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The South Pacific island of Niue is one the most remote places in the world. Its closest neighbors, Tonga and American Samoa, are hundreds of miles away. The advent of the internet promised, in a small way, to make Niue and its 2,000 or so residents more connected to the rest of the world.

In the late 1990s, an American businessman offered to hook up the island to the internet. All he wanted in exchange was the right to control the .nu suffix that Niue was assigned for its web addresses. The domain did not seem as lucrative as .tv — which was slotted to Tuvalu, another South Pacific nation — and the leaders of Niue (pronounced New-ay) signed off on the deal. But the two sides were soon at odds.

Now, after more than two decades of back and forth, the disagreement is finally nearing a resolution in a court of law. Disputes over domain names were not uncommon during the internet’s infancy but experts are hard pressed to recall one that has lasted this long.

It turned out that .nu was, in fact, very valuable. “Nu” means now in Swedish, Danish and Dutch, and thousands of Scandinavians registered websites with that suffix, creating a steady business for Niue’s business partner, Bill Semich.

Niue, an oval-shaped coral island of about 100 square miles of area, about the size of Lincoln, Neb., felt it had been cheated out of a reliable stream of cash that would have helped it reduce its reliance on tourism and foreign aid. It had turned to unorthodox sources of income before, selling stamps and coins to collectors. It had also rented out its international dialing code, until Niue’s deeply Christian residents started being awakened at midnight by wayward phone sex calls from Japan.

Niue canceled the deal with Mr. Semich in 2000 and has been attempting to reclaim .nu — which is now operated by the Swedish Internet Foundation, a nonprofit — ever since. It is seeking about $30 million in damages from the foundation, an amount that could be transformative for a tiny island that was recognized by the United States as a sovereign state only in 2022. The dispute has landed in the Swedish courts, and a judge in Stockholm began hearing Niue’s arguments last week. A ruling is expected in the coming days.

“This is a unique, complex, and somewhat strange case,” said David Taylor, an intellectual property and domain name expert at the law firm Hogan Lovells, adding that this made it extremely difficult to predict the outcome of the case.

For the leader of Niue, it is a fight for self-determination. Niue is self-governing but depends heavily on New Zealand, and the two are in a political relationship known as free association.

“We are victims of digital colonialism,” Prime Minister Dalton Tagelagi of Niue said over a crackling video link from his office in the capital of Alofi. “This domain, the .nu, recognizes Niue as a sovereign country. This is how important it is to our identity.”

Critics question that assessment, as there is formally no such thing as sovereignty in cyberspace, only administrative zones that divide the web into domains like .nu and, for instance, the .nz suffix assigned to New Zealand.

Winning the case could help ensure the long-term survival of Niue, Mr. Tagelagi said. The island’s population is now about a third of what it was in the 1960s, and the empty homes that dot the island are a reminder of the people who left for better economic opportunities. A victory could help fund its bid to join the United Nations, similar to how Tuvalu obtained U.N. membership after monetizing .tv.

If Niue manages to get .nu back, it could bring in up to $2 million in revenue a year, according to Par Brumark, a domain name expert who is acting on Niue’s behalf in the Swedish case.

Mr. Semich has repeatedly denied Niue’s claims of wrongdoing. In 2013, his company, Internet Users Society Niue, struck a deal to hand over the operation of .nu to the Swedish Internet Foundation, which runs Sweden’s .se domain. Niue moved to sue. A yearslong procedural battle that went all the way to Sweden’s Supreme Court followed until its legal system decided to hear Niue’s case.

Jannike Tilla, a vice president of the foundation, rejected Niue’s claims against it and said that it was a subcontractor for I.U.S.N. She added: “The domain is highly relevant for Swedish users, not least for many critical societal institutions.”

Some Swedish newspapers, for instance, have .nu in their web addresses. Websites currently using the domain are not expected to face any changes even if Niue wins its case.

I.U.S.N. directed questions to Emani Lui, a newly elected member of Niue’s Parliament. Mr. Lui runs the only private internet provider on Niue, previously worked with I.U.S.N. and is the son of the premier who signed the original deal with Mr. Semich. He said that the dispute over .nu had become so bitter that successive governments had lost sight of other options Niue had.

“We would have had the best in the Pacific, probably one of the best communications systems in the world” if Niue had seen eye-to-eye with I.U.S.N., he said. “It wasn’t taken up. It was more like: We want the cash.”

Mr. Tagelagi rejected that notion.

“It is the morality. Every nation, regardless of size, should be treated fairly and equally,” he said. “We are sometimes overlooked for being a small island out there in the big blue. But you can only be patient for so long.”

