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Joining the list of nations with ambitious plans in space, South Korea set off for the moon on Thursday.

Its first lunar spacecraft, named Danuri, was carried toward space on time at 7:08 p.m. Eastern time by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. After about 40 minutes and a series of engine firings, the Korean spacecraft separated from the rocket’s second stage, embarking on its journey to the moon.

When it arrives in lunar orbit, it will join spacecraft from NASA, India and China that are currently exploring Earth’s companion. Danuri’s scientific payload will study the moon’s magnetic field, measure quantities of elements and molecules like uranium, water and helium-3, and photograph the dark craters at the poles where the sun never shines.

What is Danuri, and what will it study?

Originally known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, the mission has now been given the name of Danuri, a portmanteau of the Korean words for “moon” and “enjoy.” It will be South Korea’s first space mission to go beyond low-Earth orbit.

Its scientific instruments include a magnetometer, a gamma-ray spectrometer and three cameras. NASA supplied one of the cameras, ShadowCam, which is sensitive enough to pick up the few photons that bounce off the terrain into the moon’s dark, permanently shadowed craters. These craters, located at the moon’s poles, remain forever cold, below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and contain water ice that has accumulated over the eons.

The ice could provide a frozen history of the 4.5 billion-year the solar system and a bounty of resources for future visiting astronauts. Such ice can also be extracted and melted to provide water and broken apart into oxygen and hydrogen, which would provide both air to breathe for astronauts and rocket propellants for travelers looking to launch from the moon to other destinations.

What else has South Korea done in space?

South Korea is developing its own rockets. Its first design, Naro-1, successfully reached orbit on the third try, in 2013. Since then, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute — South Korea’s equivalent of NASA — has shifted its efforts to Nuri, a larger, three-stage rocket. The second Nuri flight in June successfully placed several satellites in orbit.

South Korea has several communications and earth observation satellites in low-Earth orbit. It also has an extensive military missile program.

How many countries have sent missions to the moon?

The United States and the Soviet Union sent numerous robotic spacecraft to the moon beginning in the 1960s. NASA’s Apollo program sent astronauts there from 1968 through 1972. The world then almost entirely lost interest in the moon for three decades, but a hubbub of activity has returned.

In the past few years, China has sent multiple successful robotic spacecraft, including three landers. NASA has sent several orbiters there and has enlisted commercial companies to send payloads to the lunar surface in the coming years.

Japan and the European Space Agency have launched moon missions, and India has sent two orbiters to the moon, although a lander accompanying the second orbiter, crashed as it descended toward the surface in 2019.

Another mission in 2019, Beresheet, a lander built by an Israeli nonprofit, SpaceIL, also crashed as it attempted to land on the moon.

Why will it take Danuri so long to get to the moon?

The spacecraft is taking a long, energy-efficient route to the moon. It first heads toward the sun, then loops back around to be captured in lunar orbit in mid-December. This “ballistic trajectory” takes longer but does not require a large engine firing to slow the spacecraft when it gets to the moon.

Danuri will then adjust its orbit to an altitude of 62 miles above the moon’s surface. The main scientific mission is scheduled to last for one year.

What else is going to the moon this year?

A small NASA-financed spacecraft, CAPSTONE, is en route to the moon to explore a highly elliptical orbit, where NASA plans to build a lunar outpost for future astronauts. It is scheduled to arrive in lunar orbit in November.

But the big event of the year will be Artemis 1, an uncrewed test of NASA’s giant rocket and capsule that are to take astronauts back to the moon in the coming years. NASA is aiming to launch in late August or early September.

A couple of commercial companies, ispace of Japan and Intuitive Machines of Houston, are also hoping launch small robotic landers to the moon late this year.

A Russian court on Thursday sentenced the American basketball star Brittney Griner to nine years in a penal colony after convicting her on a drug charge, a harsh penalty that keeps her fate entwined with the geopolitical showdown over the war in Ukraine and ramps up already intense pressure on President Biden to win her release.

The U.S. government contends that she is among several Americans who have been “wrongfully detained” by Russia, used as bargaining chips in the increasingly hostile relationship between Moscow and Washington. The Biden administration has offered a prisoner swap involving Ms. Griner, but Russian officials said it was premature to discuss a deal while her case was underway.

Now that the trial is concluded, Mr. Biden faces a difficult choice between standing firm on his proposal to trade for Ms. Griner and another American, Paul N. Whelan, or sweetening the offer somehow, with either position liable to draw domestic criticism.

Meanwhile the Kremlin can use them as leverage, with no incentive to resolve the cases quickly. Her supporters, voicing horror at the verdict and sentence, are clamoring for the president to do something, while the administration is wary of giving in to Russian tactics it has all but labeled as blackmail.

“My administration will continue to work tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible,” Mr. Biden said in a statement after the verdict.

Ms. Griner, 31, one of her sport’s biggest global stars, sat mostly expressionless, eyes downcast, leaning her long frame toward the bars of the defendant’s box in a cramped courtroom outside Moscow to hear as the words of the judge, Anna S. Sotnikova, were quietly translated for her. She had already pleaded guilty and conviction is all but certain in Russian courts, so the verdict was a foregone conclusion; the real question was about sentencing.

The answer was devastating. The sentence was near the 10-year maximum for her conviction for attempting to smuggle narcotics into the country, based on two vape cartridges containing hashish oil found in Ms. Griner’s luggage when she arrived in February, a week before Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, sent his forces pouring over the border into Ukraine.

