“Wake up, Link!” High in his treehouse, a pointy-eared boy named Link is roused by the call of a fairy. He is the only resident of the Kokiri Forest without a winged companion, until Navi bursts into his dreams to tell him that his destiny lies far beyond that sheltered corner of the woods. Thus begins a journey that will lead him to a princess, pit him against a threat determined to plunge the kingdom of Hyrule into darkness and, seven years later, task him with saving a world that has fallen into the clutches of evil.

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Raivis Melnis walks down a long corridor inside Latvia’s Ministry of Defense, located in an aging building in central Riga, the capital. He shows up all alone, a striking oddity for someone with government responsibility. Born 48 years ago in the Balvi municipality, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the Russian border, the Latvian army colonel has held the defense portfolio since late May. That was when several attack drones penetrated the Baltic country’s airspace without encountering any opposition. Two struck near an empty fuel depot. The crisis prompted then–prime minister Evika Silina to dismiss the defense minister and turn to Melnis.

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A young man waits for the bus. It’s cold and he has only a few coins on him. He asks his friend if he has 15 cents. His friend doesn’t have much either. Together they try to scrape together enough to buy something and catch the bus. The boy is fed up with relying on public transit, he doesn’t own a car and still lives with his mother. “I’m 21,” he says, and there’s a baby on the way. He wants to get rich. He wants to make records that sell. He’s tired of being poor.

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Google Maps still shows a prosperous image of Pacific Place, a business center on the busy Valley boulevard in a suburb east of Los Angeles, California. But that picture no longer matches reality. The windows of a mental health clinic and a real estate agency have been boarded up to protect the premises from vandalism. One by one, shops pulled down their shutters until the mall was almost deserted. Several businesses belonging to an enigmatic figure also closed: Guojun Xuan, a wealthy Chinese immigrant who is at the center of a chilling case involving the alleged mistreatment of 21 children at his Arcadia mansion.

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How many days of work does it take to earn enough to buy a basic food basket of 10 items? If we ask that question in Ireland, the answer is just 1.2 hours of work. The picture changes dramatically in the Central African Republic, where a worker needs about 30 days to purchase the same basic basket. In Finland, a person can pay for a week’s groceries with only 1.7 hours of work, compared with the 20.4 days required for someone living in Malawi.

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Seasoned in defending rural communities and smallholder farmers, Sofía Monsalve, 56, was appointed United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food in May. In exchange for throwing herself into an unpaid position, the Colombian political scientist says she enjoys complete independence. “I have the freedom to call things by their name,” she tells EL PAÍS in Turin during Terra Madre, the gathering of the international sustainable food network Slow Food.

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On March 7, 2024, Cynthia Conforto’s cellphone exploded with calls. On the eve of International Women’s Day events, a sports journalist’s accusation of sexual assault against four Vélez Sarsfield players disrupted plans for 8M. Conforto had been in charge of the club’s Gender Department for only a few months; Vélez is one of the 30 clubs in Argentina’s professional league. The alleged incidents took place during a team training camp in Tucumán, about 750 miles from Buenos Aires.

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Chile has achieved its first successful equine cloning. The foal, an identical copy of the polo pony Capacidad, was born on September 26 in the O’Higgins region after a pregnancy of nearly a year. Fidel Ovidio Castro, 65, and Lleretny Rodríguez, 50, two Cuban-born academics working at the School of Veterinary Sciences of the University of Concepción in Chile and founders of the company Vi-Embryos, led a research team that accomplished this reproductive biotechnology milestone, together with the Los Abedules Equine Reproduction Center.

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Colombia’s left took to the streets on Wednesday against President Abelardo de la Espriella and fared better than expected. Despite doubts about its ability to mobilize people, fears of police repression stoked by the president himself, the threat of rain and the fact that the protest fell on a weekday, thousands of Colombians demonstrated peacefully for hours. The marches, seen in the country’s main cities, were the first test of the ability of a battered left to mobilize the grassroots after losing power to a right-wing outsider allied openly with the United States and who embodies everything that progressives abhor.

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Overnight, the atmosphere at the Vatican has shifted and the future has become more uncertain. The news of Pope Leo XIV’s cancerous tumor has caused devastation, just 17 months after his election in May 2025, at a time when, at 71 and in good physical condition, he was thought likely to remain pope for many years. “We thought we had a pope for 20 years and now it’s no longer clear; this changes everything in the Curia, all the dynamics,” a prelate admits.

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The No Kings movement, which organized the largest protests against the government so far during Donald Trump’s second term, is taking its mobilization to the polls to promote early voting ahead of the midterms. The goal is to get as many voters as possible to cast ballots before November 3, the official day of the midterm elections, to counter abstention and problems that could arise at a time when, they say, the government is doing everything it can to restrict the right to vote.

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At 27, Javon Daniels will vote for the first time on November 3 in the U.S. midterm elections. He will be the first member of his family to cast a ballot. He also believes he will be one of the few in his neighborhood to do so — Third Ward, a predominantly Black community southeast of Houston where nearly 43% of residents live below the poverty line.

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President Laura Fernández of Costa Rica on Wednesday inaugurated the so-called High-Containment Center Against Organized Crime (CACCO), a mega-prison designed to hold 5,100 inmates under maximum-security conditions with the aim of isolating narcotics-trafficking gangs. The Costa Rican government seeks with this move to consolidate its tough-on-crime policy, the centerpiece of propaganda amid the security crisis, which is symbolized by the enormous penal complex modeled on Nayib Bukele’s approach.

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In barely a day, hurricane Polo, which formed in late September in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico, reached the highest category — level 5, corresponding to winds above 252 kilometers (156 mph) per hour. It was the second most powerful tropical cyclone recorded in the Pacific to date. Polo later weakened before making landfall as a storm — at category 2 — in Baja California Sur, Mexico. It left behind torrential rains, floods and infrastructure damage in northwest Mexico and the southwestern United States, and five deaths linked to those floods in Mexico.

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At a rally, he spoke highly of the backside of John Husted, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. He has posted one video after another of big cats attacking real people before sharing one — created with artificial intelligence — in which he is seen fending off a fearsome lion, dressed in a suit and with his bare hands. And he has repeated tired memes disrespecting Greenland, as well as an endless stream of clips and videos flattering himself.

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