Dispatches

The Games brought billions to redevelop this Paris suburb. What will the thousands of homeless people who live there do?

By Sarah Hurtes

“I’m just bringing the cool factor to it,” said the American hip-hop producer, who has spent millions of dollars on 48 camels for a team he calls “Saudi Bronx.”

By Vivian Nereim

British Columbia recognized the Haida’s aboriginal title to their islands decades after the Indigenous group launched a battle on the ground and in the courts.

By Norimitsu Onishi and Amber Bracken

In the towns of Tulkarm and Jenin, armed militants are flocking to more hard-line factions, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while the Israeli military tries to rein them in.

By Steven Erlanger and Sergey Ponomarev

Indonesia’s Bajo people, who once spent most of their lives in boats or offshore huts, are adopting more sedentary habits, but without forsaking their deep connection to the sea.

By Muktita Suhartono and Ulet Ifansasti

Some aging residents of Ste.-Mère-Église in Normandy can still recall the American paratroopers who dropped into their backyard. It’s been a love affair ever since.

By Catherine Porter and Andrea Mantovani

Since the war in Gaza began, armed Israeli settlers, often accompanied by the army, have stepped up seizures of land long used by Palestinians.

By Ben Hubbard and Sergey Ponomarev

A festival of classic cars from the communist era brings out some nostalgia in eastern Germany for pre-unification days, although the abuses that occurred behind the Iron Curtain aren’t forgotten.

By Christopher F. Schuetze

In a small English village, a group of dedicated locals has unearthed the remains of a long-vanished palace that had been home to Henry VIII’s grandmother.

By Megan Specia

When the director and crew of “Io Capitano” toured Senegal with their acclaimed movie, audiences responded with their life stories.

By Elian Peltier and Annika Hammerschlag

The Louvre is joining in the celebration for the Olympics by opening up for dance and exercise classes early in the morning. Tickets sold out in a flash.

By Catherine Porter and Dmitry Kostyukov

On an island whose religious diversity is part of its democratic identity, many of the faithful participating in a pilgrimage for Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, were in their 20s and teens.

By Chris Buckley, Amy Chang Chien and Lam Yik Fei

As the war drags on, communities that were steadfast in their commitment to the effort have been shaken by the unending violence on the front line.

By Natalia Yermak and Brendan Hoffman

Even through the Myanmar army’s communications blackout, residents of a conflict zone find moments of grace, and occasional connectivity, away from the battlefield.

By Hannah Beech and Adam Ferguson

Coffee shops and kiosks are everywhere in Ukraine’s capital, their popularity both an act of wartime defiance and a symbol of closer ties to the rest of Europe.

By Constant Méheut, Daria Mitiuk and Brendan Hoffman

To lure swiftlets, whose saliva-built nests fetch high prices in China, people in Borneo compete to build them the most luxurious accommodations: safe, clean, dark and with pools for bathing.

By Richard C. Paddock, Muktita Suhartono and Nyimas Laula

Al-Shifa Hospital lies in ruins after a battle there between Israeli soldiers and Gazan gunmen. Shortly before withdrawing, the Israeli military brought journalists from The Times to witness the damage.

By Patrick Kingsley and Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

Thirteen years ago, a stork landed on a fisherman’s boat looking for food. He has come back every year since, drawing national attention.

By Ben Hubbard, Safak Timur and Ivor Prickett

Once a semipro baseball player in Japan, Yukihiro Shimura has now become a baseball missionary.

By Jack Nicas and Dado Galdieri

Business is good for snake catchers in Australia, as the period of brumation, a sort of hibernation for reptiles, is shrinking — a result of the warming earth.

By Natasha Frost and David Maurice Smith

The British-designed capital, Belmopan, is bureaucratic and, some say, boring. Some in the city want it to stay that way.

By Simon Romero and Alejandro Cegarra

An epidemic of auto thefts in Canada’s largest city has left many residents exasperated, with some getting creative about deterrence efforts, such as installing bollards in home driveways.

By Vjosa Isai

A plaza in Tel Aviv has become a home away from home. “If I don’t know what to do, I come here,” one relative said.

By Roni Caryn Rabin

Sheffield says it was home to the planet’s first real soccer culture. Staking a claim to that honor may hold the key to its future.

By Rory Smith

The Brazilian city of Olinda has become famous for its giant puppets during Carnival, including one made just after “Saturday Night Fever.”

By Jack Nicas and Dado Galdieri

Kibbutz Kfar Azza was evacuated after more than 60 residents were murdered and at least 18 were kidnapped on Oct. 7. But one family has returned.

By Roni Caryn Rabin

Growing a spice once worth its weight in gold, a tiny isle in Indonesia was so coveted that the Dutch traded Manhattan for it. Some 350 years later, life on the two islands couldn’t be more different.

By Richard C. Paddock, Muktita Suhartono and Nyimas Laula

The Grand Trunk Road is buzzing with talk of the coming vote, and of the country’s future.

By Christina Goldbaum, Zia ur-Rehman and Saiyna Bashir

Young Chinese are flocking to the picturesque mountain town of Dali to escape the cutthroat competition and suffocating political environment of the country’s megacities.