A week after Hamas-led terrorists stormed his kibbutz and kidnapped his wife and three young children, Avihai Brodutch planted himself on the sidewalk in front of army headquarters in Tel Aviv holding a sign scrawled with the words “My family’s in Gaza,” and said he would not budge until they were brought home.

Passers-by stopped to commiserate with him and to try to lift his spirits. They brought him coffee, platters of food and changes of clothing, and welcomed him to their homes to wash up and get some sleep.

“They were so kind, and they just couldn’t do enough,” said Mr. Brodutch, 42, an agronomist who grew pineapples on Kibbutz Kfar Azza before the attacks on Oct. 7. “It was Israel at its finest,” he said. “There was a feeling of a common destiny.”

The one-man sit-in mushroomed in the weeks after the attacks. But the sidewalks outside the military headquarters could not contain multitudes, and some people were uncomfortable with the location, which was associated with anti-government protests last year.

So the mass moved a block north to the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where a long rectangular table set for 234 people and surrounded by empty chairs had been installed to represent the captives. Since some 110 hostages have come home, half of the table has been reset to correspond to the conditions of captivity they described, with half a moldy piece of pita bread on each plate and bottles of dirty water on the table instead of wineglasses.

In the months since the attacks, the plaza has continued to attract a steady stream of Israelis and tourists on volunteer missions who want to support the families. But it has also become a home away from home for the parents, adult children, siblings, cousins and other relatives of hostages.

Although it can get damp and chilly in Tel Aviv in the winter, many have set up tents in the plaza, often sleeping there, keeping company with the only other people in the world who they say can truly understand what they are experiencing — the family members of other hostages.

“If I don’t know what to do, I come here,” said Yarden Gonen, 30, who was wearing a white sweatshirt emblazoned with a picture of her sister Romi Gonen, 23, who was shot and kidnapped at the outdoor Nova music festival near the Gaza border. A friend with her was killed.

“None of us is doing anything remotely related to our previous lives,” Yarden Gonen said. Even having coffee in a cafe would make her feel bad, she said.

“To do that would be to normalize the situation,” she said. “It would be like saying, ‘This is OK, and I’m used to it.’ And I’m not willing to do that.”

Ms. Gonen said she found comfort in the constant presence in the square of people who are not related to the hostages, like the peace activists from Women Wage Peace who stand vigil daily from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. so the families are not alone, and a trio of women who bonded over their anger at international organizations they believe have failed the hostages (they carry posters that say, “Red Cross Do Your Job!” or “U.N. Women, Where Are You?”).

“When it’s raining and I see that they’ve come, it is moving, because they could have stayed cozy at home,” Ms. Gonen said. “There is a feeling that they support us, that we haven’t been abandoned.”

Although the Israeli government has stated that one of the primary goals of the war in Gaza is to free the hostages, the army has said it has so far rescued only a small number of individuals. Three others were mistakenly killed by Israeli troops.

Most of the hostages who have returned — including Mr. Brodutch’s wife and children — were released in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, as part of a cease-fire deal negotiated with Hamas in November.

For many of the hostage families, the greatest fear is that despite the stated goal, the government is not prioritizing the extrication of the hostages. They worry it may ultimately chalk up the loss of the remaining captives as just more collateral damage in the bloody conflict.

The Gaza health ministry says that more than 29,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the territory since the war’s start.

Many people who come to the Tel Aviv plaza regularly say that if Israel does not secure the release of the hostages, the country will never be the same. “We will be worth nothing if they don’t come back,” said Jemima Kronfeld, 84, who visits every Thursday. “We will have no value. We will lose what we were, the safe feeling of being at home.”

In the initial chaos after the surprise attacks, many people did not know if their relatives — who had gone missing from kibbutzim and the site of a rave near the Gaza border — had been bound and dragged across the border, or killed, and many complained that the government was unresponsive.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a grass-roots citizens’ group, sprung up to fill the void. The group provides a wide range of services for hostage families, serving them three meals a day, making medical, psychological and legal services available, and acting as an advocacy group, organizing and funding news media appearances and meetings with world leaders, as well as rallies pressing for the hostages’ release.

The forum raises private donations but has received no support from the Israeli government, which still does not provide the families with regular updates, said Liat Bell Sommer, who quit her day job to head the forum’s international media relations team.

Other volunteers pitch in when they can.

“I just felt like I had to do something — I thought I’d go crazy if I didn’t have some part in this,” said Hilla Shtein, 49, of Tel Aviv, a human resources manager who goes to the plaza several times a week to work a stand where visitors can make a donation and pick up hats, sweatshirts and buttons that say “Bring them home NOW.”

