirth, according to Korean custom. But the centers weren’t always so luxurious, said Soohyun Sarah Kim, 46, the owner of St. Park.

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The derelict rail bridge stretches across a busy north London street, green foliage peeking out of the gaps between the beams overhead, where bright blue paint flakes from rusting steel.

Farther east, the railway’s grand Victorian-era arches span a small slice of park wedged between two streets, where tents belonging to homeless people, a discarded mattress and broken bottles are scattered about.

While the elevated train line and some of the areas it cuts through may look neglected now, if all goes according to plan, it will become the site of the Camden Highline, a planned public park that aims to turn this disused stretch of the city into a thriving green space.

“They’re all unloved bits of Camden,” said Simon Pitkeathley, the chief executive of Camden Town Unlimited, the business improvement district behind the initiative, of the areas that will one day provide the ground-level entrances to the Highline.

Strolling along the route of the planned park, which will sit some 25 feet above the streets, allows for a different view of London. Up here, the air feels fresher and the bustle below fades away as the view stretches over a patch of north London peppered with homes and office buildings.

As the traveling brass band ended San Giovanni Lipioni’s annual holiday concert with a rendition of Wham’s “Last Christmas,” the gray-haired villagers seated in the old church of the central Italian hill town gazed dotingly at the few young children clapping to the music.

“Today there is a little movement,” Cesarina Falasco, 73, said from the back pew. “It’s lovely. It’s different.”

San Giovanni Lipioni used to be known — if at all — for the discovery in its countryside of a third-century B.C. Samnite bronze head, a rare Waldensian Evangelical community and an ancient annual pageant with pagan roots that venerates a circular cane garlanded in wild cyclamen flowers. (“It represents the female genital organ,” said a tourism official, Mattia Rossi.)

But decades of emigration have shrunk the population to 137 full-time residents, and in 2023, San Giovanni Lipioni became the town with the oldest average population in Italy, a country with one of the oldest average populations in the world. While that national designation has prompted existential angst — heightened by warnings from Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (the country was “destined to disappear” unless it got busy) and Pope Francis (“the future of the nation is at stake”) — the town has embraced its creaky distinction as a lifeline.

Try going for a stroll in much of Guatemala City: It is a pedestrian’s nightmare.

Motorcycles speed down crowded sidewalks. Rifle-grasping guards squint at each passerby, sizing up potential assailants. Smoke-belching buses barrel through stop signs.

But tucked within the chaotic capital’s crazy-quilt sprawl, there is a dreamlike haven where none of that exists.

In the City of Cayalá, a utopian domain created by one of Guatemala’s richest families, the streets are quiet and orderly, the stores are upscale and the homes attainable — if only to families from the country’s small, moneyed elite, or foreigners, like the American diplomats stationed at the huge newly built United States embassy nearby.

Evoking the feel of a serene Mediterranean town, Cayalá features milky white buildings with red-tile roofs, a colossal civic hall with Tuscan columns, cafes and high-priced restaurants, colonnade-lined plazas and walkable, stone-paved boulevards. All of this is open to the public — except for the gated sections where about 2,000 families live.

“In 20 years, Cayalá will be just like La Rambla,” said Andrés García Manzo, a restaurateur who lives in one of Cayalá’s secluded villas, drawing a comparison to Barcelona’s legendary pedestrian-friendly promenade. “You can walk everywhere here in peace.”

But critics say it is largely a playground for the well-off, hard to reach by public transit, environmentally devastating and has attracted significant investment even as other parts of crime-ridden Guatemala City fall into decay.

Huang Chen-yu strode onto an outdoor stage in a southern Taiwanese county, whooping and hollering as she roused the crowd of 20,000 into a joyous frenzy — to welcome a succession of politicians in matching jackets.

Taiwan is in the final days of its presidential election contest, and the big campaign rallies, with M.C.s like Ms. Huang, are boisterous, flashy spectacles — as if a variety show and a disco crashed into a candidate’s town hall meeting.

At the high point of the rally, the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, Lai Ching-te, was introduced to the crowd in Chiayi, a county in southern Taiwan. Ms. Huang roared in Taiwanese, “Frozen garlic!”

The phrase “dongsuan” sounds like “get elected” and, yes, also like “frozen garlic.” Ms. Huang and another M.C. led the crowd of supporters, now on their feet, in a rapid-fire, call-and-response chant: “Lai Ching-te! Frozen garlic! Lai Ching-te! Frozen garlic!” Then they sped up: “Lai Ching-te! Lai Ching-te! Lai Ching-te! Frozen garlic! Frozen garlic! Frozen garlic!”

