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AL-IBEDIYYA, Sudan — In a scorched, gold-rich area 200 miles north of the Sudanese capital, where fortunes spring from desert-hewn rock, a mysterious foreign operator dominates the business.

Locals call it “The Russian Company” — a tightly guarded plant with shining towers, deep in the desert, that processes mounds of dusty ore into bars of semirefined gold.

“The Russians pay the best,” said Ammar al-Amir, a miner and community leader in al-Ibediyya, a hardscrabble mining town 10 miles from the plant. “Otherwise, we don’t know much about them.”

In fact, Sudanese company and government records show, the gold mine is one outpost of the Wagner Group, an opaque network of Russian mercenaries, mining companies and political influence operations — controlled by a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that is expanding aggressively across a swath of Africa.

Best known as a supplier of hired guns, Wagner has in recent years evolved into a far broader and more sophisticated tool of Kremlin power, according to experts and Western officials tracking its expansion. Rather than a single entity, Wagner has come to describe interlinked war-fighting, moneymaking and influence-peddling operations, low-cost and deniable, that serve Mr. Putin’s ambitions on a continent where support for Russia is relatively high.

Wagner emerged in 2014 as a band of Kremlin-backed mercenaries that supported Mr. Putin’s first foray into eastern Ukraine, and that later deployed to Syria. In recent months, at least 1,000 of its fighters have re-emerged in Ukraine, British intelligence has said.

The linchpin of Wagner’s operations, according to Western officials, is Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” who was indicted in the United States on charges of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

In 2017, Wagner expanded into Africa, where its mercenaries have become a significant, sometimes pivotal factor in a string of conflict-hit countries: Libya, Mozambique, Central African Republic and most recently Mali where, as elsewhere, Wagner has been accused of atrocities against civilians.

But Wagner is far more than a war machine in Africa, and a close look at its activities in Sudan, the continent’s third largest gold producer, reveals its reach.

Wagner has obtained lucrative Sudanese mining concessions that produce a stream of gold, records show — a potential boost to the Kremlin’s $130 billion gold stash that American officials worry is being used to blunt the effect of economic sanctions over the Ukraine war, by propping up the ruble.

In eastern Sudan, Wagner is supporting the Kremlin’s push to build a naval base on the Red Sea to host its nuclear-powered warships. In western Sudan, it has found a launchpad for its mercenary operations in neighboring countries — and a possible source of uranium.

And since Sudan’s military seized power in a coup in October, Wagner has intensified its partnership with a power-hungry commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, who visited Moscow in the early days of the Ukraine war, which began in February. Wagner has given military aid to General Hamdan and helped Sudan’s security forces to suppress a fragile grass-roots, pro-democracy movement, Western officials say.

“Russia feeds off kleptocracy, civil wars and internecine conflicts in Africa, filling vacuums where the West is not engaged or not interested,” said Samuel Ramani of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense research group in London, and the author of a forthcoming book on Russia in Africa.

Sudan, Mr. Ramani added, typifies the kind of country where Wagner thrives.

The Kremlin and Mr. Prigozhin deny any links to Wagner, which is said to be named after Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, by a founding commander who was fascinated by Nazi symbolism and history.

Mr. Prigozhin shrouds his activities in secrecy, trying to mask his ties to Wagner through a web of shell companies and traveling the African continent by private jet for meetings with presidents and military commanders. But the U.S. Treasury Department and experts who track Mr. Prigozhin’s activities say that he owns or controls most, if not all, of the companies that make up Wagner.

And as his operations in Sudan show, those companies have left a paper trail.

Russian and Sudanese customs and corporate records, obtained through the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a nonprofit in Washington, as well as mining documents, flight records and interviews with Western and Sudanese officials, reveal the extent of his business empire in Sudan — and the particular importance of gold.

The Wagner Group has “spread a trail of lies and human rights abuses” across Africa, and Mr. Prigozhin is its “manager and financier,” the State Department said in a statement on May 24.

Most officials spoke about Mr. Prigozhin and Wagner on the condition of anonymity, citing the confidentiality of their work or, in some cases, fears for their safety. General Hamdan and Mubarak Ardol, Sudan’s state regulator for mining, declined to be interviewed.

In a lengthy written response to questions, Mr. Prigozhin denied any mining interests in Sudan, denounced American sanctions against him and rejected, with a hint of a wink, the very existence of the group he is famously associated with.

“I, unfortunately, have never had gold mining companies,” he said. “And I am not a Russian military man.

“The Wagner legend,” he added, “is just a legend.”

The ‘Key to Africa’

Wagner’s operations in Sudan began in 2017 after a meeting in the Russian coastal resort of Sochi.

After nearly three decades of autocratic rule, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan was losing his grip on power. At a meeting with Mr. Putin in Sochi, he sought a new alliance, proposing Sudan as Russia’s “key to Africa” in return for help, according to the Kremlin’s transcript of their remarks.

Mr. Putin snapped up the offer.

