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There are more than four million electric vehicles on American roads, but fewer than 1,000 of them are heavy-duty trucks. On Tuesday, the three largest truck makers plan to announce a push to remedy that deficit by calling on governments and utilities to help them build many more places to charge big rigs.

Daimler Truck, which owns Freightliner; Navistar, which is controlled by Volkswagen; and Volvo Trucks have formed an association to push for chargers, improvements to the electricity grid and other measures they say are needed to promote battery- or hydrogen-powered trucks.

The new organization, Powering America’s Commercial Transportation, will be based in Washington and also be open to suppliers, nonprofit organizations and other groups.

The companies’ decision to work together underscores the degree to which the transition away from fossil fuels is dependent on government support and decisions made in Washington and state capitols. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022, provides $1 billion for electric trucks, including tax credits of up to $40,000 for companies that buy them, as well as subsidies for charging infrastructure.

But officials are just beginning to distribute the money, and the truck companies complain that they have gotten less attention from federal and state governments than makers of cars.

“There’s a lot of funding that’s available out there from the federal government,” said Dawn Fenton, vice president of government relations and public affairs at Volvo North America. “There’s been little so far focused on the heavy-duty charging infrastructure.”

Only nine fast charging stations in the United States are capable of serving heavy trucks, according to data from the Department of Energy.

Transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and trucks, buses and vans account for 29 percent of vehicle emissions, according to Calstart, a nonprofit group whose members work in industry as well as government. Poorer communities tend to suffer the most from truck pollution because they are more likely to be near industrial zones or highways.

Eliminating those emissions is difficult. An electric truck requires a big, heavy battery that reduces how much stuff the vehicle can haul.

Zero-emissions trucks are also two or three times more expensive than diesel trucks, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, although prices are expected to drop as companies increase production.

The truck makers say they are committed to selling emission-free vehicles, but environmental groups have accused them of trying to block policies that would force the industry to move faster.

This month, the Sierra Club, along with 40 other advocacy groups, sent letters to the chief executives of Daimler Truck and Volvo Trucks accusing them of trying to stymie stricter emissions standards. In comments on proposed regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency, both truck makers have lobbied for a slower introduction of new standards.

In the letter to Volvo’s chief executive, Martin Lundstedt, the group wrote, “Volvo Trucks U.S.A. must focus its efforts and resources on electrifying the transportation sector now, especially in the communities most impacted by truck emissions, instead of fighting policies needed to move the whole system faster.” The groups sent a similar letter to Martin Daum, the chief executive of Daimler Truck.

(Volvo Trucks is not part of Volvo, the carmaker, and Daimler Truck is separate from Mercedes-Benz.)

Truck makers face less competitive pressure than car companies. In the car business, Tesla has won over customers who previously drove cars made by Mercedes, General Motors and Volkswagen, forcing those companies to respond. The Tesla Model Y sport utility vehicle was the best-selling passenger car of any kind worldwide in 2023, according to JATO Dynamics, a market research firm.

No upstart truck maker has had comparable impact. Tesla has developed a long-haul electric truck called the Semi, but the company has not begun selling it in large numbers.

“We would have moved faster over the last five years if there was a zero emission truck company taking the lead,” said Katherine García, director of a Sierra Club program that promotes clean transportation.

Nikola once aimed to be the Tesla of the truck industry, but it has struggled since its founder, Trevor Milton, was accused of defrauding investors by lying about the abilities of the company’s technology. Mr. Milton was sentenced in December to four years in prison after a jury convicted him. He denies wrongdoing and is appealing. Nikola, under new management, shipped 79 vehicles in the first nine months of 2023, the most recent figures the company has disclosed.

The truck makers argue that they can’t be expected to sell battery-powered trucks when there are hardly any places to charge them. Electric trucks require extremely powerful chargers and, as a result, bigger connections to the electrical grid than are readily available. Many utilities have to upgrade old distribution lines, transformers and other equipment to be able to deliver the energy needed to refuel multiple trucks simultaneously.