The most popular items — ubiquitous throughout Israel now — are dog tags that say “Our hearts are hostage in Gaza,” in Hebrew.

“It’s hard, because it’s really in your face when you’re here,” Ms. Shtein said, adding, “But it’s pulling at your heart all the time anyway.”

After reports last week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told negotiators not to participate further in talks in Cairo about a cease-fire and the return of the hostages, the forum accused the government of abandoning the captives. Thousands protested on Saturday night, despite thunderstorms, calling on the government to secure their immediate return.

Those who visit the plaza regularly say that there is always something new to see.

In January, the artist Roni Levavi installed a giant 30-yard tunnel that people can walk through to experience being in a dark sealed space, like the tunnels in Gaza that some returned hostages have described being held in. Romi Gonen’s dance teachers hold an open lesson on the plaza every Sunday afternoon in her honor, and friends of Carmel “Melly” Gat, 39, a hostage who is an occupational therapist and yoga instructor, teach an open yoga class every Friday morning.

There is a booth where visitors can write letters to hostages, or paint a rock if they prefer, and another booth that offers mental health first aid. Occasionally, someone will sit down and play an Israeli pop song at a piano donated by relatives of Alon Ohel, 22, a musician who was kidnapped from the rave, and the crowd sings along.

When it is a hostage’s birthday, some families commemorate the day in the square, where a symbolic high chair and birthday cake are set up for Kfir Bibas, who would have turned 1 in captivity. The Israeli army said Monday that it feared for the safety of the baby and his family.

In early February, Albert Xhelili, 57, an artist visiting from Santa Fe, N.M., attracted onlookers when he started drawing charcoal portraits of the hostages that he hung on a clothesline in one of the tents on the square.

Ariel Rosenberg, 31, a marketing consultant from New York who came to Israel in January as part of a group to do volunteer work, said she and her fellow travelers had been at the plaza recently to help sort posters with pictures of the hostages, separating out those who had been released and those who were no longer alive, something that was painful for the families to do.

Ms. Rosenberg said the group members find themselves coming back every Saturday night to attend weekly rallies calling for the immediate release of the hostages, and they often stop by on other evenings as well. “I come to bear witness,” Ms. Rosenberg said. “It’s become sacred ground.”

Thousands of the small and midsize companies that form the backbone of the German economy warned this week that the country was losing its edge, as the country’s central bank signaled the threat of a recession would loom over Germany in the first three months of 2024.

“Every day, Germany is losing its ability to remain internationally competitive,” read an open letter to the government signed by 18 associations representing the businesses, in industries ranging from technology to trucking to taxi companies.

The aim of the letter was to urge lawmakers to overcome partisan fighting that is blocking passage of a law intended to provide tax credits for investments that speed the transition to a green economy. But the sweeping statement ticked off a list of concerns facing businesses, including high energy prices, labor shortages, slow efforts to digitize the bureaucracy and high taxes. “The economic downturn is homemade,” it said.

Those strains are reflected in a report released on Monday by Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, which said that the country’s economy, Europe’s largest, was poised to shrink in the first three months of the year. After a contraction of 0.3 percent in the final months of 2023, a second consecutive decline would land the country in a technical recession.

The Bundesbank cited a weak export market, price-conscious consumers who remain cautious about spending and a lack of investment by companies spooked by higher borrowing costs.

The country’s minister for the economy, Robert Habeck, called the state of the economy “dramatically bad” last week. On Wednesday, he will present the government’s economic report for 2024, which includes projections of just 0.2 percent annual growth, scaled back from the 1.3 percent expansion forecast issued last year.

Mr. Habeck’s ministry has drafted legislation, inspired by the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, to provide billions in tax credits to companies that invest in green energy. The idea is to attract many German firms that have shifted their investments to the United States.

Corporate taxes in Germany are among the highest in Europe, at more than 29 percent, compared with about 25 percent in neighboring France and the Netherlands. .

The lower house of Parliament passed the law in November, but members of the conservative opposition parties are blocking its final passage through the upper house. They point out that application of the proposed law will fall to the states, which lack sufficient resources. They are also demanding that planned cuts for subsidies to agricultural diesel fuel — a proposal that sent farmers into the streets in nationwide protests last month — should be dropped in exchange for their support.

The public appeal from the business associations is an unusual campaign for groups that usually remain in the background. It reflects the frustration felt by many of the small and midsize firms — known as the Mittelstand — over the government’s willingness to spend billions to attract large firms such as the chipmaker Intel or the battery producer Northvolt, said Jens Südekum, a professor of economics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf.

“That’s why this law is so important — it is an instrument for everybody,” Mr. Südekum said. “For small and midsize enterprises, this is really essential.”

An Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children has sent shock waves through the world of reproductive medicine, casting doubt over fertility care for would-be parents in the state and raising complex legal questions with implications extending far beyond Alabama.

On Tuesday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said the ruling would cause “exactly the type of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and paved the way for politicians to dictate some of the most personal decisions families can make.”

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as President Biden traveled to California, Ms. Jean-Pierre reiterated the Biden administration’s call for Congress to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law.

“As a reminder, this is the same state whose attorney general threatened to prosecute people who help women travel out of state to seek the care they need,” she said, referring to Alabama, which began enforcing a total abortion ban in June 2022.

The judges issued the ruling on Friday in appeals cases brought by couples whose embryos were destroyed in 2020, when a hospital patient removed frozen embryos from tanks of liquid nitrogen in Mobile and dropped them on the floor.

Referencing antiabortion language in the state constitution, the judges’ majority opinion said that an 1872 statute allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child applies to unborn children, with no exception for “extrauterine children.”

“Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, citing scripture.

Infertility specialists and legal experts said the ruling had potentially profound effects, which should be of concern to every American who may need to access reproductive services like in vitro fertilization.

One in six families grapples with infertility, according to Barbara Collura, the president and chief executive of Resolve, which represents the interests of infertility patients.

“You’ve changed the status of a microscopic group of cells to now being a person or a child,” Ms. Collura said. “They didn’t say in vitro fertilization is illegal, and they didn’t say that you can’t freeze embryos. It’s even worse — there is no road map.”

It has become standard medical protocol during in vitro fertilization to extract as many eggs as possible from a woman, then to fertilize them to create embryos before freezing them. Generally, only one embryo is transferred at a time into the uterus in order to maximize the chances of successful implantation and a full-term pregnancy.

“But what if we can’t freeze them?” Ms. Collura asked. “Will we hold people criminally liable because you can’t freeze a ‘person’? This opens up so many questions.”

Reproductive medicine scientists also blasted the ruling, saying it was a “medically and scientifically unfounded decision.”

“The court held that a fertilized frozen egg in a fertility clinic freezer should be treated as the legal equivalent of an existent child or a fetus gestating in a womb,” said Dr. Paula Amato, the president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

“Science and everyday common sense tell us they are not,” she said. Even in the natural world, she added, several eggs are often fertilized before one successfully implants in the uterus and results in a pregnancy.

Dr. Amato predicted that young doctors would stop going to Alabama to train or to practice medicine in the aftermath of the ruling, and that doctors would close fertility clinics in the state if operating them meant running the risk of being brought up on civil or criminal charges.

“Modern fertility care will be unavailable to the people of Alabama,” Dr. Amato predicted.

Couples in the midst of grueling and costly infertility treatments in Alabama said they were overwhelmed with questions and concerns, and some said they feared their providers would be forced to close their clinics.

Megan Legerski, 37, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., who is currently undergoing infertility treatment, said that she recently became pregnant after being implanted with an embryo created through in vitro fertilization, but that she miscarried after eight weeks.

She and her partner have three more frozen embryos that they can implant, she said.

“The embryos to me are our best chance at having children, and we are extremely hopeful,” Ms. Legerski said. “But having three embryos in the freezer is not the same to me as having one that implants and become a pregnancy, and it’s not the same as having a child.

“We have three embryos. We don’t have three children.”

Katie Rogers contributed reporting from Washington.

Former President Donald J. Trump continued to liken himself to the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny during a town hall in South Carolina on Tuesday, at one point directly comparing a civil fraud judgment against him to the case of an anticorruption activist who died in a Russian prison last week.

Halfway through the town hall, the host, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, asked Mr. Trump how he would come up with the $450 million penalty issued by a New York judge last week.

“It is a form of — Navalny,” Mr. Trump said. “It is a form of communism or fascism.”

The remark came after a prolonged discussion in which Mr. Trump continued to suggest that his legal travails were somehow equivalent to those of Mr. Navalny, a staunch opponent of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia who was politically persecuted and imprisoned on charges that supporters believed were fabricated in an attempt to silence him.

Mr. Trump did not specifically address Mr. Navalny’s death until Monday, when he posted on social media that the situation was reminiscent of his legal problems. The former president faces four criminal cases, all of which he has attributed to President Biden, although Mr. Biden has no oversight over them.

During the town hall, Ms. Ingraham asked Mr. Trump to expand on those comments. The former president commended Mr. Navalny for his courage, calling his death “very sad” and saying that Mr. Navalny “was a very brave guy.” He also expressed his belief that Mr. Navalny — who returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned — would have been better served by “staying away and talking from outside of the country.”

