The leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah acknowledged on Saturday that its supply route through Syria had been cut off by rebels who toppled the government last weekend, dealing another blow to Hezbollah and its patron, Iran.

Before its collapse, the Syrian government had provided a land corridor for Iran to supply weapons and materiel to Hezbollah in Lebanon, bolstering the militant group’s power and Iran’s influence as its main backer.

“Hezbollah has lost the supply route coming through Syria at the current stage, but this is a small detail and may change with time,” the Hezbollah leader, Naim Qassem, said Saturday in a televised speech.

He added that Hezbollah — which recently agreed to a cease-fire with Israel after months of war — would look for alternate means of getting supplies or see if its Syria route could be re-established under “a new regime.”

He did not specifically mention the coalition of rebel forces that swept into Damascus, the Syrian capital, last weekend, or Syria’s deposed president, Bashar al-Assad, who had for years relied on help from Hezbollah and Iran in his country’s civil war.

Hezbollah’s loss of its supply route through Syria, which remains fractured, is another setback for the militant group after a year of conflict with Israel and several months of all-out warfare. In a string of blows from September until late last month, when the cease-fire took effect in Lebanon, Israel detonated the group’s wireless devices, bombarded it with intense air raids, attacked its positions with a ground invasion and killed many of its commanders.

Mr. Qassem took over as the group’s secretary general in October, a month after its leader of three decades, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated in Israeli airstrikes south of Beirut.

So far, the cease-fire has appeared to hold despite periodic exchanges of fire. Hezbollah entered into its terms badly battered by the war: Hezbollah’s arsenal, once thought by weapons analysts to be one of the world’s largest in the hands of a nonstate armed group, was largely destroyed, according to Israeli officials.

The lack of access to Syrian territory is also a blow to Iran, which had long propped up Mr. al-Assad and used Syria as a hub to network and supply its proxies in the region, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq.

Hezbollah and Iran intervened in Syria’s 13-year civil war to bolster Mr. al-Assad’s troops, but, sapped by the last year of conflict with Israel, were unable or unwilling to come to his defense as rebels raced to Damascus in a sudden offensive this month. Russia, another supporter of the regime that has been focusing on battles elsewhere, was similarly disinclined to get involved this time.

Mr. Qassem said Saturday that he hoped for cooperation between the people and governments of Lebanon and Syria — positioning Hezbollah as open to working with whoever takes over, much as regional and global powers have done in the past week. (The United States has been in direct contact with the leading rebel group, the secretary of state said on Saturday, despite the group’s designation as a terrorist organization.)

The Hezbollah leader also expressed concern that the new government in Damascus might normalize relations with Israel after decades of hostility under Mr. al-Assad.

Mr. Qassem defended the decision to abide by the cease-fire, saying that it did not mean the end of the group’s “resistance” but was necessary to “stop the aggression” of Israel in southern Lebanon. He added that Hezbollah’s survival in the war was itself a triumph.

People came by the thousands the day after the rebels arrived in Damascus, racing down the once desolate stretch of road, up a jagged footpath cut into the limestone hillside and through the towering metal gates of Syria’s most notorious prison. They flooded the halls lined with cells, searching for loved ones who had disappeared into the black hole of torture prisons under Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Some tore through the offices of the prison, Sednaya, looking for maps of the building and prisoner logs. One woman shoved a photograph of her missing son toward others walking by, hoping someone had found him. “Do you recognize him?” she pleaded. “Please, please, did you see him?”

In the entrance hall of one section, dozens of men with sledgehammers and pickaxes tore up the floors, convinced there were secret cells with more prisoners deep underground. Crowds swelled around them as people clambered to see what they found, pausing only when Israeli airstrikes landed close enough to shake the prison’s walls.

“Move back, move back!” one man, Ahmad Hajani, 23, yelled. “Let them work!”

Since a rebel coalition overthrew the Assad government last week, unchaining a country ruled by the iron fist of the Assad family for more than 60 years, thousands of Syrians in Damascus, the capital, have taken to the streets to revel in the city’s newfound freedom.

But amid the celebrations, the country has also found itself in the opening chapter of a nationwide reckoning over the horrors that Syrians endured under Mr. al-Assad’s government as they come face to face with the network of prisons, police stations and torture chambers at the center of his family’s brutal rule.

In that time, hundreds of thousands of Syrians were swallowed up by the Assad security forces’ vast apparatus. Over the past 13 years, after the failed rebel uprising and subsequent civil war, Mr. al-Assad wielded the long arms of that system as never before to stamp out every last inkling of dissent.

Protesters, activists, journalists, doctors, aid workers and students were snatched from their shops, plucked from university classrooms and yanked from their cars at checkpoints by the secret police — never to be heard from again.

Many ended up in Sednaya, the notorious prison on the outskirts of Damascus that was often the last place detainees were dumped after months of interrogation in other detention centers. The sprawling prison with three wings became a haunting symbol of Mr. al-Assad’s ruthlessness and the center of some of the worst atrocities committed during his rule.

Tens of thousands of people were crammed into the overcrowded cells, tortured, beaten and deprived of food and water. More than 30,000 detainees were killed, many executed in mass hangings, according to rights groups. Amnesty International called Sednaya a “human slaughterhouse.”

Their relatives lived in an agonizing limbo for years, unsure if their loved ones were alive. They went to local security officials every few months to beg for information and paid thousands of dollars in bribes to government officials to track down their relatives’ whereabouts. If security officers told them their disappeared relative was dead, many refused to believe them.

“They were liars,” one woman, Aziza Mohammed Deek, said of those in Mr. al-Assad’s government. “They were all liars.”

For the relatives, absent proof that their children, siblings or spouses had been killed, they clung to the hope that somewhere, somehow, they had survived. And so, after rebels swept into Damascus last week, throngs of people rushed to prisons and detention facilities across the country.

