Category: News

A 10-month-old girl in Brooklyn died from a combination of fentanyl and heroin, and her 44-year-old father, Daniel Auster — son of the famous novelist Paul Auster — was charged in her death, the police said.

The girl, Ruby Auster, was found unconscious on Nov. 1 at a home on Bergen Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and was pronounced dead at a hospital, the police said. The medical examiner’s office later determined that she died from “acute intoxication” of the drugs, the police said.

Mr. Auster was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide after conferral with the district attorney’s office, the police said. Information about Mr. Auster’s lawyer was not immediately available.

Outside the Bergen Street rowhouse on Saturday, two neighbors said that Mr. Auster and his partner were friendly as they strolled with their baby. But one day in the fall, a jumble of baby items — clothes, books and toys — appeared on the sidewalk outside, and neighbors learned that the baby had died.

The police referred questions about how the baby was exposed to the drugs to the medical examiner’s office, which did not immediately return a call for comment.

In 1996, Daniel Auster played a minor role in a notorious nightlife murder case, in which the club promoter Michael Alig and an accomplice killed and dismembered a drug dealer, Andrew Melendez, also known as Angel, and threw his body in the Hudson River.

Mr. Auster pleaded guilty in 1998 to possessing $3,000 that had been stolen from Mr. Melendez and was sentenced to probation. He was not implicated in the killing.

A police spokesman confirmed that the Daniel Auster charged in the death of Ruby Auster had been arrested in 1998 on charges of possessing stolen property and that the charges were connected to a murder charge against Mr. Alig.

In 2003, Daniel Auster’s stepmother, Siri Hustvedt, published a novel, “What I Loved,” in which one character is a drug addict and is eventually arrested in connection with the murder of a drug dealer. In Paul Auster’s 2003 novel “Oracle Night,” the narrator is a writer whose son is a drug addict.

Throughout the Trump era it was a frequent theme of liberal commentary that their political party represented a clear American majority, thwarted by our antidemocratic institutions and condemned to live under the rule of the conservative minority.

In the political context of 2016-20, this belief was overstated. Yes, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with a minority of the popular vote. But more Americans voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democratic congressional candidates, and more Americans voted for right-of-center candidates for president — including the Libertarian vote — than voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. In strictly majoritarian terms, liberalism deserved to lose in 2016, even if Trump did not necessarily deserve to win.

And Republican structural advantages, while real, did not then prevent Democrats from reclaiming the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and Senate in 2021. These victories extended the pattern of 21st century American politics, which has featured significant swings every few cycles, not the entrenchment of either party’s power.

The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalism’s depictions of its Trump-era plight. According to calculations by liberalism’s Cassandra, David Shor, the convergence of an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats with their pre-existing Electoral College and Senate disadvantages could easily produce a scenario where the party wins 50 percent of the congressional popular vote, 51 percent of the presidential vote — and ends up losing the White House and staring down a nearly filibuster-proof Republican advantage in the Senate.

That’s a scenario for liberal horror, but it’s not one that conservatives should welcome either. In recent years, as their advantages in both institutions have increased, conservatives have defended institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College with variations of the argument that the United States is a democratic republic, not a pure democracy.

These arguments carry less weight, however, the more consistently undemocratic the system’s overall results become. (They would fall apart completely in the scenario sought by Donald Trump and some of his allies after 2020, where state legislatures simply substitute their preferences for the voters in their states.)

The Electoral College’s legitimacy can stand up if an occasional 49-47 percent popular vote result goes the other way; likewise the Senate’s legitimacy if it tilts a bit toward one party but changes hands consistently.

But a scenario where one party has sustained governing power while lacking majoritarian support is a recipe for delegitimization and reasonable disillusionment, which no clever conservative column about the constitutional significance of state sovereignty would adequately address.

From the Republican Party’s perspective, the best way to avoid this future — where the nature of conservative victories undercuts the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance — is to stop being content with the advantages granted by the system and try harder to win majorities outright.

You can’t expect a political party to simply cede its advantages: There will never be a bipartisan constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, on any timeline you care to imagine. But you can expect a political party to show a little more electoral ambition than the G.O.P. has done of late — to seek to win more elections the way that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won them, rather than being content to keep it close and put their hopes in lucky breaks.

Especially in the current climate, which looks dire for the Democrats, the Republicans have an opportunity to make the Electoral College complaint moot, for a time at least, by simply taking plausible positions, nominating plausible candidates and winning majorities outright.

That means rejecting the politics of voter-fraud paranoia — as, hopefully, Republican primary voters will do by choosing Brian Kemp over David Perdue in the Georgia gubernatorial primary.

It means rejecting the attempts to return to the libertarian “makers versus takers” politics of Tea Party era, currently manifested in Florida Senator Rick Scott’s recent manifesto suggesting tax increases for the working class — basically the right-wing equivalent of “defund the police” in terms of its political toxicity.

And it means — and I fear this is beyond the G.O.P.’s capacities — nominating someone other than Donald Trump in 2024.

A Republican Party that managed to win popular majorities might still see its Senate or Electoral College majorities magnified by its structural advantages. But such magnification is a normal feature of many democratic systems, not just our own. It’s very different from losing the popular vote consistently and yet being handed power anyway.

As for what the Democrats should do about their disadvantages — well, that’s a longer discussion, but two quick points for now.

First, to the extent the party wants to focus on structural answers to its structural challenges, it needs clarity about what kind of electoral reforms would actually accomplish something. That’s been lacking in the Biden era, where liberal reformers wasted considerable time and energy on voting bills that didn’t pass and also weren’t likely to help the party much had they been actually pushed through.

A different reform idea, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, wouldn’t have happened in this period either, but it’s much more responsive to the actual challenges confronting Democrats in the Senate. So if you’re a liberal activist or a legislator planning for the next brief window when your party holds power, pushing for an expanded Senate seems like a more reasonable long ball to try to train your team to throw.

Second, to the extent that there’s a Democratic path back to greater parity in the Senate and Electoral College without structural reform, it probably requires the development of an explicit faction within the party dedicated to winning back two kinds of voters — culturally conservative Latinos and working-class whites — who were part of Barack Obama’s coalition but have drifted rightward since.

That faction would have two missions: To hew to a poll-tested agenda on economic policy (not just the business-friendly agenda supported by many centrist Democrats) and to constantly find ways to distinguish itself from organized progressivism — the foundations, the activists, the academics — on cultural and social issues. And crucially, not in the tactical style favored by analysts like Shor, but in the language of principle: Rightward-drifting voters would need to know that this faction actually believes in its own moderation, its own attacks on progressive shibboleths, and that its members will remain a thorn in progressivism’s side even once they reach Washington.

