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LONDON — I’ve always resisted comparisons between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Not anymore.

True, the British prime minister did not try to cling to power by instructing his supporters to rampage through the Houses of Parliament. He has not made, so far, spurious claims that he’s been cheated out of office. But there was, nevertheless, something Trumpian about the way in which he tried to stop being evicted.

Even after the defection of some key allies — including the chancellor of the Exchequer and the health secretary, usually more than enough to dislodge a prime minister — he refused to budge. As more resignations were announced, the defiant message was that he intended to tough it out. It was only when the resignations flooded in that he concluded the game was up. He was probably the last person in Westminster to realize it.

The manner of his departure speaks volumes about the man. He has always acted, like Mr. Trump, as if the rules didn’t apply to him. Facts are ignored if they’re inconvenient, or dismissed altogether. Nothing matters more to him than himself. Anything or anyone can be sacrificed in that cause — friends, family, colleagues, party, government. No other prime minister in the long history of Britain’s parliamentary democracy has been so prepared to sacrifice the governance of the nation to save his own skin. That is Mr. Johnson’s special achievement.

The reasons for his departure also tell you a lot about the man. Throughout his torrid private and public lives and successful careers as journalist and politician, he has been haunted by accusations of deceit and dishonesty. Usually for good reason.

Until he became prime minister, this was often excused (as allies often excuse Mr. Trump). It was just Boris being Boris. He was a bit of a character in a bland world of identikit politicians, so you had to accept the rough with the smooth. Yes, he was economical with the truth — a euphemism for lying — but he made people laugh. He meant no harm. He was a good chap. He liked a jolly jape.

The Conservatives knew his flaws. They didn’t know what he stood for (it depended on the audience and the time of day). But they didn’t care. They chose him as leader because he was a vote-winning machine. He won the Brexit referendum in 2016 and, three years later, the first impressive Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher’s landslide of 1987. He appealed to poorer voters in regions that had never dreamed of voting Tory.

For such gains the Tories were ready to forgive much. But at the pinnacle of government, under the scrutiny of a tenacious media, deceit and dishonesty are harder to hide or excuse.

When stories broke that 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s official residence, had effectively become Britain’s party central during lockdown, it wasn’t just the injustice of it that started to turn opinion against him. It was also the typical obfuscation and downright lies that followed.

Mr. Johnson denied there had been any parties. (There were 16, some long into the night.) OK, but they complied with the rules, he insisted. (They hadn’t; scores of partygoers have had to pay police fines, including Mr. Johnson.) He wasn’t really involved, he claimed. (Photographic evidence and the testimony of his own aides suggested otherwise.) Mr. Johnson finally took refuge in a line he’s long used as a last resort: I was misled and badly advised by my team. It’s never his fault.

It all served as a reminder that bluster and lies had always been his modus operandi. Almost every week seemed to bring a fresh scandal, mainly trivial — about who was paying for gold wallpaper in his Downing Street apartment or a planned $180,000 tree house in his official country residence — but all amplified and prolonged by his consistent refusal to give straight answers.

Matters came to a head in the past week over an ally accused, not for the first time, of making inappropriate sexual advances to young men. Mr. Johnson claimed he knew nothing about the allegations when he appointed him to oversee, ironically, the party’s discipline and welfare. It wasn’t true. The defense quickly crumbled, and the denials were hastily withdrawn.

Once again, ministers who had been briefed for the daily round of broadcast interviews by Mr. Johnson’s aides found the “party line” they’d been pushing reversed within hours or, worse, when they were still on air. The embarrassment was complete. Instead of a unique electoral asset, the prime minister had become an electoral liability. The last reason for sticking with him had gone.

Mr. Johnson will go down in the history books, for good or ill, for delivering Brexit — though even that needs to be qualified. The deal he said was “oven ready” turned out to be half-baked, as the people of Northern Ireland, left without a government, can testify. Mr. Johnson could be fast and loose with the truth on big matters as well as small.

He did make use of Brexit freedoms to take the lead in developing a vaccine for the pandemic. But that only made up for his government’s often catastrophic handling of Covid in the early months. And he has been curiously quiet about what other benefits we might expect from Brexit. His government, meanwhile, has been bereft of economic policy, even as the cost of living soars.

He fared better with Ukraine, where the Russian invasion created an opening for his Churchillian pretensions and lent itself to his broad-brush approach. But in Britain, his popularity plummeted.

There are those who told us he would change. He was bright, gifted, privileged. He would grow up, settle into the job. Many wished it, including me. But that was never going to happen. As even Mr. Johnson has said, what you see is what you get. He cannot help himself and he cannot change.

At least he did resign, albeit with visible reluctance and a hint of churlishness. Yet it’s a little unsettling to think that he’ll continue as prime minister for the next few months. For though the degradation he’s spread through the country’s democracy may not reach Trumpian levels, whoever takes over is in for a rude shock. Boris Johnson has been even worse than you might think.

More than 100 million Americans have medical debt, according to a recent Kaiser Health News-NPR investigation. And about a quarter of American adults with this debt owe more than $5,000. This isn’t because they’re uninsured. More often, it’s because they’re underinsured.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to improve access to health insurance, and it did. It reduced the number of Americans who were uninsured through the Medicaid expansion and the creation of the health insurance marketplaces. Unfortunately, it has not done enough to protect people from rising out-of-pocket expenses in the form of deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance.

Out-of-pocket expenses exist for a reason; people are less likely to spend their own money than an insurance company’s money, and these expenses are supposed to make patients stop and think before they get needless care. But this moral-hazard argument assumes that patients are rational consumers, and it assumes that cost-sharing in the form of deductibles and co-pays makes them better shoppers. Research shows this is not the case. Instead, extra costs result in patients not seeking any care, even if they need it.