Brien Sheahan, head of government relations and regulatory affairs at Navistar, said one customer had ordered a fleet of electric trucks and installed 20 chargers at its depot. But, he said, “they couldn’t get it energized by the utility.”

Shortcomings in the electrical grid are “going to be a constraint on our ability to scale the industry,” said Mr. Sheahan, a former chairman and chief executive of the Illinois Commerce Commission, which regulates electric utilities.

Ms. García of the Sierra Club said that, despite slow progress so far, she was optimistic. She noted that sales of electric delivery vans and other smaller trucks were growing quickly, in part because California and other states are compelling manufacturers to reduce emissions and providing incentives for truck buyers.

Delivery vans, like those used by Amazon, require less energy and typically drive relatively short routes. As a result, those vehicles can be charged overnight on less powerful chargers than those needed for heavy trucks.

“The market is really moving quickly,” Ms. García said. “We’re at the point where it is really going to accelerate.”

The global economy has been battered by a pandemic, record levels of inflation, protracted wars and skyrocketing interest rates over the past four years, raising fears of a painful worldwide downturn. But fresh forecasts published on Tuesday suggest that the world has managed to defy the odds, averting the threat of a so-called hard landing.

Projections from the International Monetary Fund painted a picture of economic durability — one that policymakers have been hoping to achieve while trying to manage a series of cascading crises.

In its latest economic outlook, the I.M.F. projected global growth of 3.1 percent this year — the same pace as in 2023 and an upgrade from its previous forecast of 2.9 percent. Predictions of a global recession have receded, with inflation easing faster than economists anticipated. Central bankers, including the Federal Reserve, are expected to begin cutting interest rates in the coming months.

“The global economy has shown remarkable resilience, and we are now in the final descent to a soft landing,” said Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the chief economist of the I.M.F.

Policymakers who feared they would need to hit the brakes on economic growth to contain rising prices have managed to tame inflation without tipping the world into a recession. The I.M.F. expects global inflation to fall to 5.8 percent this year and 4.4 percent in 2025 from 6.8 percent in 2023. It estimates that 80 percent of the world’s economies will experience lower annual inflation this year.

The brighter outlook is due largely to the strength of the U.S. economy, which grew 3.1 percent last year. That robust growth came despite the Fed’s aggressive series of rate increases, which raised borrowing costs to their highest levels in 22 years. Consumer spending in America has held strong while businesses have continued to invest. The I.M.F. now expects the U.S. economy to grow 2.1 percent this year, up from its previous prediction of 1.5 percent.

China’s economy is also growing faster than previously thought and is projected to grow 4.6 percent this year. I.M.F. officials said the difficulties facing China’s property sector had not slowed the economy as much as they predicted; the Chinese government, they noted, has provided “significant” fiscal support.

Other large economies, such as India and Brazil, also appear to be performing better than was forecast. Perhaps most surprising, Russia, which has faced a barrage of Western sanctions and export restrictions since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, received the biggest upgrade of all the countries tracked by the I.M.F. Despite the coordinated effort to cripple its economy, Russia’s economy is expected to grow by a healthy 2.6 percent this year.

Still, sluggishness persists among some major economies. Geopolitical crises and industrial rivalries have been particularly hard on the eurozone, where fresh data released Tuesday showed the economy stagnated in the final three months of 2023 and grew by just 0.1 percent for the year.

The I.M.F. said the “notably subdued” growth in Europe reflected “weak consumer sentiment, the lingering effects of high energy prices, and weakness in interest-rate-sensitive manufacturing and business investment.”

Other threats to the global economy exist, including geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East. The war in Gaza and the associated attacks on ships by the Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels known as the Houthis in the Red Sea are of particular concern to the I.M.F. It warned that if those attacks escalated, they could lead to supply disruptions and “more persistent underlying inflation” that might require central bankers to maintain higher interest rates for a longer period.