Right now the Democrats have scattered politicians, from West Virginia to New York City, who somewhat fit this mold. But they don’t have an agenda for them to coalesce around, a group of donors ready to fund them, a set of intellectuals ready to embrace them as their own.

Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and necessity may impose itself upon the Democratic Party soon enough.

JENIN, West Bank — Ramadan nights in this Palestinian city are normally spent staying up late watching drama and comedy series during what is peak TV season, praying or drinking coffee and smoking hookah pipes at all-night cafes.

But this year in Jenin, amid a widespread Israeli military operation throughout the occupied West Bank, residents are staying up late waiting for the next military raid in their city.

“We’re exhausted,” said Israa Awartani, 32, who works at a theater. “We start to think: ‘When will it be my turn? When will it be my son or another family member?”

For the past week, Israeli forces have carried out a widespread campaign of raids into towns and cities across the West Bank, in a response to a wave of recent Palestinian attacks inside Israel that have killed 14 people. The Israeli authorities have imposed temporary economic sanctions and arrested dozens of people.

Israel says that the stepped-up military activities are a counterterrorism effort to prevent further attacks, and that it has focused them on the hometowns and villages of the recent attackers. However, Palestinian residents and critics say the operation amounts to collective punishment and is counterproductive, as it will only further stoke the cycle of hatred and bloodshed.

At least 14 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of Ramadan on April 2, including 16-year-old Mohammad Zakarneh, who was shot and killed on Sunday during one of the Israeli raids in Jenin, his mother said. He was leaving work at a produce shop and was heading home to break his Ramadan fast. The Israeli military would not comment on his death.

Also killed was Ghada Sabteen, 47, a widow and mother of six who was shot in the leg as she approached soldiers at a checkpoint near Bethlehem. Palestinian authorities have called for an investigation into her killing, but the Israeli military has not commented on whether it would conduct one.

On Wednesday, Mohammad Assaf, a 34-year-old lawyer, was shot in the chest and killed during a raid in the city of Nablus, reportedly shortly after dropping his children off at school.

Israel’s military operation comes in the wake of the worst wave of violence in Israel since 2016. The latest attack, on April 7, was carried out by a 28-year-old Palestinian gunman from Jenin who opened fire outside a busy bar in Tel Aviv, killing two people and wounding 13 others. He was later shot and killed by Israeli police forces. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, condemned the attack.

This week, Palestinian authorities also condemned Israel’s raids in the West Bank and killing of civilians, calling it collective punishment, and they urged the international community to intervene. The Palestinian foreign ministry said in a statement that it held Israel fully responsible for the repercussions of its actions.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and controls over 60 percent of its territory. It maintains a two-tier legal system there — one for the five million stateless Palestinians and one for Israeli settlers — and restricts Palestinian movement and other rights, a system that a growing number of human rights groups and advocates have called apartheid.

The Israeli government, in response to a recent such accusation from a United Nations investigator, said that it was unfair to blame Israel for the system given the threats posed by armed Palestinian groups in the occupied territories.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Israel had gone on the offensive.

“The State of Israel will do everything necessary to overcome this terrorism. We will settle accounts with everyone who was linked, either directly or indirectly, to the attacks,” he said, adding, “We will reach anywhere necessary, at any time, in order to root out these terrorist operations.”

He said there were “no restrictions” on the country’s security forces.

For the last week, Israeli forces have raided Jenin nearly every day or night, local officials and residents said. The city, like most Palestinian urban centers in the West Bank, is governed by the Palestinian Authority, but Israeli forces still regularly carry out night raids and arrests in these areas. In January during one such raid in the village of Jiljilya, a 78-year-old Palestinian American man died while in custody.

Rather than containing the latest wave of attacks, Israel’s actions will have the opposite effect, said a Western diplomat in Ramallah. The aggressive Israeli approach risks creating a new cycle of frustration, despair and victims, said the diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive political matters.

Before leaving for work each morning, Ms. Awartani checks the latest news on local social media.

“I fear I could be going to work and suddenly come upon Israeli soldiers in the street and they could shoot me,” said the mother of three girls, twin 7-year-olds and a 3-year-old. “I could die, I could become paralyzed. Then who is going to take care of my daughters?”

Ms. Awartani works in accounting at the well-known Freedom Theater, the epicenter of cultural resistance in Jenin. The theater canceled its month of programming throughout Ramadan out of respect for those killed during Israeli raids in the city and its refugee camp.

Mustafa Sheta, the theater’s manager, said he feared taking his four kids to school each morning, worried Israeli snipers might still be positioned on rooftops.

Ms. Awartani said her sister-in-law refused to go to sleep before her two university-age sons did, fearful that they would leave the house at night and be shot dead during a raid.

“We’re all afraid of losing our children,” Ms. Awartani said.

Jenin was also targeted by economic sanctions. On April 9, Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, closed border crossings between Jenin and Israel, preventing tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel from coming to Jenin to shop — a major pillar of the city’s economy.

Jenin’s merchants and businesspeople who have permits to enter Israel were no longer allowed to cross, and the transportation of all goods and products from Jenin was also banned. Permits that had been issued for 5,000 Jenin residents to visit relatives in Israel were also revoked.

Border crossings were reopened Saturday, but it was unclear if other restrictions would also be lifted.

“The objective is always to increase pressure but it never works. If it worked you wouldn’t see the same cycle of violence we see annually,” said Tahani Mustafa, a West Bank analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Israel recycles the same heavy-handed response to what it sees as Palestinian provocation.”

In the wake of last week’s attack in Tel Aviv, some Israelis said the violence had brought up memories of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, and its violent suppression by Israel, a period of unrest that lasted from 2000 to 2005 and that killed about 3,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.

For Palestinians, too, Israel’s response is evoking memories of the intifada, which has left scars still visible in Jenin. In the part of the city that originated as a refugee camp, bullet holes pockmark the walls of many buildings. Many homes were constructed after 2002, when Israel leveled hundreds of buildings in response to a string of suicide bombings.

Everywhere along the walls are posters of those killed by Israel — some of them members of Palestinian militant groups, some of them civilians. The faces of those killed in the last week of violence have yet to be added to the camp’s walls.

On a recent morning at intersections and roundabouts, schoolchildren walked past tires stacked like pillars and dumpsters used to block roads to slow Israeli incursions. Hours after Israeli forces pulled out, one dumpster was still smoldering as children walked home.

At a jewelry shop in Jenin’s main shopping district, lights glinted off rows of gold jewelry. But there were few buyers.

With Israel banning crossings into Jenin, business owners say they have lost more than half of their customers leading into the end of Ramadan, one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.

The jewelry shop’s owner, Abdullah Dawaseh, 60, said that just as Palestinians had survived the intifada, they would survive this.

