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Nearly three weeks after a hole blew open on a Boeing 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight, terrifying passengers, new details about the jet’s production are intensifying scrutiny of Boeing’s quality-control practices.

About a month before the Max 9 was delivered to Alaska Airlines in October, workers at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Wash., opened and later reinstalled the panel that would blow off the plane’s body, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The employees opened the panel, known as a door plug, because work needed to be done to its rivets — which are often used to join and secure parts on planes — said the person, who asked for anonymity because the person isn’t authorized to speak publicly while the National Transportation Safety Board conducts an investigation.

The request to open the plug came from employees of Spirit AeroSystems, a supplier that makes the body for the 737 Max in Wichita, Kan. After Boeing employees complied, Spirit employees who are based at Boeing’s Renton factory repaired the rivets. Boeing employees then reinstalled the door.

An internal system that tracks maintenance work at the facility, which assembles 737s, shows the request for maintenance but does not contain information about whether the door plug was inspected after it was replaced, the person said.

The details could begin to answer a crucial question about why the door plug detached from Flight 1282 at 16,000 feet, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon minutes after taking off on Jan. 5. The door plug is placed where an emergency exit door would be if a jet had more seats. To stay in place, the plug relies primarily on a pair of bolts at the top and another pair at the bottom, as well as metal pins and pads on the sides.

The Seattle Times reported earlier on Wednesday that Boeing had removed and reinstalled the door plug.

The F.A.A. on Wednesday approved detailed instructions for how airlines should inspect the door plugs on about 170 grounded planes. The instructions tell airlines to re-torque fasteners on the door plug, check the plug’s bolts and fittings, and fix any damage they find. Airlines can begin flying the jets again after completing the inspections.

United Airlines said it would begin inspecting its 79 Max 9 planes under the new guidelines and planned to start using them again on flights on Sunday. Alaska Airlines said it planned to put a “few planes” back into service on Friday and expected to complete inspections on all 65 of its Max 9 jets over the next week.

Also on Wednesday, Boeing’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun, met privately with lawmakers in Congress. It was the second time in recent years that the company and its leaders have had to answer for serious problems with its planes. In 2018 and 2019, two crashes of the 737 Max 8 killed 346 people.

“The American flying public and Boeing line workers deserve a culture of leadership at Boeing that puts safety ahead of profits,” Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State, the Democratic chair of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said on Wednesday. She added that she would hold hearings “to investigate the root causes of these safety lapses.”

How the panel was installed at Boeing’s factory will almost certainly be a focus of federal investigations. In addition to the N.T.S.B., the F.A.A. is looking into the incident and manufacturing practices at Boeing and Spirit.

Citing the open N.T.S.B. investigation, Boeing referred questions to the agency, which declined to comment. The F.A.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Boeing’s handling of the door plug. A spokesman for Spirit AeroSystems said the company remained “focused on the quality of each aircraft structure that leaves our facilities.”

John Cox, a former airline pilot who runs a safety consulting firm, said the new information about the door plug, if it was correct, would be an indication of “process failure” and raise questions about Boeing’s entire manufacturing operation.

“Are there similar issues in other areas besides the door?” he said. “You’ve got to look at the whole assembly process.”

The F.A.A. said on Wednesday that it would not allow Boeing to expand production of any new planes in the 737 Max series, a linchpin of the company’s commercial plane business, until the agency was convinced that quality control had improved.

Mr. Calhoun suggested this month that a manufacturing lapse had been responsible for the door plug’s blowout. But it hadn’t been clear whether the lapse, which Mr. Calhoun referred to as a “quality escape,” occurred at Boeing’s factory in Renton or Spirit’s facility in Wichita, where the door plug was first installed.

The incident has raised fresh concerns about Boeing’s quality control among investors, airline executives, pilots, passengers and others in addition to regulators. Boeing’s share price has fallen 14 percent since the blowout.

In recent days, several airline executives have sharply criticized the company, a major supplier that they rarely complain about publicly.

“I am angry,” Ben Minicucci, the chief executive of Alaska Airlines, told NBC News on Tuesday, adding that the airline found loose bolts on “many” of its Max 9s. “My demand on Boeing is what are they going to do to improve their quality programs in-house.”

Scott Kirby, United Airlines’ chief executive, told CNBC on Tuesday that “the Max 9 grounding is probably the straw that broke the camel’s back for us.” He also said he was worried that Boeing would not be able to deliver another 737 Max plane the airline had ordered, the Max 10, anytime soon. That model has not yet been certified by the F.A.A.

“We’re going to at least build a plan that doesn’t have the Max 10 in it,” Mr. Kirby said.

For now, Boeing remains in damage-control mode. Mr. Calhoun visited the Spirit AeroSystems factory last week — a plant that the plane maker sold in 2005. And Boeing said this week that it was planning to hold a “quality stand-down” on Thursday, during which production, delivery and support teams would stop work to attend learning sessions on quality.

The company said it intended to conduct similar pauses at all of its commercial airplane factories and fabrication sites in the coming weeks.

James Glanz, Santul Nerkar and Bernhard Warner contributed reporting.

Israeli forces pushed deeper into southern Gaza’s largest city on Wednesday, surrounding two major hospitals where thousands of people were seeking safety as a strike on a United Nations shelter killed at least nine people, according to U.N. officials and local health officials.

The Israeli military said it had “currently ruled out” that its aerial or artillery fire had been responsible for the strike on the shelter in Khan Younis, where the U.N. was housing about 800 people. In addition to the nine dead, 75 other people were injured, according to Thomas White, who helps oversee U.N. aid operations in Gaza.

