World

Associated media - Connected media Still, with Hungary finally voting for Sweden’s accession to NATO, at last the pieces are falling into place for a sharply enhanced NATO deterrent in the Baltic and North Seas, with greater protection for the frontline states of Finland, Norway and the Baltic nations, which border Russia. Once Hungary hands in a letter certifying parliamentary approval to the U.S. State Department, Sweden will become the 32nd member of NATO, and all the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, with the exception of Russia, will be part of the alliance. “Sweden brings predictability, removing any uncertainty about how we would act in a crisis or a war,” Mr. Dalsjo said. Given Sweden’s geography, including Gotland, the island that helps controls the entrance to the Balti...

Associated media - Associated media Israel denied the allegations, arguing that statements by Israeli government and military officials were taken out of context, and that its military has taken steps to preserve civilian lives. After the hearings, the Israeli government declassified a set of 30 secret orders which it said showed the effort to minimize casualties. . Just under a month after the case was filed, the court issued a series of “provisional measures,” similar to a temporary injunction, ordering Israel to refrain from genocidal acts, to prevent and punish incitement and to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. The court, which stopped short of demanding that Israel halt its military offensive, also ordered Israel to send a report within one month detailing the measures it had t...

Associated media - Linked media “It is evident that people are leaving all parts of the country,” said Emir Kremic, the director general of Bosnia’s state statistics agency. But how many have gone, he said, is not known with any precision, in a large part because it is not clear how many people remain. “We just don’t know how many people there are living here,” he said. For that, he added, “We need a new census.” That, however, is not something ethnonationalist politicians, fearful of the results, want. Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups — Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats — each worry about losing out in the numbers game. It took three years of wrangling after the 2013 census for the results to be released, because each group wanted to see bigger num...

Linked media - Related media Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, will be buried on Friday after a funeral service in Moscow that will be open to the public, his spokeswoman said on Wednesday, setting up the possibility of a rare display of opposition sentiment in the Russian capital. “Come early,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on social media. But mourners will still be taking a risk by attending. Hundreds of people who turned out across Russia at spontaneous memorials for Mr. Navalny after his death were detained, according to OVD-Info, a Russian-based rights group that tracks arrests. Ever since the Russian authorities reported Mr. Navalny’s death, on Feb. 16, his associates have said that the Kremlin has tried to prevent a funeral for him in Moscow that could...

Associated media - Linked media Abraham and Adra, an Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking team, had just won the festival’s award for best documentary for “No Other Land,” a movie about Palestinian resistance to Israeli campaigns in the occupied territories. It was “very hard,” Adra said, to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.” He called upon German lawmakers to “stop sending weapons to Israel,” before Abraham called for a cease-fire and an end to Israel’s occupation. The audience, which included the culture minister of Germany, Claudia Roth, applauded loudly, and there were whistles and cheers in the hall. In the days since, Abraham and Adra’s speeches have become the latest flashpoint in a long-running d...

The two women lifted a stiff corpse from the ground, revealing a squirming bug in the dirt.“That one is a live larva!” said Alex Smith, the lab manager of Colorado Mesa University’s Forensic Investigation Research Station, plucking the larva off the ground and stuffing it into a glass tube. Maggots aren’t just maggots, Mr. Smith explained — they’re potential evidence.“You can actually test the larvae and pupa casings for drugs,” he said, excitedly.His audience was a group of Mexican medical examiners who last month traveled to the Colorado facility, known as a “body farm,” where dozens of donated dead bodies are laid out in the sun to be studied as they decompose.The Mexican forensic specialists came to learn about testing cadavers for fentanyl, which is how they wound up in a field of cor...

Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, died on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles. He was 99.The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrew.In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005, Mr. Young recalled what attracted him to filmmaking.“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to be having adventures, I wanted to be living in the world.”He more than fulfilled that ambition.In the 1950s, he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and ...

Migration toward the United States through the dangerous jungle passage known as the Darién Gap has been halted, at least temporarily, following the arrest of two boat captains working for companies that play an essential role in ferrying migrants to the jungle.Boat companies suspended migrant crossings from two northern Colombia towns, Necoclí and Turbo, to the entrance of the Darién forest, according to the mayor of Necoclí, leaving roughly 3,000 migrants stranded in those communities. The Colombian law enforcement action in the region is sure to be watched closely by U.S. officials: The Biden administration has been pressuring Colombia for months to try harder to stop people from using the Darién as a path to the United States.The boat route is the main way into the Darién Gap, a strip ...

The hiking trail to Middleham Falls on the Caribbean island of Dominica is all wet leaves, slippery black stones and steps formed by tree roots. It could be a path in Middle-earth, shrouded, shadowy and green, fit for hobbits and fairies. Where sunlight pierced the canopy, rainbows formed in the mist, almost close enough to poke. Here and there, hummingbirds drew nectar from huge blossoms.The goal on that January day: a 200-foot forest cascade filling and refilling little pools on the valley floor, where I could — as one does in the secret hot pools and isolated waterfalls of Dominica — shed my clothes, slip into water and commune with the hummingbirds like a fairy queen.Dominica, 29 miles long and, at its widest, 16 miles across, is one of the wildest Caribbean islands. A former British c...

Some 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began two years ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday, acknowledging for the first time in the war a concrete figure for Ukraine’s toll.“This is a big loss for us,” Mr. Zelensky said at a news conference in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. But he declined to disclose the number of wounded or missing, saying that Russia could use the information to gauge the number of Ukraine’s active forces.Mr. Zelensky’s tally could not be independently verified. It differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials, who, this past summer, put the losses much higher, saying that close to 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 had been wounded. Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, were abo...