A few had the tearful reunions they long dreamed of. Many more are still searching, walking across the feces-smeared floors of prison cells, where recently released detainees say they begged for death.

As the week dragged on, thousands have been forced to confront a prospect they had long pushed out of mind: Their loved ones may never return home — at least not alive.

“I’m missing 40 people from my family,” said Bassam Bitaf, 38, standing outside Sednaya. “I have to know where they are, where have they disappeared to? What happened to them? Why can’t we find them?”

The Prison

Sednaya was by most accounts the most fearsome torture prison of the Assad regime. So frightening were the reports of detainees’ being beaten, starved, bloodied and broken that few in Damascus even dared utter its name during Mr. al-Assad’s rule.

The building itself sits atop a hill on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by rows upon rows of iron fences and concrete walls topped with razor wire. On Monday morning, the brush outside the prison was smoldering — the rebels had set fire to the fields a day earlier, hoping the heat would detonate the land mines scattered across the hillside.

Nonetheless, later that afternoon, the earsplitting clap of a land mine exploding drew a throng of people to the top of an escarpment looking for what had happened. Hours later, crowds rushed to the escarpment again to catch a glimpse of the clouds of smoke from Israeli airstrikes pummeling a hilltop in the distance — which Israel says is part of its effort to destroy weapons and military facilities to keep them out of the hands of Islamist extremists.

Most prisoners in Sednaya were freed early last Sunday as rebels swept into the capital and the officers at the prison fled. But rumors persisted of a secret underground section, known as the “Red Wing,” where yet more prisoners might still be alive.

“They say it’s three stories underground,” said Ghassan al-Debs, 63, walking alongside the crowd. “What if they run out of air? How would they survive?”

This was his second pilgrimage to the prison in two days in search of his son Maher al-Debs, who was arrested at age 16 in 2014 after visiting an uncle in Sahnaya, a town on the southern edge of Damascus.

The police had stopped Maher at a checkpoint as he returned to the city and accused him of visiting opposition forces farther south in Dara’a, a town near the Syria-Jordan border, his father said. A police officer then called his father and demanded $1,000 in exchange for his son’s release. Mr. al-Debs did not have the money, and he has not heard from his son since.

“I never lost hope,” he explained, pausing briefly to catch his breath and leaning his hand against a parked car to steady himself. “I always had hope, because my son is innocent. The charges against him are not real.”

Like thousands around him, Mr. al-Debs had abandoned his car two miles from the prison’s entrance and arrived on foot. He wove around the cars stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic — passing a man praying in the back of his pickup truck, the road too crowded to lay down his prayer mat, and around a group of women sobbing into their palms and crying out for God.

Rebels in mismatched uniforms were scattered throughout the crowd. Some were trying to direct the traffic. Others were making their way to the prison, too, looking for lost loved ones of their own.

At the prison, people wandered around the labyrinth of passageways and hammered randomly at the ground, hoping to hear an echo that might signal a hidden room.

“There are people here,” one woman, Layal Rayess, shouted, pointing at a concrete wall of what appeared to be an electricity room. “I can hear them.”

Ms. Rayess’s son had been snatched off a bus in Damascus 13 years ago, when he was 18. A month later, she learned from an intelligence officer that he was being questioned in a detention facility in the city. She never heard any other news of him.

“They promised he would be released,” she said, wiping tears from her cheek with the palm of her hand. One man with a shovel began pounding its spade into the wall, sending bits of concrete flying into the air.

Ms. Rayess reassured herself with the only bit of hope she had left. Hopefully, she said, her son would be found in the Red Wing.

After a few minutes, the man stopped digging and shook his head. There was nothing there.

The Morgue

By Tuesday morning, the rebels had uncovered 38 bodies at Sednaya, perhaps the first corpses of prisoners to make it out of the prison. Rights groups believe the thousands of others who died there were buried in mass graves or disposed of in a crematorium built at the complex, in what American officials described as an effort to cover up the regime’s atrocities.

Rebels took the corpses to the morgue at Al-Moujtahed Hospital, in the center of the city. The bodies looked starved or mutilated beyond recognition, with missing eyes and sunken cheeks. Some bore thick, red scars around their necks that looked like rope burns, forensic examiners said. Others were covered in round, indented scars, most likely from hot irons.

One had no face to recognize; only a blackened skull remained.

Inside an examination room of the morgue, the examiners inspected the bodies, looking for any identifying marks — tattoos, crooked teeth. They took photographs of their faces from several angles. Some of the presumed prisoners appeared to have died only days before. Others had been dead for weeks, their skin turned a green hue, corpses filling the room with the stench of decomposing flesh. As news of the bodies spread, hundreds of people who had torn through Sednaya the day before rushed to the morgue.

“Just let us take a look!” cried a group of women as they tried to force their way into the examination room.

Dr. Yasser al-Qassem directed the women to a Telegram channel where the hospital was uploading pictures of the corpses.

“The pictures, please, look at the pictures,” he yelled before slamming the door shut. He let out a heavy sigh. “There are too many people,” he said.

As some relatives of the disappeared swiped through their phones looking at the photographs, Roqaya al-Neshi, 65, debated whether to join the crowd pushing its way into the morgue. She did not recognize her son Abdul Salam in any of the pictures, but was not entirely convinced that he was not among them.

The last time Ms. al-Neshi saw her son was in 2019, a year after he was arrested at age 20 from his dorm at Homs University. She had tracked him down in Sednaya and paid a prison officer a $9,000 bribe to visit him. When the guards dragged a young man toward her — feet shackled, hands tied, skin hanging off his bones — she burst into tears.

“I told them, ‘This is not my son,’” she said. “But he told me: ‘I’m your son, Mom. It’s me.”

