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They sit in ones and twos in half-destroyed homes. They shelter in musty basements marked in chalk with “people underground” — a message to whichever troops happen to be fighting that day. They venture out to visit cemeteries and reminisce about any time other than now.Ukraine’s elderly are often the only people who remain along the country’s hundreds of miles of front line. Some waited their entire lives to enjoy their twilight years, only to have been left in a purgatory of loneliness.Homes built with their own hands are now crumbling walls and blown-out windows, with framed photographs of loved ones living far away. Some people have already buried their children, and their only wish is to stay close so they can be buried next to them.But it does not always work out that way.“I’ve lived ...

After the brass band packed up its instruments, Sergio Solano and two other food delivery workers walked a white bicycle to an overpass within view of the United Nations headquarters.A fellow worker, or compañero, as they call each other meaning “partner,” had died less than two weeks earlier that September in yet another bicycle wreck on the streets of Manhattan. Delivering food has proved to be a deadly occupation for many of them. Riding bikes at all hours, they get hit by cars and are at constant risk of having accidents and falling prey to crime.The spray-painted bicycle paid homage to Félix Patricio Teófilo, a Mexican immigrant who, like them, made his living pedaling to deliver food. They chained it to the metal railing near the intersection of 47th Street and First Avenue, where he...

Poland’s bumpy transition to a new government hit dramatic turbulence on Wednesday when a prominent hard-line minister in the former right-wing administration declared himself a “political prisoner” and announced he was going on a hunger strike to protest his arrest following conviction for abuse of power.Seeking to avoid a two-year jail sentence handed down by a Warsaw court in December, the former minister, Mariusz Kaminski, took refuge from police on Tuesday in the palace of the Polish president, a close ally of the former conservative governing party, Law and Justice.The resulting standoff between police officers loyal to the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a veteran centrist, and Law and Justice supporters escalated a disruptive campaign by the former governing party, de...

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 sang Canada’s national anthem only in French.The team’s exit “left a hole in Quebec City and Quebec regional politics, and a hole in Francophone identity, as wel...

An emergency landing on Friday of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet in Portland, Ore., led the Federal Aviation Administration to order some U.S. airlines to stop using some Max 9 planes until they are inspected. The order affects about 171 planes owned by Alaska, United and other airlines. The episode also raised troubling new questions about the safety of a workhorse aircraft design dogged by years of problems and multiple deadly crashes.No one was seriously injured in Friday’s incident. The jetliner returned to the airport in Portland shortly after a chunk of the body of the plane broke off in midair, leaving a door-size hole in the side of the aircraft.Within hours of the episode, Alaska Airlines said it would ground all 65 of the Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft in its fleet until mech...

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 said in a statement on Thursday.In addition to Mr. Oliver and his daughters, Madita Klepser, 10, and Annik Klepser, 12, the pilot, Robert Sachs, was also killed, the police said. Fishermen and divers recovered the bodies and t...