She and her legal team had hoped for a more lenient penalty based on her guilty plea, her statement that she had not meant to take the cartridges to Russia, and testimony that she used the substance legally in the United States to manage pain.

“I made an honest mistake, and I hope that in your ruling that it doesn’t end my life here,” she said before the sentencing.

She told the court that while she took responsibility for her actions, “I had no intent to break Russian law.” She said that after recovering from a bout of Covid, she had packed hurriedly to rejoin the Russian team she plays for in the W.N.B.A. off-season, and had accidentally left the cartridges in her luggage.

“I know that everybody keeps talking about political pawn and politics,” she added, “but I hope that is far from that courtroom.”

Ms. Griner’s defense team called the ruling “absolutely unreasonable,” said the court had “completely ignored all the evidence of the defense, and most importantly, the guilty plea,” and vowed to appeal. Elizabeth Rood, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, attended the court session and called the result “a miscarriage of justice.”

Russian officials have insisted that Ms. Griner’s case is simply the justice system running its course, with no political overtones — a claim that their American counterparts and many Western analysts dismissed as absurd.

William Pomeranz, a Russia expert and acting director of the Kennan Institute, a research group in Washington, noted that Ms. Griner was sentenced not to a prison but to a penal colony, which tends to mean a more remote location — many are in Siberia — and harsher conditions.

“She’s probably going to go to a penal colony that’s in the middle of Russia where she won’t know anybody,” he added. “They won’t be able to come and visit. Penal colonies can sometimes be very severe. It will be a tremendous test of her mental state if she ends up going to a penal colony.”

The United States has few options, he said. “It will just depend on the Russians and how fast they want to make a deal.”

Fellow basketball players, male and female, and basketball executives took to social media to voice support for Ms. Griner and grief at the verdict. Ms. Griner’s team, the Phoenix Mercury, said in a statement: “We remain heartbroken for her, as we have every day for nearly six months. We remain grateful to and confident in the public servants working every day to return her to her family and us.”

With Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the indiscriminate destruction it has caused, relations between Washington and Moscow are more confrontational and bitter than they have been in decades. The United States has rallied the West to send arms and other aid to Ukraine, and to punish Moscow with economic sanctions, looking for opportunities to ratchet up the pressure.

The two sides have made prisoner exchanges before, most recently in April, when Russia released Trevor R. Reed, an American held on what his family said was a bogus assault charge, in return for a Russian pilot convicted in the United States of cocaine trafficking charges. But rarely have proposed swaps come amid such tension, or involved anyone as prominent as Ms. Griner.

In a sign of how high the stakes are for Washington, Ms. Griner’s fate was among the topics discussed last Friday by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in their first direct conversation since before the invasion.

The Biden administration has offered to trade Ms. Griner and Mr. Whelan for Viktor Bout, who is serving a 25-year sentence for a 2011 conviction on a federal charge of conspiring to sell weapons to people posing as terrorists intent on killing Americans. Mr. Whelan, detained in Russia since 2018, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years.

Russia made an unspecified “bad faith” counteroffer, the White House said on Monday, which U.S. officials said they did not consider serious.

John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters on Thursday, “I don’t think it would be helpful to Brittney or to Paul for us to talk more publicly about where we are in the talks and what the president might or might not be willing to do.”

“Conversations are ongoing at various levels,” he added.

If Mr. Biden sticks to his initial offer, he could face accusations of not doing enough.

Ms. Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, and other supporters have mounted an effective public campaign to pressure the president to win her release. Supporters worry about her treatment in a country where anti-American and anti-gay vitriol are deeply embedded in popular views and official propaganda. Images of a grim-faced Ms. Griner being led, handcuffed, in and out of court, towering over her armed guards, have become commonplace in U.S. and international media.

The administration could make a more attractive offer, but U.S. officials already worry that deals for prisoners could encourage hostile foreign governments to detain Americans on trumped-up charges in exchange for concessions like freeing their own wrongdoers. Some Republicans have already complained that Mr. Biden’s existing offer creates such an incentive.

A 6-foot-9 center, Ms. Griner won a college national championship with Baylor in 2012, a W.N.B.A. championship with the Mercury in 2014, Olympic gold medals with the U.S. team at the 2016 and 2020 games, and four EuroLeague championships with the Russian team UMMC Yekaterinburg. Like many players in the W.N.B.A., where salaries are much lower than in the N.B.A., Ms. Griner — who also played one season for a professional team in China — has played overseas to supplement her income.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Crowley, Jonathan Abrams and Tania Ganguli.

Appalshop has been a cornerstone of Whitesburg, Ky., since 1969, working to tell stories about Appalachian people through art, film, music and more with a focus on their voices. Its theater usually hums with actors portraying the experiences of the region; the community radio broadcasts music and local news; and its rich archive provides a huge repository of central Appalachian history.

But on Wednesday, as Alex Gibson, the organization’s executive director, stood inside the building that has housed Appalshop for four decades, all he could see was mud.

Water damage covered the walls of the radio station. Every chair in the newly renovated 150-seat theater was caked in sludge. Filing cabinets, tables, CDs and loose film strips were tangled together. And possibly worst of all, many of the contents of Appalshop’s archives were covered in mud and debris after devastating floods in the region last week left the building submerged in water.

Mr. Gibson said he was most struck by the “indiscriminate nature with which the water destroyed things.”

“I’m seeing things that shouldn’t be together,” Mr. Gibson said. “There’s a banjo constructed by a master banjo maker covered in mud next to one of our first LP releases in 1970.”

