Category: News

Even in the darkest of times, Sri Lankans held on to their humor.

In 2022, when the island nation’s economy collapsed and the government announced a QR code system to ration gasoline, a meme spread online: “Scanning Fuel QR Code Now Makes You Forget Last Three Months.”

And when public anger forced the strongman president to flee his palace, with protesters venturing inside to fry snacks in his kitchen and jump into his pool, another meme captured the mood upon their departure: “We Are Leaving. The Key Is Under the Flower Pot.”

It is this kind of online expression, which helped fuel the largest citizens’ movement in Sri Lanka in decades, that activists and rights groups fear is now endangered.

They are concerned about a new law, the Online Safety Act, that gives the government wide-ranging powers to deem speech on social media to be “prohibited statements.” Under the law, a committee appointed by the president will rule on what is prohibited, and violations could bring penalties ranging from fines of hundreds of dollars to years in prison.

The public security minister, Tiran Alles, told Parliament that the legislation would protect against online fraud, the spread of false information and the abuse of women and children. But he also made clear its potential political applications, saying it could be used against those who insult members of Parliament on social media.

Sri Lanka is taking a page from other countries in the region that are increasingly policing what people say online, most notoriously Bangladesh, where a 2018 law known as the Digital Security Act has led to the imprisonment of activists and opposition leaders.

The Sri Lankan law “is the newest weapon in the government’s arsenal of tools that could be used to undermine freedom of expression and suppress dissent,” said Thyagi Ruwanpathirana, a regional researcher for South Asia at Amnesty International, adding that the act was “ripe for misuse.”

Ms. Ruwanpathirana said that the Sri Lankan government needed to “demonstrate the political will to uphold” international human rights obligations as the country is set this year to hold its first elections since the 2022 crash.

The main impetus for the new law, analysts say, is the protest movement that toppled the government in 2022.

Political leaders want to make sure there is no repeat, the analysts say, a concern that persists as the movement’s goals remain largely unmet. While the powerful president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, was forced out of office in 2022, little else changed at the top. The political elite has merely rearranged its seats, and Mr. Rajapaksa’s family-run political party has propped up a new president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, until the election later this year.

Mr. Wickremesinghe, a veteran politician, is trying to put the economy back in order, introducing difficult fiscal changes to improve the government’s balance sheet. But activists and rights groups say he has also gone after civil society leaders who were instrumental in the citizens’ movement.

“We saw many taking to social media to critique, to challenge and to push back on various state initiatives, so social media played a huge role in the people’s mobilization,” said Bhavani Fonseka, a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Alternatives, in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. “That gives new incentive for the government to bring in restrictions.”

Nalaka Gunawardena, a Colombo-based analyst, said that the political intentions of the new legislation were made evident by officials’ refusal to adjust it to better balance freedom of expression and the government’s concerns over online abuse.

In rushing through the legislation, Mr. Gunawardena said, the government rejected suggestions from media experts and rights activists who urged an exemption for those engaging in satire and parody.

Historically, satirists have faced trouble, and even exile, in Sri Lanka for targeting the majority Sinhala community or the powerful Buddhist monks. During the decades of the country’s bloody civil war, which ended in 2009, military leaders — particularly Mr. Rajapaksa, who served as defense secretary — were increasingly off limits.

When a coalition government briefly broke the Rajapaksa family’s hold on the country in 2015, political satire began to thrive online — the new president, Maithripala Sirisena, was a favorite of meme makers.

The elevation of the feared Mr. Rajapaksa as president in 2019 initially gave some pause, but as his management of the economy sent the country into a downward spiral, cartoonists and satirists saw little to lose.

The administrator of a popular anonymously run meme page called NewsCurry, which has about 50,000 followers on social media platforms, said that such efforts had brought attention to anti-democratic behavior and lies by politicians, helping to make up for a docile news local media. The new law, said the administrator, who asked not to be named for fear of running afoul of the authorities, should be renamed the Safety for Politicians Act.

Hamza Haniffa, who is part of a group that runs meme pages, said the law had made many of his friends hesitant to continue generating jokes. Posts have become less frequent.

“During the protest movement, we gave our opinions without being afraid,” he said. “But now we are concerned.”

Dr. Ronald V. LaRoche has not been able to cross into dangerous territory to inspect the hospital he runs in Haiti’s Delmas 18 neighborhood since it was ransacked by gangs last week, but a TikTok video he saw offered clues to its current condition: It was on fire.

He learned from neighbors and others who dared venture into gang territory that Jude-Anne Hospital had been looted and cleared of anything of value. It was the second hospital he has had to close.

