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The Supreme Court that former President Donald J. Trump helped to shape tossed him a legal lifeline on Wednesday night, making a choice that substantially aided his efforts to delay his federal trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

By deciding to take up Mr. Trump’s claim that presidents enjoy almost total immunity from prosecution for any official action while in office — a legal theory rejected by two lower courts and one that few experts think has any basis in the Constitution — the justices bought the former president at least several months before a trial on the election interference charges can start.

It is not out of the question that Mr. Trump could still face a jury in the case, in Federal District Court in Washington, before Election Day. At this point, the legal calendar suggests that if the justices issue a ruling by the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June and find that Mr. Trump is not immune from prosecution, the trial could still start by late September or October.

But with each delay, the odds increase that voters will not get a chance to hear the evidence that Mr. Trump sought to subvert the last election before they decide whether to back him in the current one.

If Mr. Trump is successful in delaying the trial until after Election Day and he wins, he could use the powers of his office to seek to dismiss the election interference indictment altogether. Moreover, Justice Department policy precludes prosecuting a sitting president, meaning that, once sworn in, he could likely have any federal trial he is facing postponed until after he left office.

On its surface, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday night was a purely logistical decision. The justices decided to keep preparations for the trial on hold while they review a lower court’s rejection of the immunity defense. They set a hearing on the issue for the end of April.

As a practical matter, however, the court’s decision slow-walked the process of resolving the immunity debate, validating what had seemed like a last-ditch move by Mr. Trump’s legal team to find a way to keep pushing back a trial date until the campaign was over.

A spokesman for Jack Smith, the special counsel who is handling the election case in Washington, declined to comment on the court’s decision. Within Mr. Trump’s camp, the court’s ruling was seen as a major victory, but not a decisive one.

A year ago, when Mr. Trump was charged criminally for the first time, in Manhattan, and then, over the course of the next five months, was indicted three more times — in Florida, Washington and Georgia — it seemed as if he would spend much of 2024 in front of a jury. Now, however, if events break his way, he could go to trial only once before the election in November.

In that case, a state judge in Manhattan set a start date of March 25 for the former president’s trial on charges of arranging hush-money payments to a porn star in an effort to avert a scandal on the eve of the 2016 election.

And on Friday, a federal judge in Florida is set to hold a hearing to reset the clock on Mr. Trump’s other federal trial — the one in which he stands accused of mishandling dozens of classified documents after he left office. That trial was scheduled to start in May, but now may or may not take place before Election Day.

The Georgia case is also mired in pretrial clashes that have cast doubt on when, or even whether, it will proceed.

The election interference case in Washington was supposed to have been the first of Mr. Trump’s four criminal proceedings to go in front of a jury. Months ago, the judge overseeing it, Tanya S. Chutkan, picked a trial date of March 4.

But then Mr. Trump filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that he enjoyed complete immunity from the charges because they arose from acts he took as president. While the claim had no precedent and went against basic legal and constitutional principles, it had a powerful attraction to Mr. Trump’s lawyers: Once it was lodged, Judge Chutkan was required to put the underlying case on hold until the question of immunity was resolved.

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court in Washington weighed in on the question, rejecting the immunity defense in a unanimous and scathing ruling that found that Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.

He then asked the Supreme Court to keep the trial proceedings on hold while the justices decided whether they wanted to weigh in on the issue, perhaps hoping less that the justices would agree with him on the merits of his claims than that they might take up the question and take their time in reaching a decision.

And that is precisely what the court did on Wednesday.

The question of when the trial will ultimately happen has been complicated by Judge Chutkan’s insistence that Mr. Trump not lose any time to prepare for the proceeding while the pause in the case remains in effect. She has suggested in court papers that, in the spirit of fairness, the former president should have an extra day to prepare for every one lost to the stay.

Judge Chutkan froze the election case on Dec. 13. That means, if she sticks to her decision, she owes Mr. Trump an additional 82 days of preparation time — equivalent to the period between Dec. 13 and the originally scheduled trial date of March 4. If the Supreme Court renders a ruling on the immunity decision in June and preparations for the trial start up again immediately, the extra 82 days could push a trial date into September.

At that point, the general election campaign would be in full swing — and there would be no guarantee that the trial could be completed by Election Day.

Last August, a team of paleontologists announced that they had discovered the fossilized bones of a gigantic ancient whale. Perucetus, as they named it, might have weighed over 200 tons, which would make it the heaviest animal that has ever lived.

But in a study published Thursday, a pair of scientists have challenged that bold claim. “The numbers don’t make any sense,” said Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the new study.

In their new analysis, Dr. Pyenson and Ryosuke Motani, a paleontologist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that Perucetus probably weighed 60 to 70 tons, which would have made it about the size of a sperm whale.

They also analyzed fossils of blue whales and provided a new estimate of the weight of that species. They concluded that blue whales weigh up to 270 tons — much more than previous estimates, of up to 150 tons — which would make them far and away the heaviest known species in the history of the animal kingdom.