For Ms. Huang, the event, days before Taiwan’s election on Saturday, was one of at least 15 rallies she would have led by the end of this campaign season.

When the owner of an underground club in Kyiv reached out to Western musicians to play in Ukraine, long before the war, there were not so many takers.

But an American from Boston, Mirza Ramic, accepted the invitation, spawning a lasting friendship with the club’s owner, Taras Khimchak.

“I kept coming back,” Mr. Ramic, 40, said in an interview at the club, Mezzanine, where he was preparing for a performance during a recent tour of Ukraine.

The country, he said “is one of the places that has welcomed me most and been the most supportive of my music.” And so especially after the Russian invasion two years ago, he added, “I wanted to come now, to show my support in these hard times.”

Mr. Ramic, born in Bosnia, is a child of war himself. At 11, he lost his father in the shelling of his hometown, Mostar, and spent years as a refugee, moving from country to country with his mother as she struggled to find a way to survive.

They lived in Zagreb, Croatia; Tunis; and Prague, before moving to the United States, first to Arizona, and eventually Boston. There, he finished his education and began a career as a musician, forming an electronic band, Arms and Sleepers, with a college friend, Max Lewis.

Pushing a walker through a television studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps onto a sound stage with the help of an assistant who settled her into a creamy beige Empire armchair.

A stylist removed the custom-made sturdy boots on her feet and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A makeup artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing red lipstick. A hairdresser tamed a few stray wisps from her trademark onion-shaped hairstyle as another assistant ran a lint roller over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was ready to record the 12,193rd episode of her show.

As one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed guests on her talk show, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, earning a Guinness World Record last fall for most episodes hosted by the same presenter. Generations of Japanese celebrities across film, television, music, theater and sports have visited Ms. Kuroyanagi’s couch, along with American stars like Meryl Streep and Lady Gaga; Prince Philip of England; and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union. Ms. Kuroyanagi said Gorbachev remains one of her all-time favorite guests.

Ms. Kuroyanagi, who jokes that she wants to keep going until she turns 100, is known for her rapid-fire chatter and knack for drawing out guests on topics like dating, divorce and, now, increasingly, death. Even as she works to woo a younger generation — the Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo-seop, 28, appeared on the show this month — many of her guests these days speak about the ailments of aging and the demise of their industry peers.

Having survived World War II, she broke out as an early actor on Japanese television and then carved out a niche as a feel-good interviewer with a distinctive style that is still instantly recognized almost everywhere in Japan. By fashioning herself into a character, rather than simply being the person who interviewed the characters, she helped establish a genre of Japanese performers known as “tarento” — a Japanized version of the English word “talent” — who are ubiquitous on television today.

At 76, David Weissenstern has collected the remains of the dead for most of his adult life. But after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people along Israel’s border with Gaza, he can no longer stand the smell of grilled meat. The odor, he says, reminds him too much of burned human flesh.

His son Duby Weissenstern, 48, has lost track of time after working successive days and nights to recover those killed on Oct. 7. He now marks time in relation to that date.

And his son-in-law Israel Ganot, 32, now gags at the smell of food that has turned rotten. He was in the second wave of recovery workers who reached bodies that had been trapped under rubble for weeks.

All three men are part of ZAKA, an Israeli nonprofit founded in 1995 whose name is the Hebrew acronym for Disaster Victim Identification. Its black-and-yellow vests have become synonymous with bus bombings and shootings in Israel, and its members are often first and last on the scene, rushing to collect every drop of blood and bone fragment for burial, sometimes even before the police arrive.

Made up of more than 3,000 volunteers, most of them ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, the group says it is driven by a holy mission to give families closure after the violent death of loved ones.

But there is little closure for the volunteers.

The work, they say, can be psychologically taxing, with many not even beginning to cope with the trauma of Oct. 7. And they are frequently called upon to recount what they saw by Israeli government officials and journalists, which can re-traumatize them, psychologists say.

A teenager jailed in Egypt, determined to bear witness to the abuses he suffered during years of detention. A proponent of peace in Colombia, shadowed by death threats. A father in India, fighting his own patriarchal impulses to give his two daughters a better life.

With reports from six continents and 34 countries, the Saturday Profile in 2023 revealed people making a difference, mostly under the radar. Every week, our correspondents often sought out not the famous nor the powerful, but the unheralded with stories worth hearing.

