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LONDON — Britain’s governing Conservative Party lost two strategically important parliamentary seats in elections in the north and south on Thursday, dealing a harsh blow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and raising fresh doubts about his scandal-scarred leadership.

Voters in Tiverton and Honiton, a rural stretch of southwest England that is the party’s heartland, and in the faded industrial city of Wakefield evicted the Conservative Party from seats that had come open after lawmakers were brought down by scandals of their own.

In Wakefield, the Labour Party won a widely expected victory, with a comfortable margin over the Conservatives. In the south, which had been viewed as a tossup, the Liberal Democratic Party scored an even more impressive result, overcoming a huge Conservative majority in the last election to win the seat by a solid margin.

The double defeat is a stinging rebuke of Mr. Johnson, who survived a no-confidence vote in his party earlier this month, precipitated by a scandal over illicit parties held at Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. It will likely revive talk of another no-confidence vote, though under the party’s current rules, Mr. Johnson should not face another challenge until next June.

In an immediate sign of the political fallout, the chairman of the Conservative Party, Oliver Dowden, resigned on Friday morning. In a letter sent to Mr. Johnson less than two hours after the votes had been counted, Mr. Dowden said the party’s supporters were “distressed and disappointed by recent events, and I share their feelings,” adding that “somebody must take responsibility.”

Mr. Dowden’s letter pointedly professed his loyalty to the Conservative Party, rather than to its leader. But on Thursday, before the results were tabulated, Mr. Johnson, who is attending a summit of Commonwealth leaders in Kigali, Rwanda, told the BBC that it would be “crazy” for him to resign, even if the party lost both elections.

The defeats exposed Conservative vulnerabilities on two fronts: the so-called “red wall,” the industrial north of England, where Mr. Johnson shattered a traditional Labour stronghold in the 2019 general election, and in the southwest, a traditional Tory stronghold often called the “blue wall.”

It was the first double defeat for a governing party in a parliamentary by-election since 1991. And as grim as the electoral prospects for the Conservatives look, they could worsen further next year, with galloping inflation, interest rate hikes and Britain almost certainly heading for a recession.

In Tiverton, where the Liberal Democrats won 53 percent of the vote to the Conservatives’ 38 percent, the victorious candidate, Richard Foord, said the result would send “a shock wave through British politics.”

The Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, said the victory in Wakefield, where Labour won 48 percent of the vote to the Conservatives’ 30 percent, was “a clear judgment on a Conservative Party that has run out of energy and ideas.”

While the political contours of the two districts are very different, they share a common element: a Conservative lawmaker who resigned in disgrace. In Tiverton and Honiton, Neil Parish quit in April after he admitted watching pornography on his phone while sitting in Parliament. In Wakefield, Imran Ahmad Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison in May after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy.

Mr. Khan’s legal troubles, which included multiple unsuccessful efforts to have his case heard secretly, meant that Wakefield did not have a functioning representative in Parliament for two years. That left people in the city deeply disillusioned, analysts said, not just about Mr. Khan but about politics in general.

“The whole unfortunate situation is about a broken political system that ignores the voters and their wishes and politicians who don’t do the right thing or serve the people who got them into power,” said Gavin Murray, editor of the Wakefield Express. “This point is amplified and exaggerated by the behavior of Boris and Downing Street.”

While there had been little expectation that the Conservatives would hold on to the Wakefield seat, the scale of the victory by the Labour candidate, Simon Lightwood, suggested the party could compete successfully against the Conservatives in the next general election.

The massive swing in votes in Tiverton and Honiton, where the Conservatives had hoped to hold on, was even more sobering for Mr. Johnson.

The Liberal Democrats’ upset victory, by a convincing margin, in one of the Conservative Party’s safest districts suggested that even the most loyal Tory voters had become disenchanted with the serial scandals and nonstop drama surrounding the prime minister.

Last year, the Conservatives were stunned by the loss of a parliamentary seat in Chesham and Amersham, a well-heeled district northwest of London. Analysts said it suggested a backlash against Mr. Johnson’s divisive brand of politics and tax-and-spend policies.

The government has promised to “level up” and boost the economy in the North of England, a reward to the red-wall voters. But some analysts see a significant risk of support fracturing among traditional Tories in the south.

The Liberal Democrats specialize in fighting on local issues in by-elections. They have a long history of achieving surprise results, and success for them in Tiverton and Honiton consolidated the party’s strong performance in local elections in May, where they also emerged the big winners.

In the days leading up to the two elections, Labour and the Liberal Democrats both concentrated their resources in the districts they were better placed to win, each leaving the other a freer run.

Vince Cable, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that rather than any official cooperation between the two parties, there was a “tacit understanding, relying on the voters to get to a sensible outcome.”

“Because the economic outlook is so awful, certainly for the next 12 to 18 months, it wouldn’t surprise me if Johnson did something very risky and went for an autumn election,” Mr. Cable said at an election-eve briefing.

Kenneth Baker, a former chairman of the Conservative Party, said that a defeat in Tiverton and Honiton would underscore that “the position is pretty bleak for the Conservative Party,” which won an 80-seat majority in Parliament in the 2019 general election.

