Russia Threat Reaches ‘Across Europe,’ U.K. Leader Tells Summit
The venue is an opulent 18th-century palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill. The guests include more than 40 of Europe’s leaders. And King Charles III is on hand to host a reception.
Yet despite the serene grandeur of the surroundings at Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, the continent’s top politicians are meeting in Britain on Thursday in a mood of heightened anxiety and with a growing urgency to find common cause in an unsettled world.
“We will face down aggression on this continent together because the threat from Russia reaches right across Europe,” said Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, as he opened the summit while sitting alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
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The ‘Other Marine’ of French Politics Hits Back
When Marine Tondelier, the leader of the Greens, is told that she is sometimes called “the other Marine” of French politics, she hits back firmly. “No!” she says. “Le Pen is the other Marine.”
Given how rapidly Ms. Tondelier’s star has risen in recent months, her response is not outrageous. The French left has produced a new star in this garrulous, straight-talking ecologist who seems suddenly to appear on every TV and radio show and whose meadow-green jacket has become so iconic it has its own account on X.
Ms. Tondelier, 37, who was born in Hénin-Beaumont, a depressed northern town in the constituency of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, was the driving force behind the creation of the New Popular Front, herding disparate parties into a left-wing alliance that won a surprise victory in parliamentary elections this month.
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In Argentina, a Catholic President and His Rabbi
President Javier Milei of Argentina is a Catholic who leads Pope Francis’s native country.
He also regularly studies the Torah, attends Shabbat dinner and has said that perhaps his most important adviser is his rabbi.
Over the past several years, Mr. Milei has taken an intense and, among most world leaders, unusual interest in Judaism.
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Same-Sex Couples in South Korea Win Landmark Rights Ruling
In a landmark ruling for gay rights in South Korea on Thursday, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples qualify for the national health insurance’s dependent coverage, a decision that rights activists hoped could pave the way for legalizing same-sex marriage in the country.
The decision would allow same-sex couples in the country to register their partners as dependents in national health insurance coverage, as married couples or couples in a common-law marriage can. Numerous other benefits are denied to same-sex and other couples living outside the traditional norms of family in South Korea.
In its ruling on Thursday, the country’s highest court ruled that denying a same-sex couple national health insurance dependent coverage “just because they are of the same sex” constitutes a serious discrimination that infringed upon citizens’ “dignity and values, their rights to pursue happiness, their freedom of privacy and their rights to be equally treated by the law.”
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