He added, “We used to have an organized archive.”

The floods killed more than three dozen people across Eastern Kentucky and displaced hundreds more. Many are still without power. Even amid the loss of life and property, members of the Appalachian community were also mourning the loss of the region’s cultural heritage.

“We’re going to try our best to save everything we can save,” Mr. Gibson said. “It’s obviously devastating emotionally to see such precious materials just sitting in water and whatever chemical combination is on my boots right now.”

Mr. Gibson and Caroline Rubens, Appalshop’s archivist, are working against the clock alongside some 50 volunteers. Their goal is to recover what Appalshop estimated to be hundreds of thousands of archival pieces from across mediums: film, photographs, artisan crafts, woodworking, musical instruments, magazines, newspapers, posters and personal family archives that have been donated to the group — all depicting life in the Appalachian Mountains.

Water tore through the first floor of Appalshop’s building, which it has occupied since 1982. That included the radio station, theater, climate-controlled vault for archives and some gallery space used for art shows.

When Appalshop first got word of potential flooding last week, the priority was making sure the staff was safe. Then they mobilized to use their resources — social media, their website and the radio station — to get information to the Whitesburg community.

Now the organization’s highest priority is making sure the archives are rescued quickly, before mold can set in. It’s still too soon to tell how many of the items are salvageable, damaged or destroyed, but the rescue has been aided by visiting archivists from nearby colleges and universities in Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and the greater Appalachia region.

A piece that is likely gone is “Sun Quilt,” a stained glass sculpture by a local artist, Dan Neil Barnes, made up of five interlocking squares that mimic the quilts common through the region. It stood outside the Appalshop building and was a popular gathering spot for visitors.

“That was a particular ache,” said Meredith Scalos, Appalshop’s communications director. “It became an iconic piece of the building. We’re not sure if there are pieces of it, but it was glass, so probably not.”

Ms. Scalos said that Appalshop has had a history of documenting floods and climate change, and that she could “see a future where we will be telling this story, too.”

In the aftermath of the floods, Appalshop wants to prioritize the community, Ms. Scalos said, and has raised tens of thousands of dollars for various mutual aid groups. The outpouring of support from archivists and volunteers is a true mark of the mountain community, she added. She said there was a similar sense of camaraderie after tornadoes killed 74 people in the region in December.

“Kentuckians show up for each other, we do,” she said.

Ms. Scalos, who grew up in rural Kentucky, said she joined the organization in part to “reconnect with my own heritage.” “Appalshop has been always more of an idea in making people feel it’s OK to be proud to be Appalachian,” she added.

But the building itself has become central to the work the group does throughout the community, hosting art openings, concerts and regular radio programming. Appalshop started as a film workshop in 1969 but expanded to include photography and literary programs, a theater company, recording studio and community organizer, all centered around the mission of documenting and celebrating Appalachian culture. Appalshop had just finished its annual summer documentary program for young people and was set to show their films the week of the floods.

Steve Ruth, a volunteer DJ on WMMT 88.7 FM, the Appalshop’s community radio station, was looking forward to hosting a bluegrass event on July 28, but the floodwaters had other ideas.

“Walking into the radio air room and seeing the situation will about bring you to your knees,” he said. “There was about five feet of water in that space, I’m sure it looked like an aquarium at one point.”

Mr. Ruth said the Whitesburg community was in shock but was “rising to the challenge.” He and Appalshop hope to have the radio station back up and running at a temporary location in town soon.

“It’s been a place where folks interested in mountain history and the region’s history have gathered,” he said. “It’s been a place that’s just not one little thing for one little group, folks from all walks of life can come in and feel good and safe.”

While a full recovery of Appalshop may take months and the fate of many of the building’s contents remains unknown, a sign of hope brought Mr. Gibson, the center’s director, some joy: despite floodwaters of more than 20 feet, a young apple tree remained standing with some 30 apples attached.

“This tree was clearly totally submerged in the rapids, and it still has so many apples and leaves on it,” he said. “I didn’t know an apple was that hard to pluck.”

Federal officials on Thursday charged four current and former police officers in Louisville, Ky., who were involved in a fatal raid on the apartment of Breonna Taylor, accusing them of several crimes, including lying to obtain a warrant that was used to search her home.

The charges stem from a nighttime raid of Ms. Taylor’s apartment in March 2020, during which officers knocked down Ms. Taylor’s door and fired a volley of gunshots after her boyfriend shot an officer in the leg, believing that intruders had burst into the home.

Two officers shot Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

Merrick Garland, the attorney general, said at a news conference that members of an investigative unit within the Louisville Metro Police Department had included false information in an affidavit that was then used to obtain a warrant to search Ms. Taylor’s home.

Mr. Garland said federal prosecutors believe that by doing so, the officers “violated federal civil rights laws, and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death.”

Three of the officers also misled investigators who began looking into Ms. Taylor’s death, Mr. Garland said, including two that he said had met in a garage in the spring of 2020 and “agreed to tell investigators a false story.”

The killing of Ms. Taylor, who was Black, helped to set off protests in the spring and summer of 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and led to intense scrutiny of the police department in Louisville.

This is a developing story that will be updated.

There was every reason to expect a close election.

Instead, Tuesday’s resounding victory for abortion rights supporters in Kansas offered some of the most concrete evidence yet that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has shifted the political landscape. The victory, by a 59-41 margin in a Republican stronghold, suggests Democrats will be the energized party on an issue where Republicans have usually had an enthusiasm advantage.

