Category: WORLD

Russians traveled from far and wide to bear witness as Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in an Arctic prison at 47, was buried in Moscow on Friday amid a heavy police presence.

Some mourners chanted his name. Others said, “Thank you for your son!” to Mr. Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, who had fought for days to reclaim his body. Eventually, the authorities relented, but Mr. Navalny’s team described having to overcome a gantlet to persuade a church, a cemetery and a hearse to take part in the burial.

Thousands turned out for the service, Mr. Navalny’s supporters estimated. Foreign diplomats were among the crowd. Some Russians shouted, “No to war,” risking arrest. Mr. Navalny’s coffin was lowered into the cemetery grounds to the strains of the Sinatra song “My Way” and one from the movie “Terminator 2,” video showed.

Mourners, above, walking to the Borisovskoye cemetery on Friday in Moscow during the funeral for Mr. Navalny. Law enforcement officers detained a man near the cemetery, below.

Carrying Mr. Navalny’s coffin from the Moscow church where his funeral was held on Friday.

Laying flowers at the grave in Moscow.

A journalist estimated in a Facebook post that “tens of thousands” of people had assembled for the funeral, though that figure could not be verified.

Diplomats, including the French ambassador to Russia, Pierre Levy, second from left, and the U.S. ambassador, Lynne M. Tracy, second from right, waiting near the church for the service.

Police officers on the roof of an apartment building during the burial.

The police presence outside the cemetery where the burial was taking place.

Some people chanted Mr. Navalny’s name and thanked his mother for her son.

Law enforcement officers outside the church after Mr. Navalny’s funeral.

Videos showed the crowd tossing flowers onto the road as the funeral cortège left the church for the cemetery.

Valerie Hopkins contributed reporting.

The Smokehouse Creek fire, the largest on record in Texas, is still largely uncontrolled across the state’s Panhandle.

So far, the fire has scorched more than a million acres, making it one of the most destructive in U.S. history. The blaze has devastated cattle ranches, consumed homes and killed at least two people. More hot, dry weather over the weekend threatens to worsen conditions.

Here is what we know so far.

When did it begin?

The blaze was ignited on Monday, and it’s not yet clear what started it.

It spread around the town of Canadian, a cattle-country community of around 2,200 people northeast of Amarillo, near the Oklahoma state line. By Wednesday, the fire had spread across vast swaths of ranch lands in the Panhandle. By Thursday, it had become the largest on record in the state.

In order to grow so quickly, a few weather conditions had to align: high temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds.

On Monday, it was 82 degrees in Amarillo. The average daytime high temperature there in February is 54 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

Where has the fire been spreading?

The Smokehouse Creek fire has been burning across a sparsely populated area of Texas that is home to most of the state’s cattle: millions of cows, calves, steers and bulls. Its sprawling ranches are not always easily traversable by road.

Wildfires are nothing new for Panhandle ranchers, many of whom know how to transform their pickups into makeshift fire trucks in order to fight a blaze. But the scale of this fire is without precedent in Texas.

In addition to the ranchers, residents of the small communities that dot the landscape, like Fritch and Canadian, have seen their homes, cars and churches reduced to rubble.

On Tuesday, two people died. Joyce Blankenship, an 83-year-old woman living on the outskirts of the town of Stinnett, perished in her home when flames overtook her property. Cindy Owen, 44, died from burns after flames surrounded her company truck as she drove home to Amarillo from Oklahoma.

Is the blaze being contained?

The Smokehouse Creek fire was 15 percent contained as of Friday morning, the authorities said.

The rugged terrain of the Canadian River Valley, where the fire started, has been a major obstacle for firefighters because fire trucks cannot navigate some of the cliffs, valleys and steep hills in the area.

Some rain on Thursday helped to stall the fire’s growth. But warm, windy and dry weather was expected to return over the weekend, which could prolong the blaze.

The National Weather Service warned of “critical fire weather conditions” in the region on Saturday — Texas Independence Day — and Sunday, urging residents to avoid outdoor activities that might cause sparks or flames.

A fire weather watch was posted for Saturday afternoon through Sunday evening, covering the Texas Panhandle and nearby parts of Oklahoma.

What about the cattle?