A Muslim cleric in Ukraine, now a medic on the front lines of the war. An anticorruption whistle-blower in Bangkok, with (he’d be the first to admit) a disreputable past. A scientist and hair salon owner in Paris, dedicated to styling curly hair.

Some of our subjects spoke to top news trends, like Africa’s first heat officer; an ex-fisherman devoted to persuading fellow Senegalese not to migrate to Europe; and a rap producer in France, who lost his voice to A.L.S. and was experimenting with artificial intelligence to replace it.

All our subjects, from a teenage rapper in Chile to an 87-year-old climate scientist in Canada staring the “death zone” in the face, are leading lives of purpose. And whatever their passions — from protesting to sewage to lakes to batik to contemporary dance to legal marijuana — all our subjects are memorable characters.

Here are our 12 favorite Saturday Profiles of the year.

When the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, welcomed friends to sing Christmas carols at his London residence last week, his remarks ran, as they often do, to his coronation of King Charles III in May.

The vaulted chamber in which his guests were gathered, he told them, had been used to rehearse the ceremony twice a week over four months. Members of his staff were assigned to play Charles and other royals in a rotating cast. “I always played the archbishop,” he said dryly.

Then he ran through the script a few times with the actual king. “We practiced putting it on and screwing it down,” Archbishop Welby said later of the 17th-century St. Edward’s Crown. “It’s a wobbly old thing.”

But on coronation day, before a hushed assembly of 2,300 and a worldwide television audience of hundreds of millions, the archbishop made one conspicuous error: He bent down after placing the crown to inspect whether it was sitting level on the sovereign’s head, an unscripted move that made him look vaguely like a carpenter inspecting his work. “I got it right,” he recalled. “I just didn’t trust myself.”

Such matter-of-factness is typical of Justin Portal Welby, a trim, affable 67-year-old clergyman who wears the trappings of his weighty post — the archbishop of Canterbury also serves as the Primate of All England and spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide — with an almost gossamer lightness. The Church of England’s looser formality means he is known as Mr. Welby, but his aides simply call him Justin.

It’s not that the archbishop isn’t high-minded. He reached for his iPad to share a quote from the midcentury American theologian and lawyer, William Stringfellow, about the “moral power of death” triumphing over earthly empires (translation: “don’t kid yourself,” Mr. Welby said). But he also cheerfully noted that he drives a seven-year-old Volkswagen Golf and confessed to getting a speeding ticket.

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Nearly a decade after police officers marched world soccer officials out of a luxury hotel in Zurich at dawn, revealing a corruption scandal that shook the world’s most popular sport, the case is at risk of falling apart.

The dramatic turnabout comes over questions of whether American prosecutors overreached by applying U.S. law to a group of people, many of them foreign nationals, who defrauded foreign organizations as they carried out bribery schemes across the world.

The U.S. Supreme Court last year limited a law that was key to the case. Then in September, a federal judge, citing that, threw out the convictions of two defendants linked to soccer corruption. Now, several former soccer officials, including some who paid millions of dollars in penalties and served time in prison, are arguing that the bribery schemes for which they were convicted are no longer considered a crime in the United States.

Emboldened by the vacated convictions, they are asking that their records be wiped clean and their money returned.

Their hopes are linked to the September cases, in which the two defendants benefited from two recent Supreme Court rulings that had rejected federal prosecutors’ application of the law at play in the soccer cases and offered rare guidance on what is known as honest services fraud. The defendants in the soccer trial had been found to have engaged in bribery that deprived organizations outside the U.S. of their employees’ honest services, which constituted fraud at the time. But the judge ruled that the court’s new guidance meant that those actions were no longer prohibited under American law.

That blow to the case, which federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are contesting, could turn the story of world soccer’s deep-seated corruption — detailed in a 236-page indictment, and proved through 31 guilty pleas and four trial convictions — into one equally about the long arm of American justice reaching too far.

A sexual assault lawsuit filed against Gérard Depardieu by a French actress has been dropped because it was past the statute of limitations, prosecutors in Paris said on Monday, but the French actor is still under investigation in a separate case.

In the lawsuit that was dropped, the actress Hélène Darras had accused Depardieu of groping her on the set of “Disco,” a comedy released in 2008. Her suit had been filed in September but was made public only last month, shortly before she appeared in a France 2 television documentary alongside three other women who also accused Depardieu of inappropriate comments or sexual misconduct.

