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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.

1. The Senate passed climate, health and tax legislation on Sunday.

The $369 billion act, elements of which appeared dead just weeks ago amid Democratic divisions, would make the most significant federal investment in history to counter climate change. It would also, for the first time, allow Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers on the price of prescription medicines. Here’s what’s in the package.

Analysis: Peter Baker wonders if the development marks a turning point for President Biden. White House aides argue that his accomplishments now compare favorably to the two-year legislative record of most any other modern president, despite the president’s notable unpopularity.

2. The Pentagon said it will send $1 billion in aid to Ukraine.

The additional ammunition will include rockets for the launchers that have been credited with destroying Russian command posts and ammunition depots, and will come from the Pentagon’s own stockpiles. The shipments will bring the total amount of U.S. military aid to more than $9 billion.

3. Four Muslim men were recently killed in Albuquerque, leaving the community in fear.

Three of the men were killed in the past two weeks. Officials say those killings might be connected to a fourth in November 2021.

“My kids won’t let me go outside of my apartment,” said Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain, whose younger brother was fatally shot a week ago just a few blocks away.

Authorities described a vehicle of interest, a dark-colored, four-door Volkswagen sedan, and said they are refraining from using the term “hate” in labeling the crimes until a motive could be established.

4. China’s military announced new exercises near Taiwan.

The announcement came a day after its military wrapped up 72 hours of drills in the waters encircling the island, its largest-ever exercises in the area. It’s a sign that China may keep up military pressure on Taiwan in retaliation for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit last week.

Beijing might be seeking to normalize its military’s presence around Taiwan, allowing Chinese forces to practice imposing a slow squeeze on the island by cutting off much of the access to its airspace and waters. Here’s what to know about the rising tensions.

The Taiwanese democracy activist Li Ming-che was recently freed from a Chinese prison. He and his wife, who met with Pelosi in Taiwan last week, are urging resistance to Beijing.

5. Four states will use disputed maps in House races this fall.

In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio, judges have found that Republican legislators illegally drew congressional maps along racial or partisan lines. In years past, the judges would have ordered new maps.

But a shift in a Supreme Court doctrine, combined with the Republicans’ willingness to play redistricting hardball, means that all four states are using the rejected maps, and questions about their legality for future elections will be hashed out in court later.

In Wisconsin, ahead of Tuesday’s primary, dozens of Republican voters and activists interviewed across the state said they wanted lawmakers to decertify the state’s 2020 election results and claw back its electoral votes.

In Washington, an excerpt from a forthcoming book revealed that Donald Trump said he wished he had “totally loyal” generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler.

6. Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza reached a cease-fire.

The conflict began on Friday afternoon when Israel launched airstrikes to foil what it said was an imminent attack from Gaza. The fighting killed 44 Palestinians, including militant leaders as well as children, and left scores of homes damaged or destroyed.

But Hamas, the de facto civilian government in Gaza, remained on the sidelines. A smaller Islamist group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, took the lead in firing more than 1,000 rockets and bore the brunt of the Israeli airstrikes.

Hamas’s decision confirmed the complex and shifting role that the movement has assumed since seizing control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. It also showcased the frictions among Palestinian Islamist militants over how best to fight Israel and highlighted the influence of Iran — which backs Hamas and Islamic Jihad — and the limits of that support.

7. Axios agreed to a $525 million sale.

The digital media company — which offers bulletin-style scoops on the realms of politics, business and technology — quickly gained traction after its founding in 2017 as readers devoured coverage of President Trump and his administration.

Cox Enterprise will buy Axios in a deal that is set to close this month. It’s structured so that the company’s three founders — Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz — have financial incentives to stay. The deal offers a rare flicker of hope for the digital publishing sector, which has been fraught with difficulty for investors and operators.

8. Inflation has hit New York City.

It’s become even more expensive to eat and drink in the city. In May, food prices in the area rose at their fastest annual pace since 1981, and the number of children visiting food pantries was 55 percent higher earlier this year than it was before the pandemic.

The Times followed five New Yorkers during their weekly eating routines to document where they were seeing the effects of inflation: A retiree discovered that a pint of berries was now at least $8; a woman paid the “ridiculous” price of $15 for French fries in Times Square.

Across the country, Americans with low incomes are pulling back from buying as high-income households keep spending, creating a bifurcated economy with potentially big consequences.

9. Mexican pizza is more than a Taco Bell menu item.

The owners of Rosario’s, a Mexican restaurant in South Philadelphia, first began serving a cheese pizza to allure the neighborhood’s older, non-Latino residents. But then they experimented with blending ingredients, which led to their first three Mexican pizzas: al pastor, carnitas and the Mexicana.

The pies — built on dough, but swapping tomato sauce for a base of black bean purée or tomatillo, guajillo pepper or mole sauces — feel like a tribute to the convergence of the city’s deeply rooted Italian population and, since the 1990s, a thriving Mexican community.

