Category: News

BOSTON — It was only the second quarter, but the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum seemed determined to build on a theme as he eyed an opportunity on Wednesday night. He took a hard dribble at Stephen Curry, spun to his right and drove straight into the lane before depositing a layup over his smaller defender.

The Celtics were eager to familiarize themselves with the basket in Game 3 of the N.B.A. finals. So they used their size to bully various members of the Golden State Warriors in the low post and off the dribble. They attempted layups. They dunked. They threw short jumpers off the glass.

In the process, Boston even survived one of Golden State’s hallmark third-quarter runs to escape with a 116-100 win at TD Garden and take a 2-1 lead in the series. Game 4 is in Boston on Friday.

The Celtics, who opened the fourth quarter by building a healthy cushion, were led by Jaylen Brown, who had 27 points and 9 rebounds. Tatum added 26 points, 9 assists and 6 rebounds, and Marcus Smart finished with 24 points. Curry had 31 points in the loss, and Klay Thompson added 25. The Celtics did most of their damage in the paint, where they outscored Golden State, 52-26.

After the first two games were in San Francisco, the series swung to Boston, a fitting site for the finals as the league celebrates the last few flickering embers of its 75th anniversary. The Celtics are chasing their 18th championship, while Golden State is making its sixth finals appearance in eight seasons.

Two of the league’s original franchises, the Celtics and the Warriors now mirror each other in another important way: Both rosters were largely constructed through drafting. And while Boston is making its first finals appearance since 2010, Celtics Coach Ime Udoka said he hoped to emulate Golden State’s long-term success.

“It’s a model for what we want to do here,” Udoka said.

The Celtics, who lost Game 2 on Sunday, have not lost consecutive games this postseason. Before Wednesday’s game, Udoka cited his team’s resilience.

“I think we put it behind us pretty quickly,” he said, “and kind of attacked the areas that we did poorly and tried to improve on those.”

About an hour and a half before the start of Game 3, as some of Golden State’s players made their way onto the court for individual warm-up work, the reserve guard Gary Payton II noticed that one of the rims seemed a bit off. He was right: It was about two inches too high.

“It happens every once in a while,” Golden State Coach Steve Kerr said before the game. “Players have a really sharp eye for that.”

The rim was soon lowered to its proper 10-foot height, but it did not seem to help. Golden State got off to a brutal start, missing 11 of its first 15 field-goal attempts as Boston ran out to a 24-9 lead. Making matters worse, Curry picked up two early fouls.

If there was concern for the Celtics, it came in the form of Tatum’s right shoulder, which he first injured in the Eastern Conference finals against Miami. On Wednesday, he was grimacing in pain after drawing a foul on an early drive.

But his 3-pointer midway through the second quarter pushed the Celtics ahead by 18. Boston shot 57.4 percent from the field to take a 68-56 lead at halftime.

All eyes, though, were on the start of the second half. In Games 1 and 2, Golden State had dominated both third quarters, outscoring Boston by a total of 35 points. The third quarter was particularly problematic for the Celtics in Game 2, when they shot 4 of 17 from the field, committed five turnovers and were outscored, 35-14. A close game quickly turned into a rout.

On Wednesday, Golden State was trailing by 9 when the team summoned some more third-quarter magic. Curry made a 3-pointer and absorbed contact for good measure when the Celtics’ Al Horford slid underneath him. It was ruled a flagrant-1 foul, which meant Golden State would retain possession after a free throw.

Curry sank the free throw, then Otto Porter Jr. buried another 3-pointer for a 7-point possession that trimmed Boston’s lead to 2.

It was an anxious moment for the Celtics, who could have folded but instead revealed their toughness once more. Early in the fourth quarter, Smart banked in a 3-pointer. Moments later, Grant Williams corralled an offensive rebound for a put back, forcing Kerr to a call for a timeout as the home crowd roared.

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday voted nearly along party lines to bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21 and ban the sale of large-capacity magazines, acting as traumatized parents of victims and survivors of mass shootings made wrenching appeals for Congress to act on gun violence.

The vote on a sprawling gun package came two weeks and a day after a gunman massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Several hours earlier, parents of one of the children killed there and an 11-year-old who survived addressed a House committee to drive home the stakes of the issue.

Though the bill passed 223 to 204, it stands no chance in the evenly divided Senate, where solid Republican opposition means it cannot draw the 60 votes needed to break through a filibuster and move forward.

The vote on Wednesday only underscored the intractable politics of gun control in Congress, where all but five Republicans voted against Democrats’ wide-ranging legislation, and talks on a compromise remained unresolved.

