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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a better cat trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survival lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will it be enough?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing mounting pressure to strike down a near-total abortion ban revived last week by Arizona’s Supreme Court, Republican state legislators are considering efforts to undermine a planned ballot measure this fall that would enshrine abortion rights in the Arizona Constitution, according to a presentation obtained by The New York Times.

The 1864 law that is set to take effect in the coming weeks bans nearly all abortions and mandates prison sentences of two to five years for providing abortion care. The proposed ballot measure on abortion rights, known as the Arizona Abortion Access Act, would enshrine the right to an abortion before viability, or about 24 weeks. Supporters of the measure say they have already gathered enough signatures to put the question on the ballot ahead of a July 3 filing deadline.

Republicans in the Legislature are under tremendous pressure to overturn, or at least amend, the 1864 ban. Former President Donald J. Trump, the national standard-bearer of the Republican Party, directly intervened on Friday, calling on Republican legislators, in a frantically worded post online, to “act immediately” to change the law. A top Trump ally in Arizona who is running for the Senate, Kari Lake, has also called for the overturning of the 1864 law, which she had once praised.

Abortion rights have been a winning message for Democrats since the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Mr. Trump, overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. And even though it is an objectively unpopular aspect of his White House legacy, Mr. Trump has repeatedly bragged that he is personally responsible for overturning Roe.

Republicans in Arizona, however, have already resisted efforts to repeal the 160-year-old law and are bracing for the potential for another floor battle on the ban that is looming for the Legislature, which is set to convene on Wednesday. The plans that circulated among Republican legislators suggest the caucus is considering other measures that would turn attention away from the 1864 law.

The presentation to Republican state legislators, written by Linley Wilson, the general counsel for the Republican majority in the Arizona State Legislature, proposed several ways in which the Republican-controlled Legislature could undermine the ballot measure, known as A.A.A., by placing competing constitutional amendments on the ballot that would limit the right to abortion even if the proposed ballot measure succeeded.

The plan, the document said, “Changes narrative — Republicans have a plan!” adding that the plan “puts Democrats in a defensive position to argue against partial birth abortions, discriminatory abortions, and other basic protections.”

One proposal would have the Legislature send to voters two other ballot initiatives that would “conflict with” and “pull votes from” the A.A.A. ballot measure. Ballot measures for a constitutional amendment can be proposed through a petition, as with the A.A.A. ballot measure, or through the State Legislature, and the document suggests that voters could read the Republican ballot measures first on the ballot if they are filed before the A.A.A. ballot measure.

One of the Republican ballot initiatives outlined in the presentation would enact an abortion ban after the fifth week of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and medical necessity. The other ballot option would propose a ban after the 14th week of pregnancy. The language of the measures would be intentionally written to mislead voters on when exactly an abortion would become illegal, according to the presentation.

The second option, for example, would be known as the “Fifteen Week Reproductive Care and Abortion Act.” But “in reality,” according to the presentation, “It’s a 14-week law disguised as a 15-week law because it would only allow abortion until the beginning of the 15th week.” Similarly, the wording of the five-week abortion ban would make abortion illegal “after the sixth week of pregnancy begins.”

An alternative to those two options would be to put forward a ballot measure that would take effect only if the A.A.A. ballot measure also passes. That plan, known as “conditional enactment,” would insert language in the state Constitution declaring that the right to an abortion in the A.A.A. ballot measure “is not absolute and shall not be interpreted to prevent the Legislature from” regulating abortion in the future. It would also include language used by anti-abortion activists, referring to “the preservation of prenatal life” and “mitigation of fetal pain.”

Ben Toma, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, confirmed the authenticity of the document and said in a statement that it “presents ideas drafted for internal discussion and consideration within the caucus. I’ve publicly stated that we are looking at options to address this subject, and this is simply part of that.”

Dawn Penich, a spokeswoman for Arizona for Abortion Access, the liberal coalition organizing the A.A.A. ballot measure, said in a statement that the Republican presentation “shows yet again why Arizonans can’t leave our most basic and personal rights in the hands of politicians.”

Kate Zernike contributed reporting from New York.

President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, reported earning roughly $620,000 in 2023, releasing their joint tax return for the third straight year of Mr. Biden’s presidency and the 26th time throughout his political career.

The couple’s tax return, released on Monday evening by the White House, showed that Mr. Biden and Dr. Biden paid just over $181,000 in state and federal taxes, with an effective federal income tax rate of nearly 24 percent.

