Category: Latest News

A judge in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump is hearing final arguments on Friday afternoon on a motion to disqualify the prosecutor who brought the case, Fani T. Willis, on the ground that a romantic relationship she had with a subordinate created a conflict of interest.

In their first line of attack on Friday, defense attorneys tried to set the bar low for disqualification, arguing that even the appearance of a conflict of interest could lead to the dismissal of Ms. Willis and her entire office from the case. The question could be pivotal to the outcome of whether the disqualification effort succeeds.

“We can demonstrate an appearance of a conflict of interest and that is sufficient,” John B. Merchant III, a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, Michael Roman, told the judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court.

Judge McAfee is not likely to rule on the matter on Friday. Rather, the hearing, which started at 1 p.m., is allowing lawyers from the two sides to sum up their arguments over a salacious subplot to the election case — one that has already caused significant embarrassment and turmoil for Ms. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Details of her personal life have been spilled out in the Atlanta courthouse where she had hoped to put Mr. Trump and 14 co-defendants on trial as soon as this summer.

The stakes are high: If Ms. Willis is disqualified from the case, her entire office would be, too, and the case would probably be turned over to a district attorney from another jurisdiction. The new prosecutor could choose to continue the case as planned, modify the charges or drop them.

Disqualification would reduce the chances that a trial would begin before the November presidential election, in which Mr. Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee.

The relationship between Ms. Willis and Nathan Wade, an Atlanta-area lawyer she hired in November 2021 to manage the prosecution team, first came to light in January, in a motion filed by a lawyer for one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.

The defense lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, asserted that the romance began before Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade, and argued that Mr. Wade was unqualified for the high-profile job, for which he has been paid at least $650,000 so far.

Ms. Merchant also claimed that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis had engaged in “self-dealing,” because the couple went on vacations together that she said Mr. Wade had paid for.

In her filing on Jan. 8, Ms. Merchant cited Georgia case law in arguing that the situation as she laid it out met the standard for a disqualifying conflict of interest.

“Such a conflict of interest has been held to arise where the prosecutor has acquired a personal interest or stake in the defendant’s conviction,” she wrote.

Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade have acknowledged that they had a romantic relationship. But they have said that it began after Mr. Wade was hired, and that it ended before Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies were charged in August in a sweeping indictment that accuses them of conspiring to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. Ms. Willis said the couple roughly split the costs of the trips they took together, with Ms. Willis often using cash to pay back Mr. Wade for her share.

In a speech at a Black church in Atlanta, Ms. Willis, an African-American Democrat, suggested that racism was motivating those who were criticizing her decision to hire Mr. Wade, who is also Black.

In a later legal filing, Ms. Willis brushed aside the motion to disqualify her as a legally dubious stunt, arguing that there was no conflict of interest. She wrote that “the existence of a relationship between members of a prosecution team, in and of itself, is simply not a status that entitles a criminal defendant any remedy.”

The judge held a series of hearings on the issue in February that felt at times like a mini-trial. Mr. Wade took the stand, as did Ms. Willis, who pushed back angrily against Ms. Merchant’s questions. Ms. Willis described feeling loneliness after becoming the district attorney, the violent threats and racist messages she had received, and her frustration that the focus on her love life had distracted the nation’s attention from Mr. Trump and the 14 co-defendants who remain after four of those originally charged pleaded guilty.

At a hearing on Tuesday, the conflicting accounts of when the prosecutors’ romance began took center stage. Ms. Merchant called Terrence Bradley, a former law partner of Mr. Wade, to the stand, hoping to help prove that the relationship began before Mr. Wade was hired.

But Mr. Bradley delivered contradictory information. Entered into evidence was a text exchange he had with Ms. Merchant months earlier, in which he said that the relationship “absolutely” predated Mr. Wade’s hiring. But on the witness stand, he repeatedly said he had no knowledge of when the romance began.

The judge will have to decide which of Mr. Bradley’s accounts to believe as he weighs whether to disqualify the prosecutors. Another witness, a former friend and employee of Ms. Willis named Robin Yeartie, also testified that the relationship predated Mr. Wade’s hiring. But under cross-examination, she said that she had left the D.A.’s office on bad terms and was no longer Ms. Willis’s friend.

There is already some precedent within the Trump case for disqualification. In July 2022, a judge blocked Ms. Willis from developing a case against Burt Jones, a fake Trump elector in Georgia in 2020, because Ms. Willis had hosted a fund-raiser for one of Mr. Jones’s political rivals. A year and a half after the disqualification, no replacement prosecutor has yet been named to continue investigating Mr. Jones, who is now Georgia’s lieutenant governor.

Pete Skandalakis, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, said in a recent interview that the current situation was different from the one involving Mr. Jones and suggested that it could move more quickly because an indictment has already been handed up.

Mr. Skandalakis, who would be the person responsible for reassigning the case, said last month that only a few other district attorney’s offices in Georgia were large enough to handle the case, and that one factor he would consider if he had to reassign the case would be a district attorney’s proximity to Fulton County. That probably means that the case would fall to a district attorney’s office in the Atlanta region.

Such an outcome would inevitably delay the case for some time.

Two good friends, Rebecca Grekin and Yannai Kashtan, met up one crisp December morning at Stanford University, where they both study and teach. The campus was deserted for the holidays, an emptiness at odds with the school’s image as a place where giants roam, engaged in groundbreaking research on heart transplants, jet aerodynamics, high-performance computing. Work that has changed the world.

Ms. Grekin and Mr. Kashtan are young climate researchers. I had asked them there to explain how they hoped to change the world themselves.

They have very different ideas about how to do that. A big question: What role should money from oil and gas — the very industry that’s the main contributor to global warming— have in funding work like theirs?

“I’m just not convinced we need fossil fuel companies’ help,” said Mr. Kashtan, 25, as we toured the lab where he works, surrounded by sensitive electronic gear used to detect methane. “The forces and the incentives are aligned in the wrong direction. It makes me very cynical.”

For Ms. Grekin, 26, that’s a delicate issue. Her entire academic career, including her Ph.D. work at Stanford, has been funded by Exxon Mobil.