“They took everything — the operating rooms, the X-rays, everything from the labs and the pharmacies,” Dr. LaRoche said. “Imagine! They are taking windows from hospitals! Doors!”

Haiti is in the throes of an uprising not seen in decades. As politicians around the region scramble to hash out a diplomatic solution to a political crisis that has the prime minister, Ariel Henry, stranded in Puerto Rico and gangs attacking police stations, a humanitarian disaster is quickly escalating. The food supply is threatened, and access to water and health care has been severely curtailed.

André Michel, an adviser to the prime minister, said Mr. Henry has refused to resign, and has demanded that the international community take all necessary measures to ensure his return to Haiti.

The United States and Caribbean leaders have been trying to convince Mr. Henry that to continue in power is “untenable.” An international security mission led by Kenya has been stalled. The United States has offered to finance the mission, but showed little interest in sending troops of its own.

While gangs expand their territory and band together in concerted attacks against the state, millions of people throughout the country are caught in the middle. Many are afraid to leave their homes for fear of getting caught in the crossfire. They are hungry. They are running out of clean water and gas. They are desperate.

“Around me everyone is running,” said Dr. LaRoche, who packed up and closed three more medical facilities to avoid more looting. “Women, children and elderly have bags on their heads, and by foot they are fleeing. It is a war zone.”

Gangs that in the past year have spread throughout the country joined forces last week to attack state institutions, releasing thousands of prisoners. They are demanding the resignation of Mr. Henry, who was prevented from returning to Haiti as violence surrounded the airport and grounded all flights.

The chaos has left people to protect themselves as best they can.

“The biggest fear is stray bullets,” said Nixon Boumba, 42, a Haiti-based consultant to American Jewish World Service, an international aid and human rights organization.

Last weekend he called the motorcycle taxi driver he uses on a regular basis to go shopping. “He told me, ‘I can’t come now. My brother was hit by a stray bullet,’” Mr. Boumba said.

The driver’s brother was struck in the stomach and is recovering at a hospital. The daughter of another friend was hit in the jaw by a bullet on the campus of the city’s main public university, he said.

Blondine Tanis, 36, a radio broadcaster who was kidnapped for ransom in July by people on her street who then sold her to another gang that held her for nine days, said the violence in Haiti was nothing like she had seen before. She compared it to the 1991 coup that led to three years of military rule, but she was a baby then.

“There are young kids in the streets with heavy automatic weapons,” she said. “They shoot people and burn their bodies with no remorse. I don’t know how to qualify that. I ask myself what happened to this generation. Are they even human?”

Ms. Tanis said she has applied to enter the United States through the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program.

As the security situation worsens, so does the food insecurity. Nearly one million of Haiti’s 11 million people are on the brink of famine, according to the U.N. About 350,000 of them are on the run, living on the streets, in tent cities or in overcrowded schools, as gangs invade their neighborhoods.

Most people now only leave their homes to do essential things, like go to the bank or shop for food and water. They take advantage of a lull in the violence to buy groceries. But experts fear that stocks will soon begin to dwindle as more and more goods pile up on the docks, because transportation by road is too dangerous and gangs have seized ports.

One person described the scene at a supermarket Saturday as a “carnival,” because so many people spent hours in line to stock up on supplies. Zanmi Lasante, a health organization affiliated with Partners In Health, which has worked in Haiti for decades, said it has enough fuel to run its generators for about a week.

Doctors Without Borders had to increase its hospital bed capacity from 50 to 75, as more and more people unable to access the closed public hospital showed up with gunshot wounds. One patient arrived at 3 p.m. for treatment of a gunshot wound from that morning. He died minutes later, said Dr. James Gana, who treats patients and helps run the clinics.

Doctors Without Borders recently reopened an emergency medical clinic in the city center after it had been closed for several months because gang members had removed patients from an ambulance and then killed them in front of the organization’s staff. Blood and oxygen supplies are running low.

“We are going very soon to have shortages of everything,” said Jean-Marc Biquet, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti. “There is no more petrol in the petrol stations. People are selling fuel in small buckets, and nobody knows where that fuel is coming from.”

With no supply of clean drinking water, there is an increased risk of cholera, he said.

Mario Delatour, 68, a filmmaker, said he has not found bottled water in three days. A generous neighbor with a water-treatment system filled a 5-gallon bottle for him on Saturday, but he still needs gas for the generator that powers his home. His neighborhood, a relative safe haven, has not had electricity in three months.

“I have enough fuel for tonight, but I don’t know about tomorrow,” Mr. Delatour said. “I’m a little bit on edge. It’s a hell of a thing, man.”