Within weeks, Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold, a new Sudanese company, began to arrive in Sudan, according to commercial flight records obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative body, and verified by researchers at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

The Treasury Department says that Meroe Gold is controlled by Mr. Prigozhin, and it imposed sanctions on the company in 2020 as part of a raft of a measures targeting Wagner in Sudan. Meroe’s director in Sudan, Mikhail Potepkin, was previously employed by the Internet Research Agency, the Prigozhin-financed troll factory accused of meddling in the 2016 United States election, the Treasury Department said.

Meroe Gold’s geologists were followed by Russian defense officials, who opened negotiations over a potential Russian naval base on the Red Sea — a strategic prize for the Kremlin, suddenly within reach.

Over the next 18 months, Meroe Gold imported 131 shipments into Sudan, Russian customs records show — mining and construction equipment, but also military trucks, amphibious vehicles and two transport helicopters. One of the helicopters was photographed a year later in Central African Republic, where Wagner fighters were protecting the country’s president, and where Mr. Prigozhin had acquired lucrative diamond mining concessions.

Incongruously, the shipments also included a vintage American car — a 1956 Cadillac Series Sixty-Two, documents show.

But the Russians soon found themselves advising Mr. al-Bashir on how to save his skin. As a popular revolt surged from late 2018, threatening to topple his government, Wagner advisers sent a memo urging the Sudanese government to run a social media campaign to discredit the protesters. The memo even advised Mr. al-Bashir to publicly execute a few protesters as a warning to others.

This memo and other documents were obtained by the Dossier Center, which is financed by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former oil oligarch and a longtime nemesis of Mr. Putin’s. Through interviews with officials and business leaders in Sudan, The New York Times confirmed key information in the documents, which the Dossier Center said were provided by sources inside the Prigozhin organization.

When Mr. al-Bashir was ousted by his own generals and placed under house arrest in April 2019, the Russians swiftly changed course.

A week later, Mr. Prigozhin’s jet arrived in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, carrying a delegation of senior Russian military officials. It returned to Moscow with senior Sudanese defense officials, including a brother of General Hamdan, who was then emerging as a power broker, according to flight data obtained by the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

Six weeks later, on June 3, 2019, General Hamdan’s troops launched a bloody operation to disperse pro-democracy protesters from central Khartoum in which at least 120 people were killed over the next two weeks. On June 5, Mr. Prigozhin’s company, Meroe Gold, imported 13 tons of riot shields, as well as helmets and batons for a company controlled by General Hamdan’s family, customs and company documents show.

Around that time, a Russian disinformation campaign using fake social media accounts sought to exacerbate political divisions in Sudan — a technique similar to the one used by the Internet Research Agency to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election. Facebook shut down 172 of those accounts in October 2019 and May 2021, linking them directly to Mr. Prigozhin.

But neither those measures nor the American sanctions deterred the Wagner Group from its main goal — capturing a slice of Sudan’s gold boom.

The Gold Miners

Poor men hoping to strike it big stream to al-Ibediyya, the gold mining town north of Khartoum, on the banks of the Nile.

After hacking gold-rich rock from the desert, they bring it to be crushed at the town’s ramshackle market, extracting gold using a crude, mercury-based technique that poses great risks to their health.

But far greater profits can be earned by running the same ore through a second, more complex gold extraction process at a cluster of industrial plants 10 miles away. One of the largest is run by Meroe Gold.

In interviews, traders described how Russians come to the market to take samples and buy gold ore, paying up to $3,600 for a nine-ton truckload. Sometimes, they said, the Russians were protected by troops from General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces.

When a team from The Times approached the gate of the Meroe plant, Ahmed Abdelmoneim, a Sudanese engineer, wanted to be helpful. About 30 Russians and 70 Sudanese worked there, he said, motioning to the living quarters, workshops and gleaming metal towers. The Russians were unlikely to speak with a reporter because of the company’s reputed “link to Wagner,” which he dismissed as untrue.

Before he could elaborate, a message in Russian crackled over the radio. A small bus pulled up outside, driven by an athletic-looking white man who wore shorts, sunglasses and a khaki-green T-shirt. He avoided eye contact with our team.

The bus drove away with Mr. Abdelmoneim, and we were invited to leave.

Gold production in Sudan soared after 2011, when South Sudan seceded and took with it most of its oil wealth, but only a handful of Sudanese have gotten rich. General Hamdan’s family dominates the gold trade, experts and Sudanese officials say, and about 70 percent of Sudan’s production is smuggled out, according to Central Bank of Sudan estimates obtained by The Times.

Most of it passes through the United Arab Emirates, the main hub for undeclared African gold. Western officials say that Russian-produced gold has likely been smuggled out this way, allowing producers to avoid government taxes and possibly even the share of the proceeds that is owed to the Sudanese government.

“You can walk into the U.A.E. with a handbag full of gold, and they will not ask you any questions,” said Lakshmi Kumar of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit that researches illicit financial flows.

Halting the flow of Russian gold has become a priority for Western governments. In March, the Treasury Department threatened sanctions on anyone who helps Mr. Putin launder the $130 billion stash in Russia’s central bank.