U.N. officials did not directly blame Israel, but said the shelter, in a vocational training center, had been hit by two tank rounds. Israel is the only combatant in Gaza with tanks.

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. Palestinian aid agency, said that the shelter was “clearly marked” as a U.N. facility and that its coordinates had been shared with the Israeli authorities. “Once again a blatant disregard of basic rules of war,” Mr. Lazzarini wrote on social media.

At a news conference in Washington, Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, called the strike “incredibly concerning” and added: “Civilians must be protected, and the protected nature of U.N. facilities must be respected.” He declined to say whether U.S. officials had spoken to the Israelis about the shelter strike.

The Israeli military said that it was conducting a review of its operations in the area of the shelter.

The Israeli military, which has described Khan Younis as a bastion of Hamas, the militant group that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, says its forces have encircled the city after weeks of heavy bombardment and gunfights. On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers were surrounding two major hospitals where thousands of Gazans were seeking safety.

In a statement, the Israeli military accused Hamas of exploiting the civilian population and said that its operation in Khan Younis would continue until it had finished “dismantling Hamas’s military framework and Hamas strongholds.”

Thousands of the civilians now in danger in Khan Younis had fled there to escape airstrikes and shelling in northern Gaza earlier in the war, packing into shelters and tents on the streets. No place in the city is safe, some say.

“Our last night in Khan Younis felt like doomsday,” one Gazan, Yafa Abu Aker, said on Wednesday morning after walking about five miles from a refugee camp in the city to Rafah, near the Egyptian border. That city, too, is packed with people who have been forced from their homes.

In Khan Younis, Ms. Abu Aker said, she and others sought refuge in areas that the Israeli military had designated as safe zones, only to witness violent clashes, military planes flying overhead, bombs falling, shelling from tanks and gunfire.

“If we had stayed,” she said, “we would have been buried under the rubble.”

On Tuesday, the Israeli military ordered evacuations from parts of the city that include two hospitals, Nasser, the largest in southern Gaza, and Al-Amal. They are among the last hospitals in Gaza still providing limited medical care.

Aid organizations and local officials said both hospitals were under siege. The Palestine Red Crescent Society, which runs Al-Amal, reported “intense shelling” nearby and said that a strike had killed three people outside its offices and in a nearby building. Israeli troops were “surrounding” Red Crescent workers and “enforcing restrictions on movement” around the group’s offices and the hospital, it said.

The Gaza Health Ministry said that Nasser Hospital had for all practical purposes been cut off by “continuous bombing,” preventing injured people from getting there and blocking the transfer of patients to a nearby Jordanian field hospital. The field hospital, too, was included in an evacuation area, the United Nations’ humanitarian affairs office said on Tuesday.

The three hospitals, with a total of more than 600 beds, account for a fifth of the remaining functional hospital capacity in Gaza, according to the U.N. It said the evacuation area held 88,000 residents and an estimated 425,000 displaced people, packed into about 1.5 square miles.

Doctors Without Borders, the aid group, said late Tuesday that its staff members at Nasser could hear bombs and heavy gunfire, and that 850 patients and thousands of people sheltering there were unable to leave because roads from the hospital were either inaccessible or too dangerous. The group said that it was “deeply concerned” for people’s safety.

The Israeli military has said that mortar fire was launched at its troops from the hospital. The claim could not be independently verified.

The strike on the shelter was only the latest to hit a U.N. facility. The organization says that 237 of its buildings have been hit in the war, including 150 belonging to its aid agency for Palestinians.

U.N. officials said the death toll from the strike on Wednesday was likely to rise.

Hanan Al-Reifi, who had been staying at the shelter, said that “many people” had been killed and wounded. She said that emergency services had not responded to calls for help and that people at the shelter did not have fire extinguishers.

The strike was likely to further stoke accusations that, despite pressure from the Biden administration and others, the Israeli military has not done enough to protect civilians in its campaign to crush Hamas.

Israel launched its offensive after Hamas led the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and seizing about 240 hostages, according to Israeli officials. Since then, more than 25,000 people have been killed in Gaza, local health officials say, and most of the territory’s 2.2 million people have been forced from their homes.

Reporting was contributed by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Victoria Kim, Farnaz Fassihi and Anushka Patil.

You could say San Francisco’s charming Noe Valley neighborhood has it all.

A thriving commercial corridor brimming with restaurants, bookstores and artisan coffee shops. So many throngs of young families that it has the moniker “Stroller Valley.” A town square with yoga classes and a farmer’s market.

But what Noe Valley still needs is a toilet.

Fifteen months after city officials were ready to throw a party in the Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate funding for a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place.

The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure. That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms.

Even more confounding was the explanation that the tiny bathroom would take two to three years to install because of the city’s labyrinthine permitting and building process. City leaders quickly canceled their potty party, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California took back the funds.

Late-night comedians skewered the city. Residents dubbed the saga “Toiletgate,” and the $1.7 million toilet soon became the “it” costume at local Halloween parties that year.

For many residents, the episode has illustrated why San Francisco so often gets bogged down by inefficiency. If an army of more than 30,000 city employees with a $14 billion annual budget cannot build a simple bathroom in a reasonable way, what hope is there that San Francisco can solve its housing shortage and fentanyl crisis?

