World

Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia while enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died Friday in a Russian prison, according to Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 47.The prison authorities said that Mr. Navalny lost consciousness on Friday after taking a walk in the Arctic penal colony where he was moved late last year. He was last seen on Thursday, when he had appeared in a court hearing via video link, smiling behind the bars of a cell and making jokes.Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, said in a live broadcast Friday that Navalny’s advisers were not yet able to issue an official confirmation of his death but believed that he had perished. And while a...

Two women will face off for Mexico’s highest office in what is set to be a historic election this spring.Mexicans will choose their first female president on June 2, and they will also vote to renew all 500 deputies for the lower chamber of Congress and the 128 members of the Senate. At the same time, 30 of the country’s 32 states will be holding elections — with 19,000 state and local offices up for grabs.This is the first national election in which Mexico will allow residents living abroad to vote in person. More than 12 million citizens live outside the country, 97 percent of them in the United States, according to the Institute of Mexicans Abroad. But in order to vote, those citizens must first register by Feb. 20.Here’s what you need to do now to be eligible to cast a ballot in June.W...

President Biden said on Monday that Israel should not proceed with a major ground offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah without a “credible plan” to protect more than one million people who are sheltering there.Mr. Biden spoke after meeting at the White House with King Abdullah II of Jordan, a key figure in the push for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. It was the first face-to-face conversation between the two leaders since the Israel-Hamas war started.“Many people there have been displaced — displaced multiple times, fleeing the violence to the north, and now they’re packed into Rafah, exposed and vulnerable,” Mr. Biden said during an appearance with King Abdullah. “They need to be protected.”The visit came as King Abdullah sought to shore up international support for an immediate c...

Brazil is experiencing an enormous outbreak of dengue fever, the sometimes fatal mosquito-borne disease, and public health experts say it is a harbinger of a coming surge in cases in the Americas, including Puerto Rico.Brazil’s Health Ministry warns that it expects more than 4.2 million cases this year, outstripping the 4.1 million cases the Pan-American Health Organization recorded for all 42 countries in the region last year.Brazil was due for a bad dengue year — numbers of cases of the virus typically rise and fall on a roughly four-year cycle — but experts say a number of factors, including El Niño and climate change, have significantly amplified the problem this year.“The record heat in the country and the above-average rainfall since last year, even before the summer, have increased ...

As Panama jumps into its boisterous Carnival period, the celebrations this weekend come amid a bizarre political drama playing out in the capital.A former president, who is also a top contender in this year’s presidential election in May, has holed himself up in the Nicaraguan Embassy in Panama City, accompanied by his furniture, including a sofa and a desk, as well as his dog, Bruno.Ricardo Martinelli, a 71-year-old conservative businessman who led Panama from 2009 to 2014, was granted asylum by Nicaragua this week after Panama’s Supreme Court denied his appeal of a money-laundering conviction that carried with it a 10-year prison sentence.Mr. Martinelli, who has faced other criminal investigations, contends not only that the case is politically motivated, but also that Panama’s president...

The Brazilian federal police carried out a sweeping operation on Thursday that targeted former President Jair Bolsonaro and many of his closest advisers and former ministers as part of an investigation into efforts to overturn Brazil’s 2022 election.The federal police force said that it was carrying out 33 search warrants and four arrest warrants. The agency said it would order another 15 people to hand over their passports, not leave the country and not contact any other people under investigation.Mr. Bolsonaro was a target of the operation and would hand in his passport within 24 hours, the former president’s spokesman said.The raids also targeted Brazil’s former defense secretary, former intelligence chief, former justice minister and former head of the Navy, Mr. Bolsonaro’s running mat...

Israel has called securing the freedom of the hostages abducted to Gaza a key goal in its war against Hamas, so many in the country were shocked on Tuesday when it emerged that at least a fifth of the captives were already dead. The news was likely to worsen a furor in Israel, where a debate over the government’s course of action in Gaza regarding the hostages has become divisive.Israeli intelligence officers have concluded that at least 30 of the remaining 136 hostages captured by Hamas and its allies on Oct. 7 have died since the start of the war, according to a confidential assessment that was reviewed by The New York Times. The bodies of two other dead Israelis, killed in 2014 during a previous war between Israel and Hamas, have been held in the territory ever since, bringing the total...

Nayib Bukele, the millennial president who reshaped El Salvador by cracking down on both gangs and civil liberties, looked poised to win another five years in office after polls closed on Sunday.The electoral authorities had not released official results by Sunday night, but Mr. Bukele claimed victory in a post on X, saying he had won more than 85 percent of the vote. Legal scholars say Mr. Bukele violated the Constitution of El Salvador by seeking a second consecutive term, but most Salvadorans don’t seem to care. Surveys showed that voters overwhelmingly supported his candidacy and were likely to maintain the ruling party’s supermajority, extending Mr. Bukele’s control over every lever of government for years.Since imposing a state of emergency in the spring of 2022. the Bukele governmen...

The new president of European soccer’s governing body settled into a chair in his glass-walled office in Switzerland, glanced out at the sweeping views of Lake Geneva and insisted he would not be there long enough to get comfortable.It was 2017, soccer was still emerging from its greatest scandal and Aleksander Ceferin, only a few months into his presidency, was unequivocal that he was already on the clock. The sport, he said, could no longer accept leaders who grew so comfortable with the trappings of power and luxury that they worked the system to remain in their jobs. He would not be like them, he promised.The three-year term to which he had been elected, finishing out the one vacated by his disgraced predecessor, “is already one term for me,” he said. If he was fortunate enough to earn...

At 4:30 p.m., the near-capacity crowd of 42,000 people at La Plaza México started restlessly whistling. They had waited since May 15, 2022 — a period of 624 days of legal challenges — for bulls to return to the world’s largest bullfighting arena, only to face another delay because of the hundreds of protesters outside.When the parade of the afternoon’s three matadors and their bullfighting entourage finally emerged to salute the fans, the arena in Mexico City erupted. Then, at 4:58 p.m., the first bull charged out and raced around the ring. Over the next two and a half hours last Sunday, fans cheered and jeered, shouted “olé,” smoked cigars, ate grilled meats and chips, drank beer and mezcal, and watched five bulls die with swords plunged into their spines.“To see it here, the ‘olé’ and h...