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A handful of Arizona Republican legislators looking to overturn a 160-year-old state law that bans nearly all abortions have a new high-profile supporter: Kari Lake, a prominent Senate candidate and a close ally of Donald J. Trump.

The state Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday that upheld the 1864 law, from before Arizona was a state, set off a political firestorm, with Democrats predicting it would cause women to turn out in droves in a key swing state to protect access to abortion rights.

Now, some Republicans are looking for a way out of their political dilemma after their party blocked efforts to reverse the law. They see Ms. Lake, who is in a competitive race that could determine control of the Senate, as an important ally. Ms. Lake has called a handful of state legislators to offer her support in any effort to repeal the law and revert to the 15-week abortion ban that was in effect in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the outreach.

The new stance is an abrupt about-face for many Arizona Republicans, who cheered when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and then pushed quickly for reinstating the near-total ban from 1864. Ms. Lake herself had praised the 160-year-old ban during her 2022 run for governor, calling it a “great law,” but on Tuesday condemned the court decision, saying it was “out of step with Arizonans.”

Other Republicans followed suit.

“It is time for my legislative colleagues to find common ground of common sense: the first step is to repeal the territorial law,” State Senator Shawnna Bolick posted on X. It was a departure for Ms. Bolick, who once signed onto a law that would require prosecutors to charge women who have abortions with homicide and voted for the 15-week ban in 2022, legislation that included a provision allowing the 1864 law to go into effect.

The Republican backtracking reflects just how sharply public opinion has shifted on abortion since the Supreme Court’s consequential ruling, and how damaging the issue has been to their party. State laws on abortion enacted since Roe was overturned fueled strong showings by Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterms, and voters have turned out in force to protect abortion rights when they have been on the ballot, even in red states.

Still, the shift in tone went only so far. As Arizona Democrats clamored for votes and debate on proposals to repeal the 1864 ban on Wednesday, they were blocked by Republicans, who quickly shut down legislative proceedings and voted to adjourn until next week.

The 1864 law outlaws abortion from the moment of conception, with an exception only to save the life of a mother, and does not make allowances for rape or incest. The 15-week ban also lacks exceptions for rape or incest.

The State Senate president, Warren Petersen, and the State House speaker, Ben Toma, both Republicans, supported the abortion ban. Despite pressure from Democrats, women’s groups and even some Republicans, they have signaled they are in no hurry to repeal it.

“We as an elected body are going to take the time needed to listen to our constituents,” Mr. Toma said, adding that the Republican-controlled House would not “rush legislation on a topic of this magnitude.”

Democrats said it was urgent to pass a repeal before the court’s ruling upholding the 1864 law takes effect. “Today’s legislative action was unconscionable,” Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, a Democrat, wrote on X. “The extremist Republican majority had the chance to do the right thing for their constituents, and they failed.”

Mr. Trump, after months of mixed signals — including privately telling allies he liked the idea of a 16-week federal ban — said this week that abortion restrictions should be left to the states, and then on Wednesday criticized the Arizona ruling and said he would not sign a federal ban.

Ms. Lake, who frequently stated her opposition to abortion on the campaign trail in 2022 and called it the “ultimate sin,” has been emblematic of a Republican shift on the issue. Last year, she said she opposed a federal ban on the procedure and would focus on passing policies giving financial benefits to women who chose to have children.

(On Tuesday, a Lake adviser claimed that the “great law” comment had been referring to the 15-week ban, signed by Gov. Doug Ducey in 2022. But Ms. Lake had referred to the near-total abortion ban by its number in Arizona’s state code, saying in a 2022 interview: “I’m incredibly thrilled that we are going to have a great law that’s already on the books. I believe it’s ARS 13-3603.”)

On Thursday, she posted a five-and-a-half-minute video on X, trying to carve out a middle ground on the issue by describing her own decision to have a baby.

“I agree with President Trump: We must have exceptions for rape, incest and the life of a mother,” Ms. Lake said in the video. “As your senator, I will oppose federal funding for abortion and federal banning of abortion.”

Other Arizona Republicans have come out against the near-total ban, including Representatives Juan Ciscomani and David Schweikert, both of whom are in competitive districts. Mr. Ciscomani said he still supported the 15-week ban, while Mr. Schweikert, who in the past cosponsored a bill that would have amounted to a federal abortion ban, called on the State Legislature “to address this issue immediately.”