“Why isn’t there a toilet here? I just don’t get it. Nobody does,” Ted Weinstein, a literary agent who lives in Noe Valley and passes by the Town Square daily, said on a recent weekday. “It’s yet another example of the city that can’t.”

Noe Valley neighbors had been pleading for a public toilet in the town square since it was converted from a parking lot in 2016. The makeover included plumbing for a bathroom, but no actual bathroom because money ran out. Children enjoying the playground and adults chatting over coffee at bright red tables have simply had to hold it.

City officials have tried to explain why $1.7 million was the normal price tag for a small public bathroom: the high cost of everything in San Francisco, including construction materials. Hiring an architect who would draw up plans. Soliciting community feedback on the design.

Numerous layers of review by commission after commission require the city to pay for staff time. Even the Civic Design Review Committee must determine whether a bathroom is “appropriate to its context in the urban environment.”

The difficulty of building a bathroom in San Francisco has shed light on why many projects face cost overruns and delays. A recent state report found it takes longer and costs more to build housing in San Francisco than anywhere else in California. It takes 523 days, on average, for a developer to get the initial go-ahead to construct housing — and another 605 days to get building permits.

And after spending five years and more than $500,000 to design bespoke trash cans — with the prototypes costing more than $12,000 apiece — the city has shelved a plan to put 3,000 of them on street corners because of a budget deficit.

Mayor London Breed has repeatedly vowed to slash the city’s red tape and has made it faster and easier for small business owners to get permission to open, and has backed local and state laws to speed housing construction. Her spokesman, Jeff Cretan, pointed to a quick overhaul last year of the decrepit United Nations Plaza into a skate park and a project planned nearby to turn office space into housing.

Still, he acknowledged, public projects take a lot of time and money.

“It’s worth changing the laws that are in place around construction projects like the restroom that slow things down,” he said.

In the case of the Noe Valley toilet, the bad publicity was enough to attract donors seeking good publicity. In November 2022, a month after the kerfuffle began, two businessmen in the toilet industry agreed to donate a modular bathroom and pay the installation costs, cutting the price tag by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Chad Kaufman, president of the Public Restroom Company, offered to donate a modular toilet to the town square. His friend Vaughn Buckley, the chief executive of Volumetric Building Companies, vowed to provide free architecture and engineering work to get the site ready. The pair also said they would pay local union workers to install the commode.

The project seemed to gain steam once the city and Mr. Buckley’s company finalized an agreement in April 2023. But months have gone by with only weeds and mulch sitting where the toilet was supposed to go.

Discussions appeared to break down last year, according to a Dec. 22 letter from the city’s Recreation and Parks Department to Mr. Buckley.

“Your team was unresponsive to our repeated attempts to engage,” the letter declares. “We are receiving inquiries from citizens, journalists and local lawmakers on the status of this highly publicized project. We will need to answer questions.”

One of the sticking points, the letter states, was Mr. Buckley’s concern over high costs to hire local workers to complete his portion of the work. Mr. Buckley said this week that the city’s construction costs “continue to be a challenge” and contended that the city’s permitting process contributed to the delay. The toilet has now cleared those hurdles, and he said he hopes physical work can begin next month.

But Mr. Buckley said the bathroom should be ready for use by April — for less money and sooner than under the original time frame. Mr. Kaufman, the one donating the actual toilet, is still fully on board, too.

“My portion is done,” he said, noting the toilet is ready and waiting in the yard of his bathroom factory in Minden, Nev. He said he will pay for traffic control when a truck carrying the shrink-wrapped toilet eventually makes its way down 24th Street, and for a crane that will lift the loo into place.

Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco supervisor who represents Noe Valley, said he has been trying to chip away at the city’s web of regulations that make projects so costly and time consuming. He is crafting a charter amendment to slim the city’s government structure, which includes 56 commissions and 74 oversight bodies.

Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet — even the free one — requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.

“To unravel everything that needs to be unraveled to make government work, a lot of people have to focus on that as a very high priority,” said Mr. Mandelman. “It’s easy to push that aside as you run from crisis to crisis.”

In the meantime, Governor Newsom has released the $1.7 million back to San Francisco after city officials promised to use the funds to install two or three public toilets, not just one.

Little progress has been made on those, either.

Nikki Haley absorbed a double-digit loss to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, but vowed to soldier on: “This race is far from over,” she said Tuesday night. But in truth, as the saying goes, it’s all over but the shouting.

I went to Haley’s Monday night rally in Salem, N.H., and as I sat there watching her throw the softest possible punches at Trump, it occurred to me that she doesn’t even appear to be running to beat Trump, but merely to prove that she can compete with him. I don’t even get the sense that she thinks she can win.

She knows how to jab, but no knockout is forthcoming.

In the Republican race, Haley is the last real challenger standing of a truly sad lot, many of whom have since tucked their tails in submission to Trump. And some, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, have endorsed the former president in such a bromance-ish, sycophantic fashion that it makes the way Mike Pence used to gush over Trump’s “broad shoulders” pale in comparison.

Haley’s survival is a testament not to a steel spine, but to a gelatinous one: her Play-Doh-like tendency to try to fit the mold of whomever she’s talking to; her attempts to be authoritative while simultaneously tying herself into knots trying not to offend a Republican base that has ditched her brand of Republicanism.

And although she has lately ramped up her verbal attacks on Trump, those attacks are wobbly and mostly trivial. Haley still suffers from what brought down most of Trump’s other opponents: She doesn’t want to vanquish him as much as tiptoe past him.