Julio Loiseau, a community activist in Port-au-Prince, said that with the power out, groceries spoil quickly, when you can find them.

“To have bread, one needs to get in line very early in the morning,” he said. “The only bread factory cannot cover its demands because of supply scarcity. My supplies ran out.”

Jean-Martin Bauer, country director in Haiti for the U.N. World Food Program, noted that the financial situation for many people is especially precarious because it has been too dangerous for people to go outside to work, and many people make their money on a day-to-day basis.

“What’s going on in Haiti is a protracted episode of mass hunger,” Mr. Bauer said. “This is probably one of the causes of what’s going on. We know hunger is related to instability and is a breeding ground for conflict, a breeding ground for strife and mass migration.”

Frantz Louis, 35, a security guard who was waiting for his shift on Saturday, said that like many Haitians, he feels Haiti has “completely collapsed.”

“The best solution for a young person for now is to leave the country,” he said. “If you want to stay in your country and you can’t eat and you can’t go where you want, what other choice do you have?”

Mr. Louis said he wondered what the gangs’ end game is. “Do they have an ideology?” he asked.

Robert, a 41-year-old furniture maker in Port-au-Prince, who did not want his name published for fear of reprisals, said he had been forced to sell his furniture for less than what it cost him to build.

“Sometimes you buy rice and you no longer have money to buy vegetable oil and spices, and that’s what happened to me last week,” Robert said, from his outdoor workshop. “Now the rice is finished, and I have to find another piece of furniture to sell at a low price — and also I need a customer.”

Robert has a wife and two children, a 7-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl. He avoids even looking at the large wardrobe he built in December that he has not been able to sell.

“The day I no longer have furniture to sell,” he said, “it will be hunger.”

The United States has a history of using its military to get food, water and other humanitarian relief to civilians during wars or natural disasters. The walls of the Pentagon are decorated with photographs of such operations in Haiti, Liberia, Indonesia and countless other countries.

But it is rare for the United States to try to provide such services for people who are being bombed with tacit U.S. support.

President Biden’s decision to order the U.S. military to build a floating pier off the Gaza Strip that would allow aid to be delivered by sea puts American service members in a new phase of their humanitarian aid history. The same military that is sending the weapons and bombs that Israel is using in Gaza is now also sending food and water into the besieged territory.

The floating pier idea came a week after Mr. Biden authorized humanitarian airdrops for Gaza, which relief experts criticized as inadequate. Even the floating pier, aid experts say, will not do enough to alleviate the suffering in the territory, where residents are on the brink of starvation.

Nonetheless, senior Biden officials said, the United States will continue to provide Israel with the munitions it is using in Gaza, while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians under bombardment there.

So the Pentagon is doing both.

For decades the Army Corps of Engineers, using combat engineers, has built floating docks for troops to cross rivers, unload supplies and conduct other military operations. Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said on Friday that the Army’s Seventh Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary), out of Joint Base Langley-Eustis, near Norfolk, Va., would be one of the main military units involved in the construction of the floating pier for Gaza.

The dock will be built and assembled alongside an Army ship off the Gaza coast, General Ryder said. The ship will need armed escorts, particularly as it gets within range of the coast, Defense Department officials said, adding that they are working through how to ensure its protection.

A U.S. Army official said that typically in these operations, a large vessel sits off the shore of the desired location, and a “roll-on-roll-off discharge facility” — a big floating dock — is constructed next to the ship to serve as the holding area. Cargo driven or placed on the dock is loaded onto smaller Navy boats and moved toward a temporary pier or causeway anchored ashore.

The 1,800-foot, two-lane temporary causeway is built by Army engineers, flanked by tugboats and driven, or “stabbed,” into the shore. Cargo aboard the smaller Navy boats can then be driven onto the causeway and onshore.

General Ryder insisted on Friday that the military could build the causeway and stab it into the shore without putting any American boots — or fins — on the ground in Gaza. He said it would take up to 60 days and about 1,000 U.S. troops to move the ship into place from the East Coast and to build the dock and causeway.

After the ship arrives offshore, it will take about seven to 10 days to assemble the floating dock and the causeway, a Defense Department official said.

“This is part of a full-court press by the United States to not only focus on working on opening up and expanding roads via land, which of course are the optimal way to get aid into Gaza, but also by conducting airdrops,” General Ryder said.

The floating pier will allow for the delivery of “upward of two million meals a day,” he said. The Gaza Strip has a population of about 2.3 million people.