A month later, the same officer told her Mr. Salam had died, but she refused to believe him. “I told them: ‘I saw him with my own eyes. How are you telling me he’s not alive now?’” she recalled, her cheeks wet with tears.

As she looked on, the mob outside the morgue wore down the hospital staff guarding the door of its cool-storage room. “Go ahead,” one of the doctors yelled. “Whoever wants to come in and check go ahead.” The flood of people crammed into the room, tossing open body bags and yanking morgue refrigerator doors open. Some stumbled out stunned. Others sobbed.

“Oh God, oh God!” one woman cried.

The Reckoning

At the end of Syria’s first week free from the Assad government, the frenzied search for hidden prison cells at Sednaya had dissipated. Instead, people shuffled through prison records scattered across the basement floor, scouring the yellowed pages for the names of loved ones.

A few still hoped they would find some clue that could lead them to their missing relatives, alive. “Maybe they took the prisoners to Iran to use them as bargaining chips with the rebels,” Jamil Ali Al-Abbaa said, rifling through the muddied pages on Thursday evening.

“Or to the Russian military bases,” suggested another, Ahmad al-Aboud, standing nearby.

But most found themselves confronted with a reality they did not want to imagine: The loved ones lost under Mr. al-Assad’s rule were gone forever. The questions that haunted them for decades may never be answered.

“All we wanted was our children. Dead or alive,” said Alya Saloum, 50, whose son disappeared 11 years ago.

“I have no hope left,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

Fernanda Torres still remembers the day her mother, Brazil’s grande dame of film, came within reach of cinema’s most coveted prize: an Oscar.

“It had great symbolism for Brazil,” Ms. Torres, an acclaimed actress herself, said in an interview. “I mean, Brazil produced something like her, you know?” she added. “It was very beautiful.”

A quarter-century ago, Fernanda Montenegro, now 95, made history when she became the first Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. She lost to Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brazil never got over what it considered a snub.

Now, Ms. Torres, 59, is attracting chatter in Hollywood that could put her in line to win the elusive golden statuette for a role that has ignited cinematic fever — and a national reckoning — in Latin America’s largest country.

Millions of viewers are packing theaters to watch “I’m Still Here,” a quiet drama starring Ms. Torres about a family torn apart by a military junta that ruled Brazil, by fear and force, for over two decades.

This past week, the movie was nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, and Ms. Torres was nominated in the lead actress category, bolstering Oscar hopes.

Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which oversees the Oscars, will not reveal its nominations until January, “I’m Still Here” is Brazil’s official entry in the international feature film category.

At home, the movie has struck a nerve in a nation that suffered through the brutal dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

Set in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s, “I’m Still Here” tells the story of Eunice Paiva and her five children, whose lives are upended when the family patriarch, Rubens Paiva, a former congressman played by Selton Mello, disappears at the hands of the military government.

By telling this family’s story, the film tackles a “piece of Brazilian history” that is being forgotten, said Walter Salles, the movie’s director and one of the nation’s most prolific filmmakers. “The personal story of the Paiva family is the collective story of a country.”

The film has quickly become a national treasure, breaking box office records and eclipsing usual crowd-pleasers like “Wicked” and “Gladiator 2.”

Since the release of “I’m Still Here” in early November, more than 2.5 million Brazilians have seen it in theaters, and it has grossed more than six times the amount made by last year’s most-watched Brazilian film.

In a troubling twist, the movie was being widely shown in Brazil just as the police revealed new details about a plot to stage a coup and keep the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, a defender of the military dictatorship, in power after he lost the 2022 election.

Against this backdrop, the film’s themes have gained an urgent new meaning, said Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose book about his family inspired the movie.

“The timing was, unfortunately, perfect,” he said, “because it showed this story isn’t just in our past.”

Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people were disappeared and some 20,000 were tortured during the dictatorship. But, unlike Chile or Argentina, where many crimes committed there under military dictatorships have been tried and punished, Brazil has not pursued accountability for its military’s atrocities.

In recent years, what many had seen as the distant past began to creep into the present. Mr. Bolsonaro, a retired army captain, spoke frequently in nostalgic terms about the dictatorship, awarded thousands of government jobs to soldiers and dismantled a panel investigating crimes committed during the military’s rule.

Movies and other forms of cultural works were frequent targets of censorship during the dictatorship, which considered them political foes. Now, films like “I’m Still Here” can serve as “instruments against forgetting,” Mr. Salles said. “Cinema reconstructs memory.”

And the film has surely ignited Brazil’s collective memory. In classrooms and newspaper pages, heated debates are unfolding over the legacy of the dictatorship. On social media, stories of suffering at the hands of the military government have gone viral, drawing millions of views.

On a recent rainy weekday, as moviegoers packed a Rio de Janeiro theater, it was clear that “I’m Still Here” had cast a wide spell. Groups of teenagers, fathers and sons and older couples were all clutching tickets.

Some snapped selfies in front of the movie’s poster. Others took deep breaths before stepping into the theater’s darkness.

Inside, the crowd gasped at the sounds of the torture of political prisoners; teared up when Eunice, played by Ms. Torres, defiantly smiled for a newspaper photo, unwavering in the face of tragedy; and stifled sobs when Ms. Montenegro made a silent appearance in the closing scenes, as an older Eunice whose memories were fading.

The film echoed a familiar past for many. “It shows everything we lived through,” said Dr. Eneida Glória Mendes, 73, who grew up in a military family during the dictatorship.

Dr. Mendes, who has watched the film twice, remembers ripping up letters she received from friends who criticized the regime so that her father would not see them. Anyone sending or receiving such correspondence could have been detained.

“We were not free,” she said. “Even a silly criticism could lead to arrest.”

For younger Brazilians, the film offered a glimpse into a reality they had heard about only at school. “For my generation, there’s this thirst to know more,” said Sara Chaves, 25, an aspiring actress.