The Panhandle is home to about 85 percent of the roughly 12 million cattle in Texas, said the state agriculture commissioner Sid Miller. But most of them are kept concentrated in feedlots and dairy farms, and those operations have been largely unaffected by the fires.

Still, wide swaths of the grassland that Texas cattle rely on for food have been reduced to a blackened expanse. Thousands of cattle may have already died, or been so injured in the blazes that they would have to be killed, Mr. Miller said.

Even those ranchers whose cattle have survived were left scrambling for a place for their herds to eat. Mr. Miller said a rancher he knew had 1,500 head of steer but “no grass and no water” and was in a desperate situation, adding that the rancher may have to move the cattle across state lines.

Is this fire unusual?

In most of Texas, wildfires happen in the summer. But in the Panhandle, the fire risk is highest around March when temperatures rise, strong winds blow over the flat landscape and dry grass can easily catch fire.

Climate change is most likely making fire season start earlier and last longer by increasing the number of days in a year with hot and dry weather conditions that enable wildfires, said John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University.

Temperatures in Texas have risen by 0.61 degrees per decade since 1975, according to a 2021 report by the state climatologist’s office. The relative humidity in the Panhandle region has been decreasing as well.

Reporting was contributed by Delger Erdenesanaa, Christopher Flavelle, Lucinda Holt and Miglena Sternadori.

A major snowstorm bore down Friday on the Sierra Nevada, including the Lake Tahoe area, with as much as 10 feet of snow expected at higher elevations. Forecasters issued dire warnings about trying to drive through blustering winds and whiteout conditions, and Yosemite National Park was closed.

“Your safe travel window is over in the Sierra,” the National Weather Service in Reno, Nev., posted on social media. “Best to hunker down where you are.”

The National Park Service said that visitors who were already in Yosemite on Friday morning must leave by noon. Many ski resorts in the region announced that they were closing for the day.

One resort, Palisades Tahoe, posted on social media that it had seen “intense” snowfall and winds of 100 miles an hour. In videos posted by the resort, ski lifts were faintly visible through a blanket of white, and the sky and the ground were indistinguishable from each other.

The resort, which was packed last weekend for a major ski competition, had become “an absolute ghost town” by Friday, said Veronica Berkholtz, a manager of the coffee shop at Palisades Tahoe.

Meteorologists began sounding rare alarms earlier this week about “life-threatening blizzard conditions” expected in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, saying the approaching storm could drop more than three feet of snow through Sunday.

On Friday, forecasters said the danger of avalanches in backcountry areas was likely to be “high to extreme” for the Central Sierra, the heart of the huge and varied mountain range that runs along the spine of California.

Forecasters reserve blizzard warnings like the one in effect on Friday for only the most severe snowstorms. The National Weather Service in Reno has issued only eight blizzard warnings in the last 12 years.

Almost exactly a year ago, a powerful snowstorm dumped more than two feet of snow on the Lake Tahoe area in less than a day. The snow piled up so thickly on rooftops that when a following storm threatened more snow and rain, residents had to scramble to shovel off enough weight to keep their roofs from caving in.

The same storm system caught officials and residents in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California off guard, trapping people for days in houses that were buried to the eaves in snow.

In the villages surrounding Lake Tahoe, residents and business owners say that they know how to prepare for lots of snow.

“It becomes part of the winter experience,” said Heather Svahn, the president of Mountain Hardware & Sports, a store in Truckee, Calif., that sells items including fishing gear, shovels and power tools.

Ms. Svahn said the store arranged for extra supplies to be delivered earlier in the week, to avoid the most treacherous travel periods. Residents have been stopping into the store, she said, to buy shovels and shear pins, special bolts for snowblowers that are prone to breaking when the machines are used in heavy, wet snow conditions.

Not much snow had fallen in Truckee yet, she said Friday morning, but she knew that it was coming.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Ms. Svahn said, before the snowstorm crested the mountain peaks to the west and reached the town.

Shannon Parrish, the owner of Grocery Outlet, which has stores in Truckee and Incline Village, Nev., said that both stores were open Friday morning, but that the situation could change quickly. Deliveries were canceled for Friday and Saturday, she said, and employees who commute from Reno were told to stay home.