Democrats highlighted the Republicans’ shift, saying they were hypocritical and papering over their anti-abortion histories.

“Arizona’s MAGA Republicans are lying about their long and detailed history of following Trump’s lead in taking away reproductive rights,” one email from the state Democratic Party read, echoing national Democrats’ messaging on abortion. Hannah Goss, a spokeswoman for Representative Ruben Gallego, the Democrat who is poised to face Ms. Lake, said her “longstanding record of wanting to ban abortion is clear.”

State Representative Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, a Democrat from southern Arizona, said that Democrats had introduced bills for six legislative sessions seeking to repeal the territorial-era ban, including a measure she introduced in January, but that Republican majorities had never allowed the measures to advance.

“I crafted a damn bill,” she said. “It just got ignored.”

The New York Times is interested in the organ transplant system.

Do you have a tip about irregularities in the system? If so, we need your help.

If you are a doctor, nurse, technician or anybody else working on organ transplants, we’d love to hear from you. We are also eager to talk to from medical residents working in those transplant programs. And of course, we also want to hear from patients and their families.

For decades, Dr. J. Steve Bynon Jr., a transplant surgeon in Texas, gained accolades and national prominence for his work, including by helping to enforce professional standards in the country’s sprawling organ transplant system.

But officials are now investigating allegations that Dr. Bynon was secretly manipulating a government database to make some of his own patients ineligible to receive new livers, potentially depriving them of lifesaving care.

Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, where Dr. Bynon oversaw both the liver and kidney transplant programs, abruptly shut down those programs in the past week while looking into the allegations.

On Thursday, the medical center, a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Texas, said in a statement that it had found evidence that a doctor in its liver transplant program had effectively denied patients transplants by changing records. Officials identified the physician as Dr. Bynon, who is employed by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and has had a contract to lead Memorial Hermann’s abdominal transplant program since 2011.

It was not clear what could have motivated Dr. Bynon to possibly tamper with the records. Reached by phone on Thursday, he referred questions to UTHealth Houston, which declined to comment.

Founded in 1925, Memorial Hermann is a major hospital in Houston, but it has a relatively small liver transplant program. Last year, it performed 29 liver transplants, according to federal data, making it one of the smallest programs in Texas.

In recent years, a disproportionate number of Memorial Hermann patients have died while waiting for a liver, data shows. Last year, 14 patients were taken off the center’s waiting list because they either died or became too sick, and its mortality rate for people waiting for a transplant was higher than expected, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, a research group.

This year, as of last month, five patients had died or become too sick to receive a liver transplant, while the hospital had performed three transplants, records show. A hospital spokeswoman said the center treated patients who were more severely ill than average.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that it was also investigating the allegations. So is the United Network for Organ Sharing, the federal contractor that oversees the country’s organ transplant system.

“We acknowledge the severity of this allegation,” the H.H.S. statement said. “We are working diligently to address this issue with the attention it deserves.”

Officials began investigating after being alerted by a complaint. An analysis then found what the hospital called “irregularities” in how patients were classified on a waiting list for liver transplants. When doctors place a patient on the list, they must identify the types of donors they would consider, including the person’s age and weight.

Hospital officials said they found patients had been listed as accepting only donors with ages and weights that were impossible — for instance, a 300-pound toddler — making them unable to receive any transplant.

Other transplant surgeons said if the list was manipulated in this way, patients would not be aware of changes in their status.

“They’re sitting at home, maybe not traveling, thinking they could get an organ offer any time, but in reality, they’re functionally inactive, and so they’re not going to get that transplant,” said Dr. Sanjay Kulkarni, the vice chair of the ethics committee at the United Network for Organ Sharing. “It’s highly unusual, I’ve never heard of it before, and it’s also highly inappropriate.”

The hospital said in its statement that it did not know how many patients were affected by the changes, or when they began. It said the issues affected only the liver transplant program, but the hospital also closed the kidney transplant program because it was led by the same doctor.

Dr. Bynon, 64, has spent his career in abdominal transplants, and is considered one of the early practitioners of advanced liver transplants. He spent nearly 20 years at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before moving to Texas in 2011.

Some former colleagues described Dr. Bynon as off-putting and arrogant, while others called him talented and dedicated.