Bipartisan negotiations in the Senate continued among a small group of Republicans and Democrats on more modest measures that might actually have a chance of drawing sufficient backing. But one crucial player, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, warned that there were “sticking points everywhere.”

The fragile talks in the Senate and the divided result in the House were stark reminders of the political obstacles that have thwarted past efforts at gun control on Capitol Hill. They were also a jarring contrast with the raw and urgent entreaties from people traumatized by gun violence that unfolded in a committee room nearby.

“We seek a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines,” Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter, Lexi, was killed in Uvalde last month, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee during a hearing on gun violence. Her voice shaking as she recounted the last time she saw her daughter and the panicked moments before she learned that Lexi was dead, Ms. Rubio used her own fresh pain to call for action.

“We understand for some reason, to some people — to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns — that guns are more important than children,” she said. “So at this moment, we ask for progress.”

Ms. Rubio, who spoke remotely with her husband sitting silently weeping by her side, was joined at the hearing by Dr. Roy Guerrero, the sole pediatrician in the small town of Uvalde, who testified in tragically graphic detail about what the AR-15 used in the massacre had done to the bodies of fourth graders. Appearing in person on Capitol Hill, he railed against lawmakers who have failed to act in the face of a rising tide of gun violence in America.

“We’re bleeding out,” he told the committee, “and you are not there.”

Dr. Guerrero recalled seeing two children in the emergency room “whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”

Miah Cerrillo, a fourth grader who survived the carnage by covering herself in a classmate’s blood and pretending to be dead, shared her ordeal in a prerecorded video, scrapping plans to appear in person.

“He shot my friend that was next to me,” she said of the gunman, speaking quietly and with little evident emotion. “And I thought he would come back to the room.”

Miah’s father, who appeared at the hearing in person on his daughter’s behalf, exited the hearing room in tears.

Democrats who organized the session cited the tragic first-person accounts as a call to action.

“No civilian needs an assault rifle, and the Second Amendment does not protect the right to own a weapon of war,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the committee. “It’s time that we ban assault rifles from our streets, from our communities, from our homes.”

Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured during a racist gun massacre in Buffalo 10 days before the Uvalde tragedy, said lawmakers who continued to do nothing in the face of mass shootings should be voted out.

“Let me paint a picture for you: My son Zaire has a hole in the right side of his neck, two on his back and another on his left leg, caused by an exploding bullet from an AR-15,” she said, adding: “I want you to picture that exact scenario for one of your children. This should not be your story or mine.”

But the hearing quickly devolved into a partisan back-and-forth, with Democrats calling for gun control measures and Republicans railing against them. Even as it was underway, Republican leaders were rallying votes against Democrats’ gun package, circulating guidance that noted that the National Rifle Association would be considering members’ votes in its future candidate ratings and endorsements.

“The majority aims to make it harder for all law-abiding Americans to protect themselves while failing to address the causes behind these mass shootings,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican whip, said in an alert that went out to all members of the Republican Conference. He dismissed the bill as “reactionary,” and argued that constitutional rights should not be dependent on age.

And inside the hearing room, as lawmakers turned to a panel of experts, the visceral emotion of the witnesses personally affected by gun violence quickly gave way to the familiar rhythm of political point and counterpoint, with little evidence that the testimony had changed the view of even a single Republican.

“Evil deeds do not transcend constitutional rights,” said Representative Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, arguing that gun-free school zone signs were part of the problem and that the solution was hardening schools.

“Senseless mass shootings are committed by unstable, disturbed loners with mental disease,” said Representative Pat Fallon, Republican of Texas. “More firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens make us all safer.” He also called for increased security on school campuses.

The hearing and the votes were scheduled after the attacks in Uvalde and Buffalo pushed the issue of gun violence to the forefront in Washington, where years’ worth of efforts to enact gun restrictions in the wake of mass shootings have failed amid Republican opposition.

Less than two weeks before the elementary school shooting in Texas, a gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 Black people in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history. Both shootings were carried out by 18-year-old gunmen using legally purchased AR-15-style weapons.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said Republican opponents of measures to restrict such weapons were advancing a “completely false vision of the Second Amendment.”

“Take responsibility for your irresponsible position,” he thundered at Republicans from across the House floor.

Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, drew on Dr. Guerrero’s testimony, asking his colleagues to “imagine for a second that a shooter with an AR-15 goes into your child’s school” and “leaves a hole the size of a basketball in their chest, or leaves their head decapitated off their body.”

“Ask yourself what you would ask of the people who represent you,” Mr. Castro said. “Would their thoughts and prayers be good enough for you if that happened to your child? Would them being worried about their primary election be OK with you?”

Republicans said they, too, wanted to safeguard children, but restricting guns would not do so.