Their federal gross income in 2023 was nearly 7 percent higher than the $580,000 they reported in 2022, largely a result of increased taxable interest income this year stemming from higher interest rates.

The bulk of their income came from the $400,000 salary that Mr. Biden earned as president, and Dr. Biden’s salary of $85,985 from Northern Virginia Community College, where she is an English professor. The president’s salary is set by Congress and has been constant since 2001.

The jump in income last year was largely attributable to the $129,876 in taxable interest, pensions, annuities, IRA distributions and Social Security benefits that the couple claimed, up significantly from the $92,087 reported last year.

Dr. Biden also earned $4,115 in royalties from books she has written, while the president reported no royalties.

In releasing his tax return this year, Mr. Biden once again sought to contrast himself with former President Donald J. Trump, who resisted releasing his returns throughout his tenure as president.

Mr. Trump’s returns were made public at the end of 2022 by the House Ways and Means Committee after a protracted legal battle. They showed that he paid a total of $1.1 million in federal income taxes during the first three years of his presidency, but paid no tax in 2020.

The New York Times obtained tax documents of Mr. Trump’s in 2020, which revealed that he paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and again during his first year as president. They also showed that Mr. Trump had paid no income tax in 10 separate years because of tax write-offs and large business losses he declared.

“President Biden believes that all occupants of the Oval Office should be open and honest with the American people, and that the longstanding tradition of annually releasing presidential tax returns should continue unbroken,” the White House said in a statement.

For 2023, the Bidens reported giving $20,477 to 17 charities, including the church Mr. Biden regularly attends in Wilmington, Del., and the National Fraternal Order of Police Foundation.

They also reported an annual $5,000 donation to the Beau Biden Foundation, which is named in honor of Mr. Biden’s son who died of brain cancer in 2015.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, also released their 2023 return. It showed that they paid $88,570 in federal income tax on total income of $450,299, an effective federal income tax rate of 19.7 percent, and more or less the same as what they reported last year.

They paid an additional $26,766 in income taxes to California and the District of Columbia and contributed $23,026 to charity.

The cost of a proposed NASA mission to gather rocks on Mars and return them to Earth is spiraling upward and slipping further into the future. So on Monday, space agency officials asked for ideas on simplifying the mission and trimming its price tag.

“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference on Monday. “And not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long.”

The mission, known as Mars Sample Return, is central to the search for signs that life may have existed on the red planet. The idea is to bring samples of rock and soil back to Earth so that scientists can prod and poke at them using their most sophisticated tools.

NASA had hoped that Mars Sample Return would cost $5 billion to $7 billion, and that the rocks would arrive on Earth in 2033.

But last fall, a panel that reviewed the mission concluded that the cost was likely to be much higher, from $8 to $11 billion. NASA officials said on Monday that after they looked over the review, they agreed with that cost estimate, and that, given budget constraints, the current Mars Sample Return mission would not be able to deliver the rocks before 2040.

On Tuesday, NASA plans to issue a “request for information” seeking alternative plans from aerospace companies as well as experts within NASA, with proposals to be due on May 17. Of those, NASA would finance several of the proposals, with studies finishing later this year. Then NASA would have to decide its next step.

“We’re going to need to go off to some very innovative new possibilities for design and certainly leave no stone unturned,” said Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate.

At the same time, she said she hoped for “traditional, tried-and-true architectures” that would reduce the risk of delay and failure.

“This is the Hail Mary,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that supports space exploration, said in an interview. Mr. Dreier said he had thought that NASA would simply announce a delay, which would reduce the amount it was spending on the mission in a given year, while adding to the final price tag.

“That would have been an easier way, from our perspective, to preserve the plan as it existed, to add certainty where there’s uncertainty,” Mr. Dreier said.

The first phase of Mars Sample Return is already underway. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, has been drilling and collecting cylindrical samples of rock and soil in the Jezero Crater, which contains an ancient river delta.

The current Mars Sample Return plan, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, involves a complex choreography. First, a new robotic spacecraft would land near the Perseverance rover, which would then hand over about 30 of its rock samples. Those would then be launched into orbit around Mars. Yet another spacecraft, from the European Space Agency, would retrieve those samples, take them back to Earth and drop them off within a small disk-shaped vehicle that would land in a Utah desert.

To undertake a mission that would move more quickly and at a lower cost, one idea might be to leave some of the samples behind on Mars. That would reduce the size and complexity of the spacecraft needed.

If scientists were forced to choose which rocks they want most, “I think that will be some very, very lively and very exciting scientific chatter,” Dr. Fox said.