“In my experience, everything he did was about the patient,” said Dr. Brendan McGuire, the medical director of liver transplants at that Alabama program, who worked with Dr. Bynon for more than a decade. “When he transplanted someone, that person was his patient for life.”

On its LinkedIn page, the University of Texas Health Science Center once featured a photo of a billboard with Dr. Bynon on it. The sign read, “Dr. Bynon gives new life to transplant patients.”

Dr. Bynon also served on the Membership and Professional Standards Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, which investigates wrongdoing in the transplant system.

Most recently, in December, Dr. Bynon made headlines for performing a kidney transplant for former Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes of Texas.

The closure of the programs at Memorial Hermann has surprised many in the transplant community because it is extremely rare for a program to be suspended over ethical issues.

At the time it shut down its programs, Memorial Hermann had 38 patients on its liver transplant waiting list and 346 patients on its kidney list, according to the hospital.

Officials said they were contacting those patients to help them find new providers.

Roni Caryn Rabin contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

President Biden plans to expand the perimeters of two national monuments in California, protecting mountains and meadows in a remote area between Napa and Mendocino as well as a rugged stretch east of Los Angeles, two people familiar with the administration’s plans said Thursday.

The San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument will each get new boundaries designed to protect land of cultural significance to Native American tribes, as well as biodiversity and wildlife corridors, said the people, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly.

The San Gabriel monument encompasses 342,177 acres of the Angeles National Forest and 4,002 acres of neighboring San Bernardino National Forest. Mr. Biden intends to expand the monument by approximately 110,000 acres.

The Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument includes nearly 331,000 acres of protected land in parts of Napa, Yolo, Solano, Lake, Colusa, Glenn and Mendocino counties, from Pacific Ocean beaches to a 7,000-foot mountain. It would be expanded by about 13,753 acres under Mr. Biden’s plan.

Native American tribes call the expansion area on the eastern edge of the existing Berryessa monument Molok Luyuk, or Condor Ridge.

Both monuments were created by former President Barack Obama under the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that authorizes the president to protect lands and waters for the benefit of all Americans. California lawmakers and tribal organizations have pressed Mr. Biden to make the declaration as part of the administration’s land conservation plan.

John Podesta, President Biden’s senior adviser on climate change, said Thursday that Mr. Biden has preserved more land than either Mr. Obama or former President Bill Clinton.

“I think we’ve got more to come, including better use and better protection of public lands,” Mr. Podesta said at an event hosted by The Washington Post, which first reported the expected monument designations. The White House declined to comment.

Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, who has introduced legislation to expand both monuments, has called the areas havens for biodiversity and said that the San Gabriel monument is one of the only green spaces accessible to low-income families in the Los Angeles area.

“The Biden administration knows the value of protecting our public lands to combat climate change and ensure our communities have access to the outdoors,” Mr. Padilla said in a statement. “I look forward to working with them to safeguard some of California’s most treasured natural landscapes and ensure they are around for future generations to enjoy.”

Legislation to expand both monuments has been stuck in Congress although there has been little to no opposition. A wind project did threaten to encroach on the Berryessa monument, but the Biden administration denied a permit for the project in 2022.

Supporters of the expansion say the Berryessa monument is biologically diverse and holds special significance for tribes in the area. Expanding its perimeter would protect it from any future development.

“We are really excited to hear about the president’s plans,” said Elaye Stefanick, the California program director for Conservation Lands Foundation, an environmental group. She said she hoped that the federal government would partner with tribes on how to best manage the expanded monument.

Rudy Ortega Jr. is the tribal president of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, whose members are native to the region around the San Gabriel monument. He said that tribal members have been nervous about urban development encroaching on monument land, and that the expansion would reduce that threat.

“The tribes like to see that as an open space,” Mr. Ortega said. “We know that the future generations of our ancestral villages will be able to go back and continue to visit.”

Dogs and cats are members of the family. So when they are sick, many pet owners will go to nearly any length to make sure they’re taken care of.

That care, however, increasingly comes at an eye-popping cost: Veterinary bills have skyrocketed in recent years. Even routine visits can add up to hundreds of dollars, and a frantic trip to the emergency vet can quickly max out credit cards.

And while pet health insurance can help ease the financial strain, it has few of the consumer protections (like coverage of pre-existing conditions) that are required for human insurance.