“The speaker started by saying this bill is about protecting our kids,” said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “That is important — it sure is. But this bill doesn’t do it. What this bill does is take away Second Amendment rights, God-given rights, protected by our Constitution, from law-abiding American citizens.”

Two Democrats, Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon, joined Republicans in opposing the bill. Five Republicans — all but one of them leaving Congress this year — supported it: Representatives Fred Upton of Michigan, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Chris Jacobs of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

In the Senate, negotiators were still grasping for a bipartisan deal that could break the stalemate. On Wednesday, a group of Republicans and Democrats at work on a narrow set of gun measures came together for their first in-person meeting.

The group, led by Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, and Mr. Cornyn, is weighing proposals to expand mental health resources, funding for school safety and grant money to incentivize states to pass so-called red-flag laws that allow guns to be taken away from dangerous people. They are also discussing allowing juvenile records to be included in background checks for prospective gun buyers under the age of 21.

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday voted nearly along party lines to bar the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under the age of 21 and ban the sale of large-capacity magazines, acting as traumatized parents of victims and survivors of mass shootings made wrenching appeals for Congress to act on gun violence.

The vote on a sprawling gun package came two weeks and a day after a gunman massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and several hours after the parents of one of the children killed there and an 11-year-old who survived addressed a House committee to drive home the stakes of the issue.

But it only underscored the intractable politics of gun control in Congress, where all but five Republicans voted against Democrats’ wide-ranging legislation, and talks on a compromise remained unresolved.

Though the bill passed 223 to 204, it stands no chance in the evenly divided Senate, where solid Republican opposition means it cannot draw the 60 votes needed to break through a filibuster and move forward.

Bipartisan negotiations in the Senate continued on Wednesday among a small group of Republicans and Democrats on more modest measures that might actually have a chance of drawing sufficient backing. But one crucial player, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, warned that there were “sticking points everywhere.”

The fragile talks in the Senate and the divided result in the House were stark reminders of the political obstacles that have thwarted past efforts at gun control on Capitol Hill. They were also a jarring contrast with the raw and urgent entreaties from people traumatized by gun violence that unfolded in a committee room nearby.

“We seek a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines,” Kimberly Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter, Lexi, was killed in Uvalde last month, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee during a hearing on gun violence. Her voice shaking as she recounted the last time she saw her daughter and the panicked moments before she learned that Lexi was dead, Ms. Rubio used her own fresh pain to call for action.

“We understand for some reason, to some people — to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns — that guns are more important than children,” she said. “So at this moment, we ask for progress.”

Ms. Rubio, who spoke remotely with her husband sitting silently weeping by her side, was joined at the hearing by Dr. Roy Guerrero, the sole pediatrician in the small town of Uvalde, who testified in tragically graphic detail about what the AR-15 used in the massacre had done to the bodies of fourth graders. Appearing in person on Capitol Hill, he railed against lawmakers who have failed to act in the face of a rising tide of gun violence in America.

“We’re bleeding out,” he told the committee, “and you are not there.”

Dr. Guerrero recalled seeing two children in the emergency room “whose bodies had been so pulverized by the bullets fired at them over and over again, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities were the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them.”

Miah Cerrillo, a fourth grader who survived the carnage by covering herself in a classmate’s blood and pretending to be dead, shared her ordeal in a prerecorded video, scrapping plans to appear in person.

“He shot my friend that was next to me,” she said of the gunman, speaking quietly and with little evident emotion. “And I thought he would come back to the room.”

Miah’s father, who appeared at the hearing in person on his daughter’s behalf, exited the hearing room in tears.

The witnesses and Democratic lawmakers who invited them to testify hoped that sharing first-person stories from people still processing the trauma of gun violence would underscore to the public and to lawmakers on the other side of the aisle all that is at stake, while increasing pressure on Republicans who oppose gun control measures to do something.

“No civilian needs an assault rifle, and the Second Amendment does not protect the right to own a weapon of war,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the committee. “It’s time that we ban assault rifles from our streets and homes.”

Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman was injured during a racist gun massacre in Buffalo 10 days before the Uvalde tragedy, said lawmakers who continued to do nothing in the face of mass shootings should be voted out.

“Let me paint a picture for you: My son Zaire has a hole in the right side of his neck, two on his back and another on his left leg, caused by an exploding bullet from an AR-15,” she said. “I want you to picture that exact scenario for one of your children. This should not be your story or mine.”

But the hearing quickly devolved into a partisan back-and-forth, with Democrats calling for gun control measures and Republicans railing against them. Even as it was underway, Republican leaders were rallying votes against Democrats’ gun package, circulating guidance that noted that the National Rifle Association would be considering members’ votes in its future candidate ratings and endorsements.