Cost-sharing isn’t set up in a thoughtful way such that it might steer people away from inefficient care toward efficient care. Deductibles are, frankly, ridiculous. The use of deductibles assumes that all medical spending is the same and that the system should disincentivize all of it, starting over each Jan. 1. There is no valid argument for why that should be. Flu season peaks in the winter. We were in an Omicron surge at the beginning of this year. Making that the time when people are most discouraged from getting care doesn’t make sense.

Co-pays and co-insurance aren’t much better. They treat all patients the same, and they assume that all patients should be treated the same way.

In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published last year, researchers looked at how increases in cost-sharing affected how older adults, who are more likely to need care, pay for and use drugs. Remember, people age 65 and older in the United States are insured with what most consider to be rather comprehensive coverage: Medicare. The researchers claimed, however, that a simple $10 increase in cost-sharing, which many would consider a small amount of money, led to about a 23 percent decrease in drug consumption. Worse, they said it led to an almost 33 percent increase in monthly mortality. In other words, making seniors pay $10 more per prescription led to people dying.

These seniors weren’t taking optional, esoteric, exceptionally expensive medications. This finding was for drugs that treat cholesterol and high blood pressure. In fact, they were considered “high value” drugs because they were proven to save lives. Further, those at higher risk of a heart attack or stroke were more likely to cancel their prescriptions than people at lower risk.

People are not smart shoppers or rational spenders when it comes to health care. When you make people pay more, they consume less care, even if it’s for lifesaving treatment.

Moreover, a $10 increase in drug cost-sharing is small potatoes compared with what most people have to pay out of pocket for care each year. The average deductible on a silver-level plan on the A.C.A. exchanges rose to $4,500 in 2021. If people tried to buy plans with a lower premium, at a bronze level, the average deductible rose to more than $6,000. Granted, some cost-sharing reductions are available for those who make less than 250 percent of the federal poverty line, but even after accounting for those, the average deductible was more than $3,100 for silver plans.

Those who receive insurance from their employers aren’t much better off than those who buy on the A.C.A. marketplaces. The average deductible for insurance offered by large companies in the United States was more than $1,200. At small companies, it was more than $2,000.

Those are only the deductibles. After they are paid, people must still cover co-pays and co-insurance until they hit the out-of-pocket maximums. The good news is that the A.C.A. limits these in plans sold in the exchanges. The bad news is that they’re astronomical: $8,700 for an individual and $17,400 for a family.

A large majority of Americans don’t have that kind of money sitting in accounts, certainly not after paying an average of about $5,000 in premiums each year for a benchmark individual silver plan. Half of U.S. adults don’t have even $500 to cover an unexpected bill. Anyone who requires significant health care will be out the entire deductible, meaning thousands of dollars, and if severely ill, is likely to hit the out-of-pocket maximum.

Of course Americans are in medical debt. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates the country’s collective medical debt is almost $200 billion.

It’s worth noting that the cost of health care in the United States is so high that even expensive premiums are not enough to cover the full amount without significant out-of-pocket spending. That doesn’t mean no better options exist for cost-sharing. We could treat those with diagnosed chronic diseases differently, as many countries in Europe do. It makes sense to try to disincentivize healthy people from overtreatment, but lots of people, including me, need care that costs money every day. It makes no sense to try to persuade me to rethink that. U.S. leaders could also consider adapting a reference pricing system, where the health system determines what constitutes the lowest-cost, highest-quality care and makes that available without any out-of-pocket spending. Cost-sharing can then be applied to other options that might cost more or have less evidence behind them.

The purpose of insurance is to protect people from financial ruin if they face unexpected medical expenses. Reducing the amount that they need to pay from six figures to five is necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not enough to give people insurance. That insurance must also be comprehensive.

HOUSTON — Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday ordered the Texas National Guard and the state police to begin apprehending migrants who illegally cross the border from Mexico and taking them back to ports of entry, a move that could put the state into direct conflict with the federal government over immigration.

Mr. Abbott, in a statement, said the goal was to return “illegal immigrants to the border to stop this criminal enterprise endangering our communities.”

The order, which significantly expanded the potential activity of Guard troops and state police personnel along the border, came amid mounting pressure on Mr. Abbott from conservatives and Republicans to take even more drastic action to address the record number of arrivals from Mexico. Federal agents recorded 240,000 crossings in May, the majority of those in Texas, though recently the daily numbers have gone down slightly, an official said, citing internal data.

This week, Texas officials from counties at or near the border have called on the governor to act, and the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, has urged Mr. Abbott to have state law enforcement personnel “put hands on people and send them back,” likening the numbers of migrants arriving in Mexico to the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.

Republicans outside Texas have also pushed Mr. Abbott. “Texas should just send them back across the border,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said during a news conference last month.

Immigration has historically been the purview of the federal government, and states have refrained from seeking to enforce federal immigration laws themselves, particularly after a Supreme Court ruling a decade ago knocked down an effort by Arizona to do so.

Mr. Abbott has so far stopped short of what many of his conservative critics have called for: a formal declaration of an “invasion” that, proponents argue, would allow the governor to seize war powers and have state law enforcement personnel not only take migrants back to the border but directly deport them.

Indeed, the first criticisms of his order came not from immigration advocates or civil rights groups but from a former top Department of Homeland Security official under the Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, who implied that the governor’s order did not go far enough. Mr. Cuccinelli has been actively calling for Mr. Abbott to make the invasion declaration.

“The governor does not appear to formally declare an invasion nor direct the National Guard and Department of Public Safety to remove illegals across the border directly to Mexico,” read a joint statement from Mr. Cuccinelli and Russ Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative nonprofit group. “That is critical. Otherwise this is still catch and release.”