“I’m Still Here” has also captivated audiences and critics abroad. When it premiered in Venice this year, it won an award for best screenplay and drew a thundering applause that lasted 10 minutes.

So when the academy shared an image on social media of Ms. Torres at a Hollywood industry gala last month, Brazilians went wild. “Give her the award already!” said one of the more than 820,000 comments on Instagram.

If she is nominated in the best actress category, Ms. Torres would be following a remarkably similar path to her mother, who was nominated in 1999 for her role as a letter writer for illiterate people in “Central Station,” a Brazilian classic also directed by Mr. Salles.

“There was this feeling in the country that she was deeply wronged,” said Isabela Boscov, a Brazilian cinema critic who has been reviewing films for three decades.

“I’m Still Here” is widely expected to receive a nomination in the international film category, according to Hollywood insiders, but Ms. Torres’s chances are more uncertain.

Sony Pictures Classics, the studio distributing “I’m Still Here” globally, which launched the successful best actress nomination bid for Ms. Montenegro, is making a concerted push for Ms. Torres. Yet she may face tough odds this year in a crowded field that includes names like Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman.

To Ms. Torres, an Oscar nomination “would be a big victory” in itself, but she is not getting her hopes up. “It would be an incredible story if I got there, following my mother,” she said. “Now, winning — I consider it impossible.”

Since the first Oscars ceremony in 1929, only two actresses have won awards for leading roles in foreign-language films.

On a recent Sunday afternoon at Ms. Torres’s home, she sat across from her mother, reminiscing about art and family and other films the two have made together.

“This is also a legacy of life, of a profession,” Ms. Montenegro said, gesturing toward her daughter, then herself.

After a career spanning more than seven decades, Ms. Montenegro is still acting in films and onstage. But her movements are slower, her eyesight is weakening and she rests more.

Sharing a character with her daughter, in a film that has inspired awe and soul-searching across Brazil, has carried personal symbolism, too. “It’s a really special moment,” Ms. Montenegro said.

After a final lipstick check in the mirror, the two actresses faced a camera for a photograph for this article. They moved their faces close together, their cheeks nearly touching. Like Eunice Paiva, in the movie both are in, they prefer to smile.

“My mother is still alive; all is well with her,” Ms. Torres explained. “I’m happy.”

“By chance, I’m still here,” Ms. Montenegro replied. Ms. Torres chimed in: “We’re still here.”

Kyle Buchanan contributed reporting from Los Angeles. Lis Moriconi contributed research.

President Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived declaration of martial law has created South Korea’s biggest constitutional crisis since the country democratized in the late 1980s.

On Saturday, Mr. Yoon was impeached by the National Assembly, making him the third South Korean president to be suspended from power through such a vote.

But the uncertainty over the country’s political future is far from resolved.

The fate of Mr. Yoon, a deeply unpopular leader, now rests in the hands of the Constitutional Court, which will decide within the next six months whether to reinstate or formally remove him.

In addition to impeachment, Mr. Yoon faces a criminal inquiry, the first ever to target a sitting South Korean president. He has been banned from leaving the country as the police and prosecutors investigate ​whether he and his supporters in the government and military committed insurrection when they sent armed troops into the National Assembly earlier this month.

Here is where things stand for Mr. Yoon and South Korea.

Why was the president impeached?

Mr. Yoon’s martial law decree on Dec. 3, which put the country under military rule for the first time in 45 years, lasted only six hours. But it threw South Korea’s democracy into chaos and drew public outrage, recalling the country’s painful history of military dictatorship decades ago.

In the impeachment bill, opposition lawmakers argued that Mr. Yoon had perpetrated an insurrection when he made the martial law declaration and sent troops into the Assembly. They said that was an attempt to stop lawmakers from voting down the decree, as was their right under the Constitution.

An initial impeachment vote on Dec. 7 failed, after lawmakers from Mr. Yoon’s People Power Party boycotted it, saying that he should be given a chance to resign.

On Saturday, the party said that it officially opposed impeachment, but its lawmakers were allowed to cast their secret ballots. The result indicated that 12 lawmakers from Mr. Yoon’s party had joined the opposition to impeach him and another 11 abstained or cast invalid votes, sealing his fate.

The vote tally was 204 in favor and 85 against.

What are the criminal accusations against the president?

The investigations into the president center on the deployment of armed troops to the National Assembly.

Col. Kim Hyun-tae, who led a special forces unit that was sent into the assembly, said he received orders to forcibly remove lawmakers ​to prevent 150 of them — the number required to repeal martial law — from gathering.

South Korea’s criminal ​law defines insurrection as any attempt to “overthrow government organs established by the Constitution or to render the exercise of their functions impossible by force.”

If ​Mr. Yoon were to be convicted of insurrection and the court ​ruled that he was its ringleader, he​ could face the death penalty or life imprisonment. Prosecutors have arrested his former defense minister​ and two former police chiefs on charges of helping to carry out insurrection.

Why did Yoon do it?

Mr. Yoon has said that he declared ​martial law out of “desperation​” in the face of an opposition that used its parliamentary majority to “paralyze” his government. Mr. Yoon ​criticized the opposition for slashing some of his government budgets planned for next year​, as well as its frequent attempts to impeach his political appointees.

But such complaints cannot be grounds for declaring martial law, Kim Young Hoon, head of the Korean Bar Association, previously told The New York Times. Mr. Yoon also did not immediately notify the National Assembly of his declaration of martial law, as required by law, according to the assembly.

“It’s clear that President Yoon’s declaration of martial law failed to meet the requirements set by the Constitution,” Mr. Kim said​.

Cho Ji-ho, head of the National Police Agency, ​told the assembly on Monday that when martial law was briefly in place, the military asked the police to help it locate and detain 15 people, including the leaders of the biggest political parties​.

Even during martial law, however, the president has no right to detain lawmakers unless they are caught in committing a crime.