By Gilles Sabrié and Vivian Wang

Some new mothers say postpartum care centers are the best part of childbirth in South Korea, where fewer people are deciding to have children because of high costs.

By Lauretta Charlton

Hoping to repeat the success of Manhattan’s park, London is transforming a disused rail line, elevated 25 feet above the city’s streets, into its own floating green space.

By Megan Specia

San Giovanni Lipioni, a tiny town in central Italy, has one of the oldest average populations in the country but hopes a marketing push will attract younger people.

By Jason Horowitz

The development of Cayalá is utopian, serene and prizewinning. As an elite stronghold in one of Latin America’s most unequal nations, it is also divisive.

By Simon Romero, Jody García and Daniele Volpe

At the island’s election rallies, warming up the crowd for candidates is crucial. “You have to light a fire in their hearts,” one host says.

By Chris Buckley, Amy Chang Chien and Lam Yik Fei

Ever since the Quebec Nordiques decamped in 1995, leaving a hole in the Francophone city, vote-seeking officials have vowed to bring them back. But younger voters may be starting to forget the team.

By Norimitsu Onishi

Followers of Afro-Brazilian religions have been displaced by New Year’s revelers. But they still find ways to make their offerings to the ocean.

By Jack Nicas and Dado Galdieri

In Chile’s oldest and most overcrowded prison, the inmates have found solace in the hundreds of stray cats.

By Jack Nicas

Our correspondents ventured to some of the world’s most remote, and dangerous, locales to report stories that reveal a country’s culture and the human condition. Here are our favorites from the year.

By Bryant Rousseau

Contortionists and acrobats with celestial skills train in squalid conditions as the promise of a former sumo wrestler to restore the national circus to its past glory has gone mostly unfulfilled.

By David Pierson

The Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is a focal point of what Israeli officials describe as counterterrorism operations across the territory.

By Christina Goldbaum and Hiba Yazbek

The war in Gaza has prompted the city, traditionally seen as the birthplace of Jesus, to tone down its Christmas celebrations.

By Yara Bayoumy and Samar Hazboun

Kibbutz Kfar Aza was devastated in the Hamas-led assault of Oct. 7, with its residents killed and kidnapped. Some see the prospects of its rehabilitation as a barometer for Israel’s future.

By Isabel Kershner and Avishag Shaar-Yashuv

A government crackdown on neon signs stems from safety and environmental concerns, but the campaign evokes the fading of the city itself.

By Hannah Beech

In Russia, the pain and loss of the war in Ukraine are felt most profoundly in small villages, where a soldier’s burial produces not just grief but a yearning to find meaning in his death.

By Valerie Hopkins and Nanna Heitmann

Rather than take a confrontational approach with trespassers looking to farm or log in a tropical rainforest in Indonesia, teams of women rangers try dialogue first.

By Muktita Suhartono and Ulet Ifansasti

The Austrian government is turning the house where Hitler was born into a police station. But many think it should be used instead to teach essential lessons about history.

By Graham Bowley

New York Times journalists traveled with an Israeli military convoy to catch a rare glimpse of conditions in wartime Gaza. They saw houses flattened like playing cards and a city utterly disfigured.

By Patrick Kingsley and Daniel Berehulak

The National Unity Government of Myanmar, formed as an alternative to the junta that orchestrated a 2021 coup, has to battle global apathy and ignorance as it struggles for recognition.

By Hannah Beech

The festival of the intricately crafted textiles of the Shetland Islands, a remote archipelago off Scotland’s coast, draws hundreds of knitters from around the world for all things wool.

By Megan Specia and Andrew Testa

South Africans are savoring a second consecutive World Cup victory, producing a racial unity that even Hollywood couldn’t make up and an escape from the country’s troubles.

By John Eligon

Chinese backpacker hostels offering bunk beds for a few dollars a night have become hubs for the anxiety and ambitions of job-seeking youth.

By Vivian Wang

Dozens of displaced locals gathered in a converted shelter, waiting for resources to be delivered to their ravaged city.

By Emiliano Rodríguez Mega

A New York Times reporter who is a former Marine has a conversation with a Ukrainian sniper about morality in war.

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Over a week since a major earthquake decimated his village in northwest Afghanistan, Noor Ahmad is on a harrowing hunt to find his 5-year-old.

By Christina Goldbaum and Yaqoob Akbary

The deadliest earthquake to strike the country in decades leveled entire hamlets. Many people lost most, if not all, of their immediate family.

By Christina Goldbaum, Yaqoob Akbary and Victor J. Blue

In a small village, Jews and Arabs have chosen to live side by side, share power and imagine a more hopeful future. But even here, the agonies of the conflict can’t be escaped entirely.

By Hiba Yazbek

With Russia trying to maintain military control of the Black Sea, Odesa is disconnected from its waters — and its history.

By Marc Santora and Laetitia Vancon

As housing costs rise, the capital’s extensive green spaces, often described as the “lungs of the city,” offer space and respite to all — when the weather cooperates, that is.

By Andrew Testa and Isabella Kwai

Goro, on the Adriatic Sea, is famous for its clams — essential for the beloved spaghetti alle vongole. But an infestation of crabs is threatening the town’s cash crop.