RAICES, a Texas nonprofit that provides legal services to migrants, said in a statement that the order was a “disgusting political stunt” and “unlawful” and called for the Department of Justice “to intervene immediately.”

While Mr. Abbott has previously deployed thousands of National Guard members to the border, the troops have largely acted as lookouts, calling federal Border Patrol agents when they spot unauthorized migrants arriving.

In his order on Thursday, Mr. Abbott appeared ready to test the bounds of the law around immigration enforcement, declaring that the Supreme Court, in a 2012 case, had not specifically addressed whether a state could detain someone on suspicion of immigration offenses or whether federal law would prohibit that.

“This is setting up a test case,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court rejected a similar effort by Arizona in 2012 to set immigration enforcement priorities, he said.

“But this is a different Supreme Court,” he added. “If you’re Texas, you might think, ‘Here’s a good opportunity to see if there’s still a majority for that precedent.’”

The governor’s order went into effect immediately, but officials said the practical details of how it would be implemented were still being worked out.

It appeared likely to complicate relations between state law enforcement officers and federal agents, who routinely work together along the border.

Mr. Abbott’s office directed inquiries to the National Guard and to the Department of Public Safety, neither of which responded to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security and the Border Patrol also did not immediately comment on the order.

Several questions remain about how the order would be carried out on the ground. It was not clear, for example, how far from the border migrants would be apprehended, how they would be identified and what would happen to them once they were deposited at the ports of entry, which are at a series of bridges between Mexico and Texas.

Also unclear was how the order would dovetail with Mr. Abbott’s existing efforts to address the arrival of migrants to Texas, one of which calls for law enforcement officers to charge those found on private ranches with trespassing. It was not expected to affect a state program in which migrants already processed by the Border Patrol have been offered rides to Washington or elsewhere on buses chartered by the state.

Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney at the A.C.L.U. of Texas, said that the order would encourage state law enforcement officers “to racially profile Black and brown people” and that it “recklessly fans the flames of hate in our state.”

Mr. Abbott has said that his administration is considering taking the further step of invoking war powers in order to deport unauthorized migrants but that there are legal concerns. Among them, he said, was the possibility that doing so could “expose law enforcement in the state of Texas to being prosecuted” by the federal government.

But anger among conservatives has grown, particularly among those in communities near the border.

On Tuesday, several county leaders held a news conference and declared, among themselves, that the surge of migrants constituted an invasion.

“We are here to change that,” said one of the county leaders, Tully Shahan, the top executive in Kinney County. “We don’t want to lose America. The Biden administration can stop this thing this hour. They can stop it now.”

Mike Bennett, the top executive in Goliad County, addressed Mr. Abbott directly, saying, “I ask the governor to step up today and deal with these people at the border.”

Mr. Abbott’s plan appeared similar to a tactic used recently by the sheriff of Kinney County, Brad Coe, who said he had driven several migrants from his county to a bridge in the border city of Eagle Pass and left them there.

“We returned four to the port of entry in Mexico so they could return home,” Mr. Coe said during the Tuesday news conference. “There was no deportation. We picked them up, put them in the truck and took them home.”

James Dobbins and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

The Las Vegas Raiders hired Sandra Douglass Morgan, the former chairwoman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, as the team’s new president. She is the first Black woman to hold the position for an N.F.L. franchise.

Morgan fills a role that was vacated twice in the past year amid front office upheaval and allegations of financial mismanagement and workplace dysfunction within the Raiders organization. She joins the Raiders nine months after the departure of Coach Jon Gruden, who resigned in October 2021 after The New York Times detailed emails in which he made misogynistic and homophobic comments before starting his second stint with the team.

A lawyer who has also sat on the boards for Caesars Entertainment and Allegiant Travel, the parent company of the airline that has the naming rights to the Raiders’ stadium, Morgan was named the vice chair of Las Vegas’ host committee for Super Bowl LVIII last year.

Since the Raiders moved to Las Vegas from Oakland, Calif., in 2020, six of the team’s eight top executives quit or were fired with little explanation. Marc Badain resigned as team president in July 2021, and his interim replacement, Dan Ventrelle, was fired in May. Ventrelle later accused the Raiders’ owner Mark Davis, whose family has run the team for more than 50 years, of creating a hostile work environment.

CANAZEI, Italy — Days before a glacier in the Italian Dolomites broke off with the force of a collapsing skyscraper, crushing at least nine hikers under an avalanche of ice, snow and rock, Carlo Budel heard water running under the ice.

“I heard what sounded like a river’s torrent,” said Mr. Budel, who lives in an isolated refuge next to the glacier on the 11,000-foot Marmolada mountain. At the mountain’s base, he watched a yellow helicopter fly overhead searching for signs of life, or remains.

Mr. Budel recalled that when he first scaled the glacier at the end of summer, not even a decade ago, he hardly needed ropes, there was so much snow.

“The difference between now and then is scary,” he said. “At this point we are on another path.”

It is an increasingly common path for a world confronting the deadly consequences of extreme weather brought on by man-made, and irreversible, climate change.

A year after Greece lost lives, livestock and entire swaths of forest to wildfires, and deadly floods swept through Germany, the calamity in these mountains this week provided the latest evidence that almost no part of the continent can escape the effects of Europe’s new, intense and often unlivable summer heat. That includes the highest peak of the Dolomites.

Italy is suffering through another prolonged and scorching heat wave, which contributed to the disaster and has brought the worst drought in 70 years along the Po River, its longest waterway, cutting off fountains and parching parts of the country.

“These kinds of events, they are getting more and more frequent, and they will be more frequent with enhanced global warming,” said Susanna Corti, the coordinator of the Global Change unit of Italy’s National Research Council.

