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Mining companies will have to limit concentrations of airborne silica, a mineral commonly found in rock that can be lethal when ground up and inhaled. The new requirements will affect more than 250,000 miners extracting coal, a variety of metals, and minerals used in products like cement and smartphones. Tuesday’s announcement is the culmination of a tortuous regulatory process that has spanned four presidential administrations.

Miners have paid dearly for the delay. As progress on the rule stalled, government researchers documented with growing alarm a resurgence of severe black lung afflicting younger coal miners, and studies implicated poorly controlled silica as the likely cause.

“It should shock the conscience to know that there’s people in this country that do incredibly hard work that we all benefit from that are already disabled before they reach the age of 40,” said Chris Williamson, head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which is issuing the rule. “We knew that the existing standard was not protective enough.”

The new requirements are to be announced by Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su at an event in Pennsylvania Tuesday morning. They come eight years after a sister agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, issued similar protections for workers in other industries, such as construction, countertop manufacturing and fracking.

Both mine safety advocates and industry groups generally support the rule’s central change: halving the allowed concentration of silica dust. But their views on the rule, proposed last July, diverge sharply over enforcement, with mining trade groups arguing that the requirements are unnecessarily broad and costly, and miners’ advocates cautioning that companies are largely left to police themselves.

The dangers of breathing finely ground silica were evident almost a century ago, when hundreds of workers died of lung disease after drilling a tunnel through silica-rich rock near Gauley Bridge, W.Va. It remains one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history.

In 1974, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal research agency, recommended reducing the existing limits on silica in the air workers breathed. For years, the report languished.

The agency reiterated its recommendation in 1995, and a Labor Department advisory committee reached the same conclusion the following year. Both also advised overhauling the existing enforcement for coal mines — a complicated arrangement in which regulators tried to control silica levels by reducing dust overall.

In 1996, work began on a rule to empower regulators to police levels in coal mines. The effort was later broadened to include lowering the silica limit for all miners, but it repeatedly stalled during George W. Bush’s, Barack Obama’s and Donald J. Trump’s presidencies.

In interviews, the heads of the agency during the Clinton and Obama administrations described a mix of politics, industry opposition and competing priorities that impeded progress on a silica rule. Both said they had prioritized a separate rule to regulate overall dust levels in coal mines, which also took years to complete and was finalized in 2014.

“I regret that we didn’t get many things done, and silica is one of those,” said Davitt McAteer, who ran the agency from 1994 to 2000.

Joe Main, who led it from 2009 to 2017, said his agency had planned to draw on work by O.S.H.A., which also faced lengthy delays before issuing its 2016 silica rule. “But the clock ran out on our administration,” he said.

Meanwhile, after years of declining rates of black lung, caused by breathing coal and silica dust, rates of the severe form of the disease had surged. In the 1990s, less than 1 percent of central Appalachian miners who had worked at least 25 years underground had this advanced stage of illness. By 2015, the number had risen to 5 percent.

Because of changes in mining practices, workers were cutting more rock, producing more silica dust. The effects began showing up on chest X-rays and in tissue samples taken from miners’ lungs. Clinics in Appalachia began seeing miners in their 30s and 40s with advanced disease.

“Each of these cases is a tragedy and represents a failure among all those responsible for preventing this severe disease,” a team of government researchers wrote in a medical journal in 2014.

While the rule to be issued Tuesday adopts the limit recommended in 1974, some miner-safety advocates worry that its benefits will be undercut by weak enforcement. The regulations largely leave it to mining companies to collect samples showing they are in compliance, despite evidence of past gamesmanship and fraud. Miners have described being pressured to place sampling devices in areas with far less dust than where they actually worked, leading to artificially low results.

Mr. Williamson said his agency protects miners who blow the whistle on unsafe conditions and works with the Justice Department to pursue criminal cases if they learn of sampling fraud.

Industry groups, meanwhile, argued after the rule was proposed that it was too strict. They asked the agency to scale back the sampling requirements and allow greater flexibility in approaches to reducing dust levels.

The provisions remained mostly unchanged in the final rule.

Companies mining materials other than coal have expressed particular concern about the cost of a new program requiring them to provide free periodic medical exams to workers. A similar program already exists in coal mining.

Mr. Williamson defended the program as a key way for miners to track their health and for researchers to track disease.

The rule’s effectiveness may not be clear for years, as lung disease can take time to develop. Mr. McAteer and Mr. Main said they were dismayed by the recent resurgence of disease and expressed regret that they had not enacted a silica rule.

“We could have done more,” Mr. Main said. “I wish we did more.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to consider the soundness of an obstruction law that has been widely used against those who took part in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is already having an effect on some of the rioters.

A small group of people convicted under the law have been released from custody — or will soon go free — even though the justices hearing arguments on Tuesday are not expected to decide the case for months.

Over the past several weeks, federal judges in Washington have agreed to release about 10 defendants who were serving prison terms because of the obstruction law, saying the defendants could wait at home as the court determined whether the law should have been used at all to keep them locked up.

Among those already free is Matthew Bledsoe, the owner of a moving company from Tennessee who scaled a wall outside the Capitol and then paraded through the building with a Trump flag, ultimately planting it in the arm of a statue of President Gerald R. Ford.

Soon to be released are defendants like Kevin Seefried, a drywall installer from Delaware who carried a Confederate flag through the Capitol, and Alexander Sheppard, an Ohio man who overran police lines to become one of the first people to break into the building.

The interrupted sentences — which could be reinstated depending on how the Supreme Court rules — are just one of the complications to have emerged from the court’s review of the obstruction statute, known in the penal code as 18 U.S.C. 1512. The charge has been used so far against more than 350 rioters, including Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, and members of the far-right extremist groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

When the justices announced in December that they planned to scrutinize the law, many legal experts expressed concern that a ruling narrowing its scope or striking down its use in Jan. 6-related cases could deliver a devastating blow to the Justice Department’s efforts to hold hundreds of rioters accountable.

Federal prosecutors have often used the obstruction count in lieu of more politically fraught charges like seditious conspiracy to punish the central event of Jan. 6: the disruption of a proceeding at the Capitol to certify the election.

But in the past few months, judges and prosecutors working on Capitol riot cases have quietly adjusted to the potential threat from a Supreme Court ruling, and the risk that there could be catastrophic consequences to the cases overall no longer seems as grave.

For one thing, there are currently no defendants facing only the obstruction charge, according to the Justice Department. Every rioter indicted on that count has also been charged with other crimes, meaning that even if the obstruction law is removed as a tool of the Jan. 6 prosecutions, there would not be any cases that would disappear entirely.

Indeed, if the court rules that the obstruction count does not apply to the Capitol attack, the main effect of the decision would be on the sentences defendants face. The obstruction law carries a hefty maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and while few, if any, rioters have gotten that much, the statute has routinely resulted in terms of several years.

But some judges have already signaled they would increase the sentences stemming from other charges if the obstruction count was not available to them.

In February, for example, Judge Royce C. Lamberth denied an early release to an Iowa man named Leo Kelly, who was sentenced to 30 months in prison on the obstruction count and six other misdemeanors.

Judge Lamberth’s reason for not setting Mr. Kelly free?

Even if the Supreme Court ruled he was not permitted to sentence Mr. Kelly for obstruction, Judge Lamberth said he could increase the defendant’s total time in prison by imposing consecutive, not concurrent, terms on the misdemeanor charges.

As a criminal trial against Mr. Trump opened on Monday, on charges that he had falsified records to cover up that sex scandal involving Stormy Daniels, Mrs. Trump did not appear. She has long privately referred to the case involving Ms. Daniels as “his problem” and not hers.

But Mrs. Trump, the former first lady, shares his view that the trial itself is unfair, according to several people familiar with her thinking.

