After months of conflict and strikes, Javier Milei’s government yielded to the demands of Argentina’s university community and on Wednesday ordered a pay increase for professors and other higher education workers. It also announced it will allocate funds to boost universities’ operating budgets and those of their hospitals, though it will not increase grants for financial-aid scholarships for low-income students. The announced raises represent a partial reversal of the president’s budget-cutting measures, but remain below the university-financing law passed by Congress that Milei refuses to implement. For that reason, universities warned that the measure is “an important step but by no means definitive or sufficient.”

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Spaniards are currently getting a close look at a pope the world still knows little about. He has gone from being a mystery, a man who seemed feeble, to becoming, in the space of two months, a startling revelation after he clashed with Donald Trump in mid-April and, two weeks ago, published a far-reaching encyclical; an argument against the techno-fascism of Silicon Valley. His visit to Spain will culminate in the definitive discovery of Prevost, since it is his first major trip to Europe and he will speak to the entire Western world. But what does this pope think and why has he been so disconcerting?

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The demand over funding and salaries at public universities in Argentina shows no signs of abating. Protests and strikes resumed this week to demand that the government of Javier Milei respect the university financing law, while the academic community awaits a ruling from the Supreme Court of Justice on the government’s noncompliance. Since Tuesday, schools affiliated with the country’s largest university, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), have been occupied by students. And faculty unions are staging strikes across the country all week.

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Climate change is setting the stage for increasingly extreme phenomena that present challenges to agriculture. In the Argentine city of Santa Fe, researcher Raquel Lía Chan, 66, created GMO seeds designed to combat one of the countryside’s greatest threats: drought.

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Argentine President Javier Milei promised to dismantle the pillars of the Argentina he inherited from Peronism — the populist movement founded by former president Juan Perón — and rebuild a new country from the ground up. One of these pillars, which withstood the onslaught of previous right-wing governments, is labor legislation, whose foundations date back to 1974. This week, the Senate is poised to pass a labor reform that modifies 200 articles of the Employment Contract Law, rendering it unrecognizable. Unlike the attempts made by former presidents Carlos Menem, Fernando de la Rúa, and Mauricio Macri, Milei faces weakened and discredited unions. Also working in his favor is a labor market that has already fragmented and shifted because of technological change and more than a decade of economic stagnation.

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