“There is a huge opportunity for the Liberal Democrats now because neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative Party have any vision or strategy whatsoever,” said Mr. Baker, who is a member of the House of Lords. Mr. Johnson, he added, is now too polarizing a figure to lead the party successfully.

“If the Conservative Party continues to be led by Boris,” he said, “there is no chance of the Conservatives winning an overall majority.”

Paolo Banchero knew Thursday would be a special day, the start of his N.B.A. career.

Earlier in the day, he had heard that the Orlando Magic weren’t sure who they would select with the first overall pick in the draft that night. When he found out, just minutes before N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver called his name, he couldn’t believe it.

“This isn’t even a dream,” Banchero said. “I feel like this is a fantasy. I dreamed of being in the N.B.A., but being the No. 1 overall pick — this is crazy.”

The Magic selected Banchero, a forward from Duke University, with the top pick in Thursday’s draft. He is a 6-foot-10, 250-pound power forward, whose mother, Rhonda Smith-Banchero, played in the W.N.B.A. He was a guard earlier in his basketball career and played football and basketball at O’Dea High School in Seattle.

In the minutes before his name was called, Banchero sat at a table on the floor of Barclays Center showing no emotion on his face. The Magic were on the clock and word began to spread that Banchero might be their pick. Cameras crowded around him, but he didn’t outwardly react. Only when he heard his name did his expression change.

He lowered his head, looked up and smiled with tears in his eyes.

“I was telling everyone I wasn’t going to cry no matter what pick I was picked,” Banchero said. “It just hit me. I couldn’t stop it.”

In his only season at Duke, Banchero averaged 17.2 points, 7.8 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game and was named the Atlantic Coast Conference’s rookie of the year.

The picks for the rest of the top five: Gonzaga’s Chet Holmgren at No. 2 to the Oklahoma City Thunder, Auburn’s Jabari Smith Jr. to the Houston Rockets at No. 3, Iowa’s Keegan Murray to the Sacramento Kings at No. 4 and Purdue’s Jaden Ivey to the Detroit Pistons at No. 5.

Three prospects were thought to have separated themselves at the top of this year’s draft: Banchero, Holmgren and Smith.

Holmgren nodded and smirked subtly as he heard Banchero’s name called first. When Silver called his name, Holmgren broke out into a wide smile, stopping for handshakes and long embraces with his family members.

“I got a thousand emotions to describe this moment,” Holmgren said during an interview that was broadcast in the arena in Brooklyn. “It’s surreal and everything I expected.”

Holmgren, 20, is a rail-thin, seven-foot-tall center who grew up in Minneapolis and was named Minnesota’s Mr. Basketball in 2021. He was a high school teammate of Jalen Suggs, whom the Magic drafted fifth overall in 2021. They each spent one season at Gonzaga.

Holmgren led Gonzaga to a 28-4 record and averaged 14.1 points per game while making 60.7 percent of his field-goal attempts. He also averaged 9.9 rebounds and 3.7 blocks per game. Gonzaga entered the N.C.A.A. tournament as the No. 1 overall seed, but was upset in the round of 16.

In the days before the draft, rumors circulated in media reports that Orlando had decided to select Smith first overall. As Smith waited for his name to be called, he looked disappointed. When finally Silver announced his name, another prospect, Louisiana State’s Tari Eason, who played in the same conference, leaped out of his seat to clap for Smith.

“I know it was a possibility, so when it didn’t happen, I was surprised,” Smith said of the prospect of his being selected first overall. “You know, all the guys up for the pick are great players. They bring a lot to the table. It was like I said in the other interviews: It was a coin flip. So when it happened, you know, I was just happy for them, clapped for them and just waiting to get my name called.”

Smith, 19, spent one season at Auburn after a distinguished high school basketball career in Georgia. He played for the same Amateur Athletic Union team as another No. 1 pick by the Magic: Dwight Howard. Smith’s father, also named Jabari Smith, spent parts of four seasons in the N.B.A. in the early 2000s.

Jabari Smith Jr. was named the Southeastern Conference’s freshman of the year and a second-team all-American this past season. Smith is a 6-foot-10 power forward with the ability to shoot from the perimeter. He made 42.9 percent of his 3-pointers and averaged 16.9 points per game at Auburn.

The first surprise of the night was the selection of Murray by the Kings at No. 4, given the expectation that Banchero, Holmgren and Smith would go in some order in the top three. The spectators at Barclays Center erupted at the announcement.

Murray is the highest-selected Hawkeye in school history. The 6-foot-8 forward earned consensus first-team all-American honors this past season and finished fourth in Division I scoring with 23.5 points per game. He led the Hawkeyes to a 26-10 record and a first-round appearance in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

Ivey spent two seasons at Purdue before declaring for the draft. He averaged 17.3 points, 4.9 rebounds and 3.1 assists per game during his sophomore season.

Long after most of the 24 players in the draft’s green room had been selected, Jaden Hardy remained, waiting for his turn. Hardy, who played for the G League Ignite last season, sat with his family and his agent, Rich Paul. He waited through the first round and six picks into the second round before he heard his name.