In private, she has called the proceedings “a disgrace” tantamount to election interference, according to a person with direct knowledge of her comments who could not speak publicly out of fear of jeopardizing a personal relationship with the Trumps.

She may support her husband, but Mrs. Trump, whose daily news habit involves scouring headlines for coverage of herself, is bound to see headlines involving Mr. Trump and Ms. Daniels that could reopen old wounds. On Monday, Justice Juan M. Merchan, the judge presiding over the case, also said that Mrs. Trump could be among the potential witnesses as the trial gets underway.

All of this could put Mr. Trump on shaky ground with his wife, who has defended him in some critical moments — including when he bragged on tape about grabbing women by their genitals — and withheld her public support in others, like when she did not appear alongside him as he locked up victories on Super Tuesday.

“At the end of the day, she can make or break his candidacy,” said Stephanie Grisham, Mrs. Trump’s former press secretary who resigned on Jan. 6, 2021, and went on to write a memoir. “And at the end of the day, she could probably make or break him.”

Some of the more personally damaging details of Mr. Trump’s behavior may not come up in court. On Monday, Justice Merchan barred some testimony related to the timing of a reported affair between Mr. Trump and a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal. The National Enquirer, which has longstanding ties to Mr. Trump, bought the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story for $150,000 and then never published it — a practice known as “catch and kill.”

Jurors may hear about the relationship between Mr. Trump and Ms. McDougal, Justice Merchan ruled — but not accounts that the affair continued while Mrs. Trump was pregnant with their son, Barron. (If the court proceedings bring up Barron, whose privacy his mother fiercely guards, Ms. Grisham said, Mrs. Trump is likely to be “not happy” with her husband “all over again.”)

The trial is nonetheless all but certain to examine a timeline that Mrs. Trump would prefer not to revisit. Mr. Trump and Ms. Daniels met at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament, at a time when the Trumps had been married for a year and Mrs. Trump had recently given birth to Barron.

Mr. Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels. But prosecutors say that when Ms. Daniels looked to sell her story a decade later, Mr. Trump directed Michael D. Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, to pay Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. The reports of a payoff blindsided Mrs. Trump, who responded to the initial reports by getting out of town.

She canceled a trip to Davos, Switzerland, with Mr. Trump, made an impromptu visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and then she jetted off to Mar-a-Lago, the Trumps’ beachside fortress in Palm Beach, Fla., where she spent part of her trip relaxing at the spa. She eventually reappeared, only to take a separate car to Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address and appear on the arm of a male military aide.

By now, allies of the Trumps say, Mrs. Trump has lumped the trial into all of the other legal problems her husband faces, and she is steelier than she was before.

Last month, she appeared next to Mr. Trump to welcome Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Weeks later, she voted alongside Mr. Trump in Florida, where she responded to a question about whether she would be campaigning more often with a cryptic “stay tuned.”

Supporters have hailed her scheduled appearance at a fund-raising event for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of L.G.B.T. conservatives, as proof that Mrs. Trump is prepared to be more engaged on the campaign trail.

The event, scheduled for Saturday, will draw attendees who have paid at least $10,000 for a chance to interact with Mrs. Trump, according to a person familiar with the planning who was not authorized to detail it.

The event will be set up like a cocktail reception, and Mrs. Trump is expected to deliver remarks about her time as first lady and reiterate her support for her husband.

But there is one catch: The event will not be held in a battleground state or at any location on a traditional campaign trail. It will be held in a reception room at Mar-a-Lago, steps from Mrs. Trump’s suite.

The Log Cabin Republicans have been a source of income for Mrs. Trump before. According to a financial disclosure last year, Mrs. Trump received a $250,000 payment from the group in December 2022. Charles Moran, a representative of the group, said in an email that Mrs. Trump was not taking a fee from the Log Cabin Republicans for her appearance.

A spokeswoman for Mrs. Trump did not respond to a request for comment for this article, and neither did a representative for the Trump campaign.

Mrs. Trump’s allies say that she will likely appear again as the campaign continues — a sign, they say, that she realizes there is a real chance she could become first lady again — but that she is likely to be selective with her time.

For now, she is focused on Barron’s graduation from high school later this spring and preparing him for college. Mr. Trump complained repeatedly on social media on Monday that he might miss his son’s graduation because of the trial. Barron attends a private school near Mar-a-Lago and is expected to graduate in May.

Mrs. Trump’s allies say other personal issues could keep her from the campaign trail. She is said to still be mourning the death of her mother, Amalija Knavs, who died in January and was one of a small number of people in Mrs. Trump’s world who had her absolute trust. Her sister, Ines Knauss, is another confidant, but Ms. Knauss lives in New York City.

Another person Mrs. Trump trusts is Kellyanne Conway, who served as counselor to Mr. Trump in the White House; Mrs. Trump is pushing for Ms. Conway to return to Mr. Trump’s orbit in a formal capacity, a development first reported by the news site Puck. Ms. Conway, who was a confidant for both Mr. and Mrs. Trump when they were in the White House, has said that Mr. Trump cares deeply about his wife’s opinion — and, in some cases, he might even fear it.

“He listens to many of us,” she told a congressional committee in 2022, “but he reserves fear for one person, Melania Trump.”

The investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack is already the largest criminal inquiry in Justice Department history, federal prosecutors have said. And even after more than three years, it has shown little sign of slowing down.

Every week, a few more rioters are arrested and charges against them are unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington. Prosecutors have suggested that a total of 2,000 or 2,500 people could ultimately face indictment for their roles in the attack.

More than 1,380 people had been charged in connection with the attack as of early this month, according to the Justice Department. Among the most common charges brought against them are two misdemeanors: illegal parading inside the Capitol and entering and remaining in a restricted federal area, a type of trespassing.

About 350 rioters have been accused of violating the obstruction statute that the Supreme Court is considering at its hearing, and nearly 500 people have been charged with assaulting police officers. Many rioters have been charged with multiple crimes, the most serious of which so far has been seditious conspiracy.

Almost 800 defendants have already pleaded guilty; about 250 of them have done so to felony charges. Prosecutors have won the vast majority of the cases that have gone to trial: More than 150 defendants have been convicted at trial and only two have been fully acquitted.

More than 850 people have been sentenced so far, and about 520 have received at least some time in prison. The stiffest penalties have been handed down to the former leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, far-right extremist groups that played central roles in the Capitol attack.

Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, and Stewart Rhodes, who once led the Oath Keepers, was given an 18-year term.

In his office on one of the upper floors of the headquarters of the Paris Olympic organizing committee, Franz Regul has no doubt what is coming.

“We will be attacked,” said Mr. Regul, who leads the team responsible for warding off cyberthreats against this year’s Summer Games in Paris.

Companies and governments around the world now all have teams like Mr. Regul’s that operate in spartan rooms equipped with banks of computer servers and screens with indicator lights that warn of incoming hacking attacks. In the Paris operations center, there is even a red light to alert the staff to the most severe danger.

So far, Mr. Regul said, there have been no serious disruptions. But as the months until the Olympics tick down to weeks and then days and hours, he knows the number of hacking attempts and the level of risk will rise exponentially. Unlike companies and governments, though, who plan for the possibility of an attack, Mr. Regul said he knew exactly when to expect the worst.

“Not many organizations can tell you they will be attacked in July and August,” he said.

Worries over security at major events like the Olympics have usually focused on physical threats, like terrorist attacks. But as technology plays a growing role in the Games rollout, Olympic organizers increasingly view cyberattacks as a more constant danger.

The threats are manifold. Experts say hacking groups and countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran now have sophisticated operations capable of disabling not just computer and Wi-Fi networks but also digital ticketing systems, credential scanners and even the timing systems for events.

