World

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 ...

Hamas on Tuesday accused Israel of killing Saleh al-Arouri, a top leader of the group, along with two commanders from its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. Mr. al-Arouri is the senior-most Hamas figure to be killed since Israel vowed to destroy the organization and eliminate its leadership after a deadly Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.Mr. al-Arouri was assassinated in an explosion in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, marking the first such assassination of a top Hamas official outside the West Bank and Gaza in recent years. It comes as officials across the region are worried about the war in Gaza igniting a wider conflagration.Israeli officials would not comment on whether their forces had targeted Mr. al-Arouri, but officials from Lebanon and the United States ascribed the attack to Israe...

Each New Year’s Eve, more than two million revelers — twice as many as typically fill Times Square — dress in white and pack Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro to watch a 15-minute midnight fireworks extravaganza.The one-night hedonistic release is one of the world’s largest New Year’s celebrations and leaves Copacabana’s famed 2.4 miles of sand strewed with trash.But it began as something far more spiritual.In the 1950s, followers of an Afro-Brazilian religion, Umbanda, began congregating on Copacabana on New Year’s Eve to make offerings to their goddess of the sea, Iemanjá, and ask for good fortune in the year ahead.It quickly became one of the holiest moments of the year for followers of a cluster of Afro-Brazilian religions that have roots in slavery, worship an array of deities and ha...

On a recent evening inside the Hotel de la Poste, an alpine hotel in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy’s most ski-and-be-seen winter destination, a boisterous party celebrated the birth of a cinematic era.Forty years earlier, the libidinous, up-chalet down-chalet comedy “Christmas Holiday,” set in the lodge, was released. Nominally about a plain but lucky-in-adultery piano bar singer and the wealthy Milanese, salt-of-the-earth Romans and tuxedoed bons vivants who surround him, the film previewed decades of gleefully vulgar, broad and formulaic Christmas comedies that earned a fortune and came to be known, after the cakes Italians devour during the season, as “Cinema Panettone.”To celebrate the anniversary, the film’s producer, writer and stars carved up an enormous panettone the size of a fire hydr...

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...

Ukraine scored a major success on Tuesday when it struck a Russian warship at port in Crimea, one of the most significant attacks against Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet in months. But in another setback for their ground campaign, Ukrainian officials acknowledged that they had all but retreated from the eastern city of Marinka after a monthslong battle to defend it.The two developments underscored the diverging fortunes of the two combatants this winter in a war that has largely settled into a deadlock: Ukraine racking up naval successes in the Black Sea and Crimea, where it is putting Russia on the defensive, and Russia pressing its attack on battlefields in the east after blunting a Ukrainian counteroffensive.A day after Russia said it had taken complete control of Marinka, Gen. Valery Zaluzhn...