World

Already, though, the rangers had made a difference. They had established the government’s presence in a formerly anything-goes region. Thanks to their outreach in San Martín, they had been invited in November to march in the annual parade celebrating the cuadrillas. Mr. Zorro thought that the invitation was a turning point for the park, a moment of acceptance. And on their motorcycle patrols through Manacacías, the rangers had logged some important wildlife sightings.Gustavo Castro, one of the rangers staying on the ranch that week, had been standing at a lookout a few months earlier when he noticed something brown and furry ambling in the tall grass. “I got closer to him, maybe five or six meters, and he carried on normally,” Mr. Castro said. “I was able to get some good videos and photos...

An Israeli soccer player for a Turkish club was briefly detained by the Turkish authorities and suspended by the club after he displayed a message of support for Israel during a game on Sunday.The player, Sagiv Jehezkel, a 28-year-old wing for the top-division club Antalyaspor, flashed the message after he scored in a match.To celebrate his goal, Mr. Jehezkel jogged to the corner of the field, where a group of photographers was positioned. He pointed to a handwritten message on a band of tape on his left wrist that included a six-pointed Star of David and “100 days, 7/10” — a reference to the start of the war between Israel and Hamas on Oct. 7.His gesture spread quickly on social media, stirring outrage among fans and even the president of his club, who called his action “propaganda” in a ...

As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. Over yerba mate and torta fritas, his mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue.The Chaná are an Indigenous people in Argentina and Uruguay whose lives were intertwined with the mighty Paraná River, the second longest in South America. They revered silence, considered birds their guardians and sang their babies lullabies: Utalá tapey-’é, uá utalá dioi — sleep little one, the sun has gone to sleep.Ms. Miguelina Yelón urged her son to protect their stories by keeping them secret. So it was not until decades later, recently retired and seeking out people with whom he could chat, that he made a startling dis...

Since mid-November, the Houthis, a Yemeni rebel group backed by Iran, have launched dozens of attacks on ships sailing through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a crucial shipping route through which 12 percent of world trade passes.The United States and a handful of allies, including Britain, struck back, carrying out missile strikes on Houthi targets inside Yemen early Friday local time and thrusting the rebels and their long-running armed struggle further into the limelight.The attack on Houthi bases came a day after the United Nations Security Council voted to condemn “in the strongest terms” at least two dozen attacks carried out by the Houthis on merchant and commercial vessels, which it said had impeded global commerce and undermined navigational freedom.Here’s a primer on the Houthis...

A sense of dread took hold in Ecuador on Wednesday, with the streets empty, classes canceled and many people afraid to leave their homes after the disappearance of two gang leaders on Monday set off prison riots, police kidnappings and the on-air storming of a TV station.Even for a country accustomed to violence, the events that have rocked Ecuador this week were shocking.“I feel like the world I knew before is gone,” said María Ortega, a schoolteacher in Guayaquil, a sprawling coastal city. “You can know how things start, but not how they’ll end.”It began with violence erupting in prisons across the South American country as soldiers surged into a penal compound in Guayaquil, after the disappearance of a powerful gang leader, Adolfo Macías, from his cell. Inmates took prison guards captiv...

Israel announced a new military phase in GazaIsrael said its military was starting to shift from a large-scale ground-and-air campaign in the Gaza Strip to a more targeted phase, with fewer troops and airstrikes, in its war against Hamas. Israeli officials have privately told their U.S. counterparts that they hoped the transition would be completed by the end of the month, U.S. officials said.Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, is in Israel to press officials there to curtail their campaign in Gaza and to prevent the war from spreading across the region. An Israeli strike last week killed senior Hamas leaders in Lebanon, and Hezbollah said yesterday that one of its commanders had also been killed in a strike in southern Lebanon.U.S. officials said they expected the transition to r...

A decade ago, a funny money mystery fell into the hands of scientists and students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima.The university had been acquiring 19th- and 20th-century Peruvian coins from local dealers, and graduate students in the chemistry department were analyzing the pieces for their thesis work. But one coin, a 10-cent piece known as a dinero, stood out.The dinero was marked “1899.” The problem was that official records indicated no coins of that denomination were minted in Peru that year — according to the people who made the money, the coin never existed.Most international coin catalogs don’t list 1899 dineros, said Luis Ortega, a chemist at the university. And in the rare cases that they do, there is often only a note of “counterfeit” with no further detai...

When Ghada Abu Samra leaves the room in Rafah where she, her mother and brother have been living between their searches for food and clean water, she sees more Gazans packing in to the already overcrowded southern city.“Every day the numbers grow in a massive way,” said Ms. Abu Samra, a 24-year-old web development student who has been in Rafah for weeks. “There is no place for anyone except to sit in the streets and build a tent.”As almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been driven from their homes by Israel’s nearly three months of airstrikes and evacuation orders, Rafah, once a city of 300,000 people, has become the main refuge for those displaced. More than 1 million people are squeezed into the city, in a tiny corner of the enclave on the Egyptian border, the United Nations s...

Canada has long promoted itself globally as a model for protecting one of the country’s most vital natural resources: the world’s largest swath of boreal forest, which is crucial to fighting climate change.But a new study using nearly half a century of data from the provinces of Ontario and Quebec — two of the country’s main commercial logging regions — reveals that harvesting trees has inflicted severe damage on the boreal forest that will be difficult to reverse.Researchers led by a group from Griffith University in Australia found that since 1976 logging in the two provinces has caused the removal of 35.4 million acres of boreal forest, an area roughly the size of New York State.While nearly 56 million acres of well-established trees at least a century old remain in the region, logging ...

At least 48 people were killed in the powerful earthquake that struck western Japan on Monday, the authorities said a day after the disaster, as they continued to comb through the rubble of collapsed and burned buildings.The dead included 19 in Wajima, a city in Ishikawa Prefecture, the coastal epicenter of the earthquake, which triggered tsunami warnings, extensive evacuations and widespread power outages after it hit around 4:10 p.m. on New Year’s Day.A large fire broke out in Wajima after the quake, which registered 7.6 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale. Some died after being trapped in rubble from destroyed buildings.The tsunami warnings were lifted on Tuesday morning, and the quake did not produce waves as high as initially feared. The police, firefighters and members of the cou...