Silver typically announces only the first-round picks, but before Hardy’s selection, he briefly stopped by Hardy’s table. As Mark Tatum, the N.B.A.’s deputy commissioner, announced that Hardy had been chosen 37th overall by the Kings, Silver waited offstage and applauded.

The Magic won this year’s draft lottery after finishing the season at 22-60, the worst record in the Eastern Conference and the second-worst record in the league. Only the Houston Rockets, who had the third pick in this year’s draft after a 20-62 season, won fewer games than the Magic.

This year marked the fourth time in the franchise’s history that it made the first overall pick. The Magic drafted Shaquille O’Neal with the first pick in 1992; Chris Webber, whom they immediately traded for Penny Hardaway, in 1993; and Dwight Howard in 2004.

The pairing of Hardaway and O’Neal yielded one N.B.A. finals appearance, but no championships for the Magic. Howard also led the Magic to one finals appearance, in 2009.

Later in their careers, O’Neal and Howard won championships while playing for the Los Angeles Lakers — O’Neal in 2000, 2001 and 2002, and Howard in 2020.

Before Banchero, the last Duke player selected No. 1 overall in the N.B.A. draft was Zion Williamson in 2019. Banchero follows two guards — Anthony Edwards (2020) and Cade Cunningham (2021) — in earning the distinction of being the top pick.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Americans have a broad right to arm themselves in public, striking down a New York law that placed strict limits on carrying guns outside the home and setting off a scramble in other states that have similar restrictions.

The decision is expected to spur a wave of lawsuits seeking to loosen existing state and federal restrictions and will force five states — California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey, home to a quarter of all Americans — to rewrite their laws.

The ruling follows the mass shootings last month in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, and was handed down on a day when the Senate passed gun control legislation that would enhance background checks for prospective gun buyers ages 18 to 21, provide incentives for states to enact so-called red-flag laws and tighten a federal ban on domestic abusers buying firearms. It was Congress’s most significant action on gun legislation in nearly three decades.

The 6-to-3 decision again illustrated the power of the six conservative justices, all of whom voted to strike down the New York law, in setting the national agenda on social issues. The court’s three liberal members dissented.

The Second Amendment, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, protects “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” States can continue to prohibit guns in some locations like schools and government buildings, Justice Thomas wrote, but the ruling left open where exactly such bans might be allowed.

Moments after the ruling was issued, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York vowed to reconvene the Legislature as early as next month to enact new measures that could let the state maintain existing regulations. Democratic lawmakers in Maryland also suggested they would rewrite legislation to survive expected legal challenges.

“We’re already dealing with a major gun violence crisis,” Ms. Hochul said. “We don’t need to add more fuel to this fire.”

The case concerned so-called may issue laws, which give government officials substantial discretion over issuing gun licenses.

In a concurring opinion, one that appeared to limit the sweep of the majority opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., wrote that “shall issue” laws used objective criteria and remained presumptively constitutional. States were generally free to require, he wrote, “fingerprinting, a background check, a mental health records check, and training in firearms handling and in laws regarding the use of force.”

Justice Kavanaugh also extensively quoted the court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which appeared to endorse other restrictions.

President Biden denounced the ruling, describing himself as “deeply disappointed.” It “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution and should deeply trouble us all,” he added.

Gun rights advocates welcomed the decision on Thursday. “The court has made clear that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is not limited to the home,” said Larry Keane, a top official with the gun industry’s top trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. “That the burden is on the government to justify restrictions, not on the individual to justify to the government a need to exercise their rights.”

The share prices of firearms manufacturers rose on Wall Street, with Smith & Wesson climbing more than 9 percent.

Jonathan Lowy, a lawyer with Brady, a gun control group, said the decision was a grave misstep. “In a stroke of the pen,” he said in a statement, “the Supreme Court today has invented a supposed right to carry, virtually anywhere, loaded guns — to potentially shoot and kill other people.”

The case centered on a lawsuit from two men who were denied the licenses they sought in New York, saying that “the state makes it virtually impossible for the ordinary law-abiding citizen to obtain a license.”

The men, Robert Nash and Brandon Koch, were authorized to carry guns for target practice and hunting away from populated areas, state officials told the Supreme Court, and Mr. Koch was allowed to carry a gun to and from work.

Justice Thomas wrote that citizens may not be required to explain to the government why they sought to exercise a constitutional right.

“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” he wrote.

“That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion,” he added. “It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”

The majority opinion announced a general standard by which courts must now judge restrictions on gun rights, one that relies on historical assessments: “The government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In focusing heavily on history, Justice Thomas rejected the standard used by most lower courts, which considered whether the law advanced an important government interest.

He acknowledged that the historical inquiry the court now requires will not always be straightforward.

Justice Thomas wrote that states remained free to ban guns in sensitive places, giving a few examples: schools, government buildings, legislative assemblies, polling places and courthouses. But he cautioned that “expanding the category of ‘sensitive places’ simply to all places of public congregation that are not isolated from law enforcement defines the category of ‘sensitive places’ far too broadly.”

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the majority’s guidance was inadequate, leaving unclear the scope of the court’s ruling.

“What about subways, nightclubs, movie theaters and sports stadiums?” Justice Breyer wrote. “The court does not say.”

