Category: News

The video is mesmerizing: As three whitish-gray geysers gush eastward from the mountains of New Mexico, a sheet of brown spills down from the north like swash on a beach.

What it represents is far more destructive.

The image, a time-lapse captured by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, shows two devastating events happening in the Western United States. The first is a wildfire outbreak in northern New Mexico that started last month and has intensified in the past two weeks, fueled by extreme drought and high winds. The second is a dust storm caused by violent winds in Colorado.

Both are examples of the sorts of natural disasters that are becoming more severe and frequent as a result of climate change.

Seven large fires were burning in New Mexico as of Tuesday, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The satellite image shows four of them. The westernmost is the Cerro Pelado fire, covering about 27,000 acres near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The northernmost is the Cooks Peak fire, covering about 59,000 acres near Taos. Just south of that are the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires, which merged around April 22 into one huge, 160,000-acre blaze.

The total land burning in the satellite image is roughly 380 square miles, an area larger than Indianapolis. The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire in particular has forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes, including in Las Vegas, N.M., a town of 13,000 about an hour east of Santa Fe.

Wildfires are a natural part of the ecosystems of the West, but human activity has made them far worse. Drought is a major contributor. The past two decades have been the driest in 12 centuries in the American Southwest, largely because of climate change, and there are no indications that conditions will improve anytime soon.

The other big factor is wind, which is fueling all of the fires in northern New Mexico right now. In fact, the Hermits Peak Fire started as a prescribed burn — meaning a fire set intentionally, under controlled conditions, to clear out dry vegetation and reduce the risk of larger, uncontrolled fires — but gusty, unpredictable winds blew it out of control.

High winds were also responsible for the second phenomenon visible in the image NOAA released: the dust storm in Colorado.

“Visibility is dropping to near zero and winds are gusting to 50-60 m.p.h. within this blowing dust,” the National Weather Service in Pueblo, Colo., said on Twitter on Friday, warning of extremely dangerous conditions for drivers.

The satellite imagery underscores how widespread the effects of such disasters can be. While the “brownout” conditions were relatively localized during the dust storm, winds carried the dust particles across hundreds of miles of southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles.

Fine particulate matter degrades air quality and poses health hazards, particularly for people with underlying lung or heart diseases. That applies to dust as well as to smoke, soot and other byproducts of wildfires.

Last summer, wildfires led to air quality warnings across almost the entire country and turned the sun red as far east as New York City. And researchers found in January that dangerous levels of smoke and ozone were increasing over much of the Western United States.

When he ran for mayor, Eric Adams positioned himself as a champion for the working class — a lifelong New Yorker who had grown up in poverty and won support from voters in the boroughs outside Manhattan.

But in his first months in office, he could oversee rent increases of up to 9 percent for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments.

The powerful Rent Guidelines Board, which the mayor effectively controls, will take a preliminary vote on Thursday on proposed rent increases of 2.7 to 4.5 percent on one-year leases and 4.3 to 9 percent on two-year leases. A final vote is expected in June.

Critics say those rates are too steep — 9 percent would be the largest increase since 1990 — and unfair when the state’s eviction moratorium ended in January and market-rate rents across the city are rising.

More than 2,000 eviction cases are being filed each week, and rents have risen 33 percent, according to one real estate website.

The proposed rent increases present a challenge for Mr. Adams, a Democrat, who is facing criticism within his party for supporting any substantial increase when many New Yorkers are still struggling during the pandemic.

His predecessor, Bill de Blasio, backed rent freezes and modest increases during his eight years in office because he said they were crucial to fighting inequality.

Mr. Adams, who is himself a landlord and has rented out his Brooklyn property, which is not rent stabilized, has defended the need for rent increases, though he did not say how much they should rise.

He argued that higher rents were necessary for small property owners facing rising costs.

“We must be fair here — allow tenants to be able to stay in their living arrangements, but we need to look after those small mom-and-pop owners,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference last month. “If you invested all your money into a 10-unit house, and you cannot pay the bills, you could lose that.”

Groups like the Working Families Party note that most rent-stabilized buildings are owned by large landlords, not small property owners. They point to a report by an urban planning professor at New York University that found that only about one-third of rent-regulated buildings were owned by landlords who had five buildings or fewer.

The issue is part of a growing rift over housing between Mr. Adams and the City Council, where leaders have criticized the mayor’s focus on removing homeless encampments at a time when affordable housing is scarce.

Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, called the proposed rent increases “unconscionable” and said they would “only exacerbate the housing and homelessness crises confronting our city.”

The politics of a rent increase are complicated for the mayor, said Basil Smikle, director of the public policy program at Hunter College. Mr. Adams could be viewed as insensitive to the concerns of New Yorkers who are struggling to pay rent, but his message about supporting small property owners could connect with his supporters, Mr. Smikle said.

“It’s possible that a lot of the mom-and-pop owners came from areas where he got strong support in Queens and Brooklyn,” he said.

A report by the Rent Guidelines Board found that costs have risen substantially for building owners since spring of last year, including a 19.6 percent increase in fuel costs. Insurance costs rose 10.9 percent and utilities like electricity rose 5.8 percent.

Shahana Hanif, a City Council member from Brooklyn and a chair of the progressive caucus, said the rent increases would be “excruciatingly painful” for tenants and urged the Adams administration to look for other solutions to support small landlords.