Dr. Corti said that if temperatures keep increasing, “we won’t have glaciers anymore” on the Alps, a dramatic change over the last at least million years in Europe, with enormous and unpredictable consequences on the shape of the continent, vegetation, animal life and the water cycle.

Dr. Corti said glaciers needed to be monitored more carefully, because “the risk of this kind of event is increasing” and because things “won’t go back to the way they were.”

Prof. Massimiliano Fazzini, a climate expert with the Italian Society of Environmental Geology, said that Italy currently has about 920 glaciers, almost entirely in the Alps, though only about 70 of them were monitored annually by the Italian Glaciological Committee.

Their contribution of snow and melted ice varied considerably depending on the year, but the water from them was usually used to fill artificial lakes that provide electricity or to direct water to rivers in times of drought. In the last 20 years, Professor Fazzini said, Italy had lost 25 percent of the water from those shrinking glaciers.

On Wednesday, as the ominous whir of helicopters buzzed over the village of Canazei, with its neat cheese-and-chocolate-commercial alpine houses, the authorities set up under the mountain, known as the Queen of the Dolomites, and announced that aid workers had recovered the remains of two more people spotted by drones. That brought the death toll from Sunday’s avalanche up to nine people, four of whom have been identified as Italian, with five people still missing.

“We are doing everything possible to find these people,” said Maurizio Fugatti, the president of Trento Province.

They were victims of what Prime Minister Mario Draghi called “the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation.” Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, speaking in Mozambique on Tuesday, said it was a “symbol of what climate change, if not governed, is producing around the world.”

“There is no hope without everyone’s cooperation,” Mr. Mattarella said.

The Dolomites in northeastern Italy, with their jagged peaks, fresh air scented with the sawing of logs from the dense alpine forests, their hills gurgling with clear creeks, have long offered Italy and all of Europe a respite from the summer heat. But now they too are warming up, with the heat wave raising temperatures on the usually frigid mountains to around 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

That helped melt the ice on a glacier that, from 2004 to 2015, had already shrunk 30 percent in volume, according to a 2019 study by Italy’s National Research Council and international universities. The researchers predicted the disappearance of the glacier in 25 to 30 years.

Other experts have said that up to half of the glaciers in the Alps may disappear by 2050, and a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year predicted irreversible loss of glaciers by the end of this century.

The consequences are dire for human life, the environment and local economies. The melting is even shifting national boundaries, which have often been drawn along glacial lines.

“Climate change,” Franco Narducci, an Italian politician, recently told Parliament, contributed to “the erosion and contraction of glaciers,” and forced the country to rethink how it drew its borders.

The most notable example has been the Rifugio Guide del Cervino, a traditional mountain lodge in the Pennine Alps on the border with Switzerland near the Matterhorn. The melting of a glacier has moved more of the refuge into Switzerland, causing a bureaucratic headache for the owner, who wants to stay in Italy, and an unexpected diplomatic headache for the two countries.

But now the pain is most acute in Canazei, the town in the Trentino area of Italy that sits in the mountain’s shadow.

On Tuesday, as reporters waited for helicopters to bring the region’s president to a news conference, Debora Campagnaro, whose sister Erica Campagnaro and brother-in-law, Davide Miotti, were still missing, took advantage of the assembled press to chastise the local authorities for not installing detection and warning devices that would have prevented people from approaching the glacier.

“My brother-in-law was an Alpine guide, extremely expert,” she said. “If he had only a sign of danger, he would not have gone with my sister. Husband and wife would not have left two children back home,” she said, her voice cracking.

Given the heat of the previous days, Ms. Campagnaro said, someone was to blame for not doing something. But as she broke from the crowd and returned to her car, she said there was another culprit: “The climactic things.”

In a grass field at the foot of the mountain, roped off with police tape, only a blue Dacia with plates from the Czech Republic remained. A sunshade glinted in the bright sun across its windshield and a spare gray T-shirt and pair of socks waited in the back. It belonged, Mr. Fugatti said, to one of the missing or dead on the mountain.

For now, only drones and helicopters have surveyed the site of the slide. Italy’s National Alpine and Cave Rescue Corps considers the glacier unstable, and too dangerous to explore by foot.

They also warned of the possibility of finding old ordnance. The glaciers played a role as a front in World War I between Austria-Hungary and Italy, when Austro-Hungarian soldiers bore tunnels deep into the ice. The retreating of the glaciers has sometimes exposed the remains of soldiers.

As technicians began equipping the area around the glacier with radar devices to sense disturbances, hikers in T-shirts and with water bottles sweated on the trails below the mountain.

“When the glacier melts, everyone will feel it, even down below,” said Anna Lazzari, 45, who came with her two children.

Her brother, Giampaolo Domidi, who has been hiking in the area for 40 years, said that the change of temperature since his youth was dramatic, and that he carried a fleece on his belt essentially as a memento of another time.

Mr. Domidi said he was “deeply worried” that global warming would make it impossible for his nephew and niece, who were sweating and exhausted next to him, to appreciate the natural wonders he grew up with.

And on the winding roads approaching the mountain and the lake fed by the glacier above, drivers got out of their cars to look at what the slide had wrought.

“They’ll never find anyone,” said Egidio Nicoletto, 74, shielding his eyes as he looked at the sheer cliff.

“Pieces, maybe,” said a motorcyclist, Raymond Oberhofer, 70.

Mr. Nicoletto said that he and his wife had a summer house nearby and that 30 years ago he skied on the glacier, even in the summer. “It was all snow, a completely different landscape,” he said. From their house, he said, they could see the majestic summit of the Marmolada, but every year “it was always less white.”