Ms. Parrish, who lives in Truckee, said eight to nine inches of snow had fallen at her house Thursday night.

“It’s really quiet,” she said. “I think people are prepared to wait it out.”

The House this week overwhelmingly passed legislation meant to speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear power plants, the latest sign that a once-contentious source of energy is now attracting broad political support in Washington.

The 365-to-36 vote on Wednesday reflected the bipartisan nature of the bill, known as the Atomic Energy Advancement Act. It received backing from Democrats who support nuclear power because it does not emit greenhouse gases and can generate electricity 24 hours a day to supplement solar and wind power. It also received support from Republicans who have downplayed the risks of climate change but who say that nuclear power could bolster the nation’s economy and energy security.

“It’s been fascinating to see how bipartisan advanced nuclear power has become,” said Joshua Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “This is not an issue where there’s some big partisan or ideological divide.”

The bill would direct the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the nation’s nuclear power plants, to streamline its processes for approving new reactor designs. The legislation, which is backed by the nuclear industry, would also increase hiring at the commission, reduce fees for applicants, establish financial prizes for novel types of reactors and encourage the development of nuclear power at the sites of retiring coal plants.

Together, the changes would amount to “the most significant update to nuclear energy policy in the United States in over a generation,” said Representative Jeff Duncan, Republican of South Carolina, a lead sponsor of the bill.

In the Senate, Republicans and Democrats have written their own legislation to promote nuclear power. The two chambers are expected to discuss how to reconcile their differences in the coming months, but final passage is not assured, particularly with so many other spending bills still in limbo.

“If Congress was functioning well, this is one of those bills you’d expect to sail through,” said Mr. Freed.

Nuclear power currently generates 18 percent of the nation’s electricity, but only three reactors have been completed in the United States since 1996. Although some environmentalists remain concerned about radioactive waste and reactor safety, the biggest obstacle facing nuclear power today is cost.

Conventional nuclear plants have become extremely expensive to build, and some electric utilities have gone bankrupt trying. Two recent reactors built at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia cost $35 billion, double the initial estimates.

In response, nearly a dozen companies are developing a new generation of smaller reactors a fraction of the size of those at Vogtle. The hope is that these reactors would have a smaller upfront price tag, making it less risky for utilities to invest in them. That, in turn, could help the industry start driving down costs by building the same type of reactor again and again.

The Biden administration has voiced strong support for nuclear power as it seeks to transition the country away from fossil fuels; the Department of Energy has offered billions of dollars to help build advanced reactor demonstration projects in Wyoming and Texas.

But before a new reactor can be built, its design must be reviewed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Some Democrats and Republicans in Congress have criticized the N.R.C. for being too slow in approving new designs. Many of the regulations that the commission uses, they say, were designed for an older era of reactors and are no longer appropriate for advanced reactors that may be inherently safer.

“Tackling the climate crisis means we must modernize our approach to all clean energy sources, including nuclear,” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado. “Nuclear energy is not a silver bullet, but if we’re going to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, it must be part of the mix.”

Among other changes, the House bill would require the N.R.C. to consider not just reactor safety but also “the potential of nuclear energy to improve the general welfare” and “the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society.”

Proponents of this change say it would make the N.R.C. more closely resemble other federal safety agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, which weighs both the risks and benefits of new drugs. In the past, critics say, the N.R.C. has focused too heavily on the risks.

But that provision updating the N.R.C.’s mission was opposed by three dozen progressive Democrats who voted against the bill and said it could undermine reactor safety. The specific language is not in the Senate’s nuclear bill.

Even if Congress approves new legislation, the nuclear industry faces other challenges. Many utilities remain averse to investing in novel technologies, and reactor developers have a long history of failing to build projects on time and under budget.

Last year, NuScale Power, a nuclear startup, announced it was canceling plans to build six smaller reactors in Idaho. The project, which had received significant federal support and was meant to demonstrate the technology, had already advanced far through the N.R.C. process. But NuScale struggled with rising costs and was ultimately unable to sign up enough customers to buy its power.

For decades, California’s behemoth economy has outpaced those of most nations, holding an outsize role in shaping global trends in tech, entertainment and agriculture.