“I’m adamantly opposed to the rent hike and find it really disgraceful that the mayor isn’t showing the compassion and empathy that we need for tenants,” she said.

The annual decision by the Rent Guidelines Board, which affects more than two million residents who live in buildings built before 1974 that have six or more units, always ignites passionate debate and an intense lobbying effort from tenants and landlords.

For decades, the board approved sizable increases almost every year — often from 3 percent on one-year leases to 8 percent on two-year leases — but that came to an end under Mr. de Blasio. As he left office, Mr. de Blasio named the board’s rent freezes and modest increases during his tenure as one of his greatest achievements.

Landlords have pushed for substantial rent increases at the higher end of the proposed range. They argue that new state rent laws approved in 2019 favoring tenants already made conditions more difficult for landlords.

“This is a starting point for owners to recover from eight years of rent freezes and inadequate guidelines, and the draconian changes to the state’s rent laws,” said Vito Signorile, a vice president at the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents about 25,000 owners.

The rent board has nine members, all appointed by the mayor: five representatives of the public, two of owners and two of tenants. Mr. Adams has named three appointees since taking office.

His choice in March of Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at N.Y.U. and an adjunct fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, as a representative of the public raised concern among tenant advocates.

Mr. Gupta told Vox last year that he was a “little skeptical of rent control.” He declined a request for an interview on Wednesday.

Brad Lander, the city comptroller, said that appointing someone “who has expressed skepticism about the entire system of rent regulation is deeply troubling.” He urged the board to reconsider its proposed increases.

“While a modest rent increase may be merited this year, Mayor Adams’s appointed board must not return to the days of Giuliani and Bloomberg’s unreasonably high increases,” Mr. Lander said.

Mr. Adams also appointed Christina Smyth, a lawyer who says on LinkedIn that she represents “multifamily building owners,” as the landlords’ representative, and Adán Soltren, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit that provides legal services to poor New Yorkers, as a representative of tenants.

Mr. Adams won a competitive Democratic primary last year with support from Black and Latino voters and working-class neighborhoods, but he is also close to business leaders and real estate developers.

Members of the Real Estate Board of New York, the real estate industry’s main lobbying arm, donated to Mr. Adams’s campaign or to a PAC that supported him.

Aby Rosen, a co-founder of RFR Realty, gave $100,000 to the PAC, called “Strong Leadership NYC,” and Gary Barnett, the founder of Extell Development Company, gave it $250,000. Other real estate executives like Richard LeFrak, C.E.O. of the LeFrak Organization, donated to Mr. Adams’s campaign.

Mr. Adams said last month that small landlords had been “decimated” by the pandemic and could lose their buildings to landlords who own thousands of units.

“What happens if they lose their buildings?” Mr. Adams said. “The megaguys come in and buy the buildings, and now we see the gentrification that we all say we fear.”

Dana Rubinstein and Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting.

WARSAW — Soviet diplomats moved out of the hulking Warsaw housing compound more than 30 years ago. But some Russians stayed behind, sheltering until the early 2000s behind a fence topped with barbed wire from a city that, with the collapse of their empire, had suddenly become hostile territory — and an important intelligence target.

A moldering, Russian pulp fiction paperback left behind inside the now derelict property, perhaps provides a clue to the preoccupations of the Russians who lived in the compound that was notorious since its heyday in the 1980s as a nest of spies: “Game on a Foreign Field.”

“It was always called Spyville and yes, many of these guys were spies,” the mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski, said in an interview.

Fed up by Russia’s refusal to relinquish the property despite court rulings that it no longer had rights to the site, the mayor last month grabbed it back, declaring that he wanted it for Ukrainians instead. The number of Russian diplomatic personnel in Warsaw, he said, has been falling for decades, accelerated by the recent expulsion of 45 suspected spies. “They didn’t need such a big infrastructure but they wanted to keep the premises,” he said. “That is why we have been fighting with them to get it back.”

Built in the late 1970s to house Soviet embassy staff when Poland was still a member of the Warsaw Pact and a seemingly obedient communist satrap, “Spyville” was officially emptied of diplomats and their families when the Soviet empire crumbled in the late 1980s but stayed in Russian hands. A louche nightclub — open only to Russians and their guests — operated there for a time but the compound, a cluster of concrete blocks around a fetid pond, has mostly been associated with espionage.

Polish urban explorers who sneaked into the property found Russian newspapers from as late as 2005, long after the Russians had supposedly left, reinforcing the compound’s reputation as a haven for undercover skulduggery.

A place of mystery and decay, it was also a small and deeply unwelcome outpost of the “Russian World,” a territorial and ideological concept dear to President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Putin used the concept to justify his invasion of Ukraine, asserting that the country was an inalienable part of Russia. But the idea that Russia has an inviolable right — for linguistic, historical, legal or other reasons — to control bits of foreign land, extends far beyond Ukraine to myriad places that the Kremlin views as its own.

During his first years in power, Mr. Putin followed the example of his predecessor as Russia’s president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and surrendered foreign outposts that no longer served any clear purpose or were too expensive to maintain. These included a listening post in Cuba and a naval base in Vietnam.

Since then, however, Mr. Putin has set a very different course, pushing for the return of lost property, including the Cuban spy post he gave up in 2001, a graveyard containing czarist-era Russian graves on the French Riviera, a church in Jerusalem and other sites he views as belonging to Russky mir, or the Russian world.