“I know people who are trying to change things from the inside,” she said. “I’ve seen change.”

We spent hours that day — first at her lab, then in his, and then off campus at a hole-in-the-wall Burmese joint — as the two disagreed and agreed in amiable and insistent ways about some of the biggest questions facing the next generation of climate scientists like themselves.

Should universities accept climate funding from the very companies whose products are heating up the planet? Is it better to work for change from within a system, or from outside? How much should the world count on cutting-edge technologies that seem far-fetched today?

And the big one. What is gained or lost when oil producers fund climate solutions?

Some of Ms. Grekin’s research has focused on calculating the true climate impact of food and other things that people consume. In the hallway outside her lab hangs a large poster describing her work. The poster prominently features the ExxonMobil logo.

“They brag about their relationship with Stanford, their association with bright, young, environmentally minded scientists,” Mr. Kashtan said, standing in the hallway. “But the majority of their money is going to things that are pretty explicitly about getting more oil out of the ground.”

Ms. Grekin pushed back on any suggestion that Exxon had influenced her research. The poster was simply being transparent about her funding, she said, which is always appropriate. “You’re supposed to share your funding sources,” she said. “They don’t have anything to do with the research. They just happen to fund graduate school.”

In any case, her work is already being used at 40 universities to cut the climate impact of their sprawling food services, she pointed out. Would that have happened otherwise?

Despite differences like these, Mr. Kashtan and Ms. Grekin are friends. They fill in to teach each other’s classes. They both talk passionately about solutions to climate change, and both co-signed an open letter last year calling on Stanford to establish guidelines for engaging with fossil fuel companies.

Mr. Kashtan says his skepticism about oil-industry motivations was born of his own experience. A physics and chemistry double-major working on his Ph.D., he previously researched a technology called electrofuels that big corporations, including fossil fuel companies, are promoting as a way to fight global warming.

The technology behind electrofuels, also known as e-fuels, sounds equal parts science fiction and magic.

It essentially involves capturing carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is rapidly warming the planet, by sucking it out of the air, then combining it with hydrogen that has been split from water (using renewable energy) to make liquid fuels that can be used in trucks and planes. Start-ups working on e-fuels, including a Stanford spinoff, have raised millions of dollars, typically from the venture capital arms of large oil and gas companies, as well as from airlines.

But Mr. Kashtan has come to believe that deploying e-fuels at scale isn’t just many years away, it also doesn’t make sense from an economic or even energy perspective. For one, he said, capturing carbon dioxide by pulling it out of the atmosphere is itself energy intensive. The rest of the process to produce the fuel, even more so.

Instead, these technologies have become industry-funded red herrings that distract from the critical task of burning less fossil fuels, he said. After all, it is the burning of coal, oil and gas that’s putting the planet-warming gases in the air in the first place.

He’s come to be particularly wary of how well-meaning colleagues, like his friend Ms. Grekin, could play a role in bringing about that delay, for example by amplifying research that emphasizes far-out technological solutions instead of, say, taking steps like curbing emissions.

Technologies like electrofuels aren’t simply “complete wastes of time, talent, and money,” Mr. Kashtan said in his characteristically direct way, “they’re exactly what fossil fuel companies want.”

We were in Mr. Kashtan’s lab, filled with tubes, tanks and ozone scrubbers. The team he’s part of was working on a project to measure air pollution from gas-burning stoves in homes across the world. It wasn’t what he expected to be researching. Since he was a child growing up in Oakland, he’s been interested in the possibilities of technology, not the harms of it.

As a boy he produced a series of YouTube videos earnestly explaining every element of the periodic table. “That’s pure Beryllium metal right there: super toxic, super hard, pretty expensive, and one of my favorite elements,” 12-year-old Yannai says in one clip, decked out in goggles and lab coat.

Ms. Grekin disputed Mr. Kashtan’s notion of new technologies as delay tactics. That approach raised the risk that the world would write off promising innovations prematurely, she said. “Sometimes you don’t know until you do the research,” she said.

“Do we need people focusing on these problems so that we can find either better solutions or and cheaper solutions? Yes. Do we know exactly what those will be? No,” Ms. Grekin said.

“But I see an exception when it comes to climate, because of the timeline,” Mr. Kashtan said. “We’re racing against the clock here.”

“Maybe I’m more optimistic about the future and Yannai, maybe, is less,” Ms. Grekin said.

We were starving and decided to look for lunch. The only option on the all-but-empty campus was a sad Starbucks. So instead we drove to a Burmese restaurant, a local favorite, snagging a table outside so that we could hear each other better.

On the way, Ms. Grekin was apologetic about driving us in her car, a bright yellow Fiat 500 that she’s had for more than a decade, instead of walking or taking a bus. Usually she doesn’t drive, she said. It was just that she’d brought several weeks’ worth of recycling to drop off that day, one of the few permissible excuses for a climate researcher to drive to campus in a car, in her view.

“I came with my entire car full of recycling,” she said.

Ms. Grekin said she also tries to buy very little. “This is from high school. Like, a lot of my clothes are from high school,” she said.

In response, Mr. Kashtan pointed to his own shirt. “This is a hand-me-down,” he said.

Fossil fuel funding for research has become a thorny issue for many universities, and particularly at Stanford’s Doerr School. Founded in 2022 with a $1.1 billion gift by John Doerr, a venture capitalist and billionaire, the school quickly attracted criticism for saying it would work with and accept donations from fossil fuel companies.

A recently issued list of funders of the Doerr School is a who’s who of the fossil fuel industry

In October, a nonprofit group founded by Adam McKay, the writer and director of “Don’t Look Up,” the climate-themed film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, criticized the Doerr School in a satirical ad that has since been viewed more than 200,000 times on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The school seeks to come up with ways to combat climate change, so we’re calling on the help of all our friends at Big Oil,” the parody says.

Stanford has been a friend to oil and gas in the past. A researcher at the Stanford Exploration Project, which began in the 1970s, later developed an algorithm for BP that contributed to a 200-million-barrel oil and gas discovery in the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, many of these older programs are atrophying and some are shutting down. A project that worked with oil and gas companies to study the geology of undersea drill sites off the coast of West Africa ended in 2022.