Hours earlier, the Israeli military had raided a neighborhood less than half a mile from the commercial drag.

“When you punish an entire population, then the entire population is going to erupt,” he said, speaking from behind a counter full of diamond rings. “Just as they want to be safe when they go to the market, we, too, want to be safe when we go to the market.”

Reporting was contributed by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad in Haifa, Myra Noveck in Jerusalem and Gabby Sobelman in Rehovot, Israel.

CLEVELAND — Bill Boldin, a fan of Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team for most of his 52 years, conducted an informal poll on Friday while he waited to meet friends at the Cleveland Guardians’ first home game of the season.

Boldin counted the team names on the jerseys of fellow Cleveland fans as they wandered around downtown. He tallied 38 shirts that featured the word “Indians” for the team’s old nickname, before he saw even one with the team’s new name, Guardians. It was a heavily imbalanced ratio, and an unscientific data set, but not unexpected.

“And I hope it stays like that forever,” Boldin said.

Boldin’s views represent a large swath of Cleveland fans, many of whom vehemently opposed the team’s decision in 2020 to change its name after 107 years. The decision came after decades of protest by Native American groups and others, who argue the old name was racist.

Friday was the first home game for the rebranded Cleveland Guardians, a new name chosen, in part, to capture a historic, Cleveland-centric theme reflected by the Guardians of Traffic statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge near Progressive Field, where the team plays. The team had already played six games as the Guardians this season, but those were all on the road. Friday provided the first opportunity for home fans to gather en masse and express their feelings and loyalties.

Bob Hostutler, a computer store owner from Willoughby, Ohio, wore a crisp, white jersey with the old team name on it, and a hat depicting Chief Wahoo, the infamous old logo of a cartoonish, smiling Native American. That caricature, beloved by many but deemed grossly offensive by others, was retired from the team uniforms in 2019 as the franchise began a gradual process to distance itself from the old imagery and nickname.

“I love Chief Wahoo,” Hostutler declared.

In the days after the team announced it would abandon its century-old name, Hostutler vowed that he would never to pay to see the Guardians, so incensed was he by the decision. But when his brother offered him a ticket to Friday’s game, he decided to go. Then, at a pregame tailgate party Friday afternoon, he was handed a Guardians T-shirt as part of a promotional giveaway. He took the shirt, but planned to re-gift it.

“I’ll never wear it,” he said.

For decades, protests against the team name were as much a part of opening day in Cleveland as flyovers and ceremonial first pitches. Protesters gathered on streets adjacent to the stadium carrying signs asking the team to change the name; many times, they faced withering abuse from fans entering the stadium. But on Friday, for the first time in recent memory, there were no protests other than a man carrying an American flag advocating world peace, and another man a few blocks away promoting religious piety.

The new form of protest comes in the form of shirts and jackets emblazoned with the word “Indians,” and caps depicting Chief Wahoo. In some cases, it is the only team attire owned by the fans wearing it, and many of the jerseys bear the names of former players who never wore a Guardians shirt. Even for fans who support the new name, asking them to buy all new gear would require a significant outlay.

But in other cases, wearing the old clothing was the point.

“I don’t like it,” said Bill Marshall, 64, a heating and air conditioning engineer from Cleveland. He said he opposed the name change, a decision ultimately made by the Guardians’ chief executive, Paul Dolan. “They caved to the pressure,” Marshall said.

Marshall demonstrated his devotion, and his opinion, in vivid color, wearing a blue jacket and hat featuring the Indians name and logo.

Adjusting to a new name will take time for many loyal fans, but name changes are actually part of the fabric of the Cleveland franchise. In the early years of the 20th century, Cleveland’s team was known as the Blues, the Bronchos and the Naps before it finally settled on the Indians in 1915.

This year, the Guardians became the fourth M.L.B. team in the last 90 years to change names without moving cities, and only the second to adopt a completely different name. In 2008, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays became the Rays. The Houston Colt 45s changed their name to the Astros in 1965, and the Cincinnati Reds were called the Redlegs from 1954 to 1958. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who had many nicknames in their early years, were known as the Superbas for 12 years before they became the Dodgers in 1932.

But for Cleveland, the name change comes amid a volatile global struggle over labels and terminology that occasionally plays out in the world of sports. And it took place at a time where teams from Washington’s N.F.L. franchise to dozens of colleges and high schools have moved to drop nicknames that were criticized as insensitive, or racist.

“The whole cancel culture thing has gone too far,” Boldin said.

A government employee from nearby Solon, Ohio, Boldin is not as inflexible as some of his fellow fans. He applauded the Washington football team’s decision to drop its offensive name, and conceded that Chief Wahoo probably needed to go, too. While hats bearing that likeness were in abundance on Friday, Boldin did not wear one.

Many people associated with the team, including fans and longtime players, have sometimes inadvertently used the old name, not out of malice, but simply from habit. Carlos Baerga, the former All-Star second baseman and now a special assistant with the team, accidentally referred to the team by its old name in conversation.

“It’s hard for a lot of people after all those years,” Baerga said. “But it’s what the team wants and what the owner wants, so you go with it. We played for the city, anyway, not the name. That is the most important thing.”

Terry Francona, Cleveland’s manager for the last 10 years, has been instrumental in helping fans accept the new name. He was born in 1959, the first of six years that his father, Tito Francona, played for Cleveland, so his heritage is intertwined with the club. Francona applauded Dolan’s courage and said Guardians are just trying to be respectful.

“People aren’t real big on change sometimes,” he said. “But I think if you ask some people maybe of color, status quo isn’t always so good.”

And not all Cleveland fans cling to the team’s past so vehemently. Alex and Jean Ann Reno, a married couple from Upland, Ind., celebrated the new Guardians era on Friday by having one of Cleveland’s new logos, a crooked, cartoon-style C, tattooed onto their ankles.

“Times change,” Jean Ann said as the couple showcased their new body art.

She and her husband drove four hours to Cleveland on Thursday, and went straight to the team store, where they bought all new Guardians gear, which they wore on Friday. Alex said they received a “ton of flack” from other fans for wearing it.

He learned to love the Cleveland team from his father, who was originally from Toledo, Ohio, and loved the team. He took Alex to his first game at Municipal Stadium in 1985 when Alex was five months old, and the old team name ran deep in family lore.

“I didn’t love it when they changed it,” Alex said, “But it’s still my team.”

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Russian journalist Farida Rustamova used the Telegram chat app for one purpose: messaging friends.

But as the authorities shut down media outlets that strayed from the official line, including the publications she wrote for, she started posting her articles on Telegram. Her feed there — where she has written about the consolidation of Russia’s elites around President Vladimir V. Putin and the reaction among employees of state-run media to an on-air protest — has already garnered more than 22,000 subscribers.