At the same time, he has resisted giving up anything that Russia still controls abroad, frustrating Japanese efforts to negotiate at least the partial return of islands seized by Moscow at the end of World War II and obstructing Polish demands, backed by court decisions, for the return of “Spyville.”

Frustrated by Moscow’s refusal to hand over the Warsaw property, which Russia rented under a Soviet-era agreement, the Polish capital’s mayor, Mr. Trzaskowski, last month entered the compound for the first time, helped by a locksmith armed with metal shears and an electric saw, along with the Ukrainian ambassador and a court-appointed bailiff.

“Spyville is now passing into our hands,” the mayor declared. Security guards hired by the Russian embassy and an embassy representative put up no resistance. Moscow’s ambassador in Warsaw, Sergei Andreev, later complained to Russian state media that the mayor had illegally “occupied” a diplomatic site.

The mayor had merely enforced court decisions in 2016 and again this month, all ignored by Moscow, that voided Russia’s claim. The Russians insist they have honored the terms of the lease; the Poles say they have not.

“The courts passed a judgment that the property was rented out by the Polish state and that the lease had ended. If you are renting a property and not using it for almost 20 years, that of course means that you don’t need it anymore,” the mayor said.

Russia, as the successor state of the Soviet Union, inherited more than 20 Warsaw properties that had been given or leased to Moscow during the communist era. One of these, which Moscow also tried to hang onto, now houses the Ukrainian embassy.

But the biggest of these, other than a vast, colonnaded embassy building that looks like a palace, is “Spyville,” located just a mile from the embassy in the south of the city.

“For Russia it is symbolic,” the mayor said. “They just push and shove over questions of a symbolic nature, asserting their importance in Warsaw and in Poland.” He added: “This is all a legacy of Soviet times. The biggest embassy properties in Warsaw are those of the Russian Federation and the Chinese, simply because in the Communist times they were getting the best plots of land.”

Poland, he added, has no designs on buildings owned by Russia, only property that was rented to Moscow “under very favorable conditions for obvious reasons” at a time when the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of troops stationed in the country to enforce its will.

Krzysztof Varga, a Polish writer and journalist who grew up near the former Soviet housing complex, said the place has been known as “Spyville” as long as he can remember. “The whole district contained many buildings that belonged to the Russians,” he said, recalling that K.G.B. agents working in an office nearby used to hang out at a restaurant in the neighborhood.

Because there were so many Russians in the area nobody bothered much about “Spyville,” he said, “Everybody knew it was the Russkis and that was it.”

But what the Russians were doing there was never clear, particularly after Soviet diplomats left and a nightclub, Club 100, opened on the premises, leading to complaints, according to one Polish media outlet, “of loud parties with more Kalashnikovs than guests” and frequent police raids.

The mayor said he has no idea what was going on inside the compound. “Somebody was using the building at the start of the century for a few years but we could not check because we could not even enter without a court order,” he said.

Club 100, long closed, stands across an untended garden from the main residential blocks, a row of concrete, modernist style buildings faced with marble at their base. They combine late Soviet aspirations for luxurious living — spacious apartments with balconies, glass-faced cabinets and orange sofas from the 1970s — with the feel of a prison thanks to stained walls, coils of barbed wire and the stench of rot and ruin.

A pile of garbage next to the entrance to Block C, sealed with a piece of particle board, contains an old mechanical typewriter with a Cyrillic keyboard, smashed pieces of furniture and rusty metal film canisters from Mosfilm, the Soviet Union’s premier film studio.

Across the pile are draped strands of film from a dark 1989 Russian fantasy thriller, To Kill a Dragon, the story of a village liberated from tyranny but unwilling to accept its newfound freedom. The movie was banned in the Soviet Union, convulsed at the time of the film’s release by angry debate over the wisdom of the country’s retreat from communism, but was still shown to and, it seems, appreciated by Soviet diplomats and spies living in Warsaw.

Mr. Trzaskowski, the mayor, said he initially planned to turn the recovered property into a shelter for refugees from Ukraine, of which Poland has taken in nearly three million. But he found “Spyville” in such a state of disrepair — all the elevator cables had been cut and one block is structurally unsound — that engineers now need to decide whether the buildings, the tallest of which have 11 floors, can be salvaged or need to be torn down.

Whatever gets decided, Mr. Trzaskowski added, “it will definitely serve the Ukrainian community” in one way or another. On that, he said, municipal authorities and Poland’s central government, which otherwise agree on little and frequently fight, “are on the same page.”

Anatol Magdziarz in Warsaw contributed reporting.

Despite a last-minute plea to “respectfully bow out” of contention for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the country singer Dolly Parton made it in anyway, joining a musically diverse array of inductees for 2022 that also includes Eminem, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Eurythmics, Duran Duran and Pat Benatar.

The honorees — voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals — “each had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture and helped change the course of rock ’n’ roll,” said John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock Hall, in a statement.

Parton, 76, had said in March that she was “extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated” but didn’t feel that she had “earned that right” to be recognized as a rock artist at the expense of others. Ballots, however, had already been sent to voters, and the hall said they would remain unchanged, noting that the organization was “not defined by any one genre” and had deep roots in country and rhythm and blues.

