Prince Harry will get his long-awaited day in court against Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids on Monday, as his lawsuit against News Group Newspapers for unlawful gathering of private information finally goes on trial in London.

Harry himself is not expected to take the stand for at least the first two weeks of the trial, which will be devoted to “generic issues” relating to the practices of the papers from the 1990s to the early 2010s, when lawyers say their reporters routinely hacked the prince’s cellphone and those of other celebrities to dig up intimate details.

The hearings could nonetheless prove damaging to Mr. Murdoch and several of his former lieutenants. Lawyers for Harry, 40, the younger son of King Charles III, will set out to show that the News Group executives concealed and sought to destroy evidence of hacking and other improper practices.

Harry is one of only two plaintiffs left from an original group of about 40; the rest, including the actor Hugh Grant, have settled with News Group. The other plaintiff, who is also scheduled to take the stand, is Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, who alleges that News Group hacked his phone and targeted him for political reasons.

Harry has so far refused to settle, casting his suit as a last chance to hold the British news media to account for one of its darkest periods. In addition to hacking phones, the tabloids hired private detectives and encouraged journalists to lie and misrepresent themselves to gain access to highly personal data.

“One of the main reasons for seeing this through is accountability because I am the last person that can actually achieve that,” Harry said last month in an interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit.

He acknowledged that any settlement might not compensate him for his legal costs, and that with News Group aggressively seeking to settle its remaining litigation out of court, it was not clear whether any cases would follow his.

Still, the prospect of multiple days of testimony by the prince, who left Britain for Southern California in part because of what he said was the relentless media intrusion into his life, guarantees a riveting spectacle.

Harry has testified once before, in June 2023 in a hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers. At the time, he was the first senior member of the royal family to take the stand in court since 1891, when Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, testified about wrongdoing during a game of baccarat at which he was present.

Timothy Fancourt, the judge in the 2023 case as well as the current one, ruled that Harry had been a victim of “widespread and habitual hacking,” and awarded him 140,600 pounds, or $171,600. Harry settled the remainder of his privacy claims against the Mirror Group for at least £400,000, or $488,000.

Lawyers involved in previous hacking cases said Harry was taking a risk in exposing himself to several days of cross-examination. He is citing 30 articles that span a period from 1996 to 2011, some of which asserted that he was a regular drug user. His lawyer, David Sherborne, said that was not true.

If Harry continues to reject any settlement offer from News Group, under English law he is at risk of paying substantial legal costs if the court does not award him a commensurate amount at the end of the trial. While a last-minute settlement is still possible, lawyers said he seemed intent on airing his charges in open court.

“Harry appears to have reconciled himself that this is a price worth paying for getting to what he believes is the truth,” said Daniel Taylor, a media lawyer in London who has represented other former plaintiffs in the case. “His overriding imperative is to take the matter to trial in order to expose what he believes is their egregious wrongdoing.”

That, in turn, raises the stakes for Mr. Murdoch’s former associates. Among those who could come under unwelcome scrutiny is Will Lewis, a former News executive who helped manage the company’s response to the hacking scandal in 2010 and 2011, and is currently the publisher of The Washington Post.

Lawyers for Harry say Mr. Lewis was part of a scheme to conceal evidence of hacking by removing files from a computer belonging to Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News U.K. The files were transferred to a USB drive that either was lost or has not been opened because it was encrypted, according to a complaint submitted by the plaintiffs.

News Group has said Ms. Brooks was questioned about deleting emails during her criminal trial in 2014, and was cleared of the charges. Mr. Lewis was never charged. He later was chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, before being named publisher of The Post in 2023.

“Any allegations of wrongdoing are untrue,” Mr. Lewis said in a statement to The Times last June. “I have no further comment to make.”

Lawyers for News Group argue that Harry is trying to turn the trial into a broader public inquiry into phone hacking. In May, Judge Fancourt rejected a bid by Harry’s lawyers to draw Mr. Murdoch into the case, saying, “There is a desire on the part of those running the litigation on the claimants’ side to shoot at ‘trophy’ targets, whether those are political issues or high-profile individuals.”

Mr. Murdoch, 93, testified before Britain’s Parliament in 2011 that he should not be held personally responsible for hacking, given that he ran a global company with 53,000 employees. But he shut down News of the World, the tabloid most closely linked to hacking, and issued a contrite apology.

For Harry, Mr. Murdoch has remained an archnemesis. Harry and his older brother, William, have long held his tabloids, among others, responsible for the death of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, who was killed in a car accident in Paris in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.

In his memoir, “Spare,” Harry described Mr. Murdoch’s politics as being “just to the right of the Taliban’s.”