Rosario’s now carries 14 Mexican-style pies and more than a dozen classic pizzas, making the restaurant part of a new generation of Latino-owned pizzerias in the U.S. that are creating a style of their own.

10. And finally, some spiders may spin dreams.

By day, jumping spiders hunt their prey, stalking and pouncing like cats. But researchers found that, at night, these spiders exhibit signs of rapid eye movement, or R.E.M. sleep, when most human dreaming occurs.

“There’s no reason to think that they don’t dream, depending on how you define dreaming,” one entomologist said. “I could imagine a replay of memories that allow them to work out possible problems.”

Jumping spiders have complex brains for their size and have been shown to plan their routes and perform elaborate courtship dances.

The discovery suggests that R.E.M. sleep may be more common across animals and may help untangle its purpose and evolution.

Have an imaginative evening.

Brent Lewis compiled photos for this briefing.

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Here are today’s Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee and Wordle. If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

Olivia Newton-John, who sang some of the biggest hits of the 1970s and ’80s while recasting her image as the virginal girl next door into a spandex-clad vixen — a transformation reflected in miniature by her starring role in “Grease,” one of the most popular movie musicals of its era — died on Monday at her ranch in Southern California. She was 73.

The death was announced by her husband, John Easterling.

Though never a critical favorite, Ms. Newton-John amassed No. 1 hits, chart-topping albums and four records that sold more than two million copies each. More than anything else, she was likable.

In the earlier phase of her career, this English-Australian singer beguiled listeners with a high, supple, vibrato-warmed voice that paired amiably with the kind of swooning middle-of-the-road pop that, in the mid-1970s, often passed for country music.

Her performance on the charts made that blurring clear. She scored seven Top 10 hits on Billboard’s Country chart, two of which became back-to-back overall No. 1 hits in 1974 and ’75. First came “I Honestly Love You,” an unashamedly earnest declaration co-written by Peter Allen and Jeff Barry, followed by “Have You Never Been Mellow,” a feather of a song written by the producer of many of her biggest albums, John Farrar.

“I Honestly Love You” also won two of the singer’s four Grammys, for record of the year and best female pop vocal performance.

A complete obituary will be published soon.

Crime, murder and mass shootings have dominated headlines this year. Just over the weekend, a shooting in Cincinnati wounded nine people, and another in Detroit killed one and wounded four.

But the full crime data tells a different story. Nationwide, shootings are down 4 percent this year compared to the same time last year. In big cities, murders are down 3 percent. If the decrease in murders continues for the rest of 2022, it will be the first year since 2018 in which they fell in the U.S.

The declines are small. But they are welcome news after two years of large increases left the murder rate nearly 40 percent higher than it had been.

“I would say I have a heavily guarded optimism,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

One reason for hope: The likely causes of the spike in murders in 2020 and 2021 are receding.

Disruptions related to Covid probably led to more murders and shootings by shutting down social services, which had kept people safe, and closing schools, which left many teens idle. (My colleagues Thomas Fuller and Tim Arango wrote about the connection between the pandemic and gun violence.) But the U.S. has opened back up, which will likely help reverse the effects of the last two years on violent crime.

The aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 also likely caused more violence, straining police-community relations and diminishing the effectiveness of law enforcement. That effect, too, has eased as public attention has shifted away from high-profile episodes of police brutality. A similar trend played out before: After protests over policing erupted between 2014 and 2016, murders increased for two years and then fell.

2020 was a chaotic year overall, with Covid, protests about police and a presidential election. This turmoil fostered social discord and anomie, which also could contribute to murders: As people lose trust in each other and their institutions, they are more likely to lash out in crime and violence. As the chaos recedes, the violence may be receding as well.

This kind of good news rarely goes reported — an example of what my colleague David Leonhardt has called the media’s bad news bias. In 2022, bad news bias has left many Americans thinking that violent crime is worse this year when it ultimately may not be. And this bias has skewed public perceptions of crime and violence in the past, too.

Bad news bias

When the media reports on crime, it almost always focuses on grim stories. A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that headlines about shootings in New York City recently increased while the actual number of shootings remained relatively flat. The old cliché here is that if it bleeds, it leads.

The constant stream of bad news is one reason, experts say, that Americans consistently say crime is getting worse when it is not. Between the 1990s and 2014, crime — including violent crime and murders — fell more than 50 percent across the U.S. Yet for most of that time, a majority of Americans told Gallup that crime was up compared to the year before.

The bad news bias potentially leaves Americans more scared for their safety than they should be. It also may drive more people to believe that punitive criminal justice policies are needed, or that reforms are increasing crime when they are not. In a speech last month, for example, Donald Trump recounted several recent murders in grisly detail and called for “tough,” “nasty” and “mean” anti-crime policies.

