World

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...

Ana Ofelia Murguía, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed actresses, whose voice acting as Mama Coco in the animated movie “Coco” brought her international recognition, died on Sunday. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and its National Theater Company, which did not say where she died.The National Theater Company described Ms. Murguía on social media as “one of Mexico’s greatest actresses.” In a statement, Lucina Jiménez López, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, described her career as one that “marked an entire era.” In the 2017 film “Coco,” made by Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, Ms. Murguía plays the key role of Mama Coco, the great-grandmother of a boy, the protagonist Miguel, who finds himself in the land of the dead on a journ...

Lee Jae-myung, the leader of South Korea’s main opposition party, was stabbed in the neck on Tuesday morning by a man who approached him asking for his autograph, the police said.Mr. Lee, 59, the leader of the liberal Democratic Party, was making his way through a crowd in the port city of Busan when he was attacked, according to the police and live-streamed TV footage of the incident. He had just finished taking questions from journalists after touring the site of a planned airport.The police in Busan said the assailant, a 66-year-old man, had been detained and was under investigation for a possible charge of attempted murder. But they did not provide details about Mr. Lee’s condition or the motives of the attacker, who they said had used a knife with a five-inch blade.Mr. Lee was bleedin...

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...