Perucetus first came to light in 2010, when Mario Urbina, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History at the National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, spotted a bone in a desert in southern Peru. He and his colleagues excavated 13 vertebrae, four ribs, and part of a pelvis.

The bones had many hallmarks of whales’ bones. But they were also astonishingly large and heavy. Dr. Urbina and his colleagues reconstructed the full skeleton of Perucetus by studying the much smaller whales that lived at the same time. They also drew inspiration from living manatees, which have dense skeletons that let them stay underwater to graze on sea grass.

Dr. Urbina and his colleagues ended up with a reconstruction of a bizarre animal. It had an enormous éclair-shaped trunk, a tiny head, flippers and vestigial hind legs.

But Dr. Motani, an expert on reconstructing the bodies of extinct marine animals, was puzzled by their conclusions. “I thought, how could it be? How can you pack that mass into that volume?” he said.

Dr. Motani contacted Dr. Pyenson, an expert on whale fossils. They both felt that modeling Perucetus after manatees was a mistake, since only whales have evolved to truly gigantic sizes.

“It’s really important to compare apples to apples,” Dr. Pyenson said.

For their own study, Dr. Pyenson and Dr. Motani took a fresh look at living whales. Since no one can haul a live blue whale onto a scale, no one has ever made a precise measurement of its weight. Dr. Pyenson and Dr. Motani dredged up data collected by Japanese whaling ships in the 1940s, and used that as the basis for a new estimate.

They also created a three-dimensional model of the blue whale, and used it to make a model of Perucetus. With this approach, they estimated that Perucetus weighed 60 to 70 tons, much less than the other research team had concluded.

Eli Amson, an expert on bone tissue at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and an author on the original study, disagreed with the new approach. “This extinct whale had a very different biology than that of recent whales,” he said.

Dr. Amson said that he and his colleagues are now making their own three-dimensional model of the ancient species. They are finding that Perucetus was even more manatee-like than they originally believed, strengthening their conclusion that it rivaled or surpassed the blue whale in weight, he said.

Dr. Pyenson said Perucetus remains a major discovery, despite the smaller size he and Dr. Motani are suggesting. Paleontologists have long believed that whales evolved to huge sizes only in the past few million years. Even at 60 tons, Perucetus would have been a giant among early whales.

“Whales were clearly exploring big sizes,” Dr. Pyenson said.

As a fall rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump becomes increasingly likely, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania is announcing an Election Threats Task Force, a federal-state partnership, in the critical battleground state.

The task force, announced Thursday morning by Gov. Josh Shapiro, will seek to thwart attempts to disrupt elections as well as protect voters from intimidation. The organization will include the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department, the Pennsylvania Department of State and multiple state agencies.

In a country already awash in disinformation and lies about the safety, security and integrity of elections, the task force points to how seriously elected officials are taking threats to the coming campaign.

Pennsylvania is one of the first battleground states, if not the first, to announce such a collaboration this far from November.

“We take our responsibility as stewards of our democracy seriously and the Election Threats Task Force will ensure all levels of government are working together to combat misinformation, safeguard the rights of every citizen and ensure this election is safe, secure, free and fair,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement.

After the 2020 election, Pennsylvania election officials had to navigate a sustained effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his re-election loss in a state that Mr. Biden had won by 80,000 votes.

Mr. Shapiro, then the attorney general, fought multiple lawsuits, including efforts to get millions of ballots thrown out. Other election officials, including Al Schmidt, a Republican who is now the secretary of the commonwealth and then a Philadelphia election official, faced death threats.

“In recent years, we’ve seen bad-faith actors attempt to exploit these changes by spreading lies and baseless conspiracy theories, and attempting to delegitimize our safe, secure and accurate elections,” Mr. Schmidt said in a statement. “This task force has been working together to develop and coordinate plans to combat this dangerous misinformation and continue providing all eligible voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

In addition to the task force, Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Schmidt created a fact-check page on the administration website, debunking numerous false claims about the 2020 election and voting in the state.

The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it was proposing new regulations for how airlines must treat passengers in wheelchairs, an effort aimed at improving air travel for people with disabilities.

Under the proposed rule, damaging or delaying the return of a wheelchair would be an automatic violation of an existing federal law that bars airlines from discriminating against people with disabilities. The Transportation Department said that change would make it easier for the agency to penalize airlines for mishandling wheelchairs.

The proposed regulations would also require more robust training for workers who physically assist disabled passengers or handle their wheelchairs.

“There are millions of Americans with disabilities who do not travel by plane because of inadequate airline practices and inadequate government regulation, but now we are setting out to change that,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “This new rule would change the way airlines operate to ensure that travelers using wheelchairs can travel safely and with dignity.”

For people in wheelchairs, flying can be difficult and uncomfortable, and mistakes by airlines can make for an even more agonizing experience. More than 11,000 wheelchairs and scooters were mishandled by airlines last year, according to the Transportation Department.