In February, Mr. Dreier wrote an essay about whether NASA could turn to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a cheaper robotic Mars Sample Return mission. SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket is being designed with the goal of sending people to Mars.

“The answer is almost certainly ‘no,’” Mr. Dreier wrote then. “At least, not anytime soon.”

But if Mr. Musk and SpaceX are interested, NASA is now willing to listen. Mr. Dreier said that SpaceX would need to solve numerous technical challenges, including how it could produce propellants for the return trip.

“Is this getting to be less, or more expensive and time-consuming and risky than the original J.P.L. concept?” Mr. Dreier said, referring to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s plan.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Dreier said that, as an optimist, perhaps Mr. Nelson was right and that someone would offer a better solution.

But he added that NASA’s announcement on Monday could be a pretext for canceling the mission, or trying to convince Congress that it indeed needed $11 billion.

“It may just be that people don’t want to accept that that’s what it costs,” he said. “I guess that’s one of the things we’ll find out.”

The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily allowed a ban to take effect in Idaho on gender-affirming treatment for minors, a signal that at least some justices appear comfortable with wading into another front in the culture wars.

In siding with state officials who had asked the court to lift a block on the law, the justices were split, with a majority of the conservative justices voting to enforce the ban over the objections of the three liberal justices. The justices also specified that their decision would remain in place until the appeals process had ended.

The court specified that it would allow the ban to apply to everyone except the plaintiffs who brought the challenge.

Although orders on the emergency docket often include no reasoning, the decision included concurrences by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who was joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented and was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Elena Kagan noted a dissent.

The law, passed by the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature, makes it a felony for doctors to provide transgender medical care for minors, including hormone treatment.

States around the country have pushed to restrict transgender rights. At least 20 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, including Idaho, have enacted legislation that limits access for gender transition care for minors.

Idaho officials had appealed to the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld a temporary block on the law as litigation continues in lower courts.

The law, the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, makes it a crime for medical providers to offer medical care to transgender teenagers.

Attorney General Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, in his emergency application, said that the case raised a recurring question that a majority of the justices had expressed interest in: whether a court can enact what is known as a universal injunction, which freezes a state law from going into effect — not just for the parties directly involved in the case, but for everyone.

Mr. Labrador contended that a federal court erred in applying the freeze so expansively. “The plaintiffs are two minors and their parents, and the injunction covers two million,” he wrote.

Temporarily barring the law meant “leaving vulnerable children subject to procedures that even plaintiffs’ experts agree are inappropriate for some of them,” he added.

Mr. Labrador continued, “These procedures have lifelong, irreversible consequences, with more and more minors voicing their regret for taking this path.”

The plaintiffs, two minors and their parents who are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that this case was not the right vehicle for addressing concerns about universal injunctions.

That is because the four plaintiffs are anonymous, referred to only by pseudonyms. If the court narrowed the temporary pause on the Idaho law to apply only to those directly involved in the lawsuit, the plaintiffs, including minors, would be forced to “disclose their identities as the transgender plaintiffs in this litigation to staff at doctors’ offices and pharmacies every time they visited a doctor or sought to fill their prescriptions.”

James Dean, a landscape painter who ran a NASA program that invited artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell and Jamie Wyeth to document aspects of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, died on March 22 in Washington. He was 92.

His son Steven confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility.

From the final Mercury mission in 1963 until 1974, Mr. Dean gave dozens of artists access to astronauts, to areas near the launchpads at Cape Canaveral (and the Kennedy Space Center) and to ships that recovered astronauts after their ocean splashdowns.

Mr. Dean believed that artists offered a perspective that could not be found in photographs.

“Their imaginations enable them to venture beyond a scientific explanation of the stars, the moon and the outer planets,” Mr. Dean and Bert Ulrich wrote in their book, “NASA/ART: 50 Years of Exploration” (2008).

One night before L. Gordon Cooper blasted off on the last Mercury mission in May 1963, Mr. Dean allowed the painters Peter Hurd and Lamar Dodd to work from a field near the rocket’s launchpad, and provided them with huge lamps for illumination.

A security guard who saw the two artists amid the bushes with their paints and brushes quickly determined that they did not pose a threat — and escorted them to the top of the launchpad, where they looked inside the Mercury capsule, which gave Mr. Dodd the inspiration for his abstract gouache painting, “Max Q.”

In 1965 Jamie Wyeth, then 19, painted “Support,” a watercolor of the launch of Gemini 4 from a nearby gantry, the massive structure that encloses and services rockets before they lift off.