Haley keeps insisting that she’d do better than Trump in a general election matchup with President Biden, pointing to the other side of a mountain that won’t be moved.

Trump won’t just go away; he’ll have to be defeated. And Haley can’t defeat him because she has no answer for the central problem: She needs the support of a group of voters who are religiously devoted to him.

However, I do believe that the longer she stays in the race, the more damage she’ll do to Trump’s bid. She has begun to highlight his shopworn, confused-sounding rants. We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on Biden’s age and acuity, but Trump is almost as old. He flubs and gaffes, too. Haley is drawing out a small piece of the unvarnished version of Trump.

As McKay Coppins smartly observed this month in The Atlantic, Trump has become an abstraction to voters, existing in many Americans’ minds “as a hazy silhouette — formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions — rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.” And what he plans is pretty terrifying.

I saw this haziness firsthand at a polling place in New Hampshire on Tuesday, as many of the people voting for Trump described him to me in hagiographic terms. I’ve seen it even among some liberals who’ve somehow forgotten the agita and anguish that the Trump years produced.

It’s probably not her intention, but Haley is providing a service to the nation: a soft launch of reminding voters that Trump is a chaos agent of the highest order who put the nation through a dizzying series of unnecessary crucibles that tested the very durability of our institutions and our ability to withstand his anti-democratic onslaught.

Haley has begun to do the work that Biden and his campaign team will greatly expand on — if they’re smart. Because from my conversations at that same polling place, I gathered that some of Trump’s support isn’t as intense and devoted as I thought it was. Several of the people who told me that they voted for him are also worried about the criminal cases against him. One man told me he was a registered Republican and that he’d voted for Trump since his preferred candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, had dropped out.

Right now, Trump is using the backdrop of his pending criminal cases to present himself as a victim. But as we move toward the general election and also the possibility of actual trials, his victim narrative may lose its value as a political advantage and become something more like a millstone.

I arrived in New Hampshire troubled about the prospect of a second Trump presidency — a very real possibility — but I leave it buoyed by the sense that he’s weaker than he appears and that Haley’s jabs, though not that effective, are only the precursors to the haymakers that the Biden campaign could land.

The chairman of Arizona’s Republican Party resigned abruptly on Wednesday, a day after the publication of a 10-minute recording of a conversation between himself and Kari Lake, a former nominee for governor, in which he appeared to offer a bribe to persuade Ms. Lake to drop her 2024 Senate campaign.

In the recording, which was published by The Daily Mail, Jeff DeWit, the chairman, tells Ms. Lake that there are “very powerful people that want to keep you out” of the race, and suggests he is passing on a message from them. He says he had been told to ask her: “Is there any companies out there or something that could just put her on the payroll and give her — to keep her out?”

Later in the conversation, which Mr. DeWit repeatedly urges Ms. Lake not to repeat to anyone, he starts to ask, “Is there a number at which — ” before Ms. Lake interrupts, saying “I can be bought?” He replies, “Not be bought,” but instead wait a few years before running.

Ms. Lake brushed off the attempts, repeatedly telling Mr. DeWit that she was offended by the approach. “That’s immoral — I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror,” she says, according to the recording.

The recording concludes with one more request from Mr. DeWit: “I actually just wish you’d give me a counteroffer that’s big,” he says. She replies: “I can’t be bought.”

Ms. Lake, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022 with a fervent embrace of his false claims about the 2020 election. Arizona voters instead picked her opponent, Katie Hobbs, flipping control of the governor’s mansion to a Democrat in a key battleground state.

On Wednesday, Mr. DeWit accused Ms. Lake of releasing a “selectively edited” recording of the conversation, which he said had happened in person at Ms. Lake’s house more than 10 months ago. He indicated he had not realized he was being recorded in the conversation.

“Contrary to accusations of bribery, my discussions were transparent and intended to offer perspective, not coercion,” he said in a statement, though he also acknowledged that he “said things I regret.” Mr. DeWit said he suspected Ms. Lake had prepared for this situation and had “crafted her performance responses” during the conversation with the intent of later releasing the recording.

He also said that Ms. Lake had pressured him to resign on Wednesday, threatening to release a second recording if he did not.

“I received an ultimatum from Lake’s team: resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording,” Mr. DeWit wrote in the statement. “I am truly unsure of its contents, but considering our numerous past open conversations as friends, I have decided not to take the risk. I am resigning as Lake requested, in the hope that she will honor her commitment to cease her attacks, allowing me to return to the business sector — a field I find much more logical and prefer over politics.”

Ms. Lake’s team then pushed back.

“No one from the Kari Lake campaign threatened or blackmailed DeWit,” Garrett Ventry and Caroline Wren, senior advisers to Ms. Lake, said in a statement, adding that the tape showed that Mr. DeWit “attempted to bribe Kari Lake,” but “thankfully Kari is an extremely ethical person who rejected DeWit’s multiple attempts to offer her money and corporate board seats in exchange for Kari not running for public office.”

Mr. DeWit declined to comment further.

The Biden administration is pausing a decision on whether to approve what would be the largest natural gas export terminal in the United States, a delay that could stretch past the November election and spell trouble for that project and 16 other proposed terminals, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The White House is directing the Energy Department to expand its evaluation of the project to consider its impact on climate change, as well as the economy and national security, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations. The Energy Department has never rejected a proposed natural gas project because of its expected environmental impact.