The New York Times is interested in speaking to pet owners who can share their recent experiences paying for veterinary care.

We will not publish any part of your response to this questionnaire without talking with you first. We will not share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will use it only to reach out to you. If you would feel more comfortable sharing your story with us anonymously, please visit our tips page.

A new super PAC supporting former President Donald J. Trump has $27 million in cash on hand, two days after the group held its first event with Mr. Trump ahead of the November election, according to an official with the group.

The super PAC, Right for America, raised $13.05 million during the first fund-raising quarter of the year, the official said. An additional $12 million was raised in connection with the event, and $2 million more was raised this month.

“We are thrilled by the support we have gotten in the few weeks we have been around,” said Lee Rizzuto, Right for America’s treasurer. “We look forward to doing our part in making sure Donald Trump is returned to the White House.”

The biggest donor to the group is Isaac Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment chief executive who has been involved since the group formed weeks ago. Mr. Perlmutter and his wife, Laura, donated $10 million, a person familiar with the amount said.

Right for America held its first event on Tuesday night, with a dinner of roughly 25 people at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla. The group is planning another fund-raising dinner soon, but is not expected to start spending until closer to the general election in November.

Among those who attended the dinner was Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., who helped bring some of the people to the gathering, according to a person familiar with the event.

The group is led by Sergio Gor, a longtime Trump associate who has published Mr. Trump’s two post-White House books. It is the second super PAC supporting Mr. Trump after Make America Great Again Inc., which has been the main outside group backing the former president since he declared his third candidacy for president in November 2022.

Mr. Perlmutter, an old friend of Mr. Trump and a member of Mar-a-Lago, had been interested in going through a different entity to support the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and then pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical domination that abusers use to punish their partners, died on March 18 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 82.

His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was most likely a heart attack that occurred while he was on a Zoom call with women’s advocates in British Columbia.

Through studies that began in 1979, Drs. Stark and Flitcraft became experts in intimate partner violence, sounding an alarm that battering — not car accidents or sexual assault — was the largest cause of injury that sent women to emergency rooms.

But by talking to battered women as well as veterans who had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from their treatment in the military, Dr. Stark began to understand that coercive control was a strategy that included violence but that also involved threats of beatings, isolating female victims from friends and family and cutting off their access to money, food, communication and transportation.

“Like assaults, coercive control undermines a victim’s physical and psychological integrity,” he wrote in “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life” (2007). “But the main means used to establish control is the micro-regulation of everyday behaviors associated with stereotypic female roles, such as how women dress, cook, clean, socialize, care for their children or perform sexually.”

Dr. Stark started a forensic social work practice in 1990 — a year later, he earned a master’s of social work degree from Fordham University — and began to testify for victims in courts.

In 2002, he was the lead witness for 15 women whose children had been placed in foster care by New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services because they had witnessed their mothers being abused in the home. A federal judge ruled in favor of the women, concluding that the city had violated their constitutional rights by separating them from their children.

In 2019, Dr. Stark testified in London in an appeal of the murder conviction of a domestic abuse victim, Sally Challen, who had bludgeoned her husband to death with a hammer; she was released from prison.

“Coercive control,” he told the court, “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to hurt.”

His research on coercive control has helped revolutionize the field of domestic abuse.

“What distinguishes him from everybody else is that he took this rather obscure concept that until that point was in the literature of prisoners of war and cults and transported it into the world of domestic abuse,” said Lisa Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship” (2015).

Evan David Stark was born on March 10, 1942, in Manhattan and grew up in Queens, the Bronx and Yonkers, N.Y. His father, Irwin, was a poet who taught narrative writing at the City College of New York. His mother, Alice (Fox) Stark, was a secretary for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of Black workers run by the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph.

Dr. Stark received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1963 and a master’s in the same subject in 1967 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a doctoral student, he helped organize a protest in late October 1967 against on-campus recruitment of students by Dow Chemical, which manufactured napalm for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The demonstration turned bloody when police officers with riot sticks forcibly removed students from a campus building where Dow’s interviews were being held.

After the protests, an F.B.I. agent visited a university official, Dr. Flitcraft said, and Dr. Stark’s graduate fellowship was soon rescinded. (He subsequently received his Ph.D. in sociology in 1984 from the State University of New York at Binghamton.) He fled to Canada with his future first wife, Sally Connolly, finding work there as a senior planner for the Agricultural and Rural Development Agency in Ottawa in 1967.