General Ryder acknowledged that neither the airdrops nor the floating pier would be as effective as sending aid by land, which Israel has blocked. “We want to see the amount of aid going via land increase significantly,” General Ryder said. “We understand that is the most viable way to get aid in.”

But, he added, “we’re not going to wait around.”

The United States will work with regional partners and European allies to build, fund and maintain the corridor, officials said, noting that the idea for the project originated in Cyprus.

On Thursday, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, welcomed the Biden announcement. But, speaking with reporters after briefing the Security Council, she added, “At the same time I cannot but repeat: Air and sea is not a substitute for land, and nobody says otherwise.”

The Biden humanitarian efforts in Gaza so far “may make a few people in the United States feel good,” Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, said in an interview. But, he added, “this is applying a very small Band-Aid to a very big wound.”

The humanitarian aid will probably be gathered in Larnaca, Cyprus, some 210 nautical miles from Gaza, officials said. That would allow Israeli officials to screen the shipments first.

While the temporary port will initially be military-run, Washington envisions it eventually being commercially operated, the official said.

Officials did not go into detail about how aid delivered by sea would be transferred from the coast farther into Gaza. But the assistance will be distributed in part by the Spanish chef José Andrés, founder of the nonprofit World Central Kitchen, which has served more than 32 million meals in Gaza.

Two diplomats briefed on the plans said the port would be erected on Gaza’s shoreline slightly north of the Wadi Gaza crossing, where Israeli forces have erected a major checkpoint.

The central problems, however, remain unsolved. Aid officials say that delivering supplies by truck is far more efficient and less expensive than bringing them to Gazans by boat. But trucks are still unable to deliver goods amid Israeli shelling and ground fighting, which is fierce in southern Gaza.

And delivering assistance by sea may not prevent the chaos that has accompanied deliveries.

More than 100 people in Gaza were killed last month, health officials there said, when hungry civilians rushed at a convoy of aid trucks, leading to a stampede and prompting Israeli soldiers to fire at the crowd.

The U.S. military has airdropped aid in the Middle East and South Asia during previous conflicts, even during wars in which the United States was directly involved.

In 2014, President Barack Obama ordered military aircraft to drop food and water to tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped on a barren mountain range in northwestern Iraq. The Yazidis, members of an ethnic and religious minority, were fleeing militants who were threatening genocide.

In 2001, President George W. Bush ordered British and American troops striking the Taliban in Afghanistan to airdrop daily rations to civilians trapped in remote areas of the country.

President Biden expressed regret on Saturday for using the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented immigrant who has been charged in the killing of a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia, agreeing with his progressive critics that it was an inappropriate term.

Mr. Biden used the word during an unscripted colloquy with Republicans during his State of the Union address on Thursday night, and then came under fire from immigration supporters who consider the term dehumanizing. Among those who said he should not have used it were several congressional Democrats.

“I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal’; it’s ‘undocumented,’” Mr. Biden said on Saturday in an interview with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC, during which he addressed his disagreements with former President Donald J. Trump.

“And look, when I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of the things I talked about in the border was his, the way he talks about ‘vermin,’ the way he talks about these people ‘polluting the blood,’ ” he said, adding, “I talked about what I’m not going to do. What I won’t do. I’m not going to treat any, any, any of these people with disrespect.”

He continued: “Look, they built the country. The reason our economy is growing. We have to control the border and more orderly flow, but I don’t share his view at all.”

Mr. Capehart asked if that meant he regretted using the word “illegal.”

“Yes,” Mr. Biden answered.

The president’s reply went further than when he was first asked about the matter by reporters on Friday. He did not explicitly take back the term at that point, noting that the immigrant charged in the murder in Georgia was “technically not supposed to be here.”

The president’s use of the word came on Thursday night when he was pressing Republican leaders to stop blocking a bipartisan agreement to toughen border security. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who enjoys the role of provocateur, shouted at him about the case of Laken Riley, the student who was killed last month by, according to the authorities, a Venezuelan migrant who had entered the country illegally. The case has become a cause célèbre among hard-liners critical of illegal immigration.

“What about Laken Riley? Say her name!” screamed Ms. Greene, who was wearing a T-shirt that read “Say Her Name,” and had been handing out buttons in the chamber with the same slogan.

Mr. Biden interrupted his speech to comply, holding up one of the buttons and saying Ms. Riley’s name, although he mispronounced her given name.

“Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed,” Mr. Biden said.

“By an illegal!” Ms. Greene shouted.

“By an illegal, that’s right,” Mr. Biden agreed. “But how many of thousands of people are being killed by legals?” he added in mangled syntax, making the point that crime rates among undocumented immigrants have historically been lower than among others living in the United States.