“I didn’t like the harm he did each and every day to Truth, his wanton desecration of objective facts,” Harry wrote. “I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality.”

Migrants used to gather by the hundreds in encampments in Ciudad Juárez, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, waiting for a chance to cross into the United States. But as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office on Monday, few people could be found this past week on the once-teeming embankments.

All that remained were extinguished campfires, discarded shoes, shirts and toothbrushes.

One Mexican city after another has reported a similar situation along the border with the United States, where the number of migrants has steadily dropped in recent months. The decline has been attributed largely to hardened restrictions introduced by the Biden administration and by Mexican and Panamanian officials meant to deter migration.

As President Biden came under increasing pressure during his re-election campaign to curb migration flows, he issued in June an executive order effectively blocking undocumented migrants from receiving asylum. That month, U.S. border officials recorded 83,532 illegal crossings, a significant drop from the previous month’s 117,905.

Despite the decline, illegal crossings remain higher than during much of Mr. Trump’s first term, fueling calls by the new Trump administration, and even by some Democrats in Congress, for more severe restrictions on migration to the United States.

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Homeland Security Department, told senators on Friday that she planned to reinstate a Trump-era policy forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. cases and reduce temporary immigration relief for people from countries experiencing unrest.

“Border security must remain a top priority,” Ms. Noem said.

Some officials in Latin America are pushing back, arguing that the tougher restrictions on both sides of the border have worked to stem the crisis.

“The flow of migration from the south of Mexico toward the border has diminished in the last few months,” said Enrique Serrano Escobar, who leads the Chihuahua State office responsible for receiving migrants. “There is no crisis,” he said of Ciudad Juárez. “There is no problem.”

The quieter border these days contrasts with the recent years of frequent tragedies along the frontier, including family separations and the 2023 fire at a migrant detention facility in Ciudad Juárez that killed dozens.

Thousands of migrants are still trying to make their way north even as the authorities on both sides of the border harden restrictions. But overall, movement through the Darién Gap, the inhospitable land bridge connecting North and South America, and shelter capacity in U.S.-Mexico border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros have become indicators of how migration flows are easing.

“Normally, we would have around 150,” said Lucio Torres, who has been overseeing a shelter in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande, for three years. The shelter has capacity for 300 people. This week, the facility housed only seven.

Mr. Serrano Escobar said that migrant shelters run by government and civic organizations in Ciudad Juárez, with capacity for about 3,000 migrants, are currently only about 40 percent full. “The city is calm,” he added.

In November, more than 46,000 people crossed the border illegally, the lowest number during the Biden administration. December saw more than 47,000 illegal crossings. By comparison, in December 2023, illegal crossings surpassed a record of roughly 250,000.

Mexican security forces said that they detained more than 475,000 migrants in the last quarter of 2024. That is nearly 68 percent more detentions compared with the same period a year earlier, according to government data.

Solsiree Petit, 44, a Venezuelan teacher in Ciudad Juárez, said she had tumors in her breasts that require surgery. She said her sons, 10 and 17, had turned themselves in to the U.S. authorities seeking asylum about a week ago. She said she had an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in El Paso to submit her own asylum application on Jan. 29.

She said she hoped that her appointment would still be honored under the Trump administration. “I prefer not to think otherwise about that,” she said, “because it depresses you more.”

CBP One, the phone app that Ms. Petit used to schedule her appointment, allowed U.S. immigration authorities to process nearly 44,000 migrants in December at ports of entry.

While the Biden administration created the app to incentivize migrants to avoid crossing into the country illegally, Ms. Noem, the Homeland Security nominee, said she would wind down use of the app, reflecting concerns among Republicans that it was used to allow migrants into the country who should be barred from entry.

Similar to the tense calm seen in Ciudad Juárez, the Pumarejo shelter in Matamoros, which can accommodate 1,500 people, currently has only 260, according to shelter officials. In Tijuana, three notable shelters indicated that they were only 50 percent full.

Shelters in Guatemala City have also all but emptied of migrants heading north, said Karina López, a social worker at the city’s Casa del Migrante shelter. Several years ago, the shelter struggled to care for more than 3,000 weary migrants with just over 100 beds. Those numbers are unheard-of today, Ms. López said. That is partly because people are staying only a few hours in their rush to get to the border before the inauguration, she said.

Fear of violent crime and extortion is also thought to be keeping some migrants away from shelters targeted by organized crime in Mexico. Instead of seeking refuge there, some are choosing to stay with acquaintances, in rented rooms or with their smugglers as they try to make their way to the border, legally or illegally.