After returning to the United States, he spent a year, beginning in 1968, as an administrator for an antipoverty program in Minneapolis.

In 1970, Dr. Stark helped organize the Honeywell Project, which campaigned to persuade Honeywell Inc. to halt its weapons manufacturing.

He went on to teach sociology at Quinnipiac College (now Quinnipiac University) in Hamden, Conn., from 1971 to 1975. He married Dr. Flitcraft in 1977, when she was working on her thesis at the Yale School of Medicine. She examined the injuries of 481 women during one month at Yale New Haven Hospital’s emergency room and found that they had been victims of physical abuse at a rate 10 times higher than the hospital had identified.

Dr. Flitcraft and Dr. Stark together expanded the study, which was published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1979. They wrote: “In sum, where physicians saw one out of 35 of their patients as battered, a more accurate approximation is one in four; where they acknowledged that one injury out of 20 resulted from domestic abuse, the actual figure approached one in four.”

They added, “What they described as a rare occurrence was in reality an event of epidemic proportions.”

Dr. Stark was a research associate at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies from 1978 to 1984. He was hired the next year by Rutgers University and taught in its School of Social Work as a professor of women and gender studies until he retired in 2012.

In 1985, he and Dr. Flitcraft chaired the United States surgeon general’s special working group on prevention of domestic violence.

In subsequent studies, they replicated their initial findings on a broader scale, showing that of the 3,600 women treated for injuries at Yale New Haven’s emergency room in one year, 20 percent had been beaten by their husbands or other male intimates.

He and Dr. Flitcraft were co-authors of “Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health” (1996). On his own, Dr. Stark wrote “Children of Coercive Control” (2023).

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their sons Sam, Daniel and Eli; another son, Aaron, from his marriage to Ms. Connolly, which ended in divorce in 1975; three grandchildren; and a sister, Joyce Duncan.

Dr. Stark’s work in coercive control has resonated in the United Kingdom, where he taught sociology at the University of Essex in the early 1980s, had a fellowship at the University of Bristol in 2006 and was a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh in 2013.

In a speech to the organization Scottish Women’s Aid in 2006, he “first convinced campaigners that a new approach to the criminalization of domestic abuse was needed,” The Guardian wrote in his obituary.

Cassandra Wiener, a legal scholar at The City Law School in London who wrote the obituary, said by phone that Dr. Stark’s promulgation of coercive control helped lead to its criminalization in England and Wales as well as to similar laws in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Last year, Ms. Wiener said, she was with Dr. Stark when he spoke to a delegation of French government officials who were considering whether to criminalize coercive control in their country.

“You could hear a pin drop,” she said, “and the head of the delegation, a judge, said, ‘I get it, we need to make progress on it.’”

There’s a struggle for law and order in many of the world’s tropical forests, and nature is losing.

Last week, I wrote about the major progress Colombia made in 2023, slashing deforestation rates by 49 percent in a single year. But this week, we learned the trend reversed significantly in the first quarter of this year. Preliminary figures show tree loss was up 40 percent since the start of the year, Colombia’s Minister of Environment, Susana Muhamad, told reporters on Monday.

Why have things changed so quickly? Mostly because a single armed group controls much of Colombia’s rainforests.

Muhamad explained that conflicts with Estado Mayor Central, a group that is thought to run a sprawling cocaine operation among other illegal activities, were partly behind the striking numbers. “In this case, nature is being placed in the middle of the conflict,” she said. According to experts, E.M.C. had largely banned deforestation and in recent months it seems to have allowed it again.

A 2023 United Nations report referred to this entanglement between drug trafficking and environmental crime as “narco-deforestation.” Perhaps nowhere is that phenomenon more clear than in Colombia, a country that’s both a stage for the decades-old global war on drugs and one of the most biodiverse corners of the planet, where the Andes Mountains meet the vast Amazon rainforest.

But what’s happening in Colombia underscores a growing challenge for many developing countries. Vast pristine forests are both essential to curb climate change and biodiversity loss, and they’re also prized by groups who want to hide illegal activities beneath thick tree canopies.

Today I want to explain why experts on the ground say that there’s no way to protect crucial forests like the Amazon without dealing with the growing power of armed groups.