What happens now?

Mr. Yoon has vowed to fight in court to regain his power.

In a recorded speech released shortly after his impeachment, he listed what he considers his accomplishments as president, including his efforts to strengthen military ties with the United States and Japan. Now, his efforts have been paused, he said.

“But I will never give up,” he said.

The court will decide within the next 180 days whether Mr. Yoon is guilty of the crimes the National Assembly accused him of and, if so, whether they are serious enough to merit removal. If the court does formally remove him, South Korea is then supposed to elect a new leader within two months.

During Mr. Yoon’s suspension from office, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the No. 2 official in the government hierarchy, will serve as interim leader. Because Mr. Han is not an elected official, he will lead South Korea with no real political heft as the country faces challenges like North Korea’s growing nuclear threat and the return of Donald J. Trump to the White House.

As Mr. Yoon awaits action by the Constitutional Court on his impeachment, he is also watching for the next steps by investigators. It remained unclear when they would question him or whether they would attempt to arrest him.

The ban on overseas travel “is usually considered a precursor to arrest,” Kim Jongcheol, a professor of law at Yonsei University in Seoul, previously told The Times.

Jin Yu Young and Victoria Kim contributed reporting.

When President Javier Milei of Argentina stepped onto the grounds of Giorgia Meloni’s party festival at Rome’s Circus Maximus, a conservative fair that mixed holiday and Italy-First energy, he found a skating rink, a Christmas tree and an upbeat, anti-woke crowd.

But with the visit, he got something more than recordings of Mariah Carey and meetings with Ms. Meloni, the prime minister of Italy and a conservative ally. He also received Italian citizenship.

“More than among friends, I feel like I am with family,” Mr. Milei said onstage at the event.

Mr. Milei, whose grandparents emigrated from Italy to Argentina, received the citizenship because of his bloodline, Italy’s foreign ministry said this week. The announcement sparked some anger among critics of the government in Italy, who have long opposed Italy’s citizenship law for allowing people with distant Italian ancestry to get an Italian passport, but not granting citizenship to children of immigrants born in Italy.

“Granting the Italian citizenship to President Milei is yet another slap in the face to boys and girls who were born here or live here permanently and have been waiting for citizenship for years and years, sometimes without any result,” Riccardo Magi, a liberal opposition lawmaker, wrote on X.

Unlike the United States, Italy does not automatically grant citizenship to children born in its borders, whether or not the child’s parents are in the country legally.

Liberal forces have proposed a referendum to change the law, but Ms. Meloni’s government has resisted alterations that would relax it. Instead, the Italian authorities have recently updated their interpretation of the citizenship law based on decisions by Italy’s supreme court, making it harder to obtain it through bloodlines.

Because of a huge emigration wave in the end of the 19th century from Italy across the Atlantic, thousands of people in the Americas have been able to obtain Italian citizenship in recent years thanks to their ancestry. Over 900,000 Italian citizens live in Argentina, according to Italy’s national statistics institute. (About 150,000 Italian citizens who were not born in Italy live in the United States.)

In recent years, many upper-middle class Argentines have sought a second passport to move abroad and escape the tough economic situation at home.

Mr. Milei has repeatedly expressed pride in his Italian ancestry, often telling the story of his grandparents’ immigration and praising Italian culture. But he has not explained publicly why, as a head of state, he would seek the citizenship of another country. Mr. Milei’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In an interview with Italian television earlier this year, Mr. Milei said that he was passionate about Italian opera and that he felt he had “75 percent Italian blood” because three of his grandparents were Italian.

Mr. Milei is known for listening to opera while discussing politics with guests at the presidential residence. In an interview this week, he said his favorite Italian operas were “Lucia di Lammermoor,” by Donizetti, and “Norma,” by Bellini. Mr. Milei is Roman Catholic and leads the country of Pope Francis’ birth.

Mr. Milei is not the first Argentine president to have dual citizenship. Mauricio Macri, who led the country from 2015 to 2019, also had an Italian passport, as his father had emigrated from Italy to Argentina at age 18.

Despite some differences in ideological foundations between Mr. Milei, a right-wing libertarian, and Ms. Meloni, a conservative whose party has post-Fascist roots, the two leaders have strengthened ties in recent months, as the Argentine president seeks closer links to other prominent right-wing figures around the world.

Last month, when Ms. Meloni visited Argentina, Mr. Milei gave her a statuette of himself wielding a chain saw, one he used during his campaign to symbolize the slashing he planned for the nation’s government. He said that he and Ms. Meloni acknowledged “common challenges” and held similar views on the importance of law enforcement, private property, the protection of families and opposition to excessive bureaucracy and the “woke virus.”

Ms. Meloni, who introduced Mr. Milei at the festival on Saturday, said the two shared an opposition to welfare payments and believe that work is the only way to fight poverty.

When they met on Friday, Ms. Meloni said she and Mr. Milei discussed a common desire to further strengthen their bilateral partnership, especially with regards to the fight against transnational organized crime. They also addressed Italy’s desire to increase its economic and commercial presence in Argentina, starting from the energy sector, she said.

Lucía Cholakian Herrera contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.

Every Christmas season, Elizabeth Teasdale sets aside an entire room in her house on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia to store presents for her family’s large holiday gathering. By now, 20 to 30 packages should be stashed away.

This week there were two.

It has not been the most wonderful time of the year.

A strike by more than 50,000 postal workers in Canada is now in its fourth week, threatening to leave empty spaces under many Christmas trees.

After nearly a month without mail, Steven MacKinnon, the federal labor minister, said Friday that he had asked the independent Canada Industrial Relations Board to order strikers back to work if it determines the two sides are at an impasse.

“Canadians are rightly fed up,” he told reporters, adding that service might return as early as next week.