The Kansas vote implies that around 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to roll back abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states (a few states on each side are very close to 50-50). This is a rough estimate, based on how demographic characteristics predicted the results of recent abortion referendums. But it is an evidence-based way of arriving at a fairly obvious conclusion: If abortion rights wins 59 percent support in Kansas, it’s doing even better than that nationwide.

It’s a tally that’s in line with recent national surveys that showed greater support for legal abortion after the court’s decision. And the high turnout, especially among Democrats, confirms that abortion is not just some wedge issue of importance to political activists. The stakes of abortion policy have become high enough that it can drive a high midterm-like turnout on its own.

None of this proves that the issue will help Democrats in the midterm elections. And there are limits to what can be gleaned from the Kansas data. But the lopsided margin makes one thing clear: The political winds are now at the backs of abortion rights supporters.

A surprisingly decisive outcome

There was not much public polling in the run-up to the Kansas election, but the best available data suggested that voters would probably split fairly evenly on abortion.

In a Times compilation of national polling published this spring, 48 percent of Kansas voters said they thought abortion should be mostly legal compared with 47 percent who thought it should be mostly illegal. Similarly, the Cooperative Election Study in 2020 found that the state’s registered voters were evenly split on whether abortion should be legal.

The results of similar recent referendums in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee and West Virginia also pointed toward a close race in Kansas — perhaps even one in which a “no” vote to preserve abortion rights would have the edge.

As with the Kansas vote, a “yes” vote in each of those four states’ initiatives would have amended a state constitution to allow significant restrictions on abortion rights or funding for abortion. In contrast with Kansas, the initiatives passed in all four states, including a 24-point victory in Louisiana in 2020. But support for abortion rights outpaced support for Democratic presidential candidates in relatively white areas across all four states, especially in less religious areas outside the Deep South.

It’s a pattern that suggests abortion rights would have much greater support than Joe Biden did as a candidate in a relatively white state like Kansas — perhaps even enough to make abortion rights favored to survive.

It may seem surprising that abortion supporters would even have a chance in Kansas, given the state’s long tradition of voting for Republicans. But Kansas is more reliably Republican than it is conservative. The state has an above-average number of college graduates, a group that has swung toward Democrats in recent years.

Kansas voted for Donald J. Trump by around 15 percentage points in 2020, enough to make it pretty safely Republican. Yet it’s not quite off the board for Democrats. Republicans have learned this the hard way; look no further than the 2018 Democratic victory in the governor’s race.

Even so, a landslide victory for abortion rights in Kansas did not appear to be a probable outcome, whether based on the polls or the recent initiatives. The likeliest explanations for the surprise: Voters may be more supportive of abortion rights in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe (as national polls imply); they may be more cautious about eliminating abortion rights now that there are real policy consequences to these initiatives; abortion rights supporters may be more energized to go to the polls.

Abortion rights supporters may not always find it so easy to advance their cause. They were defending the status quo in Kansas; elsewhere, they will be trying to overturn abortion bans.

Whatever the explanation, if abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result was not close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.

A shift in turnout

If there’s any rule about partisan turnout in American politics, it’s that registered Republicans turn out at higher rates than registered Democrats.

While the Kansas figures are still preliminary, it appears that registered Democrats were likelier to vote than registered Republicans.

Overall, 276,000 voters participated in the Democratic primary, which was held on Tuesday as well, compared with 451,000 who voted in the Republican primary. The Democratic tally amounted to 56 percent of the number of registered Democrats in the state, while the number of Republican primary voters was 53 percent of the number of registered Republicans. (Unaffiliated voters are the second-largest group in Kansas.)

In Johnson County, outside Kansas City, Mo., 67 percent of registered Democrats turned out, compared with 60 percent of registered Republicans.

This is a rare feat for Democrats in a high-turnout election. In nearby Iowa, where historical turnout data is easily accessible, turnout among registered Democrats in a general election has never eclipsed turnout among registered Republicans in at least 40 years.

The superior Democratic turnout helps explain why the result was less favorable for abortion opponents than expected. And it confirms that Democrats are now far more energized on the abortion issue, reversing a pattern from recent elections. It may even raise Democrats’ hopes that they could defy the longstanding tendency for the president’s party to have poor turnout in midterm elections.

For Republicans, the turnout figures may offer a modest silver lining. They might reasonably hope that turnout will be more favorable in the midterms in November, when abortion won’t be the only issue on the ballot and Republicans will have many more reasons to vote — including control of Congress.

A day after Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, visited Taiwan, celebrating it as a bulwark of democracy, China launched three days of military exercises around the island, which its forces may use to press in closer than ever, honing their ability to impose a blockade.

A barrage of Chinese propaganda said the drills, which started at midday Thursday, would serve as punishment for Ms. Pelosi’s visit, and as a shock-and-awe deterrent against opponents of Beijing’s claims to the self-ruled island. But more than that, the six exercise zones that the People’s Liberation Army has marked out in seas off Taiwan — one nudging less than 10 miles off its southern coast — could give Chinese forces valuable practice, should they one day be ordered to encircle and attack the island.

“Use the momentum to surround,” read a slogan used by People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s main newspaper, as it announced that the drills had begun. Taiwanese military observers said they did not detect any immediate upsurge in Chinese naval activities.

The six zones were chosen for their importance in a potential campaign to seal off Taiwan and thwart foreign intervention, Major General Meng Xiangqing, a professor of strategy at the National Defense University in Beijing, said in an interview on Chinese state television. One zone covers the narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait. Others could be used to block a major port or attack three of Taiwan’s main military bases, he said.