While that reputation remains, the state has a less enviable distinction: one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates.

Nationwide, the rate is 3.7 percent, and in January, the country added 353,000 jobs. California’s job growth has been slower than the nationwide average over the last year, and the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high — 5.1 percent in the latest data, a percentage point higher than a year earlier and outpaced only by Nevada’s 5.4 percent.

With layoffs in the tech-centered Bay Area, a slow rebound in Southern California from prolonged strikes in the entertainment industry and varying demand for agricultural workers, California is facing economic headwinds in the new year. And residents feel it.

The state has historically had higher unemployment than the U.S. average because of a work force that is younger and fast growing, said Sarah Bohn, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Still, she noted, the labor force shrank in California in the past six months — a troubling trend.

“When looking at this shrinking, are there less opportunities and people have just stopped looking for work?” Ms. Bohn asked. “What will this mean for consumers and businesses?”

During the early part of the pandemic recovery, the unemployment rate in California was not an outlier — 4 percent in May 2022 versus 3.6 percent nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the situation deteriorated.

Roughly 36,000 Californians who work in the information industry, which includes tech, lost their jobs last year. Several powerhouse companies based in the state — Google, Meta and X, formerly known as Twitter — cut tens of thousands of positions to reduce costs as the industry increasingly pivoted its focus toward artificial intelligence.

In recent weeks, Snap, the Santa Monica-based parent of the Snapchat messaging app, announced it would cut about 500 employees, 10 percent of its global work force. And Northrop Grumman, the aerospace giant, signaled it planned to lay off 1,000 workers in the Los Angeles area.

Despite a bruising several months, the unemployment rate in San Francisco and Silicon Valley remained relatively low — 3.5 percent in the city and 3.2 percent in San Mateo County — indicating that many workers found new jobs relatively quickly.

The outlook is worse in Southern California, where the ripple effects from last year’s entertainment industry strikes are still having an impact.

Nearly 25,000 workers lost their jobs in Hollywood, according to a report released in December by the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. While the prolonged work stoppages by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA ended last fall, some jobs dependent on the industry never returned, and many people have struggled to land full-time work.

The unemployment rate in Los Angeles County is around 5 percent, with jobs in the information industry, which includes motion picture and sound recording jobs, accounting for a large portion of the hole.

During the strikes, some restaurants and other small businesses that relied on Hollywood workers closed for good, and others that scaled back on staff haven’t built back to previous levels, said Kevin Klowden, an executive director at the Milken Institute, an economic think tank in Santa Monica.

A stall in streaming growth has put increased financial pressures on many studios, Mr. Klowden said, adding that “peak TV production is generally agreed to have already happened even before the strike.”

“There are a lot of stories about actors and crews having trouble finding consistent work because of the slow ramp-up of new productions,” he said.

After a Hollywood strike in 2007-8, it took a year for the industry to recover, and this time — with persistent losses — it will take even longer, Mr. Klowden said.

For parts of the state where agriculture is a key industry, the economic situation is yet more dire.

In Imperial County, a stretch along the Mexican border long known for agricultural production, the latest unemployment rate was about 18 percent, up 3.1 percentage points from a year earlier. And Tulare County, in the Central Valley, has an unemployment rate around 11 percent, up 2.7 percentage points. Automation has been a factor.

In a survey released in the fall by the Public Policy Institute of California, roughly one in four Californians said the availability of well-paying jobs was a big problem in the local area.

There are economic bright spots. The state has seen job growth in education and health care, along with the leisure and hospitality industries.

“California is the tent pole of the American economy in terms of American recovery — in terms of job creation, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in January as he unveiled his budget.

Mr. Newsom’s office released an analysis of the state’s economic outlook for the year ahead, noting that “while unemployment in California may be rising somewhat faster than the nation, it is increasing from an extraordinarily low level, reflective of a tight labor market that is adjusting to more sustainable growth after rebounding so swiftly in the wake of the pandemic-induced recession.”

Dee Dee Myers, director of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, said in a statement, “There is ample reason to believe that California’s economy will continue to grow more quickly than the nation’s.”

