How the Israeli Hostage Rescue Led to One of Gaza’s Deadliest Days
As Many South Koreans Shun Marriage, Two Women Try to Redefine Family
The event was to celebrate and discuss the book written by Hwang Sunwoo and Kim Hana, both 47, about their life together as single women in South Korea. But a man in the audience was there to offer criticism. He told the two women that they were making the country’s birthrate, already the world’s lowest, even worse. Their book, he argued, would encourage other women to follow suit.
“The irony was that the man, of our age, was unmarried himself,” Ms. Hwang said. “More people choose not to marry or not to have children, but it’s usually women to blame.”
South Korean society is deeply patriarchal and built around the traditional idea of family. Many government benefits — tax, housing, insurance and other incentives — are tailored for families. In return, families are expected to shoulder much of social welfare, such as caring for sick or elderly relatives.
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French Parliament Votes to Keep Its Centrist Leader, Enraging the Left
After three tense rounds of voting, French lawmakers on Thursday re-elected a centrist ally of President Emmanuel Macron as president of the National Assembly, infuriating the left after its victory in parliamentary elections this month.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, a member of Mr. Macron’s Renaissance party, won with 220 votes in the 577-seat assembly to 207 votes for André Chassaigne, the candidate of the New Popular Front left-wing alliance that came in second.
In effect, after weeks of political tumult, the result gave the impression that nothing had changed in France. The so-called Republican front of left and center parties that kept Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally from power in the runoff election on July 7 turned into a center-right front to keep out the left.
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The Catholic President Who’s ‘Almost’ Jewish
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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Germany Promised to Step Up Militarily. Its Budget Says Differently.
Two-and-a-half years after Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to overhaul Germany’s military, his government’s proposed budget for 2025 calls for only a modest increase in defense spending.
The draft budget was deeply disappointing to those looking for signs that Germany would live up to Mr. Scholz’s promise of a “Zeitenwende,” defined by the chancellor himself as an “epochal tectonic shift” in strategy, which he announced with great fanfare in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
With the war in Ukraine grinding on, Russia continuing to saber-rattle and Donald J. Trump gaining momentum for a return to the White House, Germany has been under increasing pressure from its allies to step into a more robust security role.
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