Stanford’s newer fossil fuel funded programs instead tend to focus on climate solutions, like blue hydrogen or carbon storage. Mr. Kashtan questions the climate bona fides of many of those programs.

The Natural Gas Initiative, for example, works with an industry consortium to research ways that natural gas can be part of the climate solution. It is led by a former Chevron strategist, and industry funders get a spot on its board of advisers for a quarter-million dollars a year.

“They’re ultimately about how to drill more efficiently,” he said.

“Exxon did offer me internships that were basically like, ‘Let’s get more oil out of the ground more efficiently,’” Ms. Grekin said. “But I didn’t want to do that,” she said. “So I fought really hard and got an internship that was sustainability-related.”

She feels that her current research, into ways to make heating and air-conditioning systems in commercial buildings more efficient, wouldn’t have been possible without Exxon, which made an entire office building in Houston available to her for experimentation. Her Exxon funding also paid for a recent stint in the Amazon rainforest back in Brazil, where she helped teach a course about sustainable polymers and locally sourced materials.

“The way I see it is, if this money wasn’t coming to me, it could be going toward a new drill, a new rig,” she said.

Can these two friends reach a compromise? They say they did find common ground hammering out proposed guidelines on how Stanford should engage with fossil fuel companies.

The guidelines include a call for eliminating financial sponsorships from any company, trade group or organization that doesn’t have a credible plan for transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable power, doesn’t provide transparent data, or is otherwise at odds with goals set forth under the Paris accord, the landmark 2015 agreement among the nations of the world to fight climate change.

“In my opinion, all of the fossil fuel companies currently funding Stanford research would be pretty much disqualified,” Mr. Kashtan said. “The only thing that’s going to prompt these companies to shift is either being sued into bankruptcy, or some kind of economic or regulatory pressure, not partnerships with universities.”

Ms. Grekin looked taken aback. “I’d like to think that we don’t have to go to those extremes,” she said.

An Exxon spokeswoman said the company was “investing billions of dollars into real solutions.” She added, “Research and healthy debate by students like Rebecca and Yannai are critical to developing solutions that will help us all.”

A spokesman for the Doerr School said, “We are proud of our students for engaging in civil discourse on this topic, and we are listening.”

The conversation stretched on. We ordered more tea. We ended up overstaying our welcome at the Burmese restaurant.

“Maybe I’m naïve,” Ms. Grekin said as we wrapped up the day. She recalled a moment from one of her early Exxon internships, near its sprawling refinery in Baytown, Texas, when she “looked up and there was this huge ball of flame coming out of a flare,” she said, referring to the towering, flaming stacks that are a dramatic feature of refineries. In that moment, she said, she felt her work on sustainability insignificant, her effect on reducing emissions even smaller than what that flare was emitting that very second.

She now thinks differently. “If I can change Exxon by even 1 percent,” she said, “the impact I have might make up for more than that flare.”

When developers set out to build 60 subsidized apartments in an affluent corner of Florence, S.C., the chairman of the County Council waxed enthusiastic. Affordable housing “would serve a great need,” he wrote, and its proximity to services and jobs fit county planning goals. He pledged a small grant.

Then the neighbors found out. Lawyers, executives and civic leaders, they gathered at the Florence Country Club, a half-mile from the proposed development, and vowed to block it. Nine days later, the plan suffered a fatal blow when the Council, in a meeting that took three minutes and 14 seconds, began rezoning the site, led by the chairman who had praised it.

The Council’s sudden reversal is the subject of a fair housing suit — most of the prospective tenants were Black in a neighborhood of mostly white residents — and a study of forces that keep low-income families from opportunity-rich neighborhoods.

In many if not most affluent communities, existing land-use rules would have barred low-income housing, with the regulations often operating so quietly that they hide how fully exclusion is a product of design. But a quirk in the Florence County zoning code, permitting the subsidized apartments, brought the opposition into public view.

“What’s unusual here is that we see an exercise of political power that is typically invisible,” said Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who studies housing regulation. “It makes the opposition to affordable housing clearer than it often is.”

The shortage of affordable housing is wreaking havoc nationwide with families of modest means. Nearly two-thirds of low-income renters — a record share — face “severe cost burdens,” meaning they spend more than half their income on rent and utilities. The federal government deems shelter affordable if it consumes 30 percent of income or less.

At the same time, mounting evidence has emphasized the harm children suffer by growing up in disadvantaged places. As gateways to schools, safety and connections, neighborhoods go far in determining who gets ahead. By moving to better neighborhoods, a pioneering study found, children from low-income families increased their average lifetime earnings by an average of nearly $200,000.

Speaking before the County Council, opponents said the Florence project would increase danger from traffic and flooding in an area troubled by both. Adding apartments near one of the city’s busiest intersections would leave more drivers cutting through streets where their children play, critics said, and paving the six-acre wooded site would worsen runoff.

No one mentioned the prospective tenants’ race or class.

“This is a wonderful time for us to move this good project to a better location,” Jean Leatherman, a neighborhood resident, told the Council. “We are not opposed to the development — we are opposed to the location of this development.”

Like many of the project’s opponents, Ms. Leatherman has a history of civic engagement, including as a fund-raiser for the public schools, whose students largely come from low-income and minority backgrounds.

“It’s not about race,” she said in an interview, referring to the opposition to the project. “I wouldn’t care if it was $500,000 luxury apartments. If you put 60 of them, I would be opposed.”

A different conversation involving other opponents of the project unfolded on Facebook, where one warned that subsidized housing serves “sorry lazy people” and another wrote that “the only thing that protects us from high crime is distance.” Low-income housing, a third person wrote, is “woke crap.”

The proposed apartments, to be known as the Jessamine, won financing from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, the federal government’s largest affordable housing program. It spends about $13 billion a year giving developers tax credits, which they sell, generally to banks or other corporations, to raise construction funds in exchange for keeping rents low.