She noted a recent directive by Mr. Newsom to create a master plan for career education that connects students to job opportunities. One priority is to reduce barriers for people seeking state jobs — including college degree requirements unnecessary for some duties, according to an outline of the directive.

But elevated unemployment will have a ripple effect on the state for a while, said Robert Fairlie, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Joblessness reduces overall earnings, he said, which translates into lower consumer demand and investment.

“There is a negative multiplier effect on the state economy from the higher unemployment rates we are seeing,” Mr. Fairlie said.

Elyse Jackson is among those feeling the pinch.

Ms. Jackson, 27, has not had a steady job since December 2022. An art department coordinator on feature films in Los Angeles, she had hoped to find work soon after the strikes ended last fall.

“The rehiring and new productions have just been so slow,” said Ms. Jackson, a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union. She has taken on $15,000 in debt in recent months and struggles to pay the rent on the apartment she shares with her partner in the Echo Park neighborhood.

Unable to keep waiting for jobs in her industry, she recently filled out dozens of applications for administrative work around the city. She has yet to hear back.

“In terms of skill sets, I am certainly qualified for these jobs,” Ms. Jackson said. “There just seems to be a lot of competition because of the market and unemployment.”

In the nearly five months since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, igniting the most divisive foreign policy crisis of the Biden presidency, Donald J. Trump has said noticeably little about the subject.

He criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, before quickly retreating to more standard expressions of support for the country. And he has made blustery claims that the invasion never would have happened had he been president. But his overall approach has been laissez-faire.

“So you have a war that’s going on, and you’re probably going to have to let this play out. You’re probably going to have to let it play out, because a lot of people are dying,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Univision a month after the attack. His main advice to Mr. Netanyahu and the Israelis, he said then, was to do a better job with “public relations,” because the Palestinians were “beating them at the public relations front.”

Mr. Trump’s hands-off approach to the bloody Middle East conflict reflects the profound anti-interventionist shift he has brought about in the Republican Party over the past eight years and has been colored by his feelings about Mr. Netanyahu, whom he may never forgive for congratulating President Biden for his 2020 victory.

Mr. Trump has offered no substantive criticisms of Mr. Biden’s response to the Hamas invasion and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza. Instead, he has pinned the blame for the entire crisis on Mr. Biden’s “weakness,” in the same way he often does when violence or tragedy occurs.

“You would have never had the problem that you just had, the horrible problem where Israel — Oct. 7, where Israel was so horribly attacked,” the former president told a crowd in Rock Hill, S.C., on Feb. 23, before switching to more practiced attack lines against Mr. Biden.

It is unimaginable that in a pre-Trump Republican Party, the standard-bearer would have had so little to say about a major terrorist attack against Israel and a broadening regional conflict in the middle of a presidential campaign.

“This is one of America’s closest allies under attack. And it’s stunning that in such circumstances you have heard so little from Trump,” said John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who became a sharp critic of him and who has long been hawkish in support of Israel.

Yet people close to Mr. Trump, who leads Mr. Biden in polls, feel little if any urgency for him to put out more detailed foreign policy plans — about Israel or any other matter.

In 2016, Mr. Trump gave one major speech and a number of interviews about foreign policy. But it is unclear whether he will do the same in this campaign. He has a record in office to point to now. And when it comes to supporting Israel, his advisers see that record as unimpeachable.

“President Trump did more for Israel than any American president in history, and he took historic action in the Middle East that created unprecedented peace,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for his campaign. She added: “When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end.”

Moreover, Mr. Trump has faced no dissent within his party over his stance on Israel and Gaza.

By contrast, the Democratic Party is tearing itself apart over the Israel-Hamas conflict. Mr. Biden confronted a protest vote in Tuesday’s Michigan primary aimed at pressuring him to alter his approach toward the conflict. And a New York Times/Siena College poll from December found broad voter disapproval over his handling of the conflict. Among voters between 18 and 29 years old — a demographic crucial to Democrats’ electoral success in recent years — nearly three-quarters of voters disliked Mr. Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.

Mr. Trump has enthusiastically consumed news about young progressives turning against Mr. Biden over Israel. And his campaign and its allies plan to exploit that division to their advantage.