A wide swath of Canadian residents and businesses has been affected. But the hardest hit have been those in remote communities like Ms. Teasdale’s town of Inverness, where Canada Post is the only delivery option. Even Amazon relies on it.

“We can use our sense of humor, call it a piece of our new reality,” Ms. Teasdale said. “We got around Covid and will get around this. It is what it is, I guess.”

For some people in areas with no service other than the post office, the strike’s effects are potentially much more serious than missing Christmas gifts.

National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak of the Assembly of First Nations, the country’s largest association of Indigenous groups, urged the federal government to impose an end to the walkout, citing a potential health threat. Many Indigenous people live in the most remote and sparsely populated stretches of the vast country.

“Many of our citizens rely entirely on Canada Post for access to prescription medications, medical equipment, and health care supplies,” National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak said in a statement.

A federal mediator said earlier in the week that talks between the postal service and its union were heading in the wrong direction.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and Canada Post remain far apart on wages and other issues, particularly a plan by the post office to use more part-time workers to expand weekend parcel delivery rather than paying full-time employees overtime.

The post office has offered an 11.5 percent wage increase over four years, which the union has rejected. Instead, the union has reduced its demand over the same period from 24 percent to 19 percent. Canada Post, which faces chronic financial problems, has said it cannot afford such a raise.

Like many Canadians, Ms. Teasdale is fast giving up hope that mail service will be restored in time for Christmas shipping. She also does not expect an Amazon order she placed before the walkout to show up before Dec. 25.

Amazon said in a statement that “only a small percentage” of orders placed by Canadians are delivered through Canada Post.

The company added that it had “taken measures to minimize customer impact,” but offered no details.

Ms. Teasdale has had to come up with a Plan B.

One of the parcels in her gift room, with two T-shirts, arrived only because she paid an online retailer to ship them to a community at the end of the line for various parcel and courier delivery companies.

From there, she also paid a local courier company, “one of those little local vans,” to take care of the final leg of the journey to her house. The total shipping cost? About 50 Canadian dollars, or $35, she estimates.

Like many people in her community, Ms. Teasdale will probably ask neighbors who are traveling for the holidays to become good Samaritan gift couriers. People who have the time and can afford it, she said, are also making the eight-hour round trip to the provincial capital of Halifax to shop.

And many others, Ms. Teasdale said, are making the best of a challenging situation by turning the clock back to the days when the gifts people exchanged were homemade. Baking and cooking have become particularly popular these days.

“My neighbor was here the other day looking for Mason jars,” she said.

But some things still must be shipped. About 25 miles away in Margaree Valley, Anne Morrell Robinson and her husband, Joel, who hold Canadian and American citizenship, needed to send tax forms to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

They set off with an envelope on a two-and-a-half-hour drive to a FedEx drop-off in an office supply store.

Once there, she said, a clerk struggled, but ultimately managed to enter the shipping information correctly into a computer. Then came the bad news.

“The courier services have all shut down for 48 hours because they’re so overwhelmed,” Ms. Robinson, said referring to FedEx and Purolator, a courier firm owned by Canada Post, which it operates separately. The tax envelope came home with them.

Like the U.S. Postal Service, Canada Post is in dire financial shape. It has lost more than 3 billion Canadian dollars (or about $2.1 billion) since 2018 and has warned that it may run out of cash early next year.

The pandemic and the extraordinary surge in e-commerce did yield a significant windfall for the post office, with parcel deliveries rising by 50 percent in 2020. But that windfall has largely disappeared because of new competitors.

Ian Lee, a business professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who was once a financial analyst at Canada Post, said that the postal service had lost most of the parcel delivery business to smaller services that rely on gig workers — who receive no benefits and, in some cases, use their own vehicles.

“We are not going back to the old economy of file cabinets and letters and checks in the mail,” Professor Lee said. “That’s what’s vanishing, literally, before our eyes. So then the question is: What do we put in its place?”

For Ms. Robinson, a professional quilt maker, the tax envelope is not the only thing affected by the strike. She decided that her customers, who are largely in the United States and overseas, would recoil at the rates charged by FedEx. So she suspended shipping.

“There’s so many benefits to living in a rural community, but this is not one of them,” she said. “It’s a sad situation.”

From desperate stabs at diplomacy to fanciful expressions of flattery, Ukrainian officials are doing everything they can to bring President-elect Donald J. Trump into their corner as they try to strengthen their position in the war against Russia.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine traveled almost 1,500 miles last weekend on the off chance he could meet with Mr. Trump in Paris. (He did.) Ukrainian leaders have delayed signing a critical minerals cooperation agreement with the United States, with an eye toward letting Mr. Trump claim credit after taking office. (Rather than President Biden.) One Ukrainian lawmaker even nominated Mr. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The fate of Ukraine depends on Trump,” said the lawmaker, Oleksandr Merezhko. He said he spontaneously nominated Mr. Trump for the prize last month because of his promise to bring peace to Ukraine and his decision to sell the country anti-tank Javelin missiles during his first term. “We should appreciate what he’s done for us. We should be thankful.”

Since the election in November, Ukrainians have repeatedly tried to press their case with the president-elect, known for his skepticism about American support for Ukraine’s war effort and even about Mr. Zelensky himself. Mr. Trump recently told the French magazine Paris Match that ending the war in Ukraine would be his main foreign policy priority after his inauguration next month. He has vowed to try to start peace talks as soon as taking office.

With his military losing ground in Ukraine’s east, Mr. Zelensky’s public messaging has shifted since Mr. Trump’s election. He is portraying Ukraine as being open to negotiations that could involve concessions, including ceding Russian-occupied territory in the east and regaining it later through diplomacy. That is meant as a signal to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy team that the Ukrainian leader is reasonable compared with the nuclear saber-rattling of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“They want to secure their place on the new U.S. administration’s radar,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, the head of a Kyiv-based think tank, New Europe Center. “They’re trying to establish contacts, build bridges.”