Some Sudanese gold might be going directly to Moscow.

From February to June 2021, Sudanese anticorruption officials tracked 16 Russian cargo flights that landed in Port Sudan from Latakia, Syria. Some flights, operated by the Russian military’s 223rd Flight Unit, originated near Moscow. The Times was able to verify most of those flights using flight-tracking services.

Suspecting the planes were being used to smuggle gold, the officials raided one flight before it took off on June 23. But as they were about to break open its cargo, a Sudanese general intervened, citing an order from Sudan’s leader, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said a former senior anticorruption official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.

The plane was moved to the military section of the airport, he said, and left for Syria a couple of hours later without being searched.

The anticorruption body, set up to dismantle Mr. al-Bashir’s network inside Sudan, was disbanded five months later, after October’s military coup.

General al-Burhan declined to be interviewed for this article. Lt. Gen. Ibrahim Gabir, a fellow member of the ruling Sovereignty Council, played down accounts of Russian smuggling.

“People are talking,” he said. “But you need evidence.”

From Russia With Cookies

Since 2016, the United States has imposed no fewer than seven rounds of sanctions on Mr. Prigozhin and his network, and the F.B.I. is offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Those measures have done little to stem his expansion in Africa, where he sometimes feels emboldened to flaunt his ties.

In a splashy bid for Sudanese support, Mr. Prigozhin donated 198 tons of food to poor Sudanese last year during the holiday month of Ramadan. “A gift from Yevgeny Prigozhin,” read the packets of rice, sugar and lentils, under a slogan that recalled the depths of the Cold War: “From Russia With Love.”

The donation, made through a subsidiary of Meroe Gold, included 28 tons of cookies that had been specially imported from Russia. “They were meant for children, but everyone enjoyed them,” said Musa Gismilla, the head of the Sudanese charity that distributed the aid.

But there was a hitch. Mr. Prigozhin insisted on diverting 10 tons of the food to Port Sudan, where Russia was lobbying for naval access, instead of to more needy regions. Mr. Gismilla was disturbed.

“It suggested the gesture was more about politics than humanitarianism,” he said.

In his response to The Times, Mr. Prigozhin wrote that he had “nothing to do with Meroe Gold,” yet added that he had learned that the company was “currently in liquidation.”

He confirmed the charity donation, which he said was at the behest of a Sudanese woman with whom he had “friendly, comradely, working and sexual relations” — apparently a mocking explanation most likely to cause particular offense in a conservative Muslim society.

Wagner’s main military ally in Sudan, General Hamdan, is also reaching for public support. Since betraying his onetime patron, Mr. al-Bashir, in 2019, General Hamdan has sought to distance himself from his reputation as a ruthless commander in the Darfur conflict that led to an estimated 300,000 civilian deaths in the 2000s.

Instead, Mr. Hamdan has signaled his ambition to lead Sudan, building a support base among traditional leaders he has courted using money and vehicles, diplomats said, and with friendly foreign powers like Russia.

Two senior Western officials said that Wagner organized General Hamdan’s February visit to Moscow, where he arrived on the eve of the war in Ukraine. Although the trip was ostensibly to discuss an economic aid package, they said, General Hamdan arrived with gold bullion on his plane, and asked Russian officials for help in acquiring armed drones.

On his return to Sudan a week later, General Hamdan announced that he had “no problem” with Russia opening a base on the Red Sea.

Supporting a Coup ‘to Steal Gold’

The murkiest part of Wagner’s Sudan drive is in Darfur, a region riven by conflict and rich in uranium. There, Russian fighters can slip into bases controlled by General Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces, Western and United Nations officials say — and sometimes use the bases to cross into Central African Republic, Libya and parts of Chad.

This year, a team of Russian geologists visited Darfur to assess its uranium potential, one Western official said.

Since the war in Ukraine began, Russian disinformation networks in Sudan have churned out nine times as much fake news as before, trying to generate support for the Kremlin, said Amil Khan of Valent Projects, a London-based company that monitors disinformation flows.

That message is not welcomed by everyone. Several protests against Meroe Gold operations have erupted in mining areas. A Sudanese YouTube personality known only as “the fox” has attracted large audiences with videos that purport to lift the lid on Wagner’s activities. And pro-democracy demonstrators theorize that Moscow was behind last October’s military takeover of the Sudanese government.

“Russia supported the coup,” read an unsigned poster that appeared in Khartoum recently, “so it could steal our gold.”

SAN FRANCISCO — It was exactly the kind of release the fans at the Chase Center had been seeking — some reason to jump up out of their seats in a delirious celebration of this team they couldn’t believe had lost Game 1.

It happened at the end of the third quarter. Jordan Poole took a few steps past midcourt, pulled up and launched a 39-foot shot that swished through the net. Poole hopped back the other way on his left foot and raised both his eyebrows while seemingly every Golden State fan leaped to their feet and started screaming with joy and perhaps a little relief.

That shot gave the Warriors a 23-point lead heading into the fourth quarter, and finished the Boston Celtics in Game 2 of the N.B.A. finals. Golden State won, 107-88, to tie the series at one game each. Game 3 is Wednesday night in Boston.