The proposed regulations add to earlier moves by the Biden administration intended to improve the flying experience for disabled travelers. In 2022, the Transportation Department published a bill of rights for airline passengers with disabilities. Last year, the agency finalized new regulations to require more commercial aircraft to have accessible bathrooms.

What is the meaning of a cat’s meow that grows louder and louder? Or your pet’s sudden flip from softly purring as you stroke its back to biting your hand?

It turns out these misunderstood moments with your cat may be more common than not. A new study by French researchers, published last month in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that people were significantly worse at reading the cues of an unhappy cat (nearly one third got it wrong) than those of a contented cat (closer to 10 percent).

The study also suggested that a cat’s meows and other vocalizations are greatly misinterpreted and that people should consider both vocal and visual cues to try to determine what’s going on with their pets.

The researchers drew these findings from the answers of 630 online participants; respondents were volunteers recruited through advertisements on social media. Each watched 24 videos of differing cat behaviors. One third depicted only vocal communication, another third just visual cues, and the remainder involved both.

“Some studies have focused on how humans understand cat vocalizations,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, lead author of the study and a cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre. “Other studies studied how people understand cats’ visual cues. But studying both has never before been studied in human-cat communication.”

Cats display a wide range of visual signals: tails swishing side to side, or raised high in the air; rubbing and curling around our legs; crouching; flattening ears or widening eyes.

Their vocals can range from seductive to threatening: meowing, purring, growling, hissing and caterwauling. At last count, kittens were known to use nine different forms of vocalization, while adult cats uttered 16.

That we could better understand what a cat wants by using visual and vocal cues may seem obvious. But we know far less than we think we do.

“We often take for granted our ability to understand the people and the animals that we’re close to, and that we live with,” said Monique Udell, director of the Human-Animal Interaction Laboratory at Oregon State University, who was not involved in this study. “It’s worth doing these investigations because it’s showing us that we’re not always accurate, and it helps us understand where our blind spots are, that we really do benefit from having multiple sources of information.”

And the fact that we’re not very good at picking up on signs of animal discontentment should not come as a surprise, Dr. Udell suggested. “We’re more likely to perceive our animals as experiencing positive emotions because we want them to,” she said. “When we see the animals, it makes us feel good, and our positive emotional state in response to the animals gives us these rose-colored glasses.”

Even some of the most common cues may be misunderstood.

Purring, for example, is not always a sign of comfort. “Purring can be exhibited in uncomfortable or stressful conditions,” Dr. de Mouzon said. “When a cat is stressed, or even hurt, they will sometimes purr.”

Such instances are a form of “self-soothing,” said Kristyn Vitale, an assistant professor of animal health and behavior at Unity Environmental University in Maine, who was not involved in the new study.

The same lack of understanding applies to visual cues in dogs.

“People tend to perceive the wag of the tail as this really positive thing,” Dr. Udell said. “Actually, there are so many different, subtle cues that can be given off with the tail. Is the tail wagging more to the left or the right? How fast is the tail wagging? Is it above the midline or below? All of those wags mean entirely different things. Some of them are happy. Some are pre-aggression warning signs. You can see the whole gamut in just the tail wag.”

These studies may help to improve not only owners’ personal relationships with their pets, but also animal welfare, the researchers say.

As an example, Dr. de Mouzon pointed to a cat’s habit of suddenly biting. “Over time, with cats communicating and humans not understanding, the cat will just bite,” she said, “because they have learned over time that this is the only way to make something stop.”

Animal rescue shelters use such findings to educate prospective owners. Dr. Udell and Dr. Vitale are assessing whether cats can be suitable as therapy animals, or in aiding children with developmental differences.

Dr. Udell said such interventions were “increasingly important when we’re looking at mental health, when we’re looking at children who have difficulty bonding with people, if we look at what is now considered the loneliness epidemic.”

She continued, “These are all places where animal companionship can make really big differences.”

And the benefits for improving relationships between pets and their owners can be profound, Dr. Udell said.

“You can’t rely on animals to be these effective companions if you’re not mindful of their welfare,” she said. “And animal welfare, human welfare and interactions between the two are intricately linked. If you’re improving the lives of animals, you’re likely providing better outcomes for people, too.”

Clocks and calendars are handy, even if they are out of step with the astronomical world.

Earth’s actual orbit around the sun takes six hours and nine minutes more than the strict 365 days that our regular scheduling mechanisms prefer. To sync the natural world to our calendars, we add a leap day every four years, on Feb. 29 — today.

This all seems like mere chronological housekeeping, but there are other concerns at play, according to Judah Levine. He’s is the head of the Network Synchronization Project in the Time and Frequency Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, in Boulder, Colo. He is one of dozens of time experts around the world who work on coordinating the world’s clocks so they are in sync not only with one another but with the natural world. He sat down with The New York Times to discuss what more is at stake on Leap Day.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So this all starts with Julius Caesar?

He was the guy who started the initial leap day business, in something like 46 B.C.