“The majority aims to make it harder for all law-abiding Americans to protect themselves while failing to address the causes behind these mass shootings,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican whip, said in an alert that went out to all members of the Republican Conference. He dismissed the bill as “reactionary,” and argued that constitutional rights should not be dependent on age.

And inside the hearing room, as lawmakers turned to a panel of experts, the visceral emotion of the witnesses personally affected by gun violence quickly gave way to the familiar rhythm of political point and counterpoint, with little evidence that the testimony had changed the view of even a single Republican.

“Evil deeds do not transcend constitutional rights,” said Representative Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, arguing that gun-free school zone signs were part of the problem and that the solution was hardening schools.

“Senseless mass shootings are committed by unstable, disturbed loners with mental disease,” said Representative Pat Fallon, Republican of Texas. “More firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens make us all safer.” He also called for increased security on school campuses.

The hearing and the votes were scheduled after two mass shootings in the span of 10 days pushed the issue of gun violence to the forefront in Washington, where years’ worth of efforts to enact gun restrictions in the wake of such shootings have failed amid Republican opposition.

Less than two weeks before the elementary school shooting in Texas, a gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 Black people in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history. Both shootings were carried out by 18-year-old gunmen using legally purchased AR-15-style weapons.

Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said Republican opponents of measures to restrict such weapons were advancing a “completely false vision of the Second Amendment.”

“Take responsibility for your irresponsible position,” he thundered at Republicans from across the House floor.

Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, drew on Dr. Guerrero’s testimony, asking his colleagues to “imagine for a second that a shooter with an AR-15 goes into your child’s school” and “leaves a hole the size of a basketball in their chest, or leaves their head decapitated off their body.”

“Ask yourself what you would ask of the people who represent you,” Mr. Castro said. “Would their thoughts and prayers be good enough for you if that happened to your child? Would them being worried about their primary election be OK with you?”

Republicans said they, too, wanted to safeguard children, but restricting guns would not do so.

“The speaker started by saying this bill is about protecting our kids,” said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “That is important — it sure is. But this bill doesn’t do it. What this bill does is take away Second Amendment rights, God-given rights, protected by our Constitution, from law-abiding American citizens.”

Two Democrats, Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon, joined Republicans in opposing the bill. Five Republicans supported it: Representatives Fred Upton of Michigan, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Chris Jacobs of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

In the Senate, negotiators were still grasping for a bipartisan deal that could break the stalemate. On Wednesday, a group of Republicans and Democrats at work on a narrow set of gun measures came together for their first in-person meeting.

The group, led by Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, and Mr. Cornyn, is weighing proposals to expand mental health resources, funding for school safety and grant money to incentivize states to pass so-called red-flag laws that allow guns to be taken away from dangerous people. They are also discussing allowing juvenile records to be included in background checks for prospective gun buyers under the age of 21.

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

A man armed with a pistol, a knife and other weapons was arrested near the Maryland home of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh early Wednesday after he said he traveled from California to kill the Supreme Court justice, federal officials said.

Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., was charged with attempted murder after two U.S. deputy marshals saw him step out of a taxicab in front of the justice’s house in Chevy Chase, Md., early Wednesday morning, federal prosecutors said. Mr. Roske was dressed in black and carrying a suitcase and a backpack, according to a federal affidavit.

Inside the suitcase and backpack, the authorities later discovered a “black tactical chest rig and tactical knife,” a pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, a screwdriver, a nail punch, a crowbar, a pistol light and duct tape, in addition to other items, according to the affidavit.

His plan was to break into the house, kill the justice and then kill himself, according to the affidavit.

Mr. Roske told the police that he was upset about the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and about a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion suggesting that the justices were poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that guarantees the right to an abortion. There have been protests outside Justice Kavanaugh’s home and the homes of the other justices since the leaked draft was published last month.

In addition to the abortion ruling, the justices could strike down a century-old New York State law that places strict limits on the carrying of handguns. Both decisions are expected to be issued this month.

“Roske indicated that he believed the justice that he intended to kill would side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws,” the affidavit said.

When Mr. Roske arrived and saw the two deputy marshals, who were standing next to their parked car, he started walking down the street, according to the affidavit.

Soon after, the Montgomery County Emergency Communications Center received a call from Mr. Roske, who said he was having suicidal thoughts and had a firearm in his suitcase, according to the affidavit.

He said he had traveled from California to Maryland “to kill a specific United States Supreme Court Justice,” the affidavit said.

Officers from the Montgomery County Police Department arrived and found Mr. Roske still on the phone with the communications center.

Mr. Roske was taken into custody without incident, said Shiera Goff, a spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Police Department. If he is convicted, he could face up to 20 years in federal prison. He was scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Maryland on Wednesday afternoon. It was unclear whether he had a lawyer.