The Colombian case

Armed groups in Colombia have long prohibited logging in the forest. The main reason, experts say, was to protect the illegal drug operations that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, ran in the forest.

FARC’s role protecting the forest became clear after 2016, when it signed a peace deal with the Colombian government, which disarmed the group and turned it into a political party called Comunes. When FARC disbanded, a local power vacuum caused deforestation rates to skyrocket as cattle ranchers, illegal miners and dissident groups cut down forests.

But as the dust settled, the Estado Mayor Central, a dissident group controlled by Ivan Mordisco, a former FARC commander, consolidated power in much of the Colombian rainforest. The old FARC tactics of restricting logging seemed to return and deforestation rates started to fall again. Until recently.

Muhamad noted that El Niño may have also made the Amazon more vulnerable to forest fires this year. I called Rodrigo Botero, the director of an environmental nonprofit in Colombia called the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development, to understand what else changed. He told me they can see new roads being opened and ranches expanding in the region. Government agents can’t stop it because the group, which is estimated to have over 3,000 troops, controls access to much of the forest.

It’s not totally clear why the E.M.C. seems to have begun allowing logging again. Botero said he feared the E.M.C. could be trying to use deforestation rates as leverage to get more favorable treatment from the government.

First, they showed the government the benefits they could deliver by forbidding deforestation, he explained. And then, Botero added, it was like they told the government, “if you can’t count on us, look at what we can do.”

It’s a global problem, too

There is no evidence that the E.M.C. were successful in what seems to be an attempt to use the Amazon as a political tool. The government says it’s actively trying to arrest Mordisco.

Politics aside, what the Colombian case made clear to me is that controlling armed groups is now a fundamental part of conservation policy.

Bram Ebus, a consultant at the International Crisis Group and an investigative reporter, has spent years documenting how both drug traffickers and rebel groups like the E.M.C. are expanding their reach in the rainforests of South America in a project called Amazon Underworld.

He told me the illegal trade managed by these powerful criminal groups is no longer restricted to drugs or minerals, though they are still major sources of income. There is growing concern that criminal networks are also tapping into a vast menu of businesses to launder their illegal gains, such as illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, ranching and land grabbing.

Researchers, journalists and government officials have long documented how mining funded conflict in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nature was collateral damage. Illegal mining operations connected to conflict have been very harmful to biodiversity in the Congo River Basin’s rainforest, for example.

Colombia continues to negotiate for peace, and its Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development didn’t comment on whether the Amazon was being used as a political tool, but added that violations will be investigated and that it will continue working to curb deforestation. (The E.M.C. could not be reached for comment.) But, in many cases, it’s becoming hard to tell politically motived groups from purely criminal gangs. That’s bad news for nature and whoever dares defend it.

Many countries simply don’t have the resources to protect forests, let alone take on armed groups. Right now, one of the developing countries with the biggest budget for forest protection, Brazil, has so few officers that each worker patrols on average an area the size of Denmark, according to an association of environmental protection officers. They are now striking to protest poor working conditions.

Meanwhile, criminal and rebel groups have continued to expand their reach.

“You see that all these groups who are participating in the conflict have one key objective, which is to expand, to get more troops, to get more money, to get more territorial control,” Ebus told me. “The environment right now is a hostage of war.”

Getting rid of ‘forever chemicals’

What happened: For the first time, the federal government is requiring municipal water systems to remove six synthetic chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems that are present in the tap water of hundreds of millions of Americans, my colleague Lisa Friedman reported.

The Environmental Protection Agency will start requiring that water providers reduce perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS, to near-zero levels. The compounds, found in everything from dental floss to firefighting foams to children’s toys, are called “forever chemicals” because they never fully degrade and can accumulate in the body and the environment. The new effort will cost at least $1.5 billion per year.

Where PFAS are found: The chemicals are so ubiquitous that they can be found in the blood of almost every person in the United States. A recent study that tested 45,000 water samples around the world found that about 31 percent of samples that weren’t near any obvious source of contamination had PFAS levels considered harmful to human health, as my colleague Delger Erdenesanaa wrote this week.

Exposure to PFAS has been associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, according to the E.P.A. (Lisa wrote a helpful explainer on what else we need to know about PFAS.)