Unlike public housing or Section 8, the program is not intended for the poorest tenants. The Jessamine’s developers called it work force housing, for people like nursing aides or security guards. But some indigent families rent tax-credit apartments with vouchers or other aid. In South Carolina, tax-credit tenants have median annual incomes of about $17,000.

In a statewide competition for the credits, the Jessamine won points for location — its census tract had the county’s best score on an index of opportunity — and political support. The county planning director, Shawn Brashear, praised its “ideal location,” and the council chairman, Willard Dorriety Jr., pledged up to $10,000 for a fire hydrant.

Most of the neighborhood, called the Country Club, was zoned for single-family housing. But the Jessamine was in an unzoned “doughnut hole” — county property surrounded by city land — which allowed apartments.

When neighbors saw workers preparing the site, alarm spread. “I was getting calls every day,” Frank J. Brand II, who was the district’s councilman at the time, said in a deposition. “No one called me saying they were happy.”

Some residents approached the developers about buying them out. Hostile articles appeared in a political blog. Hours before critics met at the Country Club to plan their opposition, Mr. Dorriety rescinded his support.

Nine days later, in a meeting that lasted less than four minutes, the Council voted 8-0 to halt construction in doughnut holes and reconsider their zoning. More meetings were needed to make the moratorium final, but the outcome was clear.

The Jessamine’s opponents included a former mayor of Florence, Joe W. Pearce Jr.,; a lawyer from one of the city’s most prominent families, Walker H. Willcox; and Ms. Leatherman, whose late husband, Hugh K. Leatherman, a state senator for 40 years, was often described as South Carolina’s most powerful man.

Another critic, C. Pierce Campbell, runs one of the state’s largest law firms, Turner Padget; his home sits yards from the proposed site. Heavy traffic had left cars flipped over in his yard, he told the Council, and the proposed drainage pond beside the road could turn such crashes lethal.

“That’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever heard of,” he said.

Unlike the out-of-town developers, “I live there,” he said, and “this matters to me personally.”

While influential critics spoke forcefully, few people outside the neighborhood knew the proposal existed, and no potential tenants addressed the Council. “I doubt they were aware,” said the Rev. Calvin Robinson Jr., the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, a prominent Black congregation. “I didn’t know about it.”

One of the developers, Drew Schaumber, wrote council members that they should “be ashamed of” ignoring renters’ needs. “You represent ALL Florence citizens, not just those that live in the 29501 ZIP code,” he wrote.

The contours of the dispute would sound familiar to students of fair housing. In one of the first cases under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a federal court found that Lackawanna, N.Y., had illegally rezoned a white neighborhood to block subsidized housing. While officials said they acted to protect strained sewers, the court saw “invidious discrimination” and warned, “The pattern is an old one.”

In 1983, a federal court found that Greenville County, S.C., broke the law by rezoning a site planned for subsidized housing. Neighborhood opposition, it ruled, was driven by “racial concerns — and not the objections to congestion or waste disposal capacity.”

Georgetown County, S.C., is being sued for rejecting a tax-credit project opposed by residents of a golf-course community 1.6 miles away. While the project won unanimous support from the planning commission, critics warned online that it would serve “lazy welfare lifers” and create a “breeding ground for crime.” As in Florence, most of the tenants would have been Black, and most of the critics were white.

Opposition to affordable housing is also common in left-leaning communities, with recent fights unfolding in Milton, Mass., and the Chevy Chase section of Washington, D.C. Fears about property values, crime and schools often animate debate.

“A lot has changed in American life over the past 50 years, but the hostility to affordable housing has remained surprisingly durable,” said Justin Steil, a professor of urban planning and law at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is an expert witness for the Jessamine developers.

Since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, Mr. Steil said, residential segregation by race has fallen only modestly, and economic segregation has grown as the affluent increasingly live in wealthy enclaves.

To win the Florence suit, the developers do not have to show that officials had discriminatory motives — only that their actions had a racially disparate impact (without serving a valid goal that could not be met in less discriminatory ways).

Analyzing other Florence tax-credit housing, Mr. Steil estimated that 78 percent of the Jessamine’s tenants would have been Black in a neighborhood that is at least 80 percent white. Hence its demise “perpetuated residential segregation,” he wrote.

Council members said they had long intended to re-examine zoning in the county’s so-called doughnut holes and did not single out the Jessamine.

Many economists argue that exclusionary zoning raises rents by limiting the housing supply. Growing evidence suggests that it also constrains mobility by keeping low-income children from places where they might flourish.

Opportunity Insights, a research project based at Harvard, collected more than 20 million de-intentified tax records to track neighborhood effects on people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By moving from a neighborhood that is below average in opportunity to one above average, it found, low-income children raised their average lifetime earnings by $198,000.

“Where you grow up matters a great deal for shaping your life outcomes,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a founder of the project, who is now an economist at M.I.T.

Mr. Schaumber, the developer, has built four tax-credit buildings in Florence without resistance, but all of them were in low-income neighborhoods. Qwendolyn Bines, 40, lives in one called the Belmont, which is comfortable and clean but on a commercial thoroughfare, separated from a car repair shop by a fence with razor wire.

Ms. Bines has done clerical work for school systems in the area for 15 years and earns about $38,000. But she has never been able to afford market-rate housing, which would consume about 45 percent of her income.

She said she and her daughters love their three-bedroom apartment, where Kaylee, 5, sleeps with a unicorn bedspread and Kaylyn, 12, displays certificates from the honor roll. (The $765 monthly rent is about 60 percent of the market rate.) But Ms. Bines said affordable housing “should not just be in the poor parts of town.”

Data from Opportunity Insights frames the stakes. By moving from Ms. Bines’s census tract to the one surrounding the Country Club, a low-income child would grow up to earn an additional $12,000 a year on average, it shows. That is a gain of nearly 50 percent, which Mr. Hendren called “exceedingly rare” in social policy.

Ms. Bines briefly lived in a different tax-credit building, until threats from a violent boyfriend forced her to move. She called the Jessamine’s location ideal for raising children and suggested a reason beyond traffic for neighborhood opposition.