The Celtics had a habit this postseason of playing well when they had to win and playing with less urgency when they could afford to lose. That worked for them in the first three rounds, but it meant that their second- and third-round series each went to seven games.

Boston Coach Ime Udoka addressed that with his team before Game 2 of the finals.

“It’s time to be greedy and go for two,” Udoka said.

He had also addressed Golden State’s penchant for making big third-quarter runs, a major problem for a Celtics team that had made a habit this season of third-quarter struggles.

In Game 1, Boston was able to overcome being outscored by 14 points in the third quarter because it dominated the fourth, outscoring Golden State 40-16.

In Game 2, Golden State didn’t allow a recovery. Instead that was when the dam broke.

The Warriors outscored the Celtics by 21 points in the third quarter on Sunday, and pushed their lead to 29 early in the fourth.

In Game 1, Stephen Curry unleashed a quick barrage of 3-pointers early, scoring 21 points in the first quarter. In Game 2, Curry remained threatening to the Celtics, and scored 29 points, 14 of them in the third quarter.

Celtics forward Jayson Tatum temporarily recovered from his Game 1 slump, but was eventually stymied in the third quarter.

Tatum shot 3 of 17 from the field in Game 1, and rebuffed suggestions that his shooting may have affected the rest of his game. As for moving beyond the one-game slump, he was confident he would be able to do that.

“You don’t let it creep into your mind,” Tatum said before Saturday’s practice. “I can’t do nothing about what happened last game.”

He responded by scoring 21 points in the first half of Game 2, making 7 of 16 shots. But he took only two shots from the field in the third quarter, despite playing all 12 minutes.

Al Horford, who led the Celtics with 26 points in Game 1, and blew a kiss to the Chase Center crowd when the game ended, took only four shots and scored 2 points in Game 2.

The game was close early, and the Celtics even had a 9-point lead at one point in the first quarter. But Golden State never let Boston sustain any lead. Despite 21 points from Tatum and 15 from Jaylen Brown in the first half, Golden State led by 2 at halftime.

By early in the fourth quarter, the game was so well in hand that most of Golden State’s starters rested for at least some of the final frame.

Streamers and confetti fell from the rafters after time expired, and Curry, who sat for the fourth quarter, looked up at them briefly. He had ensured that the series would return to San Francisco and last at least until a Game 5.

HOUSTON — When President Biden meets Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, he will be following in the footsteps of presidents like Jimmy Carter, who flew to Tehran in 1977 to exchange toasts with the shah of Iran on New Year’s Eve.

Like the prince, the shah was an unelected monarch with a tarnished human rights record. But Mr. Carter was obliged to celebrate with him for a cause that was of great concern to people back home: cheaper gasoline and secure oil supplies.

As Mr. Carter and other presidents learned, Mr. Biden has precious few tools to bring down costs at the pump, especially when Russia, one of the world’s largest energy producers, has started an unprovoked war against a smaller neighbor. In Mr. Carter’s time, oil supplies that Western countries needed were threatened by revolutions in the Middle East.

During the 2020 campaign, Mr. Biden pledged to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah” for the assassination of a prominent dissident, Jamal Khashoggi. But officials said last week that he planned to visit the kingdom this summer. It was just the latest sign that oil has again regained its centrality in geopolitics.

Just a few years ago, many lawmakers in Washington and oil and gas executives in Texas were patting themselves on the back for an energy boom that had turned the United States into a net exporter of oil and petroleum products and made it more energy independent. With prices rising, that achievement now looks illusory.

The United States is the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer, but it accounts for only about 12 percent of the global petroleum supply. The price of oil, the principal cost in gasoline, can still shoot up or tumble depending on events halfway around the world. And no president, no matter how powerful or competent, can do much to control it.

Those facts are cold comfort to Americans who are finding that a stop at the gas station can easily cost a hundred dollars, much more than just a year earlier. When fuel prices rise, consumers demand action and can turn against presidents who seem unwilling or unable to bring them back down.

Always looking ahead to the next election when their jobs or their party’s hold on power is at stake, presidents can find it impossible not to try to cajole or plead with foreign and domestic oil producers to drill and pump more oil, faster.

“A president has to try,” said Bill Richardson, an energy secretary in the Clinton administration. “Unfortunately, there are only bad options. And any alternative options are probably worse than asking the Saudis to increase production.”

Two other oil-producing countries that could increase production — Iran and Venezuela — are U.S. adversaries that Western sanctions have largely cut out of the global market. Striking any deal with their leaders without securing major concessions on issues like nuclear enrichment and democratic reforms would be politically perilous for Mr. Biden.

Energy experts said even Saudi Arabia, which is widely considered to have the most spare production capacity ready to be put to use, could not bring down prices quickly on its own. That’s because Russian output is sliding and could fall much further as European countries reduce their purchases from the country.