Mr. Roske told the police that he had begun thinking “about how to give his life a purpose” and decided to kill a Supreme Court justice after finding the justice’s address online, the affidavit stated.

The affidavit did not identify which justice Mr. Roske had threatened to kill, but Patricia McCabe, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, confirmed that the arrest took place near Justice Kavanaugh’s house around 1:50 a.m. Wednesday.

The arrest was reported earlier by The Washington Post. In a statement, the F.B.I. said that it was aware of the arrest, and that it was working with law enforcement agencies on an investigation.

As news of the arrest circulated on Wednesday morning, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland said in a statement that he had asked Attorney General Merrick B. Garland last month to increase security outside the justices’ homes.

“I call on leaders in both parties in Washington to strongly condemn these actions in no uncertain terms,” Governor Hogan, a Republican, said. “It is vital to our constitutional system that the justices be able to carry out their duties without fear of violence against them and their families.”

At a news conference on Wednesday to discuss the school shooting in Uvalde, Mr. Garland said that the threat against Justice Kavanaugh was “behavior that we will not tolerate.” He added that last month he “accelerated the protection of all the justices’ residences 24/7,” and that he had met with the Supreme Court marshal, the F.B.I., the U.S. Marshals and his own prosecutors to “ensure every degree of protection available is possible.”

“Threats of violence, and actual violence, against the justices, of course, strike at the heart of our democracy,” Mr. Garland said. “We will do everything we can to prevent them, and to hold people who do them accountable.”

In a bulletin issued on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security said that after the publication of the leaked draft opinion in the abortion case, advocates for and against abortion rights have “encouraged violence” on public forums, “including against government, religious, and reproductive healthcare personnel and facilities, as well as those with opposing ideologies.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, called on the House to pass a Supreme Court security bill that would provide police protection to the immediate families of the nine justices. The Senate passed the bill unanimously in May.

“No more fiddling around with this,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “Pass it before the sun sets today.”

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said in a statement that President Biden “needs to personally and forcefully condemn violence and threats against Supreme Court Justices.”

“Thank God that law enforcement stopped this lunatic,” he said.

The sounds of war echo throughout Bakhmut, a largely deserted city in eastern Ukraine, just 10 miles from the front. Even with a trained ear, it is hard to tell what artillery fire is outgoing or incoming.

The terror can be all the more acute for the vulnerable and those unable to care for themselves, among them Zinaida Riabtseva, 77, who is blind and cannot leave her fifth-floor apartment on her own.

As Russian forces bear down with intensifying ferocity in an effort to control the Donbas region, which borders Russia, aid workers are scrambling to evacuate the old, the infirm and the disabled. Those who leave their homes do not know if they will ever be able to return, joining the more than 12 million Ukrainians who have been displaced by Russia’s invasion.

Last week, British and Ukrainian volunteers with the aid group Vostok-SOS, were called in to evacuate Ms. Riabtseva, along with her husband, Yuriy Riabtsev. After carefully placing her on a stretcher, volunteers carried her down five flights of stairs, while her husband followed behind with a few pieces of luggage.

Since the invasion began in February, Vostok-SOS has evacuated 15,000 people from eastern Ukraine. On one such evacuation mission, Vostok staff recently drove through back lanes to reach the home of their latest evacuee, Mykhaylo Silichkin. When they arrived in front of his tidy house, he hopped out through the front gate on his crutches, a cigarette perched in his mouth. One volunteer picked up his prosthetic leg. Others carried his luggage. Mr. Silichkin locked the gate as he left, not knowing if he would ever return.

The conflict in Ukraine has also upended the lives of many young people caught in the line of fire. Maria Alefirenko, 31, was paralyzed in a mortar attack during the fighting against Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine eight years ago. On a recent day in Mykolaivka, an aid worker lifted her into a car. Her father, who had cared for her for years, stayed behind. He cried as she left.

Ukrainian officials say that about 80 percent of the civilian population of the Donetsk region, one of the two provinces that make up the Donbas, have already fled. Cities like Bakhmut have become ghost towns, their shops boarded up, their streets deserted but for military vehicles and ambulances zipping through. Some residents who remained behind cook food on campfires in their yards because there is no gas in the city.

But vulnerable people remain, and evacuations continue daily even in frontline towns that face regular shelling.

As towns and cities in eastern Ukraine empty out in the face of the Russian offensive, volunteers drive around in minivans, working off lists of addresses of older or disabled people who have remained behind, well past the time when it was safe to flee.

In Sloviansk, residents who have not left are now at risk from daily artillery and cruise missile strikes, which blow out windows in apartment buildings.