“To her parents, I say my heart goes out to you,” he went on. “Having lost children myself, I understand.”

He then argued that Republicans could do something about illegal migration by passing the compromise legislation. “Get this bill done,” he told them. “We need to act now.”

Ms. Riley’s mother, Allyson Phillips, was not comforted by the president’s words and expressed indignation that he had mispronounced her daughter’s name.

“Biden does not even KNOW my child’s name,” she wrote on Facebook, adding that it was “pathetic.” She continued: “If you are going to say her name (even when forced to do so) at least say the right name!”

Mr. Trump met with Ms. Riley’s parents before a campaign rally in Rome, Ga., on Saturday, according to a senior campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita. And he seized on Mr. Biden’s comments once he took the stage, where the crowd held up signs with Ms. Riley’s photograph and the words “Say Her Name.”

“They just told me prior to what I’m doing right now that Joe Biden went on television and apologized for calling Laken’s murderer an illegal,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, adding that the immigrant in Georgia “shouldn’t have been in our country, and he never would have been under the Trump policy.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.

The threat of a last-minute obstacle to the merger of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company and a cash-rich shell company appears to have subsided.

Two early founders of Trump Media & Technology Group reached a temporary truce with Mr. Trump’s company at a hearing on Saturday morning in Delaware Court of Chancery. The agreement would preserve the two founders’ right to a significant equity stake in the parent company of Truth Social until a judge hears further arguments on the merits of their lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed on Feb. 28 by a company controlled by Wes Moss and Andy Litinsky, had the potential to delay a scheduled March 22 vote by shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. on the long-delayed merger with Trump Media.

If shareholders approve the merger, it would give Trump Media more than $300 million in badly needed cash to keep operating. The deal would also boost Mr. Trump’s net worth by more than $3 billion, based on Digital World’s current stock price.

“No one is suggesting I should do anything to interfere with the closing,” Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III of Delaware Chancery Court said of the shareholder vote. He later added, “I’m pretty confident we can work something out.”

The agreement was reached just days after another Delaware Chancery Court judge refused to delay the merger in response to a lawsuit filed by a company controlled by Patrick Orlando, the former chief executive officer of Digital World and the original sponsor of the shell company known as a special purpose acquisition company.

Mr. Orlando, Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinksy were early participants in talks that ultimately led to the announcement of a proposed merger between Trump Media and Digital World in October 2021. But the deal was delayed, in part, because of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into those negotiations, which took place before Digital World went public in September 2021.

Last summer, Digital World agreed to pay $18 million to the S.E.C. as part of a settlement to resolve the investigation. Regulators had said those early merger talks violated federal securities laws because they were not properly disclosed to investors. Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are not supposed to have a deal lined up before raising money from the public.

Mr. Moss and Mr. Litinsky were contestants on Mr. Trump’s reality television show “The Apprentice.” Shortly after he left the White House in January 2021, the two men talked to Mr. Trump about creating a social media company.

They claim in their lawsuit that Trump Media has a plan to severely dilute their equity stake in the company they control, United Atlantic Venture, by issuing more shares. But a lawyer for Trump Media said during the hearing that the company has no such intention.

Vice Chancellor Glasscock said that if that were true, “maybe the whole thing goes away.”

The potential merger comes as Mr. Trump is on the verge of wrapping up the Republican nomination for president. It also comes as he is facing a deadline to cover a $454 million penalty imposed upon him by a New York judge in a civil fraud case. Mr. Trump is also facing rising legal bills as he defends himself against charges in four criminal cases.

After the merger, Mr. Trump would own roughly 79 million shares in a publicly traded company. But a provision in the merger agreement currently prevents him from selling those shares to raise cash for six months.

Dr. Ronald V. LaRoche has not been able to cross into dangerous territory to inspect the hospital he runs in Haiti’s Delmas 18 neighborhood since it was ransacked by gangs last week, but a TikTok video he saw offered clues to its current condition: It was on fire.

He learned from neighbors and others who dared venture into gang territory that Jude-Anne Hospital had been looted and cleared of anything of value. It was the second hospital he has had to close.

“They took everything — the operating rooms, the X-rays, everything from the labs and the pharmacies,” Dr. LaRoche said. “Imagine! They are taking windows from hospitals! Doors!”

Haiti is in the throes of an uprising not seen in decades. As politicians around the region scramble to hash out a diplomatic solution to a political crisis that has the prime minister, Ariel Henry, stranded in Puerto Rico and gangs attacking police stations, a humanitarian disaster is quickly escalating. The food supply is threatened, and access to water and health care have been severely curtailed.

