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Tesla is in a bad spot.

The world’s largest electric carmaker on Monday told employees it would lay off more than 10 percent of its work force, and two senior executives said they were leaving.

Earlier this month Tesla announced a stunning drop in sales, delivering 387,000 cars worldwide in the first quarter, down 8.5 percent from the same time last year. The company’s stock has fallen more than 35 percent this year, including a 5.5 percent drop on Monday. Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, appears strangely disengaged with the company’s stumbles and preoccupied with other pursuits.

Tesla is still the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer, credited with almost single-handedly creating the E.V. sector. As Tesla went, so went the industry.

But in a remarkably short period of time, the electric vehicle business appears to have untethered itself from Tesla.

American, Korean, Chinese and European carmakers all have big, durable E.V. product lines with growing sales. Ford sold 20,223 electric vehicles in the first quarter of the year, an increase of 86 percent from the previous year, making it the second best-selling E.V. brand in the U.S.

BMW said it delivered 82,700 all-electric cars around the world in the first three months of the year, up sharply from a year earlier. And in China, where Musk helped establish the market for electric vehicles, and the expertise to produce them, Tesla is losing its edge over Chinese competitors.

In recent months, total E.V. sales have softened a bit. But analysts expect long term sales to keep rising. Phasing out gas powered cars is an effective, and relatively easy, way to bring down planet warming emissions. And policy developments around the globe make it a near certainty that most big carmakers will be going all-in on E.V.s in the years ahead.

“The challenges with any particular company, Tesla or otherwise, doesn’t mean doom and gloom for the E.V. industry at large,” said Pete Slowik of the International Council on Clean Transportation. “We are at a place where this transition is real and we have significant momentum from every global automaker.”

Tesla’s woes

Tesla was the first carmaker to prove there was a market for electric vehicles. That helped make it the most valuable car company in the world, and prompted traditional automakers to jump into the E.V. market. More recently, however, Tesla has been slow to innovate.

It has not introduced a new car in years. The company reportedly canceled plans for a low-cost model in the face of rising competition. The Cybertruck release has been marred with problems. A long-promised fully self driving mode remains elusive. And Musk, who is also the chief executive of the rocket company SpaceX and the owner of social media platform X, has alienated many consumers with his polarizing behavior.

Tesla’s market share of E.V. sales in the United States is now 51 percent, down from 65 percent less than two years ago.

There are many factors at play, but at the root of Tesla’s troubles is the mercurial Musk, whom I interviewed in a surreal 2018 conversation during the depths of the Model 3 production woes.

Musk is an entrepreneur who has always taken big swings. These days, he is eschewing the traditional carmaker strategy of offering gradual upgrades each year and introducing a few new models each decade. Instead he is betting on big innovations, including the Cybertruck and especially self-driving mode, to revive Tesla.

“He only seems interested in Mars-shots these days,” said my colleague Jack Ewing, who has been speaking with sources privy to what’s happening inside Tesla. “He seems bored by the idea of coming out with an upgraded Model 3.”

That strategy may appeal to Musk’s world-conquering ambitions. But it’s not a winning formula in the car business, which is driven by incremental updates and the regular introduction of new models.

Tesla, which does not have a media relations department, did not reply to a request for comment.

Acceleration

Recent policy changes make it virtually certain that the E.V. market will keep growing. Last month the Biden administration finalized rules that will effectively force automakers to make a majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. all-electric or hybrids by 2032. E.V.s make up just 7.6 percent of new U.S. car sales today.

In Europe, China and other countries around the world, governments have introduced policies designed to spur the adoption and production of electric vehicles.

What’s more, E.V.s are going to get much better, and soon. Batteries are expected to get lighter and more powerful, range is going to improve and prices will likely come down.

Those advances will make it easier than ever for new companies to gain market share, especially if Tesla isn’t keeping up with the latest features or introducing new models.

Tesla isn’t going away anytime soon. It remains the biggest seller of E.V.s in the U.S., and is worth 10 times as much as Ford. All of the major North American carmakers have agreed to adopt Tesla’s charging standard, and Tesla has not given any sign that it is slowing down its build out of chargers.

But without a renewed burst of innovation — whether it be new models, longer range, new features or radically lower prices — Tesla will be at risk of falling behind in the industry it helped create.

The global coral crisis may have already started

The world’s coral reefs may be in the middle of the widest global bleaching event ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and international partners announced Monday. Extraordinarily high ocean temperatures are to blame.

Bleaching happens when corals become so stressed that they lose the symbiotic algae they need to survive, my colleague Catrin Einhorn explained. If the water surrounding them is too hot for too long, bleached corals die.

This is the fourth global bleaching event on record, but scientists expect it to affect more reefs than any other. They should know for sure within a week or two.

Coral reefs, as Catrin wrote, nurture an estimated one-quarter of ocean species at some point during their life cycles, supporting fish that provide protein for millions of people and protecting coasts from storms.

Some scientists are trying “assisted evolution” to give vulnerable wildlife such as coral reefs a chance, my colleague Emily Anthes wrote. In 2015, for instance, scientists created more heat-resistant coral by crossbreeding colonies from different latitudes.

Many conservation groups fear that the interventions are just a distraction to the broader solutions needed to avert the extinction crisis, especially curbing climate change.

— Manuela Andreoni

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Time is running out for you to spot Pons-Brooks, the devil-horned comet that swoops into view once every 71 years. Last visible to people on Earth in the 1950s, the comet is prone to outbursts, or unexpected flares in brightness.

“It’s an exceptional comet,” said Eliot Herman, a retired biotechnologist at the University of Arizona and an astrophotographer who has been tracking Pons-Brooks for several months. “Not only does it get brighter as it comes closer to the sun, but also the comet is changing drastically day to day,” he said.

The comet, a green ball of ice, caught the attention of the public last July, when it looked as if it had sprouted horns after an outburst through its dusty atmosphere. Some likened the comet’s shape to the Millennium Falcon spacecraft that Han Solo and Chewbacca use in the Star Wars franchise. The comet had a series of additional outbursts in the fall, including one on Halloween.

By December, Pons-Brooks had hints of a tail. That feature became longer and more prominent in early March as the comet sailed closer to the sun. Some hoped it might flare brightly enough to be seen during the total solar eclipse on April 8, but it was not visible to the unaided eye during the event.

There are just a few days left to catch sight of Pons-Brooks before it reaches the point at which it is nearest the sun on April 21. In that phase, known as perihelion, the sun’s light will block the comet from view.

To see the comet, Bill Cooke, an astronomer who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, recommends going outside at twilight and scanning the western horizon using binoculars or a telescope. Find Jupiter, the brightest object in the night sky other than the moon. Pons-Brooks will be to the lower right of it.

But don’t expect to see its characteristic devil horns. “The horns have gone away now,” Dr. Cooke said. “It looks more like the typical comet people envision.”

In about a week, the comet will duck below the horizon, lost to the northern sky. People in the southern hemisphere may be able to spot the comet through May, though it will appear much dimmer.

After that, Pons-Brooks will bid farewell to stargazers on Earth for another seven decades as it embarks on another journey around our sun.

Federal regulators on Tuesday will issue new protections for miners against a type of dust long known to cause deadly lung ailments — changes recommended by government researchers a half-century ago.

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.”

Follow live coverage of the Jan. 6 obstruction case at the Supreme Court.

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.

In January 2018, when she first saw reports that her husband had paid off a porn star, Melania Trump was furious. She jetted off to Palm Beach, leaving the president to languish in Washington. She eventually returned, only to take a separate car to Donald J. Trump’s first State of the Union address.

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.”