“Us,” she said. “I feel like they don’t want African Americans over there.”

In depositions, council members, who did not respond to interview requests, repeated their warnings about traffic and flooding. Mr. Brand, who lost his next election to represent the Country Club neighborhood, partly blamed the Jessamine dispute and said he wished he had acted sooner to shrink or stop the project.

Mr. Dorriety said he withdrew his support in deference to Mr. Brand’s opposition and the voters he represented.

“The consensus of Florence County Council,” he said, “is you don’t mess in another man’s district.”

President Biden and his economic team, concerned that elevated mortgage rates and housing costs are hurting Americans and hindering his re-election bid, are searching for new ways to make housing more available and affordable.

Mr. Biden’s forthcoming budget request will call on Congress to pass a raft of initiatives to build more affordable housing and help certain Americans afford to purchase a home. The president is also expected to address housing affordability for both homeowners and renters in his State of the Union address next week, according to people familiar with the speech planning.

On Thursday, administration officials announced a handful of relatively modest executive actions, including steps to increase the supply of manufactured homes. White House officials said this week that they would announce “additional actions we are taking to lower housing costs.”

The increased focus on housing affordability comes as congressional Republicans assail Mr. Biden over high mortgage rates and housing costs, and as allies of the president warn that those costs are hurting working-class voters he needs to win in November.

There is little Mr. Biden can do immediately and directly to affect mortgage rates. Those are heavily influenced by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies, and the White House is careful not to appear to be pressuring the central bank to cut rates. Fed officials have signaled that they expect to begin cutting rates this year.

New research from economists at Harvard University and the International Monetary Fund — including Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary — suggests high mortgage rates and other borrowing costs are contributing to Americans’ relatively gloomy mood about the economy, despite low unemployment and healthy growth. By weighing on consumer confidence, those costs could be depressing Mr. Biden’s re-election hopes.

“If you’re Biden, you’re cheering for inflation to continue its way down and for the Fed to lower interest rates,” Judd N.L. Cramer, a Harvard economist and one of the paper’s authors, said in an interview. The president should particularly care about that, he added, “because consumers are more aware than we’ve given them credit for of those borrowing costs.”

Mr. Biden has made a habit of asking aides about the current state of mortgage rates, which have more than doubled since he took office and as the Fed raised rates to combat the worst bout of inflation in four decades.

The average 30-year mortgage rate jumped to nearly 8 percent last fall from below 3 percent in 2021. It has declined slightly this year but recently ticked up again and now sits just under 7 percent.

Monthly payments for prospective homeowners have soared because of the increase. The monthly payment for a typical mortgage for a $400,000 home — which is just under the median sales price nationwide — is about $2,900 at a 7 percent interest rate, assuming a 20 percent down payment. That is about $800 more per month than the payment would be at a 3 percent rate.

The increased burden of high borrowing costs can make home buying seem prohibitive, which is one reason polls show that younger adults in particular are concerned about housing prices. Mr. Cramer said his research suggested that high mortgage rates also frustrate existing homeowners, who may want to sell their home but have seen the ranks of potential buyers thinned because fewer people can afford to pay their asking price.

The research, published on Monday as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, seeks to shed light on a puzzle of the Biden economy: why consumer sentiment remains lower than historical evidence suggests it should be, given the job market is strong and wages are rising.

Drawing partly on alternate ways of calculating inflation rates in the past, the researchers — Mr. Cramer, Mr. Summers and Karl Oskar Schulz of Harvard, along with Marijn A. Bolhuis of the I.M.F. — conclude that rising borrowing costs for homes, cars and more under Mr. Biden account for much of the depression in sentiment.

“Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” they write.

White House economists have run their own calculations on consumer sentiment. They find it is largely dragged down by persistently high grocery prices and residual frustration with the coronavirus pandemic. In recent months, as mortgage rates fell slightly, they calculated that housing issues were helping to brighten consumers’ moods.

Still, Mr. Biden’s aides say they know how difficult housing costs are for Americans. They are scrounging for ways to alleviate them, even on the margins, before the election.

The president has already tried and failed to persuade Congress to pass expansive plans to build more affordable housing units, along with aid for certain Americans trying to buy homes, like down payment assistance for people whose parents do not own homes. Republicans who control the House have not been receptive to those proposals this year.

“The president considers the long-term shortage of affordable housing to be one of the most important pieces of unfinished business we have,” Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview.

The research suggest a drop in mortgage rates could swiftly lift Mr. Biden with consumers and in his campaign. They suggest the slight fall in rates in recent months was a reason sentiment surged at the end of last year and the start of this one.

White House officials agree. But, they are quick to add, Mr. Biden will not push the Fed to cut rates.

The Biden administration issued new rules on Friday designed to prevent disasters at almost 12,000 chemical plants and other industrial sites nationwide that handle hazardous materials.

The regulations for the first time tell facilities to explicitly address disasters, such as storms or floods, that could trigger an accidental release, including threats linked to climate change. For the first time, chemical sites that have had prior accidents will need to undergo an independent audit. And the rules require chemical plants to share more information with neighbors and emergency responders.

“We’re putting in place important safeguards to protect some of our most vulnerable populations,” Janet McCabe, Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told reporters ahead of the announcement.

Administration officials called the stronger measures a step forward for safety at a time when hazards like floods and wildfires — made more extreme by global warming — pose a threat to industrial sites across the country. In 2017, severe flooding from Hurricane Harvey knocked out power at a peroxide plant outside Houston, causing chemicals to overheat and explode, triggering local evacuations.

Some safety advocates said the rules don’t go far enough. They have long called for rules that would make facilities switch to safer technologies and chemicals to prevent disasters in the first place. The new regulations stop shy of such requirements for most facilities.

The lack of tougher requirements was particularly disappointing, the advocates said, because President Biden championed similar measures, as senator, to bolster national security.

“If we simply require facilities that store or utilize large amounts of chlorine or other dangerous chemicals to transition to inherently safer technologies wherever feasible,” Mr. Biden said at a hearing of the Senate environment and public works committee in June 2006, “we could, in fact, completely or primarily eliminate known threats to our communities.”