A balanced view

Experts caution against making too much of the year’s trends. The decreases so far are relatively small, and they could end up a blip. Robberies and some property crimes are up in big U.S. cities. And America still has far more gun violence than its peers, largely because of widespread gun ownership.

The murder rate “is still significantly higher than it was two or three years ago,” said Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, which tracks U.S. crime data.

But the trend, right now, is heading in a good direction. For an accurate view of crime in the U.S., Americans need to hear that.

Metropolitan Diary: “Surprised, I turned to see an older man there on the sidewalk.”

Lives Lived: On TV, Clu Gulager played Billy the Kid on the “The Tall Man.” He also appeared in critically acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show.” Gulager died at 93.

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

A rainy trade honeymoon: Fresh off acquiring generational superstar Juan Soto last week, the Padres were humbled last night in a sweep at the hands of the rival Los Angeles Dodgers. San Diego was outscored 20-4 in the series, and now trails L.A. in the NL West by 15 and a half games. Ouch. Elsewhere, the New York Mets and flame-throwing Jacob deGrom suddenly look scary.

A remarkable return: Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier made her season debut last night — about 10 weeks after giving birth. She rejoins a team at risk of missing the playoffs for the first time since 2010.

A scary debut: Manchester City was already a runaway favorite to dominate the English Premier League in 2022-23. The two-goal debut of superstar arrival Erling Haaland yesterday underscored every prediction.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Learn to love to a jazz icon

Duke Ellington arrived in New York just as the Harlem Renaissance was getting underway. His orchestra became the soundtrack of the era, and he was its icon, a global ambassador for American culture.

The Times asked a dozen musicians, writers and critics to recommend one track to help readers fall in love with Ellington. Their selections include swinging big-band tunes, tales of working-class Black life and a song the bandleader Miho Hazama calls “the happiest music in the world!”

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

What happens to food scraps in the garbage is both gross (rats, garbage juice) and weighty (methane emissions, climate crisis). In New York, the fate of old food has recently inflamed passions and caused a political stink.

But now, the city is trying to move past compost “drama” with a new plan to help more New Yorkers separate organic waste — food scraps and yard waste that can be transformed into rich soil — from other, non-compostable trash.

New York has long lagged behind other big cities in recycling organic waste, which makes up a third of the garbage it sends to landfills. In 2020, City Hall suspended its composting program and plans to expand it to the entire city, citing pandemic budget strains. When it returned, there was a new, convoluted opt-in process that served only a handful of neighborhoods.

Eric Adams had citywide composting on his “Get Stuff Done” list during his mayoral campaign. But after taking office, he called the program “broken” and scrapped it to save money. He vowed to find a cheaper, more effective, more equitable approach, but compost devotees were enraged.

Now, City Hall is unveiling a new pilot program that it says will get more people to participate at a lower cost. It also has a new organizing principle: no drama.

City officials plan to announce on Monday that starting in October, garbage trucks will cruise by every dwelling in Queens every week to pick up separated food scraps and yard waste.

Jessica Tisch, the sanitation commissioner, said that developing the program and making trash separation feel less like an extra headache than a new city service were top priorities for her department.

“Simple and easy to use,” Ms. Tisch said in an interview on Sunday. “No drama for New Yorkers.”

Officials and environmental advocates said the key to success is marketing the program as one that will make garbage cleaner, both inside people’s homes and on the streets, and reduce the city’s growing rat problem. That, they argue, could make composting just as attractive to people who rarely think about the climate impact of their garbage as it is to passionate environmentalists.

“The whole concept,” Ms. Tisch said, “is that New Yorkers want to do the right thing and if you make it easy enough, they will.”

The new compost trucks will just show up, she said. No opt-in needed (“That was a psychodrama”). No requirement to participate (“We’re not there yet”). And no “bin drama.” The city will provide brown bins as it does in the existing opt-in program, which will continue. But in Queens, yard waste, such as leaves, can also go in a bag. For food scraps, any bin is fine — as long it is sealed and rat proof.

Ms. Tisch also has a plan to eliminate what she calls a whole other “level of drama”: Apartment residents will no longer need approval from building managers, who often veto their requests for organics pickup in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan neighborhoods that offer it.

Sanitation officials say building managers often assume food-scrap bins mean more messes, more odors and more trouble for building superintendents.

“They are wrong,” said Josh Goodman, the assistant commissioner for public affairs at the Department of Sanitation. “The garbage is gross now. Rats rip the bags open now. If the organic material is in a separate, sealed container, rats have a much harder time getting into it.”

The Adams administration also hopes the Queens plan will dampen the political drama.

Some of the environmental advocates, climate experts, public-housing residents, community gardeners and others who have lobbied successive administrations to adopt universal composting were consulted on the plan. They cautiously call it promising.