In an interview with NPR last week, Parton said she would accept her induction after all, should it come to pass. “It was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for the people in rock music, and I have found out lately that it’s not necessarily that,” she said.

But she added, “if they can’t go there to be recognized, where do they go? So I just felt like I would be taking away from someone that maybe deserved it, certainly more than me, because I never considered myself a rock artist.”

Following years of criticism regarding diversity — less than 8 percent of inductees were women as of 2019 — the Rock Hall has made a point in recent years to expand its purview. Artists like Jay-Z, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson have been welcomed in from the worlds of rap, R&B and pop, alongside prominent women across genres like the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Tina Turner.

This year, Eminem becomes just the tenth hip-hop act to be inducted, making the cut on his first ballot. (Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording.)

Parton, Richie, Simon and Duran Duran were also selected on their first go-round, while fresh nominees like Beck and A Tribe Called Quest, who had been eligible for more than a decade, were passed over. Simon, known for her folk-inflected pop hits like “You’re So Vain,” was a first-time nominee more than 25 years after she qualified. Benatar and Eurythmics, long eligible, had each been considered once before.

Those passed over this year also included Kate Bush, Devo, Fela Kuti, MC5, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Dionne Warwick.

Judas Priest was on the ballot, but will instead be inducted in the non-performer category for musical excellence, alongside the songwriting and production duo Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. Harry Belafonte and Elizabeth Cotten will be recognized with the Early Influence Award, while the executives Allen Grubman, Jimmy Iovine and Sylvia Robinson are set to receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award, named for the longtime Atlantic Records honcho and one of the founders of the Rock Hall.

The 37th annual induction ceremony will be held on Nov. 5, at Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, Calif., and will air at a later date on HBO and SiriusXM.

Russia’s decades-long dominance of Europe’s energy market is crumbling, and the biggest blow is expected this week as the European Union moves toward a ban on Russian oil.

On Wednesday, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, proposed a complete import ban on Russian oil with crude phased out over six months and refined products stopped by the end of the year, subject to approval by the member states.

With this phased approach, “we maximize pressure on Russia, while at the same time minimizing collateral damage to us and our partners around the globe,” she said.

Oil prices rose after the announcement. Brent crude was up more than 3.7 percent for the day.

Analysts say it will be possible to sever Europe’s oil ties to Russia, but the effort will take time and may lead to shortages and higher prices for gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products — a situation that could penalize consumers already struggling with inflation and, ultimately, derail the economic recovery from the pandemic.

It’s “going to be complicated,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm. “You have got a de-linking of two very intertwined parts of the global energy system,” he said, adding, “There are going to be disruptions and costs associated with that.”

“But policymakers are increasingly convinced it is necessary and better to do that relatively rapidly, both to try and reduce revenues for funding Russia and to reduce European exposure to Russian influence,” Mr. Bronze said.

The European Union’s aims are clear. With Russia continuing to wage war in Ukraine, Europe wants to deny President Vladimir V. Putin funds from sales of oil, usually his largest export earner and a cornerstone of the Russian economy. Russia’s oil sales to Europe are worth $310 million a day, estimates Florian Thaler, chief executive of OilX, an energy research firm.

The move against oil would be part of an effort to end Moscow’s ability to twist European arms over energy. In its latest attempt to do so last week, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria. Russian oil may be an easier target than gas, analysts say. “The oil system can reconfigure itself,” said Oswald Clint, an analyst at Bernstein, a research firm, adding that oil was “a very deep, liquid and fungible market” served by thousands of tankers.

Still, for the European Union, cutting itself off from Russian oil will be a herculean task that may risk sowing division. About 25 percent of Europe’s crude oil comes from Russia, but there are wide differences in the level of reliance among countries, with the general rule being that nations geographically closer to Russia are more entangled in its energy web.

Britain, which is not a member of the European Union and has oil production from the North Sea, has said it will phase out Russian energy; Spain, Portugal and France import relatively low amounts of oil from Russia.

On the other hand, several nations, including Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and Bulgaria, usually import more than 75 percent of their oil from Russia and might struggle to replace it with alternative sources soon.

“It is physically impossible to operate Hungary and the Hungarian economy without crude oil from Russia,” Hungary’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, said on Tuesday.

While worries focus on gas pipelines, huge volumes of oil also flow from Russian oil fields through the Druzhba pipeline (named after the Russian word for friendship), whose northern branch feeds Germany and Poland and southern line goes to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Refineries along this route, including the PCK facility in Schwedt, near Berlin, “have been running on Russian crude for the last 50 years,” Mr. Thaler of OilX said. “You need to source a proxy for that on the international market.”

Mr. Thaler said Hungary and Slovakia could potentially receive more oil from tankers in the Adriatic Sea, via a pipeline that runs through Croatia, while the Czech Republic could be fed from a terminal in Trieste, Italy. Policymakers in Brussels may give Hungary and perhaps other countries long lead times to win their support.

Germany, on the other hand, and Poland now seem determined to end their dependence on Russian energy, and this change of heart in Germany seems to be key to European policy. Germany plans to bring oil through the eastern port of Rostock as well as from across the border in Poland, from the port of Gdansk.

The German government says it has been able to end contracts for Russian crude, with the exception of the Schwedt refinery and another in eastern Germany called Leuna, which together account for roughly 12 percent of the country’s imports from Russia.

“That means the embargo is already being implemented, step by step,” Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, said on Monday.