By Jason Horowitz

The fare is free for those older than 65, and so some retired people spend their days riding the trains to the end of the line.

By Victoria Kim and Chang W. Lee

After a summer of intense heat, raging fires and catastrophic floods, a term for pervading dread about climate change and other environmental crises is having its moment.

By Jason Horowitz

Swimming in Paris is a full-on cultural experience, offering intimate views into the French psyche, which is on near-naked display in the swimming lanes, locker rooms and (mostly coed) showers.

By Catherine Porter

In a city where weather that would constitute a deadly heat wave in Europe is just a typical summer day, official “night beaches” have become a popular way to cool down.

By Vivian Nereim and Andrea DiCenzo

In a Ukraine village, there are no tears for Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner private militia, whose presumed death in a plane crash was reported this week.

By Marc Santora and Tyler Hicks

The urge to play a violent video game in the midst of the most brutal land war in Europe since World War II may seem baffling. But it’s a way to cope.

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

The neighbors may complain about the noise, but outdoor spaces that bloomed under a pandemic program are now a permanent and vibrant fixture of city life.

By Liz Alderman

Turkey’s largest city is dotted with the tombs of religious figures, where pilgrims seek divine intervention. “When you ask for something from God, those who are beloved by God can be a go-between.”

By Ben Hubbard, Gulsin Harman and Ivor Prickett

Italy falls for “Mare Fuori,” a television melodrama about the inmates of a juvenile detention center who pass the time making out — when not scowling at or occasionally stabbing one another.

By Jason Horowitz

Australia has the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors of any country besides Israel. In Melbourne, some of their descendants are leading the way to preserve the Yiddish language.

By Natasha Frost

Opponents of Spain’s comic shows at bullfights by people with dwarfism say they are banned by a new law. But performers say the show must go on.

By Jason Horowitz

At Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, the monks help make Britain’s only Trappist beer, a full-bodied brew that has won fans since its launch five years ago.

By Stephen Castle

Tunisians put canned tuna on pizza, pastries and pretty much everything else. Don’t even ask for a tuna-free sandwich. But inflation risks turning an everyday essential into a luxury out of reach.

By Vivian Yee

While the Taliban have erased most obvious vestiges of the U.S. nation-building effort in Afghanistan, the cultural legacy of two decades of American occupation has been harder to stamp out.

By Christina Goldbaum and Jim Huylebroek

Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the paramilitary Wagner Group, has been driven to fury by a mismanaged war in Ukraine. He turned on his creator, before apparently reversing course.

By Roger Cohen

A restaurant that celebrates Ukraine’s struggles in earlier wars is finding a second life in this one.

By Patricia Cohen

A building where South Korean dissidents were interrogated and tortured by a powerful government agency is now home to a popular youth hostel.

By Lauretta Charlton

At a bar in a once-occupied Ukrainian village, dehumanizing messages on the walls were a stark reminder that the Kremlin wants to stamp out Ukraine and its culture.

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

The Ukraine conflict is causing soul-searching among the Doukhobors, a peace-loving group that emigrated to Canada in 1899.

By Dan Bilefsky

Along Ireland’s coast, fishing has been a way of life for generations. But changes to the industry — including a cut in quotas after Brexit and a government plan to scrap boats — may see a way of life disappear.

By Megan Specia and Finbarr O’Reilly

The twists and turns of a war are rarely easy to predict. In Ukraine, they landed on a city in the east that few had ever heard of. And then the whole world watched for months.

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Zibo has become a social media star for its distinctive barbecue style. Now the city is overrun with visitors.

By Vivian Wang

The incongruous arrival of a large and endangered monk seal has distracted Israelis from a period of violence and political unrest.

By Patrick Kingsley

Was a “medieval New York” called Jomsborg a literary fantasy or a historical reality? New archaeological discoveries may provide a clue.

By Andrew Higgins

Although favism, a blood disorder that can cause a violent reaction to fava beans, lurks throughout Italy, many Romans look forward to May, when the legumes are in season.

By Jason Horowitz

The return of budget tour groups from mainland China is sparking frustrations — and a dose of snobbery — in a city starved for business.

By David Pierson and Olivia Wang

More than 5.5 million people who left after the war began in February 2022 have gone back home — and not just to large cities like Kyiv or Dnipro, but to small places near the front line, as well.

By Jeffrey Gettleman and Finbarr O’Reilly

The Pearly Kings and Queens, known for their button-festooned costumes, preserve a charitable tradition that began in the Victorian era and became a symbol of the city’s working-class culture.

By Megan Specia

A Polish town that was once occupied by the Soviets used to embrace its history with military re-enactments and Lenin banners. But “nobody wants to be reminded of Russia these days.”

By Andrew Higgins

A ferry used to traverse the banks of the Adda River, in northern Italy, but drought and an abundance of bureaucracy have closed it down.

By Jason Horowitz

Palestinian Muslims give the eidiya — a gift of money — to female relatives and children on the Eid that marks the end of Ramadan. It is a revered tradition but one that can come with a heavy price.

By Raja Abdulrahim