Justice Breyer’s dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, focused on the deadly toll of gun violence.

“In 2020,” he wrote, “45,222 Americans were killed by firearms. Since the start of this year, there have been 277 reported mass shootings — an average of more than one per day. Gun violence has now surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.”

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. responded to the dissent.

“It is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served by most of the dissent’s lengthy introductory section,” he wrote. “Why, for example, does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years? Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities?

“Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home?” Justice Alito asked. “And how does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator.”

Justice Breyer questioned the majority’s methodology for judging the constitutionality of gun control laws in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, No. 20-843.

“The court’s near-exclusive reliance on history is not only unnecessary, it is deeply impractical,” he wrote. “It imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”

Judges, he wrote, are not historians. “Legal experts typically have little experience answering contested historical questions or applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems,” he wrote, adding: “Laws addressing repeating crossbows, launcegays, dirks, dagges, skeines, stilladers and other ancient weapons will be of little help to courts confronting modern problems.”

In the Heller decision, the Supreme Court recognized an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense. Since then, it has been almost silent on the scope of Second Amendment rights.

Indeed, the court for many years turned down countless appeals in Second Amendment cases. In the meantime, lower courts generally sustained gun control laws.

The court’s reluctance to hear Second Amendment cases changed as its membership shifted to the right in recent years. President Donald J. Trump’s three appointees — Justices Kavanaugh, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — have all expressed support for gun rights.

And the Supreme Court’s most conservative members have long deplored the court’s reluctance to explore the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment.

In 2017, Justice Thomas wrote that he had detected “a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.”

“For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous,” Justice Thomas wrote. “But the framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense.”

Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — The nation’s capital, so often a backdrop for inaction, had seldom witnessed anything quite like it — two branches of government splintering in opposite directions on guns, one of the country’s most divisive issues, in the space of two hours on a single day.

At a little after 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, the Senate advanced a bipartisan gun control bill that however incremental is still the most significant gun safety measure in decades. At 10:30 a.m., the Supreme Court delivered a decisive, sharply partisan blow to gun regulations, jolting national firearms policy to the right, perhaps for years.

The result was a monumental victory in the courts for the gun rights movement and a less significant but important legislative accomplishment for those demanding a response to the recent massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Tex. For the country there was an ever deepening confusion about the direction of national gun policy in an era of mass shootings, rising crime and a surging conservative push to expand gun rights and the reach of the Second Amendment.

“What a day,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel with the Giffords Law Center, the legal arm of the national gun safety group created by former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona Democrat and survivor of a 2011 shooting near Tucson.

“The Senate was finally getting to bipartisan consensus on these reforms, mainly because a bunch of Republican senators heard from their voters that something needed to be done,” he added. “Then the Supreme Court completely hijacks everything with an interpretation of gun rights that is completely out of step with what Democrats, independents and even a lot of Republicans wanted.

“Where does it all go from here?”

The court’s decision to strike down New York’s 100-year-old law restricting the carrying of guns in public is the most sweeping ruling on firearms in years, and only the court’s second major statement on the right to keep and bear arms.

In the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas compared restrictions on Second Amendment rights to limits on the right of free expression under the First Amendment and every American’s Sixth Amendment right to “confront the witnesses against him.” Critics were quick to point out that exercising those rights seldom involved the use of lethal force.

In the short term, the ruling forces five states, including New York, California and New Jersey, to drastically loosen their gun regulations.

In his sweeping 130-page opinion, Justice Thomas wrote that states may continue to ban guns in “sensitive” public places — like schools, courts and government buildings — but warned that local authorities should not define the category of such places too broadly.

“Put simply,” he added, “there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a ‘sensitive place’ simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.”

While the majority decision did not explicitly address federal regulation of firearms, Justice Department lawyers are assessing the consequences of the ruling on their procedures. Some restrictions, they believe, like the one on carrying weapons into courts, will remain in effect — but they are less sure about restrictions in post offices, museums and other facilities where guns are currently banned.

Although the court was widely expected to weaken state gun laws, the timing was a slight surprise: Most aides in the Capitol and at the White House believed the widely-anticipated decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen would come next week, as the court neared the coda of a term expected to be capped by an ending of Roe v. Wade.

This week, the focus was squarely on the Senate, which had managed to hash out a hard-won compromise on a package of gun regulations that would expand background checks for potential gun buyers under the age of 21, include serious dating partners in a law that prevents domestic abusers from purchasing firearms and provide federal money for state “red flag” laws to allow guns to be temporarily taken from people deemed dangerous.

A final vote on the package, which was expected to attract some Republican support, was expected perhaps as early as Thursday evening. That would make June 23, 2022, one of the most important days in America’s troubled centuries-old history with guns.

The Supreme Court decision — denounced by Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 Justice Department official, as “deeply disappointing’’ while a defiant Mayor Eric Adams of New York vowed to keep the city from becoming the “wild, wild West’’ — was seen as helping Democrats make the case for passing the Senate bill.

“The landscape for gun violence prevention laws is different today than it was just 48 hours ago,” said Kris Brown, the president of Brady, one of the country’s oldest gun control groups. “That decision has only underscored the urgent need for the Senate to act and pass this bill.”