The I.M.F. also expressed trepidation about President Biden’s use of industrial policy to subsidize America’s clean energy and semiconductor sectors. Mr. Gourinchas said such actions had been leading to a “tit for tat” in trade restrictions, one that weighed on global output. He said he believed that some of the measures put in place by the United States, such as rules requiring companies to use American-made components to qualify for certain manufacturing tax credits, were not compliant with international trade rules.

Yet Biden administration officials view those policies as among the biggest factors helping to fuel America’s economic recovery.

At a speech in Chicago last week, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen noted that America’s economy had outpaced those in the rest of the world, achieving stronger growth while cooling inflation more quickly than other large, advanced economies.

“Put simply, it’s been the fairest recovery on record,” she said.

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday, the latest twist in what is widely seen as a campaign by the military to sideline one of its leading critics from politics.

The sentence, which was delivered in a case in which Mr. Khan is accused of leaking state secrets, came about a week before Pakistan is set to head to the polls for the first national election since he was ousted in a vote of no confidence in April 2022.

Analysts have called the election among the least credible in Pakistan’s 76-year history because of the military’s widespread crackdown on Mr. Khan and his supporters.

His ouster set off a political showdown between Mr. Khan and the country’s powerful military, which has long been the invisible hand guiding the country’s politics. Mr. Khan and his supporters have accused military leaders of orchestrating his removal — an accusation they deny.

The country has been embroiled in the political crisis spawned by Mr. Khan’s ouster for a year and a half. As Mr. Khan and his supporters have railed against the country’s generals, public anger at the military has swelled. In May, hundreds of protesters attacked military installations in scenes that were once unimaginable in Pakistan.

In response, the military launched a widespread intimidation campaign aimed at weakening Mr. Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., and curbing the remarkable political comeback he has made even as he has been jailed and barred from contesting the national election next week.

The verdict on Tuesday was handed down by a special court that was established earlier this year and that analysts say is more deferential to the military’s wishes. Mr. Khan has called the trial a “fixed match,” suggesting its outcome was predetermined, and his party said it would appeal the verdict.

“This 10-year sentence won’t stand for 10 days before the appellate courts. Such brazen disregard of law and constitution has never been witnessed before,” Taimur Malik, one of the lawyers for Mr. Khan, said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a former foreign minister and close aide to Mr. Khan, was also handed a 10-year sentence on Tuesday in the same case.

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad.

The authorities in Southern California announced on Monday that they had arrested five men in connection with the six people found fatally shot at a remote crossroads in the Mojave Desert last week, a grisly scene that investigators believe stemmed from a dispute over marijuana.

Just days ago, the news of the bodies seemed a stunning mystery, with few details offered to the public.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department received a call on Jan. 23 for a wellness check. That prompted deputies to head toward an intersection off Highway 395 outside El Mirage, a community about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

There, they discovered the bodies of five men. An additional male victim was found early the next morning. Video captured by television news stations blurred out the graphic images. No updates were offered.

But behind the scenes, the authorities were quickly piecing together clues in an area they said was known for illicit marijuana.

“From the moment we started this investigation, we started to receive strong leads, and after I was briefed, I was quite confident that we’d be able to get the subjects that were involved in this homicide into custody,” Shannon Dicus, the sheriff of San Bernardino County, told reporters on Monday.

The sheriff said dumped bodies connected to illegal marijuana growing were not new to the region. “It isn’t an anomaly,” he said. “The anomaly here is the amount of people that were murdered.”

He said that the department’s marijuana enforcement teams had served a total of 411 search warrants last year for illegal marijuana growing and had seized 655,000 marijuana plants, 74,000 pounds of processed marijuana and $370 million.

The authorities revealed on Monday that the 911 call that prompted their search had come from a man believed to be one of the victims. Dispatchers received a call from a man who said in Spanish that he had been shot but did not know his location. The call ended, but his cell signal was tracked to a remote area in the Mojave Desert.

Because the area is particularly isolated, the Sheriff’s Department sought navigation help from the California Highway Patrol’s aviation division.