“He was a leader on this, but now that he’s in charge, there’s no there, there,” said Rick Hind, an environmental consultant and the former legislative director at Greenpeace.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday morning.

The E.P.A. estimates that more than 130 million people live within three miles of sites that handle hazardous chemicals that are covered by the new rule. In a “worst-case scenario” accident, more than 2,000 of those sites could endanger 100,000 people or more, according to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report. Eighty-three of those facilities could endanger more than a million people in a worst-case scenario, the report said.

Facilities include chemical plants and wholesalers, oil refineries, natural gas plants, wastewater treatment plants, fertilizer distributors, many of them critical infrastructure, but also a risk to nearby communities.

Former President Barack Obama had tried to strengthen the rules, proposing safeguards after a deadly 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas killed 15 people. The Trump administration rolled back most of those rules before they took effect, part of a slew of environmental and safety regulations that it unraveled. In 2021, the E.P.A. announced plans to restore the rule.

Since then, a coalition of environmental groups and experts, as well as national security experts and former military officials concerned with terrorist and other threats to chemical sites, have pushed the E.P.A. to require hazardous sites to use safer chemicals.

“The use of inherently safer alternatives is the only foolproof way to prevent worst-case scenarios from becoming catastrophic disasters,” Christine Todd Whitman, a former New Jersey governor and the E.P.A. administrator under George W. Bush, urged in a 2022 letter co-signed by several retired army generals.

There are examples of chemical manufacturers swiftly adopting alternatives. In 2009, The Clorox Company announced it would phase out the use of chlorine gas, a particularly hazardous chemical used as a chemical weapon in World War I, at all of its factories. Three years later, the company said it had completed that task.

And following the 9/11 attacks, a wastewater treatment plant in Washington, D.C., just miles from the White House and the U.S. Capitol, removed hundreds of tons of explosive liquid chlorine and sulfur dioxide from its premises in a matter of weeks.

In comments submitted to the E.P.A. during the rule-making process, the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s largest lobbying group, pushed back against the measure, saying safer technologies were “not simple to identify or implement.” Overall, the rules “burden affected industries by requiring them to undertake extensive new trainings, retrofits, and analyses, none of which will result in a reduction of accidental releases,” the industry group said. Moreover, “natural hazards are inherently difficult to predict, and complete protection may be infeasible.”

Qingsheng Wang, associate professor of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University who specializes in process safety, said switching to safer alternatives was a no-brainer for new facilities able to start from scratch. “But for existing facilities, modifying processes could be very difficult,” he said.

Still, the goal should be to “minimize certain chemicals, substitute, simplify,” he said. “If we can do that, it’s a good way to improve safety.”

Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaching a contract by prioritizing profit and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence over 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.

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 make its technology open source and that Mr. Altman pay back the money that Mr. Musk says was earned as a result of its behavior. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, is also named as a defendant.

OpenAI and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit is a fresh challenge for Mr. Altman, who was briefly ousted as OpenAI’s chief executive last year before regaining control of the company. The company’s relationship with Microsoft is also facing scrutiny from regulators in the United States, European Union and Britain.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content that was used to train the chatbots.

The falling out between Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman has been a subject of intrigue in Silicon Valley.

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 September 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 Ilya 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.”

It took authorities more than 30 years to hunt down one of Germany’s most wanted fugitives. For Michael Colborne, an investigative journalist running old photographs through a facial recognition service, it took about 30 minutes.

At the request of a German podcasting duo, he’d been asked to search for matches to the decades-old wanted photographs of Daniela Klette, a member of the leftist militant group Red Army Faction, Germany’s most infamous postwar terrorist group, originally known as the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Instead, the facial recognition software he used lighted upon a woman called Claudia Ivone. In one image, she posed with her local capoeira troupe as they waved their arms exuberantly. Another showed her in a white headdress, tossing flower petals with an Afro-Brazilian society at a local street festival.

He had stumbled on an alias Ms. Klette had used for years, as she hid in plain sight in the German capital.

This week, German police announced they had finally caught Ms. Klette, now 65, trumpeting her arrest as a “masterpiece” and a “milestone.” Some German journalists had a different interpretation of events.

“What was their success?” one journalist asked, challenging officials at a news conference this week. “Listening to a podcast?”

It is still unclear whether Mr. Colborne’s findings for the podcast, Legion, whose latest season on Ms. Klette was released in December on Germany’s public broadcaster ARD, actually led to Ms. Klette being discovered by police. The police say they found her thanks to a tip in November, around the same time Mr. Colborne, 42, and Legion were doing their research.

Nonetheless, it raised an awkward prospect: That a fugitive who had eluded German police since Mr. Colborne, a Canadian journalist who works for the investigative website Bellingcat, was in junior high school, was identified with relative ease using two publicly available programs, PimEyes and AWS Rekognition.

“Somebody like me, who does not speak German, who does not know much beyond the basic background of Daniela Klette — Why was I able to find such a lead in like literally 30 minutes?” he said. “There are hundreds of German far-right extremists with warrants for their arrest. If I can find somebody who’s been on the run for 30 years, why can’t German authorities find some of these other wanted people?”

The question comes at a time when Germans are growing increasingly concerned about security. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germans have been keenly aware of the risks for Europe as it witnesses its biggest land war since World War II.

Late in 2022, German intelligence services discovered one of their own officers had been working as a double agent, sending sensitive information about the war to Russia.

Around the same time, police uncovered a network of conspiracy theorists with far-right links, who had devised a violent and fantastical plot to storm Germany’s Parliament in the hopes of triggering a coup.

Peter Neumann, a German professor of security studies at King’s College London, said a major flaw in Germany’s ability to hunt down extremists and militants was an overly zealous application of data protection laws, which many Germans attribute to the country’s history of surveillance and repression under the Nazis and in communist former East Germany.

“For 70 plus years now, this has been a democratic state, and it is really handicapped by its inability to acquire data, even for perfectly legitimate reasons,” Professor Neumann said.