The zone near Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, where there are crucial bases, “creates conditions to bolt the door and beat the dog,” said General Meng, using a Chinese saying that refers to blocking an enemy’s escape route.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has said that he hopes to eventually unify Taiwan and China through peaceful steps. But like his predecessors, he has not ruled out force, and China’s military buildup has reached a point where some military commanders and analysts think an invasion is an increasingly plausible, though still highly risky, scenario. The exercises could help Chinese forces test their readiness for that.

“They’re definitely going to use this as an excuse to do something that helps them prepare for a possible invasion,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University who studies China’s military and its potential to attack Taiwan.

“It’s not just about the messaging,” she said. “Under the guise of signaling, they’re trying to basically test their ability to conduct complex maneuvers that are necessary for an amphibious assault on Taiwan.”

It remains unclear how close Chinese forces will come to Taiwan during the exercises, which are scheduled to end on Sunday. In one possible sign of what to expect, China’s Liberation Army Daily said on Thursday that the Eastern Theater Command was holding its own practice operations that included the navy, air force and rocket force. They were focused on “joint enclosure and control,” assaults on sea and land, and air domination operations, it said.

The Chinese military could also test Taiwan’s responses by firing into the territorial waters directly off its coast. Three of the exercise zones have corners jutting into those waters.

“It signals that, since Taiwan is part of China, it doesn’t get a 12-nautical-mile zone,” said William Overholt, a senior research fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University, referring to the sea perimeter by which Taiwan defines its territorial waters. “Taiwan either has to defend its zone like an independent country or cave.”

Kinmen Island, a Taiwanese-controlled island a little over six miles off China’s coast, reported that on Wednesday night, flying objects of unclear origin — probably drones — flew overhead. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said that its website was paralyzed by “denial of service” cyberattacks late on Wednesday night.

“We haven’t seen anything unusual in the Kinmen area, but their movements near Taiwan are more obvious,” Major General Chang Jung-shun of Taiwan’s Kinmen Defense Command said by telephone. “Some of their ships used for exercises have been detected.”

China is trying to reinforce its influence over Taiwan by upgrading deterrence after the visit by Ms. Pelosi, who praised the island’s people for standing strong against Beijing, several Chinese analysts said.

“The tendency of external forces exploiting Taiwan to contain China has become increasingly clear,” Wu Yongping, a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who studies Taiwan, said in written answers to questions. “The Chinese government has adopted some unprecedented military operations in response to this.”

One of the People’s Liberation Army’s designated exercise zones lies off the eastern coast of Taiwan, at the farthest point from the Chinese mainland. When China held intimidating military exercises off Taiwan during a crisis 25 years ago, the People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., did not go that far.

“It’s an intentional message meant to highlight the P.L.A.’s heightened capacity to project power farther from the Chinese mainland, and it’s a visible signal that China can surround the island,” said Brian Hart, a fellow with the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It will also complicate traffic to and around the island from all sides.”

Global Times, a swaggeringly nationalist Chinese newspaper, raised the possibility of missiles being fired from the mainland into that eastern zone, arcing over Taiwan. “If the Taiwan military responds, the Liberation Army is entirely able to trap the turtle in the jar,” one Chinese commentator, Zhang Xuefeng, told the paper, using a Chinese saying for catching prey with ease.

But Mr. Hart said China was unlikely to fire missiles over Taiwan. “That would be extremely escalatory,” he said. “They will more likely fire ship-based or air-launched missiles into that area without flying missiles over the island.”

After decades of tensions and several military crises with China, many on Taiwan have become inured to threats. But even if China does not take the most potentially incendiary steps this time, experts and officials on the island worry that the operations could spark an incident — a collision at sea or in the air, or a misfired missile — that inflames tensions into a full-fledged crisis.

A monitoring service run by the U.S. Naval Institute reported on Monday that a strike group led by the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier was in the Philippine Sea, some distance east of Taiwan, and that the U.S.S. Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship, was also in that area.

“Previously, the Chinese Communists carried out military exercises at a distance, now they’ve become close-up,” Chang Yan-ting, a retired deputy commander of Taiwan’s air force, said in an interview.

“The Chinese military exercises around Taiwan will put our national military in a very dangerous position,” he said. “They’re already at our doorstep.”

Jane Perlez and John Liu contributed reporting. Claire Fu contributed research.

The N.F.L. appealed the six-game suspension of Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson on Wednesday, according to a league spokesman.

The league challenged the penalty issued Monday by a third-party disciplinary officer as a result of a hearing over accusations that Watson had engaged in sexually coercive and lewd behavior toward two dozen women he hired for massages. The N.F.L. is arguing for an indefinite suspension with the option of reinstatement after a year, according to a person with knowledge of the league’s appeal who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The league also recommended a fine and treatment for Watson and cited concerns over his lack of remorse in the brief it filed Wednesday, the person said.

The union, which declined to comment, has until the close of business on Friday to respond.

Following a process agreed upon in the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the N.F.L. Players Association, the appeal will be heard by Commissioner Roger Goodell or a person of his choosing. The league did not immediately say who would oversee the appeal, which will be heard on an “expedited” basis.

There is no set timeline laid out in the C.B.A. for a ruling to be made.