“I don’t care if the devil himself is in my way, I’m going forward,” said Juan Hernández, a handyman from Honduras. Mr. Hernández, 45, said he had lived in the United States for 23 years and had been deported five times. He arrived six months ago in Monterrey, a major industrial hub in northeast Mexico, after being deported to Honduras following a conviction in North Carolina for drunken driving.

He said he planned to cross the border again soon in a bid to reunite with his two children living in Raleigh, N.C.

For now, migrants like Mr. Hernández appear to be a minority. Not long ago in the historic center of Guatemala City, the sidewalks were filled with people begging for spare change or a meal for their children, many of them draped in the Venezuelan flag. This week, they were mostly absent.

In the Darién Gap, the number of migrants fell sharply after the Panamanian government introduced tougher restrictions to complement the Biden administration’s new asylum policies.

Two years ago, boatloads of people trying to get to the jungle would leave every day from Necoclí, a Colombian beach town at the southern end of the jungle. Migrants would often photograph the boat journeys and share pictures on social media, where they came to symbolize the migrants’ last moments of safety before entering the perilous Darién Gap jungle.

Now, days go by when there are not enough migrants to fill a single boat. Instead, the boats are leaving every two or three days and not always full.

In August 2023, a record 80,000 migrants passed through the Darién in a single month. In December, just under 5,000 people went through, according to Panamanian officials.

Yet, as the Trump inauguration approaches, smugglers have continued to urge migrants to get to the border and avoid a potential crackdown. Fearing it could be their last chance to make their way to the United States, some have resorted to begging friends to loan them money or to turning over the deeds to their homes to smugglers as collateral, shelter operators say.

One option offered by smugglers and referred to by migrants as the “V.I.P. route” shuttles migrants from Guatemala to Cancún, Mexico, by land, and from Cancún to Ciudad Juárez by air using false Mexican passports, according to Ms. López, the social worker. The price of a one-way flight on this route peaked at around $450 this week.

After the inauguration, the price drops to about $100.

Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal from Guatemala City; Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia; Chantal Flores from Monterrey, Mexico; Edyra Espriella from Matamoros, Mexico; Aline Corpus from Tijuana, Mexico; and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Rocío Gallegos from Mexico City.

When Hamas militants led a deadly cross-border raid on Oct. 7, 2023, they triggered a war with Israel that has devastated Gaza. They also set off shock waves that have reshaped the Middle East in unexpected ways.

Powerful alliances were upended. Long-established “red lines” were crossed. A decades-old dictatorship at the heart of the region was swept away.

Fifteen months after the October attacks, with a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas set to start on Sunday, here is a look at how the region has been radically transformed.

Israel

Israel has reasserted its military dominance but may face heavy diplomatic and domestic costs.

The country’s leaders treated the Hamas-led attacks as an existential threat and have been determined to defeat Hamas and weaken its main backer, Iran. Israel has not only succeeded in debilitating Hamas in Gaza, but has also decimated the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah and dealt a heavy blow to Iran’s network of Middle Eastern allies.

Closer to home, and in the realm of global public opinion, Israel’s successes have been more ambiguous. While its assault on Gaza has severely weakened Hamas, it has not destroyed it, as the government had vowed to do.

Israel’s economy has been battered by the war, and the country’s polarized politics — briefly overlooked when the war began — seem to have returned to their fractious state of affairs. The country’s international standing is in tatters, threatening its diplomatic goals, such as the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia.

These dynamics could shift once again with Monday’s inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who pushed in his first term to normalize ties between Arab states and Israel and may seek to revive those efforts.

In the longer term, it is hard to predict what threats Israel may face from a generation of young Lebanese and Palestinians who have been traumatized by the death and destruction that Israel’s bombardment has wrought on their families and homes.

Hamas

Hamas and its leader at the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, Yahya Sinwar, wanted them to set off a wider regional war between Israel and Hamas’s allies. But the group failed to anticipate how the conflict might end.

For Palestinian civilians, the future looks bleaker than ever.

Israel’s bombardment and invasion have forced almost all Gazans from their homes and killed more than 45,000 people, according to the Gazan health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel has reduced vast swaths of the enclave to rubble.

Israel has killed off Mr. Sinwar and the rest of Hamas’s top military and political brass, and the group’s popularity among Gazans has faded, though U.S. officials estimate that Hamas has recruited almost as many fighters as it has lost over 15 months of fighting.

And yet, its remaining leaders may claim that its survival is a victory.

Israel insists Hamas cannot rule the enclave after the war, but has resisted calls to lay out a plan for postwar Gaza. Gulf states like Saudi Arabia now say they won’t normalize relations with Israel unless it commits to a path to establish a Palestinian state.