One idea under discussion among Trump allies as a way to drive the Palestinian wedge deeper into the Democratic Party is to run advertisements in heavily Muslim areas of Michigan that would thank Mr. Biden for “standing with Israel,” according to two people briefed on the plans who weren’t authorized to discuss them publicly.

Trump allies have gleefully deployed similarly underhanded tactics to suppress the Democratic vote in his two previous campaigns. But the latest idea is especially audacious given that Mr. Trump’s Middle East policy as president unapologetically and lopsidedly favored Israel against the Palestinians. He gave Mr. Netanyahu nearly everything he wanted, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing decades of American foreign policy and bucking the United Nations, while lashing the Palestinians with aid cuts and diplomatic punishments, before brokering accords between Israel and four Arab states.

Given Mr. Trump’s pro-Israel record, the Oct. 7 attack would have seemed to present the opportunity to lean into his credentials by describing how he would deal with the crisis as president.

Other candidates have seized on such moments. Richard Fontaine, who was a foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, recalled how Mr. McCain responded that summer when Russian troops entered Georgia — an international land invasion that Europe had not seen in decades.

Mr. McCain offered a list of aggressive actions the United States should take to punish the Russians, and told a Pennsylvania crowd that he had assured Georgia’s leader “that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians.”

Today’s Republican Party is a long way from the “we are all Georgians” era. But there is still a strong pull toward Israel, especially among evangelicals.

Michael Allen, a former national security aide to former President George W. Bush, said that a pre-Trump Republican candidate might have highlighted what he would have done differently from the incumbent president to support and supply Israel, and gone further to “say that the predominant, malign influence in the region is Iran, and we can’t move forward without dealing with them in some effective way.”

Instead, Mr. Trump’s initial instinct in the days immediately following the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust was to use Israel’s national trauma to settle a personal score with Mr. Netanyahu.

On Oct. 11, Mr. Trump publicly attributed the Hamas invasion to Mr. Netanyahu’s lack of preparation, praised the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as “very smart,” and piled on another even more gratuitous attack: claiming Mr. Netanyahu had “let us down” during the Trump presidency by declining to participate in the January 2020 strike that killed the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani.

What happened next, behind the scenes, seems to have left a lasting impression on Mr. Trump. Close Trump advisers and allies described his public castigation of Mr. Netanyahu as an unintended act of political self-harm — even if many privately shared some frustrations with the Israeli leader — and privately urged him to issue a statement making clear his support for Mr. Netanyahu and for Israel’s right to defend itself, according to two people with direct knowledge of the outreach who insisted on anonymity to describe it.

One of those people was David Friedman, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, according to the people with knowledge of the outreach. Mr. Friedman did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Mr. Trump followed their recommendations. In the fallout from his remarks, Mr. Trump walked back his criticism, posting on social media that he stood with Mr. Netanyahu and Israel. And he proposed expanding his administration’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim nations to cover Palestinian refugees from Gaza.

As something of a makeup effort, Mr. Trump, in an Oct. 28 address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, vowed unyielding support for Israel against Hamas, promising to defend the country from what he called “the barbarians and savages and fascists that you see now trying to do harm to our beautiful Israel.”

More recently, he has promised simply to “stand proudly with our friend and ally, the state of Israel,” as he told a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville last week.

Still, the initial criticism of Mr. Netanyahu aggravated concerns among a broad network of Jewish groups and others on the pro-Israel right that Mr. Trump’s personal grievances and transactional politics could make him a less reliable partner for Israel in a second term than he was in his first.

The worry is that he may allow his animus toward Mr. Netanyahu to color his approach to the relationship, and that he may still court favor with antisemites like the rapper Kanye West or the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, whom he hosted at Mar-a-Lago in late 2022.

Those Trump allies are working quietly to ensure that Mr. Trump feels that he has incentives to support Israel if he is elected.

Mr. Bolton counts himself among the ranks of those concerned.

“Anybody who thinks that he’s going to be pro-Israel as he was in his first term could well be in for a surprise,” Mr. Bolton said. “Like everything else for Donald Trump, support for Israel he saw as a political plus for him. And if he ever saw it as not a political plus, the support would disappear.”

Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good.

Mr. Musk, who helped create OpenAI with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, said the company’s multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft represented an abandonment of its founding pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available.