Sue L. Robinson, the retired federal judge jointly appointed by the N.F.L. and the players’ union to oversee the disciplinary hearing, found that Watson violated the league’s personal conduct policy by engaging in unwanted sexual contact with another person, endangering the safety and well-being of another person and undermining the N.F.L.’s integrity. She suggested in her 16-page report that Watson’s conduct, which she called “predatory” and “egregious,” might have deserved a stricter penalty but that she was limited by the league’s policies and past record of discipline.

Watson has denied the accusations against him, and two Texas grand juries declined to indict him. He settled all but one of the 24 lawsuits filed against him by women he hired for massages. Jimmy and Dee Haslam, owners of the Browns, said they would “continue to support” the quarterback to whom they awarded a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract in March.

Robinson said in her report that Watson’s denials did not appear credible and that he showed no remorse.

The players’ union said before Robinson’s decision that it would not appeal, but after the suspension was announced on Monday the N.F.L. said it would review her findings and “make a determination on next steps” within the three business days the C.B.A. allows for challenges.

The six-game suspension was criticized by Tony Buzbee, the lawyer representing most of Watson’s accusers, as well as experts in sports law and advocates for sexual abuse victims. The league had argued to Robinson that Watson deserved at least a full-year suspension while the union had fought for a lesser penalty.

Robinson said that her decision to suspend Watson for six games was based on the penalties the league had meted out in other cases involving gender-based violence.

The league began its investigation of Watson in March 2021, when Ashley Solis, a licensed massage therapist in Houston, filed the first lawsuit against him. The women said that he assaulted or harassed them during massage appointments in 2020 and 2021, when Watson played for the Houston Texans. In a brief filed to Robinson, the league wrote that Watson had “used his status as an N.F.L. player as a pretext to engage in a premeditated pattern of predatory behavior toward multiple women.”

Watson’s case was the first handled under a new process established in the 2020 C.B.A. By assigning an arbitrator to oversee the review of facts and decide on the initial penalty, the revision aimed to stem criticisms of Goodell’s outsized and sometimes capricious power in the disciplinary process.

If Robinson had found that Watson did not violate the personal conduct policy, there would have been no discipline and neither side could appeal. But she concluded that there was enough evidence, including the accounts of four women that she said were “substantially corroborated,” to support multiple violations of the policy by Watson.

According to the C.B.A., decisions by Goodell, or his designee, are “full, final and complete” and binding on all parties, including the player.

The union may challenge the league’s appeal in federal court, as it has done over player conduct decisions in the past. One noteworthy instance came in 2015, when quarterback Tom Brady challenged his four-game suspension in the so-called Deflategate scandal. A district court judge sided with Brady, saying that Goodell exceeded his power by suspending the quarterback for his role in an alleged scheme to take air out of game balls to improve their grip. Goodell’s decision, however, was upheld in 2016 by a federal appeals court panel that affirmed his broad authority to discipline players.

Michael LeRoy, an arbitrator who teaches labor law at the University of Illinois, said that the C.B.A.’s language made an “emphatic point” about the finality of the process agreed to by both sides.

“I think it’s virtually airtight against judicial overturning,” LeRoy said. “Courts are highly deferential to the fact findings as well as the conclusions with respect to a contractual violation or not. So I think Watson is just going to be tilting at windmills if he challenges this in federal court.”

Watson can continue to practice with the Browns during training camp as the appeal continues.

“The court practically dared women in this country to go to the ballot box to restore the right to choose,” President Biden said by video Wednesday, as he signed an executive order aimed at helping Americans cross state lines for abortions. “They don’t have a clue about the power of American women.”

In interviews, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, urged Democrats to be “full-throated” in their support of abortion access, and Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said the Kansas vote offered a “preview of coming attractions” for Republicans. Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a highly competitive district, issued a statement saying that abortion access “hits at the core of preserving personal freedom, and of ensuring that women, and not the government, can decide their own fate.”

Republicans said the midterm campaigns would be defined by Mr. Biden’s disastrous approval ratings and economic concerns.

Both Republicans and Democrats caution against conflating the results of an up-or-down ballot question with how Americans will vote in November, when they will be weighing a long list of issues, personalities and their views of Democratic control of Washington.

“Add in candidates and a much more robust conversation about lots of other issues, this single issue isn’t going to drive the full national narrative that the Democrats are hoping for,” said David Kochel, a veteran of Republican politics in nearby Iowa. Still, Mr. Kochel acknowledged the risks of Republicans’ overstepping, as social conservatives push for abortion bans with few exceptions that polls generally show to be unpopular.

“The base of the G.O.P. is definitely ahead of where the voters are in wanting to restrict abortion,” he said. “That’s the main lesson of Kansas.”

Polls have long shown most Americans support at least some abortion rights. But abortion opponents have been far more likely to let the issue determine their vote, leading to a passion gap between the two sides of the issue. Democrats hoped the Supreme Court decision this summer erasing the constitutional right to an abortion would change that, as Republican-led states rushed to enact new restrictions, and outright bans on the procedure took hold.

The Kansas vote was the most concrete evidence yet that a broad swath of voters — including some Republicans who still support their party in November — were ready to push back. Kansans voted down the amendment in Johnson County — home to the populous, moderate suburbs outside Kansas City — rejecting the measure with about 70 percent of the vote, a sign of the power of this issue in suburban battlegrounds nationwide. But the amendment was also defeated in more conservative counties, as abortion rights support outpaced Mr. Biden’s showing in 2020 nearly everywhere.

After months of struggling with their own disengaged if not demoralized base, Democratic strategists and officials hoped the results signaled a sort of awakening. They argued that abortion rights are a powerful part of the effort to cast Republicans as extremists and turn the 2022 elections into a choice between two parties, rather than a referendum just on Democrats.