“This is one of the few channels that are left where you can receive information,” she said in a call over Telegram.

As Russia has silenced independent news media and banned social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Telegram has become the largest remaining outlet for unrestricted information. Since the war started, it has been the most downloaded app in Russia, with about 4.4 million downloads, according to Sensor Tower, an analytics firm. (There have been 124 million downloads of Telegram in Russia since January 2014, according to Sensor Tower.)

“Telegram is the only place in Russia where people can exchange opinions and information freely, although the Kremlin has worked hard to infiltrate Telegram channels,” said Ilya Shepelin, who used to cover the media for the now-shuttered independent TV channel Rain and has established a blog critical of the war.

After the independent radio station Echo of Moscow was shut down last month, its deputy editor in chief, Tatiana Felgengauer, said, her Telegram audience doubled. And after the Russian authorities blocked access to the popular Russia news site Meduza in early March, its Telegram subscriptions doubled, reaching nearly 1.2 million.

“I get my news there,” said Dmitri Ivanov, who studies computer science at a university in Moscow. He said that he relied on Telegram to view “the same media outlets I trust and the ones whose sites I would read before.”

Opponents of the war use the platform for everything from organizing antiwar protests to sharing media reports from the West. In March, The New York Times launched its own Telegram channel to ensure that readers in the region “can continue to access an accurate account of world events,” the company said in a statement.

But the freedom that has allowed the unfettered exchange of news and opinion has also made Telegram a haven for disinformation, far-right propaganda and hate speech.

Propagandists have their own popular channels — Vladimir Solovyov, the host of a prime time talk show that is a font of anti-Ukraine vitriol every weeknight, has more than 1 million subscribers. Channels in support of Russia’s war, many of them run by unidentified users, proliferate.

State-run media outlets, like Tass and RIA News, also distribute their reports via Telegram.

Telegram has also opened the door to critics of President Vladimir V. Putin from the right, hard-liners exhorting the Kremlin to do more.

Yuri Podolyaka, a military analyst who tends to parrot the government line when he appears on Russia’s popular, state-run Channel One, takes a markedly different approach in the videos he posts to Telegram.

The pro-Russian allies in southeastern Ukraine are not getting sufficient equipment, he says. The Russian government is too slow to establish occupation administrations in the cities it has taken. And refugees from Ukraine are asking in vain for the payments of about $120 promised by Mr. Putin.

“This is not just a war that’s happening on the front lines, this is a war for people’s minds,” he admonished in a video posted Saturday for his more than 1.6 million followers.

Igor I. Strelkov, a Russian army veteran and former defense minister of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, has attracted more than 250,000 followers to his Telegram channel by analyzing problems in how the war is being fought, providing a reality check to government propaganda about how perfectly the war is going.

“I doubt that, after losing the golden first month of the war, our forces will manage to surround and destroy the Ukrainian force in the Donbas,” he said in a video clip posted this week, conceding that some might consider his views treason. “Unfortunately, I see the Ukrainian military command acting an order of magnitude more competently than the Russian one.”

Indeed the word “war,” legally banned in Russia with regard to Ukraine, crops up frequently on Telegram amid the more personal and partisan views by both supporters and opponents.

One of the most vocal government cheerleaders is Ramzan Kadyrov, the pugnacious leader of Chechnya, whose Telegram channel has mushroomed to nearly two million followers from about 300,000 before the war.

He publishes frequent videos of his troops laying siege to Mariupol, often displaying dubious military methods like standing fully upright in an open window while firing a machine gun toward an invisible enemy.

Mr. Kadyrov was roundly mocked as a “TikTok Warrior” online after one picture from a series meant to depict his own field trip to Ukraine showed him praying in the gas station of a brand that only exists in Russia.

Why doesn’t the Kremlin simply ban Telegram, as it has so many other independent news sources? It did, or tried to, in 2018, after the company defied government orders to allow Russian security services access to user data.

But the government lacked the technical means to block access to the app, and it stayed mostly available for Russian users. By 2020, the government lifted its ban, saying that Telegram had agreed to several conditions, including stepped-up efforts to block terrorism and extremist content.

Rather than stifling Telegram, the Kremlin tries to control the narrative there, not just through its own channels but by paying for posts, said Mr. Shepelin, the media analyst. The number of subscribers to official or hard-line channels dwarfs the audience for opponents.

Pavel Chikov, the head of the Agora Human Rights Group, who has represented Telegram in Russia as a lawyer, said the company may have maintained its Russian operations so far because the authorities find it useful to spread the idea that they have certain ties with Telegram and its founder, Pavel V. Durov, “whether it’s true or not.”

Mr. Chikov said he does not believe that Telegram provides any sensitive information about communications to the Russian government or others because if it did, he said, “people all over the world would stop using it.”

But security researchers have raised alarms about how exposed Telegram users may be. Messages, videos, voice notes and photos exchanged through the app do not have end-to-end encryption by default and are stored on the company’s servers. That makes them vulnerable to hacking, government demands or a snooping rogue employee, said Matthew D. Green, an expert on privacy technologies and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“A service like that is an incredibly juicy target for intelligence agencies, both Russian agencies and others,” said Mr. Green.

Telegram has said the data stored on its servers is encrypted and that protection of user privacy is a top priority. But Mr. Green and other experts say that Telegram’s approach makes communications through the app less secure compared to other messaging services like Signal.

Kevin Rothrock, the managing editor of the English-language version of Meduza, said he was worried about how easy it is for someone with sinister intentions to glean private information through Telegram.

“You can see who’s commenting, who’s in the group chats, people’s phone numbers,” he said. “There’s a rich database.”

Telegram did not respond to requests for comment about its policies and security.

The company is run by Mr. Durov, a Russian émigré who co-founded it with his brother, Nikolai, in 2013, and now operates out of Dubai.

The brothers had created one of Russia’s most popular social network sites, but Pavel sold his share in 2013 and fled the country after refusing to give the government the private data of anti-Russia protesters in Ukraine. (It is not known whether Nikolai also sold his share or where he lives.)

Mr. Durov has said little about the war publicly. In early March, he took to Telegram to remind followers why he left Russia. He also pointed out that his mother had Ukrainian roots and that he had many relatives in Ukraine, making the conflict “personal” for him.

At the beginning of the war, he said that the app would consider suspending all services in Russia and Ukraine to avoid a flood of unverified information. An outcry followed and within hours, Mr. Durov walked back the plan.

Perhaps one of the greatest risks for Russians relying on Telegram for independent journalism is that the company’s actions appear to mostly be in the hands of one man.