Fears about hacking attacks are not just hypothetical. At the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, a successful attack nearly derailed the Games before they could begin.

That cyberattack started on a frigid night as fans arrived for the opening ceremony. Signs that something was amiss came all at once. The Wi-Fi network, an essential tool to transmit photographs and news coverage, suddenly went down. Simultaneously, the official Olympics smartphone app — the one that held fans’ tickets and essential transport information — stopped functioning, preventing some fans from entering the stadium. Broadcast drones were grounded and internet-linked televisions meant to show images of the ceremony across venues went blank.

But the ceremony went ahead, and so did the Games. Dozens of cybersecurity officials worked through the night to repel the attack and to fix the glitches, and by the next morning there was little sign that a catastrophe had been averted when the first events got underway.

Since then, the threat to the Olympics has only grown. The cybersecurity team at the last Summer Games, in Tokyo in 2021, reported that it faced 450 million attempted “security events.” Paris expects to face eight to 12 times that number, Mr. Regul said.

Perhaps to demonstrate the scale of the threat, Paris 2024 cybersecurity officials use military terminology freely. They describe “war games” meant to test specialists and systems, and refer to feedback from “veterans of Korea” that has been integrated into their evolving defenses.

Experts say a variety of actors are behind most cyberattacks, including criminals trying to hold data in exchange for a lucrative ransom and protesters who want to highlight a specific cause. But most experts agree that only nation states have the ability to carry out the biggest attacks.

The 2018 attack in Pyeongchang was initially blamed on North Korea, South Korea’s antagonistic neighbor. But experts, including agencies in the U.S. and Britain, later concluded that the true culprit — now widely accepted to be Russia — deliberately used techniques designed to pin the blame on someone else.

This year, Russia is once again the biggest focus.

Russia’s team has been barred from the Olympics following the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, although a small group of individual Russians will be permitted to compete as neutral athletes. France’s relationship with Russia has soured so much that President Emmanuel Macron recently accused Moscow of attempting to undermine the Olympics through a disinformation campaign.

The International Olympic Committee has also pointed the finger at attempts by Russian groups to damage the Games. In November, the I.O.C. issued an unusual statement saying it had been targeted by defamatory “fake news posts” after a documentary featuring an A.I.-generated voice-over purporting to be the actor Tom Cruise appeared on YouTube.

Later, a separate post on Telegram — the encrypted messaging and content platform — mimicked a fake news item broadcast by the French network Canal Plus and aired false information that the I.O.C. was planning to bar Israeli and Palestinian teams from the Paris Olympics.

Earlier this year, Russian pranksters — impersonating a senior African official — managed to get Thomas Bach, the I.O.C. president, on the phone. The call was recorded and released earlier this month. Russia seized on Mr. Bach’s remarks to accuse Olympic officials of engaging in a “conspiracy” to keep its team out of the Games.

In 2019, according to Microsoft, Russian state hackers attacked the computer networks of at least 16 national and international sports and antidoping organizations, including the World Anti-Doping Agency, which at the time was poised to announce punishments against Russia related to its state-backed doping program.

Three years earlier, Russia had targeted antidoping officials at the Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics. According to indictments of several Russian military intelligence officers filed by the United States Department of Justice, operatives in that incident spoofed hotel Wi-Fi networks used by antidoping officials in Brazil to successfully penetrate their organization’s email networks and databases.

Ciaran Martin, who served as the first chief executive of Britain’s national cybersecurity center, said Russia’s past behavior made it “the most obvious disruptive threat” at the Paris Games. He said areas that might be targeted included event scheduling, public broadcasts and ticketing systems.

“Imagine if all athletes are there on time, but the system scanning iPhones at the gate has gone down,” said Mr. Martin, who is now a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.

“Do you go through with a half-empty stadium, or do we delay?” he added. “Even being put in that position where you either have to delay it or have world-class athletes in the biggest event of their lives performing in front of a half-empty stadium — that’s absolutely a failure.”

Mr. Regul, the Paris cybersecurity head, declined to speculate about any specific nation that might target this summer’s Games. But he said organizers were preparing to counter methods specific to countries that represent a “strong cyberthreat.”

This year, Paris organizers have been conducting what they called “war games” in conjunction with the I.O.C. and partners like Atos, the Games’ official technology partner, to prepare for attacks. In those exercises, so-called ethical hackers are hired to attack systems in place for the Games, and “bug bounties” are offered to those who discover vulnerabilities.

Hackers have previously targeted sports organizations with malicious emails, fictional personas, stolen passwords and malware. Since last year, new hires at the Paris organizing committee have undergone training to spot phishing scams.

“Not everyone is good,” Mr. Regul said.

In at least one case, a Games staff member paid an invoice to an account after receiving an email impersonating another committee official. Cybersecurity staff members also discovered an email account that had attempted to impersonate the one assigned to the Paris 2024 chief, Tony Estanguet.

Millions more attempts are coming. Cyberattacks have typically been “weapons of mass irritation rather than weapons of mass destruction,” said Mr. Martin, the former British cybersecurity official.

“At their worst,” he said, “they’ve been weapons of mass disruption.”

President Biden will kick off a three-day tour of Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state, with a speech on Tuesday that focuses on taxes and aims to contrast his policies with those of former President Donald J. Trump.

In Scranton, his hometown, Mr. Biden is expected to talk about the tax code in the frame of economic fairness, arguing that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts benefited billionaires while his own agenda has helped working- and middle-class families.

The president “will outline how Trump’s tax plan is a handout to the rich and leaves the middle class holding the bag,” Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director, said during a call with reporters. “The address will drive home a simple question: Do you think the tax code should work for rich people and for corporations or for the middle class?”

All of that is standard election-year fare. But the backdrop to Mr. Biden’s campaign swing could not be more unusual. In an unprecedented trial, Mr. Trump is spending most of this week, and much of the coming month or two, in a Manhattan courtroom facing criminal charges. Democrats hope that the contrast of Mr. Biden campaigning and carrying out the duties of a president while Mr. Trump’s lawyers plead his innocence will highlight the choice voters face in November.

And Mr. Biden must also contend with the fallout from Iran’s weekend attack on Israel, which raised new fears of a wider regional war in the Middle East.

On Tuesday, the day after Tax Day, Mr. Biden is likely to promote his plans for changes to the tax code, including expanding the child tax credit, instituting a tax credit for first-time home buyers and making permanent tax credits for those who buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

He often asks his audiences on the campaign trail: “Does anybody think the tax code is fair?”

Pennsylvania is a key target for both the Biden and Trump campaigns. Mr. Biden’s easiest path to re-election involves him winning Pennsylvania, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin, the so-called blue wall states. In 2020, he narrowly defeated Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes. Polling shows that another tight race is likely in the state, the nation’s most populous battleground.

Mr. Trump held a major rally in eastern Pennsylvania on Saturday. Both he and Mr. Biden, who spent much of his childhood in Scranton, have sought to highlight their ties to the state. “I went to school here, right?” Mr. Trump, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, reminded his audience. “I went to school in Pennsylvania. I love Pennsylvania.”

While Mr. Biden’s campaign has invested heavily in opening offices and hiring staff members around the state, Pennsylvania Democrats have urged him to broaden his travel beyond Philadelphia, a major hub of Democratic votes that is also logistically convenient for him to visit. They say it is imperative that Mr. Biden campaign in western Pennsylvania, as well as swing areas like Erie County, which Mr. Biden flipped in 2020.

This week, Mr. Biden is doing just that. After leaving Scranton, he will visit Pittsburgh on Wednesday to give an official address at the headquarters of the United Steelworkers. Unions are a major constituency for Democrats, and Mr. Biden has signaled opposition to an effort by a Japanese company to acquire U.S. Steel, a move also opposed by the steelworkers union, which has endorsed him.