“The Republicans who are running for office are quite open about their support for banning abortion,” said Senator Warren. “It’s critical that Democrats make equally clear that this is a key difference, and Democrats will stand up for letting the pregnant person make the decision, not the government.”

A Kansas-style referendum will be a rarity this election year, with only four other states expected to put abortion rights directly to voters in November with measures to amend their constitutions: California, Michigan, Vermont and Kentucky. However, the issue has already emerged as a defining debate in some key races, including in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Democratic candidates for governor have cast themselves as bulwarks against far-reaching abortion restrictions or bans. On Tuesday, Michigan Republicans nominated Tudor Dixon, a former conservative commentator, for governor, who has opposed abortion in cases of rape and incest.

And in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican nominee for governor, said, “I don’t give a way for exceptions” when asked whether he believes in exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. Governor’s contests in states including Wisconsin and Georgia could also directly affect abortion rights.

Other tests of the impact of abortion on races are coming sooner. North of New York City, a Democrat running in a special House election this month, Pat Ryan, has made abortion rights a centerpiece of his campaign, casting the race as another measure of the issue’s power this year.

“We have to step up and make sure our core freedoms are protected and defended,” said Mr. Ryan, the Ulster County executive in New York, who had closely watched the Kansas results.

Opponents of the Kansas referendum leaned into that “freedom” message, with advertising that cast the effort as nothing short of a government mandate — anathema to voters long mistrustful of too much intervention from Topeka and Washington — and sometimes without using the word “abortion” at all.

Some of the messaging was aimed at moderate, often suburban voters who have toggled between the parties in recent elections. Strategists in both parties agreed that abortion rights could be salient with those voters, particularly women, in the fall. Democrats also pointed to evidence that the issue may also drive up turnout among their base voters.

After the Supreme Court’s decision, Democrats registered to vote at a faster rate than Republicans in Kansas, according a memo from Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. Mr. Bonier said his analysis found roughly 70 percent of Kansans who registered after the court’s decision were women.

“It is malpractice to not continue to center this issue for the remainder of this election season — and beyond,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. “What Democrats should say is that for Americans your bedroom is on the ballot this November.”

Inside the Democratic Party, there has been a fierce debate since Roe was overturned over how much to talk about abortion rights at a time of rising prices and a rocky economy — and that is likely to intensify. There is always the risk, some longtime strategists warn, of getting distracted from the issues that polls show are still driving most Americans.

Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said he understood the hesitancy from party stalwarts.

“The energy is on the side of abortion rights,” he said. “For decades that hasn’t been true so it’s difficult for some people who have been through lots of tough battles and lots of tough states to recognize that the ground has shifted under them. But it has.”

He urged Democrats to ignore polling that showed abortion was not a top-tier issue, adding that “voters take their cues from leaders” and Democrats need to discuss abortion access more. “When your pollster or your strategist says, ‘Take an abortion question and pivot away from it’ you should probably resist,” he said.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this week showed that the issue of abortion access had become more salient for women 18 to 49 years old, with a 14-percentage-point jump since February for those who say it will be very important to their vote in midterm elections, up to 73 percent.

That is roughly equal to the share of voters overall who said inflation would be very important this fall — and a sign of how animating abortion has become for many women.

Still, Republicans said they would not let their focus veer from the issues they have been hammering for months.

“This fall, voters will consider abortion alongside of inflation, education, crime, national security and a feeling that no one in Democrat-controlled Washington listens to them or cares about them,” said Kellyanne Conway, the Republican pollster and former senior Trump White House adviser.

Michael McAdams, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said that if Democrats focused the fall campaign on abortion they would be ignoring the economy and record-high prices: “the No. 1 issue in every competitive district.”

One of the most endangered Democrats in the House, Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, agreed that “the economy is the defining issue for people.”

“But there is a relationship here, because voters want leaders to be focused on fighting inflation, not banning abortion,” he said. Mr. Malinowski, who said he was planning to advertise on abortion rights, said the results in Kansas had affirmed for him the significance of abortion and the public’s desire to keep government out of such personal decisions.

“There is enormous energy among voters and potential voters this fall to make that point,” he said.

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington.

ODESA, Ukraine — Five days after an explosion at a Russian prison camp killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war, evidence about what happened remains sparse, but Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday that they were steadily compiling proof that the mass slaughter was a war crime committed by Russian forces.

At a background briefing for journalists in the capital, Kyiv, senior Ukrainian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity outlined evidence to suggest that Russian forces appeared to be preparing for mass casualties in the days before the July 29 explosion.

Satellite images taken before the explosion, they said, show what appear to be freshly dug graves within the prison complex. A New York Times analysis of images from Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs confirms that some time after July 18 and before July 21, about 15 to 20 ground disturbances appeared on the southern side of the complex, roughly 6 to 7 feet wide and 10 to 16 feet long at first; some later appeared to have been lengthened and merged with each other. Whether they were graves is unclear.

In addition, a day before the explosion, Russian forces positioned near the camp had opened fire on Ukrainian troops in an apparent attempt to draw return fire, the Ukrainian officials said.

“Understanding that we would not return fire, they carried out a terrorist attack themselves,” one of the briefers said. “How they did this needs to be carefully studied.”