“OpenAI has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company, Microsoft,” said the lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Superior Court in San Francisco.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a fight between the former business partners that has been simmering for years. After Mr. Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018, the company went on to become a leader in the field of generative A.I. and created ChatGPT, a chatbot that can produce text and respond to queries in humanlike prose. Mr. Musk, who has his own A.I. company, called xAI, said OpenAI was not focused enough on the technology’s risks.

Silicon Valley insiders believe that generative A.I., the technology behind ChatGPT, is a once in a generation technology that could transform the tech industry as thoroughly as web browsers did more than 30 years ago. But others, most notably Mr. Musk, have said that the technology can also be dangerous — perhaps even destroy humanity.

The lawsuit adds to an array of problems piling up for OpenAI. The company’s relationship with Microsoft is also facing scrutiny from regulators in the United States, European Union and Britain. It has been sued by The New York Times, several digital outlets, writers and computer programmers for scraping copyrighted material to train its chatbot. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Mr. Altman and OpenAI after the company’s board removed him in November, before reinstating him days later.

Mr. Musk’s lawsuit said he became involved with OpenAI because it was created as a nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” A key component of that, the lawsuit said, was to make its technology open source, meaning it would share the underlying software code with the world. Instead, the company created a for-profit business unit and restricted access to its technology.

The lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial, accused OpenAI and Mr. Altman of being in breach of contract and violating fiduciary duty, as well as unfair business practices. Mr. Musk is asking that OpenAI be required to open up its technology to others and that Mr. Altman and others pay back Mr. Musk the money that Mr. Musk gave to the organization. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.

OpenAI declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The suit could expose OpenAI to a lengthy and invasive legal review that reveals more about Mr. Altman’s dismissal and OpenAI’s pivot from being a nonprofit organization to for-profit company. That change, which was engineered by Mr. Altman in late 2018 and early 2019, has been the source of backbiting at OpenAI for years and contributed to the board’s decision to fire him as chief executive.

Though Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the A.I. lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and transform into a commercial operation that would work alongside his other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with his plan have said. When his attempt to take control failed, he left the OpenAI board, the people said.

Speaking at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit last year, Mr. Musk said that he wanted to know more about the chaos that unfolded at OpenAI last year, including why Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder, joined with other board members to fire Mr. Altman in November. He said that he was concerned that OpenAI had discovered some dangerous element of A.I., which is a question that his legal team could investigate during the lawsuit.

“I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Mr. Musk said at the DealBook conference. Making a reference to a powerful ring in “The Lord of the Rings,” he added, “The ring of power can corrupt, and he has the ring of power.”

Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The falling out between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has long been a subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley. The men first met during a tour of SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company, and later bonded over their shared concerns about the threat that A.I. could pose to humanity.

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI’s nonprofit status was a major source of friction, as tensions grew between company executives interested in trying to make money from new A.I. technology and Mr. Musk, who wanted it to remain a research lab.

“Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Mr. Musk said at one point, according to the complaint. “I will no longer fund OpenAI until you have made a firm commitment to stay, or I’m just being a fool who is essentially providing free funding to a startup. Discussions are over.”

The lawsuit tries to show Mr. Musk as an indispensable figure in OpenAI’s development. From 2016 to 2020, Mr. Musk contributed more than $44 million to OpenAI, according to the lawsuit. He also leased the company’s initial office space in San Francisco and paid the monthly expenses. He was personally involved in recruiting Mr. Sutskever, a top research scientist at Google, to be OpenAI’s chief scientist, according to the complaint.

“Without Mr. Musk’s involvement and substantial supporting efforts and resources,” the suit says, “it is highly likely that OpenAI Inc. would never have gotten off the ground.”

The two largest pharmacy chains in the United States will start dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone this month, a step that could make access easier for some patients.

Officials at CVS and Walgreens said in interviews on Friday that they had received certification to dispense mifepristone under guidelines that the Food and Drug Administration issued last year. The chains plan to make the medication available in stores in a handful of states at first. They will not be providing the medication by mail.

Both chains said they would gradually expand to all other states where abortion was legal and where pharmacies were legally able to dispense abortion pills — about half of the states.