Did he just declare a leap day?

I think he just said, “Every four years.” He was Caesar — he didn’t have to take a vote. Although he proclaimed it, it didn’t happen until about 30 or 40 years later.

The goal was to make the spring equinox happen in the spring, and the problem was that the equinox was bumping into winter; that was not cool.

The spring equinox in many societies was associated with a harvest festival; in order to have a harvest festival, you have to have a harvest. Passover, roughly in the time of Jesus, was a harvest festival, so Passover had to occur in the spring; it had to be loosely hooked into the equinox. The same thing is true of the of the Christian Easter.

But Caesar came before that.

Julius Caesar must have used a similar argument — that when we don’t do the leap day, those harvest holidays get pushed closer to winter. He may have been responding to a Roman requirement.

Then, in the Christian environment, the leap day produced a problem relative to Christmas, because Easter was moving back toward Christmas.

By definition, Easter falls on the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Right. The larger problem is that Christmas is a defined date, but Easter is a movable feast. And Passover, loosely speaking, is similar — it’s got to be a springtime thing.

The Jewish calendar doesn’t have a leap day, but it does have a leap month. It happens seven times in 19 years. It affects the Jewish calendar — it affects all the holidays. There’s a great discussion in the Talmud about how you decide when to do the leap month, and the root of the discussion is that Passover has got to be a harvest festival.

Then came the Gregorian fix. What was that?

It was made by Pope Gregory to correct the Julius Caesar rule, which was OK but not exactly right. From the time of Julius Caesar to the time of Pope Gregory was, like, 15 centuries. At that point, the equinox was at least 10 days off target — a little less than a day per century. Easter was now moving into the summer. Pope Gregory dropped those 10 days from the calendar, and he removed three leap days every 400 years from the system. That made a small adjustment so that the problem wouldn’t recur.

The idea was to keep the equinox at March 21, plus or minus a day.

Was it enough to keep Passover and Easter and harvest celebrations in the desired spot?

At least for several thousand years.

Because small time differences still accumulate?

I’m sure there’s a round-off now, and there will be a problem in 10 centuries, but loosely speaking, the holidays occur at the right time and will for the foreseeable future.

What’s important to understand nowadays about Leap Day?

That the fundamental reason for it is to keep the seasons and the calendar linked together. That’s why leap days are there.

Why does this happen with the spring equinox but not the winter or summer solstice?

It could. But once you fix the length of the year, it doesn’t matter how you fix it. Once you’ve synchronized the astronomical year with the calendar, you could do it any way and it would be equally good.

We could have leaped in winter, summer or autumn?

Yes. But the spring is always exciting because it’s a time of harvest and rebirth. It’s always had a special place in people’s hearts. It’s a special time.

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, on Wednesday sued JBS USA, the American arm of the world’s largest meatpacker, accusing the company of making misleading statements about its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The lawsuit is a major setback for JBS, which is based in Brazil, as it pursues a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The lawsuit alleges that JBS has made a series of deceptive statements about its record on climate change, including claims that it will achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

Ms. James cited several instances in recent years when the company claimed it was on the path to being net zero, or not adding any carbon emissions to the atmosphere. One she cited occurred during an onstage interview with Gilberto Tomazoni, the company’s global chief executive, at a New York Times event in September.

Other examples of misleading claims, Ms. James said, include a 2015 industry presentation, a full-page ad that JBS placed in The Times in 2021, and statements that currently appear on the company’s website.

She added that JBS has “used greenwashing and misleading statements to capitalize on consumers’ increasing desire to make environmentally friendly choices,” including with statements such as: “Agriculture can be part of the climate solution. Bacon, chicken wings, and steak with net zero emissions. It’s possible.”

“When companies falsely advertise their commitment to sustainability, they are misleading consumers and endangering our planet,” Ms. James said in a statement. “JBS USA’s greenwashing exploits the pocketbooks of everyday Americans and the promise of a healthy planet for future generations.”

In a statement to The Times, JBS said it disagreed with the attorney general’s allegations. It said that it would continue to work with farmers and others “to help feed a growing population while using fewer resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.”

JBS was already under scrutiny for its environmental record, labor practices and past activities. In 2017, its holding company, J&F Investimentos, agreed to pay $3.2 billion in reparations and fines as part of a Brazilian federal investigation after the company acknowledged bribing public officials to sign off on investments so it could expand its business internationally. In a 2020 plea agreement, J&F pleaded guilty to related charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Since then, the holding company says, it has developed a robust anti-corruption program for JBS, a requirement of the plea deal, though it recently announced it would challenge the fine it had previously agreed to in the 2017 settlement agreement. A Brazilian Supreme Court Justice temporarily suspended payment.

In the live interview with the Times, Mr. Tomazoni said JBS was working to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. “We are so confident that we are doing a great job on that,” he said. “And look, we pledge to be net zero in 2040.”

But JBS’s claim that it would be able to achieve zero emissions was deemed misleading by the National Advertising Review Board last year.