On Thursday, he will campaign in Philadelphia.

Although the economy will be Mr. Biden’s focus during his tour, Democrats are also trying to keep the issue of abortion front and center, seeking to tie Mr. Trump directly to bans on the procedure in many states, most recently in Arizona.

Ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit to Pennsylvania over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee unveiled billboards in the eastern part of the state.

“Because of Trump, over 20 states have extreme abortion bans,” the billboards said in English and Spanish. “If he gets his way, Pennsylvania could be next.”

Abortion is legal in the state until 24 weeks of pregnancy with exceptions after that and, with a Democratic governor in office, restrictions seem highly unlikely. Democrats have argued that Mr. Trump would sign a federal ban on abortion if he were re-elected. Mr. Trump said last week that he would not, reversing a position he held during his term in the White House.

Michael Gold contributed reporting from Schnecksville, Pa.

Lindsey McNeil and her 7-year-old daughter, Noelle, who suffers from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, were jolted by an alert they received from Florida’s Department of Children and Families late last month that Noelle would be losing her Medicaid coverage 10 days later.

Their lives have since begun to unravel, Ms. McNeil said. Noelle has stopped seeing the four therapists she visits each week and is running low on medications she needs to prevent her seizures from flaring up. Monday brought a measure of relief: Ms. McNeil learned that Noelle’s coverage had been temporarily reinstated as they wait for a resolution to an appeal filed with the state.

“We’ve worked really hard to grow our family and our life and a home for this child,” Ms. McNeil said. “It’s a little daunting to think about what she may lose, and what we may not be able to provide for her.”

Noelle was one of the most recent casualties of the unwinding of a pandemic-era federal policy that required states to keep people on Medicaid, the health insurance program that covers low-income Americans, in exchange for more federal funding. While the policy was in place, enrollees were spared regular eligibility checks. Enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program swelled to a record of more than 90 million, and the nation’s uninsured rate dropped to record lows.

But the policy lapsed at the start of April last year, allowing states to resume trimming their rolls, and the so-called unwinding process that ensued has had far-reaching effects. More than 20 million Americans lost Medicaid at some point in the past year, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group — an unprecedented event in the joint federal-state program’s nearly 60-year history.

The disruption is not over yet. Only about 70 percent of renewal checks have been completed, according to Daniel Tsai, a senior official at the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, suggesting that millions more people could lose coverage by the time the process concludes.

Here are some takeaways from the shrinking of Medicaid over the past year.

Many of those who lost coverage have not found an alternative.

In a survey released on Friday by KFF, almost a quarter of adults who lost Medicaid during the unwinding said they were currently uninsured, while 70 percent of those who were dropped from the program said they had wound up uninsured at least temporarily.

The Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, which recorded a record number of sign-ups for 2024, provided a refuge for some people. Edwin Park, a Georgetown University researcher, pointed to recent federal data that showed that roughly 25 percent of those losing Medicaid had signed up for marketplace plans.

Children have been hit especially hard.

More than half the nation’s children were covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program before the unwinding began, and the toll on that population has been pronounced.

Nearly five million children have lost Medicaid so far, according to state data analyzed by Georgetown researchers. About two million of them have been in Texas, Georgia and Florida, all of which have not expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act.

Coverage losses have been severely damaging even when temporary. In Richmond, Va., Trina King’s 12-year-old son, Jerome, who has Down syndrome, went about two months without Medicaid late last summer and early fall. Ms. King said the gap was the result of a series of delays in confirming Jerome’s eligibility after she had moved and missed a renewal packet. The mailing had been sent to her old address even though she had notified the state that she had moved, Ms. King said.

Jerome, whose coverage was eventually reinstated, skipped appointments with a roster of specialists who accept Medicaid, including a spine doctor; an ear, nose and throat specialist; a cardiologist; and a urologist, Ms. King said. During the gap in his coverage, his sessions with a home health aide had to be canceled. Ms. King put off a post-surgical follow-up appointment that Jerome needed and also skipped some of his routine medical appointments.

Most people are being dropped because of bureaucratic mistakes.

Like Jerome, roughly 70 percent of people who have lost Medicaid were dropped for what were considered procedural causes, according to a KFF analysis of state data. Many people lost coverage after they did not return required paperwork to a state Medicaid office, while others were accidentally booted because of technical glitches.

Hunter Jolley, a 33-year-old bartender in Little Rock, Ark., who makes around $19,000 a year, lost Medicaid last fall after renewal paperwork was mailed to an old address. Mx. Jolley, who uses the pronouns they and them, said they had failed to secure coverage again despite applying three times to get back into the program.

“It’s all pretty terrifying,” Mx. Jolley said, adding that they had skipped medical and therapy appointments and reduced psychiatry appointments to once every three months, paying $270 out of pocket for them.

Those technical errors stem in part from how Medicaid is organized.

The different ways that state Medicaid programs are set up help explain the varying rates of procedural disenrollments, health policy experts said.

“People often think of one big Medicaid program when we talk about aggregate numbers, but the experience of people across the country, depending on the state they live in, has been very different,” said Mr. Tsai, the federal Medicaid official.

Jennifer Tolbert, a health policy expert at KFF, said the unwinding had laid bare the nation’s highly decentralized system of Medicaid administration, with states using different technology, some of it outdated and glitchy.

Kelly Cantrelle, a senior Medicaid official in Nevada, said the software used by the state to verify eligibility had not been programmed to vet each member of a household correctly, a problem that at one point led to children being booted from Medicaid even if they were still eligible for it. The state’s contractor responsible for the software had to scramble to update it, she added.

Carrying out the enrollment checks has been a complex undertaking even for large state Medicaid bureaucracies. Pennsylvania had roughly 6,000 full-time employees working on the unwinding, said Hoa Pham, an official with the state’s Department of Human Services.

Some argue that trimming enrollment will return Medicaid to its intended scope.

Some health policy experts and state leaders have made the case that paring down the Medicaid rolls over the past year was needed to preserve the program for those eligible for it.

Researchers at the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative policy research organization, estimated last summer that there were about 18 million people on Medicaid who were ineligible for coverage, costing the program more than $80 billion annually.

“Medicaid has eligibility requirements that are on the books,” said Drew Gonshorowski, a researcher at Paragon who has written about the potential savings from trimming the Medicaid rolls. “We shouldn’t be haphazardly expanding coverage by just not doing eligibility determinations. The program should work as intended.”

It was so close. Had just one missile or drone gotten through and killed a lot of Israelis, American officials feared, the region could have gone up in flames.

So when Israeli and U.S. forces, with help from Arab allies, managed a near-perfect defense against last weekend’s aerial barrage from Iran, it represented not only an extraordinary military and diplomatic feat but also a major victory for President Biden’s effort to head off escalation of the war in the Middle East.

Mr. Biden and his team hoped that the developments over the weekend could give all three major actors enough to claim victory and walk away. Iran could claim vindication for taking aggressive action in response to the Israeli strike that killed some of its top military officers. Israel showed the world that its military is too formidable to challenge and that Iran is impotent against it. And the United States kept the region from erupting for another day.

It may not work out that way, however. Rather than pocketing the win, such as it was, Israeli officials said on Monday that they would respond — without saying when or exactly how — and Mr. Biden’s advisers were bracing to see what that might entail.

A less-visible cyberattack or a pointed but limited military action might satisfy Israel’s desire to re-establish deterrence without provoking Iran into firing back again. A more extensive and in-their-face attack on Iranian soil, on the other hand, could prompt Tehran to mount a counterattack, and suddenly the conflict could explode into a sustained and increasingly dangerous war.