Gun rights organizations in turn welcomed the ruling as a necessary constitutional check against the growing restrictions imposed in New York, California, New Jersey and other states. “The court has made clear that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is not limited to the home,” said Larry Keane, a top official with the gun industry’s top trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

The decision gave some potential political cover to the Senate Republicans who have backed the gun control bill, which earned its main Republican sponsor, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a fusillade of boos from gun rights activists at a state party gathering last week.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, followed up a statement applauding the bipartisanship of the legislation with a blistering defense of gun rights in the wake of the ruling.

“Great day for the Second Amendment,” he wrote. “The Supreme Court’s decision is yet another example of reinforcing the concept that the Second Amendment is an individual right rooted in the ability to defend oneself and property.”

Hopes of finding additional survivors faded a day after a deadly earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan, with the worst damage apparently centered in remote, mountainous Paktika Province. Provincial officials said that at least 1,000 people had been killed, while the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated that 770 people had been killed and 1,440 people had been injured in the 5.9-magnitude quake, and cautioned that those figures were very likely to rise.

In Geyan, one of the hardest hit districts in the province, the agency said that 1,500 houses were damaged or destroyed. These images show the initial scale of the damage and the relief efforts, which officials said were winding down.

Thursday, June 23

People amid the destruction caused by the earthquake in Geyan village.

A Taliban helicopter taking off after dropping supplies in Geyan.

Hawa and her daughter Safia, at the hospital in Sharana, in Paktika Province. Hawa lost almost her entire family except for two of her children.

Afghans standing by the bodies of relatives killed in an earthquake in Geyan.

Burying victims in Geyan.

People warmed themselves by an outdoor fire after their homes were destroyed by the earthquake.

Residents laid out clothes to dry near the ruins of damaged houses in the Bernal district in Paktika Province.

Mira was pulled out of the rubble and taken to a hospital in Sharana. One side of her body was crushed by the rubble, and she sustained serious injuries.

A government delegation that arrived in Azore Kalai village praying before starting to distribute aid on Thursday.

A damaged house in Azor Kalai village of Geyan district.

Residents from the village of Azor Kalai in the district of Geyan sorted through the belongings that they managed to pull out of the rubble, while taking shelter in makeshift tents.

Padshah Gul, 30, outside where his house once stood. He and his brother spent hours rescuing at least a dozen family members from the wreckage, but two died, including his sister-in-law.

Food and tents being unloaded from trucks in Geyan.

Wednesday, June 22

A photo provided by the state-run news agency Bakhtar shows the destruction caused by the earthquake in Paktika Province.

In another photo from the news agency, soldiers and Red Crescent officials responding to the earthquake.

An injured person at a hospital in Paktika Province.

People lining up to donate blood for the earthquake victims in Geyan.

A photo from the Bakhtar news agency shows the evacuation of an injured person in Paktika Province.

Searching for survivors in a village in Paktika Province.

ELK GROVE, Calif. — The French bulldog business is booming for Jaymar Del Rosario, a breeder whose puppies can sell for tens of thousands of dollars. When he leaves the house to meet a buyer, his checklist includes veterinary paperwork, a bag of puppy kibble and his Glock 26.

“If I don’t know the area, if I don’t know the people, I always carry my handgun,” Mr. Del Rosario said on a recent afternoon as he displayed Cashew, a 6-month-old French bulldog of a new “fluffy” variety that can fetch $30,000 or more.

With their perky ears, their please-pick-me-up-and-cradle-me gaze and their short-legged crocodile waddle, French bulldogs have become the “it” dog for influencers, pop stars and professional athletes. Loyal companions in the work-from-home era, French bulldogs seem always poised for an Instagram upload. They are now the second-most-popular dog breed in the United States after Labrador retrievers.

They are also being violently stolen from their owners with alarming frequency. Over the past year, robberies of French bulldogs have been reported in Miami, New York, Chicago, Houston and — especially, it seems — across California. Often, the dogs are taken at gunpoint. In perhaps the most notorious theft, Lady Gaga’s two French bulldogs, Koji and Gustav, were ripped from the hands of her dog walker, who was struck, choked and shot in last year’s attack on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

The price of owning a Frenchie has for years been punishing to the household budget — puppies typically sell for $4,000 to $6,000 but can go for multiples more if they are one of the new, trendy varieties. Yet owning a French bulldog increasingly comes with nonmonetary costs, too: The paranoia of a thief reaching over a garden fence. The hypervigilance while walking one’s dog after reading about the latest abduction.

For unlucky owners, French bulldogs are at the confluence of two very American traits: the love of canine companions and the ubiquity of firearms.

On a chilly January evening in the Adams Point neighborhood of Oakland, Calif., Rita Warda was walking Dezzie, her 7-year-old Frenchie, not far from her home. An S.U.V. pulled up and its passengers exited and lunged toward her.

“They had their gun and they said, ‘Give me your dog,’” Ms. Warda said.