JBS said at the time that it disagreed the advertising board’s “interpretation of how consumers perceive the challenged claims,” but agreed to comply with the recommendation to stop using the net-zero claims in “published statements and advertising claims going forward.”

JBS produces huge quantities of beef, pork and chicken. It has annual revenues of more than $50 billion and an extensive supply chain that includes tens of thousands of farms in the Amazon. A Times investigation found that ranches supplying JBS significantly overlapped Indigenous land, conservation zones or areas that were deforested after 2008, when laws regulating deforestation were put in place in Brazil.

JBS said at the time that the ranches had been in compliance with rules to prevent deforestation when it bought from them, though it acknowledged it couldn’t trace indirect suppliers. It also said it had excluded thousands of suppliers because of irregularities.

Its proposed listing on the New York Stock Exchange has faced strong opposition, drawing together an unusual alliance of environmentalists, other meatpackers and both Republican and Democratic politicians. Last week, JBS said it was delaying plans for the listing until at least the second half of the year.

Glenn Hurowitz, the chief executive of Mighty Earth, a nonprofit group that investigates supply chains that affect forests, said the lawsuit demonstrated how a company’s handling of climate and environmental issues can become an obstacle to business success.

The lawsuit “should be a warning signs to other companies that think environmental concerns can be easily dismissed,” he said.

People who frequently smoke marijuana have a higher risk of heart attack and stroke, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The article, published in The Journal of the American Heart Association, is an analysis of responses to the U.S. government’s annual survey on behavioral risk from 2016 to 2020.

The respondents answered health questions, including reporting their own health problems related to heart disease.

About 4 percent of the respondents reported daily marijuana use, which the researchers suggested raised the chance of a heart attack by 25 percent and of a stroke by 42 percent. Among those who never smoked tobacco, daily use was tied to a 49 percent higher risk of heart attack and a more than doubled risk of stroke, the study indicated.

About three-quarters of the respondents said that smoking was their main method of using weed. The other quarter consumed it by vaping, through edibles or drinking it.

“Cannabis smoke releases the same toxins and particulate matter that tobacco does,” said the study’s first author, Abra M. Jeffers, a data analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She conducted the analysis during her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.

The study is merely observational in its review of survey responses; it does not provide conclusive evidence that regular marijuana use causes heart disease.

Even so, researchers and experts said they were concerned about its implications, especially as cannabis use has increased in recent years. Thirty-eight states have legalized medical use of marijuana, and 24 have begun allowing recreational use.

Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, said in an email that as cannabis consumption has risen, “there has also been an increase in the emergence of adverse health effects including addiction, respiratory problems, accidents, psychosis and cardiovascular events.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is weighing whether to follow the recommendations of a team of federal scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, which concluded last year that marijuana should be reclassified to a less restrictive category of controlled substances. They cited a lesser potential for abuse than other drugs have as well as marijuana’s possible medical benefits.

But the new paper’s authors warned that frequent marijuana use “could be an important, unappreciated risk factor leading to many preventable deaths.”

“This study demonstrates that smoking cannabis may be as harmful as smoking tobacco,” said Dr. Salomeh Keyhani, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study’s senior author.

“Cannabis is being marketed to the public as a substance that is harmless and might be good for you,” Dr. Keyhani added. “I worry that we’re sleepwalking into a public health crisis. The progress on tobacco smoking might be undone.”

Heart disease is already the nation’s leading cause of death. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 695,000 Americans died in 2021 of cardiovascular-related causes, such as coronary artery disease.

Other surveys have documented the surge in consumption of marijuana. The percentage of Americans reporting marijuana use increased to 17 percent last year from 7 percent in 2013, according to a Gallup poll.

A study published in August and financed by the National Institute of Drug Abuse offered more details on consumption by age. From 2012 to 2022, reported use among adults up to age 30 increased to 44 percent from 28 percent, while daily use rose to 11 percent from 6 percent. Among those 35 to 50 years old, the proportion for overall use rose to 28 percent from 13 percent.

A 2023 federal survey documented marijuana use in the past year among 8 percent of eighth graders, 18 percent of 10th graders and 29 percent of 12 graders.

The new study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. The surveys that were analyzed came from 434,104 respondents, who were 18 to 74 years old. Sixty 60 percent were white, 12 percent were Black and 19 percent were Hispanic.

Dr. David C. Goff, director of a cardiovascular division at the institute that financed the research, cautioned that comparing the theoretical harms of smoking tobacco versus marijuana was challenging because of differing consumption patterns. People tend to consume more cigarettes a day, but marijuana users tend to inhale marijuana more deeply and hold it for longer.

“What we can say is it’s a bad idea to put smoke in your lungs,” he said.

Even relatively casual weed use had an association with heart disease in the new study. Weekly use was tied to a 3 percent greater risk of heart attack and a 5 percent greater chance of stroke.