“The key question is whether you trust Pavel Durov or not,” said Mr. Chikov, the rights lawyer.

“We’re all hoping Telegram plays nice with us,” Mr. Rothrock said. “That’s a lot of eggs in one basket.”

Valeriya Safronova and Adam Satariano reported from London, and Neil MacFarquhar from Istanbul. Ivan Nechepurenko, Alina Lobzina and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

DALLAS — When a judge in South Texas signed an order this past week setting an execution date of Oct. 5 for John Henry Ramirez, it seemed like the end of the road.

Mr. Ramirez was convicted in 2008 for the murder of a convenience store worker, a crime he has acknowledged committing. He was sentenced to death and appealed his case to the Supreme Court — not to stop his execution, but to prepare for it. He asked to have his Baptist pastor pray out loud and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, a request that brought his case national notoriety. Last month, the court ruled in his favor, clearing the path for his execution to proceed as long as the state of Texas complied with his request.

But in a surprise turn of events on Thursday, District Attorney Mark Gonzalez of Nueces County filed a motion withdrawing the death warrant for Mr. Ramirez, citing his “firm belief that the death penalty is unethical and should not be imposed on Mr. Ramirez or any other person.” His own office had requested the execution date just days earlier, but Mr. Gonzalez, a Democrat, wrote in his motion that an employee in his office had done so without consulting him.

In a broadcast from his office on Facebook Live on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Gonzalez, whose district includes Corpus Christi, where the crime occurred, explained his decision.

“For a while now, I’ve said that I don’t believe in the death penalty,” he said. “My office is not going to seek the death penalty anymore.” He said he would be a hypocrite if he advanced Mr. Ramirez’s execution even as he instructs his office not to pursue the death penalty in new cases. Mr. Gonzalez and his office did not respond to requests for comment.

The motion by Mr. Gonzalez does not address the merits of Mr. Ramirez’s conviction or his religious liberty case. Whether it is approved is at the discretion of Judge Bobby Galvan, who set Mr. Ramirez’s execution date and presided over his original jury sentencing.

Mr. Gonzalez’s term ends in 2024, and any district attorney who succeeds him in office would have the option of reinstating the death warrant.

Mr. Ramirez was convicted of repeatedly stabbing Pablo Castro in a 2004 robbery that prosecutors said netted him $1.25. He evaded law enforcement for three years, during which he fled to Mexico and started a family. His guilt is not in question; Mr. Ramirez has called his crime a “heinous murder.”

Reached on Friday afternoon, one of Mr. Castro’s sons, Fernando, called the district attorney’s move “outrageous.” He was 11 when his father was murdered and strongly supports the execution. “I’d like to talk to this guy face to face and give him a piece of my mind,” he said of Mr. Gonzalez.

Mr. Castro, who lives in Florida, described the expense, stress and emotional upheaval of traveling to Texas several times in recent years as execution dates were set and then rescinded.

Mr. Ramirez’s lawyer, Seth Kretzer, said that he was pleased by the decision and that it came out of the blue. Given that Mr. Gonzalez’s office had issued three previous death warrants on Mr. Ramirez before the one this past week, Mr. Kretzer said he was mystified by what had changed.

“Once an office has made a decision to do one course of action, usually they don’t undo it helter-skelter,” he said.

District attorneys generally have the authority to decide whether to pursue the death penalty in states that allow it. In some cases, prosecutors have attempted to revoke death sentences, though that usually involves doubts about the guilt of the convicted person, allegations of misconduct in the case or concerns about mental health.

Mr. Gonzalez, who has described himself as a “Mexican biker lawyer covered in tattoos,” is part of a wave of progressive prosecutors who represent a shift away from an aggressively punitive approach to justice.

Mr. Gonzalez was elected in 2016, defeating a fellow Democrat in a long-shot primary. His views on the death penalty were muddled during the race, and several years into his tenure, he was still publicly conflicted on the issue, frustrating some advocates when he deferred to a jury on the question of whether to seek the death penalty in another high-profile murder case.

But his opinions about capital punishment have been evolving. Early last year, he was one of almost 100 elected local prosecutors, attorneys general and other criminal justice leaders who signed a letter to the Biden administration urging it to end the death penalty in the United States. The U.S. attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, imposed a moratorium on federal executions last summer.

In his Facebook Live broadcast, Mr. Gonzalez explained his shifting approach.

“I have to deal with my own growth and my own rationale and thinking and logic,” he said, apologizing to anyone upset by the decision. “I did this because I thought this would be the right thing to do.”

He encouraged viewers to research the pros and cons of the death penalty, arguing that it has a disproportionate impact on people “of color, low economic status or even low intellect.”

In prison, Mr. Ramirez got to know Dana Moore, the pastor of Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi. Mr. Ramirez became a member of the church, and Mr. Moore visits him regularly to pray and talk. In August, Mr. Ramirez filed a federal lawsuit against prison officials for denying his request to have Mr. Moore pray out loud and lay a hand on him in the execution chamber.

The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in his favor, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the majority that while a state may limit the activities of spiritual advisers in the execution chamber, it ought not ban them.

Mr. Moore said he heard about the reversal on Thursday. He was confused, since he had been with Mr. Ramirez “feet from the death chamber” last fall and they had heard nothing from Mr. Gonzalez’s office at the time. Mr. Ramirez received a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court at that time so the court could hear his religious freedom case.

On Friday, the pastor said he was relieved for Mr. Ramirez, but he was also thinking about Mr. Castro’s family. “Whatever happens, I pray they find peace,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Russia is ambling toward a major default on its foreign debt, a grim milestone that it has not seen since the Bolshevik Revolution more than a century ago and one that raises the prospect of years of legal wrangling and a global hunt by bondholders for Russian assets.

The looming default is the result of sanctions that have immobilized about half of Russia’s $640 billion of foreign currency reserves, straining the country’s ability to make bond repayments in the currency the debt was issued in — dollars. Girding for a default, Russia has already pre-emptively dismissed it as an “artificial” result of sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies, and it has threatened to contest such an outcome in court.

The coming fight, which would probably pit Russia against big investors from around the world, raises murky questions over who gets to decide if a nation has actually defaulted in the rare case where sanctions have curbed a country’s ability to pay its debts.

Russia does not appear likely to take the declaration of a default lightly. If that should occur, it would raise Russia’s cost of borrowing for years to come and effectively lock it out of international capital markets, weighing on an economy that is already expected to contract sharply this year. It would also be a stain on the economic stewardship of President Vladimir V. Putin that would underscore the costs Russia is incurring from its invasion of Ukraine.

At stake for Russia, which has already suffered the abrupt rupture of decades of crucial business ties with the United States, Europe and other nations, is one of the underpinnings of economic growth: the ability to smoothly borrow money from outside its borders.