“This weekend we saw Biden at his best,” said Laura Blumenfeld, a Middle East analyst at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and a former State Department policy adviser. “The U.S.-led aerial display with European and Arab regional partners played like an action movie trailer for a new Middle East air defense alliance.”

But, she added, the reality is that the Israel Defense Forces will inevitably respond. “Turning the other cheek is not in the I.D.F. playbook,” she said. “A simple ‘don’t’ won’t work. Israel’s response is not a question of if, but when and how. You can’t get around Middle East math — one grave, opposite one grave.”

Some hawkish analysts said that Mr. Biden was thinking about it all wrong. His effort to avoid escalation may trigger one instead, they argued, because Iran and other enemies have been emboldened by increasingly public disagreements between Washington and Jerusalem over Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza.

“This perception of separation may have been a factor in Iran taking the unprecedented step of attacking Israel directly,” said Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

It was not enough to shoot down Iranian missiles, he added.

“Stopping the attacks after they launch is not the same as deterring them from being launched,” he said. “If Biden’s team once more seeks to carve out a space between itself and Israel, then it will invite further conflict.”

The successful defense of Israel was the result of 10 days of intense diplomacy and military coordination by the Biden administration and years of security relationships built up by multiple administrations throughout the region. After it became clear that Iran was planning to strike Israel for the first time after decades of shadow war, American officials scrambled to activate, for the first time, regional air defense plans that have been in the works for years.

American military officials worked closely with Israeli counterparts to map out a scheme to take down incoming missiles and drones, coordinated with British and French forces in the region, and arranged with Arab allies to provide intelligence and tracking data and permit use of their airspace.

Jordan, which has been highly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, nonetheless shot down Iranian drones crossing over its territory toward Israel. An American Patriot battery based in Iraq shot down an Iranian ballistic missile crossing through Iraqi airspace.

In some ways, the larger cooperation against Iran is the outgrowth of the changing politics of the region, as exemplified by the Abraham Accords sealed under President Donald J. Trump, through which Arab states like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established normal diplomatic relations with Israel for the first time. The Biden administration has been attempting to draw Saudi Arabia into the accords, and while no deal has been reached, the sheikhs in Riyadh have been ready to build ties with Israel in part out of shared animosity toward Iran.

The interception of nearly every one of more than 300 missiles and drones without any fatalities in Israel or even major physical damage felt like validation for those who have worked on erecting a web of security arrangements in the region.

John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, called it a “spectacular” success. “That’s the upshot here,” he said at a briefing on Monday. “A stronger Israel, a weaker Iran, a more unified alliance and partners. That was not Iran’s intent when it launched this attack on Saturday night, not even close. Again, they failed. They failed utterly.”

Mr. Kirby disputed speculation that Iran did not really intend to do damage because it telegraphed its coming attack for more than a week, and he denied reports that Tehran had even passed along messages through intermediaries giving details about time and targets. He scoffed at the suggestion that more than 300 missiles and drones amounted to just a face-saving exercise.

“Maybe they want to make it appear like this was some sort of small pinprick of an attack that they never meant to succeed,” he said. “You can’t throw that much metal in the air, which they did, in the time frame in which they did it, and convince anybody realistically that you weren’t trying to cause casualties and that you weren’t trying to cause damage. They absolutely were.”

Mr. Biden himself has said little publicly about the strike. “Together with our partners, we defeated that attack,” he said on Monday in his first public appearance since the strike, a White House meeting with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani of Iraq. “The United States is committed to Israel’s security.”

Mr. Sudani, whose country maintains a fragile balance between the United States and Iran, said he favored efforts to stop “the expansion of the area of conflict, especially the latest development.”

But he also used the opportunity to press Mr. Biden about his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “We’re actually very eager about stopping this war, which claimed the life of thousands of civilians — women and children,” Mr. Sudani said.

The flare-up with Iran has diverted attention from the Gaza war at the very moment when Mr. Biden had begun turning up the pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do more to ease civilian suffering.

Shibley Telhami, a Middle East scholar at the University of Maryland, said Mr. Netanyahu had an interest in prolonging the dispute with Tehran, “both as a distraction from the horrors of Gaza and as a way of changing the subject to an issue where he is more likely to get sympathy in the U.S. and the West.”

Mr. Telhami said the success over the weekend did little to undo “the damage of Biden’s strategic failure” in stopping the crisis in Gaza. “It shouldn’t take our attention away from this bigger strategic failure, whose costs have been immense and still unfolding,” he said.

Still, Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said it was no small matter to avert a larger regional war, at least for now.

“Biden deserves big credit,” he said. At the same time, he added, it may fade fast. “We’re still on the edge because the circumstances are extraordinary and the crisis could escalate any day.”

Katherine Moseby wanted to be clear: She does not hate cats. “They’re a wily beast,” she said, as her truck rumbled down a desert road. “But I respect them. They’re pretty incredible animals. Amazing hunters. Very smart.”

That was precisely the problem, said Dr. Moseby, the principal scientist and co-founder of Arid Recovery, a conservation nonprofit and wildlife reserve in South Australia. Cats are not native to Australia, but they have invaded nearly every corner of the country. She gestured out the window at the dusty, red expanse, which bore few signs of life. But feral cats were absolutely out there, Dr. Moseby said, and they had a taste for the tiny, threatened marsupials that lived at Arid Recovery.

Even with extensive fencing, keeping the cats at bay requires constant vigilance. Over the previous few nights, a “pest control contractor” — a robustly bearded sharpshooter equipped with an all-terrain vehicle and powerful spotlight — had been riding through the Arid Recovery reserve, shooting cats.

When Dr. Moseby, who is also a researcher at the University of New South Wales, pulled up to the Arid Recovery office a few minutes later, she made her way to a small outbuilding to check on the shooter’s progress. A line of red droplets led down the stone path. “Fresh blood trail’s a good sign,” she said, before pushing open the door.

Inside, the carcasses of more than a dozen cats were piled in a large, shallow tub. The shooter was responsible for four of them, Dr. Moseby said, looking over the animals. The others had been caught over the preceding weeks and were being stored until researchers could examine the contents of their stomachs.

It was a scene to make most any cat lover squeamish, and Dr. Moseby, who grew up with pet cats, once would have been “outraged” by the idea of killing them, she said. But after repeatedly discovering the half-eaten carcasses of greater bilbies and burrowing bettongs, just two of the reserve’s vulnerable residents, she had come to a stark conclusion: “You have to make a choice between cats and wildlife.”

Cats are not villains. But they are hunters, and through no fault of their own they take an enormous toll on the world’s wildlife. They pose an especially acute threat in Australia, which has no native feline species but is home to a menagerie of slow-to-reproduce, snack-size mammals.

“Cats are just catastrophic,” said John Read, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide and Dr. Moseby’s husband. The two founded Arid Recovery in 1997.

Since European settlers, and their cats, began arriving in Australia in the late 18th century, at least 34 species of native mammals have gone extinct. It is the worst mammalian extinction rate in the modern world, and cats have been “a major contributor,” said Sarah Legge, a wildlife ecologist at Charles Darwin University and the Australian National University. “Our fauna just haven’t evolved to cope with cats.”

Pet cats do their share of damage, but the feral cat population is an especially intractable problem. The Australian government has labeled feral cats “a nationally significant pest” and declared “war” on the free-ranging felines more than once.

For decades, Drs. Moseby and Read have been on the front lines. They have devoted some of their efforts to developing new tools for reducing the ranks of feral cats. “We need to do it as efficiently and effectively and humanely as possible,” Dr. Read said. “But we need to do it.”

They also know that the cats are too entrenched to eliminate altogether, and that protecting native animals will require more than cat control. After all, there are two sides to the predator-prey relationship. And if cats are in Australia to stay, the bilbies and bettongs will need to find a way to live safely alongside them.