“Presidents may be the most powerful figure in the American government, but they cannot control the price of oil at the pump,” said Chase Untermeyer, U.S. ambassador to Qatar in the George W. Bush administration. “Even if prices do go down for reasons out of his control, President Biden probably won’t get much credit for it, either.”

Some Republican lawmakers and oil executives have argued that Mr. Biden could do more to increase domestic oil and gas production by opening up more federal lands and waters to oil drilling in places like Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. He could also ease regulations on pipeline construction so Canadian producers could send more oil south.

But even those initiatives — which environmentalists and many Democrats oppose because they would retard efforts to combat climate change — would have little immediate impact because it takes months for new oil wells to start producing and pipelines can take years to build.

“Were the administration to accede to every aspect of the industry’s wish list, that would have a modest impact on today’s prices because it would mostly be about production in the future,” said Jason Bordoff, who is director of Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy and was an adviser to President Barack Obama. “And it would come with substantial downsides politically, socially and environmentally.”

Mr. Biden and his aides have been jawboning U.S. oil executives to pump more oil with little success. Most oil companies are reluctant to expand production because they fear that drilling more now will lead to a glut that will send prices tumbling. They remember when oil prices fell below zero at the start of the pandemic. Big companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Shell have largely stuck to the investment budgets they set last year before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Energy traders have become so convinced that the supply will remain limited that the prices of the U.S. and global oil benchmarks climbed after news broke that Mr. Biden was planning to travel to Saudi Arabia. Oil prices rose to about $120 a barrel on Friday, and the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.85 on Sunday, according to AAA, more than 20 cents higher than a week earlier and $1.80 above a year ago.

Another Biden administration effort that has appeared to fall flat is a decision to release a million barrels of oil daily from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Analysts said it was hard to discern any impact from those releases.

The Biden team has also been in talks with Venezuela and Iran, but progress has been halting.

The administration recently renewed a license that partly exempts Chevron from U.S. sanctions aimed at crippling the oil industry in Venezuela. In March, three administration officials traveled to Caracas to draw President Nicolás Maduro into negotiations with the political opposition.

In another softening of sanctions, Repsol of Spain and Eni of Italy could begin shipping small amounts of oil from Venezuela to Europe in a few weeks, Reuters reported on Sunday.

Venezuela, once a major exporter to the United States, has the world’s largest petroleum reserves. But its oil industry has been so crippled that it could take months or even years for the country to substantially increase exports.

With Iran, Mr. Biden is seeking to revive a 2015 nuclear accord that President Donald J. Trump pulled out of. A deal could free Iran to export more than 500,000 barrels of oil a day, easing the global supply crunch and making up for some of the barrels that Russia is not selling. Iran also has roughly 100 million barrels in storage, which could potentially be released quickly.

But the nuclear talks appear to be mired in disagreements and are not expected to bear fruit soon.

Of course, any deals with either Venezuela or Iran could themselves become political liabilities for Mr. Biden because most Republicans and even some Democrats oppose compromises with the leaders of those countries.

“No president wants to remove the Revolutionary Guards of Iran from the terrorist list,” Ben Cahill, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said about one of the sticking points in the talks with Iran. “Presidents are wary of any moves that look like they are making political sacrifices and handing a win to America’s adversaries.”

Foreign-policy experts say that while energy crises during war are inevitable, they always seem to surprise administrations, which are generally unprepared for the next crisis. Mr. Bordoff, the Obama adviser, suggested that the country invest more in electric cars and trucks and encourage more efficiency and conservation to lower energy demand.

“The history of oil crises shows that when there is a crisis, politicians run around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to figure out what they can do to provide immediate relief to consumers,” Mr. Bordoff said. U.S. leaders, he added, need to better prepare the country for “the next time there is an inevitable oil crisis.”

It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug.

But the results were astonishing. The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam, endoscopy, PET scans or M.R.I. scans.

Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, an author of a paper published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the results, which were sponsored by the drug company GlaxoSmithKline, said he knew of no other study in which a treatment completely obliterated a cancer in every patient.

“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Dr. Diaz said.

Dr. Alan P. Venook, a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study, said he also thought this was a first.

A complete remission in every single patient is “unheard-of,” he said.

These rectal cancer patients had faced grueling treatments — chemotherapy, radiation and, most likely, life-altering surgery that could result in bowel, urinary and sexual dysfunction. Some would need colostomy bags.

They entered the study thinking that, when it was over, they would have to undergo those procedures because no one really expected their tumors to disappear.

But they got a surprise: No further treatment was necessary.

“There were a lot of happy tears,” said Dr. Andrea Cercek, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a co-author of the paper, which was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Another surprise, Dr. Venook added, was that none of the patients had clinically significant complications.

On average, one in five patients have some sort of adverse reaction to drugs like the one the patients took, dostarlimab, known as checkpoint inhibitors. The medication was given every three weeks for six months and cost about $11,000 per dose. It unmasks cancer cells, allowing the immune system to identify and destroy them.

While most adverse reactions are easily managed, as many as 3 percent to 5 percent of patients who take checkpoint inhibitors have more severe complications that, in some cases, result in muscle weakness and difficulty swallowing and chewing.