Lebanon

A shattered Hezbollah, once the crown jewel of Iran’s so-called axis of resistance, has loosened its grip on Lebanon. But Israel’s invasion and bombardment have left Lebanon facing billions of dollars in reconstruction costs amid an economic crisis that predated the war.

Hezbollah, formerly Lebanon’s dominant political and military force, has suffered a stark reversal of fortunes since the 2023 attacks. Israel has killed most of its top leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah. Its patron Iran has been weakened. And its supply lines through Syria are in jeopardy. More broadly, the group’s core promise to Lebanon — that it alone can protect the country from Israel — has been gutted.

Years of political gridlock, largely blamed on the militant group, eased up enough this month to enable the Lebanese Parliament to elect a new president and appoint a prime minister who is backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Despite the blows, Hezbollah can still call on thousands of fighters, and has support from Lebanon’s large Shiite Muslim community. It may yet find a way to rebuild within Lebanon’s fractious political system.

Syria

The toppling of Bashar al-Assad last month — one of the most dramatic and unexpected consequences of Oct. 7 — dismantled a brutal authoritarian regime. But the inevitable turmoil that followed has created the conditions for new power struggles.

For nearly 13 years, Mr. al-Assad had largely contained a rebellion against his family’s five-decade grip on power — with help from Russia, Hezbollah and Iran.

But as Moscow focused on its war in Ukraine, and Iran and Hezbollah reeled from Israeli attacks, rebels led by the Turkish-backed Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham sensed an opportunity. They surged through Syria and toppled the government in a matter of days.

With Iran and Russia on the back foot, Turkey is now in a prime position to play a pivotal role in Syria. Moscow hopes to maintain some of its naval and air bases, but the fate of its negotiations with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is uncertain.

Meanwhile, the United States has maintained a small military presence in Syria to fight the Islamic State terrorist group and is allied with Kurdish-led forces that Turkey regards as an enemy. And Israel has seized Syrian territory near the Golan Heights as a buffer zone and has been carrying out extensive airstrikes on what it says are Syrian military and weapons targets.

Syria’s neighbors and European nations — hosting millions of Syrian refugees — are watching closely to see whether the country can achieve stability or will descend once more into violent chaos.

Iran

Iran’s powerful network of regional alliances has unraveled, leaving the country vulnerable — and potentially incentivized to build a nuclear weapon.

Long seen as one of the Middle East’s most influential powers, Iran has emerged severely diminished from the reordering of the past 15 months. It has effectively lost much of its once-potent “axis of resistance,” the network of allies it used to counter the influence of the United States and Israel.

Its closest partner, Hezbollah, is now too weak to pose a serious threat to Israel. And with Mr. al-Assad ousted from Syria, Iran has lost influence over the country that provided a critical supply line for weapons and militants.

Previous red lines that kept the region from all-out war have been erased: Since Israel assassinated Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was a guest in Tehran, Iran and Israel have carried out direct airstrikes against each another.

Where exactly that leaves Tehran is unclear. A weakened Iranian government that feels increasingly vulnerable may be compelled to weaponize its decades-old nuclear program. U.S. officials have warned Iran may need only a few weeks to enrich uranium to bomb-grade levels.

Since 1988, the hulking presses at Lanex Manufacturing on the edge of Windsor, Ontario, have been stamping out door strikers, folding-seat latches, tailpipe hangers, frame braces and other prosaic bits of metal that make their way into vehicles ranging from Corvettes to Honda minivans.

But, these days, worries about the future permeate the plant as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to enter the White House. He has threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on all goods exported from Canada to the United States. In Windsor, that would ravage its lifeblood: automobiles and everything that goes into them.

“Everybody’s waiting for the next shoe to drop,” Bruce Lane, the president of Lanex, said in its boardroom, whose walls were made of painted concrete blocks. “If Windsor lost its automotive business, Windsor would not survive.”

Few Canadian cities are as acutely aware as Windsor of the integration of the two countries’ economies. The city sits just across the Detroit River from Detroit, and Canada’s maple-leaf flag often flies next to the stars and stripes there. And no industry has been interwoven across the border for as long as auto making.

“These workers here in Windsor are more exposed to trade with the United States than anyone else,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at a steel plant during a recent visit to the city.

Mr. Trump, he added, “is proposing tariffs that would damage not just people here in Windsor but people right across the country and indeed in the United States.”

Windsor’s two major landmarks are shared with Detroit: the $5.7 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge, scheduled to open this year, and the 96-year-old Ambassador Bridge, which carries about $300 million in cross-border trade each day. Of Canada’s $440 billion in annual exports to the United States, only oil and gas generate a larger amount than cars, trucks and auto parts.