While oil is spoken of as a single commodity, there are many types with different characteristics, and refineries are often configured to run certain grades of crude. Switching away from Russian oil may involve costs if the fuel can even be found, analysts say.

Zsolt Hernadi, the head of MOL, a large Hungarian oil company, recently said it could require up to four years and $700 million to recalibrate his company’s refineries in the event of an embargo on Russian oil.

Analysts say an embargo could trigger a costly competition for alternative sources of oil.

Viktor Katona, an oil expert at Kpler, which tracks energy flows, said that of the substitutes potentially available for Russian oil, only Saudi output was a good fit. So far the Saudis, who will lead an OPEC Plus meeting on Thursday, have shown little inclination to increase their output more than incrementally. Mr. Katona said Iranian oil might also work, but sanctions imposed by the United States continue to crimp Iran’s fuel sales. Oil from Venezuela, which is also crimped by sanctions, is often mentioned as a possible swap for Russian crude.

Strains are already showing up in the market for diesel, which is used by both ordinary drivers and truckers. Diesel is in short supply because European distributors are wary of buying refined products from Russia, which once supplied large volumes of the fuel to Europe. Diesel is selling for the equivalent of about $170 a barrel, well above the $107-a-barrel futures price of Brent crude, the international standard, and Mr. Katona expects the price to keep going up. At the pump, diesel prices in Britain are up more than 35 percent over the last 12 months, according to the RAC, a motorists’ club.

An embargo is “going to inflict tangible pain on the European refiner and, in consequence, on the European customer,” Mr. Katona said.

Analysts say the releases of oil from reserves announced by Washington and the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which are scheduled to provide more than a million barrels of extra oil a day over six months, have so far had more impact on the American than the European market.

For Germany, Europe’s largest economy, the toughest decision will be what to do about the refinery in Schwedt, which is majority-owned by Rosneft, the Russian national oil company, and holds smaller stakes in two other refineries in Germany. Another Russian company, Lukoil, also holds stakes in refineries in Europe, including one of Italy’s main refineries, ISAB, in Sicily.

“Those companies would have little incentive to run non-Russian crudes,” Mr. Bronze said.

The German economic ministry said it did not expect “a voluntary termination of supply relations with Russia” in Schwedt and has been exploring legal options, including whether a state takeover could be justified.

And then there is the question of whether an embargo on Russian oil for Europe will achieve the aim of cutting off the Kremlin’s revenues. So far, the pressure on Russia seems to be raising prices and, therefore, revenues. Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, projects that even though Russian oil production is likely to decline in 2022, the Russian government’s total income from the fuel is likely to be up around 45 percent, to $180 billion.

Russia is also finding homes for its oil in India and, to a lesser extent, Turkey, as buyers take advantage of substantial discounts. “It might be just a game of musical chairs,” Mr. Katona said.

Opponents and supporters of abortion rights had expected for months that the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but the leaked draft opinion late Monday came as if out of the blue, setting off shock, outrage and jubilation on both sides of the nation’s deeply polarized abortion debate.

Activists took to the streets to declare their intention to fight harder, especially over control of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. Candidates sought to raise money off the news. And in states that are poised to ban abortion or guard access to it, politicians and governors declared that they were ready to act.

Yet many Americans woke up stunned, not realizing — and some still not believing — that Roe and the constitutional right to an abortion that it has guaranteed for five decades could disappear within a matter of weeks.

Connie Wright, a Des Moines-area grandmother of eight, was getting ready for bed on Monday night when her phone lit up with a friend’s text about the leak. Searching online to confirm it, Ms. Wright fell to her knees. “I feel like this is something I’ve been praying for forever,” she later said. “And that it was answered prayer. And I just kept thanking the Lord for these innocent babies’ lives that are being saved.”

Jordyn McFadden, a first-year law student at Washington University in St. Louis who was studying outside a Starbucks, said the draft ruling that suggests Roe v. Wade will be overturned made her see the Supreme Court as “tyrannical.”

“Just another political body,” said Ms. McFadden, 23, who is from New Hampshire. “It’s insane to me that an unelected body can control the right” to have an abortion. “And after how many years of having the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade? Now it’s completely over.”

For the people most involved, the leak was a call to action.

Bradley Pierce, who leads the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, was on his way to Louisiana to testify for a bill he helped draft there when he paused in an airport to do a Facebook Live post about the leaked opinion.

“We need to be putting political pressure on the court right now,” he told supporters. “We need to keep introducing bills about abolition across the country. Don’t let up.”

On the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, Jamie Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, declared herself “shocked but not surprised.” She had been at the court in early December, when the justices heard oral arguments in the case at issue, a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, well before the limit of viability established by Roe. Those arguments made clear that a majority of the justices — she called them “five radically anti-choice Catholics” — were in favor of overturning the decision.

“Last week we had polling that 30 percent of Americans didn’t think anything was going to happen to Roe and hadn’t heard much about it,” she said. “I hope today that number is zero.”

“We’re fighting a religious movement,” she said, “we have religious ideology being codified into law, and we have to have people of faith rising up and saying, ‘Not in our name.’”