Since Russia’s predicament is so unusual, it remains something of an open question who is the ultimate arbiter of a sovereign debt default.

“This points to the squishiness and patchwork nature of sovereign debt markets,” said Tim Samples, a legal studies professor at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and an expert on sovereign debt. “I think this is set to be convoluted and disputed for a variety of reasons.”

Mr. Samples suggested that there could be a “cascade” of events that brings Russia to a default.

The most direct verdict could come from the big credit ratings agencies, which have already signaled that Russia’s credit worthiness is eroding and that a default could be on the horizon.

This past week, Moody’s warned that Russia’s payment of about $650 million of dollar-denominated debt in rubles on April 4 could be considered a default if it does not reverse course and pay in dollars by May 4, when a 30-day grace period concludes. That followed a similar warning earlier in the week by S&P Global, which placed Russia under a “selective default” rating.

But it is not clear how the ratings agencies will weigh in if Russia fails to make payments after its grace periods run out because of European Union sanctions that have restricted the agencies from rating Russia. Spokesmen from Moody’s and S&P did not comment. A Fitch spokesman said he could not offer any comments on Russia’s creditworthiness in light of the sanctions.

The Biden administration put additional pressure on Russia earlier this month when the Treasury Department started blocking Russia from making debt payments using dollars held in American banks. That new restriction was intended to force Russia to choose between draining the remaining dollar reserves it has in Russia or using new revenue (from natural gas payments, for example) to make bond payments and avoid defaulting on its debt.

Russia can still make payments on Russian sovereign debt as long as it is not trying to use funds from Russian government accounts that are held in American financial institutions.

After the grace period on the foreign currency bond payments expires on May 4, the next key moment will be May 25. That is when American bondholders will no longer be able to accept Russian debt payments under a temporary exemption that the Treasury Department has allowed.

While the verdict of the ratings agencies carries significant weight, bondholders will determine the consequences of Russia failing to make payments that were due or that violate the terms of its contracts. The bondholders could take a wait-and-see approach or declare that the bonds are immediately due and payable, which could cause other bonds with “cross default” provisions to also be in default.

Another potential arbiter of default is the Credit Derivatives Determination Committee, which is a panel of investors in the market for default insurance, or credit-default swaps. The committee is deliberating whether Russia’s payments in rubles constitute a “failure to pay,” which would kick-start insurance payouts. The panel already ruled that the state-owned​​ Russian Railways JSC was in default for missing a bond interest payment.

To some analysts, that decision and the payments in rubles mean that Russia already is technically in default.

“If Russia doesn’t pay on time, doesn’t pay in the currency in the contract, that’s a default — it’s crystal clear,” said Timothy Ash, a senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management. “For all intents and purposes, Russia is already in default.”

Defaults have been tied up in courts before. Argentina notably defaulted in 2014 after negotiations with hedge funds that refused to accept reduced payments broke down and a federal judge in the United States ruled that it could not make its regular payments on bonds without also paying the hedge fund holdouts. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Argentina’s appeal in the case.

Russia’s case is unique because of the sanctions, and it is expected to argue that its ability to make payments in the currencies in its bond contracts has been constrained because it cannot access all of its reserves.

Mr. Ash suggested that it would be difficult for Russia to find a court that is sympathetic with Russia’s position.

“A U.S. court is never going to rule against O.F.A.C.,” Mr. Ash said, referring to U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers the sanctions.

But Mr. Samples suggested that, given Russia’s global pariah status, creditors could struggle to pursue Russian assets even if they win a favorable judgment in court.

He predicted that Russia would look for creative ways to avoid acknowledging a default, such as pointing to arcane language in bond contracts that could be interpreted to allow for payments in other currencies or by seeking a friendly court jurisdiction, perhaps in Russia.

“I do expect them to stick to their own alternative facts,” Mr. Samples said.

Despite the symbolism of a default, the economic implications for Russia and the world could be relatively small.

Economists estimate that Russia’s total foreign public debt amounts to about $75 billion, while Russia’s annual energy sales are worth about $200 billion. Investors have been anticipating a default since late February, and policymakers have suggested that a default does not pose a threat to the stability of the financial system.

Ultimately, the market will determine whether Russia is worthy of credit, and its actions in Ukraine and future sanctions will determine the fate of its economy.

“It feels like garnish and a dressing on top of a very ugly and profound set of circumstances,” said Anna Gelpern, a Georgetown Law professor who specializes in sovereign debt. “They’re drinking from a fire hose as far as the energy revenues, so why do they need to borrow?”

SHELBY TOWNSHIP, Mich. — The shouting in the banquet hall erupted just minutes after the Macomb County Republican Party convention was called to order.

In a room packed with about 500 people, Mark Forton, the county party chairman and a fierce ally of former President Donald J. Trump, began railing against the establishment Republicans in the audience. A plan was afoot to oust him and his executive team, he said.

“They’re going to make an overthrow of the party, and you have a right to know what this county party has done in the last three years,” he said as his supporters booed and hollered and opponents pelted him with objections. Republicans in suits and cardigans on one side of the room shouted at die-hard Trump supporters in MAGA hats and Trump gear on the other.

The night ended as Mr. Forton had predicted, with a 158-123 vote that removed him and his leadership team from their posts.

The raucous scene in Macomb County exploded after months of infighting that roiled the Michigan Republican Party, pitting Trump loyalists like Mr. Forton, who continue to promote Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 presidential election, against a cohort of Republicans who are eager to move on. The splintering threatens to upend the upcoming Republican state convention, where county precinct chairs vote on nominees for secretary of state, attorney general and other statewide offices.

Mr. Trump is all in on trying to sway those contests — and other races across the state, which he lost by 150,000 votes in 2020. The former president has endorsed 10 candidates for the State Legislature, including three who are challenging Republican incumbents, and has already picked his favorite candidate for speaker of the State House next year. Mr. Trump also has made numerous personal entreaties to shore up support for Matthew DePerno, who is running for attorney general, and Kristina Karamo, a candidate for secretary of state.

In Michigan and other battleground states, Mr. Trump’s chosen candidates have become megaphones for his election claims — frustrating some Republicans who view a preoccupation with the 2020 election as a losing message in 2022.

Republicans in Wisconsin and Arizona have encountered similar fractures over support for continued investigations into the 2020 election, and Mr. Trump’s attempts to play kingmaker in the Ohio Senate race is splintering Republicans there as well.

The root of the rupture in Michigan can, in part, be traced to endorsements made by Meshawn Maddock, a co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a Trump confidante. The Republican Party leadership has traditionally stayed out of statewide races, especially before the state convention. But Ms. Maddock endorsed Ms. Karamo and Mr. DePerno.