The documentary, which showed Depardieu making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea, set off a fierce debate in France that prompted President Emmanuel Macron and dozens of actors, directors and other celebrities to defend Depardieu, splitting the French movie industry.

Depardieu, 75, has denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations against him.

On Monday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said that Darras’s suit was dropped in late December because the statute of limitations had run out on the alleged assault, an outcome that was widely expected — including by the actress herself. She told Agence France-Presse in December that she still “wanted to respond to the defense that plays down our allegations by saying they’re ‘just’ witness accounts.”

In France, adult victims of sexual assault have six years after an alleged crime to file a lawsuit.

Another lawsuit, filed in Spain by Ruth Baza, a Spanish journalist who has accused Depardieu of kissing and groping her without her consent when she was in Paris in 1995, could face a similar fate.

Maximila Imali, a top Kenyan sprinter, did not lose her eligibility to compete in the Paris Olympics because she cheated. She did not fail a doping test. She broke no rules.

Instead, she is set to miss this year’s Summer Games because she was born with a rare genetic variant that results in naturally elevated levels of testosterone. And last March, track and field’s global governing body ruled that Ms. Imali’s biology gave her an unfair advantage in all events against other women, effectively barring her from international competition.

As a result, Ms. Imali, 27, finds her Olympic dream in peril and her career and her livelihood in limbo.

Unless she is willing to suppress her testosterone levels through medication — which she is not — or she prevails in an appeal she has filed challenging the new regulations, she and other intersex athletes will be barred from competing in all running, jumping and throwing events under the increasingly restrictive and contentious rules that govern women’s track and field.

The legality of those rules has been disputed as they have evolved, and as sports governing bodies attempt to balance fair play in women’s sports with the complicated issues of biological sex and gender identity. But the application of the regulations continues to cause confusion for those affected: rule changes sometimes made with little or no warning; careers forcibly switched abruptly or ended at their peak; and embarrassment, humiliation and fears about personal safety.

“They are destroying our talent, and our dignity,” Ms. Imali said in a recent video interview about her appeal. She said she should not be punished for the way she was born because she had done nothing wrong.

Luis Rubiales, Spain’s onetime soccer chief, is due to be tried over his nonconsensual kiss of a star player during the Women’s World Cup medal ceremony last summer after a judge recommended on Thursday that he face a court’s judgment in a high-profile case that has upended the sport in Spain.

The judge also recommended that Mr. Rubiales and three officials with the Royal Spanish Football Federation, soccer’s governing body in the country — including Jorge Vilda, who was fired as the women’s team coach in the wake of the incident — be tried on charges of coercion for exerting pressure on the player, Jennifer Hermoso, to show support for Mr. Rubiales in the immediate aftermath of the kiss.

The judge concluded that the kiss by Mr. Rubiales, after the Women’s World Cup final in Sydney, Australia, “was nonconsensual and was a unilateral and surprise act.” The judge also found that even if the kiss was more celebratory than sexual in nature, Mr. Rubiales’s behavior was within the bounds of the “intimacy of sexual relations” and he should be held to account.

Public prosecutors and Ms. Hermoso now have 10 days to formalize their accusations, and then a trial will take place. If found guilty of sexual assault, Mr. Rubiales would face a prison sentence of one to four years.

Mr. Vilda filed an appeal regarding the judge’s findings on Thursday. As a result, the judge is required to gather further testimony about the matter. All of the accused have three days to appeal the judge’s recommendations.

The ruling was the culmination of a pretrial inquiry, presided over by the judge, Francisco de Jorge, in which witnesses including Ms. Hermoso, officials and other players gave evidence regarding sexual assault accusations against Mr. Rubiales in a closed-door hearing that ended on Jan. 2. The judge also examined videos of the kiss from numerous angles and a video recorded on a bus after the medal ceremony, in which Ms. Hermoso initially seemed to make light of the incident.

A deputy culture minister in Italy is under investigation, accused of laundering stolen goods, in particular a Baroque painting that had been reported stolen from a castle in Piedmont, Italy, a decade ago.

The deputy minister, Vittorio Sgarbi, who is an art historian and critic, as well as a media personality, has said he is innocent.

The tale of the investigation began in 2013, when, according to police documents, a painting was reported stolen from the castle, which had been a restaurant for a time. Eight years later, in 2021, Mr. Sgarbi featured a painting called “The Capture of St. Peter,” attributed to the 17th-century artist Rutilio Manetti, from his own collection, in an exhibit that he curated in Lucca, Tuscany.