Three days later, a stranger called and said she had found the dog wandering around a local high school. Ms. Warda is now taking self-defense classes and advises French bulldog owners to carry pepper spray or a whistle. Ms. Warda says she does not know why Dezzie’s abductors gave him up but it could have been his advanced age: Frenchies have one of the shortest life spans among dog breeds, and 7 years old was already long in the tooth.

In late April, Cristina Rodriguez drove home from her job at a cannabis dispensary in the Melrose section of Los Angeles. When she pulled up to her home in North Hollywood, someone opened her car door and took Moolan, her 2-year-old black and white Frenchie.

Ms. Rodriguez said she did not remember many details of the theft. “When you have a gun at your head, you kind of just black out,” she said.

But footage from surveillance cameras in her neighborhood and near the dispensary appear to indicate that the thieves followed her for 45 minutes in traffic before pouncing.

“They stole my baby from me,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “It’s so sad coming home every day and not having her greet me.”

Patricia Sosa, a board member of the French Bull Dog Club of America, said she was not aware of any tally of annual thefts. Social media groups created by Frenchie owners are often peppered with warnings. If you own a Frenchie, says one post on a Facebook group dedicated to lost or stolen French bulldogs, “do not let it get out of your sight.”

“Criminals are making more money from stealing frenchies than robbing convenience stores,” the posting said.

Ms. Sosa, who has a breeding business north of New Orleans, said the lure of profiting from the French bulldog craze had also spawned an industry of fake sellers demanding deposits for dogs that do not exist.

“There are so many scams going on,” she said. “People think, ‘Hey, I’ll say I have a Frenchie for sale and make a quick five, six, seven thousand dollars.’”

Ms. Sosa said breeders were particularly vulnerable to thefts. She does not give out her address to clients until she thoroughly researches them. “I have security cameras everywhere,” she said.

French bulldogs, as the name suggests, are a French offshoot from the small bulldogs bred in England in the mid-1800s. An earlier iteration of the Bouledogue Français, as it is called in France, was favored as a rat catcher by butchers in Paris before becoming the toy dog of artists and the bourgeoisie, and the canine muses that appeared in works by Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Today, the American Kennel Club defines French bulldogs as having a “square head with bat ears and the roach back.”

In the world of veterinary medicine, Frenchies are controversial because their beloved features — their big heads and bulging puppy dog eyes, recessed noses and folds of skin — create what Dan O’Neill, a dog expert at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College, calls “ultra-predispositions” to medical problems.

Their heads are so large that mothers have trouble giving birth; most French bulldog puppies are delivered by cesarean section. Their short, muscular bodies also make it hard for them to naturally conceive. Breeders typically artificially inseminate the dogs.

Most concerning for researchers like Mr. O’Neill is the dog’s flat face, which can belabor its breathing. French bulldogs often make snoring noises even when fully awake, they often tire easily and they are susceptible to the heat. They also can develop rashes in their folds of skin. Because of their bulging eyes, some French bulldogs are incapable of a full blink.

Mr. O’Neill leads a group of veterinary surgeons and other dog experts in the United Kingdom that urges prospective buyers to “stop and think before buying a flat-faced dog,” a category that includes French bulldogs, English bulldogs, Pugs, Shih Tzus, Pekingese and Boxers.

“There’s a flat-faced dog crisis,” Mr. O’Neill said. French bulldogs, he concluded in a recent research paper, have four times the level of disorders of all other dogs.

These pleadings and warnings have not stopped French bulldogs from rocketing in popularity, propelled in large part by social media. As in the United States, the French bulldog in Britain has been neck and neck with the Labrador for the title of most popular breed in recent years.

Ms. Sosa blamed poor breeding for bad outcomes. “Well-bred dogs are relatively healthy,” she said.

Mr. Del Rosario, the breeder in Elk Grove, a suburban city just south of Sacramento, says professional football and basketball players have been some of his most loyal customers. He has sold puppies to players for the Kansas City Chiefs, Cincinnati Bengals, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Houston Texans, New York Jets and Arizona Cardinals. Four years ago, the San Francisco 49ers bought Zoe, a black brindle Frenchie that serves as the team’s emotional support dog. Two years later, the team added Rookie, a blue-gray French bulldog puppy with hazel eyes, to its canine roster.

Mr. Del Rosario’s most expensive Frenchie was a “lilac” with a purplish gray coat, light eyes that glowed red and a pinkish tint on his muzzle. It sold for $100,000 to a South Korean buyer who wanted the dog for its rare genetics. The dog was one of several hundred puppies that Mr. Del Rosario has sold over the past decade and a half.

He has kept seven Frenchies for his extended family, including his two daughters, 9 and 10 years old. The girls play with the Frenchies at home but Mr. Del Rosario is strict about not letting them walk the dogs alone.

“I don’t care if you’re going to the mailbox,” he said. “Nope, they just can’t take the dogs out by themselves.

“With all this stuff going on with these dogs, you just never know.”

Germany’s largest storage chamber for natural gas stretches underneath a swath of farmland the size of nine soccer fields in the western part of the country. The bucolic area has become a kind of battlefield in Europe’s effort to defend itself against a looming gas crisis driven by Russia.

Since last month, the German government has been rapidly pumping fuel into the vast underground site in Rehden, hoping to fill it in time for the winter, when demand for gas surges to heat homes and businesses.