The problem, he noted, is everywhere, even in the province of Venice, where he lives. The rains there have slowed. “In Venice,” he said. “We don’t even know what water is anymore.”

In the days before the deadly slide, Mr. Budel posted a video on social media, where he has tens of thousands of followers. “Poor Marmolada glacier,” he wrote in the caption. “This year this glacier is going to get such a blow.”

Sitting in a wool hat thousands of feet below his refuge, he said that the lack of snow during the winter had left the glacier exposed, and that he had found it in worse condition in mid-June than he did last August.

“This tragedy makes us understand that climate change exists, but unfortunately it happened on a Sunday at 2 in the afternoon, the worst time and day possible,” he said. “Because if not, if it happened during the week and wasn’t a tragedy, we wouldn’t even be talking about it.”

Carlos Moncayo was just 22 when he was crushed to death by thousands of pounds of dirt at a construction site in Manhattan’s meatpacking district.

More than seven years later, a construction safety bill named after him could become law, if Gov. Kathy Hochul chooses to sign it. The legislation, known as Carlos’s Law, would dramatically raise the fines faced by corporations for construction accidents that result in criminal convictions.

While the bill passed both houses of the State Legislature on the final day of the session last month, Ms. Hochul’s office has said only that she was reviewing it.

Prosecutions for injuries or deaths on construction sites are exceedingly rare nationwide, but the Moncayo case was an exception. The Manhattan district attorney’s office pursued charges, and the general contractor, Harco Construction, was found guilty of manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and reckless endangerment.

The company was ultimately sentenced to pay just $10,000 because of state-imposed limits on corporate penalties. The district attorney at the time, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., denounced the outcome, saying the fine was merely “Monopoly money” for the company.

Supporters of Carlos’s Law say that the specter of much higher fines in such cases would deter contractors from cutting corners on safety, sometimes with perilous consequences.

The city’s Department of Buildings has recorded 84 construction-related fatalities since 2015. Statistics shows that deaths are more likely at nonunion sites, where workers may face pressure to comply with unreasonable demands.

Diana Florence, who served as the lead prosecutor on Mr. Moncayo’s case, said in an interview that many construction injuries and even deaths are not properly investigated from the outset.

But the Moncayo case hinged on a coincidence: A police supervisor who responded to the scene had once worked in construction, and he immediately recognized that the pit that Mr. Moncayo was working in was not reinforced, as it should have been.

“He realized that the trench was basically a ticking time bomb,” Ms. Florence said.

Prosecutors would later argue that supervisors had ordered Mr. Moncayo, who was undocumented and did not belong to a union, to go into the pit despite the danger, because the project was behind schedule.

The site they were working on, near the High Line, had once been the restaurant Pastis and was being turned into a Restoration Hardware store.

The case spurred a yearslong effort to increase the fines in such cases and to expand liability so that companies can be held responsible for the actions of a greater range of employees.

Carlos’s Law was first introduced in 2017 and passed the State Assembly that year, but was held up in the State Senate by opposition from Republicans and the real estate industry.

This year, though, there was a breakthrough. The Mason Tenders’ District Council, an alliance of construction laborers’ unions and a major force behind the bill, reached agreement in May with the Real Estate Board of New York on adjustments to the legislation, including changes to provisions affecting supervisors and foremen.

The version that passed allows the courts to decide restitution without a cap and raises minimum fines to $500,000 for felonies and $300,000 for misdemeanors in cases involving injuries or deaths.

“We think that’s going to catch the attention of the rogue developers and contractors that put their workers’ lives at risk in the pursuit of profit,” said Mike Hellstrom, business manager for the mason tenders.

In a joint statement after the bill’s passage, Mr. Hellstrom and James Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board, said they had “every intention of building on the partnership between our organizations that contributed to this legislative achievement.”

Ms. Hochul is up for election in November and enjoys strong support from organized labor, leading supporters of Carlos’s Law to believe that she will sign it into law soon. The deadline to act on any of the more than 1,000 bills that passed both chambers during the last session is the end of the year.

Collecting comprehensive data on criminal cases stemming from workplace injuries and deaths is complicated. Federal regulators occasionally refer cases to the Justice Department for prosecutions but must meet a high bar of evidence for “willful violations” that cause the death of an employee.

State and local prosecutors may bring charges, as they did in the Moncayo case. In fact, months after Mr. Moncayo’s death, the Manhattan district attorney’s office and several other agencies, including the city Department of Investigation, announced the creation of a Construction Fraud Task Force to focus on misconduct amid a boom in new construction.

The current district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has urged Ms. Hochul to sign Carlos’s Law, which he said would establish “meaningful deterrence.”

“Corporations must be held accountable when a worker is injured or killed due to unsafe conditions,” Mr. Bragg said in a statement.

The fines in question are separate from those imposed by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration or local agencies for violations at work sites.

The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, an advocacy group that pushed for the bill, has called for other prosecutors across the state to follow the lead of the Manhattan district attorney’s office and be more proactive on prosecuting such cases.

Supporters of Carlos’s Law, including NYCOSH, say that even if prosecutions remain the exception, the law would restrain unscrupulous builders, by raising the costs associated with worker injuries.

“We want cases of Carlos’s Law to be rare because we want employers to be responsible and to follow every applicable safety and health standard and not put workers’ lives in danger,” said Charlene Obernauer, the group’s executive director.

Diana Moreno, the interim executive director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a Queens-based nonprofit, said the bill’s signing would address a “shameful injustice.”

“The risk of having to pay a substantial fine, a minimum of $500,000 under this new law, will finally hold developers and construction companies accountable and incentivize them to uphold health and safety standards,” she said.

Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who sponsored the bill in the Assembly alongside James Sanders Jr. in the Senate, said that the issue was personal for her. About 25 years ago, her brother Wagner fell off a scaffold while on a construction job and was left permanently disabled.

She now represents the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and counts among her constituents many undocumented immigrants from the Caribbean and from countries in Africa who work in construction.

“You have a lot of construction firms that take advantage of immigrant workers, pay low, do not train them, do not provide a safe area for them to work because they don’t value their lives,” she said. “They know that these immigrants do not have the resources to pursue a lawsuit or claim, so they take advantage.”

Before putting in her vote for the bill, State Senator Jessica Ramos read the names of workers who had died in New York since Mr. Moncayo, noting that most of them were Latino, and many were her neighbors in Queens.

“It is going to be lifesaving for families in my district,” she said of the bill.

Francisco Moya, now a member of the City Council representing roughly the same area of Queens as Ms. Ramos, helped write the bill when he was in the Assembly.

He also felt a personal connection to the Moncayo case. He and Mr. Moncayo shared Ecuadorean roots and lived just blocks away from one another.

“This is a victory in the fight to make sure that every construction worker that leaves their house in the morning for work is alive to make it home for dinner,” he said.

A top Russian diplomat lashed out at the Biden administration on Thursday for trying to “foment hype” around the case of the detained American basketball star Brittney Griner, hours before her trial was expected to resume in a court near Moscow.

The diplomat, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister, said that the publicity around Ms. Griner’s case — American officials say she is essentially a hostage taken by President Vladimir V. Putin amid the war in Ukraine — was not helping her interests.

Mr. Ryabkov indicated that Moscow would be prepared to negotiate her fate, but only after the court reached a verdict on the drug charges that were brought against her. She has been detained in Russia since Feb. 17, accused by the Russian authorities of having a vape cartridge with hashish oil in her luggage at an airport near Moscow.

“We have a long-established form of discussing these matters,” Mr. Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday in Moscow, according to the Interfax news agency. “The American side’s attempts to foment hype and make noise in the public environment are understandable, but they don’t help to practically resolve issues.”

If Ms. Griner is convicted, she faces up to 10 years in a Russian penal colony.

After her trial began last week, she sent a handwritten letter to Mr. Biden asking him not to “forget about” her and other American detainees overseas.

Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke on Wednesday with Ms. Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, according to a statement released by the White House.

During the call, the statement said, the president read a draft of a letter that he planned to send to Brittney Griner. He also said that his administration was pursuing “every avenue to bring Brittney home.”

Cherelle Griner has publicly expressed frustration with Mr. Biden and his administration’s efforts to secure her wife’s release.

In a statement to The New York Times on Wednesday, Cherelle Griner said she was grateful to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris “for the time they spent with me and for the commitment they expressed to getting B.G. home.”

The United States government has classified Brittney Griner as “wrongfully detained” and is working to secure her release regardless of the outcome of the trial. While the Kremlin claims it has no involvement in Ms. Griner’s case, Russian state media reports have indicated that Moscow may press the United States to free a Russian in American custody — like the convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout — in exchange for her freedom.

Mr. Ryabkov said that until the conclusion of Ms. Griner’s case, “there are no formal procedural grounds” to discuss further steps. He hinted, however, that Moscow was interested in negotiating over her fate, claiming that she would be helped by “a serious reading by the American side of the signals that they received from Russia, from Moscow, through specialized channels.”

He did not specify what those signals were, but insisted that talks on Ms. Griner’s fate should take place out of the public eye, according to Russian news reports.

“Hype and publicity, for all the love for this genre among modern politicians, only gets in the way in this particular instance,” Mr. Ryabkov said, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. “This does not just distract from the case, but creates interference in the truest sense of the word. That’s why silence is needed here.”

LONDON — His support crumbling, his government in disarray, his alibis exhausted, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain tried frantically on Wednesday to salvage his position, even as a delegation of cabinet colleagues traveled to Downing Street to plead with their scandal-scarred leader to step down.

By Thursday morning, more than 50 government ministers or aides had quit. The day before, multiple Conservative Party lawmakers had urged Mr. Johnson to resign, and he had received a withering reception in Parliament, where backbenchers jeered, “Bye, Boris!” as he left by a side door after a merciless grilling over his handling of the party’s latest sex-and-bullying scandal.

Amid the fast-moving developments, Mr. Johnson vowed to fight on, insisting he had a mandate from voters to steer Britain into its post-Brexit future, even as rebellious cabinet ministers tried to dislodge him.

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Johnson fired one of his closest advisers, Michael Gove, from a powerful economic post in the Cabinet. Earlier in the day, the BBC reported that Mr. Gove had urged Mr. Johnson to resign.

That moment of drama was followed by the late-night resignation of another cabinet minister, Simon Hart, the Welsh secretary.

Elsewhere in Westminster, lawmakers considered — and then postponed, for a few days at least — a change in party rules that would allow another confidence vote, possibly next week, against the prime minister, who survived such a vote just a month ago.

There was a growing consensus that, however events play out over the next few hours or days, the curtain was falling on the era of Boris Johnson. Less than three years after he entered Downing Street, before riding a wave of pro-Brexit passion to win a landslide election victory, Mr. Johnson seemed cornered — a protean political gambler finally out of moves.

That does not mean the end will come quickly or gracefully. Mr. Johnson resisted the appeals of the cabinet delegation to resign. He has not ruled out calling a snap election to throw his fate to British voters. Such a move would need the assent of Queen Elizabeth II, which could precipitate a political crisis.

“The job of a prime minister in difficult circumstances, when he’s been handed a colossal mandate, is to keep going,” a grim-faced Mr. Johnson declared in Parliament, rejecting yet another call for his resignation.