This month, prosecutors in the central Italian town of Macerata confiscated “The Capture of St. Peter,” saying in a statement issued with Italy’s art theft police that they believe that the painting reported stolen from the castle in Piedmont and the painting Mr. Sgarbi exhibited are one and the same. Mr. Sgarbi, though under investigation, has not been charged with a crime.

The inquiry comes after an investigation of the reported theft of the Piedmont painting by the daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and “Report,” an investigative television program on the national broadcaster RAI 3, interviewing restorers and associates of Mr. Sgarbi.

The owner of the castle told the reporters and said in a police statement that the painting went missing shortly after a man had visited the castle and offered to buy the artwork, which she had refused to sell. The man was identified in the television investigation as a former collaborator and friend of Mr. Sgarbi.

A uno se le acusa de secuestrar a una mujer. Otro habría repartido munición. Un tercero fue descrito como participante en la masacre de un kibutz en la que murieron 97 personas. Y se dice que todos eran empleados de la agencia de ayuda de Naciones Unidas que escolariza, alberga y alimenta a cientos de miles de palestinos en la Franja de Gaza.

Las denuncias figuran en un expediente proporcionado al gobierno de Estados Unidos en el que se detallan las acusaciones de Israel contra una decena de empleados del Organismo de Obras Públicas y Socorro de las Naciones Unidas que, según afirma, desempeñaron un papel en los atentados de Hamás contra Israel del 7 de octubre o durante sus repercusiones.

La ONU dijo el viernes que había despedido a varios empleados tras ser informada de las acusaciones. Pero poco se sabía de las acusaciones hasta que el informe fue examinado el domingo por The New York Times.

Estas acusaciones son las que han llevado a ocho países, entre ellos Estados Unidos, a suspender el pago de parte de la ayuda a la UNRWA, como se conoce al organismo, mientras la guerra sume a los palestinos de Gaza en una situación desesperada. Más de 26.000 personas han muerto allí y casi dos millones han sido desplazadas, según funcionarios gazatíes y de la ONU.

Los trabajadores de la UNRWA han sido acusados de ayudar a Hamás a organizar el ataque que desencadenó la guerra en Gaza, o de prestarle ayuda en los días posteriores. Según las autoridades israelíes, ese día murieron unas 1200 personas en Israel y unas 240 fueron secuestradas y trasladadas a Gaza.

En las frenéticas primeras horas del 7 de octubre, entre el llanto de las sirenas y noticias de tiroteos a lo largo de la frontera sur de Israel, Achiya Schatz se apresuró con su niño pequeño y su esposa, que estaba embarazada, a resguardarse en un refugio antibombas cerca de Tel Aviv.

No se quedó mucho tiempo.

Los primeros informes del ataque de Hamás ya se estaban mezclando con rumores, inundando las redes sociales y grupos de chat privados, convirtiéndose en una masa cargada de emoción y en gran medida no verificada. Schatz, uno de los investigadores de desinformación y verificadores de datos más conocidos en Israel, se apresuró a volver a su computadora en casa, sabiendo que tenía poco tiempo para detener la propagación de las falsas afirmaciones.

De alguna manera, ya era demasiado tarde.

Desde el ataque inicial, los vigilantes de desinformación en la región han sido abrumados por narrativas infundadas, medios manipulados y teorías de conspiración. El contenido se ha difundido en enormes volúmenes a gran velocidad: fragmentos de videojuegos y reportajes antiguos haciéndose pasar por imágenes actuales, intentos de desacreditar fotos auténticas como generadas artificialmente, traducciones inexactas y acusaciones falsas distribuidas en múltiples idiomas.

En la niebla de la guerra, los rumores y las mentiras son especialmente peligrosos, pues son capaces de adoptar la apariencia de hechos y afectar decisiones. Los verificadores de datos y analistas de la desinformación están destinados a ser parte de la defensa, y ofrecer una evaluación clara de la evidencia disponible.

Sin embargo, el trabajo es difícil incluso para los profesionales experimentados, quienes enfrentaron resistencia mientras luchaban contra narrativas falsas y engañosas a través de múltiples elecciones y una pandemia. En Medio Oriente, donde los sitios web de verificación de datos y la investigación de la desinformación son relativamente recientes y a menudo están mal financiados, los desafíos se han multiplicado.

En Haití, debido al incremento en el número de asesinatos y secuestros, ahora hasta los policías abandonan el país.