But with Canadian officials taking Mr. Trump at his word that he will follow through on his threat of tariffs, Mr. Lane and others in the auto industry are already bracing for the potential fallout.

George Papp is the chief executive of Papp Plastics, whose headquarters sits near the imposing new suspension bridge. He said his U.S. customers, mainly automakers, would simply invoke the terms of contracts he has with them and deduct the cost of tariffs from the amount they pay him.

“Who’s going to take the hit?” Mr. Papp said. “Me, and people like me and companies like mine.”

Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturer’s Association, a Canadian trade group, estimated that most of his members had single-digit profit margins and that the tariffs Mr. Trump was threatening would be ruinous.

The intertwining of the auto industry across the two countries was cemented in 1965 when Canada and the United States reached an agreement that effectively eliminated the border for the industry. Today, 90 percent of cars and trucks made in Canada are sent to the United States, primarily by train.

At Lanex, small metal parts that few motorists will ever see are forged into shape by upward of 600 tons of pressure by the firm’s presses. Their journeys illustrate how enmeshed the two countries’ auto industries have become.

As a small supplier, Mr. Lane does not deal directly with carmakers, but sells his goods through larger parts makers. Seat-locking hooks that Lanex makes for Honda minivans are sent to a plant elsewhere in Ontario, where they are fitted with other parts and then shipped to an assembly line in Alabama that belongs to Honda, a Japanese company.

Mr. Lane’s factory has sent parts to Michigan for heat treating, brought them back to Windsor for more machining and then sold them to a U.S. company.

“Windsor is used to going back and forth across the border,” Mr. Lane said. “It’s like just like getting up out of bed in the morning.”

The turmoil from possible tariffs comes at an already difficult time for Canada’s auto business. Many auto-parts manufacturers have yet to see their business return to levels from before the coronavirus pandemic because of lagging car sales. In 2020, Lanex had about 60 employees working on two shifts, but it now has about two dozen employees running a single shift.

The anxiety is particularly acute in Windsor, which has a metropolitan population of roughly 484,000. Aside from cargo trucks rumbling across the Ambassador Bridge, the city’s most obvious automotive symbol is a giant Stellantis factory that produces Chrysler Pacifica minivans as well as Dodge Charger muscle cars.

A city within the city, the European-based Stellantis employs 4,500 workers at the factory. Aided by billions of dollars in Canadian subsidies, it is building a battery plant in a joint venture with the South Korean company LG in Windsor and recently spent 1.89 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.3 billion) to retool its assembly plant to make electric vehicles alongside gasoline-powered ones.

But, like many auto makers, Stellantis is now in a slump as it struggles with the transition to electric vehicles and with competition from China.

James Stewart, the president of the local union that represents Windsor’s Stellantis workers, said he did not believe a large tariff would necessarily deal a fatal blow to Stellantis’s operations in Windsor, given how much the company had invested.

But with so much of Windsor’s economic well-being intimately tied to trade with the United States, Mr. Stewart said, tariffs would deal a heavy blow, including the closing of businesses, layoffs and production cuts.

“We’re a suburb of Detroit; we’ve always felt that way,” he said, adding that Windsor seemed to be “under attack and for no reason.”

Mr. Trump initially characterized tariffs as a way to prod Canada and Mexico into better securing their borders to tamp down the flow of undocumented migrants.

But he also mused about making Canada the 51st state, noting that the United States was heavily invested in Canada’s military defense, and threatened to use economic force annex it. He has also vented about what he describes as the “subsidizing’’ of Canada by the United States, an apparent reference to the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, largely because of oil and gas imports.

The Trudeau government is expected to detail how it would retaliate against any U.S. tariffs on Monday, the day Mr. Trump is to take office.

But Canada’s comparatively small economy makes it difficult for the country to inflict substantial economic harm on the United States, though levies against specific products could hurt individual states. Retaliatory tariffs would also drive up prices in Canada.

Back at the Lanex plant, Mr. Lane said that, by pure coincidence, the company had been embarking on a “secret” manufacturing project unrelated to automobiles and that had unexpectedly become a potential hedge against tariffs. He declined to offer any details to avoid tipping off competitors.

Mr. Papp, the plastics-company owner, said that even though he would oppose tariffs, which would hurt his business, he was a fan of Mr. Trump and understood why the president-elect had argued that tariffs were needed to help rebuild industry in the United States.

Regardless of what happens, Mr. Papp said, Canada and the United States will always remain unshakable allies.

“You can’t separate our countries,” he said. “They’re bolted together.”