“This could be the metamorphosis of New York City composting,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a lawyer and New York City environment director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Hopefully a beautiful butterfly will emerge.”

He said that “butterfly” would be universal curbside composting collection for everyone in the city.

City Hall was likely to be pushed this direction in any case. A City Council bill that would require mandatory citywide organics collection has gathered a veto-proof number of sponsors, including the speaker, Adrienne Adams, and Sandy Nurse, the sanitation committee chair. Mr. Goldstein contended that the Queens plan did not take away the need for that measure and said its timing was “probably not a coincidence.”

The ultimate goal is to capture the eight million pounds of compostable waste that now goes every day to landfills, where it emits methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. Even in districts with opt-in composting, just 10 percent of residents take part, meaning trucks travel long distances between stops. The mayor has argued that makes the cost per ton of collected organics prohibitive.

Sanitation officials say by more efficiently designing routes and work schedules, their plan reduces the organics operations cost per community district by more than half, from $860,000 to a projected $320,000. The program’s new costs, they say, total $2 million, which is less than $1 per Queens resident.

Innovations include trucks that will follow compost-only routes that reach more homes per day. Other routes will use two-sided trucks to collect both recyclables and organics. The department will hire 76 new organics-only sanitation workers, helping to reduce overtime pay.

Queens has more trees and yards than other boroughs and was chosen because yard waste is an entry point that has helped cities such as Seattle and Toronto achieve high composting rates, since people already have to place cuttings and leaves in separate bags.

The borough’s diversity — dense apartment districts, single-family homes, large public-housing complexes and various underserved areas — will also test how best to make composting universal and equitable, officials said.

Mr. Goodman said that another pilot program exceeded expectations. The city placed sealed compost bins on sidewalks. By unlocking them with an app and cranking a handle, people can deposit organic waste. The bins, placed mostly in the Astoria section of Queens, fill up daily, with almost no inappropriate items.

New street bins, mostly in Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn, will bring the total to 400.

City organics waste goes to a facility on Newtown Creek, which turns it into renewable energy, and to a city composting site on Staten Island, which turns it into soil that is given to parks and community gardens or sold in bulk.

The city also plans to spread the word that people can keep compost in their freezer or a small sealed indoor bin between collection days to make their kitchen less stinky.

“It’s not new stuff,” Mr. Goodman said. “It’s in your garbage anyway.”

Media narratives are driven by trajectory.

Things get better or worse. People rise and fall. Maybe there is an upstart sensation who threatens the establishment. Maybe there is a spectacular fall from grace. Maybe there is a comeback. Regardless of the story, the direction of movement is what matters.

Joe Biden got caught in one of those narratives: that things were going badly and people were losing confidence. Then, of course, the polls backed up that narrative, which provided a patina of proof.

But the truth is that news narratives and polls are symbiotic. The narratives help shape what people believe, which is then captured by the polls, and those polling results are then fed back into news narratives as separate, objective and independent fact.

“Joe Biden can’t catch a break” was a neat narrative. Every new disappointing data point fit snugly within it. But reality doesn’t play by media rules. It is often much more nuanced.

As the legendary football coach Lou Holtz once put it: “You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”

Biden has had some bad months, to be sure, but there is no way to get around the fact the last month or so has been stellar for the administration.

On the economic front, as of Wednesday, gas prices had fallen for 50 consecutive days, down 86 cents from the record average high of $5.02 on June 14, according to CNN. The jobs market has also shown incredible resilience. Friday’s jobs report alone far outpaced expectations.

There are challenges. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation increased “9.1 percent for the 12 months ending June, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending November 1981.” This doesn’t invalidate that Biden has had a good month; it only underscores the complexities of any news story.

On the legislative front, in June, Biden signed the most significant federal gun safety legislation in nearly 30 years. Two weeks ago, his big spending bill, Build Back Better, which everyone thought was dead, was resurrected in the trimmed down form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, all Senate Democrats have gotten behind the bill and it has passed in that body. These developments don’t erase legislative disappointments like the failure of the voter protection bill or the police reform bill, but they are victories nonetheless.

There are foreign policy wins, like the killing of the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Afghanistan, and the overwhelming vote in the Senate in favor of expanding NATO to include Finland and Sweden, a direct reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the Russians have suggested that they are open to discussing a prison swap to free Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, both of whom are still being held in Russian custody. Here, again, there are challenges. For instance, tensions are heating up with China, particularly after a visit to Taiwan by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

Then, there is the uber issue of the Supreme Court striking down the right to an abortion. This was a gutting disappointment to liberals, and many have accused the White House of not reacting strongly enough.

But it appears that the issue has roused some otherwise disinterested or dispassionate voters and may help Democrats to hold off a massive wave of Republican wins in the midterms. We need look no further than Kansas, a state that voted strongly for Donald Trump in 2020, but that last week voted even more strongly to keep the right to an abortion in the state Constitution.