Robert Page, a pharmacist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora who was not involved with the new study, said that patients and their health care providers should have open conversations about cannabis use. But he added that even doctors were often unaware of the risks.

“People don’t know the data,” he said. “They think because it’s natural, it’s safe.”

If the career of Roger Fidler has any meaning, it is this: Sometimes, you can see the future coming but get trampled by it anyway.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Fidler was a media executive pushing a reassuring vision of the future of newspapers. The digital revolution would liberate news from printing presses, giving people portable devices that kept them informed all day long. Some stories would be enhanced by video, others by sound and animation. Readers could share articles, driving engagement across diverse communities.

All that has come to pass, more or less. Everyone is online all the time, and just about everyone seems interested in, if not obsessed by, national and world happenings. But the traditional media that Mr. Fidler was championing do not receive much benefit. After decades of decline, their collapse seems to be accelerating.

Every day brings bad news. Sometimes it is about recently formed digital enterprises, sometimes venerable publications whose history stretches back more than a century.

Cutbacks were just announced at Law360, The Intercept and the youth-oriented video site NowThis, which laid off half its staff. The tech news site Engadget, which comprehensively tracks tech layoffs, laid off its top editors and other staff members. Condé Nast and Time are shedding employees. The continued existence of Vice Media, once valued at $5.7 billion, and Sports Illustrated, in another era the most influential sports publication, is uncertain. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post eliminated hundreds of journalists between them. One out of four newspapers that existed in 2005 no longer does.

The slow crash of newspapers and magazines would be of limited interest save for one thing: Traditional media had at its core the exalted and difficult mission of communicating information about the world. From investigative reports on government to coverage of local politicians, the news served to make all the institutions and individuals covered a bit more transparent and, possibly, more honest.

The advice columns, movie reviews, recipes, stock data, weather report and just about everything else in newspapers moved easily online — except the news itself. Local and regional coverage had a hard time establishing itself as a paying proposition.

Now there are signs that the whole concept of “news” is fading. Asked where they get their local news, nearly as many respondents to a Gallup poll said social media as mentioned newspapers and magazines. A recent attempt to give people free subscriptions to their local papers in Pennsylvania as part of an academic study drew almost no takers.

“Soon after the printing press emerged in the 15th century, the scriptoriums for copying manuscripts in monasteries rapidly began shutting down,” said Mr. Fidler, now 81 and living in retirement in Santa Fe, N.M. “I’m not very optimistic about the survival of the majority of newspapers in the United States.”

The decline of the news media has been paralleled by the fracturing of American society, which is now as angry and divided as it’s been since the height of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests more than a half-century ago. As the media fell, the noise level rose.

Perhaps it could have been different. Contrary to the myth that all the newspaper magnates of the 1980s and 1990s thought the good times would last forever, quite a few saw trouble lurking in the far distance.

Mr. Fidler spent 21 years at Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain that had important metro dailies in cities like Miami and San Jose, Calif. One early project was Viewtron, an effort to put terminals into people’s homes that would deliver news, shopping and chat. It delivered too little and cost too much. In 1986, Viewtron was shut down.

What Mr. Fidler took away from Viewtron’s failure was that newspaper readers needed something that looked like a newspaper and that didn’t pinch them in the wallet. He helped develop technology for lightweight tablets that would use flat-panel displays that were low cost but clear and bright with a relatively long battery life.

Such displays did not exist in the early 1990s but were promised by the end of the decade. The newspaper would be transmitted through high-speed digital telephone networks or direct broadcast satellite transmissions. “I think this will be the salvation for the traditional serious newspapers,” Thomas Winship, a longtime editor of The Boston Globe, told The New York Times in a 1992 profile of Mr. Fidler.

While at least some publishers were convinced, the tablets never came to save newspapers. One problem was there was no consensus on a software standard. Tablets did not really become viable until Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. But the real problem for the news business was the emergence of a devastating and unforeseen competitor: the internet.

“I was too narrowly focused,” Mr. Fidler conceded.

The internet would first create an alternative to printed newspapers and magazines, then become a competitor, and finally annihilate many of them. “I didn’t consider all the possible cross impacts of emerging technologies that would lead to Craigslist, alternative news sites, social media and other products that would greatly diminish newspaper circulation and advertising revenue,” Mr. Fidler said.

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for collaborating and for sharing information. Being amorphous and infinitely flexible, it allowed for slow adapters and fast adapters at the same time, which circumvented the sort of hand-holding for readers that Mr. Fidler believed necessary. Newspapers lost their classified ads to the internet almost immediately. The display ads lingered, but Google and Facebook, and later Amazon, took over that market.

The web, by essentially allowing every voice to be heard at the same volume, encouraged publishers to join the party. Newspapers and magazines simply gave away what they had charged for in physical form. They were pushed by Silicon Valley, which needed quality content to keep people online and using its technology.

“Publishers got this mistaken belief that content is like a commodity and should be available everywhere for free,” Mr. Fidler said. It took years to institute paywalls, by which point many publications were fatally weakened.