The move comes as Mr. Biden gears up for what is likely to be a contentious re-election campaign. He is courting climate voters, particularly the young activists who helped him win election in 2020 and who have been angered by his administration’s approval last year of the Willow project, an enormous oil drilling operation in Alaska.

It also comes as the United States leads the world in both liquefied natural gas exports and oil and gas production. The country has seven export terminals with five more already under construction.

The project in question, Calcasieu Pass 2, is among 17 additional terminals that have been proposed by the fossil fuel industry.

Still, Republicans and former President Donald J. Trump, who is expected to be his party’s choice to challenge Mr. Biden in November, are sure to try to use any delay in permitting against him, charging that Mr. Biden is hampering American energy.

“This move would amount to a functional ban on new LNG export permits,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “The administration’s war on affordable domestic energy has been bad news for American workers and consumers alike.”

Mr. Trump, who has inaccurately called global warming a “hoax,” has promised to expand fossil fuel production and shred Mr. Biden’s climate agenda. “We’re going to drill, baby drill, right away,” he told voters after he won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month.

Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, would dwarf the country’s existing export terminals. The $10 billion project would be situated along a shipping channel that connects the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Charles, La. It would export up to 20 million tons of natural gas per year, increasing the current amount of exported American gas by about 20 percent.

The project first requires approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before it shifts to the Energy Department for consideration.

The Energy Department is required to weigh whether the export terminal is in “the public interest,” a subjective determination. But now, the White House has requested an additional analysis of the climate impacts of CP2.

Natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane, is cleaner than coal when it is burned. But methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short term, compared with carbon dioxide, and it can leak anywhere along the supply chain, from the production wellhead to processing plants to the stovetop. The process of liquefying gas to make it suitable for transport is incredibly energy intensive as well, creating yet more emissions.

Whatever new criteria is used to evaluate CP2 would be expected to be applied to the other 16 proposed natural gas terminals that are awaiting approval.

Scientists have overwhelmingly said that nations must deeply and quickly cut the emissions from burning gas, oil and coal if humanity is to avoid climate catastrophe. Last month at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, the United States joined 196 other countries in promising to transition away from fossil fuels.

More than 150 scientists signed a Dec. 19 letter to Mr. Biden, urging him to reject CP2 and the additional proposed facilities. “The magnitude of the proposed build out of LNG over the next several years is staggering,” they wrote. Approving new terminals would “put us on a continued path toward escalating climate chaos,” the letter said.

Given the scientific imperative, experts say that it is reasonable to consider climate impacts before building new gas export terminals.

“So far there is really no requirement to consider the cumulative climate, economic or market impact of all those facilities,” said Ben Cahill, a senior fellow in the energy security and climate change program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan research organization. “And it’s a very valid question.”

Shaylyn Hynes a spokeswoman for Venture Global LNG, the Virginia-based company that wants to build CP2, wrote in an email that “it appears the administration may be putting a moratorium on the entire US LNG industry. Such an action would shock the global energy market, having the impact of an economic sanction, and send a devastating signal to our allies that they can no longer rely on the United States.”

A delay of many months could jeopardize the financing for CP2. Venture Global LNG, has other gas export terminals that have already run into equipment and shipping problems and legal disputes.

That’s exactly the hope of climate activists who launched a social media campaign last fall to urge Mr. Biden to reject CP2.

“We see CP2 as stopping the first fraction of the largest LNG build out to date,” said Alex Haraus, a 25-year-old Colorado social media influencer who has led a TikTok and Instagram campaign aimed at urging young voters to demand that Mr. Biden reject the project. His posts have received about 7 million views on TikTok and Instagram.

Among those who saw the posts were Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, senior advisers to Mr. Biden on climate policy. Mr. Podesta is also a veteran of climate advocacy and presidential campaigns. Mr. Haraus had a Zoom meeting with Mr. Zaidi this week and with Mr. Podesta last month to discuss the project, one of several meetings about CP2 between White House climate officials and environmental groups.

Climate activists have compared their CP2 campaign with a successful effort waged over a decade ago to persuade President Barack Obama to reject the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

In that campaign, the climate activist Bill McKibben was able to transform an obscure oil pipeline project that had been on track for routine federal approval into a high profile symbol of Mr. Obama’s commitment to fighting climate change.

The Obama administration found that the pipeline was not “in the public interest” because of the emissions associated with producing the oil that would be moved through the pipeline.

Mr. McKibben has also taken a large role in organizing the CP2 campaign.

“Keystone is a great example of how this can work,” Mr. Haraus said. “And we absolutely will reward or punish him on this decision,” he added, referring to Mr. Biden.

Within the White House, there is little division over the decision to delay CP2, in part because it is not seen as a major energy security issue, said people familiar with the discussion. That’s because the United States is already producing and exporting so much gas. That capacity is set to nearly double over the next four years, making the need for CP2 less urgent.

American dominance of the natural gas market is a recent tale. Until 2016, the United States did not export any natural gas. But the expansion of hydraulic fracking translated into tremendous growth in natural gas supplies and a new export industry.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States redirected exports from Asia to Europe in order to help allies that had been reliant on Russian gas.

But Republicans, oil and gas companies, and some energy analysts warn that even the glut of natural gas exports may not be enough to prevent Russian President Vladimir Putin from wielding natural gas supplies as a weapon.

“No one hates U.S. L.N.G. more than Vladimir Putin,” said Daniel Yergin, the vice chairman of S & P Global and an oil industry historian.