Walgreens will start providing the pill within the next week in a small number of its pharmacies in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California and Illinois, said Fraser Engerman, a spokesman for the chain. “We are beginning a phased rollout in select locations to allow us to ensure quality, safety and privacy for our patients, providers and team members,” he said.

CVS will begin dispensing in all of its pharmacies in Massachusetts and Rhode Island “in the weeks ahead,” Amy Thibault, a spokeswoman for the company, said.

The chains will be monitoring the prospects in a few states, including Kansas, Montana and Wyoming, where abortion bans or strict limitations have been enacted but are enjoined because of legal challenges.

Mr. Engerman said that Walgreens was “not going to dispense in states where the laws are unclear” to protect its pharmacists and staff members.

As for CVS, “we continually monitor and evaluate changes in state laws and will dispense mifepristone in any state where it is or becomes legally permissible to do so,” Ms. Thibault said. In some states where abortion is legal, she said, pharmacists are prohibited from dispensing mifepristone because laws require that to be done by doctors or in a hospital or clinic.

It is uncertain how much initial demand there will be for the service at brick-and-mortar pharmacies. In the states where the chains will begin dispensing, abortion pills are already available in clinics or easily prescribed through telemedicine and sent through the mail. But some women prefer to visit doctors, many of whom do not have the medication on hand. The new development will allow doctors and other eligible providers to send a prescription to a pharmacy for the patient to pick up.

As the availability in retail pharmacies expands, they may become a more popular alternative, and depending on the outcome of a case the Supreme Court will hear later this month, the pharmacy option could take on more importance.

In that case, abortion opponents have sued the F.D.A., seeking to remove mifepristone from the market in the United States. An appeals court ruling in that case did not go that far but effectively banned the mailing of mifepristone and required in-person doctor visits. If the Supreme Court upholds that ruling, it could mean that patients would have to obtain mifepristone by visiting a clinic, doctor or pharmacy.

In order to obtain certification, the pharmacy chains had to take specific steps, including ensuring that their computerized systems protected the privacy of prescribers, who are certified under a special program that the F.D.A. applies to mifepristone and several dozen other medications.

Pharmacy certification is granted by manufacturers of mifepristone. Walgreens was certified by the brand name manufacturer Danco Laboratories, and is seeking certification from the generic manufacturer GenBioPro, Mr. Engerman said. CVS was certified by GenBioPro.

Medication abortion is a two-drug regimen that is now the most common method of terminating pregnancies in the United States and is typically used through 12 weeks of pregnancy. Mifepristone, which blocks a hormone necessary for pregnancy development, is taken first, followed 24 to 48 hours later by misoprostol, which causes contractions that expel pregnancy tissue.

The same regimen is also used for miscarriages, and those patients can now also obtain mifepristone from the pharmacy chains.

Mifepristone has been tightly regulated by the F.D.A. since its approval in 2000, and doctors and other health providers are required to obtain special certification to prescribe it. It has previously been available primarily from the prescribers or from clinics or telemedicine abortion services, in which the pills were generally shipped from one of two mail-order pharmacies that were authorized. Misoprostol has never been as tightly restricted as mifepristone and is used for many different medical conditions. It is easily obtained at pharmacies through a typical prescription process.

The American Pharmacists Association urged the F.D.A. to allow retail pharmacies to distribute mifepristone, even though the medication is unlikely to generate significant revenue. In a statement last year, the association said that it wanted the agency “to level the playing field by permitting any pharmacy that chooses to dispense this product to become certified.”

Shortly after the F.D.A. policy change was announced in January 2023, Walgreens and CVS said they planned to become certified and offer mifepristone in states where laws would allow pharmacies to dispense it.

Walgreens later became the focus of a consumer and political firestorm after it responded to threatening letters from Republican attorneys general in 21 states, confirming that it would not dispense the medication in those states.

Both chains have had protests outside their stores, mostly from anti-abortion advocates, and similar protesters interrupted a meeting of shareholders at Walgreens Boots Alliance, the chain’s parent company.

CVS is the nation’s largest chain with over 9,000 stores in all 50 states. Walgreens has about 8,500 stories in all states except North Dakota.

A handful of small independent pharmacies began dispensing mifepristone last year.