But Mr. Trump then said that what had happened to Mr. Navalny was happening “in our country too.” He went on to mention his four indictments, which he said were “all because of the fact that I am in politics.”

Ms. Ingraham then followed up by asking Mr. Trump if he viewed himself as a “potential political prisoner.” Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly without evidence claimed that the criminal cases against him are part of a plot to keep him from winning a second term, seemed to affirm her.

“If I were losing in the polls, they wouldn’t even be talking about me,” Mr. Trump said.

Still, Mr. Trump did not condemn Mr. Putin, who has drawn widespread condemnation and speculation from officials, including Mr. Biden, that he or the Russian government may have had a hand in Mr. Navalny’s death.

During the town hall, he praised Russia’s military, which is invading Ukraine, for its prowess.

“You’re really up against the war machine in Russia,” Mr. Trump said. “Russia, what did they do? They defeated Hitler, they defeated Napoleon. Yeah, they’re a war machine.”

Mr. Trump has opposed providing more military aid to Ukraine, and he has vowed to end the war if elected president, though he is vague on the details other than citing his relationship with Mr. Putin.

When asked by Ms. Ingraham about his opposition to supporting Ukraine, Mr. Trump again insisted the invasion would not have happened if he had won re-election in 2020 and then said that he would encourage European leaders to provide more aid to Ukraine.

A former F.B.I. informant accused of making false bribery claims about President Biden and his son Hunter — which were widely publicized by Republicans — claimed to have been fed information by Russian intelligence, according to a court filing on Tuesday.

In the memo, prosecutors portrayed the former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, as a serial liar incapable of telling the truth about even the most basic details of his own life. But Mr. Smirnov told federal investigators that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.

Those disclosures, including Mr. Smirnov’s unverifiable claim that he met with Russian intelligence officials as recently as three months ago, made him a flight risk and endangered national security, Justice Department officials said. Mr. Smirnov had been held in custody in Las Vegas, where he has lived since 2022, since his arrest last week.

He was released from custody on Tuesday on a personal recognizance bond after a detention hearing, said his lawyers, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld.

Prosecutors did not specify which story Russian intelligence is said to have been fed to Mr. Smirnov, an Israeli citizen. But they suggested they could not believe anything he said. And they had many tales to choose from.

The memo describes Mr. Smirnov as a human hall of mirrors: He fed the F.B.I. bogus information about the Bidens and misled prosecutors about his wealth, estimated at $6 million, while telling them he worked in the security business, even though the government could find no proof that was true.

“The misinformation he is spreading is not confined” to his false claims about the Bidens, wrote prosecutors working for David C. Weiss, the special counsel investigating Hunter Biden on tax and gun charges.

“He is actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials in November,” they added.

That appeared to refer to Mr. Smirnov’s claim, made in late 2023 to the F.B.I., that he had spoken to the head of a Russian intelligence unit who said he had intercepted phone calls made by guests at a hotel overseas. Those included “several calls placed by prominent U.S. persons the Russian government may use as ‘kompromat’ in the 2024 election,” according to prosecutors.

Mr. Smirnov also told his F.B.I. handler that he was involved in meetings to help resolve the war in Ukraine, and that he had knowledge of assassination squads operating in “a third-party country.”

Last week, Mr. Weiss charged Mr. Smirnov with fabricating claims that President Biden and his son each sought $5 million bribes from a Ukrainian energy giant, Burisma, demanding the money to protect the company from an investigation by the country’s prosecutor general.

Those allegations, which prosecutors now say were brazen fabrications motivated by Mr. Smirnov’s animosity toward the president, were widely promoted by congressional Republicans who cited it as a justification for their now-stalled effort to impeach Mr. Biden.

Mr. Smirnov was taken into custody last week as he walked off an international flight from what prosecutors described as “a monthslong, multicountry foreign trip.” During that trip, he claimed to have had contacts with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and had planned to embark on a similar trip days later, according to the memo.

What makes the Smirnov case so unusual, aside from its political significance, is the willingness of the F.B.I. to publicly burn a confidential informant who had been on the bureau’s payroll as recently as last year. The filing contained excerpts from his source reporting documents, raw notes from interviews between handlers and informants that are considered some of the most sensitive federal law enforcement documents.

Also on Tuesday, Hunter Biden’s legal team filed motions in federal court arguing that the arrest of Mr. Smirnov — while unrelated to the charges Mr. Biden faces — has tainted the public’s perception of their client, making fair trials impossible.

“It now seems clear that the Smirnov allegations infected this case,” said Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, who accused Mr. Weiss of following “Mr. Smirnov down his rabbit hole of lies.”