Speaking this week at an energy conference, Mike Sommers, the president of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, said curtailing the construction of future terminals would be damaging to American allies, “particularly those in Europe who are desperate for American natural gas.”

For about two months, a barrage of missile and drone attacks in the Red Sea by Houthi militants has posed a difficult choice to shippers using the Suez Canal: risk an airborne strike and pay sharply higher insurance rates, or forgo the canal and take the longer route around Africa, snarling schedules and entailing higher fuel charges.

The attacks — at a choke point that handles 12 percent of global trade, including nearly one-third of the world’s container ship traffic — have already forced some shutdowns at European auto plants and raised fears of a surge in consumer prices.

For shipping companies, costs have already increased. A composite measure of global shipping costs, the Drewry World Container Index, has more than doubled since late last year. The rise is partly tied to a shortage of empty shipping containers, caused by up to two weeks of additional time for trips going around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.

And using the Red Sea now requires expensive war risk insurance. It’s a specialty that a group of brokers and underwriters centered around London offer.

“We are not fair weather underwriters,” said Munro Anderson, head of operations at Vessel Protect, a marine war risk insurance firm. “We are there for our clients when things are at the most difficult,” he added.

War risk coverage is often required for vessels going into areas designated as high risk by a group of insurers called the Joint War Committee, which consists of underwriters at Lloyds and other organizations. War risk is “an area of business where generally if the underwriting community get it right, they make money out of it,” said Marcus Baker, global head of marine, cargo and logistics at Marsh, an insurer in London.

But the cost to insure container ships or tankers transiting the Bab al-Mandeb strait off Yemen en route to the Suez has jumped in recent weeks.

Marine war risk premiums have soared around 50 fold since before the war, to as high as 1 percent of the value of the ship, although about 0.7 percent appears to be more common. For a ship carrying goods worth $100 million, that means an extra $700,000 for the few days necessary to go through the Red Sea area.

Mr. Baker said war risk rates for the Red Sea were less exorbitant than those for shipping in the Black Sea from Ukraine, which can range up to 3 percent. One reason for the differential: The environment is considered more hostile because Russia is a more dangerous attacker than the Houthis. So far, insurers say, the Houthi attacks, while intimidating, have produced relatively little damage.

Some underwriters are also insisting that clients have language in their contracts guaranteeing that they have no connection to Israel, whose military campaign in Gaza is the reason the Houthis give for their attacks, or to the United States and Britain, which have launched air and missile strikes on the Yemen-based group. In an effort to ward off against attacks, a growing number of ships have broadcast messages like “No Contact Israel,” according to TankerTrackers, a monitoring service.

So far the U.S.-led multinational naval task force to protect commercial ships in both the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden has not helped lower insurance costs, brokers say, though rates may be leveling off. Israel has offered to compensate shipowners for any damage sustained in Israeli waters.

But at the moment, most of the giant vessels that bring stacks of containers from China to Western ports are taking the Africa route, which could require an extra two weeks with higher fuel costs. Over a recent 30-day period, 517 container ships steered clear of the Red Sea by going around the Cape of Good Hope, while 212 continued through the Suez Canal, said Jonathan Roach, who tracks container shipping for Braemar, a London ship broker. In November, he said, the ratio was roughly the reverse.

Tankers that carry oil and liquefied natural gas around the world are also increasingly avoiding the Suez Canal. Even L.N.G. tankers from Qatar, a major supplier of gas to Europe whose vessels had been considered shielded from Houthi attacks because the emirate had hosted Hamas leaders, are now going around Africa, said Laura Page, an analyst at Kpler, which tracks shipping.

Over time, more tankers may choose the longer route. “There will be a point at which the pain and the cost to go into the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal outweighs simple economics of going around the Cape,” Lois Zabrocky, chief executive of International Seaways, which owns and operates oil and chemical tankers, said at an investor event last week. “And this is a constantly evolving situation.”

Still, energy prices have been subdued, reflecting weakened demand and rising production in the United States and elsewhere, with Brent crude below its level on Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel. Even as tanker freight rates have risen by about 25 percent since the Red Sea disruptions began, according to Goldman Sachs, European natural gas prices have remained muted, probably because of large amounts of fuel in storage and alternative supplies from the United States.

CMA CGM, a Marseille-based company that is one of the world’s largest container shippers, is sending some vessels through the Suez Canal, at times escorted by the French navy. Analysts say the ships still moving through Suez tend to be older and smaller vessels that would involve lower losses if they were hit.

It’s unclear if escalating shipping costs will be reflected in consumer prices, especially in Europe, where economies are barely growing. Weak consumer demand means businesses will face pressure to absorb extra shipping costs in their profit margins “instead of passing price rises to the consumer,” said analysts at Morgan Stanley this week.

One factor easing the current crisis is a surfeit of ships and cargo containers. After the severe shipping log jams of 2022, logistics companies ordered large numbers of ships and containers that are now helping to ease a global crunch in the movement of goods.

Longer shipping routes resulting from avoiding the Red Sea are actually helping the market absorb what would have been a substantial oversupply of vessels, at least temporarily heading off the pressure for companies to scrap excess ships, Mr. Roach of Braemar said. “Perhaps it’s not such a bad time for this situation to happen,” he said.

Despite that ample supply of ships and containers, the Red Sea hostilities have caused freight costs to spike. Mr. Roach said it would probably take another three to four months or more of Red Sea disruption for prices to equal their 2022 peak.