The good old days weren’t that good

For all the gloom that the media is wallowing in about the media, the situation is contradictory.

Reliable local reporting in many places is sparse or nonexistent. But there is also a much wider variety of foreign, national and cultural news available online than previous generations could get in print. For all the celebration of the old days, if you were in a city with a mediocre newspaper — and there were many — access to quality journalism was difficult.

“Basically, the world has been opened up to us. There’s so much good journalism out there,” said David Mindich, a journalism professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. “If you had said to me 20 years ago, ‘I see a generation listening to long-form audio shows,’ I would have said: ‘Attention spans are getting shorter. I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ But it did.”

Most long-form audio shows, even at their best, are not news in the way, say, a zoning commission report is news. The erosion of the idea of news can be seen even more vividly in the magazine field. Where the goal was to inform, now it is to entertain.

“Time magazine just selected Taylor Swift as the person of the year,” said Samir Husni, a longtime magazine analyst. “It never selected Elvis or the Beatles. She was the first entertainer. We’re becoming more about marketing in journalism than truth in journalism because we’re depending on the customer to pay the price rather than advertising.”

This is how digital has changed journalism, he said: “The thing now is to make everybody happy. But that was never the role of journalism, making people happy.”

Marc Benioff, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who bought the struggling Time in 2018 with his wife, Lynne, viewed the selection of Ms. Swift differently: “Best selling issue of all time!” (In recent years, at least.) A few weeks after the Swift issue appeared, Time’s union said 15 percent of the magazine’s unionized editorial staff got the ax.

That was more of a strategic move than a sign of distress, Mr. Benioff said.

“If you’re going to make these media businesses work, you have to shift the product mix, which also means you have to shift the employee mix,” he texted. The paywall, put in place in 2011, was dropped last year. As a brand, Time needs the widest exposure possible.

Two years ago, Mr. Benioff told Axios that Time’s revenue would be up 30 percent in 2022 to $200 million. That might have been aspirational. “Revenue in 2024 should hit $200 million, a new high,” he says now. “We’re even going to make money.”

Other publications are trying to take the profit motive out of journalism.

Nonprofit news ventures tend to be small, low profile and unevenly distributed across regions. But there are many signs of growth. The number of outfits serving communities of color — never very well served by traditional publications — has doubled in the past five years, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Readers generally respond, too.

“People talk about nonprofit reporting in their communities like it’s a normal part of the news ecosystem, not like it’s some outside force,” said Magda Konieczna, author of “Journalism Without Profit: Making News When the Market Fails.” In some places, the effect is striking. “Philadelphia is now a news jungle rather than a news desert.”

Ms. Konieczna teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. A few weeks ago, a Canadian news giant, Bell Media, announced that it was cutting hundreds of jobs and ending many of its television newscasts. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the decision was “eroding our very democracy.”

“My neighbors read The New Yorker but don’t know where to find local news, or why they would want to, in large part because it doesn’t really exist,” Ms. Konieczna said. “This is the dystopian future.”

The New Yorker, as it happened, employed A.J. Liebling, the greatest press critic of the postwar years. He called himself an optimist despite seeing a downhill march ever since he became a reporter in 1925.

“The function of the press in society is to inform, but its role is to make money,” he wrote. The more it did the latter, he argued, the less it bothered with the former.

There was no golden age, but Roger Fidler is still inconsolable. He long ago outlasted Knight Ridder, which was sold to McClatchy, another chain, in 2006. McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020. He spends a couple of hours each day reading the news in the printed edition of a community newspaper and the digital editions of national and regional newspapers. It is a lot, and yet not enough.

“Social media and its comments overwhelmed us,” he said. “We’re flooded with information because everybody’s a journalist. Everyone thinks they have the truth. Everyone certainly has an opinion. It’s discouraging to see how it’s gone.”

President Biden and his allies had reasons for both hope and concern after a Michigan primary election that revealed the party’s painful divisions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and confronted him with his largest measure of Democratic opposition to date.

He avoided his anxious supporters’ darkest predictions by winning the Tuesday primary, 81 percent to 13 percent, over an “uncommitted” movement that sprang up to protest his backing of Israel. Yet more than 100,000 voters registered their disapproval of him, signaling serious discontent among Arab Americans, young voters and progressives as he tries to stitch back together his winning 2020 coalition.

Democratic unease with Mr. Biden’s handling of the Mideast war will not go away as the presidential primary calendar moves on to more than a dozen Super Tuesday states next week, but his allies are optimistic that Michigan will serve as the high-water mark for resistance to the president within his party.

Though many states have the option for Democrats to cast protest votes against Mr. Biden, they are not nearly as likely as Michigan was to become a national litmus test for his popularity or his handling of the war in Gaza.

No other place will have the combination of a large and politically active Arab American community, a battleground-state spotlight with heightened stakes for November, and a weekslong runway in which Michigan hosted the country’s only Democratic primary action.