The new regulation is “life changing,” Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, told Lisa. “We are one huge step closer to finally shutting off the tap on forever chemicals once and for all.”

So what can you do to avoid PFAS? The E.P.A. maintains a list of cleaning products that are safe from these chemicals. And the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, has been tracking companies that say they are stripping them from their products. — Manuela Andreoni

A recent Federal Aviation Administration audit of the production of the Boeing 737 Max raised a peculiar question. Was it really appropriate for one of the plane maker’s key suppliers to be using Dawn dish soap and a hotel key card as part of its manufacturing process?

The answer, it turns out, may be yes.

The F.A.A. conducted the audit after a panel known as a door plug blew off a 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. The New York Times reported last month that the agency’s examination had identified dozens of problems at Boeing and the supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage of the 737 Max.

Boeing and Sprit have both come under intense scrutiny after the episode involving the Alaska plane, which appears to have left Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., missing four bolts used to secure the door plug in place. Spirit has had its own share of quality problems in recent years and has been bruised by financial losses, and Boeing said last month that it was in talks to acquire the company, which it spun out in 2005.

But in the aftermath of the Alaska episode, Spirit says one thing has been misunderstood: its use of the dish soap and the hotel key card.

In fact, the company says it is now properly authorized to use the soap as well as a newly created tool that resembles a key card. Both have been approved by the appropriate engineering authorities at Boeing and documented for use under F.A.A. standards as factory tools known as shop aids, according to Spirit.

“People look at the hotel key card or Dawn soap and think this is sloppy,” said Joe Buccino, a Spirit spokesman. “This is actually an innovative approach to solving for an efficient shop aid.”

A Boeing spokeswoman confirmed that the company had approved the use of the soap and the key card tool as shop aids. The F.A.A. said it could not comment because the audit was part of its continuing investigation in response to the Alaska episode.

As part of the audit, agency employees visited Spirit’s factory in Wichita, Kan. One aspect of the manufacturing process they scrutinized was how Spirit handled door plugs, which take the place of emergency exits that would be needed if a plane was configured with a denser seating arrangement.

At one point, the F.A.A. observed Spirit mechanics using a hotel key card to check a door seal, which was “not identified/documented/called-out in the production order,” according to a document describing some of the audit findings.

Spirit officials said the key card was used to check the gap between the seal and the door plug to make sure there was no obstruction, rolling or pinching. Workers had previously tried other tools that either were too brittle or did not bend enough. But Spirit engineers found that the key card, with rounded corners and just the right amount of flexibility, allowed them to check the gap without damaging the seal.

After Spirit workers were spotted using the key card, the company’s engineers developed a similar tool for its employees to use moving forward. The new device, which is green and square, is meant to be a scraping tool, but Spirit smoothed its serrated edges and rounded its corners.

Sean Black, Spirit’s chief technology officer, led the effort to get the new tool approved for use by Boeing and properly documented.

“Our workers routinely find creative ways to make the process of building fuselages more efficient,” Mr. Black said. “In this case, workers created the door rigger seal tool, which allows our teams to test the door seals without any risk of degrading the seal over time.”

Then there was the matter of the dish soap.

At another point during the audit, the F.A.A. saw Spirit mechanics apply liquid Dawn soap to a door seal “as lubricant in the fit-up process,” the document describing some of the audit findings said. The agency also saw the door seal get cleaned with a wet cheesecloth to remove the soap and debris, according to the document, which said that instructions were “vague and unclear on what specifications/actions are to be followed or recorded by the mechanic.”

Those observations dealt with the process in which workers make sure the seal is properly installed against the door frame. Mr. Buccino said the Dawn soap was to ensure there were not tears or bulging when the seal was being installed. He said the chemical properties of the soap were found not to degrade the resilience of the seal over time. Spirit again worked to get Boeing’s approval to use the soap and to get it properly documented.

Spirit workers did not land on the dish soap on the first try. Mr. Buccino said that other common products had been used in the past — including Vaseline, cornstarch and talcum powder — but that they ran the risk of degrading the seal over time.

The outbreak of dengue fever that has unfolded in Latin America over the past three months is staggering in its scale — a million cases in Brazil in a matter of weeks, a huge spike in Argentina, a state of emergency declared in Peru, and now another, in Puerto Rico.