German police, he argued, hamper their own ability to fight crime through “overcompliance” or overly strict laws. He said police are unable to record conversations between organized crime members, for example, if they may be sitting next to someone at a restaurant having an innocent conversation that would also be heard.

Another problem, he said, was that Germany has been struggling and failing for years to digitize a government that has remained stubbornly beholden to paper mail and even fax machines.

“They are not necessarily even thinking in terms of people’s presence in the virtual space,” he said. “Right wing extremists, but also jihadists, they are operating in online spaces on messaging forums — in places that German authorities wouldn’t consider it to be real. But they certainly are real.”

Ms. Klette is a remnant of a different era of security threats, when leftist militancy was one of the most violent threats to society.

During her time in hiding, the police say, Ms. Klette and two accomplices, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, who are also wanted in connection with Red Army Faction activities, committed at least 13 violent robberies, netting them about two million euros (a little more than $2.1 million).

Police are still searching for Mr. Staub and Mr. Garweg. They believe that the two men are still in Berlin.

Ms. Klette lived for years in the historically left-wing neighborhood of Kreuzberg. Neighbors told local reporters she was a friendly, calm presence and that she was often seen with a big white dog. She tutored local children and helped write letters, one neighbor told Bild, a tabloid. A boyfriend, who visited sometimes, was said to be about the same age as Ms. Klette and wore a long white ponytail.

One Brazilian woman living in Berlin posted on Facebook about her shock over the discovery that a woman she’d done capoeira with was a fugitive on the run.

“If the German secret police didn’t find Daniela Klette, it’s not like Brazilians would have guessed that the capoeirista, who paraded at the Carnival of Cultures, is Germany’s most wanted national and international terrorist,” she wrote.

On Wednesday, after finding a hand grenade in her home, police evacuated the gray, nondescript, rent-controlled building on a street where the Berlin Wall once ran. The next day, they discovered a grenade launcher and a Kalashnikov machine gun.

Kreuzberg, a rapidly gentrifying Berlin neighborhood, has a special history with the Red Army Faction. It was in a basement there where, in February of 1975, the group held Peter Lorenz, a Berlin political boss, for five days in what they called the “people’s prison.” Lorenz was only released after the West German government agreed to free several RAF guerrillas in a trade.

It also is the kind of neighborhood where well-paid government consultants live next to Turkish immigrants, social security recipients and artists, and where the Berlin attitude of letting everyone live as they please is still felt strongly.

On Facebook, Ms. Klette posted mostly pictures of flowers and posters advertising events at the Afro-Brazilian association in which she was active. It was those photographs that ultimately got her in trouble.

Mr. Colborne’s unwittingly successful identification of her for Legion last winter, however, initially led to nothing because the podcasters were unable to find the woman in the photographs he’d found.

His realization that his sleuthing had in fact worked, he said, has inspired conflicted feelings. It shows the power, he said, of what someone using easily accessible software can do with a single photograph.

“You can find pictures they don’t even know were taken of them. You can find out where they lived, where they went to university,” he said. “I can’t stress enough that some of these tools can and will further be abused by bad actors.”

Long lines of people, some holding flowers, were forming in Moscow on Friday for the funeral services for Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, two weeks after his mysterious death in a remote Arctic penal colony.

Hours before the planned mourning rites, Mr. Navalny’s family had not received his body from a Moscow morgue, a spokeswoman said. But the body was eventually handed over around 12:30 p.m. local time, she said.

Planning for the service was taking place under pressure from the Russian authorities, who have arrested hundreds of mourners at memorial sites since Mr. Navalny died. Police presence was heavy around the church where funeral services were due to take place in the afternoon.

The services are being held at the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, a Russian Orthodox church in southern Moscow. Images on social media showed attendees lining up, but also security cameras that the local news media reported had been recently installed, and signs forbidding mourners to take pictures or video in the church.

Still, Ivan Zhdanov, who, like many of Mr. Navalny’s closest associates, is in exile outside Russia, encouraged people to come to the church, saying that the police had not been arresting mourners, as many had feared.

“People are coming to say farewell, and no one is touching them,” Mr. Zhdanov said. “Those who want to come to say farewell can do so.” Mr. Navalny’s supporters also created a website for supporters to light a virtual candle in his memory.

When asked on Friday whether he could comment on Mr. Navalny’s political legacy, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said, “I can’t.” He suggested that the Kremlin would crack down on anyone who sought to protest during the funeral. “Any unsanctioned gatherings will be in violation of the law,” Mr. Peskov told reporters during a daily phone call.

The funeral was not mentioned among the top stories on the state news agencies RIA Novosti or TASS.

In the past two weeks, members of Mr. Navalny’s team complained repeatedly about the difficulty of negotiating with the Russian authorities to have Mr. Navalny’s body released to his family, which took days, and agreeing on a place to hold the funeral services.

Members of his team described difficulty persuading a church, a cemetery and even a hearse to take part in the burial, saying that the authorities wanted to prevent Mr. Navalny’s funeral from becoming a flashpoint for dissent.

On Thursday, allies of Mr. Navalny, who was 47, described systemic pressure on all hearse operators, saying that several that had agreed to take Mr. Navalny’s body from the church to the cemetery had pulled out at the last minute, citing threats. His team and his wife blamed the Kremlin and Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin. Their assertions could not be independently verified.

“Two people are to blame for the fact that we do not have a place for a civil memorial service and farewell to Alexei — Vladimir Putin and Sergei Sobyanin,” Mr. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.

“People in the Kremlin killed him, then they mocked Alexei’s body, then they mocked his mother, and now they mock his memory,” she added. “We don’t want any special treatment — just to give people the opportunity to say goodbye to Alexey normally.”

While Mr. Navalny opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the church where he will be buried has shown public support for it. Photos posted on its VK social media page on Monday showed priests in front of the church with a Lada car bought for soldiers participating in what Russia calls its “Special Military Operation.”

Two days before, a post showed letters sent by young parishioners to soldiers for “Defenders of the Fatherland” day, a holiday celebrating veterans.