Both candidates have been vocal supporters of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election. Mr. DePerno was one of the lawyers involved in Republican challenges in Antrim County, Mich., where a quickly corrected human error on election night spawned a barrage of conspiracy theories. Ms. Karamo belongs to a slate of “America First” secretary of state candidates running across the country and campaigning, in part, on distorted views of the 2020 election.

Beyond her endorsements, Ms. Maddock has been working to help prepare convention delegates. Last month, Ms. Maddock attended a mock convention held by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and reiterated glowing praise from Mr. Trump for Ms. Karamo, Mr. DePerno and John Gibbs, the conservative challenger to Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican congressman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“He was so fired up about Michigan,” Ms. Maddock said of conversations with Mr. Trump as she spoke during a question-and-answer session at the mock convention, according to audio of the event obtained by The New York Times. “This man cannot stop talking about Matt DePerno, Kristina Karamo, John Gibbs, who’s running against Peter Meijer.”

In a statement, Mr. DePerno said he’s “proud that local and state party leaders have endorsed my campaign. Ms. Karamo’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Republican candidates facing Mr. DePerno and Ms. Karamo were taken aback by the endorsements and were outraged at the meddling by the state party leadership before the convention. Ms. Maddock, some candidates charged, appeared to be trying to tip the scales in favor of Trump-backed candidates.

Beau LeFave, a Republican state legislator who is running for secretary of state, said that he had spoken to both Ms. Maddock and her husband, State Representative Matt Maddock, “multiple times” before jumping into his race. They told him they were both rooting for him “and that they’re going to stay out of it,” he said.

“So it was quite a surprise to find out that they lied to me,” Mr. LeFave said.

Ms. Maddock was not available for an interview, according to Gustavo Portela, a spokesman for the Michigan Republican Party. He said that co-chairs had endorsed candidates in the past but acknowledged that the dynamic this cycle was a bit unusual.

“You’ve never had a co-chair who has been this close to a former president, who arguably has a lot of influence on the convention floor,” Mr. Portela said. He added that the party believes the contested races ahead of the convention were “a good thing” that “speaks to the frustration with the direction of our country, and more importantly, the direction of the state.”

The state party has struggled with other conflicts. After more than a year of hearing specious claims about vote counts and election equipment, some activists began questioning why the party would use tabulation machines. A group called Unity 4 MRP started an online campaign to pressure the party to count paper ballots by hand rather use the major brands of voting machines.

“Grassroots groups would sooner stare into the glowering, red eyes of Beelzebub than to allow a Dominion, ESS, or Hart tabulator to run its lecherous paws over their sacred ballots,” another group, Pure Integrity Michigan Elections, wrote in an email to supporters, according to The Detroit Free Press.

Eventually, the party leadership announced a concession: an audit of the convention vote overseen by a former secretary of state. But that didn’t please everyone.

“We have state committee members who fought hard to make sure that you do not have a hand count, and you need to ask why, and you need to be angry, and you need people figuring it out,” said J.D. Glaser, an activist who attended a rally of election skeptics in February. “This is our Republican Party. They’re working against you.”

The Macomb County Republican Party convention was one of 83 county meetings held Monday to pick the delegates to the statewide Michigan Republican Party endorsement convention on April 23.

In the weeks leading up to the event in the Detroit suburbs, Mr. Forton, a retired autoworker and longtime political activist, had rankled prominent Republican elected officials with his conspiracy-theory-laden assertions about the election and what he has described as “a cabal” of Democrats and Republicans who have been installed to control the country.

Presiding over the convention, Mr. Forton argued that his wing of Trump supporters had revived the county party, replenished its coffers and helped usher in a wave of Republican victories in the state. He slammed what he viewed as the old-guard Republicans in the room, some of whom were preparing the way to vote him out of office as he spoke.

“They have been wanting to take this county party back for a long time,” he said, adding that he and his supporters were “not going away.”

Some on Mr. Forton’s side of the room were attending a convention for the first time, spurred to do so, they said, out of concern for the direction of the party and outrage over the lack of audits and investigations into the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“What is happening here should be calm and exciting, but what you have is a Republican Party that does not think the same,” said Tamra Szacon, who earlier had led the prayer and was decked out in a cowboy hat and glittering American flag heels. “One of our biggest things is that we believe the election was stolen — a lot of people do.”

On the other side of the room, Republicans said they were frustrated with the bickering. Natasha Hargitay, a 35-year-old single mother, said she had been to more than a dozen conventions and had never been to one so contentious. She described herself as “Switzerland,” neutral in the fight. Still, she had not been pleased with Mr. Forton’s comments.

“I lost a lot of respect for him when he said, ‘We are the real Republicans,’” she said. “That means you are dividing the Republican Party.”

After the commotion, Eric Castiglia, who was elected the county’s new chairman, pledged to welcome all Republicans into the fold. He said he believed the state convention, with its machine and hand count election, would provide an opportunity to show election skeptics that the process could be fair.

“We have to start working on what we’re going to do with our values and not be a place where every candidate is a RINO, or not a Republican enough,” Mr. Castiglia said in an interview, using shorthand for “Republican in name only.”

But Mr. Forton has no intention of moving on. On Thursday, he filed a petition to state party leaders appealing his ouster.

The injector pen is not, by any stretch, a new invention. Drugmakers of every ilk have been using it for decades to deliver all sorts of crucial medications into the bloodstream. By adding this old technology to its insulin drug, Glargine, however, the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi was nonetheless able to secure additional patents for a lucrative product. The drug’s existing patents were expiring, and new ones enabled the company to maintain its monopoly — and the bounty that goes with it — much longer. But for the patients who depend on this life-sustaining drug? Too many are still struggling to afford it.

Sanofi is not alone, of course. Other drugmakers have patented scores of uninspiring tweaks to their existing products: making a tablet instead of a pill, changing the dose, adding a flavor. When it comes to protecting a drug monopoly, it seems no modification is too small.

Drugmakers for decades have argued that patents are essential to American innovation. For all that lip service to medical advancement, though, a recent investigation by the House Oversight Committee concluded that market share is more likely the point. Twelve of the drugs that Medicare spends the most on are protected by more than 600 patents in total, according to the committee. Many of those patents contain little that’s truly new. But the thickets they create have the potential to extend product monopolies for decades. In so doing, they promise to add billions to the nation’s soaring health care costs — and to pharmaceutical coffers.

And for all the hand-wringing over how to lower prescription drug costs in recent years, little has been said about the patent system or its many failings. Put simply: The United States Patent and Trademark Office is in dire need of reform.