The United States on Tuesday cast the sole vote against a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have called for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, saying it feared it could disrupt hostage negotiations.

It was the third time Washington wielded its veto to block a resolution demanding a stop to fighting in Gaza, underlining America’s isolation in its continued, forceful backing of Israel.

Over four months of war, Israel has come under increasing international pressure over the scope and intensity of its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, with many leaders decrying the high civilian death toll.

Algeria’s U.N. ambassador, Amar Bendjama, lashed out at the United States on Tuesday, telling the Council that the veto “implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon” the Palestinians. He said “silence is not a viable option, now is the time for action and the time for truth.”

The diplomatic maneuvering comes at a time when aid organizations are warning that urgent assistance is needed for a population suffering from severe malnutrition and the spread of infectious disease.

Thirteen Security Council members voted in favor of the resolution, which was drafted by Algeria, while Britain abstained.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that the resolution would jeopardize Washington’s continuing negotiation efforts with Qatar and Egypt to broker a deal that would release hostages from Gaza in exchange for a temporary humanitarian cease-fire. Those negotiations have stumbled, with neither Israel nor Hamas reaching a consensus on the terms for a deal.

“Any action the council takes right now should help not hinder these sensitive and ongoing negotiations,” Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said. “Demanding an immediate unconditional cease-fire without an agreement requiring Hamas to release the hostages will not bring endurable peace.”

Aid agencies were scathing in their criticism of the U.S. position. Avril Benoit, the executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States, called the repeated blocking of cease-fire resolutions by the United States “unconscionable.”

“The United States at the U.N. Security Council is effectively sabotaging all efforts to bring assistance,” she said at a panel on Tuesday with other leaders of aid organizations. “The statements are one thing, the actions are another. We see that a cease-fire is the only way to ensure the safe delivery of assistance to the people who need it most.”

Israeli and U.S. officials have argued that an immediate cease-fire would allow Hamas to regroup and fortify in Gaza, and reduce the pressure for making a deal to release hostages held in the territory.

The United States has drafted a rival resolution, which is still in early stages of negotiations, that calls for a temporary humanitarian cease-fire “as soon as practicable,” and the release of hostages. The draft resolution’s use of the term “cease-fire” would be a first for the United States since the war in Gaza began.

The draft also states that Israel’s army must not carry out an offensive in Rafah under the current conditions there.

With the United States expected to circulate its draft among Council members, two diplomats said that the resolution would be challenged, given the U.S. veto on Tuesday, and that Russia and China were expected to veto.

Waves of Palestinians have sought refuge in Rafah in recent months after Israeli ground forces pushed into the cities in northern Gaza, and then advanced southward. Israeli officials have said they are working on a plan to evacuate Rafah of civilians, and that they intend to destroy Hamas battalions there — one of Israel’s primary objectives since the Oct. 7 attacks that Hamas led into Israel, killing about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.

But in a sign that fighting remained active in the north despite four months of bombardment there, Israel’s military ordered two neighborhoods of Gaza City to evacuate on Tuesday. The U.N.’s World Food Program also said it was halting deliveries in the north on Tuesday, describing scenes of chaos as its teams faced looting, hungry crowds and gunfire in recent days.

While the fiercest fighting and most intense bombing has in recent weeks shifted further south, to areas around the city of Khan Younis, the evacuation order from Israel’s military on Tuesday for the Zaytoun and Turkoman neighborhoods of Gaza City highlighted the feeling expressed by many Gazans that nowhere is safe. More than 29,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s campaign began, according to the territory’s health officials.

World Food Program deliveries had been suspended for the past three weeks in the north because of safety concerns, and the agency was attempting to restart them on Sunday with an initial convoy. But the trucks were surrounded by “crowds of hungry people” while en route toward Gaza City and forced to fend off attempts to climb onto the vehicles, it said in a statement.

Another convoy on Monday “faced complete chaos and violence due to the collapse of civil order,” the statement added, saying that several trucks were looted and a driver was beaten.

The World Food Program pointed to a U.N. report published on Monday showing that acute malnutrition has surged in the northern part of the enclave, with one out of six children in the north of the territory suffering its effects.

In October, the United States vetoed a humanitarian resolution, put forth by Brazil, to deliver aid to Gaza at a time when Israel had placed the strip under a strict blockade of essential aid, saying it could undermine President Biden’s efforts with the government of Israel to win aid delivery to Gaza.

The vetoes by the United States have also allowed two countries often criticized for their own human rights abuses, Russia and China, to accuse Washington of being a major roadblock to preventing more death and suffering in Gaza. “It is not that the Security Council does not have an overwhelming consensus, but rather it is the exercise of the veto by the United States that has stifled the Council consensus,” said China’s ambassador, Zhang Jun.