Biden’s string of victories may not yet be enough to shift the narrative about him from spiraling to rebounding, but a fair read of recent events demands some adjustment.

The White House must also shift its messaging, from defensive to offensive. I’ve never truly bought the argument that Biden’s polling was bad because he simply wasn’t doing enough to tout his accomplishments. There were some periods where the disappointments actually seemed to carry more weight than his achievements.

But that’s not the case now, and the administration must seize this moment, and not be shy about shouting about its wins.

This is one area where Trump succeeded: boasting. When he was campaigning in 2016, he claimed that if he was elected, people might even “get tired of winning.” As he put it, people would say: “Please, please, it’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.” To which he said he would respond: “No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more.”

He would go through his term bragging about how anything that happened on his watch was the biggest and best.

We now know that the Trump presidency was a disaster that nearly destroyed the country, but, if a failure like Trump can crow about all he did, even when the evidence wasn’t there, then surely Biden can find a way to do a little crowing of his own, particularly during one of the most successful stretches of his presidency.

Biden, you did it. Boast about it.

LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — There was a mass grave that held 300 people, and I was standing at its edge. The chalky body bags were piled up in the pit, exposed. One moment before, I was a different person, someone who never knew how wind smelled after it passed over the dead on a pleasant summer afternoon.

In mid-June, those corpses were far from a complete count of the civilians killed by shelling in the area around the industrial city of Lysychansk over the previous two months. They were only “the ones who did not have anyone to bury them in a garden or a backyard,” a soldier said casually.

He lit a cigarette while we looked at the grave.

The smoke obscured the smell.

It was rare to get such a moment to slow down, observe and reflect while reporting from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. But that day, the Ukrainian soldiers were pleased after delivering packets of food and other goods to local civilians, so they offered to take reporters from The New York Times to another site that they said we should see: the mass grave.

After leaving the site, I naïvely thought the palpable presence of death in the air could not follow me home — over all of the roads and checkpoints separating the graves in the Donbas — to my loved ones in the western part of Ukraine.

I was wrong.

I had returned to Kyiv, the capital, to the small apartment I had been renting, and was washing the smoke and dust of the front lines off my clothes when my best friend, Yulia, texted: She had lost her cousin, a soldier, fighting in the east.

I would soon have to stand over another grave.

It was an experience familiar to many Ukrainians. Five months after the full-scale Russian invasion began, the wars’ front lines mean little. Missile strikes and the news of death and casualties have blackened nearly every part of the country like poison.

Yulia’s cousin Serhiy was serving in an air mobile battalion around the city of Izium in the east. A few hours before he died, he sent his last message to his mother, Halyna: an emoji of a flower bouquet. Then he drove to the fight on the front line, where a Russian machine gun found him.

In Donbas, these tragedies are a backdrop to everyday existence, piling up in numbers that seem inconceivable even as they completely surround you, an inescapable reality that feels like the very air in your lungs.

There is no catharsis for the people living in the frontline regions. Instead, they seem overwhelmed by the vastness of what is going on around them — as if it’s an existential threat too big for them to do anything about. So they wait numbly for what often seems the inevitable outcome, hypnotized by indecision, all while often forgetting they are directly in harm’s way.

It felt different in the west, away from the front. In the Donbas, almost every sudden odd noise was exactly what you suspected it to be: something lethal flying nearby, seeking out the living.

In contrast, Kyiv was almost peaceful. With running water, gas, electricity and internet, it was far from the medieval conditions of a destroyed Lysychansk. People were playing Frisbee and walking dogs in the parks, devoid of the bodily stiffness and sense of dread that accompanies the threat of sudden death.

The chain of midsummer missile strikes on cities far from the fighting in the east and south had only just started, turning the daily news of killed civilians into a nightmare: unsuspecting people — children among them — blasted apart or burned alive inside malls and medical centers in broad daylight. It left tight knots in our stomachs, but they hadn’t transformed yet into something almost genetic, a terror that would be passed on to the offspring by the survivors of this war.

Another nightmare, a private one, was contained in Serhiy’s coffin, closed to spare the family the sight of his wounds. It heralded the war’s arrival in Lishchn, a postage stamp of a village in northwest Ukraine where Yulia’s family came from. There was no thud of artillery or shriek from a missile, just the quiet hum of a funeral procession.

Because of soldiers like Serhiy fighting on the front line, the village residents still had their present and future, distorted by war, but protected. That’s why, on that Saturday morning, hundreds of them came to Serhiy’s parents’ yard to share the weight of their grief and take a long farewell walk with the family.

As the priest read prayers to the crowd, a flock of swallows maneuvered high above us — a set of peaceful black spots crossing the blue sky. One of them flew down and sat on a wire just above Serhiy’s mother, who was wailing by the coffin, placed on a pair of kitchen stools outside the house.