André Michel, an adviser to the prime minister, said Mr. Henry has refused to resign, and has demanded that the international community take all necessary measures to ensure his return to Haiti.

The United States and Caribbean leaders have been trying to convince Mr. Henry that to continue in power is “untenable.” An international security mission led by Kenya has been stalled. The United States has offered to finance the mission, but showed little interest in sending troops of its own.

While gangs expand their territory and band together in concerted attacks against the state, millions of people throughout the country are caught in the middle. Many are afraid to leave their homes for fear of getting caught in the crossfire. They are hungry. They are running out of clean water and gas. They are desperate.

“Around me everyone is running,” said Dr. LaRoche, who packed up and closed three more medical facilities to avoid more looting. “Women, children and elderly have bags on their heads, and by foot they are fleeing. It is a war zone.”

Gangs that in the past year have spread throughout the country joined forces last week to attack state institutions, releasing thousands of prisoners. They are demanding the resignation of Mr. Henry, who was prevented from returning to Haiti as violence surrounded the airport and grounded all flights.

The chaos has left people to protect themselves as best they can.

“The biggest fear is stray bullets,” said Nixon Boumba, 42, a Haiti-based consultant to American Jewish World Service, an international aid and human rights organization.

Last weekend he called the motorcycle taxi driver he uses on a regular basis to go shopping. “He told me, ‘I can’t come now. My brother was hit by a stray bullet,’” Mr. Boumba said.

The driver’s brother was struck in the stomach and is recovering at a hospital. The daughter of another friend was hit in the jaw by a bullet on the campus of the city’s main public university, he said.

Blondine Tanis, 36, a radio broadcaster who was kidnapped for ransom in July by people on her street who then sold her to another gang that held her for nine days, said the violence in Haiti was nothing like she had seen before. She compared it to the 1991 coup that led to three years of military rule, but she was a baby then.

“There are young kids in the streets with heavy automatic weapons,” she said. “They shoot people and burn their bodies with no remorse. I don’t know how to qualify that. I ask myself what happened to this generation. Are they even human?”

Ms. Tanis said she has applied to enter the United States through the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program.

As the security situation worsens, so does the food insecurity. Nearly one million of Haiti’s 11 million people are on the brink of famine, according to the U.N. About 350,000 of them are on the run, living on the streets, in tent cities or in overcrowded schools, as gangs invade their neighborhoods.

Most people now only leave their homes to do essential things, like go to the bank or shop for food and water. They take advantage of a lull in the violence to buy groceries. But experts fear that stocks will soon begin to dwindle as more and more goods pile up on the docks, because transportation by road is too dangerous and gangs have seized ports.

One person described the scene at a supermarket Saturday as a “carnival,” because so many people spent hours in line to stock up on supplies. Zanmi Lasante, a health organization affiliated with Partners In Health, which has worked in Haiti for decades, said it has enough fuel to run its generators for about a week.

Doctors Without Borders had to increase its hospital bed capacity from 50 to 75, as more and more people unable to access the closed public hospital showed up with gunshot wounds. One patient arrived at 3 p.m. for treatment of a gunshot wound from that morning. He died minutes later, said Dr. James Gana, who treats patients and helps run the clinics.

Doctors Without Borders recently reopened an emergency medical clinic in the city center after it had been closed for several months because gang members had removed patients from an ambulance and then killed them in front of the organization’s staff. Blood and oxygen supplies are running low.

“We are going very soon to have shortages of everything,” said Jean-Marc Biquet, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti. “There is no more petrol in the petrol stations. People are selling fuel in small buckets, and nobody knows where that fuel is coming from.”

With no supply of clean drinking water, there is an increased risk of cholera, he said.

Mario Delatour, 68, a filmmaker, said he has not found bottled water in three days. A generous neighbor with a water-treatment system filled a 5-gallon bottle for him on Saturday, but he still needs gas for the generator that powers his home. His neighborhood, a relative safe haven, has not had electricity in three months.

“I have enough fuel for tonight, but I don’t know about tomorrow,” Mr. Delatour said. “I’m a little bit on edge. It’s a hell of a thing, man.”

Julio Loiseau, a community activist in Port-au-Prince, said that with the power out, groceries spoil quickly, when you can find them.

“To have bread, one needs to get in line very early in the morning,” he said. “The only bread factory cannot cover its demands because of supply scarcity. My supplies ran out.”