Maksym Sutkovy, a deputy mayor of Bakhmut, said Russian forces were advancing on an arc to the south and east. About 65,000 people had already fled, he said, from a prewar population of about 100,000, and heavy fighting persisted every day.

“We cannot climb into the heads of people,” said Mr. Sutkovy, adding that some residents had stayed behind because they were too poor to move or desensitized to danger after weeks of being bombarded. “People get used to living with explosions,” he said. “What in peaceful times is inconceivable becomes ordinary, everyday.”

So the effort to evacuate the old and vulnerable goes on, even amid the thud of explosions. The departures and displacement provoke strong emotions, as people who have lived their whole lives in one place are finally, sometimes grudgingly, persuaded to leave.

“Now I’m going to a safe place to get better,” said Anatoliy Shevchenko, 73, who was injured in early May.

Valentyna Evtushenko cried as she waved goodbye to her brother Oleksandr Evtushenko, 68, who was being evacuated from a hospital in Sloviansk and transferred to one in Chernihiv, where his nephew lives, in northern Ukraine. Oleksandr, his sister said, “has only me,” adding that they live together in a private house on the outskirts of Sloviansk.

Amid painful goodbyes, there are small gestures of comfort.

In Bakhmut, Pavlo Boreyko leaned in close to his 90-year-old father, Petro Boreyko, gently explaining that it was time to go. His father sat on a sofa in front of a woven red carpet hanging on the wall before volunteers carefully slipped a stretcher under him. Incapacitated and no longer able to speak, The elder Mr. Boreyko was carried down the stairs of his apartment building. Once he was inside the minivan waiting below, his son made sure his father was comfortable. Then one of the volunteers placed his cat, in a travel box, beside him.

It was the start of a long journey, including several hours by minivan to the city of Pokrovsk, where Mr. Boreyko was then transferred to an evacuation train that took him to the relative safety of western Ukraine. It was also a journey fraught with danger. Russian missiles have been continuously targeting critical infrastructure across Ukraine and just four days before his evacuation, the depot at the train station in Pokrovsk was hit by a missile strike.

“It is important to show calmness to people even when the shelling starts, otherwise it will be hard to deal with their panic,” said Vladyslav Arseniy, a former construction worker who volunteered to evacuate residents from frontline towns.

Mr. Arseniy said he has been driving on daily evacuation missions and has helped about 700 people leave their homes and find refuge elsewhere.

Mr. Arseniy said he had met many people who refused to leave. Every evening, his group studies a list of people willing to evacuate, dividing them up among evacuation teams. The teams then drive from house to house in the frontline towns and villages, picking up people and bringing them to train stations, where they then head west.

In Bakhmut, there is a particular urgency to work fast as the area is under attack.

Medical evacuation trains are not scheduled every day. On days when there are none, volunteers transport people to a hospital in Sloviansk and evacuate them the next day.

While helping her bedridden mother into an evacuation minivan, Oksana Zakharenko appeared distressed. She didn’t want to leave, having become accustomed to the continuous explosions. But aid workers with Mr. Arseniy’s group persuaded her the time had come to go.

“Why did we have to get used to it?” she asked.

Andrew Kramer and Ivor Prickett contributed reporting.

For the most part on Tuesday, primary voters in seven states from New Jersey to California showed the limits of the ideological edges of both parties.

A liberal district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled in the most progressive of cities, San Francisco, but conservative candidates carrying the banner of former President Donald J. Trump did not fare well, either.

For all the talk of sweeping away the old order, Tuesday’s primaries largely saw the establishment striking back. Here are some takeaways.

California called for order.

Wracked by pandemic, littered with tent camps, frightened by smash-and-grab robberies and anti-Asian-American hate crimes, voters in two of the most progressive cities sent a message on Tuesday: Restore stability.

In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican who rose to prominence on the city’s police commission, blanketed the city with ads promising to crack down on crime if elected mayor.

His chief opponent, Karen Bass, a veteran Democratic congresswoman, argued that public safety and criminal justice reform were not mutually exclusive, and disappointed some liberal supporters by calling to put more police officers on the street. The two are headed for a November mayoral runoff.

And in San Francisco, voters who were once moved by Chesa Boudin’s plans as district attorney to reduce the number of people sent to prison ran out of patience with seemingly unchecked property crime, violent attacks on elderly residents and open drug use during the pandemic. They recalled him.

Statewide, the Democratic attorney general, Rob Bonta, advanced easily to the general election runoff. Mr. Bonta is a progressive, but was careful to stress that criminal justice reform and public safety were both priorities.