Although there has not been an official ruling from the Supreme Court, governors were pushing ahead with the fight. Several Republican governors, including those in Florida and Virginia, condemned the leak, saying it was an attempt to whip up opposition to the court’s decision and mobilize Democrats. In Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, signed a ban on abortions after about six weeks, modeled on a Texas law the Supreme Court has allowed to stand that relies on civilian enforcement, with bounties of at least $10,000 for successful lawsuits against anyone who aids or abets an abortion.

Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade. A Gallup poll in June found that 58 percent of Americans were opposed, a figure that has been relatively unchanged for three decades. A Public Religion Research Institute poll last week found that 61 percent oppose overturning Roe, and 36 percent support it.

In Miami, Jamaica Rose, a 32-year-old chef who supports Roe v. Wade, was among those still doubting that the court would consider overturning it after so many decades.

“I don’t see it as a realistic possibility,” she said, even though she had heard the news the night before. “It’s pretty longstanding and it has had a lot of support.”

“It’s something that’s kind of ingrained,” she said. “Individuality is huge for every American.”

Near the city’s Freedom Tower, a group of protesters was gathering, summoned by text messages from abortion rights groups and Democrats with news of the draft opinion.

“Especially in a country that stands for freedom — with the controversy when it came to masks and things like that — just infringing on a human right that has to do with the body just seems extremely hypocritical,” said Amanda Lewan, 23, who had joined with two friends.

Over lunch at the Downtown Market in Grand Rapids, Mich., Elyse Greene and a friend said they were shaken by the draft opinion and the idea that they might not have a right to an abortion.

“As an African American woman, it feels like my whole existence is being attacked,” said Ms. Greene, who is 26. The draft decision made her worry about what the conservative majority on the Supreme Court might do next. “Once you start taking apart things that give humans rights, what will stop them from bringing back the Jim Crow era? What will stop them from taking away rights that African Americans have worked so hard for?”

In South Jordan, Utah, Mary Taylor, the leader of Pro-Life Utah, threw her phone across the room in excitement when a friend called her with the news. Utah passed a trigger ban in 2020, similar to laws in a dozen other states, that would almost immediately outlaw abortion with few exceptions if the Supreme Court overturns Roe. If that law takes effect, “We will be more on defense mode,” said Ms. Taylor, 63. But, she added, “Our services are going to be needed more than ever.”

In Lake Charles, La., Yvette Clark, 61, was trying to sort through what the leaked ruling would actually mean politically and for women in her state. Ms. Clark, a dance instructor who is active in her Catholic parish, described herself as “pro-life” but is not an activist, and said she had “an abundance of compassion” for women who have chosen an abortion.

“Does it mean abortion rights will go to the states or some states will allow abortions and some won’t?” she wondered. “Louisiana already has strict abortion laws, so I guess they will be upheld. I’m a little unclear on what that all means.”

She was cautiously in favor of a rollback of Roe v. Wade. “At the same time,” she said, “I’m so tired of everyone yelling at each other and everything being such a huge fight.”

When Christina Rodriguez first read the news over her morning coffee in Tucson, Ariz., she hoped it was misinformation, or some kind of mistake. Within a few hours, Ms. Rodriguez, 34, was preparing to attend an impromptu protest outside the federal courthouse on Tuesday evening.

Ms. Rodriguez has worked as a field organizer for Democratic causes but is currently at home with her 2-year-old and anticipating the birth of her second son this summer. “It’s absolutely imperative for my children, boy or girl, to make decisions about their own bodies,” she said. “Now that that choice could be stripped away, it’s scary.”

Even before the draft opinion was leaked on Monday night, a coalition of national abortion rights groups had announced they would spend $150 million to help elect allies up and down the ballot in the midterms this November. But Tuesday morning, they acknowledged that it had been hard to mobilize support among voters, or even convince sympathetic Americans that Roe was at risk.

The draft opinion, said Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, could serve as “a wake-up call.”

The organizers of the Women’s March, which attracted hundreds of thousands of demonstrators after the election of Donald J. Trump, called for supporters of abortion rights to gather outside federal, state and local government buildings on Tuesday. Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director, predicted that the draft opinion would prove even more motivating. “We do know that this is an issue that charges up our base,” she said. “We expect to see big pushback.”

But if overturning Roe was a victory for anti-abortion groups, they were not resting. Outside the Supreme Court, Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, who has been frequently arrested and the target of many lawsuits for his anti-abortion actions, said they would next push for a federal law prohibiting abortion, similar to one that outlawed polygamy.

“This is like D-Day for us,” he said. “This is taking the beach. It is not the end of the war. We will make it to Berlin.”

Reporting was contributed by Eric Berger, Robert Chiarito, Jill Cowan, Alexandra Glorioso, Ann Hinga Klein, Patricia Mazzei and Luke Vander Ploeg.

Politico’s top editors and executives spent Sunday morning sipping Bloody Marys and nibbling bite-size waffles and wienerschnitzel as they chatted with top Washington officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, at an annual brunch hosted at the opulent Georgetown home of Robert Allbritton, a Politico founder.

What wasn’t discussed: Politico was onto a giant scoop, one that would rattle the country fewer than 36 hours later.

By the time of the brunch, Politico was working on a story about a leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court that would strike down Roe v. Wade, according to two people with knowledge of the process inside the newsroom. Awareness of the document and the article about it was contained to a very small group.

The article, published Monday night, immediately put Roe v. Wade and the direction of the court front and center in the nation’s political debate. But it also put a spotlight on Politico, an organization that has reshaped coverage of Washington with its blanket reporting on all things politics since it was founded 15 years ago.