The absence of significant side effects, Dr. Venook said, means “either they did not treat enough patients or, somehow, these cancers are just plain different.”

In an editorial accompanying the paper, Dr. Hanna K. Sanoff of the University of North Carolina’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study, called it “small but compelling.” She added, though, that it is not clear if the patients are cured.

“Very little is known about the duration of time needed to find out whether a clinical complete response to dostarlimab equates to cure,” Dr. Sanoff said in the editorial.

Dr. Kimmie Ng, a colorectal cancer expert at Harvard Medical School, said that while the results were “remarkable” and “unprecedented,” they would need to be replicated.

The inspiration for the rectal cancer study came from a clinical trial Dr. Diaz led in 2017 that Merck, the drugmaker, funded. It involved 86 people with metastatic cancer that originated in various parts of their bodies. But the cancers all shared a gene mutation that prevented cells from repairing damage to DNA. These mutations occur in 4 percent of all cancer patients.

Patients in that trial took a Merck checkpoint inhibitor, pembrolizumab, for up to two years. Tumors shrank or stabilized in about one-third to one-half of the patients, and they lived longer. Tumors vanished in 10 percent of the trial’s participants.

That led Dr. Cercek and Dr. Diaz to ask: What would happen if the drug were used much earlier in the course of disease, before the cancer had a chance to spread?

They settled on a study of patients with locally advanced rectal cancer — tumors that had spread in the rectum and sometimes to the lymph nodes but not to other organs. Dr. Cercek had noticed that chemotherapy was not helping a portion of patients who had the same mutations that affected the patients in the 2017 trial. Instead of shrinking during treatment, their rectal tumors grew.

Perhaps, Dr. Cercek and Dr. Diaz reasoned, immunotherapy with a checkpoint inhibitor would allow such patients to avoid chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.

Dr. Diaz began asking companies that made checkpoint inhibitors if they would sponsor a small trial. They turned him down, saying the trial was too risky. He and Dr. Cercek wanted to give the drug to patients who could be cured with standard treatments. What the researchers were proposing might end up allowing the cancers to grow beyond the point where they could be cured.

“It is very hard to alter the standard of care,” Dr. Diaz said. “The whole standard-of-care machinery wants to do the surgery.”

Finally, a small biotechnology firm, Tesaro, agreed to sponsor the study. Tesaro was bought by GlaxoSmithKline, and Dr. Diaz said he had to remind the larger company that they were doing the study — company executives had all but forgotten about the small trial.

Their first patient was Sascha Roth, then 38. She first noticed some rectal bleeding in 2018 but otherwise felt fine — she is a runner and helps manage a family furniture store in Bethesda, Md.

During a sigmoidoscopy, she recalled, her gastroenterologist said, “Oh no. I was not expecting this!”

The next day, the doctor called Ms. Roth. He had had the tumor biopsied. “It’s definitely cancer,” he told her.

“I completely melted down,” she said.

Soon, she was scheduled to start chemotherapy at Georgetown University, but a friend had insisted she first see Dr. Philip Paty at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Dr. Paty told her he was almost certain her cancer included the mutation that made it unlikely to respond well to chemotherapy. It turned out, though, that Ms. Roth was eligible to enter the clinical trial. If she had started chemotherapy, she would not have been.

Not expecting a complete response to dostarlimab, Ms. Roth had planned to move to New York for radiation, chemotherapy and possibly surgery after the trial ended. To preserve her fertility after the expected radiation treatment, she had her ovaries removed and put back under her ribs.

After the trial, Dr. Cercek gave her the news.

“We looked at your scans,” she said. “There is absolutely no cancer.” She did not need any further treatment.

“I told my family,” Ms. Roth said. “They didn’t believe me.”

But two years later, she still does not have a trace of cancer.

Key figures in the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election have thrown their weight behind a slate of Republican candidates for secretary of state across the country, injecting specious theories about voting machines, foreign hacking and voter fraud into campaigns that will determine who controls elections in several battleground states.

The America First slate comprises more than a dozen candidates who falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. It grew out of meetings held by a conspiracy-mongering QAnon leader and a Nevada politician, and has quietly gained support from influential people in the election denier movement — including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com executive who has financed public forums that promote the candidates and theories about election vulnerabilities.

Members of the slate have won party endorsements or are competitive candidates for the Republican nomination in several states, including three — Michigan, Arizona and Nevada — where a relatively small number of ballots have decided presidential victories. And in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints the secretary of state, State Senator Doug Mastriano, who is aligned with the group, easily won his primary for governor last month.

The candidates cast their races as a fight for the future of democracy, the best chance to reform a broken voting system — and to win elections.

“It doesn’t really matter who’s running for assembly or governor or anything else. It matters who is counting the vote for that election,” said Rachel Hamm, a long-shot contender in California’s primary on Tuesday, at a forum hosted by the group earlier this year.

But even in losing races, the slate has left its mark. As they appeal for votes on the stump and on social media, the candidates are seeding falsehoods and fictions into the political discourse. Their status as candidates amplifies the claims.