Perhaps the most audacious effort occurred after Ukrainian officials learned that Mr. Trump planned to go to Paris last Saturday for the reopening of the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

First, they pushed for help from the French president’s office to organize a meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump, according to a French official who requested anonymity to discuss the preparations. Then, with no guarantee of a meeting, Mr. Zelensky’s team traveled many hours to Paris from Kyiv by train and plane.

The meeting was confirmed just before Mr. Trump walked into the Élysée Palace for talks with France’s president. Less than an hour later, Mr. Zelensky joined them. The discussion between the three men, supposed to last 15 minutes, stretched to 45.

“President Trump is, as always, resolute,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on social media shortly afterward, posting a photograph of their handshake under the palace’s gilded ceilings and chandeliers. “I thank him.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky added flattery, writing that he had told Mr. Trump that Mr. Putin “fears only him and, perhaps, China.”

Other efforts to appeal to the president-elect included a trip to Washington this month by Mr. Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, who met with members of Mr. Trump’s team.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has been Ukraine’s biggest supplier of military aid, more than $62 billion worth, and Mr. Biden has been one of Ukraine’s biggest defenders on the international stage. But Ukraine’s war prospects are looking dim: Russia now occupies about 20 percent of the country and is pressing ahead relentlessly to capture more eastern territory. And Ukraine’s recruitment system has not produced enough qualified new soldiers.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump promised to end the war in 24 hours. He has not said how, but given his skepticism over aid to Ukraine, officials in Kyiv fear he will immediately cut off the flow of money and weapons and try to force a settlement on terms favorable to Moscow.

A hint at how Mr. Trump might proceed comes from Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser whom the president-elect has nominated to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia. In a research paper published by a pro-Trump think tank in April, Mr. Kellogg proposed peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow with major consequences: If Kyiv did not participate, U.S. aid would be cut off. If Moscow did not participate, Kyiv would get more U.S. aid.

Mr. Trump has had a tricky relationship with Mr. Zelensky — the first phone call between them in 2019, in which Mr. Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Mr. Biden, led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. Their second phone call did not happen until this past July.

Mr. Trump has also spoken favorably about Mr. Putin and said he wants to establish a positive relationship with him.

Mr. Zelensky’s team is betting that Mr. Putin is not ready to negotiate in good faith, despite claims by aides that Mr. Putin is open to peace talks, analysts said.

“They’re trying to explain to Trump and his people that if there is someone who doesn’t want to negotiate now, it’s Putin, not Zelensky,” Ms. Getmanchuk said. “Part of the Ukrainian tactic is to show that they’re constructive, realist.”

Ukrainian officials and business people have also tried to appeal to Mr. Trump’s transactional approach, saying the country is rich in natural resources that could support U.S. industries Mr. Trump wants to boost.

Ukraine has deposits of 20 critical minerals, such as cobalt and graphite, with reserves valued up to $11.5 trillion, according to Horizon Capital, Ukraine’s leading private equity firm. The country is home to a third of Europe’s proven lithium reserves, a key material for rechargeable batteries that could be of interest to the electric car business of Elon Musk, a Trump ally.

Ukraine had planned to sign an agreement to cooperate on extracting and processing minerals with the Biden administration. But the Ukrainian authorities have postponed the signing twice, according to officials on both sides — a signal that Kyiv may be waiting for Mr. Trump to take office to present the deal as an early victory for his administration.

“This war is about money,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Trump ally, told Fox News last month. “So Donald Trump’s going to do a deal to get our money back, to enrich ourselves with rare earth minerals. A good deal for Ukraine and us, and he’s going to bring peace.”

There are signs that Ukraine’s message is getting through. On Sunday, the day after meeting Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine “would like to make a deal and stop the madness.”

But there are also signs that Mr. Trump is hedging his bets. He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was open to reducing military aid to Ukraine.

One continuing point of friction is Mr. Zelensky’s insistence that Ukraine be granted NATO membership. That demand is unlikely to resonate with Mr. Trump, who is skeptical of NATO itself and aware that Mr. Putin considers Ukrainian membership a nonstarter. Mr. Kellogg has said that Kyiv’s allies should put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period to persuade Mr. Putin to join peace talks.

For all of Mr. Trump’s bluster, many in Ukraine have pinned their hopes on him to end the war on acceptable terms. A recent poll by the New Europe Center found that 44 percent of Ukrainians trust Mr. Trump, higher than in any other European country, including Trump-friendly Hungary.

Part of that support, Ms. Getmanchuk said, stems from the disappointment many Ukrainians feel with Mr. Biden’s cautious approach to helping Ukraine’s military. Some Ukrainians nickname Mr. Biden “2L” — for “too little, too late.” Mr. Trump’s vow to end the war quickly has resonated with a growing number of war-weary Ukrainians who now favor peace talks, even though they do not want to cede territory.

At the Trump White Coffee Bar — one of at least two Kyiv cafes named for Mr. Trump — customers said they wanted him to fulfill his campaign promise.

“I hope Trump will do what he promised — for peace to come to Ukraine,” said Yulia Lymych, 25, a real-estate agent. “This is the main wish of Ukrainians. I feel very sorry for the guys who died at war. I have friends who died and friends who are still fighting. My boyfriend is fighting. I want them all to come back home.”

The United States has been in direct contact with the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which overthrew the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad a week ago, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Saturday.

His remarks were the first official confirmation that Washington is communicating with a group that it designated a terrorist organization several years ago but whose behavior Washington hopes to influence now that the group controls Syria’s interim government.

“We’ve been in contact with H.T.S. and with other parties” in Syria, Mr. Blinken said, referring to the rebel group, after a meeting with Arab ministers in Aqaba, Jordan, to discuss how to assist Syria’s political transition.