And in a sign of the ubiquity of concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza, Prince William, the heir to the British throne, on Tuesday issued a rare, if measured, public statement on the war.

“I remain deeply concerned about the terrible human cost of the conflict in the Middle East since the Hamas terrorist attack,” he said in comments issued by his office.

“I, like so many others, want to see an end to the fighting as soon as possible,” he added. “There is a desperate need for increased humanitarian support to Gaza. It’s critical that aid gets in and the hostages are released.”

Matthew Mpoke Bigg and Stephen Castle contributed reporting.

President Biden said last week that he was “looking at a whole number of options” to make good on his 2021 warning to Vladimir Putin that Russia would face “devastating” consequences if Aleksei Navalny were to die in prison. Now that Putin has treated that warning with his customary contempt, Biden needs to act as a matter of moral clarity and personal credibility, and for the strategic imperative of demonstrating to a dictator that American threats aren’t hollow.

But how? Some analysts suggest that the administration, which on Tuesday vowed to impose tougher sanctions, will struggle to find ways to make them more effective, and that the best single policy to hurt Putin is to continue supporting Ukraine militarily. They’re right about the second point. As several close Russia watchers told me, however, there’s much more to be done about the first.

There are four broad approaches.

Finances: “The single most important thing we can do to hit back at Putin is to enact legislation to confiscate the $300 billion of frozen Russian bank reserves for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine,” Bill Browder, investor and political activist, wrote me on Monday. Browder is best known as the moving force behind the Magnitsky Acts, which put sanctions on Russian officials implicated in corruption and other abuses.

Browder’s suggestion isn’t new. And it’s been resisted by U.S. government officials who fear that it exceeds what American law allows and would encourage a flight from dollar assets. But as the Harvard legal scholar Larry Tribe and a team of experts from the firm of Kaplan, Heckler & Fink noted last year in a report for the Renew Democracy Initiative, seizing Russia’s assets is explicitly allowed as a “countermeasure,” an act designed to compel an aggressor to come into compliance with international law. As for the flight-from-the-dollar argument, it might otherwise be persuasive if the need to save Ukraine and punish Russia weren’t more urgent.

Seizing Russia’s assets “would be like two fingers in the eyes from the West,” Browder added. “Putin doesn’t care how many soldiers are killed, but he cares profoundly about his money. To top it off, all countries should call this new legislation the Navalny Act.”

Recognition: “Do not recognize Putin as the president of Russia after March 17 — that simple,” Garry Kasparov, the legendary chess and human-rights champion, told me by phone from Berlin. “Do not recognize the regime as legitimate.”

Kasparov was alluding to next month’s sham presidential election, in which Putin is running for a fifth term. But he’s also nodding to a deeper point, which is that while Putin might be indifferent to questions of legality, he craves and is keenly attuned to the trappings of political legitimacy, particularly internationally, which bolster his claims to rule.

It’s a point that was underscored to me by the economist Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago who this month was arrested in absentia by a Russian court. “Putin and his henchmen should be recognized and treated as a gang whose hold on power in Russia is based on brute force rather than any kind of legitimacy,” Sonin said. “It does not make sense to negotiate with Putin as any kind of agreement will have to be renegotiated when his regime falls.”

Dissidents: When Natan Sharansky called me from Jerusalem, that great Soviet refusenik, who exchanged letters with Navalny last year, turned almost immediately to Vladimir Kara-Murza, another imprisoned dissident. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza, 42, also survived poisonings and comas. Like Navalny, he’s being held in a “strict regime” penal colony on a 25-year-sentence for his opposition to Putin.

“If there are no changes” to Western policy, Sharansky said, Putin “could kill Kara-Murza tomorrow. The West needs to understand that these dissidents are the real friends of the free world, and they have to be seen as candidates for prisoner exchanges.” Sharansky was particularly critical of the 2022 exchange of a Russian archfiend, Viktor Bout, for the basketball star Brittney Griner, which surely enticed the Kremlin to arrest Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter, last March. “America showed they are a bad bargainer,” Sharansky lamented.

Sharansky is seconded by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The great Soviet dissidents taught us that they were fortified by Western attention to their plight,” Gerecht told me. “Today, we don’t know what Russian dissident, what Russian on the cusp of going ‘rogue,’ might galvanize Russians who loathe the regime.”

Power: One of my sources for this column asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of his current position, but he’s a long-admired expert on energy markets. “America’s liquefied natural gas is now part of NATO’s arsenal against Russia,” he told me. Biden, he advised, could “restore U.S. credibility as an L.N.G. exporter by lifting the administration’s ‘pause’ on new L.N.G. permits and thereby give Europe and Japan confidence to stop importing Russian L.N.G.”