I’ve watched these ceremonies before on reporting duty, but from the emotionally safe distance of an outsider. But that day, there was Yulia, trembling in the wind. So I put my arm around my best friend, as close to a person’s raw pain as ever before.

Hours later, when the prayers ended, Halyna could not cry anymore. She just spoke quietly to her son, the way she used to over 30 years ago, when he was a newborn, his face in the cradle as tiny as the face in the funeral photograph of the smiling uniformed man holding a rocket launcher.

Finally, we made the long walk to take Serhiy from the family’s yard to his grave.

Hundreds of people walked with Serhiy’s parents through his native village. There was a shop where he might have bought his first cigarettes, and a lake where he probably swam after ditching school with his friends.

Experiences from Serhiy’s life seemed to hide in every corner of their village. It made the walk excruciatingly long.

My steps that day fell in concert with the pain of one family — but just one. There are so many more in this war, which seems far from over.

It was hard to keep my thoughts from drifting back over the wheat fields of Donbas, to that yawning mass grave in Lysychansk.

There was no one present to mourn them there. After the Russians took over the city during the last days of June, the 300 body bags with name tags attached by Ukrainian soldiers were probably joined by many more, unnamed. But I figured that someone somewhere was quietly mourning each of them.

Now, as I’m writing this, others are walking those same tracks of remembrance and loss throughout Ukraine — over city alleys and wheat fields, over rubble and broken glass, through eastern steppes, western forests, liberated villages, trenches and bleeding cities at the edge of the front line.

Ahead, there will be a sunny afternoon for some of us to stop, take the hand of someone we love and let go of everything and everyone we lost to the war.

But how long is the walk to get there?

Muhammad Imtiaz Hussain is afraid to step outside his home in Albuquerque to water his plants. Or retrieve books from his car. Or even venture out onto his balcony.

“My kids won’t let me go outside of my apartment,” said Mr. Hussain, 41, whose younger brother Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, was fatally shot a week ago Monday just a few blocks away. He was one of four Muslim men who were killed recently in the city — three in the past two weeks — and authorities believe the deaths are connected and meant to target the Muslim community.

The latest victim, a Muslim man in his mid-20s from South Asia whose name has not been released by the police, was killed on Friday just before midnight. Another man, Aftab Hussein, 41, was fatally shot on July 26. Authorities say that the killings of all three might be connected to the November 2021 killing of Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, outside a business he and his brother ran.

As the Albuquerque Police, the F.B.I. and the State Police appealed to the public for help in finding the killer or killers — on Sunday authorities described a vehicle of interest, a dark-colored, four-door Volkswagen sedan — the attacks have left Muslims in a state of terror.

One member who attended the Islamic Center of New Mexico, the same mosque as all four of the victims, said that he may never return, citing a fear of becoming “bait.”

Other members have temporarily left the state to stay with family members in other parts of the country to wait out the investigation. One man, who immigrated from Iraq, said that he felt safer back when he first came to the country in the 1980s. Another member, Salem Ansari, said that some who attend the mosque and work night shifts have quit their jobs.

“This situation is getting so much worse,” Mr. Ansari said.

Ahmad Assed, president of the mosque, said that he grew up in Albuquerque attending the Islamic Center but never felt isolated as a Muslim in the city. But now, he said, the community is going through a “sort of managed panic.”

The elder Mr. Hussain said that he had lived safely in his neighborhood for eight years since moving to the United States with his wife and children. His brother Muhammad arrived in 2017, and both men would go to the library at midnight or buy coffees late into the evening while attending the University of New Mexico as international students.

“Now, I look outside the window and think, ‘Oh, this is the place where my brother was killed. Should we move?’” he said.

Mr. Hussain said that he had initially hoped to send his brother’s body back to be buried with family in Pakistan, but the numerous gunshot wounds had made his brother unrecognizable, and Mr. Hussain did not want his family to see him. The killer “wanted to finish him — the whole nine yards,” he said.

In general, anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States have been trending downward. Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice at California State University at San Bernardino and the director of the school’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said that the number of hate crimes reported against Muslims was lower in 2020 than in any year since 9/11, though he added that those numbers may be skewed because of pandemic restrictions.

But he said that hate crimes remain a concern: They rose more than 20 percent in 2021 and increased another 4.7 percent in the first half of 2022, the center reported. Also, “underlying anti-Muslim attitudes” are pervasive and resurface during times of national hardship, according to Professor Levin’s studies.

The authorities said that they are refraining from using the term “hate” in labeling the crimes until a motive could be established.

Just last year, the Islamic Center faced an attempted arson from a woman who the police say set three fires on the mosque playground and one fire at the mosque’s main entry. No one was injured, and the woman was arrested and charged with arson. The case is pending.