The news organization is now at the center of a debate about who leaked the document and why, including rampant speculation about the motives of Politico’s sources. It is extremely rare for an important draft opinion inside the Supreme Court to leak to the press.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court confirmed that the draft opinion was authentic. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in a statement that he had directed the marshal of the court to investigate the leak, which he described as “a singular and egregious breach” of trust.

Politico has said little about the reporting behind the article, written by the reporters Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, or deliberations before publication. Its spokesman declined to comment for this article. Politico’s editor in chief, Matthew Kaminski, has said that he would let the article speak for itself. The article said that the document was provided by “a person familiar with the court’s proceedings,” and that the person had provided additional details that helped authenticate the document, but it didn’t say what those details were.

In the hours before publishing the article, Mr. Kaminski and Politico’s executive editor, Dafna Linzer, called senior editors to let them know the article was coming and that a memo about it would go out to the newsroom, according to one of the people with knowledge of the process.

Moments after publishing the article, Mr. Kaminski and Ms. Linzer alerted the newsroom in an email, defending their decisions.

“After an extensive review process, we are confident of the authenticity of the draft,” they wrote. “This unprecedented view into the justices’ deliberations is plainly news of great public interest.”

News organizations around the world, including The New York Times and The Associated Press, quickly followed Politico’s reporting. In an interview with Mr. Gerstein on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday evening, Ms. Maddow told Mr. Gerstein that he would “always in your entire life be the reporter that broke this story.”

Although the views of individual justices have occasionally been disclosed publicly before the Supreme Court has announced a decision, the leak of an important draft opinion is unusual, said Lucas A. Powe Jr., a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin, and a former Supreme Court law clerk who has been studying the high court for more than 50 years.

“Your loyalty is to your justice and to the court, and you just don’t leak things,” Mr. Powe said of the standard practice among employees of the Supreme Court.

Politico was justified in writing about the draft opinion, which is newsworthy and relates to a matter of national public concern, said Marty Baron, the former executive editor of The Washington Post who oversaw the publication of several high-profile stories, including the documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

“This seems pretty simple,” Mr. Baron said. “They were provided a document. The document was authenticated to their satisfaction, and they published.”

The publication provoked swift reaction from supporters and opponents of abortion rights, who demonstrated at the Supreme Court in Washington.

On Tuesday, Traci Schweikert, Politico’s chief talent officer, sent an email to workers detailing safety measures the company “proactively” put in place for its offices, such as restricting access to certain floors, “given the heightened visibility to Politico following our reporting on the Supreme Court last night.”

“Be aware of anyone accessing our elevators with you and the possibility of ‘tailgating’ to our floor,” the email said. Employees were also advised to consider the privacy settings on their social media accounts to avoid potential online harassment.

“If you choose public settings, we strongly encourage you to consider removing any personal information if your social media accounts identify you as a Politico employee,” the email added.

Founded in 2007, Politico was among a crop of media upstarts that redefined news for the digital era. Urged on by Jim VandeHei and John Harris, two of its founders, to “win the morning,” Politico’s reporters and editors covered Washington high and low, devoting space in their influential email newsletters to presidential campaigns and more trivial details like birthdays of prominent local figures.

After a fast rise to prominence, Politico has faced new competition in recent years, including from sites like Axios, which was started by Mr. VandeHei and others after he left Politico. Axel Springer, the Berlin-based publishing conglomerate, bought Politico from Mr. Allbritton last year for more than $1 billion, part of a plan to expand in the United States with a portfolio of titles that include Insider and Morning Brew.

This year, Politico announced that Goli Sheikholeslami would be its new chief executive, replacing Patrick Steel, who left in 2021.

The executives, as well as Axel Springer’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, were all in attendance at the Politico brunch on Sunday, which serves as a bookend to the flurry of events surrounding Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

It was an introduction of sorts for Ms. Linzer, previously a top editor at NBC News and MSNBC, who started in her new role as executive editor of Politico on April 25.

Ms. Linzer is married to the journalist Barton Gellman, now at The Atlantic, who led The Washington Post’s coverage of the Snowden documents.

The scoop seemed to impress Mr. Döpfner, who praised Politico’s reporting in an email to the staff on Tuesday. “I admire how you carefully outlined the facts, putting reader’s interest first in a nonpartisan way,” he said, according to a copy of the email viewed by The New York Times.

Politico also praised the scoop internally. A roundup of press clippings shared with Politico employees showed that the Supreme Court story led cable news programming, was dominating news websites and had “taken over Twitter.”

WASHINGTON — The Trump family business and President Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration committee have jointly agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the attorney general for the District of Columbia, who claimed that the Trump International Hotel in Washington illegally received excessive payments from the inauguration committee.

The settlement in the civil suit came with no admission of wrongdoing by the Trump Organization, the former president or the inaugural committee.

But the payment amounted to nearly three-quarters of the $1.03 million that the lawsuit, filed by Attorney General Karl Racine of Washington, said had been paid to Mr. Trump’s hotel by the nonprofit inaugural committee to rent out space at what Mr. Racine asserted was an above-market rate and then use it in part to host a private reception for Mr. Trump’s children on the evening he was sworn in as president.