The information being tossed out under the guise of election reform, particularly the machine manipulation of votes, threatens to corrode Americans’ trust in democracy, said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama. “What you do is you encourage people not to have confidence in the elections process and people lose faith.”

In private weekly calls that stretch on for hours on Friday mornings, the candidates discuss policies and campaign strategy, at times joined by fringe figures who have pushed ploys to keep Mr. Trump in power. In 11 states, the group has sponsored public forums where prominent activists unspool intricate conspiracies about vulnerabilities in voting machines.

Secretary of state races were once sleepy affairs, dominated by politicians who sought to demonstrate their bureaucratic competence, rather than fierce partisan loyalty. But Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results — including his failed attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” votes to reverse his loss — has thrust the office’s power into the spotlight.

Since its founding last year, the America First slate has ballooned from a handful of candidates to a high of around 15. Many have little chance of succeeding. On Tuesday, Ms. Hamm will compete to place among the top two candidates in California, and Audrey Trujillo, who is running unopposed in New Mexico, will cinch her G.O.P. nomination. Neither candidate is favored to beat Democratic opponents in their solidly blue states.

But America First candidates could be competitive in at least four battleground states: Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Two of them have already scored primary victories in these states: In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, a novice Republican activist who gained prominence challenging the 2020 results there, won her party’s endorsement at an April convention, all but securing her nomination in August. The Republican primary winner for Pennsylvania governor, Mr. Mastriano, was involved in an effort to keep the state’s electoral votes from President Biden in 2020. He has said he wants to cancel all voter registrations and force voters to re-register.

A leading candidate in Nevada’s primary next week is Jim Marchant, one of the organizers of the America First slate. The former state assemblyman and another candidate won the endorsement of the central committee of the state Republican Party, giving them a boost before voters go to the polls on June 14. The group’s candidate in Arizona, Mark Finchem, is a leading contender and the top fund-raiser in the primary race.

Mr. Marchant has said he was urged to start the coalition by unnamed people close to Mr. Trump. The project picked up steam in the spring of last year, after Mr. Marchant attended a meeting of activists hosted by a man known in QAnon circles by the alias Juan O’Savin, according to an account from one of the people involved in the group.

Major figures in the election denier movement were drawn in. In May 2021, when Mr. Marchant organized an all-day meeting in a suite at the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, Mr. Lindell appeared remotely briefly. Soon after, the group gathered again at a distillery in Austin, Texas, according to two people who attended the meeting.

The host of that session was Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel and a leading proponent of a machine-hacking theory involving Communists, shell companies and George Soros, the Democratic financier. Mr. Waldron is perhaps best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation that recommended Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to delay the certification of the 2020 results. The document made its way to the inbox of the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and is now part of the congressional investigation into the deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The group posted a platform that calls for moving to paper ballots, eliminating mail voting and “aggressive voter roll cleanup.”

In recent months, the core group has been recruiting new candidates. Around 25 people, including some of the candidates and people seeking to influence them, join the weekly conference calls, according to some of the candidates who were recruited. The group discusses campaigns and policy ideas, including how to transition to hand-counting all ballots — a notion election experts say is impractical and can lead to errors and cause chaos.

“It’s startling to have statewide candidates, multiple candidates for a really important statewide office, running on a deeply incoherent policy plank,” said Mark Lindeman, an expert on elections with Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit.

Mr. Byrne, who spent millions on the discredited “audit” of votes in Arizona, has taken particular interest in sponsoring public forums. He has pledged to spend up to $15,000 on each event, and has contributed around $83,000 to a political action committee controlled by Mr. Marchant.

In an interview, Mr. Byrne said he is primarily interested in spreading ideas about “election integrity and how it needs to be fixed” rather than promoting specific candidates for office.

“I see them as gatherings of highly concerned citizens,” Mr. Byrne said.

At one forum in Dallas, speakers delivered lectures purporting to demonstrate weaknesses of American voting systems. Some issued dark warnings about the forces they claim are manipulating the system, including Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Soros, Democrats, communists and establishment Republicans.

“They took the ability to cheat to a global scale,” said Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist who moderated the event.

Tina Peters, an America First candidate in Colorado, assailed the “evil, evil people” she’s up against. Ms. Peters, a county clerk in Colorado, is under indictment related to allegations she tampered with elections equipment, and a judge has barred her from overseeing this year’s elections.

Ms. Peters and her attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Her campaign has said her legal troubles amount to a political witch hunt.

Other speakers included Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a Texas businessman whose firm produced a widely circulated report that Mr. Trump and his associates presented as evidence of fraud. The report, which focused on results in one Michigan county, was later debunked by Republicans in the State Senate.

Mark Cook, a technology consultant who has worked for Mr. Lindell, also spoke to the group, telling them that “this system controls our freedom.”

In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Cook said he hoped his work would “make our election system more accurate, more transparent and more understandable by the public.”

Mr. Lindell told The Times he has gotten involved because he believes “most” secretaries of state are corrupt and should all be replaced.

“They let our country be taken through computers,” he said.

