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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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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Javier Milei’s government announced Wednesday the signing of an agreement with the United States to strengthen “its surveillance and control capabilities in the South Atlantic,” according to an official statement. The deal runs for five years and means, on one hand, a U.S. contribution of technology to modernize the South American country’s naval equipment and, on the other, authorization for forces from U.S. Southern Command to take part in patrolling Argentina’s southern sea.

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