The opposition leader, Keir Starmer, brushed that off, excoriating Mr. Johnson and the cabinet ministers who have yet to abandon the prime minister after a seemingly endless stream of scandals. The latest chapter of this drama kicked off on Tuesday with the resignations of two senior ministers.

“Anyone quitting now, after defending all that, hasn’t got a shred of integrity,” said Mr. Starmer, the Labour Party leader, staring balefully across a table at Mr. Johnson. “Isn’t this the first recorded case of the sinking ship fleeing the rats?”

For all the drama in Parliament, the real action on Wednesday occurred out of sight, where Mr. Johnson’s dwindling band of supporters and growing gang of adversaries maneuvered. Mr. Johnson’s dismissal of Mr. Gove was particularly charged, since in 2016, Mr. Gove had derailed Mr. Johnson’s first bid for the Tory Party leadership by unexpectedly entering the contest himself.

The latest chapter in the crisis began on Tuesday when two senior cabinet ministers abruptly resigned: the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and the health secretary, Sajid Javid. The trigger was Mr. Johnson’s handling of a case involving Chris Pincher, a Conservative lawmaker who admitted to having been drunk at a private members’ club in London where, it was alleged, he groped two men.

On Thursday, the flurry of resignations continued, with Brandon Lewis, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland; Helen Whately, the Exchequer secretary to the treasury; Damian Hinds, the security minister; and George Freeman, the science minister, among those announcing on Twitter that they were quitting and sharing their letters to the prime minister.

Given the speed with which Mr. Johnson’s government was unraveling, many Tory lawmakers believe that Mr. Johnson needs to be replaced quickly to mitigate the electoral damage to the party. Even before the latest scandal broke, opinion polls showed the Conservatives trailing well behind Labour.

The dilemma for the party’s senior figures was whether to permit a swift no confidence vote against Mr. Johnson. Under existing party rules, there cannot be another such vote until a year after the last one — next June.

But the leaders of the 1922 Committee, which represents backbench Conservative lawmakers, have been willing to rip up their rule book before: When Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, won a confidence vote in 2018 but then failed to push her Brexit plan through a log-jammed Parliament.

According to Graham Brady, who chairs the committee, the proposed rule change was in his pocket when he went to meet the prime minister, but he never showed it to Mrs. May, who agreed to step aside.

Under a fast-track scenario this time, lawmakers would hold the confidence vote before the summer recess. If Mr. Johnson lost, they would move fast to select two leading candidates to replace him as party leader and prime minister. The two contenders would then run in a final contest where the selection is by the party’s members.

Tobias Ellwood, a former minister and critic of Mr. Johnson, said he had reservations about changing the rules but believed it would happen if the prime minister refused to leave on his own. He likened a change of leader to a trip to the dentist.

“We have been putting it off,” he said. “You’ve got to go to the dentist and get through it — getting rid of Boris is that trip to the dentist.”

Moving fast, Mr. Ellwood said, would allow the party to use the summer vacation to conduct the leadership election and give a new prime minister a platform at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in the fall. That looked increasingly likely as the situation worsened for Mr. Johnson on Wednesday, with more than 30 junior ministers and ministerial aides submitting their resignations.

At one point, five junior ministers quit in the same resignation letter, including the equalities and local government minister, Kemi Badenoch, and Neil O’Brien, a minister with responsibility for Mr. Johnson’s policy of “leveling up” prosperity across the country.

Downing Street was unable to give a timetable for replacing others who declared they were no longer able to serve Mr. Johnson, including the Treasury minister, John Glen, and his Home Office colleague, Victoria Atkins.

Mr. Johnson had moved quickly to announce replacements for Mr. Sunak and Mr. Javid, signaling that he planned to try to steady the government. And he did his best to project a defiant image.

Confronted by the prospect of a new confidence vote, Mr. Johnson might opt to call a general election instead, even if the prospects for his party are bleak. The prime minister has reminded critics repeatedly of his party’s landslide victory in 2019, when he vowed to “Get Brexit Done,” and thrashed a divided Labour Party.

Constitutional experts argue that the queen might refuse to grant an election on the grounds that the Conservatives still have a sizable parliamentary majority. However, rejecting such a request might be difficult for Buckingham Palace, which prides itself on staying above politics. Moreover, the Labour Party is eager for an election and would relish a fight against a discredited prime minister.

Above all, however, there are Mr. Johnson’s Houdini-like instincts. In the last three years, he has survived multiple investigations, a criminal fine by the police, and a no-confidence vote among Conservative lawmakers. He may believe he can escape yet again.

“Unlike most leaders, he doesn’t care how much damage he does on his way out the door,” said Jonathan Powell, who served as chief of staff to a former prime minister, Tony Blair. “There isn’t anyone in our history who’s had this kind of nature. Our system is not built for something like this.”

The warring gangs took over several neighborhoods around Port-au-Prince weeks ago, going door to door, raping women and girls, killing the men, beheading many of the adults and then forcing the newly orphaned children into their ranks.

One woman, Kenide Charles, took cover with her 4-month-old baby underneath a bed, waiting for the fighting to subside. It never did and she fled, crossing gang checkpoints with her son raised above her head, like a human white flag.

This week marks a year since Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was murdered in his home in one of the capital’s wealthiest neighborhoods as dozens of police stepped aside, letting the assassins through. Many Haitians had no love for the deeply unpopular president, but thought his assassination would be the country’s new rock bottom and believed they could start climbing back up.

Instead, the picture remains grim with a seeming state of lawlessness taking hold in parts of the country.