Some of the candidates have aired similar ideas on the campaign trail. In Nevada, Mr. Marchant has called to decertify Dominion voting machines, and urges the use of paper ballots in a state that first began allowing machines to count votes in 1951. “Your vote hasn’t counted for decades,” Mr. Marchant said in a February debate, according to the Nevada Independent. “You haven’t elected anybody.”

In an interview on Facebook in March, Ms. Trujillo, the New Mexico candidate, asserted that U.S. voting systems are “no better than any other communist country like Venezuela or any of these other states where our elections are being manipulated.” She called the 2020 presidential election a “coup.”

And in Arizona, Mr. Finchem has sued to try to ban the use of voting machines in the November elections. Mr. Lindell says he is financing the lawsuit.

Mr. Marchant, Ms. Trujillo and Mr. Finchem did not respond to requests for comment.

Alyce McFadden contributed reporting and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

If you continue to harbor doubts that the Supreme Court’s conservatives are advancing an ideological agenda, the next few weeks will probably lay those to rest.

Before breaking for the summer at the end of this month, the court is likely not only to strike down or severely curtail the constitutional right to an abortion and expand gun rights but also undermine important environmental protections.

From my perspective as an environmental lawyer and a former clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a case that looms large is West Virginia v. E.P.A., which should be decided within weeks. The justices will determine how much authority the Environmental Protection Agency has to address the climate crisis by regulating emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide from power plants.

The Obama-era regulation at issue never went into effect because the Supreme Court’s conservatives suspended the rule. And it never will go into effect because the Biden administration is in the process of proposing a new rule. So there is no dispute to resolve yet, and thus no “case or controversy” that would support the court’s jurisdiction.

Why is the court going beyond calling balls and strikes, as Chief Justice John Roberts memorably described his role, to take a case it arguably doesn’t have jurisdiction to hear? Some of the court’s conservatives seem eager to assist polluting industries by undercutting the power of agencies to regulate in the public interest. More specifically, certain justices have signaled their interest in sharply limiting the E.P.A.’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in the West Virginia case by invoking and expanding a “major questions” doctrine. That doctrine invites unelected judges to second-guess Congress when lawmakers give an agency the authority to regulate on matters that have “major” political or economic significance.

Agencies need latitude to regulate in a world of novel problems and scientific complexity. Congress routinely gives them expansive authority through broadly-worded statutes. And Congress puts its own limits on agency discretion. Laws like the Administrative Procedure Act require that agency actions be consistent with science and informed by public input. Further, Congress has ample tools to get a wayward agency back on track: confirmation and oversight hearings, budget instructions, or even statutory amendments if necessary.

Expanding the major questions doctrine would destabilize this legislative balance and shift power to the courts. The doctrine would leave agencies with little power to tackle new and pressing environmental problems like climate change without a steady stream of statutory instructions at a degree of detail that an inexpert and political entity like Congress is unequipped to provide. Worse, the doctrine is uncertain and manipulable. Even conservative justices struggle to define what triggers a “major question” review. Virtually any environmental regulation worth issuing has “major” impacts on some industry, so the doctrine invites polluters to challenge regulations and gives sympathetic judges a potent tool for striking them down.

Even more concerning, West Virginia v. E.P.A. may be only the beginning. In its next term, the Supreme Court will likely take up another important environmental case: Sackett v. E.P.A., which concerns the geographic reach of the Clean Water Act.

Once again, the court agreed to take up a case it would normally have declined: Appeals courts have consistently agreed on the scope of the statute relevant to the Sackett case, and the E.P.A. and the Army Corps of Engineers will likely soon finalize a new proposed rule to provide further clarity on how the law should work. So again, the court appears to be reaching out aggressively to hear a case that could advance a deregulatory policy agenda: restricting the scope of one of the country’s most important environmental laws, administered by an agency mandated to protect the public health and environment.

The Clean Water Act prevents polluters from dumping waste into the nation’s waters without a permit. Conservative groups and extractive industries want the court to hold that the law does not protect certain wetlands, which would benefit polluting industries to the detriment of downstream waters and people.

Americans are increasingly concerned about the environment, and two-thirds of us think our government should do more to protect it. Why then do the Supreme Court’s conservatives seem to be going so far out of their way to hamstring federal efforts to regulate polluters and slow climate change?

The reason is that the court’s five most conservative justices were seemingly selected primarily for their fidelity to an agenda that is far outside the legal mainstream that even Charles Fried, President Ronald Reagan’s conservative solicitor general, called it “reactionary.” Moreover (and not coincidentally), they were confirmed by senators who together were elected with fewer votes than senators who opposed their confirmations. Three of them — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote.

This profound disconnect between the will of the people and the court’s deregulatory agenda on the environment could not come at a more dangerous time. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that our window to avert irreversible climate harm is closing fast. If the Supreme Court chooses this moment to pursue an agenda of limiting federal regulatory power, it will serve the interests of corporations — particularly fossil fuel companies — while pushing people and the planet closer and closer to the point of no return.

Sambhav Sankar is the senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice, an environmental law group.