According to Mr. Navalny’s spokeswoman, the official medical report concluded that the cause of death was “natural causes,” which his family, supporters and human rights watchdogs dispute. In the past year and a half, Mr. Navalny was ordered to spent 296 days in a punishment isolation cell, known in Russian as “SHIZO.” It is considered the most severe form of legal punishment for inmates in Russian prisons.

“They tortured him with hunger, they tortured him with cold,” his aide Leonid Volkov said during a livestream of the funeral on Mr. Navalny’s YouTube channel. For half a year, he was suing to get access to a dentist, which was eventually denied.

The Kremlin has rejected the family’s accusations of its involvement, and Mr. Putin has not commented publicly on Mr. Navalny’s death. But the Russian leader authorized an order promoting the deputy director of the country’s Federal Penitentiary Service, Valery Boyarinev, just three days after Mr. Navalny’s death.

And Mr. Putin appeared defiant on Thursday in an annual speech, threatening the West with nuclear escalation and praising Russia’s political system as “one of the foundations of the country’s sovereignty.”

Mr. Navalny’s funeral takes place during a period of intense crackdown, and less than three weeks before Mr. Putin seeks another six-year term in elections scheduled for mid-March.

At least 400 people have been detained since Mr. Navalny’s death, according to the watchdog OVD-Info, including some for simply laying flowers at improvised memorials to him. A priest who sought to hold a funeral prayer for Mr. Navalny in St. Petersburg was detained while leaving his house.

One of Russia’s most respected rights activists, Oleg Orlov, whose organization Memorial shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison over a piece he wrote condemning the invasion of Ukraine.

The local news media reported on Friday that the police were examining the passports of every attendee at Mr. Navalny’s funeral during a security check before entry to the church. Those reports could not be independently confirmed.

There was a fear that anyone who came to the funeral could be added to a database and possibly penalized at a later date, a rights lawyer, Evgeny Smirnov, told the independent television station Rain. Mr. Navalny’s organization shared information offering legal consultations to people planning to mourn him.

Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

A former graduate student at M.I.T. has pleaded guilty to killing a Yale graduate student in January 2021 in a gruesome shooting that shocked people on both university campuses.

The defendant, Qinxuan Pan, 32, narrowly escaped arrest just minutes after the murder. He spent the next three months hiding from law enforcement, and the following two years maintaining his innocence. That changed on Thursday, when Mr. Pan pleaded guilty, possibly bringing an end to a case that had caused some Connecticut residents to question the competence of local police.

Mr. Pan faces a single charge of murder, according to a statement by John P. Doyle Jr., the state’s attorney in New Haven. As part of his plea agreement, Mr. Pan could face 35 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on April 25.

The prosecutor’s office made no mention of Mr. Pan’s possible motives for the attack. In a 96-page warrant filed in state court in February 2021, a New Haven police detective described Mr. Pan’s actions as follows:

In 2019, when he was a doctoral student in M.I.T. ’s department of electrical engineering and computer science, Mr. Pan met Zion Perry, an undergraduate student at M.I.T., and they became friends. The two remained in contact through Facebook, where Ms. Perry posted an announcement celebrating her engagement on Jan. 30, 2021, to Kevin Jiang, a 26-year-old graduate student in environmental science at Yale.

A week later, on Feb. 6, 2021, Mr. Pan allegedly stole a dark blue S.U.V. from a dealership in Massachusetts, according to a criminal complaint filed by the police department in Mansfield, outside Boston. He drove to Ms. Perry’s neighborhood in New Haven, near the campus of Yale, where she was a doctoral student in biochemistry and biophysics.

Mr. Jiang and Ms. Perry had spent much of the day together. They went ice-fishing and cooked dinner at her apartment. He left a few minutes after 8 p.m., and climbed into his Toyota Prius. He had driven only a few blocks before Mr. Pan rammed him with the stolen S.U.V., according to the warrant. Mr. Jiang got out of his car, and Mr. Pan fired eight bullets at him, including multiple shots to his face.

A surveillance camera captured the crash. A neighbor witnessed the shooting, and multiple people saw the shooter get back into his S.U.V. and drive away, according to the police.

About 30 minutes after the shooting, police in the nearby town of North Haven received a call from a local scrapyard, where a driver had gotten his S.U.V. stuck on some railroad tracks. Police officers responded to find Mr. Pan behind the wheel of the dark blue GMC. He was wearing a gray knit hat printed with a “MetroPCS” logo, the detective noticed.

Mr. Pan told the officers he had become lost looking for the highway back to Massachusetts. The officers discovered that the vehicle’s license plate had been reported lost or stolen. In a statement to The New Haven Independent, a local news website, North Haven Police Chief Kevin Glenn said the officers did not know at the time that the vehicle had been stolen.

The officers did not take Mr. Pan into custody. Instead, they arranged for a tow truck, which retrieved the S.U.V. from the tracks, and brought Mr. Pan to a nearby motel.

Ninety minutes later, the New Haven Police Department issued an alert for a dark-colored S.U.V. In the alert, a dispatcher erroneously said the vehicle may have been driven by two people, possibly including a Black man. None of the witnesses to the shooting had reported a second assailant, and none had described the shooter as Black, according to the warrant.

The next morning, the same police officer who had discovered Mr. Pan stranded in the scrapyard was called to an Arby’s restaurant next door to the motel, according to the warrant. A worker had called because a bag had been discovered near the restaurant’s dumpster. It contained items including a Ruger semiautomatic pistol, seven firearm magazines and several boxes of ammunition.

The bag also contained a gray knit hat with a “MetroPCS” logo. Police requested a warrant for Mr. Pan’s arrest on Feb. 26, 2021.

A multistate manhunt ensued. Eventually, Mr. Pan was tracked to Alabama, where he had rented an apartment under an assumed name. After a three-month search, he was arrested in Alabama and extradited to Connecticut, Mr. Doyle said on Thursday.

During Mr. Pan’s prolonged flight, some residents in the New Haven area accused the police of having botched the case, according to The New Haven Independent. The fact that Mr. Pan was discovered stuck on railroad tracks should have prompted the officers to ask more questions, some residents said.

In a statement to The Independent, Chief Glenn said, “The officers involved in this investigation did their job properly.”