Mr. Moïse was killed in a sprawling plot that ensnared Colombian ex-soldiers, informants for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and American citizens. Haitian government officials were also accused of playing a role. A key suspect in the killing is expected to stand trial in Florida. The international community promised to help solve the president’s murder and prevent the crime from contributing to a mountain of impunity that has plagued Haiti for centuries.

But the many questions around Mr. Moïse’s killing remain unanswered, contributing to a broken central government and a rising dominance of multiple gangs.

The violence that recently rocked Ms. Charles’s impoverished neighborhood over nearly two weeks in May is a sign of how brutal life is for many Haitians.

“I see no future in Haiti for my kids,’’ Ms. Charles, 37, said. “Even to feed them is a struggle.” Her older daughter, Charnide, 9, sat nervously next to her mother, her shoulder-length braids adorned by lavender-colored beads.

When Ms. Charles was finally able to return to her neighborhood on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, the entire block of houses where her home once stood had been burned to the ground. The corpses of at least 91 victims lay along the streets or in their homes, while the attack left at least 158 children orphans, many of whom were then recruited by gangs, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network, a Port-au-Prince-based rights monitor.

Like many Haitians, Ms. Charles worries that if Mr. Moïse cannot get true justice, what chance does she have to live a life of dignity in a country with some of the world’s highest rates of inequality?

“I live in a country where the president was killed,” Ms. Charles said. “If something like this can happen to a president with all that security, what about me in my house? What about me walking in the streets? What about my children?”

Two investigations into Mr. Moïse’s assassination, one by the Haitian government and another by the United States, have led to several arrests.

In Haiti, jailed suspects in the assassination have not been put on trial — including 18 ex-Colombian soldiers considered by many to be pawns in the plot. Judges and legal clerks in the case have been threatened and told to change witness testimony.

And a key suspect in the assassination — Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry — fired government officials who summoned him for questioning in the case. Phone records indicate Mr. Henry had spoken with the man accused of masterminding the assassination, Joseph Felix Badio, a former justice ministry official, in the days leading to and hours after Mr. Moïse’s death. The prime minister has denied wrongdoing and Mr. Badio remains free.

A separate United States government-led probe has also yielded no answers and instead raised suspicions of a link between the assassins and American intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A. A chief suspect in the case, Mario Palacios, a former Colombian soldier, was extradited to Florida in January to stand trial.

The Justice Department stunned observers when it requested that the court in Miami hearing Mr. Palacios’s case appoint a “Classified Information Security Officer” to bar the suspect’s testimony from being made public because he has an undisclosed link to American intelligence agencies.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has refused to answer questions regarding several of the Haitian suspects in the case who have served as agency informants. In May, the Senate Judiciary Committee rebuked the D.E.A. for failing to respond to queries regarding its conduct in Haiti.

Justice has also been elusive for the 18 Colombian ex-soldiers jailed in Haiti. They have complained of torture at the hands of the Haitian police, a lack of food and access to showers or bathrooms. The judge in their case has been changed five times and the Colombians have yet to meet a lawyer, 12 months after their imprisonment.

Haiti’s Justice Minister did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“Not even a judge has heard them, they have not even been charged,” said Diana Arbelaez, the wife of one of the accused former soldiers.

“There is no evidence, because if they had it they would have been accused,” she added.

Ms. Arbelaez said she and other wives send food packages to their husbands in prison and include bags for them to defecate in, because they are rarely allowed to use latrines and had been relieving themselves on the floors of their cell.

Sandra Bonilla, whose husband is also one of the 18 Colombian prisoners, traveled to Haiti to see her husband late last year and said she saw signs of torture, including festering wounds and missing teeth.

Colombia’s government maintains that since the alleged crimes involving the former soldiers happened in Haiti, they must be tried there, rather than Colombia.

Colombia’s Vice President Marta Lucia Ramirez said in an interview that the administration was eager for the accused to face trial, blaming Haiti’s faltering justice system for leaving the men in limbo. She plans to visit the men in prison.

In Haiti, the violence that has stalked Haitians struck the country’s largest court last month, when a gang took over the Judicial Palace and set fire to files. A month later, the gang still occupies the court.

For Ms. Charles, her family’s only stroke of luck was that she had sent her three older children out of the neighborhood just days before the attack began on May 1. Their schools had been closed all of April because of violence and she worried their boredom would make them easy prey for the gangs.

The violence that swept across Ms. Charles’s neighborhood was part of a wave that consumed much of Port-au-Prince in April and May, displacing 16,000 people as internal refugees, according to the United Nations. The organization added that gang violence forced 1,700 schools to shut down in and around the capital, leaving roughly 500,000 children out of their classrooms. Some schools have been targeted by gangs, looking for students to kidnap for ransom.

“Extreme violence has been reported, including beheadings, chopping and burning of bodies, and the killing of minors accused of being informants for a rival gang,” the United Nations said in May.

“Sexual violence, including gang rape of children as young as 10, has also been used by armed gang members to terrorize and punish people living in areas controlled by rival gangs,” the U.N. added.

Many aid groups say they have had difficulties implementing their programs because of the violence, or because gangs demand bribes to work in their territory. When they are able to enter neighborhoods they see children struggling.

“When the children’s schools are closed, they don’t have anything to do, and the parents need to work, what will happen?’’ said Judes Jonathas, a senior program manager for Mercy Corps in Haiti, one of the largest aid groups operating in the country. “It’s a huge danger, they are huge magnets for the gangs.”

Just a few weeks after Mr. Moïse’s killing, a powerful earthquake rocked the country, killing more than 2,000.

“It’s multiple crises in Haiti,’’ Mr. Jonathas said. “Can you imagine a child growing up in Haiti today, what kind of options they have in the future? What kind of people will they be?’’

Andre Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Genevieve Glatsky and Sofia Villamil contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.