Politics

To most of this bakery’s millions of devotees, the idea that its “Steak Bake” could be “lifted” lies somewhere between folly and heresy. It brings diced beef, gravy and crisp puff pastry together in perfect harmony. It cannot be improved, or ameliorated, or heightened. It has already attained its highest form.Its popularity attests to that. The bakery, Greggs, a family chain founded in 1939 to deliver door-to-door baked goods to mining communities around Newcastle, England, sells hundreds of thousands of them every week, mostly to customers who walk into one of their more than 2,300 branches around Britain and take them away in a paper bag, to be eaten hot, on the go.Mark Reid and Kieran McBride, of the upscale Fenwick department store in Newcastle, decided this fall simply to play with it...

At a remote spot in the Arizona desert, near a hole in the border wall, dozens of migrants huddled over wood fires.After fleeing war in Sudan, violent gangs in Central America or Mexican cartels, the men had all crossed into the United States illegally, walked on foot over rugged terrain for hours, and arrived at this outpost exhausted, hungry and cold.They wanted to turn themselves into the authorities to ask for asylum, but were stranded here, miles away from the closest town, Sásabe.Then, as temperatures dropped on Tuesday night, a convoy of Border Patrol agents rolled in, loaded the men into a van to be processed and sped away — off to search for more people in need of rescue.“We are not equipped to deal with this,” Scott Carmon, a Border Patrol watch commander, said while surveying th...

Ukraine scored a major success on Tuesday when it struck a Russian warship at port in Crimea, one of the most significant attacks against Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet in months. But in another setback for their ground campaign, Ukrainian officials acknowledged that they had all but retreated from the eastern city of Marinka after a monthslong battle to defend it.The two developments underscored the diverging fortunes of the two combatants this winter in a war that has largely settled into a deadlock: Ukraine racking up naval successes in the Black Sea and Crimea, where it is putting Russia on the defensive, and Russia pressing its attack on battlefields in the east after blunting a Ukrainian counteroffensive.A day after Russia said it had taken complete control of Marinka, Gen. Valery Zaluzhn...

Over the past two weeks, the owner of a hip wine bar in Buenos Aires saw the price of beef soar 73 percent, while the zucchini he puts in salads rose 140 percent. An Uber driver paid 60 percent more to fill her tank. And a father said he spent twice as much on diapers for his toddler than he did last month.In Argentina, a country synonymous with galloping inflation, people are used to paying more for just about everything. But under the country’s new president, life is quickly becoming even more painful.When Javier Milei was elected president on Nov. 19, the country was already suffering under the world’s third-highest rate of inflation, with prices up 160 percent from a year before.But since Mr. Milei took office on Dec. 10 and quickly devalued the Argentine currency, prices have soared a...

United Nations and other aid workers warned on Saturday that a new U.N. Security Council resolution calling for stepped-up aid for Gaza’s embattled civilians would fail to stop the spiraling humanitarian crisis because it did not demand a full halt to the fighting.The resolution called on the U.N. Secretary General to appoint a special coordinator for aid to Gaza and establish a mechanism to speed up aid delivery in consultation with all relevant parties.But without a cease-fire to accompany the stepped-up assistance, aid officials said they cannot address the insufficient food and fuel entering the territory, the collapse of Gaza’s commercial sector, frequent comminations disruptions or the inability of relief workers to reach many areas because of intensive Israeli airstrikes and ground ...

It was the depths of the Cold War in the 1960s, and Caracas was on edge.Marxist guerrillas in Venezuela were getting weapons and training from Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Along Venezuela’s eastern border, anticolonial leaders in what was then British Guiana were agitating for independence.Alarmed that a Guyanese leader could create a Cuban beachhead in South America, Venezuela’s staunchly anti-Communist president, Rómulo Betancourt, came up with a strategy, which blunted the independence push: At the United Nations, his government resurrected a long-festering claim to more than half of Guyana’s territory.Now the dispute over Essequibo — an oil-rich, Guyanese region nearly the size of Florida — has flared back to life. This month, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, unveiled new maps displaying...