World

George Best’s résumé, in the late 1960s, was pretty much flawless. He was a dazzling, edge-of-the-seat winger, certainly one of the finest players on the planet. For a time, he perhaps did not even require the caveat. He was an English and European champion. Along with Bobby Charlton and Denis Law, he was a sanctified member of Manchester United’s Holy Trinity.More than that, he was a true crossover star. He was a fashionista. He was a heartthrob. He dated models. He graced the hippest nightclubs. He owned a trendy boutique. He was a darling of the swinging ’60s, a genuine celebrity. He had sufficient cultural cachet that he was known, in Spain, as El Beatle.All of that should, of course, have afforded him unquestionable authority when it came to the game that made him famous. Sadly, thoug...

Russia targeted Ukrainian cities with more than 150 missiles and drones on Friday morning, in what Ukrainian officials said was one of the largest air assaults of the war. At least 30 people were killed, and more than 160 were wounded, according to the Ukrainian government, and critical infrastructure was damaged.“This is the biggest attack since the counting began,” Yurii Ihnat, a Ukrainian Air Force spokesman, said in a brief telephone interview, adding that the military did not track air assaults in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022.For several hours on Friday, missiles, drones and debris slammed into factories, hospitals and schools in cities across Ukraine, from Lviv in the west to Kharkiv in the east, straining the country’s air defenses and...

At a remote spot in the Arizona desert, near a hole in the border wall, dozens of migrants huddled over wood fires.After fleeing war in Sudan, violent gangs in Central America or Mexican cartels, the men had all crossed into the United States illegally, walked on foot over rugged terrain for hours, and arrived at this outpost exhausted, hungry and cold.They wanted to turn themselves into the authorities to ask for asylum, but were stranded here, miles away from the closest town, Sásabe.Then, as temperatures dropped on Tuesday night, a convoy of Border Patrol agents rolled in, loaded the men into a van to be processed and sped away — off to search for more people in need of rescue.“We are not equipped to deal with this,” Scott Carmon, a Border Patrol watch commander, said while surveying th...

Before Oct. 7, Hana Cooper downloaded everything from daily news reports to rabbinic blog posts, saving them for posterity in the Israeli National Library’s archive of the Israeli internet and the broader Jewish online world.But within days of the Hamas-led attacks, Ms. Cooper began spending her time archiving violent images of the assault, many of them posted by the attackers themselves on digital platforms like Telegram.“It was surreal,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “I was working with the same tools, but in a completely different world. The war became everything that I did.”Israel’s cultural sector had to reconstitute itself on Oct. 7, as the nation grieved the roughly 1,200 people killed that day and the military called up hundreds of thousands of citizens.With rockets from Gaza fl...

An archaeological expedition in Mexico seeks what’s left of the sprawling, centuries-old catacombs hidden below the ruins of Mitla. More information

Read: The 10 Best Books of 2023Best TV ShowsNathan Fielder, the Canadian actor known for his deadpan delivery, is back with a dark comedy called “The Curse.” Here’s a trailer. It’s streaming on Paramount+ Canada. (Mr. Fielder was an executive producer on “How To With John Wilson,” another show that critics say is worth your time.)Read: Best TV Shows of 2023Best Movies“Past Lives,” the debut film by the South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song, is “an examination of destiny, chance, love and the invisible thread that binds one soul to the next,” writes Alissa Wilkinson, a movie critic at The Times. (I enjoyed watching this film at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, which has made it available for rent. You can also catch it on streaming platforms in Canada.)An honorable mention on the lis...

It was the depths of the Cold War in the 1960s, and Caracas was on edge.Marxist guerrillas in Venezuela were getting weapons and training from Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Along Venezuela’s eastern border, anticolonial leaders in what was then British Guiana were agitating for independence.Alarmed that a Guyanese leader could create a Cuban beachhead in South America, Venezuela’s staunchly anti-Communist president, Rómulo Betancourt, came up with a strategy, which blunted the independence push: At the United Nations, his government resurrected a long-festering claim to more than half of Guyana’s territory.Now the dispute over Essequibo — an oil-rich, Guyanese region nearly the size of Florida — has flared back to life. This month, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, unveiled new maps displaying...

There was a noticeable absence among the participating countries when Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced that the United States was organizing a new naval task force to confront the threat from Yemen’s Houthi militia marauding against global shipping in the Red Sea.No regional power agreed that its navy would participate. The only Middle Eastern country taking part is the tiny island state of Bahrain, and there was otherwise conspicuous silence from regional capitals.Many Arab countries depend heavily on the trade that flows through the Red Sea, from the Suez Canal in the north to the Bab-al-Mandeb Strait that Yemen abuts in the south. But with the United States’ repeated and vocal announcements of support for Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip fomenting anger among Arab popula...

Chileans on Sunday rejected a new constitution that would have pulled the country to the right, likely ending a turbulent four-year process to replace their national charter with little to show for it.Nearly 56 percent of voters rejected the proposed text, with all of the votes counted.It is the second time in 16 months that Chile, the South American nation of 19 million, has rebuffed a proposed constitution — the other was written by the left — showing how deeply divided the nation remains over a set of rules and principles to govern it even after four years of debate.That debate began in 2019 after enormous protests prompted a national referendum in which four out of five Chileans voted to scrap their constitution, a heavily amended version of the 1980 text adopted under the bloody milit...

Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, the emir of Kuwait who took power as the ruler of his tiny oil-rich state at a time of paralysis and political infighting in 2020, has died, Kuwait’s state news agency said on Saturday. He was 86.“With great sadness and sorrow, we offer our condolences to the Kuwaiti people, Islamic and Arab nations and the people of the world,” the Kuwaiti royal court said in a statement.One of Sheikh Nawaf’s earliest acts was to appoint a half brother, Sheikh Mishal al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, a veteran intelligence and security czar, as his crown prince, or designated heir, to deputize for him at important political and state occasions.Critics interpreted the appointment of Sheikh Mishal, now 83 — possibly the world’s oldest crown prince — as a sign that Kuwait w...