Ukrainian officials, along with independent analysts, have cautioned that assessments so far have been solely reliant on publicly available information, including video published by the Kremlin’s own news services, of the blast site near the town of Olenivka on Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine’s Donbas region. A lack of verifiable evidence has made drawing clear conclusions difficult, and the Russian government so far has refused to grant independent investigators access to the site.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has a mandate under the Geneva Conventions to inspect conditions in which prisoners of war are held, requested permission from the Russian government to access the site on the day of the explosion.

“As of yet, we have not been granted access to the POWs affected by the attack nor do we have security guarantees to carry out this visit,” the Red Cross said in a statement on Wednesday. Additionally, the organization said offers to donate supplies like medicine and protective gear have gone unanswered.

Russia’s defense ministry has claimed, without offering any verifiable evidence, that Ukraine’s own military used a highly sophisticated American precision-guided rocket system known as HIMARS to kill the Ukrainian troops.

Military analysts call that unlikely, but impossible to rule out with the available information.

The Russian video and the satellite pictures show evidence of a smaller blast than those typically caused by the HIMARS-fired rockets supplied to Ukraine. The rockets usually leave a crater, but none is evident in the images. The walls of the barracks and much of the interior are blackened but still intact, and there is no apparent damage to an adjoining building. The interior images show beds still upright and lined up in rows, inconsistent with the strong shockwave seen in other HIMARS strikes.

“There’s some evidence pointing away from a HIMARS. But that doesn’t mean that I know or you can tell from the evidence presented specifically what it was,” said Brian Castner, a weapons expert for Amnesty International. He added that “you need to leave open the possibility that a weapon from either side fell short, misfired.”

Moscow at first said Ukraine had carried out the strike to dissuade others from surrendering and giving information to Russian interrogators. On Wednesday it offered a new explanation, as Colonel Gen. Alexander Fomin, deputy defense minister, said in a speech that Ukrainian officials had ordered the strike after Russia began publishing video interrogations of captured fighters admitting to attacks on civilians.

“The Kyiv authorities seek to eliminate witnesses and perpetrators of their crimes against their own people,” General Fomin said.

Ukrainian and American officials have rebutted the Kremlin claims, and Ukrainian investigators have hypothesized that an explosive device was detonated inside the barracks. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency issued a statement alleging that soldiers held at the prison had been tortured. Earlier, some officials had speculated that Russian forces had killed the prisoners to cover up evidence of abuse.

The murder of soldiers captured in battle would add to the host of apparent Russian war crimes since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. In the first months, Russian forces massacred civilians in bedroom communities outside of Kyiv. They bombed a maternity ward and a theater where civilians were sheltering in Mariupol on their path to leveling that coastal Ukrainian city. Russian rockets have hit apartment buildings, shopping malls, train stations, busy public squares and fleeing civilians.

In each case, Russian officials have denied the facts on the ground and spun baseless — and often contradictory — conspiracy theories in an attempt to deflect blame. In several cases, such as the bombing of a busy train station in Kramatorsk in April that killed 50 people, Russia has blamed its own attacks on Ukraine, asserting with no evidence that Ukraine is conducting so-called false flag operations to make Russia look bad.

No Russian guards were killed or wounded in the prison explosion in Olenivka, which appeared to leave other structures nearby undamaged.

Some of the prisoners killed were badly wounded soldiers slated to be swapped in a prisoner exchange expected to occur in the coming weeks, said Andrei Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service. These soldiers “should have been in a hospital not in a barracks,” he said in a statement.

Nearly all of those killed were soldiers who had fought in the defense of Mariupol and surrendered in May after an 80-day siege at the sprawling Azovstal Iron and Steel Works.

In Ukraine, these soldiers have become war heroes, their likenesses seen on billboards throughout the country. The idea that Ukraine’s military would seek to kill them is beyond comprehension, said Maj. Mykyta Nadtochii, the commander of the Azov Regiment, a unit within Ukraine’s national guard whose fighters made up the majority of those killed at Olenivka.

“We understand what it means to be a prisoner,” Major Nadtochii said in an interview. “We understand that they are working them over, and not in the nicest way.”

Since the explosion, Major Nadtochii said, he had been scrambling to gather information about the condition of his troops, but remained largely in the dark. The few soldiers he had been able to contact at Olenivka, who were in another location the night of the explosion, described only hearing two bangs. He confirmed that the lists of dead and wounded provided by the Russian government consisted primarily of Azov troops, though he suspected Russian authorities were hiding the true scope of the carnage.

“Honestly nothing surprises me in this war anymore, but somewhere deep in my soul there was hope that nevertheless they were human and might adhere to agreements and rules for conducting war,” he said. “But I’ve become convinced that these are not people, they’re animals.”

The Azov Regiment has become central to the Kremlin’s war narrative. Though now incorporated into the Ukrainian armed forces, its origins as a strongly nationalist volunteer paramilitary group with ties to right-wing fringe figures have been used by the Kremlin to falsely paint all of Ukraine as fascist and to claim that Russia is engaged in “denazification.”

On Tuesday, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the Azov Regiment a terrorist organization, raising fears in Ukraine that Russian prosecutors could eventually charge captive Azov soldiers with grave crimes and block their return to Ukraine in prisoner swaps.

In response to the designation, Ukraine’s National Guard issued a statement reaffirming the Azov Regiment’s place within the chain of command of the Ukrainian armed forces.

“Following the horrible execution of prisoners of war in Olenivka,” the statement said, “Russia is searching for new excuses and justifications for its war crimes.”

Michael Schwirtz and Stanislav Kozliuk from reported from Odesa, Ukraine, Christiaan Triebert from New York and Kamila Hrabchuk from Kyiv, Ukraine.