“Jamie went off to the edge and let his legs hang over, and he’s painting like he’s sitting on a dock up in Maine someplace,” Mr. Dean said in an interview in 2019 with Carolyn Russo, the art curator at the National Air and Space Museum.

Mr. Rauschenberg roamed the space center’s grounds in the weeks before the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon.

“He didn’t bring a sketch pad or anything like that with him but what he wanted to do was look at our photo files to experience the action real-time,” Mr. Dean told Ms. Russo.

The experience led Mr. Rauschenberg to create “Stoned Moon,” a series of 34 lithographs, including “Sky Garden,” in which he superimposed a negative image of the Saturn 5 rocket, with many of its parts labeled, over images of it blasting off.

In the hours before Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, Mr. Dean got permission for the illustrator Paul Calle to sketch Neil Armstrong, Col. Buzz Aldrin and Lt. Col. Michael Collins having breakfast and then suiting up — the only artist allowed in those spaces.

James Daniel Dean was born on Oct. 14, 1931, in Fall River, Mass. His father, John, was a pastry chef. His mother, Sadie (Griffin) Dean, managed the home.

James recognized that he had artistic talent in high school when a history teacher told students to draw their homework, and he began sketching airplanes and ships. In 1950, he entered the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Mass., and graduated in 1956, with time in between for his Army service in Panama.

He was hired as a graphic designer in the Secretary of Defense’s office; five years later, he joined NASA’s office of Educational Programs and Services. In 1963, a year after James Webb, the NASA administrator, created the fine art program, Mr. Dean was named its founding director, one of his many responsibilities in the office.

While Mr. Dean handled the art program’s logistics, Hereward Lester Cooke, a curator of painting at the National Gallery of Art, reached out to the artists, who were paid $800 each. They collaborated on the 1971 book, “Eyewitness to Space,” a collection of Apollo-related paintings and drawings.

“Jim had the foresight to know that artists would make an important contribution to the space age,” Mr. Ulrich said by phone. “The history of the agency unfolds through art and through the eyes of the artists.”

The concept of commissioning art at an agency devoted to science was not universally accepted early on, Mr. Dean recalled. He told The Orlando Sentinel in 1983 that some space technicians “regarded the artists with amused tolerance.”

He added, “Later as they saw their space hardware converted by the artists’ imagination and skill into images of fantasy and beauty, they increasingly became respectful.”

The artwork led to exhibitions in 1965 and 1969 and to several traveling tours.

Mr. Dean — who referred to himself as the “other” James Dean to differentiate himself from the actor — left NASA in 1974 to join the Air and Space Museum (which opened two years later), as the curator of art under Colonel Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut who was its director.

Mr. Dean was in charge of transferring some 2,000 paintings and drawings from NASA to the museum as well as preparing exhibits and acquiring other artworks. He also contributed paintings of the space shuttle program to NASA.

He retired in 1980 to focus on his own painting from a studio in Alexandria, Va. He also designed stamps for the U.S. Postal Service, including one in 1985 that celebrated Frederic Bartholdi, who sculpted the Statue of Liberty.

His friendship with Colonel Collins resulted in Mr. Dean creating sketches that depict NASA’s history in “Liftoff: The Story of America’s Adventure in Space” (1988).

In addition to his son Steve, Mr. Dean is survived by another son, Richard; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His wife, Rita (Williams) Dean, whom he married in 1952, died in 2019. His son James died in 2018.

Mr. Dean arranged for Mr. Rockwell, whose paintings were renowned for their nostalgic evocations of small-town America, to meet the astronauts John Young and Virgil (Gus) Grissom during a countdown demonstration test before their Gemini 3 flight in 1965.

Mr. Rockwell, who was working for Look magazine at the time, left with photographs of the two astronauts. But after returning to his studio in Stockbridge, Mass., he realized that he needed more details about their spacesuits. He asked Mr. Dean for one.

Mr. Dean’s request was initially denied because material inside the suit was classified and could not be mailed. So he contacted Joseph W. Schmitt, a suit technician, who brought one to Stockbridge. Mr. Schmitt stayed for a week as Mr. Rockwell painted Mr. Young and Mr. Grissom suiting up.

When the painting was being hung at the National Gallery for an exhibition in 1965, Mr. Dean asked John Walker, the museum’s director, what he thought of it.

“And he looked at me seriously and he said, ‘I never knew Norman Rockwell had such quality,’” Mr. Dean told Ms. Russo. The next morning, Mr. Dean called Mr. Rockwell to tell him what Mr. Walker had said.

“He said, ‘Oh, now I can die happy.’”