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France will withdraw nearly 1,500 troops from the West African nation of Niger by the end of the year, President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday, a decision that could upend the West’s security footprint in the region, including the future of 1,100 American forces based in Niger.In an interview on French television, Mr. Macron also said that the country’s ambassador to Niger would leave “within the next hours.” He added, “And we are ending our military cooperation with the de facto authorities in Niger, because they no longer want to fight terrorism.”The short announcement comes after weeks of escalating tensions between France and the new military leaders in Niger, who seized power in a coup in July. It also caps years of waning influence for France, a former colonizer in West Africa whose...

A Black high school student in Texas who was suspended because of the way he wears his hair, along with his mother, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on Saturday against the state’s governor and attorney general.Darryl George, 17, and his mother, Darresha George, said in the lawsuit that the state leaders failed to enforce a new Texas law that makes it illegal for schools and employers to discriminate against people with hairstyles “commonly or historically associated with race.”The law, called the CROWN Act, went into effect on Sept. 1. The day before, Darryl was given an in-school suspension because officials at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas, said that his hair violated the district’s dress code, according to the lawsuit.Darryl, a high school junior, has locs, or lon...

Ukraine has stepped up its use of a new shipping route that has allowed it to begin reviving grain exports to circumvent a de facto Russian blockade of its Black Sea ports.Repeated airstrikes by Russian forces since July on Ukraine’s port of Odesa after the Kremlin’s withdrawal from a deal that had allowed Ukraine to export its food crops directly across the waters to Turkey had forced Ukraine to stop using its three Black Sea ports as an export route and work to establish an alternative.Two ships successfully used the new route last week without incident, and three more cargo vessels have entered Ukrainian waters in recent days, according to officials.When Moscow withdrew from the Black Sea Grain Initiative in July, it said it would consider any vessel approaching a Ukrainian port to be a...

Yoel Inbar, a noted psychology professor at the University of Toronto, figured he might be teaching this fall at U.C.L.A.Last year, the university’s psychology department offered his female partner a faculty appointment. Now the department was interested in recruiting him as a so-called partner hire, a common practice in academia.The university asked him to fill out the requisite papers, including a statement that affirmed his belief and work in diversity, equity and inclusion. He flew out and met with, among others, a faculty diversity committee and a group of graduate students.Dr. Inbar figured all had gone well, that his work and liberal politics fit well with the university. Some faculty members, he said, had even advised him on house hunting.But a few days later, the department chair ...

“Tea has my heart,” Liz Coleman explained as she sank into a chair under the gold-painted ceilings of the Grand Café in Oxford, England. “But I can’t live without coffee.”Ms. Coleman, 31, was getting her caffeine fix from an almond milk latte that she sipped during a break from a nearby conference this month. As a British woman of Persian descent, tea looms large in her home life, she said, but when she is out, it is always coffee.Tea is woven deep into Britain’s cultural fabric, having arrived in the 1650s after Dutch traders brought it to Europe from China. Centuries of tradition made it the nation’s favorite hot drink. But coffee, a longtime rival, has increasingly challenged that status, and a recent survey suggested it had finally ousted tea from its prime spot, setting off a war of s...

Investigators continued on Friday to comb through the wreckage of a bus that went off a New York highway and overturned while carrying a Long Island high school marching band to Pennsylvania the day before, killing two people and injuring dozens of others.Although Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Thursday that a faulty front tire appeared to have caused the bus to veer off the road, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the New York State Police and the Orange County, N.Y., Sheriff’s Office were seeking to determine whether other factors may have been involved, officials said. In a news conference on Friday afternoon, John Humm, an investigator with the N.T.S.B., said it was too early to determine what had caused the incident, but said several people had been ejected from t...

Jeovane de Jesus Aguiar was knee-deep in mud in the 100-yard gash he had cut into the Amazon rainforest, filtering brown water out of a pan, when he found the small, shiny flake he was looking for: a mixture of gold and mercury.Mr. Aguiar had drizzled liquid mercury into the ground in his makeshift gold mine on the eastern edge of the small South American nation of Suriname, just as he had every few days.The toxic element mixes with gold dust and forms an amalgam he can pluck out of the sludge. Then he sets the mixture aflame, burning off the mercury into the air, where winds spread it across the forest and across borders, poisoning the plants, animals and people it finds.Left behind is the gold. That part usually ends up in Europe, the United States and the Persian Gulf, most often as exp...

As the fall semester began at New College of Florida, a small public school known as proudly unconventional until Gov. Ron DeSantis set about overhauling it this year, new students were easy to spot.Many were recruited athletes, clad in T-shirts branded with the school’s new mascot, a muscled, flexing banyan tree. They stood out from returning students, many of whom roamed the campus in bare feet or with vividly dyed hair.“Will these people be OK with us being weird as we are?” said Emma Curtis, a 21-year-old fourth-year student, voicing a concern shared by others.The influx of athletes is just one of the sweeping changes that have come to New College since Mr. DeSantis and his allies vowed in January to transform the liberal arts institution, known as Florida’s “public honors college,” in...

They are made of plastic or plastic foam, weigh only a few pounds and are often launched simply by having a soldier throw them into the air, as if tossing a javelin.In a slow-moving counteroffensive against Russian forces that has been reliant at times on the smallest advantages, a fleet of cheap, mostly off-the-shelf drones is providing one for the Ukrainians.The drones have begun to make a difference in one corner of a stagnant war, soldiers, commanders and pilots said in interviews, because their different materials and variable frequencies can evade enemy jamming systems. That has allowed them to venture farther in searches for enemy artillery positions and multimillion-dollar air defense systems, all while risking aircraft worth only a few thousand dollars apiece.Along one of their tw...

The football team of Minor High School in Adamsville, Ala., had just beaten its opponent at an away game in Birmingham last week when Johnny Mims, the school’s band director, told his musicians to play three more tunes in celebration as the crowd prepared to file out of the stadium.After all, the Minor Tigers had just defeated the Mustangs of P.D. Jackson-Olin High School 27-0.But when officers with the Birmingham Police Department told him to stop the music, Mr. Mims said at a news conference on Wednesday, he refused, explaining that he and the band director for the Mustangs, the home team, had agreed to keep playing in a tradition known as a “fifth-quarter” performance.Mr. Mims did not stop, and the verbal confrontation with the police escalated. Officers with Birmingham Police Departmen...