But if Mr. Biden’s immediate electoral worries have receded after Michigan, the political pressure over his position on Israel threatens to linger through the summer and fall barring a major shift in policy or progress to end the bloodshed in Gaza.

Opposition to American political, military and financial support for Israel has dogged Mr. Biden and other prominent Democrats at public events around the country, with frustration spreading beyond Arab American and Muslim communities to college campuses and other progressive areas.

An apparent desire to avoid confrontations with antiwar demonstrators has led Mr. Biden’s campaign to encase him and Vice President Kamala Harris in political Bubble Wrap, taking unusual steps to maintain a focus on more politically friendly topics. When Ms. Harris visited Michigan last week, she spoke about abortion rights before just nine invited people in Grand Rapids. Her previous stops to promote the issue came before crowds of cheering supporters — events meant to show enthusiasm for her and the Democratic ticket.

In Minnesota, where an “uncommitted” push began on Monday before the state’s March 5 primary, Gov. Tim Walz, a top Biden surrogate, said a group of demonstrators had been protesting Mr. Biden’s position on Israel outside his home every day. Others have protested at recent events Mr. Walz has attended to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday and an appearance at a community college.

“It is concerning, as it should be,” Mr. Walz, who is also the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said in an interview on Wednesday. “This is what the political process is supposed to do. It forces us to be making sure we’re hearing folks. They are in pain. They are frustrated. They want to see something done.”

The Michigan activists who organized the three-week “uncommitted” effort on a $200,000 budget — a relative pittance in a populous state — judged their share of the vote to be a success. On Wednesday, they warned again that Mr. Biden risked losing to former President Donald J. Trump if he did not stop the war or break from Israel’s government.

“We’re asking you, President Biden, to stop killing our families before you come and ask for our support,” said Abbas Alawieh, one of the movement’s organizers.

James Zogby, the founder of the Arab American Institute in Washington and a Democratic National Committee member since 1993, said Mr. Biden and the White House had no choice but to engage with those angered by the war in Gaza and to keep shifting the administration’s approach to the conflict.

“I can’t help them if they don’t want to be helped,” he said. “I’m not giving up because I don’t want to see Donald Trump back in the White House, but they have to help us help them.”

Still, the results on Tuesday suggested that Mr. Biden had managed to limit the political damage over his Israel policy.

In the six college towns that are home to Michigan’s largest public universities, “uncommitted” received 18 percent support — a share higher than the statewide percentage and enough to raise concerns about the general election, but well short of the anti-Biden margins in Dearborn and other areas with large Arab American populations.

The “uncommitted” organizers, and the progressives who followed their lead, did not push a broader case about Mr. Biden’s political standing or his age, which have for months been a central focus of Democratic worries about his prospects in the general election.

In Colorado, which also holds its primary on March 5, former Representative David Skaggs wrote an essay in The Denver Post last week announcing that he would vote “uncommitted.” Expressing deep reservations about Mr. Biden’s political strength, he warned that negative perceptions about the president’s age would “haunt the Biden campaign” and potentially doom it to defeat.

The Biden campaign has sought to carefully navigate his public appearances, wary of exposure to protesters and scrutiny by mainstream and right-wing news outlets alike.

In recent weeks, the president has popped up more frequently on social media, where has discussed how he met Jill Biden, the first lady, and retold the heartbreaking story about caring for his young sons after his first wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. The Biden campaign also joined TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that has become the primary news source for tens of millions of young Americans.

“Campaign events are only one source of communication, and while the president and vice president are the best and most prominent messengers, they’re not the only messengers,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan of Virginia, a member of the Biden campaign’s advisory board. “The nature of campaigns has changed in a social media world.”

The Biden campaign has long maintained that the voters it needs to win in November are not avid consumers of traditional news outlets that cover the president’s movements and public events.

“The president’s strong primary performances in diverse states show that strategy is working,” said Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman.

Still, the political consequences of the Gaza war go well beyond the simple tabulation of “uncommitted” votes in Michigan, warned Doug Schoen, a veteran Democratic pollster who has served as a consultant for five Israeli prime ministers.

The fracturing of the president’s coalition, Mr. Schoen said, is part of a broader sense of ineffectiveness, bolstered by Republican intransigence in Congress, the failure of border security legislation and Mr. Trump’s somewhat specious argument that the world was at peace during his administration and is in chaos now.

“This is less about parsing votes in certain key states than the fact that he looks weaker,” Mr. Schoen said of Mr. Biden, “making it that much more imperative for him to prove that he can govern.”

While Michigan Democrats spent the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s primary issuing dire warnings — mostly in private — that Mr. Biden had a political problem that could endure into the general election, his allies in the 15 Super Tuesday states appear less worried.

“We’re not always going to all agree on every single issue,” said Representative Robert Garcia of California, which holds its primary next week. “When the coalition is so diverse, I might have a different perspective than the president on some issues, maybe on the border and immigration. But I’m still going to vote for him.”

Alyce McFadden contributed reporting from New York.