He said that the United States had communicated a set of governing principles that it is urging Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to adopt, including respect for human rights and rejecting extremism. The United States has also stressed the importance of finding and returning Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist kidnapped in Syria seven years ago.

Mr. Blinken spoke at the end of a three-nation tour through the region, scheduled hastily in response to the sudden change of power in Syria. The trip, which also featured stops in Ankara, the Turkish capital, and Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, ended with the meeting in Aqaba.

The abrupt demise of the Assad government in Syria has prompted celebrations but also uncertainty over how the new interim administration there can manage a transition in a country shattered by 13 years of civil war and decades of repression.

“We’ve seen how the fall of a repressive regime can swiftly give way to more conflict and chaos, how the shoes of one dictator can be filled by another,” Mr. Blinken warned. “Or how interference by an outside country can be thrown off, only to be replaced by another.”

Syria’s power shift is another upheaval in a region reeling since the attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which set off war that has gone on for more than a year. The events in Syria have set in motion a realignment with implications for Turkey, Israel, Iran, Lebanon and the Russian government, which has given refuge to Mr. al-Assad and was a stalwart ally of his.

Mr. Blinken met in Aqaba with foreign ministers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt, as well as the caretaker prime minister of Lebanon and secretary general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, according to a statement by Jordan’s Foreign Ministry. Turkey, the United Nations and the European Union also participated, but representatives of Syria’s new leadership did not attend.

The conference participants issued a joint statement after their meeting, saying that Syria “finally has the chance to end decades of isolation.”

They called for an inclusive and nonsectarian government that respects the rights of women and minorities, does not harbor terrorists and does not threaten its neighbors. The group also urged the free movement of returning refugees, the protection of foreign diplomatic personnel and the destruction of any remaining chemical weapons.

A senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said that Biden administration officials had opened two separate communication channels for the discussions with the newly empowered Syria rebels. The first was established shortly after Mr. Assad fled the country for Russia on Sunday, the other more recently as part of the search for Mr. Tice, who is believed to be alive.

Having direct contact with a group classified as a terrorist entity is politically dicey for the Biden administration. But many U.S. officials say the Syrian rebel faction appears to have grown more moderate, and may be prepared to govern in line with American principles, though they add that it is too early to remove the formal terrorist designation.

“What really counts is action — and sustained action,” Mr. Blinken said.

For now, Biden officials believe communication can have an important influence over the group’s behavior.

An aide to Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, called Saturday on Syria’s new leaders to “overcome their tortured history” to create a unified and inclusive state, resistant to the meddling of outside powers.

Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to the Emirati president, praised the moderate statements of Syria’s new leaders but expressed concern about the rebels’ past affiliations with radical Islam.

“These are all indicators that are quite worrying,” Mr. Gargash said on Saturday at a World Policy Conference in Abu Dhabi as his country’s foreign minister attended the meeting in Jordan.

He said he hoped that Iran, a staunch ally of Mr. al-Assad, which recently mended ties with the Arab nations of the Gulf, will now concentrate on domestic economic issues and “reasonable and rational concerns about its national security.” Iran, he said, should stop trying to insert itself into the Arab world with regional ambitions and military proxies and should learn lessons from its defeats.

“To come back and try to reincarnate a program of regional expansion based on militias, based on sectarianism, is not really in the good of the region or in the good of Iran itself,” he said.

In a sign that the Gulf States may play a greater role in Syria’s future than they have in its recent past, Mr. Gargash promised to support the country’s reconstruction.

Turkey is another country that appears to be emerging with greater influence in Syria, given its support of the offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Some Syrian rebel factions backed by Turkey joined forces with the group in the assault.

The Turkish government made plans this week to reopen its embassy in Damascus, Syria’s capital, which has been closed for almost 13 years. It also conducted military operations, including airstrikes, in northern Syria against Kurdish militants whom it considers a threat.

On Friday, the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, issued a stark warning to members of the Kurdish militia that controls northeastern Syria, the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.

“It is our strategic target to eliminate the YPG,” he said in an interview with the Turkish broadcaster NTV. He said any members who were not Syrian should leave the country as soon as possible, and added: “The entire command level of YPG should leave the country, too. The remaining ones should continue living as they lay down their weapons.”

The Kurdish-led forces in Syria have been important partners with the United States in the fight there against the Islamic State terrorist group.

The outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011 helped to fuel the rise of the Islamic State, which conquered large swaths of Syria and Iraq and took years to defeat. The potential that ISIS might try to take advantage of the power shift in Syria is a chief concern for U.S. and regional leaders.

“This is a moment of vulnerability in which ISIS will seek to regroup, taking advantage of the transition in Syria,” Mr. Blinken said in Aqaba.

Compounding that worry is the fact that Turkey has funded and trained a Syrian rebel force, the Syrian National Army, which provided security for Turkish military bases in northern Syria and helped it fight Kurdish-led forces in the country.

The commander of Syria’s largest Kurdish militia accused the United States this past week of abandoning its Kurdish allies in Syria.

In another ripple effect of the rebel takeover in Syria, Russian forces appeared on Friday to be packing up some military equipment at an important air base near the Syrian port city of Latakia in a possible prelude to a broader withdrawal.

The Hmeimim base is a critical part of Moscow’s military foothold in the region. But the upheaval in the country has left the prospects for a continuing Russian military presence in Syria unclear for now.

Israel has also seized an opportunity created by the collapse of the Assad dynasty, bombing weapons stores and other targets in Syria to eliminate what it says are potential threats and also seizing territory in the country near the disputed Golan Heights.

Syria on Friday condemned Israel’s attacks and called on the U.N. Security Council to compel the Israeli government to cease any further attacks.

Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Koussay Aldahhak, said the Security Council should “compel Israel to respect international law,” and not allow it to benefit from Syria’s transition.

Safak Timur and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.