After deputies arrived, they found four men with severe burns and another man in a sport utility vehicle. The two vehicles found on the scene were a Dodge Caravan and a Chevrolet Trailblazer, one of which had several bullet holes. The next day, investigators found an additional victim a short distance away.

Four of the six victims have been identified: Baldemar Mondragon-Albarran, 34, of Adelanto; Franklin Noel Bonilla, 22, of Hesperia; Kevin Dariel Bonilla, 25, of Hesperia; and a 45-year-old man whose name was not released, pending notification of his relatives. Franklin Bonilla is believed to have made the 911 call.

On Sunday, the authorities served search warrants in several communities near where the bodies were found. Detectives recovered evidence, including eight firearms that will be analyzed to determine whether they were used in the killings. The suspects were arrested at a compound near what the authorities said appeared to be a future growing operation.

Investigators determined that arrangements had been made for the suspects to meet the victims at the remote location for a marijuana transaction.

The suspects are all area residents: Toniel Baez-Duarte, 34, and Mateo Baez-Duarte, 24, of Apple Valley; and Jose Nicolas Hernandez-Sarabia, 33, Jose Gregorio Hernandez-Sarabia, 34, and Jose Manuel Burgos Parra, 26, of Adelanto. The five men are in custody with no bail, pending a review from the local district attorney’s office.

“We are still conducting a follow-up investigation, but we are confident we have arrested all the suspects in this case,” said Michael Warrick, a sergeant with the homicide detail on the department’s specialized investigations division.

Aimee Ortiz contributed reporting.

The Democratic Unionist Party, the main Protestant party in Northern Ireland and one of its biggest political forces, said on Tuesday that it was ready to return to power sharing after a boycott of almost two years had paralyzed decision-making in the region.

After an internal meeting that stretched into the early morning, Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the party, known as the D.U.P., said at a news conference that he had been mandated to support a new deal, negotiated with the British government, that would allow his party to return to Northern Ireland’s governing assembly.

“Over the coming period we will work alongside others to build a thriving Northern Ireland firmly within the union for this and succeeding generations,” Mr. Donaldson said. He added, however, that the return to power sharing was conditional on the British government’s legislating to enshrine a new set of measures that had not yet been made public.

The announcement from the D.U.P., which represents those who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, will be welcomed by many voters frustrated by the political stalemate, as well as by the British and Irish governments, which have both put pressure on the party to end the deadlock.

But it could also herald a seismic shift in the territory’s history, opening the door for Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, to hold for the first time the most senior political role of “first minister” rather than “deputy first minister.”

Sinn Fein is committed to the idea of a united Ireland, in which Northern Ireland would join the Republic of Ireland, rather than remain part of the United Kingdom.

The breakthrough followed months of tense discussion between the D.U.P. and the British government aimed at bringing the unionists back into Stormont, the Northern Ireland assembly in Belfast that was launched as part of the Good Friday agreement that ended the region’s decades of sectarian violence, known as the Troubles.

Stormont cannot operate without the participation of the territory’s two leading parties, representing unionists, who are mainly Protestants, and nationalists, who are largely Roman Catholics.

The D.U.P. walked out in February 2022 in protest of post-Brexit trade rules, and since then, civil servants have kept the basic functions of government running.

But bigger decisions require the approval of Stormont, and Mr. Donaldson has been under growing pressure to end the boycott, not just from the British and Irish governments, but also from voters in Northern Ireland, where services including health care have been under acute pressure.

This month, tens of thousands of people took part in the biggest strikes in recent memory, as public-sector workers walked out in protest over their pay, which has lagged that of colleagues in the rest of the United Kingdom because of the political gridlock.

In December, the British government offered an additional 3.3 billion pounds for Northern Ireland on the condition that the D.U.P. returned to Stormont.

Mr. Donaldson, however, has also been pressed by hard liners in his own party to stand firm, and the decision to return to government could put him on a collision course with them.

