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A 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck the eastern parts of the Philippines on Saturday, leading to tsunami warnings across the region and as far as the southern part of Japan, nearly 2,000 miles away.There were no immediate reports of damage.The quake struck at about 10:37 p.m. local time in Mindanao, in the eastern part of the Philippines, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami advisory for the Pacific coast of Japan, from the Miyakojima-Yaeyama region to Chiba Prefecture.Residents of the provinces Suriago del Sur and Davao Oriental on the eastern part of Mindanao were warned to head to higher ground or move farther inland because of the possibility of tsunami waves of more than one meter, or a little more than three feet, according to the Phi...

After a week of calm, Yousef Hammash woke up in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Friday to the booming sounds of explosions. The brief feeling of safety he had felt was over, he thought.“Seven weeks of madness have been followed by seven days of humanitarian pause,” Mr. Hammash, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s advocacy officer in Gaza, said in a voice message. “And now, we are back to the cycle of violence again.”The region’s fragile, seven-day truce collapsed early Friday, and Gaza was once again pummeled as Israel resumed one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century. In the following hours, Gazan health officials said, 178 Palestinians were killed and another 578 people were wounded. The deal for the truce struck by Israel and Hamas, which went into effect on Nov. 24, ...

Growing up, all Yuni Matsumoto wanted was to fit in.But his name made that hard. It was highly uncommon in Japan and, on top of that, essentially unreadable as written. Middle school classmates ridiculed him. The bullying got so bad that he eventually dropped out of school.Mr. Matsumoto, 24, had what is known as a kira-kira — meaning “shiny” or “glittery” — name. A growing number of Japanese parents are choosing these unconventional names, often in hopes of making their children stand out in a country where pressure to conform is strong.Mr. Matsumoto’s parents were driven by that same desire for uniqueness, but to him, his name was a shackle. This spring, he went to family court and had it changed to a common one, Yuuki, written in a way anyone could read. “I felt like I had finally been f...

The fragile truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on Friday morning because the adversaries could not find common ground for further exchanges of hostages and prisoners, according to Israeli and Hamas officials.Publicly, Israel and Hamas blamed each other for military activity that violated the weeklong cease-fire. Israel said Hamas had fired rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, while Hamas said Israeli troop operations had resumed in northern Gaza. But two Israeli officials and Zaher Jabareen, a Hamas official who oversees prisoner issues, said the real reason the pause ended was a stalemate in prisoner-swap negotiations.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had hoped for at least one more round of exchanges, said the Israeli officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity beca...

The Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Education Department has opened an investigation into allegations of antisemitism at Harvard University, where the campus, like many others, has been roiled by demonstrations and confrontations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students in the weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.The complaint against Harvard, filed on Tuesday, joins a growing list of federal civil rights investigations into complaints of discrimination based on “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” including at Columbia, Cornell, Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tampa and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.The list includes a handful of school districts as well, including New York City public schools, Clar...

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.“David,” Henry Kissinger said to me one day in the summer of 2017, after a lengthy interview for the obituary that appeared Wednesday evening in The New York Times. “Are you writing one of those articles that will appear when I can no longer argue with its premise?”He said it with a mischievous sparkle in his eye. In a series of running conversations stretched over roughly seven years, I had told Mr. Kissinger, when he asked, that I was “writing about your life.”The master of diplomatic nuance knew exactly what that meant. Few who are being interviewed for their own obituary want to be reminded, too explicitly, about their mortality. But Henry Kissinger didn’t bec...

Hunter College has agreed to reschedule a screening of a documentary critical of Israel, following an outcry from faculty members and students who claimed that the administration’s earlier decision to cancel it violated academic freedom.A screening of the documentary, “Israelism,” had been scheduled for Nov. 14 as part of a film series organized by a professor in the New York school’s film and media department. It would have been followed by a discussion with one of the directors and one of the film’s protagonists, a young American Jew who travels to Israel and the West Bank and discovers a reality very different from the story she was raised with.But that morning, Hunter’s interim president, Ann Kirschner, announced that the screening would be canceled because of safety concerns.“In the c...

In page after page of fly-on-the-wall detail, the indictment unsealed in New York this week describes a chilling plot: A criminal operative, on orders from a government official in India, tried to arrange the killing of a Sikh American on U.S. soil.As the scheme unfolded, court documents said, it grew only more brazen. When a prominent Sikh was gunned down in Canada in June in what prosecutors call a related assassination, the operative was told to speed up in New York, not slow down, the indictment says. And he was ordered to proceed even as India’s prime minister was on a red-carpet visit to Washington.The plot was eventually foiled, the indictment says. But its damning narration leaves open a burning question: Why would the Indian government take such a gamble?The Sikh secessionist move...

Lisa Phillip, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at an Orlando charter school, appreciates many of Florida’s new guidelines for teaching civics.She has enjoyed discussing, as the state requires, the advantages that the U.S. government and economy have over socialism and communism — something that some of her immigrant students feel innately, she said.And she doesn’t mind teaching about “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the nation’s founding documents. The subject prompted her students at Central Florida Leadership Academy to reflect on how the country’s politics, they believed, fell short of the basic morality in the Ten Commandments.This fall, Ms. Phillip is one of thousands of social studies teachers adjusting to a hotly debated overhaul of civics in several conserv...

Hamas freed a group of 10 Israeli hostages, four Thai nationals and two Israeli-Russian dual citizens on Wednesday, the sixth such release of hostages since a cease-fire began on Friday.The group included a few relatives of people who had already been released.Here’s what we know about the Israeli hostages released on Wednesday.Ra’aya Rotem, 54Ra'aya RotemCredit...Hostages and Missing Families Forum, via ReutersRa’aya Rotem, 54, her daughter, Hila, 12, and her daughter’s friend Emily Hand, 9, were hiding in her family’s safe room in Kibbutz Be’eri on the morning of Oct. 7, before they were kidnapped. Ra’aya texted her brother around noon, telling him that she and her daughter were being taken, according to The Times of Israel.On Saturday, Hila was released from Hamas captivity without her ...