Building a better cat trap

The Arid Recovery reserve sits just outside Roxby Downs, a small mining town in Australia’s vast, desert interior. During a visit in early November — it was spring in the Southern Hemisphere — temperatures soared well past 100 degrees. A bleached kangaroo skeleton baked in the sun.

The reserve’s deep orange sand dunes are surrounded by a wire fence designed to keep out feral cats as well as foxes and rabbits, two other European invaders that have wreaked havoc on Australian ecosystems. That has made Arid Recovery an oasis for animals like the burrowing bettong, a compact cousin of the kangaroo that resembles a hopping, heavyset rat.

By the mid-20th century, the bettongs had died out on mainland Australia, thanks, in part, to predation from cats and foxes. Today, burrowing bettongs are confined to islands and fenced reserves like Arid Recovery.

These “feral-free safe havens” have become a cornerstone of conservation in Australia. But Arid Recovery’s founders viewed them as short-term solutions. “Our objective was always to try and get conservation happening outside fences,” Dr. Read said.

Over the years, they tried releasing bettongs and bilbies, which have the erect ears of a rabbit and the protruding snout of a very small aardvark, outside the reserve. They used traps, poisoned bait and sharpshooters to keep the local cat population low, but the outcome was always the same: a lot of dead bilbies and bettongs. “It’s just so disheartening going out every day, radio tracking animals that you’ve released, and then finding them dead under a bush,” Dr. Moseby said.

So the couple started searching for new solutions, using what they had learned about cat behavior. Years of feral-cat forensics, which included swabbing the carcasses of dead prey animals and cataloging the stomach contents of captured cats, had revealed that a small subset of cats, mostly large males, were doing most of the damage. “A lot of the cats that are killing these threatened prey are actually serial killers,” Dr. Moseby said.

In 2016, Drs. Moseby and Read and two colleagues proposed focusing on these repeat offenders by turning vulnerable prey into poisonous “toxic Trojans.” Since then, they have been part of a scientific team developing small, poison-containing implants that can be injected beneath the skin of threatened prey animals.

The outer coating of the implant would dissolve, releasing a fatal dose of poison into the stomach of any cat that had made the mistake of dining on the wrong animal. That might be cold comfort to a bilby that just became dinner, but could save its compatriots from a similar fate.

In conjunction, Dr. Read has been leading an effort to design a better cat trap. As long as prey are plentiful, cats generally prefer hunting their own dinner to scavenging for human-supplied bait. “They’re often reluctant to go into a cage trap unless they’re starving,” Dr. Read said, noting that the best hunters are the hardest cats to trap.

What cats are not reluctant to do, however, is keep themselves clean, which is accomplished by licking their fur frequently. So Dr. Read created the Felixer, an automated, solar-powered machine that sprays a toxic gel onto passing cats. The devices are equipped with range-finding sensors, a camera and algorithms to help it distinguish cats from other animals. In one six-week field trial, a deployment of 20 Felixers appeared to kill 33 cats, scientists estimated. More than 200 of the devices have been deployed across Australia, Dr. Read said.

“I think it’s going to be a really important addition to the tool kit,” Dr. Legge said.

Indeed, even at Arid Recovery, keeping the cat population in check required a suite of tools, including conventional traps, camera monitoring and shooters. No approach was foolproof. “Sometimes we’ll have one cat we’re trying to catch, and it can take 12 months,” Dr. Moseby said.

Surveys suggest that Australians view feral cats as threats to native wildlife, and that many support lethal control methods. But the killing of animals is always a fraught subject, especially when the targets look just like beloved family pets. Drs. Moseby and Read have received their fair share of hate mail, and some celebrities and animal rights groups have spoken out against Australia’s cat culling campaigns.

Some scientists have objected, too. Arian Wallach, a conservation biologist at the Queensland University of Technology, described herself as a “pro-cat conservationist” and referred to the country’s war on cats as “mass murder.”

Ecosystems are complex, Dr. Wallach said, and it’s not a given that the large-scale removal of cats would meaningfully reduce the odds of extinction for threatened species. At this point, she said, conservationists should accept cats as part of Australia’s landscape and think creatively about other ways to protect endangered animals. “If that’s what conservation has to offer is a big pile of dead cats,” she said, “then I really don’t think that my profession has much to offer at all.”

Survival lessons

Although Dr. Moseby is firm that Australia needs to reduce its feral cat population, she knows that conservationists cannot count on complete eradication. “It’s impossible,” she conceded.

So she has also been working to combat a problem known as prey naïveté. According to the prey naïveté hypothesis, a lack of prior exposure to cats means that some Australian animals may not be able to recognize or respond to feline threats.

Research suggests that fenced reserves and other safe havens may exacerbate the problem, by making it safe for sheltered populations to lose whatever defensive behaviors they did have.

Dr. Moseby’s unusual solution? Give threatened prey a crash course in survival by releasing feral cats into one of Arid Recovery’s enclosures.

In 2015, she did just that, adding five feral cats to a paddock full of bilbies and bettongs. Over time, she hoped, the bilbies and bettongs would learn how to avoid becoming victims, and the cats would accelerate natural selection by removing the weakest, least predator-savvy individuals from the population.

It was a risky tactic; the experiment would only work if the cats posed a legitimate danger. “We want cats eating some animals and coexisting with them and scaring them and hunting them and having near misses,” Dr. Moseby said.

After two years, the cat-exposed bilbies behaved more cautiously than bilbies that lived in a predator-free paddock. And they were more likely to survive when released in a new location with a high density of cats.

After five years, the bettongs in the cat paddock were not only warier than their more sheltered counterparts but also had larger heads and feet. “We think that’s either because they can escape better or that cats are more likely to prey on smaller animals,” Dr. Moseby said. “So it’s driving that selection for larger animals.”

Will it be enough?

The results suggest that it is possible to spur rapid changes in the bodies and behaviors of threatened prey, said Dr. Legge, who was not involved in the research. “But the question remains: Is that ever going to be enough to help these bettongs survive in the presence of cats?” she said. “It kind of seems unlikely. But I think it’s worth a try.”

Dr. Moseby and her colleagues are also investigating the possibility of using a native predator — the western quoll, a carnivorous marsupial — to sharpen the defenses of animals that have long been confined to predator-free safe havens. “We’re hoping that will be at least a steppingstone to improving their responses to cats,” Dr. Moseby said.

Testing that hypothesis will require a lot more time and data, so late one night last November, Dr. Moseby and Kylie McQualter, a postdoctoral researcher, set out to collect some.

Wearing headlamps, they traipsed through the predator-free paddock, working their way along a meandering trail of baited cage traps. In the prey naïveté studies, these animals served as controls; periodically trapping them allowed researchers to collect data on their physical traits and behaviors, which would serve as a point of comparison for the animal populations living alongside cats and quolls.

It was a successful night, yielding one bilby, three bandicoots and an embarrassment of bettongs, which sat, placid and unblinking, in trap after trap. The scientists worked quickly, using a hanging scale and calipers to take the measure of each marsupial before releasing it back into the desert night. But the bettongs were in no hurry to flee from these humans and their bright lights and strange scientific tools. “Off you go!” Dr. Moseby urged one.

It was easy to imagine how this docile demeanor might get a bettong into trouble in the unforgiving world beyond the fence. But here, few dangers lurked, and the bettongs eventually wandered off, some grunting softly as they disappeared into the dark.

Microsoft on Tuesday plans to announce a $1.5 billion investment in G42, an artificial intelligence giant in the United Arab Emirates, in a deal largely orchestrated by the Biden administration to box out China as Washington and Beijing battle over who will exercise technological influence in the Gulf region and beyond.