Christian Roeloffs, chief executive of Container xChange, a company in Hamburg, Germany, that operates a market for shipping containers, said that prices for the boxes were spiking because the sudden lengthening of shipping journeys had caught the industry with inventories of the boxes in the wrong places.

Importers rushing to stock up on orders from Chinese factories before they close for the upcoming New Year’s holidays are also leading to a scramble for containers, he said.

“Even though, in theory, the capacity is there, it cannot be deployed so quickly,” Mr. Roeloffs said. He predicted China’s holiday period next month would give shippers time to recover. “We will really see a normalization,” he said.

Jenny Gross contributed reporting.

Even by the standards of a news business whose fortunes have plummeted in the digital age, the last few weeks have been especially grim for American journalism.

Prominent newspapers like The Washington Post are shedding reporters and editors, and on Tuesday, The Los Angeles Times laid off more than 20 percent of its newsroom. Cable news ratings have fallen amid an uncompetitive presidential primary contest. Esteemed titles like Sports Illustrated, already a shadow of their former selves, have been gutted overnight.

As Americans prepare for an election year that will feature disinformation wars, A.I.-generated agitprop and a debate over the future of democracy, the mainstream news industry — once the de facto watchdog and facilitator of public discourse — is struggling to stay afloat.

The pain is particularly pronounced at the community level. An average of five local newspapers are closing every two weeks, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School, with more half of all American counties now so-called news deserts with limited access to news about their hometowns. Of 1,100 public radio stations and affiliates, only about one in five is producing local journalism.

“At a time when America arguably needs more solid news coverage than ever, it is very disturbing to see economic forces arrange so powerfully against traditional news sources,” said Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president who works with a group of M.I.T. researchers studying the future of news and information.

“It’s not just disturbing,” he added. “It’s dangerous.”

The decline has gone on for years, but a painful confluence of challenges has resulted in the current carnage.

Americans are suffering from news fatigue, inundated with major stories like the coming election and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Those who do follow the news have increasingly turned to social media and anti-establishment sites that exist outside legacy organizations.

Companies are spending more of their ad budgets to reach users on big tech platforms like Instagram and Google — which in turn have become less reliable in referring readers to traditional news sources. Twitter, now X, shed users and relevance after its chaotic takeover by Elon Musk, while Google and Meta laid off key news employees and the head of Instagram’s Threads app said it would not focus on news.

Troubles at the corporate level have also taken a toll.

The rise of streaming and a drop-off in moviegoing have led to belt-tightening at the parent companies of many news outlets. Disney, which owns ABC News, shed thousands of jobs last year. With NBCUniversal losing viewers from its once-formidable cable-TV division, NBC News laid off several dozen employees this month. CNN, owned by debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery, went through a round of layoffs. Paramount, which owns CBS News, is also planning deep cuts, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.

The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Boston Globe have found success by attracting digital subscribers, and there are some green shoots among niche, subscription-based start-ups that largely focus on a single industry, like The Information for tech and The Ankler for Hollywood.

Still, the onslaught of painful headlines is an ominous sign for the broader news industry’s efforts to forge sustainable business models.

The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times appeared poised for comebacks after each newspaper was bought by a tech-savvy billionaire, the sort of financial benefactor the industry hoped could offer a lifeline as print revenue dwindled. Hiring sprees and Pulitzer Prizes followed at both papers.

But both lost tens of millions of dollars last year. This month, Kevin Merida, The Los Angeles Times’s widely respected editor, resigned after clashing with the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Then came the extensive layoffs.

“If you care about journalism — local news, national news, international news — every warning light should be blinking red,” Mary Louise Kelly, a host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” wrote on X after word of those layoffs spread.

The Post is cutting costs under its billionaire owner, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The paper surged in popularity during the Trump administration but failed to build on its subscriber growth. Shortly before the new year, The Post announced that 240 journalists had accepted buyouts.

The Baltimore Sun, Maryland’s largest newspaper, also faces an uncertain future. It was sold this month to David D. Smith, a businessman who runs the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. Many reporters at The Sun are concerned that Mr. Smith will impose his political interests on a newspaper that he recently admitted he had barely read in the past 40 years.

The magazine world has not been immune. Last week, Sports Illustrated, once a titan of sports journalism, whose cover was a coveted prize for the world’s greatest athletes, said it was laying off much of its entire staff, and its future is in doubt as its owners consider licensing the property to new investors. Days earlier, Condé Nast folded Pitchfork, once a kingmaker among music’s smart set, into GQ magazine and laid off employees, including the editor in chief.

On Tuesday, unionized workers at Condé Nast organized a walkout and protest at its World Trade Center headquarters. Time magazine, owned by billionaire Marc Benioff, the Salesforce founder, also began laying off employees this week.

The recent bad news is, in some ways, a continuation from last year. In 2023, Business Insider, The Los Angeles Times and NPR cut at least 10 percent of their staffs; the news division of BuzzFeed was shut down; News Corp cut 1,250 people; National Geographic laid off its remaining staff writers; Vox Media went through two rounds of layoffs; Vice Media filed for bankruptcy; Popular Science shut its online magazine; and ESPN, Condé Nast and Yahoo News all cut jobs.

“A new reality has sunk in among legacy media, both print stalwarts owned by billionaires and some of the high-profile national digital players who won such notice a decade ago,” said Ken Doctor, a media entrepreneur and analyst.

Now, the news industry is looking ahead to fresh hurdles posed by the technology of artificial intelligence. Some outlets have expressed concern that A.I. algorithms, which generate impromptu answers to readers’ questions, could replace online news sites as go-to sources for current events.