The settlement also came just days before the Trump family was slated to formally close on the sale of the Trump International Hotel, which will be converted to a Waldorf Astoria after Mr. Trump’s name is stripped from the landmark building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House.

Negotiations to settle the suit intensified earlier this year after a Superior Court judge in Washington set a trial date for September and rejected an effort by the Trump Organization to be removed from the lawsuit, making it likely that members of Mr. Trump’s family were going to be called in open court to testify.

“After he was elected, one of the first actions Donald Trump took was illegally using his own inauguration to enrich his family,” Mr. Racine said in a statement announcing the settlement on Tuesday. “Nonprofit funds cannot be used to line the pockets of individuals, no matter how powerful they are.”

Mr. Trump issued his own statement Tuesday morning, disputing the allegations.

“Given the impending sale of The Trump International Hotel, Washington D.C., and with absolutely no admission of liability or guilt, we have reached a settlement to end all litigation with Democrat Attorney General Racine,” Mr. Trump’s statement said. “This was yet another example of weaponizing Law Enforcement against the Republican Party and, in particular, the former President of the United States. So bad for our Country!”

Lee Blalack, a lawyer for the Trump inaugural committee, said the $750,000 payment was being split equally between the committee and the Trump family companies, a cost the inaugural committee decided was worth it given an estimate that the trial would have generated legal bills twice as high.

“Settlement was prudent simply to avoid the significant costs of litigating these baseless allegations through trial,” he said in the statement, adding that the inaugural committee’s payment was being covered by its insurance company.

The $750,000 from the inauguration case will be donated by Mr. Racine to two nonprofit groups that promote democracy and support youth in Washington, D.C., Mikva Challenge DC and DC Action, organizations that were founded by or run by former aides to President Bill Clinton, including Abner Mikva, a former federal judge, White House counsel to Mr. Clinton and Democratic member of Congress from Illinois.

Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., among many others, had to sit for depositions as Mr. Racine moved ahead in the case filed against the Trump Organization and the inauguration committee.

The settlement follows an action last year by the United States Supreme Court, after Mr. Trump left office, to dismiss separate legal claims that he had illegally accepted payments at the hotel from foreign government officials, in violation of the so-called emoluments clauses of the Constitution.

Those lawsuits were deemed to be moot because Mr. Trump no longer served as president, meaning the federal courts never concluded if Mr. Trump had violated the constitutional ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments.

In 2019, Mr. Trump agreed to a legal settlement in New York that he had misused charitable donations to benefit himself.

But the legal peril for Mr. Trump continues, with investigations ongoing in New York, where the state attorney general and two district attorneys have been examining statements that the Trump Organization made about the value of its properties, as well as other business practices; and in Georgia, where Mr. Trump and others are being investigated to determine if they criminally interfered with the 2020 presidential election.

Mr. Racine filed his lawsuit after an initial investigation by his office produced emails that showed that former aides to Mr. Trump’s inauguration questioned, even at the time the contract with the Trump hotel was being negotiated in December 2016, if the inauguration committee was overpaying the Trump family for the hotel rental.

“I am a bit worried about the optics of PIC paying Trump Hotel a high fee and the media making a big story out of it,” Rick Gates, the former deputy chair of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and a member of Trump’s inauguration planning committee, wrote in a December 2016 email to Ivanka Trump, referring to the Presidential Inauguration Committee, as they negotiated a deal to rent out ballrooms and other space at the Trump hotel.

The price that the Trump hotel proposed to charge the inauguration committee was reduced after these initial concerns were raised, but the fee remained much higher than what the same hotel had charged another nonprofit group during the inauguration, and still created concern among aides to Mr. Trump, emails collected during the lawsuit show.

The rental of the Trump hotel also included a special “friends and family” party sponsored by the adult children of Mr. Trump, Mr. Racine said in the lawsuit, a sign of how money donated to a nonprofit was being used for personal benefit.

The inaugural committee set up by Mr. Trump, which collected donations from corporations and individuals who later would often seek official action by the Trump administration to help their business interests, raised more than $107 million, far more than any previous inauguration.

The more than $1 million paid by the inauguration committee to the Trump hotel was seen by ethics watchdog groups as just the start of a pattern that lasted through the administration, with Mr. Trump and his family using his White House status to enrich themselves.

Under District of Columbia law, the attorney general oversees nonprofits, a power that the office has used in recent years to investigate a local nonprofit hospital and a theater company, among others accused of misuse of charitable funds.

Mr. Racine filed a motion on Tuesday asking Judge Yvonne Williams, of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, to dismiss his 2020 lawsuit, after lawyers for the Trump Organization and the inauguration committee signed a deal detailing the terms of the proposed settlement.

The agreement noted that none of the current officers at the inauguration committee are involved in other nonprofits in the District of Columbia, eliminating any need to impose restrictions on their involvement in other charities in the city, as the New York attorney general had done as part of the settlement there in 2019.

In the New York case, Mr. Trump was ordered to pay more than $2 million in damages for what Attorney General Letitia James described as “misusing charitable funds for his own political gain,” including money from the Trump Foundation to pay for a portrait of Mr. Trump that cost $10,000 and using foundation money for a political campaign event.

Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit group that tracked spending at Trump company operations, said the settlement was an important concession, even though the Trump Organization did not admit wrongdoing.

“Trump displayed from the first day of his presidency that the whole enterprise was a grift,” he said. “And much of that was in plain sight of the public.”