Jean-Martin Bauer, country director in Haiti for the U.N. World Food Program, noted that the financial situation for many people is especially precarious because it has been too dangerous for people to go outside to work, and many people make their money on a day-to-day basis.

“What’s going on in Haiti is a protracted episode of mass hunger,” Mr. Bauer said. “This is probably one of the causes of what’s going on. We know hunger is related to instability and is a breeding ground for conflict, a breeding ground for strife and mass migration.”

Frantz Louis, 35, a security guard who was waiting for his shift on Saturday, said that like many Haitians, he feels Haiti has “completely collapsed.”

“The best solution for a young person for now is to leave the country,” he said. “If you want to stay in your country and you can’t eat and you can’t go where you want, what other choice do you have?”

Mr. Louis said he wondered what the gangs’ end game is. “Do they have an ideology?” he asked.

Robert, a 41-year-old furniture maker in Port-au-Prince, who did not want his name published for fear of reprisals, said he had been forced to sell his furniture for less than what it cost him to build.

“Sometimes you buy rice and you no longer have money to buy vegetable oil and spices, and that’s what happened to me last week,” Robert said, from his outdoor workshop. “Now the rice is finished, and I have to find another piece of furniture to sell at a low price — and also I need a customer.”

Robert has a wife and two children, a 7-year-old boy and 15-year-old girl. He avoids even looking at the large wardrobe he built in December that he has not been able to sell.

“The day I no longer have furniture to sell,” he said, “it will be hunger.”

Several fans of the Kansas City Chiefs who attended a playoff game on a bitterly cold January day in Missouri suffered frostbite that required amputations, according to the hospital that treated them.

Twelve people — including some football fans who were at Arrowhead Stadium on Jan. 13 — had to undergo amputations involving mostly fingers and toes, the hospital, Research Medical Center in Kansas City, said in a statement on Saturday.

The center said it treated dozens of patients who experienced frostbite during an 11-day cold snap. Not all of the patients who had amputations attended the Chiefs game. Some were people who worked outdoors in the extreme cold, the hospital said.

The exact number of fans who attended the game who had amputations was unclear. The hospital said there was some overlap among the fans and those who had also worked outdoors.

The hospital also noted that symptoms of frostbite can develop slowly, and that many of the frostbite patients it treated could not identify when their injuries occurred — when their pain, numbness and other symptoms began.

The hospital said it was a record number of frostbite patients since the burn center opened 11 years ago.

The National Weather Service had warned of dangerous temperatures that week, starting Jan. 6, with Arctic air spilling onto the Plains.

“Our specialized physicians and expert care team continue to treat and monitor patients’ healing to address long-term needs, and we expect more surgical procedures over the next two to four weeks as their injuries evolve,” the hospital said.

At kickoff of the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins, temperatures hovered around minus 4 degrees, with a windchill of minus 26 degrees.

The helmet of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes cracked open during a tackle, a malfunction that the helmet’s manufacturer said was caused by the extreme cold.

Dr. Megan Garcia, the medical director of the hospital’s Grossman Burn Center, said in an interview with WDAF-TV that the Chiefs fans who came in with frostbite injuries had to schedule amputation surgeries after weeks of hospital treatment.

The treatment included rewarming the injured areas, applying antibiotics and thrombolytic therapy to dissolve blood clots and restore circulation, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy to boost oxygen to injured areas to reduce swelling.

Patients with frostbite experience “lifelong sensitivity and pain,” Dr. Garcia said, “and will always be more susceptible to frostbite in the future.”

During the cold snap in January, the medical center’s parent company posted information about frostbite on its website, warning that it can happen within minutes of skin exposure in freezing air, and in less time with wind chill.

People who work outside during the winter were especially vulnerable, the hospital said in its statement, as were people “attending football games, the elderly, pregnant women, and kids waiting at the bus stops to return to school.”

Frostbite happens in “extremely cold temperatures,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with injury often happening during the thawing process as vessels become damaged by clots and inflammation, strangling blood flow.

Although frostbite can happen anywhere on the body, it typically affects exposed areas like the nose, ears, cheeks, chin, fingers and toes.

Julie Loving, a physician assistant in the emergency department at Adirondack Medical Center in Saranac Lake, N.Y., said the hospital treats three to five patients for frostbite every winter.

After administering medication to expand blood vessels and generate new tissue, patients undergo a bone scan, she said.

“Sometimes it can take days, sometimes weeks, to make a decision that someone needs an amputation,” she said. “When someone presents at the E.R. that first day, there’s no way to predict.”