En vista de que no hay un presidente electo en el poder y la percepción generalizada sobre el primer ministro es que es ilegítimo, ahora se escuchan clamores que piden la destitución del gobierno por parte de un grupo inesperado: una brigada de oficiales armados cuya supuesta tarea es proteger áreas expuestas a peligros ambientales.

Esta semana, integrantes armados y uniformados de la brigada se enfrentaron a fuerzas gubernamentales en el norte de Haití, con lo que exacerbaron las tensiones en una nación de por sí volátil donde las pandillas han tomado el control de grandes sectores de la capital, Puerto Príncipe, además de sembrar el caos en áreas rurales.

El grupo ambiental, llamado Brigada para la Seguridad de Áreas Protegidas (conocido como B-SAP), enfureció cuando el primer ministro despidió a su líder. El miércoles, oficiales del grupo intentaron invadir la oficina local de aduanas y las unidades de la Policía Nacional de Haití enviadas a contener el ataque los detuvieron con gases lacrimógenos.

Algunos analistas han mostrado su preocupación porque ciertos líderes del grupo expresaron públicamente su lealtad a Guy Philippe, antiguo comandante de la policía y golpista que hace poco regresó a Haití después de cumplir una condena de seis años en una prisión federal estadounidense.

El director de la CIA está preparado para dar un nuevo impulso a las negociaciones sobre la liberación de rehenes en Gaza y un alto al fuego prolongado, según funcionarios estadounidenses, quienes dijeron que el director de la agencia se reunirá con altos funcionarios israelíes, egipcios y cataríes en Europa.

Los funcionarios esperan zanjar las discrepancias entre Israel y Hamás, especialmente en dos cuestiones: la duración de cualquier pausa en los combates y el destino de los líderes de Hamás en Gaza, según funcionarios informados sobre las conversaciones.

Esta es la situación actual.

¿Cómo van las negociaciones?

Una tregua de una semana en noviembre permitió la liberación de más de 100 de los rehenes secuestrados en el ataque de Hamás del 7 de octubre sobre Israel; 240 prisioneros palestinos fueron liberados como parte de ese acuerdo. Desde entonces, ambas partes han adoptado posiciones aparentemente inamovibles para otro acuerdo similar.

Las conversaciones han avanzado de manera errática, y el líder de la agencia israelí de inteligencia el Mosad se ha reunido con funcionarios cataríes tanto en Catar como en Europa. Muchos de los líderes políticos de Hamás residen en Catar. Egipto, que colinda con la Franja de Gaza, también ha desempeñado un papel clave.

William Burns, el director de la CIA, se reunirá con altos funcionarios israelíes, egipcios y cataríes, de acuerdo con funcionarios estadounidenses. Dijeron que la aparente disposición de Israel a acordar un cese de hostilidades más larga como parte de cualquier liberación adicional de rehenes ha creado una nueva oportunidad para las negociaciones.

Tras más de cien días de guerra, el avance limitado de Israel para desmantelar a Hamás ha generado dudas en el alto mando militar sobre la viabilidad a corto plazo de alcanzar los principales objetivos bélicos del país: erradicar a Hamás y liberar también a los rehenes israelíes que aún permanecen en la Franja de Gaza.

A estas alturas de la guerra, Israel ha establecido el control sobre una parte de Gaza menor de lo que había previsto en un principio en los planes de combate desde el comienzo de la invasión, que fueron revisados por The New York Times. Ese ritmo más lento de lo previsto ha llevado a algunos mandos a expresar en privado su frustración por la estrategia del gobierno civil para Gaza y los ha llevado a concluir que la libertad de los más de 100 rehenes israelíes que aún permanecen en Gaza solo puede conseguirse por medios diplomáticos y no militares.

El doble objetivo de liberar a los rehenes y destruir a Hamás es ahora mutuamente incompatible, según las entrevistas con cuatro altos mandos militares, que hablaron bajo condición de anonimato porque no se les permite hablar públicamente de sus opiniones.

También existe un conflicto entre el tiempo que Israel necesitaría para erradicar por completo a Hamás —una larga lucha en la red de túneles del grupo— y la presión, ejercida por los aliados de Israel, para acabar con la guerra con rapidez en medio de una espiral de muertes de civiles.

Los generales afirmaron además que una batalla prolongada destinada a desmantelar por completo a Hamás quizá costaría la vida de los rehenes israelíes retenidos en Gaza desde el 7 de octubre, cuando militantes de Hamás invadieron Israel, mataron a alrededor de 1200 personas y secuestraron a cerca de 240 individuos, según estimaciones israelíes.