Under the partnership, Microsoft will give G42 permission to sell Microsoft services that use powerful A.I. chips, which are used to train and fine-tune generative A.I. models. In return, G42, which has been under scrutiny by Washington for its ties to China, will use Microsoft’s cloud services and accede to a security arrangement negotiated in detailed conversations with the U.S. government. It places a series of protections on the A.I. products shared with G42 and includes an agreement to strip Chinese gear out of G42’s operations, among other steps.

“When it comes to emerging technology, you cannot be both in China’s camp and our camp,” said Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Secretary, who traveled twice to the U.A.E. to talk about security arrangements for this and other partnerships.

The accord is highly unusual, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in an interview, reflecting the U.S. government’s extraordinary concern about protecting the intellectual property behind A.I. programs.

“The U.S. is quite naturally concerned that the most important technology is guarded by a trusted U.S. company,” said Mr. Smith, who will take a seat on G42’s board.

The investment could help the United States push back against China’s rising influence in the Gulf region. If the moves succeed, G42 would be brought into the U.S. fold and pare back its ties with China. The deal could also become a model for how U.S. firms leverage their technological leadership in A.I. to lure countries away from Chinese tech, while reaping huge financial awards.

But the matter is sensitive, as U.S. officials have raised questions about G42. This year, a congressional committee wrote a letter urging the Commerce Department to look into whether G42 should be put under trade restrictions for its ties to China, which include partnerships with Chinese firms and employees who came from government-connected companies.

In an interview, Ms. Raimondo, who has been at the center of an effort to prevent China from obtaining the most advanced semiconductors and the equipment to make them, said the agreement “does not authorize the transfer of artificial intelligence, or A.I. models, or GPUs” — the processors needed to develop A.I. applications — and “assures those technologies can be safely developed, protected and deployed.”

While the U.A.E. and United States did not sign a separate accord, Ms. Raimondo said, “We have been extensively briefed and we are comfortable that this agreement is consistent with our values.”

In a statement, Peng Xiao, the group chief executive of G42, said that “through Microsoft’s strategic investment, we are advancing our mission to deliver cutting-edge A.I. technologies at scale.”

The United States and China have been racing to exert technological influence in the Gulf, where hundreds of billions of dollars are up for grabs and major investors, including Saudi Arabia, are expected to spend billions on the technology. In the rush to diversify away from oil, many leaders in the region have set their sights on A.I. — and have been happy to play the United States and China off each other.

Although the U.A.E. is an important U.S. diplomatic and intelligence partner, and one of the largest buyers of American weapons, it has increasingly expanded its military and economic ties with China. A portion of its domestic surveillance system is built on Chinese technology and its telecommunications work on hardware from Huawei, a Chinese supplier. That has fed the worries of U.S. officials, who often visit the Persian Gulf nation to discuss security issues.

But U.S. officials are also concerned that the spread of powerful A.I. technology critical to national security could eventually be used by China or by Chinese government-linked engineers, if not sufficiently guarded. Last month, a U.S. cybersecurity review board sharply criticized Microsoft over a hack in which Chinese attackers gained access to data from top officials. Any major leak — for instance, by G42 selling Microsoft A.I. solutions to companies set up in the region by China — would go against Biden administration policies that have sought to limit China’s access to the cutting-edge technology.

“This is among the most advanced technology that the U.S. possesses,” said Gregory Allen, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former U.S. defense official who worked on A.I. “There should be very strategic rationale for offshoring it anywhere.”

For Microsoft, a deal with G42 offers potential access to huge Emirati wealth. The company, whose chairman is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirates’ national security adviser and the younger brother of the country’s ruler, is a core part of the U.A.E.’s efforts to become a major A.I. player.

Despite a name whimsically drawn from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” in which the answer to the “ultimate question of life” is 42, G42 is deeply embedded in the Emirati security state. It specializes in A.I. and recently worked to build an Arabic chatbot, called Jais.

G42 is also focused on biotechnology and surveillance. Several of its executives, including Mr. Xiao, were associated with a company called DarkMatter, an Emirati cyber-intelligence and hacking firm that employs former spies.

In its letter this year, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party said Mr. Xiao was connected to an expansive network of companies that “materially support” the Chinese military’s technological advancement.

The origins of Tuesday’s accord go back to White House meetings last year, when top national security aides raised the question with tech executives of how to encourage business arrangements that would deepen U.S. ties to firms around the world, especially those China is also interested in.

Under the agreement, G42 will cease using Huawei telecom equipment, which the United States fears could provide a backdoor for the Chinese intelligence agencies. The accord further commits G42 to seeking permission before it shares its technologies with other governments or militaries and prohibits it from using the technology for surveillance. Microsoft will also have the power to audit G42’s use of its technology.

G42 would get use of A.I. computing power in Microsoft’s data center in the U.A.E., sensitive technology that cannot be sold in the country without an export license. Access to the computing power would likely give G42 a competitive edge in the region. A second phase of the deal, which could prove even more controversial and has not yet been negotiated, could transfer some of Microsoft’s A.I. technology to G42.

American intelligence officials have raised concerns about G42’s relationship to China in a series of classified assessments, The New York Times previously reported. Biden administration officials have also pushed their Emirati counterparts to cut the company’s ties to China. Some officials believe the U.S. pressure campaign has yielded some results, but remain concerned about less overt ties between G42 and China.

One G42 executive previously worked at the Chinese A.I. surveillance company Yitu, which has extensive ties to China’s security services and runs facial-recognition powered monitoring across the country. The company has also had ties to a Chinese genetics giant, BGI, whose subsidiaries were placed on a blacklist by the Biden administration last year. Mr. Xiao also led a firm that was involved in 2019 in starting and operating a social media app, ToTok, that U.S. intelligence agencies said was an Emirati spy tool used to harvest user data.

In recent months, G42 has agreed to walk back some of its China ties, including divesting a stake it took in TikTok owner ByteDance and pulling out Huawei technology from its operations, according to U.S. officials.

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

Former President Donald J. Trump leaned heavily on major Republican donors in March as his campaign and the Republican Party sought to close the financial gap separating him from President Biden, new federal filings showed on Monday.

For much of the race, Mr. Trump has relied on small donors — in particular, those giving less than $200 online — to sustain his campaign. Most big donors steered clear.

But in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump finished trouncing his primary opponents and Mr. Biden and the Democrats gathered fund-raising steam, these donors have opened their checkbooks to the former president.

In the last two weeks of March alone, one committee backing Mr. Trump raised nearly $18 million, nearly all from six-figure contributions. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party finished the month with $93 million on hand between all their committees, his campaign has said, having raised more than $65 million in March.

Still, Republicans are lagging behind. In the first three months of the year, Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party together raised more than $187 million, his campaign has said, including $90 million in March, ending the month with $192 million on hand.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has not provided a full account of its first-quarter fund-raising. The two committees that filed on Monday reported raising nearly $90 million combined since January, but that does not include money raised directly by the campaign or the Republican National Committee.

The filings on Monday with the Federal Election Commission were the first detailed look this year at the joint fund-raising committees through which Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have raised the majority of their money. These committees, some of which can raise more than $800,000 from individual donors in concert with the candidates’ parties, transfer funds to the campaigns themselves and also build out national campaign operations.

(The campaigns and parties themselves have been filing monthly reports, which do not include details on the individual donors.)

Biden Victory Fund, the president’s main joint fund-raising committee with the party reported raising $121.3 million in the first three months of the year.

Top donors included Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy”; the billionaire entrepreneur Reid Hoffman; and the lawyer George Conway, a vocal Trump critic who until last year was married to Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser.

The reporting period included Mr. Biden’s March 28 fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall, which campaign aides said brought in $25 million.