The Islamic Center has instructed its nearly 2,500 members to stay home as much as they can, use the “buddy system” when going out and refrain from “engaging with or agitating” anyone, Mr. Assed said.

He added that he still felt supported by other communities but that this time he also was feeling a sense of “hopelessness and despair.”

“I do watch my back and get in the car. I’m watching all my surroundings,” he said. “You don’t know whether they’re following you from the mosque, if they’re actually watching people going in and out of the mosque and following them elsewhere. The pattern is unknown.”

Some community members have expressed frustration about the lack of details from the police investigation, but Mr. Assed said he was in contact with authorities and understood why they have kept any developments under wraps. Authorities have neither elaborated on why they believe the killings are linked nor indicated whether there were any witnesses.

Mr. Hussain said that he wanted the federal and state governments to pour as many resources as possible into catching the killer.

But until someone is caught, nothing is likely to lessen his fear — or his grief.

“My 5-year-old keeps asking, ‘Hey, where is my uncle?’” he said. “She’ll see me crying and say, ‘Are you a crybaby? Why are you crying?’ But we can’t tell her. Not yet.”

BLACKSBURG, Va. — After years of spirited opposition from environmental activists, the Mountain Valley Pipeline — a 304-mile gas pipeline cutting through the Appalachian Mountains — was behind schedule, over budget and beset with lawsuits. As recently as February, one of its developers, NextEra Energy, warned that the many legal and regulatory obstacles meant there was “a very low probability of pipeline completion.”

Then came Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and his hold on the Democrats’ climate agenda.

Mr. Manchin’s recent surprise agreement to back the Biden administration’s historic climate legislation came about in part because the senator was promised something in return: not only support for the pipeline in his home state, but also expedited approval for pipelines and other infrastructure nationwide, as part of a wider set of concessions to fossil fuels.

It was a big win for a pipeline industry that, in recent years, has quietly become one of Mr. Manchin’s biggest financial supporters.

Natural gas pipeline companies have dramatically increased their contributions to Mr. Manchin, from just $20,000 in 2020 to more than $331,000 so far this election cycle, according to campaign finance disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission and tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics. Mr. Manchin has been by far Congress’s largest recipient of money from natural gas pipeline companies this cycle, raising three times as much from the industry than any other lawmaker.

NextEra Energy, a utility giant and stakeholder in the Mountain Valley Pipeline, is a top donor to both Mr. Manchin and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, who negotiated the pipeline side deal with Mr. Manchin. Mr. Schumer has received more than $281,000 from NextEra this election cycle, the data shows. Equitrans Midstream, which owns the largest stake in the pipeline, has given more than $10,000 to Mr. Manchin. The pipeline and its owners have also spent heavily to lobby Congress.

The disclosures point to the extraordinary behind-the-scenes spending and deal-making by the fossil fuel industry that have shaped a climate bill that nevertheless stands to be transformational. The final reconciliation package, which cleared the Senate on Sunday, would allocate almost $400 billion to climate and energy policies, including support for cleaner technologies like wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles, and put the United States on track to reduce its emissions of planet-warming gases by roughly 40 percent below 2005 levels by the decade’s end.

A spokesman for Mr. Manchin said the Mountain Valley Pipeline “will help bring down energy costs, shore up American energy security and create jobs in West Virginia.” An official in Mr. Schumer’s office said the pipeline deal “was only included at the insistence of Sen. Manchin as part of any agreement related to this reconciliation bill.”

Natalie Cox, a spokeswoman for Equitrans, said the company maintained a “high standard of integrity” while engaging with policymakers. She declined to say whether Equitrans had pressed either senator on the pipeline. NextEra Energy, which also develops renewable projects across the country and stands to benefit widely from the bill, did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite concessions like the pipeline deal, major environmental groups as well as progressives in Congress have praised the legislation. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for the country to enact meaningful climate legislation.

But in Appalachia, where the Mountain Valley Pipeline cuts through steep mountainsides and nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands, the deal has highlighted the economic and social tensions in a region where extractive industries over the generations have produced jobs in coal mines and on fracking rigs but have also left behind deep scars on the land and in communities.

For years, environmental and civil rights activists as well as many Democratic state lawmakers have opposed the pipeline project, which would carry more than two billion cubic feet of natural gas per day out of the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia and through southern Virginia. Construction on the pipeline was supposed to be complete by 2018, but environmental groups have successfully challenged a series of federal permits in court, where judges have found the pipeline developers’ analyses about the effects on wildlife, sedimentation and erosion lacking.

The pipeline deal means Appalachia is again becoming a “sacrifice zone” for the greater good, said Russell Chisholm, an Iraq war veteran and a member of Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights, a coalition of groups that oppose construction.

