World

A Haitian judge has indicted 51 people for their roles in the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, including his wife, Martine Moïse, who is accused of being an accomplice, despite being seriously wounded in the attack.A 122-page copy of the indictment by Judge Walther Voltaire that was provided to The New York Times does not accuse her of planning the killing nor does it offer any direct evidence of her involvement.Instead, it says that she and other accomplices gave statements that were contradicted by other witnesses, suggesting that they were complicit in the killing. The indictment also cites one of the main defendants in the case in custody in Haiti, who claimed that Mrs. Moïse was plotting with others to take over the presidency.The accusations echo those contained in a cr...

Even from a few miles away, the death rattle of another Ukrainian city echoed through the mist and fog. Russian warplanes were dropping more thousand-pound bombs on Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, reducing an already battered city to rubble and ashes.Since Jan. 1, President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have dropped around one million pounds of aerial bombs on an area encompassing just 12 square miles, according to estimates by Ukrainian officials and British intelligence.Avdiivka fell to the Russians on Saturday, after some of the most horrific and destructive fighting of the two-year-old war. In the end, Russia’s superior firepower and manpower overwhelmed Ukrainian forces over many months, even as Russia incurred a staggering number of casualties.The Ukrainians withdrew under withering bombar...

A United Nations agency that monitors and defends human rights was ordered on Thursday to leave Venezuela by the government of President Nicolás Maduro, an extraordinary move that will further strip the country of foreign oversight at a time when its government stands accused of intensifying repression.The announcement by Yván Gil, the foreign minister, comes just days after the detention and disappearance of Rocío San Miguel, a prominent security expert and human rights advocate.Following her detention, several U.N. entities issued online statements expressing concern about the arrest, some calling it part of a pattern in which the government tries to silence critics through intimidation.Mr. Gil said he was giving the staff of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 72 h...

The United States has informed Congress and its allies in Europe about Russian advances on a new, space-based nuclear weapon designed to threaten America’s extensive satellite network, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.Such a satellite-killing weapon, if deployed, could destroy civilian communications, surveillance from space and military command-and control operations by the United States and its allies. At the moment, the United States does not have the ability to counter such a weapon and defend its satellites, a former official said.Officials said that the new intelligence, which they did not describe in detail, raised serious questions about whether Russia was preparing to abandon the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bans all orbital nuclear weapons. But...

As the S.S. Arlington, a Canadian ship carrying wheat across Lake Superior, started to sink in stormy weather on May 1, 1940, its crew clambered into a lifeboat and then gazed upon a strange sight.There, across the stormy waters, was their captain, Frederick Burke, known as Tatey Bug, waving to them from the Arlington’s deck, moments before he went under with his ship.The odd behavior of the captain, a solitary figure who was left alone after his men escaped, remains a mystery. And it is likely that an explanation, like the ship itself, will never surface, according to researchers at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, which announced on Monday that the Arlington had been found off the coast of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.“The question is whether he was saying, ‘Hey, hold the...

Israeli leaders have framed an invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah as an imperative to achieve its goal of eliminating Hamas. But it’s a strategy that is fraught with complexity and is generating criticism over the potentially catastrophic impact such an operation would have on the more than 1 million Gazans sheltering there.The planning will likely take Israel’s military some time, Israeli officials and analysts said on Sunday. A major challenge for Israeli forces will be how to move civilians who have crowded into the city out of harm’s way. Many Gazans fled to Rafah on the instructions of the Israeli military to avoid the fighting farther north in Gaza, and a chorus of international leaders have expressed concerns that the people there have nowhere to go.The prospect of an assau...

For about 350 years, humanity’s most innovative hand-held computer was something called a slide rule. As typewriters once symbolized the writer, slide rules symbolized the engineer.These analog calculators came in metal, wood, plastic and even bamboo, and they could be found all over the world. Their functions included computing higher-order multiplications, exponents and logarithms, among other mathematical operations. They were usually long and rectangular with a retractable middle segment, and they featured dense fields of letters, lines and numbers stacked on top of one another.They looked almost comically abstruse, as if they might be used as paddles in the hazing rituals of a math fraternity.Non-nerds struggled to make sense of them. Then, in the early 1970s, lightweight electronic c...

When it’s after hours, and the boss is on the line, Australian workers — already among the world’s best-rested and most personally fulfilled employees — can soon press “decline” in favor of the seductive call of the beach.In yet another buttress against the scourge of overwork, Australia’s Senate on Thursday passed a bill giving workers the right to ignore calls and messages outside of working hours without fear of repercussion. It will now return to the House of Representatives for final approval.The new bill, which is expected to pass in the House with ease, will let Australian workers refuse “unreasonable” professional communication outside of the workday. Workplaces that punish employees for not responding to such demands could be fined.“Someone who is not being paid 24 hours a day sho...

In the ancient prehistory of Earth, there is a chapter that waits to be told known as Romer’s gap. Researchers have identified a hiatus in the tetrapod fossil record between 360 million and 345 million years ago, after fish had begun to adapt to land and more than 80 million years before the first dinosaurs.While mysteries remain about evolution’s experiments with living things during that 15-million-year gap, a fossilized tree described in a new paper offers greater insights to some of what was happening during this period in nature’s laboratory.Named Sanfordiacaulis densifolia, the tree had a six-inch diameter with a nearly 10-foot-tall trunk composed not of wood, but of vascular plant material, like ferns. Its crown had more than 200 finely striated, compound leaves emanating from spira...

Speaker Mike Johnson has said that the Senate package would be dead on arrival in the House.Credit...Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesSpeaker Mike Johnson pledged Saturday that the House would hold a vote next week on legislation to speed $17.6 billion in security assistance to Israel with no strings attached, a move likely to complicate Senate leaders’ efforts to rally support for a broader package with border security measures and aid to Ukraine.Mr. Johnson’s announcement to members of his conference came as senators were scrambling to finalize and vote on a bipartisan national security bill that has taken months to negotiate. The move could further erode G.O.P. support for the emerging compromise, which was already flagging under criticism from party leaders like Mr. Johnson and former Preside...