New miscellaneous

A sense of dread took hold in Ecuador on Wednesday, with the streets empty, schools closed 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…

When the Nordiques left Quebec nearly 30 years ago, the hockey team’s departure fueled the kind of mythologizing and nostalgia familiar to fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers.The Nordiques’ stint in Quebec, playing there in the N.H.L. from 1979 to 1995, overlapped with the French-speaking province’s two failed attempts to secede from the rest of Canada, and the team’s identity melded with that of their fans: a linguistic minority struggling to assert itself in a part of the world dominated by English speakers.The Nordiques wore their politics on their sleeves, literally, putting the Quebec flag’s fleur-de-lis on their uniforms. They also…

The Vatican’s recent declaration allowing the blessing of same-sex couples caused a stir around the globe, but perhaps most of all in Africa, a rising center of the Roman Catholic Church’s future. In one statement after the next, bishops in several countries spoke of the fear and confusion the declaration has caused among their flocks, and said it was out of step with the continent’s culture and values.The bishops also harbored a deeper fear: that in a place where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and where many forms of Christianity are competing for worshipers,…

The film and television actor Christian Oliver, his two children and a pilot were killed on Thursday when the small plane they were traveling in crashed during a flight to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, the police said.Mr. Oliver, 51, who appeared in “The Good German,” “Speed Racer” and the TV series “Saved by The Bell: The New Class,” and his daughters were the only passengers in the single engine plane traveling from Bequia, an island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, when it crashed into the sea at midday, the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force…

Many Israelis welcomed the assassination of a top Hamas official in Beirut as a necessary, even inevitable, step in the campaign to destroy Hamas that Israel has been waging since the terror group’s brutal Oct. 7 attacks.But some analysts said the killing of the official, Saleh al-Arouri, on Tuesday carries risks for Israel, and the benefits are unclear. The assassination appeared likely to put on ice any talks between Israel and Hamas over freeing more hostages taken on Oct. 7, dealing yet another setback to families waiting desperately for their loved ones to come home.While the death of Mr. al-Arouri,…

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 National Theater Company, which did not specify the cause of death.The National Theater Company described 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…