He was visiting on Friday with a neighbor, Jammie Hale, who held up a jar of cloudy tap water. It was thick with sediment that Mr. Hale suspected had been dislodged by construction along the pipeline’s route, which runs alongside his property near Virginia’s border with West Virginia. Both men have clashed with the police at protests. They spoke beneath an American flag that Mr. Hale had hung upside down ever since workers started laying down pipe.

“If working people, poor people reaped the benefits, this bill could really help,” Mr. Chisholm said. “But it’s all beyond us, because it turns out they’ve been negotiating behind the scenes. It turns out the pipeline was on the negotiating table, and we weren’t at that table.”

“There’s a tendency to write off our region as a red state that got what was coming to them,” he added.

The concerns in Appalachia underscore the real-world fallout of the Democrats’ concessions to fossil fuels. The climate bill requires the federal government to auction off more public lands and waters for oil drilling as a prerequisite for more renewable energy sources like wind and solar. It expands tax credits for carbon capture technology that could allow coal- or gas-burning power plants to keep operating with reduced emissions.

Mr. Manchin has also secured pledges for a follow-up bill that would make it easier to greenlight energy infrastructure projects and make it tougher to oppose such projects under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act.

Those provisions could encourage further construction of pipelines, gas-burning power plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure to the detriment of low-income neighborhoods, which already disproportionately host these industries and often have fewer resources to negotiate with developers.

“People like me who are just trying to survive don’t have the time to attend hearings and meetings,” said Crystal Mello, who has cleaned homes for a living in southwest Virginia for two decades. She listened in on local hearings on her earbuds as she swept floors, and found whatever time she could to support “sit-ins” in trees in nearby Elliston to stop pipeline workers from felling them. She is now a community organizer even as she continues to clean houses.

“These mountains are meant to have trees protecting them,” she said. “People are saying this is a good deal, but at what cost?”

The concessions to natural gas pipelines come amid what has been a dramatic turnaround in the industry’s fortunes. For years, a glut of natural gas had depressed prices, and the coronavirus pandemic further cut demand. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the U.S. economic rebound, has pushed prices higher.

As a result, natural gas pipelines and export terminals have become a key growth opportunity as Europe looks for ways to wean itself from Russian gas. And even as the United States takes steps to add more renewable sources of energy, natural gas and oil remain the bedrock of the U.S. economy, and much of that fuel moves around the country through pipelines.

Gov. Jim Justice, Republican of West Virginia, has said that the pipeline should be finished and has called on the Biden administration to encompass all forms of energy. “This country needs to be totally energy independent,” he said at a briefing in February. “Without any question, if it were, we would feel better, stronger and better off.” Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Republican of Virginia, has also said the pipeline is vital to his state.

Supporters point to other benefits that the legislation would bring to West Virginia. It would cement a federal trust fund to support coal miners who have black lung disease, for example, and offer incentives for building wind and solar farms in areas where coal mines or coal plants recently closed.

“If you look to the future, it’s going to help,” David Owens, a retired local firefighter, said after he had filled up his S.U.V. outside Blacksburg, Va. Pipeline opponents were only “delaying the inevitable,” he said. “It’s going to happen.”

It remains unclear precisely how Mr. Manchin’s pipeline deal will work. According to terms released by the senator, the agreement requires federal agencies to take “all necessary actions” to permit the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s construction and operation. The terms of the agreement, which would be included in the follow-up bill, would also give the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit jurisdiction over all future legal challenges, rather than keep that authority with the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., where environmentalists had found success.

The Fourth Circuit has overturned permits issued by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, saying that their analyses about adverse effects on wildlife, sedimentation and erosion were flawed. The pipeline project has particularly struggled to get approval to cross streams or wetlands in a part of the country with so many of them.

Joseph M. Lovett, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Appalachian Mountain Advocates who is fighting the pipeline, said that any change in legal jurisdiction mandated by Congress “was ridiculous.”

“We’re a nation of laws. The powerful people don’t have the right to choose judges,” he said, adding, “If rich people can pay to get a better day in court, that’s just corruption.”

Mr. Manchin has made clear his view that fossil fuels will continue to be necessary. He became a millionaire from his family coal business and has taken more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any of his colleagues have.

Mr. Manchin has attracted more contributions in part because he is the chairman of the Senate energy committee. Major pipeline companies that have made contributions include Enterprise Products Partners, Energy Transfer LP, Plains All American Pipeline and Williams Companies.

David Seriff, who has long opposed the pipeline, looked out on Saturday from Brush Mountain, where the pipeline would cross half a mile from his home. With construction stalled, sections of the thick pipe have laid exposed on the ground for years. “I don’t come out here much anymore because I hate to see this,” he said.

Mr. Seriff said he was encouraged by Congress’s action on climate. “But the Democrats and people who say they’re environmentalists are ready to build the pipeline, too,” he said.