It forewarns of a changing landscape for the disease. The mosquitoes that spread dengue thrive in densely populated cities with weak infrastructure, and in warmer and wetter environments — the type of habitat that is expanding quickly with climate change.

More than 3.5 million cases of dengue have been confirmed by governments in Latin America in the first three months of 2024, compared with 4.5 million in all of 2023. There have been more than 1,000 deaths so far this year. The Pan-American Health Organization is warning that this may be the worst year for dengue ever recorded.

The rapidly shifting disease landscape needs new solutions, and researchers in Brazil delivered the lone shred of good news in this story with the recent announcement that a clinical trial of a new dengue vaccine, delivered in a single shot, had provided strong protection against the disease.

There are two existing vaccines for dengue, but one is an expensive two-shot regimen, while the other can only be given to people who have already had a dengue infection.

The new one-shot vaccine uses live, weakened forms of all four strains of the dengue virus, and it was created by scientists at the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The vaccine was licensed for development by the Instituto Butantan, a huge public research institute in São Paulo, and Merck & Co.

Butantan will make the vaccine. It already produces most of the immunizations used in Brazil, and has the capacity to make tens of millions of doses of this new one. The institute plans to submit the dengue vaccine to Brazil’s regulatory agency for approval in the next few months and could begin producing it next year.

But that won’t help with this outbreak, and by the time the production gears up and a national rollout gets started, it may not be enough to help with the next one, either; dengue typically surges in three- or four-year cycles.

And it won’t necessarily be of help to the rest of Latin America: Butantan will only make the vaccine for Brazil. Other countries in the region struggling with dengue will have to purchase it from Merck, which has not said what it plans to charge for the shot.

And there is, of course, demand for a dengue vaccine beyond the Americas: mosquitoes are spreading the disease to Croatia, Italy, California and other regions that haven’t seen it before. Places used to handling mild outbreaks now face record-breaking ones: Bangladesh had 300,000 cases last year.

Dengue is commonly known by the name breakbone fever, after the excruciating joint pain it causes. Not everybody experiences that pain: Three-quarters of people infected with dengue don’t have any symptoms at all, and among those who do, most cases resemble only a mild flu.

But about 5 percent of people who become sick will progress to what’s called severe dengue. Plasma, the protein-rich fluid component of blood, can start to leak out of blood vessels, causing patients to go into shock or suffer organ failure.

When patients with severe dengue are treated with blood transfusions and intravenous fluids, the mortality rate tends to be between 2 and 5 percent. But when they don’t get treatment — because they don’t realize it’s dengue and don’t seek treatment quickly enough, or because health centers are overwhelmed — the mortality rate is 15 percent.

In Brazil, the current dengue outbreak is hitting children hardest; those under 5 have the highest mortality rate of any age group, followed by those aged 5 to 9. Adolescents between 10 and 14 have the highest number of confirmed cases, according to the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, a national public health research center.

As clinics began to be overwhelmed with dengue patients in January, the Brazilian government bought the entire global stock of a Japanese-made vaccine for dengue called Qdenga. Public health nurses are delivering it to children ages 6 to 16, but there will only be enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 3.3 million of Brazil’s 220 million people this year.

This big national effort will protect a few million children, but it won’t contribute anything to its herd immunity.

Qdenga is not cheap: It’s about $115 per dose in Europe and $40 in Indonesia. Brazil is paying $19 per dose, having negotiated a lower price for its huge purchase.

Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which makes Qdenga, announced a deal last month with Biological E, a large Indian generic drug maker, to license and produce up to 50 million doses a year, part of a race to accelerate production. The Indian vaccine should cost considerably less. But Biological E is unlikely to have regulatory approval to market it before 2030; it’s a slow process that involves transferring technology, setting up a production line and getting a new version of even a well-known product approved by regulators.

Dengue costs Brazil at least $1 billion a year in health care treatment and lost productivity. And that figure doesn’t take into account the human suffering involved.

There four different strains of the dengue virus complicate more than the process of making a vaccine: the potentially fatal form of the disease is more common when a person has a second infection, with a different strain than they had the first time. Qdenga protects against all four strains of dengue, and the hope is that the new Butantan vaccine does too, although the data released so far show it tested only against the two types that were circulating during the first part of the trial; more results are expected in June.

Millions more people will have been exposed to dengue when this outbreak finally passes. But they’re going to need that new vaccine more urgently than ever.