The scene is being repeated at storage facilities across the continent, in a jousting over energy between Europe and Russia that has been escalating since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

In the latest sign that Moscow appears intent on punishing Europe for sanctions and military support for Ukraine, Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant, last week cut by 60 percent the amount of gas it delivers via Nord Stream 1, a critical pipeline serving Germany and other countries. It is not clear if the throttling is a precursor to a complete cutoff.

The move has added urgency to efforts in Germany, in Italy and elsewhere to build up inventories of gas in a crucial effort to moderate stratospheric prices, reduce Moscow’s political leverage and head off the possibility of shortages this winter. Gazprom’s actions have also forced many countries to loosen their restrictions on power plants burning coal, a major source of greenhouse gases.

“If the storage facilities are not filled by the end of summer, the markets will interpret that as a warning of price spikes or even energy shortages,” said Henning Gloystein, a director at Eurasia Group, a political risk firm.

Gas prices are already extraordinarily high, about six times what they were a year ago. Germany’s finance minister, Christian Lindner, has warned that the persistently high energy costs were threatening to plunge Europe’s largest economy into an economic crisis, and the government has called on consumers and companies to conserve gas.

“There is a risk of a very serious economic crisis because of the sharp increase in energy prices, because of supply chain problems and because of inflation,” Mr. Lindner told ZDF public television on Tuesday.

The stage was set for an energy crisis last year. A cold snap in late winter ate into gas reserves, and Gazprom stopped selling any supplies beyond its contractual obligations. Gazprom-owned storage facilities in Germany, including the massive underground chamber in Rehden, which the German government took control of in April, were allowed to dwindle down to nearly empty.

To avoid a repeat of last year, and to safeguard against supply disruptions, the European Union agreed in May to require member states to fill their storage facilities to at least 80 percent of capacity by Nov. 1. So far, countries are making good progress toward this goal, with overall European storage levels at 55 percent.

The giant facility in Rehden is more than 12 percent full, but Germany, Europe’s largest gas consumer, has reached an overall level of 58 percent — both well above the levels this time last year. Other big gas users, including France and Italy, have stores at similar levels, while Spain has more than 77 percent.

But while storage levels are still edging up, Gazprom’s cutbacks put those targets in doubt and threaten a crunch next winter, analysts say.

If Nord Stream was shut down completely, “Europe could run out of storage of gas in January,” said Massimo Di Odoardo, vice president for gas research at Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm.

Gazprom has blamed the cutbacks on a pipeline part that was sent for repairs and hadn’t returned in time. But European leaders have flatly rejected this argument, and a Germany regulator said it saw no indication of how a mechanical issue could result in such decreases.

“The Russian side’s justification is simply a pretext,” said Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, last week. “It is obviously the strategy to unsettle and drive up prices.”

The gambit is succeeding. European gas futures have risen about 50 percent over the last week.

The reduction in supplies to the German pipeline, which also affected flows to other European countries including France, Italy and the Netherlands, dashed any remaining hope among European leaders that they can count on Russian gas, perhaps the most difficult fuel to replace.

“It is now clear that the contracts that we have with Gazprom are not worth anything anymore,” said Georg Zachmann, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research institution in Brussels. Analysts say Moscow will probably continue to use gas for maximum leverage, doing what it can to put the brakes on Europe’s efforts to fill storage, in order to keep prices high and increase the vulnerability of countries like Germany and Italy to political pressure over energy.

In recent days, the governments of Germany, the Netherlands and Austria have all taken steps to try to conserve gas, in part by turning to coal-fired power plants that either had been shuttered or were scheduled for phaseout. The moves have raised concerns that the European Union’s effort to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will be driven off track.

Bringing back coal sends a signal “which is inconsistent with the environmental rhetoric in recent years,” said Tim Boersma, director of global natural gas markets at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

The government in the Netherlands continues to resist calls from some quarters to ramp up output at Groningen, a huge gas field that is being shut down because production there has caused earthquakes.

In Berlin, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has refused to consider keeping the country’s three nuclear power plants online. The reactors are scheduled to be shut down at the end of the year as part of the country’s efforts to quit nuclear energy.

Two years ago, Germany decided to phase out coal-burning power plants by 2038, in its mission to be carbon-free by 2045. But last week Mr. Habeck, who is a member of the Greens party, announced that the government would be temporarily reversing those efforts in response to the gas cutbacks.

For RWE, a major energy provider in Germany, the reversal means a reprieve for three plants that were supposed to shut down in September. The plants burn soft coal, or lignite, the dirtiest form of the fuel. The company is now scrambling to find enough employees to keep the plants running.

The change will require a work force of “several hundred positions,” said Vera Bücker, a spokeswoman for RWE. Some of them will be filled by delaying plans for employees to retire early, while others will be new hires for jobs that are scheduled to be phased out by the first part of 2024, when the regulation expires.

The about-face on coal is a challenge for energy providers who were focusing on transitioning to natural gas as a bridge to renewable sources of energy. Now they have to find new sources of coal and set aside plans to cut carbon emissions.