The agency was created more than two centuries ago for the express purpose of protecting and promoting innovation. For most of the ensuing decades, it has stood as a beacon of American ingenuity. But critics say that by the time the office issued its 11 millionth patent last year, it had long since devolved into a backwater office that large corporations game, politicians ignore and average citizens are wholly excluded from. As a result, not only is legal trickery rewarded and the public’s interest overlooked, but also innovation — the very thing that patents were meant to foster — is undermined.

The trouble goes well beyond prescription drugs. “The patent office holds sway over huge swaths of the U.S. economy,” said Priti Krishtel, an attorney and co-founder of the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, a nonprofit dedicated to patent system reform. “It has the power to shape markets, and just about every industry you can think of, from agriculture to technology, is impacted by its shortcomings.”

Given that import, it’s concerning that the agency spent the past year without a permanent director. With that post now filled — the Senate confirmed Kathi Vidal, a Silicon Valley patent attorney, this month — there’s a fresh opportunity to modernize and fortify the patent system. Ms. Vidal and Congress should seize that opportunity quickly. Here’s how they can start.

Enforce existing standards. The best way to ensure that patents spur innovation instead of thwarting it is to set a high standard for what deserves patent protection in the first place and then to honor it.

In the United States, that standard already exists: To secure a patent, an invention must be truly novel and nonobvious, it must be described in enough detail for a reasonably qualified person to build and use it, and it must actually work. The problem is these rules are poorly enforced.

The pharmaceutical industry is a good example. Nearly 80 percent of the drugs associated with new patents between 2005 and 2015 were not new. But the issue is not confined to drugmakers. The Theranos debacle, to take just one other example, was touched off by officials who granted scores of patents for a device that had never been built and that turned out not to work. The company was able to secure those patents without disclosing almost any technical information about its product.

It will take comprehensive reform to repair these deficiencies, but one simple thing that officials can do right now is give patent examiners more time and resources to do their jobs. Even the most complicated patent applications receive just 19 hours of scrutiny, on average, according to a Brookings Institution report. Some 70 percent of patent examiners have said that that’s not nearly enough time.

Capping the number of times an inventor can resubmit a rejected application would also help — in part by reducing the administrative burden and resulting backlog, as well as by removing the incentive for examiners to approve dubious applications just to get them out of the way.

Improve the process for challenging bad patents. Bad patents have steep costs. They gum up the wheels of innovation by making it harder for would-be inventors to proceed with their work. They strain budgets by preventing cheaper products from entering the market. And they leave honest inventors vulnerable to patent trolls — people who buy up weak patents not to create anything new or useful but to hold legitimate inventions ransom. But the process of weeding these patents out once they’ve been granted remains fraught: It can take years and many thousands of dollars to challenge a bad patent in court, and even when the case seems obvious, success is never guaranteed.

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board, a panel of judges that reviews and decides on patent challenges without lengthy court battles, was meant to solve at least some of these problems. But it has been beset by criticism and legal challenges since its creation in 2012. It has also been undermined by Trump-era policies that allow the patent office to deny legitimate patent challenges for purely bureaucratic reasons. During the Trump administration, critics say, such discretionary denials allowed scores of dubious patents to stand.

Lawmakers should pass the Restoring the America Invents Act, a bill that would limit such discretionary denials, and Ms. Vidal should use her authority to curb this practice in the meantime. Officials should also consider broader fixes: Make it easier to challenge bad patents before they are granted. Force secondary pharmaceutical patents to undergo an automatic review by the appeal board. Rethink the legal structure for patent challenges.

“The appeals court tends to be an echo chamber,” said Matthew Lane, a patent lawyer with the public advocacy group InSight Public Affairs. “Because judges there tend to come from and listen to the patent bar.”

Eliminate potential conflicts of interest. Too many patent office directors have come from or gone to industry jobs within months of holding the federal post. This revolving door poses a real risk to the integrity of the patent office. The most recent example of that comes from the Trump administration appointee Andrei Iancu. During his tenure, the patent office used its discretionary powers to deny a challenge to a patent held by a company that his former law firm represented. He then returned to that firm as soon as his time in government was up.

The office’s finances also need to be reconfigured. The majority of its revenue comes from issuance fees, which are assessed only after a patent is granted. This means that the agency charged with serving as patent gatekeeper has a direct incentive to keep that gate as open as possible. It’s hard to say whether or how much patent examiners are influenced by this incentive, but some research has found that when patent office coffers ebb, patent approvals tend to flow.

Officials could solve this problem by revising the patent agency’s fee schedule, so that a majority is due when an application is filed. (Rebates and other supports would help ensure that smaller companies aren’t priced out.) The patent office could also develop a sliding scale system in which the largest and wealthiest patent filers subsidize the smallest and least endowed.

Collaborate with other agencies. There is a natural overlap of the interests and responsibilities of federal regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency and the concerns of the patent office. But there are very few formal mechanisms and hardly any rules that compel those camps to work together. Companies of all types routinely exploit this gap, like children playing two disconnected parents against each other.

In 2014, for example, the E.P.A. discovered that some pesticide makers were routinely amplifying the novel effects of their latest products in patent applications, only to downplay the same effects to federal regulators. “They would tell the patent office that their pesticide deserved a patent because it was different than what was already out there,” said Charles Duan, a public interest attorney and a member of the patent office’s public advisory committee. (This is Mr. Duan’s own opinion; he was not speaking for the committee.) “Then they’d tell the E.P.A. that the same pesticide didn’t need extra regulatory clearance because it was no different than what was already out there.”

Experts have long warned that the same thing could easily be happening at the F.D.A.: Existing regulations allow medical device makers to sidestep burdensome regulatory approvals if their newer products are deemed similar to ones that already exist. Critics say that pharmaceutical companies also have a habit of describing certain drugmaking processes as common when talking to regulators and novel when applying for patent extensions. The key to breaking such habits is communication among agencies.

Ms. Vidal should make collaboration with regulatory agencies the rule. She should also work with the Federal Trade Commission, an agency whose job it is to ferret out exactly the kind of anticompetitive practices that the patent office is vulnerable to.

Let the public participate. For too much of its history, the patent office has treated inventors and companies as its main customers while all but ignoring the people whose lives are affected by patenting decisions. That needs to change. Officials can start by appointing more public representatives to the patent office’s public advisory committee. Right now, six of the committee’s nine members are attorneys who represent commercial clients or private interests; only one works in public interest.

Officials should also establish a public advocate service similar to the one that exists at the Internal Revenue Service and should make a concerted effort to ramp up their public outreach. “The patent system has gotten so complicated that it’s impossible for anyone who’s not an inventor or a lawyer to penetrate it,” said Mr. Duan.

The patent system affects everyone, though. It’s time the people in charge of it recognize that.