The choices seemed to signal a shift to the center that was likely to reverberate through Democratic politics across the nation. But longtime California political observers said the message was less about ideology than about effective action.

“This is about competence,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, who served in local government in Los Angeles for nearly four decades and is now the director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“People want solutions,” he said. “They don’t give a damn about left or right. It’s the common-sense problem-solving they seem to be missing. Government is supposed to take care of the basics, and the public believes the government hasn’t been doing that.”

For House Republicans, the Jan. 6 commission vote still matters.

In May 2021, 35 House Republicans voted for an independent, bipartisan commission to look at the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

At first blush, the vote should not have mattered much: The legislation creating the commission was negotiated by the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, John Katko of New York, with the blessing of the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy of California. Besides, the commission was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate and went nowhere.

But Tuesday’s primaries showed that the vote still mattered. In Mississippi, Representative Michael Guest, one of the 35, was forced into a June 28 runoff with Michael Cassidy, who ran as the “pro-Trump” Republican and castigated the incumbent for voting for the commission. In South Dakota, Representative Dusty Johnson, another one of the 35, faced similar attacks but still mustered 60 percent of the vote.

In California, Representative David Valadao, who also voted for the commission, struggled to keep pace with his Democratic challenger, State Assemblyman Rudy Salas, as a Republican rival, Chris Mathys, took votes from his supporters on the right.

In all, now, 10 of the 35 will not be back in the House next year, either because they resigned, retired or were defeated in primaries. And more are likely to fall in the coming weeks.

In New Jersey, it is all about name recognition.

In New Jersey on Tuesday, two familiar names won their party nominations to run for the House in November: for the Republicans, Thomas Kean Jr., the son and namesake of a popular former governor; for the Democrats, Robert Menendez, son and namesake of the sitting senator.

Mr. Menendez goes into the general election the heavy favorite to win New Jersey’s heavily Democratic Eighth Congressional District and take the seat of Albio Sires, who is retiring.

The younger Mr. Kean has a good shot, too. He narrowly lost in 2020 to the incumbent Democrat, Representative Tom Malinowski, but new district lines tilted the seat toward the Republicans, and Mr. Malinowski has faced criticism for his failure to disclose stock trades in compliance with a recently enacted ethics law.

MAGA only gets you so far.

Candidates from the Trump flank of the Republican Party could have done some real damage to the prospects of a so-called red wave in November, but with the votes still being counted, far-right candidates in swing districts did not fare so well.

National Republicans rushed in to shore up support for a freshman representative, Young Kim, whose narrowly divided Southern California district would have been very difficult to defend, had her right-wing challenger, Greg Raths, secured the G.O.P.’s spot on the ballot. It looked as though that would not happen.

In Iowa’s Third Congressional District, establishment Republicans got the candidate they wanted to take on Representative Cindy Axne in State Senator Zach Nunn, who easily beat out Nicole Hasso, part of a new breed of conservative Black Republicans who have made social issues like opposing “critical race theory” central to their political identity.

And if Mr. Valadao hangs on to make the November ballot for California’s 22nd Congressional District, he will have vanquished a candidate on his right who made Mr. Valadao’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump central to his campaign.

Ethics matter.

Two primary candidates entered Republican primaries on Tuesday with ethical clouds hanging over their heads: Representative Steven Palazzo in Mississippi and Ryan Zinke in Montana.

In 2021, the Office of Congressional Ethics released a report that said Mr. Palazzo had used campaign funds to pay himself and his wife at the time nearly $200,000. He reportedly used the cash to make improvements on a riverside property that he was hoping to sell. Voters in Mississippi’s Fourth District gave him only about 32 percent of the vote, forcing him into a runoff on June 28.

Mr. Zinke left what was then Montana’s only House seat in 2017 to become Mr. Trump’s first interior secretary. He departed that post in 2019 with a number of ethics investigations examining possible conflicts of interest and questionable expenditures of taxpayer funds. Still, when Mr. Zinke declared to run for Montana’s new First District, he was widely expected to waltz back to the House.

Instead, he was in an extremely tight race with Dr. Al Olszewski, an orthopedic surgeon and former state senator who had come in a distant third when he tried to run for his party nomination for governor in 2020, and fourth when he vied for the Republican nomination to run for the Senate in 2018.

If at first you don’t succeed …

Dr. Olszewski may not win, but his improved performance could be an inspiration to other past losers. The same goes for Michael Franken, a retired admiral who on Tuesday won the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa in November.

Mr. Franken has the résumé for politics: He is an Iowa native and led a remarkable career in the Navy. But losing often begets more losing, and in 2020, he came in a distant second to Theresa Greenfield for the Democratic nod to take on Senator Joni Ernst.