Instead, she added, members of the medical staff monitor how the tissue evolves. If the tissue does not regenerate, it becomes infected, and that is when amputation is necessary, she said.

Prolonged exposure to cold weather also puts people at risk of hypothermia, a sudden drop of body temperature, and lung diseases, such as pneumonia.

A representative for the Kansas City Chiefs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Cold weather is often a feature at N.F.L. games, where fans bundle up but sometimes strip down, going shirtless to stand out in a crowd.

The coldest game recorded in N.F.L. history was the Ice Bowl of 1967, when the Green Bay Packers defeated the Dallas Cowboys in a New Year’s Eve game. Temperatures in Wisconsin were at minus 13 degrees at kickoff.

In her rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union speech Thursday night, Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, told a story about a Mexican woman who was a victim of sex trafficking at the age of 12, laying blame at the feet of the current administration.

“President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace,” she said.

The story, while wrenching, was highly misleading.

Although Ms. Britt did not name the victim in her speech, she has previously shared the story of a woman who appears to be the same individual based on congressional testimony, news releases and news reports.

That woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, is a Mexican citizen who does not live in the United States and who has spoken frequently about her experiences of being forced into sexual slavery for four years. In 2023, Ms. Jacinto participated in an event near the Texas border with Mexico that was also attended by three senators, including Ms. Britt. In a video released shortly after that trip, Ms. Britt discussed Ms. Jacinto’s experiences.

In her speech Thursday, Ms. Britt talked about the harrowing story as part of a critique of President Biden’s border policies, saying that “we wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country.” She added that “this is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”

In fact, as first reported by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday, Ms. Jacinto’s experiences did not happen in the United States. She has testified that she was kidnapped in Mexico City and that her shocking experience of being raped thousands of times took place entirely in Mexico. Moreover, she has said the kidnapping occurred in 2002 and she was rescued in 2006. Ms. Jacinto continues to live in Mexico and does not appear to have ever lived in the United States or to have sought asylum here.

In other words: None of this happened during President Biden’s administration, nor does it appear to have anything to do with his policies regarding the U.S. border with Mexico. But that didn’t stop the first-term senator from strongly implying that the president could have somehow prevented it from happening, using rhetoric that seemed calibrated to inflame public fears about immigration.

“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis,” she said. “He invited it.”

Ms. Jacinto did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Ms. Britt, Sean Ross, stood behind her speech.

“The story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct,” he said in a statement. “And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.”

He did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about what direct responsibility Mr. Biden had for what Ms. Jacinto experienced or what an anecdote about sex trafficking entirely within another country has to do with U.S. border policies.

President Biden signed a $460 billion spending package on Saturday to avert a shutdown of critical federal departments even as lawmakers continue to wrestle over a financing blueprint for many other agencies more than halfway into the current fiscal year.

The president finalized the legislation before leaving his home in Wilmington, Del., to fly to Atlanta for a campaign rally. It will extend funding through the rest of the fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, for about half of the government, including the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Justice, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Veterans Affairs.

But the rest of the government, including the Pentagon and the Homeland Security Department, remained on short-term life support, facing the prospect of running out of money by March 22 unless Congress and the president can agree on a plan. In his short tenure, Speaker Mike Johnson has made clear his desire to avoid a shutdown, even to the point of relying on Democratic votes, but the path ahead remains tricky.

In a statement issued by the White House, Mr. Biden made no mention of the outstanding issues but simply expressed his gratitude to eight congressional leaders for defusing the crisis over the first half of government. “Thank you,” he wrote, naming the eight “for their leadership.”

The $460 billion legislation, which packaged six of the 12 annual spending bills, was passed on lopsided bipartisan votes in the House on Wednesday, 339 to 85, and in the Senate on Friday, 75 to 22, just in time to beat a midnight deadline when funding was set to lapse. Mr. Biden ordered preparations for a partial shutdown to halt until he could sign the bill on Saturday.

The measure will largely hold the funding of the affected agencies to the levels in the debt limit and spending deal negotiated last year by Mr. Biden and Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, keeping domestic spending relatively flat outside of certain veterans’ programs.

While Republicans managed to insert some relatively modest policy provisions into the package, their most polarizing demands were rejected. Among the policies Republicans failed to include in the spending package was a move stripping funding for a new rule by the Food and Drug Administration allowing the abortion drug mifepristone to be distributed through the mail and at retail locations.

Congress now has 13 days to figure out the six remaining spending bills unless it votes to give itself more time, a challenge for Mr. Johnson, who is under enormous pressure from hard-liners in his conference to hold out for deeper spending cuts in domestic programs even though he has an extremely narrow majority.