While Russia’s oil and gas revenues have fallen steeply since the Ukraine war began, they still came to close to $100 billion last year — enough to finance the Kremlin’s war machine. What else could hurt? David Petraeus, the retired general and former C.I.A. director, had a specific suggestion: “The White House should announce the provision of the Army Tactical Missile System to Ukraine, which would double the range to approximately 300 kilometers of the missiles provided by the U.S. to date.”

Along with everyone I spoke with, Petraeus recognized that those missiles could be provided only if the $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine that the Senate approved last week can overcome a wall of Republican opposition in the House. Every Republican with a memory of what their party once stood for has an obligation to vote for that bill, just as Biden has a duty to ensure that evil will not go unpunished, and that Navalny did not die for nothing.

It began, prosecutors said, with one man accusing another of staring at him.

Groups of men, who appeared to be strangers, exchanged angry words and threats. A female friend tried to intervene. And then, surrounded by thousands of people at a rally last week celebrating Kansas City’s Super Bowl victory, at least two men pulled out their guns and began shooting.

“Just being stupid,” one of the men, Lyndell Mays, 23, told detectives later, according to the authorities, after admitting to firing his gun at least once or twice into the crowd.

Mr. Mays and another Missouri man, Dominic Miller, 18, were charged with murder for the death of a bystander, prosecutors announced on Tuesday. Ballistics tests revealed that a bullet from Mr. Miller’s gun killed Elizabeth Galvan, 43, a D.J. and radio host known as Lisa, who was at the parade on Wednesday with her family, prosecutors said.

Two dozen people were wounded by gunfire, including nine children.

Prosecutors described how a seemingly mundane interaction spiraled into violence, then chaos. As shots rang out, spectators screamed, ran for cover and rushed to tend to the wounded. Ms. Galvan was lying on the ground, fatally shot in the abdomen. Elected officials in attendance, including the governor of Kansas, were quickly evacuated for their safety.

More charges were expected as the police continue to investigate the shooting, Jean Peters Baker, the Jackson County prosecutor, said. Prosecutors would not say how many guns were believed to have been involved.

“We seek to hold every shooter accountable for their actions on that day,” she said. “Every single one. While we are not there yet on every single individual, we are going to get there.”

Both Mr. Miller and Mr. Mays were shot and remain hospitalized. They each are charged with second-degree felony murder, two counts of armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon. They are each being held on a $1 million bond, and if convicted, could be sentenced to life in prison.

“Consequences must be swift, certain, and severe,” said Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City.

It was not clear whether Mr. Miller or Mr. Mays were represented by lawyers, and the men could not be reached.

Separately, two days after the shooting, two teenagers were charged with resisting arrest and “gun-related” offenses. The teenagers have not been publicly identified and could eventually be tried as adults after a judicial process that can take days or weeks to decide how they should be tried.

The connection between the two men who were charged with murder and the teenagers who were charged with lesser offenses last week is unclear.

In a statement, Ms. Galvan’s family thanked the prosecutor and the Kansas City Police Department for their work in investigating the “senseless act of violence” that killed her.

“Though it does not bring back our beloved Lisa, it is comforting to know that the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office and the K.C.P.D. made it a top priority to seek justice for Lisa, the other shooting victims, those who had to witness this tragedy unfold and the Kansas City community,” the statement said.

The shooting erupted at the end of a parade and rally that drew tens of thousands of jubilant Kansas City Chiefs fans to the downtown area.

Surveillance video from the area, as described in charging documents from prosecutors, showed one group of people staring at one man, and a verbal argument ensuing. More people nearby joined the argument, and as it continued, the people who were involved began to produce firearms.

The authorities said that Mr. Miller was seen in the video appearing to fire shots, then was struck by a bullet in his lower back, causing him to fall to the ground. He then ran away, the charging documents say, shouting “I’m shot, I’m shot.”

A bystander saw that Mr. Miller was carrying a black firearm near his waistband, and tackled and disarmed him, the authorities said.

When interviewed by detectives at the hospital, Mr. Miller admitted that he was armed with a handgun at the rally and said that he fired roughly four or five shots, because he observed another man shooting at him, the authorities say.

Mr. Mays, the other man charged with murder, told detectives at the hospital that he had fired the first shots.

“He hesitated shooting because he knew there were kids there,” according to charging documents. Mr. Mays told the authorities that he only began firing because he believed that a woman in his group was going to be shot, the documents say.

Both the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office and the Kansas City Police Department said they had no previous contact with either Mr. Miller or Mr. Mays.