Ms. Greenfield was defeated that November, and for all his tales of triumph over past adversity, Mr. Franken is likely to face the same fate this fall. Mr. Grassley will be 89 by then, but Iowans are used to pulling the lever for the senator, who has held his seat since 1981. Despite Mr. Grassley’s age, the seat is considered safely Republican.

WOLLONGONG, Australia — I recently moved back here to my home country partly because I believe Australians can show the world how much money households can save through simple climate solutions like rooftop solar

How is it that Australia, a country that historically has been a coal-burning climate pariah, is leading the world on solar? The four-bedroom house we recently bought provides a hint: It came with two rooftop solar systems of 11 kilowatts of combined capacity and a battery with 16 kilowatt-hours of storage. This system should produce more than enough to power my family’s home, one electric car and both of our electric bikes with some left over to send back to the grid.

Solar is now so prevalent in Australia that over a quarter of households here have rooftop panels, compared with roughly 2.5 percent of American households.

Australia pays its solar installers salaries comparable to those in the United States, and it buys most of its solar modules from China at 25 cents per watt, just a little less than what American buyers pay. Our houses are mostly detached single-family, like America, too. But unlike in the United States, it’s easy to get permits and install rooftop solar in Australia.

Australia’s rooftop solar success is a function party of luck, partly of design. In the early 1990s, regulators considered rooftop solar a hobby, and no one stood in the way of efforts to make the rules favorable to small-scale solar. Looking for a good headline to varnish over Australia’s refusal to agree to the same greenhouse emissions reductions as the rest of the world in the 1997 Kyoto climate agreement, the federal government embraced renewable energy policies that set the stage for rooftop solar. Households were given rebates for the upfront costs, and were paid to send excess electricity back to the grid. In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard doubled the rebate, a move that is credited with kick-starting a solar installation boom.

Why has America been significantly slower to adopt this solution to high energy costs? The failures are mostly regulatory: local building codes and zoning laws, state rules that govern the grid connection and liability issues.

Permitting can take as little as a day in Australia and is done over the web; in the United States permitting and connecting to the grid can take as long as six months. Many customers just give up. America also generally requires a metal conduit around the wiring; in Australia, the connections can be less expensive soft cables, similar to extension cords.

The cost of rooftop solar in the United States depends on many things, including the latitude, tree cover and federal and state incentives. Installation costs can also vary quite a bit, depending on what laborers charge and the local permitting and inspection policies.

My friend Andrew Birch, co-founder of the solar and solar software companies OpenSolar in Sydney and Sungevity in the United States, wrote an excellent critique of American rooftop solar and its high price in 2018. Mr. Birch then created a consortium that worked with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to make a free tool called SolarAPP+, or Solar Automated Permitting Process. That user-friendly process could now be adopted by any willing city. Solar could be faster to install tomorrow.

The policy prescriptions for the United States are straightforward: simplify regulations and promote fair access to the grid, allowing every generator, big or small, to connect as equals and supply electricity and battery storage without burdensome connection rules.

According to my calculations, more than half of the energy needed to run America’s cars and households could be generated on the roofs of its households. Some states are moving in the right direction: In April, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida protected solar incentives by blocking legislation that would have slashed “net metering,” which allows solar customers to sell excess power to utilities. California, however, is considering taxing residential solar customers connected to the grid, the opposite of the kind of policy that’s needed.

On Monday, the Biden administration took a significant step toward increasing solar capacity by issuing an executive order that will use the Defense Production Act to produce more clean energy appliances and solar cells. He also announced a two-year suspension of tariffs for solar panels from four countries to support faster adoption of solar energy. With support for training, this means hundreds of thousands of new jobs in solar installation.

But the administration could do even more: Through an executive order, it could expand its efforts to encourage cities to use SolarAPP+ as the permitting process, further inducing a surge in solar installations.

If a regulatory world existed where you could run an American electric pickup truck on Australian rooftop solar, it would cost 2 cents per mile, rather than the current 20 cents per mile using gasoline or diesel. When solar is used to run a hot water heater with a heat pump, my calculations show, it can cut the cost of a shower by half compared to a gas heater. Even boiling water for a cup of coffee comes in at a quarter the price when compared to using natural gas.

Rooftop solar alone can’t solve climate change. We will still need wind, industrial solar farms, hydroelectricity and probably nuclear power. But rooftop solar could make the entire energy system cheaper in America forever. The more solar we put on roofs, the fewer fields and wild spaces we need to cover with large-scale installations. Australia has shown the world the way to cheap, renewable energy, and the United States needs to head toward that same all-electrified future.

Saul Griffith is the author of “Electrify,” and the founder and chief scientist of Rewiring America, Rewiring Australia and Otherlab.

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