In May 2022, Sinn Fein overtook the D.U.P. in legislative elections and became Northern Ireland’s biggest party. A few months before, the D.U.P. had withdrawn from power sharing in protest over post-Brexit trade rules, which imposed checks on some British goods entering Northern Ireland.

Unionists said those restrictions, enshrined in a deal called the Northern Ireland protocol, would drive a wedge between the territory and the rest of the United Kingdom, and called for the British government to all but overturn it.

In 2023, Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, struck a new deal with the European Union, known as the Windsor Framework Agreement, which wrested some concessions from Brussels. But they were not enough for the D.U.P.

The party’s reservations now appear to have been resolved after new negotiations the British government in London, paving the way for an end to almost two years of administrative deadlock.

Though many will welcome the prospect of the restoration of power sharing, any deal will still be a risk for Mr. Donaldson, since hard-line unionist critics oppose compromise.

One of them, Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice party, said on Monday that his cause faced a “defining moment,” urging the D.U.P. not to agree to the post-Brexit trade arrangements. “It would be a point of no return,” he told reporters, “because that would be accepting that never again would Northern Ireland be a full part of the United Kingdom.”

A judge declined on Monday to grant a new trial for Alex Murdaugh, the former South Carolina lawyer convicted of murdering his wife and son, who had argued that he was entitled to a redo because a court clerk had improperly influenced the jurors in his case.

The judge said that the clerk, Rebecca Hill, had made “fleeting and foolish” comments but ruled that Mr. Murdaugh, 55, had not proved they were enough to affect the jury’s verdict in March 2023. As such, the judge ruled, Mr. Murdaugh did not meet the bar to have his conviction and life sentence set aside.

Still, the judge, Jean Toal, after hearing testimony from Ms. Hill, as well as all 12 jurors in the murder trial and other witnesses, had harsh words for the court clerk. She said Ms. Hill had been “attracted by the siren call of celebrity” and had wanted Mr. Murdaugh to be found guilty because she thought it would help her sell a book about the trial.

Judge Toal, a former chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, also found that Ms. Hill was “not completely credible” in her testimony in Columbia, S.C., on Monday.

Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers vowed to appeal, and said the hearing had allowed them to obtain valuable testimony for their future efforts to win a new trial. They said they hoped that the state’s appellate courts would view the law differently and not require them to prove that Ms. Hill’s comments were prejudicial.

Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers have claimed that Ms. Hill made comments to the jurors during the trial that could have swayed their votes. A state police agency has been investigating the allegations, which include that Ms. Hill told jurors not to be “fooled” by Mr. Murdaugh’s defense, that she had private conversations with a juror, and that she told jurors before they started deliberating that “this shouldn’t take us long.”

Ms. Hill has not been charged, and she denied many of the most serious allegations in her testimony, which came after each of the jurors took the stand.

One juror said that Ms. Hill had told jurors “to watch him closely,” referring to Mr. Murdaugh. The juror, who was identified only as “Juror Z,” said that the comments had influenced her decision to find Mr. Murdaugh guilty.

“To me, it felt like she made it seem like he was already guilty,” the juror testified.

However, nine other jurors who testified on Monday said that they did not have any communication with Ms. Hill about the case during the trial and that their verdict was not influenced by her.

Two jurors testified that they had heard a comment or two from Ms. Hill about the case, but that the comments had not influenced them.

One of those jurors, “Juror P,” said that on the day that Mr. Murdaugh testified, Ms. Hill said to “watch his body language.” Another juror, “Juror X,” who testified on Friday because of a scheduling conflict, reportedly said that Ms. Hill had noted to jurors that it was rare for a defendant to testify in his own defense.

When Ms. Hill took the stand on Monday afternoon, she faced tough questioning from both Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer, Dick Harpootlian, and Judge Toal.

During an hour and 15 minutes of testimony, Ms. Hill strenuously denied having spoken to jurors about anything relating to the merits of the case.