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, arguing that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete as providers of information. Some publishers, like Axel Springer, cut deals with OpenAI for annual payments in exchange for the use of their digital archives.

If there’s one bright spot, it might be local television news.

Though local TV news stations are enduring their own problems — heavier workloads for reporters, even as salaries have stagnated — many remain in better shape than local newspapers, said Mr. Heyward, the former CBS News president, who now works as a consultant to several local news outlets.

“Local TV news has a lot going for it,” he said. “Virtually every market of any size has three to four competing newsrooms, which is a stark contrast to the local newspaper, where a market is lucky to have one. And if they do, it’s generally a shadow of its former self.”

A Gallup and Knight Foundation survey in 2023 found that Americans placed far more trust in local news sources than national media organizations. And just 19 percent of Americans described their trust in journalists as “high” or “very high” in a Gallup survey released this week, a nine-point decrease from four years ago.

“They can’t be demonized as fake news,” Mr. Heyward said of local outlets. “If there’s a traffic light broken at Elm and Maple, people know it, and there are no alternative facts. Americans are having trouble finding common ground, but in a local market, they have it.”

Prosecutors charged a Minnesota state trooper with second-degree murder on Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a motorist who drove away during a traffic stop last summer in Minneapolis.

The announcement of charges against Trooper Ryan Londregan in the death of the driver, Ricky Cobb II, followed an investigation that exposed tensions between law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

Trooper Londregan is the first law enforcement officer whom Mary Moriarty, the top prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, has charged in an on-duty shooting. Ms. Moriarty, a former public defender, was elected in 2022 and has promised sweeping changes in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, including stronger efforts to hold officers accountable for misconduct.

Legal experts say that prosecutors have become more willing to charge law enforcement officials since Mr. Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, sparking a national outcry over police abuses and racism. Even so, criminal charges in such cases remain rare, and when they are brought, prosecutors struggle to secure convictions.

In addition to the second-degree murder charge, Trooper Londregan was charged with first degree assault and second-degree manslaughter.

Peter B. Wold, a lawyer for Trooper Londregan, 27, did not immediately comment on the charges.

Mr. Cobb, a 33-year-old Black man, was fatally shot on July 31 after state troopers including Trooper Londregan, who is white, pulled him over on Interstate 94 for driving without working taillights, according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.

During the stop, the troopers determined that Mr. Cobb was subject to arrest over a suspected violation of a protective order involving a former romantic partner, officials said.

Police body-camera footage released shortly after the shooting showed the sequence of events.

Trooper Brett Seide, one of three officers at the scene, asked Mr. Cobb to get out of his car as Trooper Seide stood by the driver’s side door. Mr. Cobb, who was alone in the car, can be heard questioning the request and demanding to know whether there was a warrant for his arrest.

Trooper Londregan, who was standing on the passenger’s side of the car, can be seen opening the door and reaching inside in an effort to force Mr. Cobb out, the body-camera footage shows. Trooper Seide did the same on the driver’s side. Almost immediately, Mr. Cobb’s vehicle can be seen lurching forward.

When the car began moving, Trooper Londregan fired his handgun twice, striking Mr. Cobb in the torso, officials said. Troopers Seide and Londregan tumbled to the ground as the car sped off.

Mr. Cobb drove for about a quarter-mile before his car came to a stop on the side of the highway. He died at the scene, officials said.

At the time of the traffic stop, Trooper Londregan had been a law enforcement officer for about a year and a half. He is now on paid leave.

Prosecutors said the troopers’ actions that night were at odds with how they are trained to remove an uncooperative person from a vehicle. As a matter of policy, the prosecution’s charging document said, “troopers should make every effort not to place themselves in a position that would increase the possibility that the vehicle they are approaching can be used as a deadly weapon.”

Investigators who searched Mr. Cobb’s vehicle after his death found a handgun on the floor behind the center console, according to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the state agency that investigates police shootings.

The gun was not visible in the police body-camera video, and no evidence has emerged publicly to suggest that the troopers knew there was a gun in the vehicle before Mr. Cobb’s death. Mr. Cobb was not permitted to legally possess a gun in Wisconsin because he had been convicted of domestic assault in 2017, according to court records.

Soon after his death, Mr. Cobb’s relatives and civil rights activists in Minnesota called on elected officials to fire and criminally charge the troopers involved. Relatives of Mr. Cobb met in August with Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and separately with Ms. Moriarty.

The union that represents state troopers called the meeting with the governor “improper,” arguing that it could unduly influence the criminal investigation.

As prosecutors began investigating the killing, Ms. Moriarty said her office was being stymied by State Patrol officials who refused to cooperate.

In recent years, Minnesota prosecutors have tended to present cases involving police use of deadly force to grand juries, leaving them to determine whether an officer’s conduct amounted to a crime. In the Minneapolis area, prosecutors have often asked a county attorney in a different county or the state attorney general to handle police deadly-force cases.

When she was running for office, Ms. Moriarty said she disliked those arrangements. Her campaign website promised that if elected, she would make determinations about charging police officers herself, in order to “let the people of Hennepin County hold her accountable for those decisions.”

In this case, Ms. Moriarty said the decision to file charges was made by her and her team rather than by a grand jury.

Ms. Moriarty said that Wednesday was a difficult day for the families of Mr. Cobb and Trooper Londregan.

“Our community continues to navigate the compounding trauma and grief that results from the tragic loss of our community members at the hands of police,” she said.