“How much carbon dioxide we emit will depend on how long our plants need to run,” said Markus Hennes, the spokesman for Steag, which runs several coal-fired plants in western Germany. “But our emissions will increase. That is clear.”

More disturbing for some environmentalists, Germany and other European countries are moving quickly to build terminals to receive liquefied natural gas as an alternative to Russian gas.

On Tuesday, EnBW, a German utility, signed a 20-year deal beginning in 2026 with Venture Global, a U.S. provider of liquefied natural gas. In other words, Germany will be importing gas until 2046 under this arrangement.

“We are risking locking in a new fossil fuel era,” said Mr. Zachmann of Bruegel.

HONG KONG — China is grappling with extreme weather emergencies across the country, with the worst flooding in decades submerging houses and cars in the south and record-high heat waves in the northern and central provinces causing roads to buckle.

Water levels in more than a hundred rivers across the country have surged beyond flood warning levels, according to the People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s mouthpiece. The authorities in Guangdong Province on Tuesday raised alerts to the highest level after days of rainfall and floods, closing schools, businesses and public transport in affected areas.

The flooding has disrupted the lives of almost half a million people in southern China. Footage on state media showed rescue crews on boats paddling across waterlogged roads to relieve trapped residents. In Shaoguan, a manufacturing hub, factories were ordered to halt production, as water levels have reached a 50-year high, state television reported.

Guangdong’s emergency management department said that the rainfall has affected 479,600 people, ruined nearly 30 hectares of crops and caused the collapse of more than 1,700 houses, with financial losses totaling $261 million, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

China has been grappling with summertime floods for centuries but floods this year have also coincided with heat waves that struck the northern part of the country, where the heavy rain is also expected to move in the coming days, according to the Central Meteorological Observatory.

Temperatures on Tuesday reached a high of 104 degrees Fahrenheit in nine northern and central provinces. In Henan, roadside surface temperatures as high as 165 degrees Fahrenheit created ruptures in cement roads last week that resembled the aftermath of an earthquake, local media reported.

The scorching heat in some of China’s most populous provinces has driven up the demand for air conditioning, fueling record electricity usage. In Shandong, a province in northeastern China with a population of 100 million, the maximum electricity load reached a record 92.94 million kilowatts on Tuesday, overtaking the 2020 high of 90.22 million kilowatts, state television said.

Premier Li Keqiang said on Tuesday while touring a thermal power company that the country must increase the coal production capacity to prevent power outages.

The floods and heat waves in China this year have stretched on for days and weeks, as it did last year when weeks of floods killed hundreds of people, caused power outages and displaced millions in central and southwestern China, including in Zhengzhou, where floodwaters trapped commuters in subways.

The two-pronged weather emergency that China is experiencing reflects a global trend of increasingly frequent and lengthy episodes of extreme weather driven by climate change.

China has converted farmlands to cities in past decades, lifting millions of people in rural areas out of poverty. But in its pursuit of economic development, it has also become the world’s largest polluter, with greenhouse gas emissions exceeding those of all developed nations combined.

Xi Jinping has since become the country’s first leader pledging to tackle climate change as a national priority. China introduced a carbon market last July to curb emissions and has over the past two decades nearly quintupled the acreage of green space in its cities.

But significant environmental damage has already been done. The devastation and disruptions resulting from greenhouse gases that have already been emitted are likely to continue in the coming years.

@Zixu Wang in Hong Kong and Li You in Shanghai contributed reporting.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, writing that Ghislaine Maxwell had made the choice to conspire with Jeffrey Epstein for years, “working as partners in crime and causing devastating harm to vulnerable victims,” asked a judge on Wednesday night to sentence her to at least 30 years in prison.

Ms. Maxwell, 60, is to be sentenced on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan. If the judge follows the government’s recommendation, she could spend much of the rest of her life in prison.

Ms. Maxwell was convicted on Dec. 29 on five of the six counts she faced, including sex trafficking, after a monthlong trial in which witnesses testified that she helped Mr. Epstein recruit, groom and abuse underage girls.

Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers, in a brief last week, asked the judge, Alison J. Nathan, to impose a sentence shorter than the 20 years that the court’s probation department had recommended. The lawyers suggested that the government had decided to prosecute Ms. Maxwell after Mr. Epstein’s jailhouse suicide in 2019 to appease his victims and “repair the tarnished reputations” of the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons, in whose custody the disgraced financier died.

The defense had also suggested that blame for Ms. Maxwell’s conduct lay with two men who have since died: Mr. Epstein and her cruel and intimidating father, the British media magnate Robert Maxwell, who died in 1991.

The government, in its letter on Wednesday to Judge Nathan, dismissed those claims, asserting that if anything stood out from Ms. Maxwell’s sentencing submission, it was her failure to address her criminal conduct and her “utter lack of remorse.”

“Instead of showing even a hint of acceptance of responsibility,” the office of Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote, “the defendant makes a desperate attempt to cast blame wherever else she can.”

The prosecutors said Ms. Maxwell’s attempt “to cast aspersions on the government for prosecuting her, and her claim that she is being held responsible for Epstein’s crimes, are both absurd and offensive.”

“Maxwell was an adult who made her own choices,” the government added. “She made the choice to sexually exploit numerous underage girls.”