Ms. Hill acknowledged that at one point during Mr. Murdaugh’s trial, in the presence of some jurors, she spoke to a bailiff about the fact that Mr. Murdaugh might testify, and that she remembered telling the jurors to pay attention and that it was “a big day.” She also said she had held a personal feeling about Mr. Murdaugh’s guilt, though she said she did not share that feeling with any jurors.

In a statement on Monday, Ms. Hill’s lawyers said they respected the judge’s ruling. “We agree with Justice Toal’s finding that the Colleton County jurors selected for this very complicated and lengthy trial were consummate professionals and operated within the instructions of the court,” said the lawyers, Justin Bamberg and Will Lewis.

Ms. Hill was a fixture of the courthouse in Walterboro, S.C., during Mr. Murdaugh’s murder trial, which stretched from January to March 2023. She later wrote a book about the trial that she said had earned her and her coauthor about $100,000. She recently acknowledged plagiarizing some of the book’s preface from a draft of a BBC article.

On Monday, she said many passages in the book that had sparked controversy were false, including her account of locking eyes with a juror during the trial and realizing that they both believed Mr. Murdaugh was guilty. She said the false accounts were the result of her using “poetic license.”

When Judge Toal questioned Ms. Hill on the stand on Monday, the judge zeroed in on her credibility. Judge Toal asked Ms. Hill about evidence that seemed to contradict her testimony.

Mr. Harpootlian accused Ms. Hill of wanting a guilty verdict because she believed a conviction would help her sell more books. Ms. Hill denied that accusation, even though Rhonda McElveen, a clerk from another county who helped Ms. Hill during the murder trial, testified that Ms. Hill had told her as much.

Ms. McElveen said she had also heard Ms. Hill tell people in the courthouse not to be fooled by Mr. Murdaugh’s defense, though she said she did not hear Ms. Hill say that to any jurors.

Under questioning from Creighton Waters of the South Carolina attorney general’s office, who was the lead prosecutor in the murder trial, Ms. McElveen acknowledged that she never reported any of Ms. Hill’s actions to the trial judge because she did not have serious concerns about Ms. Hill’s behavior.

Earlier on Monday, Judge Toal had encountered a hiccup in the proceedings, saying she had learned that some jurors who were waiting to testify had used their cellphones to watch Juror Z testify about Ms. Hill influencing her vote. The phones were supposed to have been taken away from the jurors before the hearing began.

“I am very unhappy about it,” the judge said.

The allegations against Ms. Hill, which Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers first raised in September, are another twist in the tragic tale of the Murdaugh murders, a crime that has horrified and fascinated observers around the country since June 2021, when Mr. Murdaugh’s wife, Maggie, and their younger son, Paul, were shot to death.

Mr. Murdaugh has always maintained his innocence. But a key video shown at his trial revealed that he was at the family’s dog kennels with his wife and son shortly before they were killed, contradicting his claim that he had not been with them at that time. Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before returning the guilty verdicts that Ms. Hill read out.

Mr. Murdaugh had been stealing millions of dollars from clients and law partners for years before the murders. Prosecutors said in the murder trial that he had carried out the killings in a bizarre, failed attempt to gain sympathy and stop his law firm from scrutinizing his finances.

Though he is challenging his murder convictions, Mr. Murdaugh has admitted to having stolen vast sums of money over the years. He pleaded guilty in November to a series of financial crimes and was sentenced to an additional 27 years in prison.

Lawyers with the South Carolina attorney general’s office who prosecuted the case had argued in court papers that the claims about Ms. Hill were “unfounded and not credible.” Even if Ms. Hill did make inappropriate comments, the state lawyers argued, the comments were not enough to influence the jurors in their decision.

Mr. Murdaugh, who has been disbarred, is a fourth-generation lawyer whose family had vast influence in the legal world of South Carolina’s Lowcountry region. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had each led a prosecutor’s office in the region — in total, for more than 80 years — and the family ran a law firm in the small town of Hampton for even longer.