Trump 47 Committee Inc. — Mr. Trump’s new joint fund-raising committee with the Republican National Committee — was formally set up with the F.E.C. on Jan. 31. It reported raising $23.6 million in the quarter, including $17.8 million in the second half of March alone, largely from six-figure contributions.

Those gifts included $814,399 dated March 25 from Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who was a vital supporter of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign but was less engaged with his 2020 run. Mr. Trump had been courting Mr. Mercer and other donors in recent weeks.

Mr. Trump’s joint fund-raising agreement with the R.N.C. directs a portion of the contributions to Trump 47 Committee Inc. to a political action committee that has been paying his costly legal bills. The first $6,600 given goes to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and the next $5,000 goes to his Save America PAC, which last year spent more than $50 million on his legal expenses. The R.N.C. and state parties receive the remaining amount.

Other top-dollar donors to Trump 47 included Roger William Norman, a Nevada real-estate developer who gave nearly half a million dollars last year to a super PAC backing Mr. Trump, and Robert T. Bigelow, the Las Vegas aerospace mogul, who gave $5 million to the Trump super PAC in February.

Jeffrey C. Sprecher, the chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, also gave more than $800,000, as did his wife, Kelly Loeffler, who briefly served as a Republican senator from Georgia.

Joe Ricketts, the chairman of TD Ameritrade, also gave the maximum amount. Other major donors included Linda McMahon, the former pro-wrestling entrepreneur; Phil Ruffin, the casino magnate; and Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets. All three also gave at least $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC last year.

Mr. Trump’s Save America joint fund-raising committee — which had served as his main fund-raising vehicle during the primary campaign — raised $65.8 million in the first quarter of 2024, and ended March with $13.7 million on hand.

Iran’s much-anticipated retaliation for Israel’s killing of senior military leaders produced a fiery aerial display in the skies over Israel and the West Bank.

But in important ways, military analysts say, it was just that: a highly choreographed spectacle.

The more than 300 drones and missiles that hurtled through Iraqi and Jordanian airspace Saturday night before they were brought down seemed designed to create maximum drama while inflicting minimal damage, defense officials and military experts say. Just as they did back in 2020 when retaliating for the U.S. killing of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iranian leaders this weekend gave plenty of warning that they were launching strikes.

Iran also sequenced the attack, a retaliation for airstrikes on an Iranian Embassy building in Syria on April 1, in such a way that both Israelis and Americans were able to adjust their aerial defenses once the Iranian missiles and drones were in the air.

The result: a lot of bang, but relatively little destruction on the ground.

Few of Iran’s drones and missiles found their intended targets, an inaccuracy level that military experts and defense officials say was probably by design.

Iran planned the attacks in a way that would send a warning to Israel and create deterrence but avoid sparking a war, according to two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said Iran gave countries in the region about 72 hours advance warning.

“I think Iran is very concerned about what comes next if they were too effective,” said Gen. Joseph L. Votel, a former leader of the U.S. military’s Central Command. “The early notification of what they were doing seems a little interesting to me.”

The repercussions of such an immense aerial attack could still push Israel, Iran and even the United States closer to the wider war that President Biden has been trying to avoid. It was Iran’s first direct attack on Israel after decades of a shadow war, and Israeli leaders were considering a possible response.

Mr. Biden has made clear to Israeli leaders that while the United States is committed to defending Israel, he has no interest in attacking Iran. In fact, the president and his team, hoping to avoid further escalation, are advising Israel that its successful defense against the Iranian airstrikes constituted a major strategic victory that might not require another round of retaliation, U.S. officials said.

In the space of five hours on Saturday night, Israel demonstrated that with the help of its allies, it could provide residents with solid protection from deadly airstrikes.

Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, which became operational in 2011, intercepts rockets. But this weekend, Israel primarily used fighter jets and its Arrow 3 system, which is designed to intercept ballistic missiles outside the earth’s atmosphere, including those armed with nuclear and other nonconventional warheads, a defense official said.

Iron Dome’s interceptors are six inches wide and 10 feet long. They rely on sensors and computerized guidance to target short-range rockets. The Arrow system can fly longer distances to go after bigger threats.

Jacob Nagel, a former acting Israeli national security adviser, said Israel also used a system called David’s Sling, which shoots down drones, missiles and rockets, and interceptions from Israeli warplanes.

The strikes were proof of concept for the Arrow 3 system, which had mostly been used to take down the occasional incoming missile fired by Houthi militia forces in Yemen. During the Iranian assault, the long-range system saw “more use than during the rest of its time since its invention put together,” Mr. Nagel said. “And we saw that it works.”

“The achievement as a whole is surprising,” he added. “The Iranians never dreamed that we would intercept so many. They must have anticipated that a large chunk would be shot down, but they did not realize that 99 percent would be intercepted.”

Mr. Nagel strongly rebuffed the idea, however, that Iran had not sought to inflict damage on their targets in Israel. “Symbolism is when you fire three or four rockets, not 320” drones and missiles, he said. “They fired all the varieties in their arsenal.”

Israel got help from the United States, Britain and France. American officials said U.S. fighter jets shot down more than 70 exploding drones in the attack, while two Navy warships in the eastern Mediterranean destroyed four to six missiles, and an Army Patriot battery in Iraq knocked down at least one missile that passed overhead. The more than 300 drones and missiles Iran launched was on the high end of what U.S. analysts had expected, one official said.

Jordan, a critic of Israel’s war effort in Gaza, said that its military had shot down aircraft and missiles that entered its airspace during the attack.

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired leader of Central Command, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that Israel showed that it could defend its airspace, cities and people.

“So I think that Israel this morning is now much stronger than they were yesterday,” he said.

On the surface, that would suggest that Iran came out weaker and showed that it still had a long way to go before it could make good on its leaders’ frequent calls for the destruction of Israel.

But military analysts and defense officials cautioned about drawing firm conclusions about Iranian military capability from Saturday night’s display.

Iran demonstrated that weapons fired from its territory could reach Israel, and for a foe with demonstrated nuclear ambitions, that capability should worry Israeli military strategists, General Votel, who led Central Command from 2016 to 2019, said in an interview.

“They can launch missiles that can reach Israel, even though they were shot down outside Israeli airspace,” General Votel said. “It’s concerning, particularly for a country that is pursuing nuclear weapons capability.”

Afshon Ostovar, an expert on Iran’s military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that Iran showcased a large part of its military capability, but not all of it.

Many of Iran’s drones were Shahed-136 “kamikazes,” the same type that Russia is using in Ukraine. These are slow-moving and fly low, he said.

Fabian Hinz, an expert on Iran’s military at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Berlin, examined footage of the drones and missile launches published by media outlets affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, as well as photos of debris published by Israel, to determine the types of weapons that Iran used in the attack. Mr. Ostovar analyzed the attack from a strategic point of view, taking into account the weapons that were used.

Iran launched two types of long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, both developed by the Guards aerospace unit, both analysts said.

The cruise missile, called the Paveh, has a range of about 1,650 kilometers, or about 1,000 miles. It is the same type of missile that Iran has provided to the Houthi militia group in Yemen and to Shiite militant groups in Iraq. The ballistic missiles, they said, are called Emad and have a similar range.

Iran also used the Kheibar Shekan ballistic missile, one of its newest and most advanced. The precision-guided missile has a range of 1,450 kilometers, or about 900 miles. Iranian military officials have said its warhead can evade missile defense systems.

“The mix of weapons is what you would have expected in a substantial attack against Israel,” Mr. Hinz said. “They have basically used their sophisticated system to conduct these strikes. Launching over 100 ballistic missiles over a short period of time is quite something, and doing a combined attack with that many different weapons is really the upper tier of potential actions they could do.”