China has warned its people to think twice before visiting the United States, citing trade tensions. It also told its students to be careful about studying there and accused two American universities of hacking. And it has vowed to cut down on the number of Hollywood films that can be shown in China.

The trade war between the United States and China is already eroding far more than just economic ties. The rapid expansion of the battlefield, from trade to culture and education, underscores how fragile the relationship between the United States and China has become.

The United States, for its part, has revoked some Chinese student and scholar visas, as part of a broader targeting of international students by the Trump administration. While the moves were not directly related to the trade dispute, some conservatives have suggested linking them: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, posted online last week that it was a “great idea” to expel all Chinese students as retaliation for China hitting back with its own tariffs.

For decades, the flow of students, travelers, artists and businesspeople between the countries served as a steadying force, even when political or economic tensions flared. But as relations have deteriorated in recent years, both countries have started to turn those ties into bargaining chips, too.

“This is an emotional reaction, not a rational one,” said Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based international relations scholar. “Rationally, the more tense China-U.S. trade relations become, the more both sides need to keep an overall balance, to avoid a full-on conflict.”

Until recently, both the United States and China had been trying to rehabilitate those softer exchanges, perhaps because they had gotten a glimpse of how dangerous their absence could be.

During Mr. Trump’s first term and the early years of President Joseph R. Biden’s, relations plunged to their lowest point in decades, inflamed by the coronavirus pandemic, disputes over Taiwan and an alleged spy balloon. At the same time, the yearslong closure of China’s borders during the pandemic led to a freeze of interpersonal exchanges.

When Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden finally met in person in 2023 to try and thaw the relationship, they pledged to restore some of those exchanges, as a way to shore up ties. Mr. Xi said he would invite more American students to China. American officials promised that they welcomed Chinese students.

Economic and political considerations were always inextricable from these détentes. Amid a lackluster economy, China last year allowed the highest number of foreign movies to be imported since 2019; official media noted that imported films would improve box office sales. American musicians who performed in China brought tourism to their host cities. China was eager to project itself as open as it tried to woo back foreign investors.

In the United States, Chinese students — who make up one-quarter of international students there — are a vital source of funding for American universities. In 2023, they contributed about $14.3 billion to the American economy, according to U.S. government data.

Still, both sides vaunted the ties as worthwhile in their own right. “The China-U.S. relationship has experienced ups and downs,” an article in Chinese state media said, “but China’s steadfast commitment to promoting friendly exchanges between the peoples of China and the U.S. has remained unchanged.”

Now, those promises are fading.

To retaliate for American tariffs, China has announced levies of its own, export controls, bans on certain American companies doing business in China — and the import of fewer Hollywood movies.

The government made clear that it expected — and might encourage — the economic frostiness to spill over to attitudes toward the United States in general. The tariffs would “inevitably reduce how favorably Chinese audiences view American films,” the national film administration said.

A day earlier, China’s culture and tourism ministry had warned travelers to “fully assess the risks” of visiting the United States, given the “deterioration of Sino-U.S. economic and trade relations.”

A separate warning from the education ministry did not mention the trade war, instead focusing on legislation passed in Ohio targeting academic collaborations with China. But it was published the same day as the tourism warning, and was the first alert the ministry had issued to Chinese students going abroad since 2021.

On Tuesday, Chinese state media separately accused the University of California and Virginia Tech of taking part in cyberattacks on the Asian Winter Games, which China hosted earlier this year. (The authorities also said they had added three people supposedly affiliated with the U.S. National Security Agency to a wanted list. Hashtags encouraging people to report clues about American spies trended on social media.)

Mark Owczarski, a spokesman for Virginia Tech, said in an email, “Virginia Tech does not engage in cyber attacks. We have found no evidence that these allegations are true.”

The University of California and the American Embassy in Beijing did not immediately comment.

Wang Li, a study abroad consultant in Beijing, said that she had been inundated by messages from parents and students in the last week. She hosted a livestream with 1,800 viewers to discuss the education ministry’s warning on Monday, where she addressed questions about whether people could still apply for visas or whether it was advisable to do so.

“This was all very sudden,” Ms. Wang said in an interview, referring to both the ministry’s warning and the American government’s visa revocations of many international students, including from China. “So it has caused panic.”

On Chinese social media, some users have said they were debating whether to cancel trips to the United States over the upcoming five-day May Day holiday. They cited fears of being turned away at the border and of general animosity toward China.

Da Wei, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the travel and study notices were a warning shot to Washington from the Chinese government. He noted that they were not outright bans but also acknowledged that the countries were on the route to escalation, and that China was signaling that it could go further.

“Once you lose control, everything could happen, and it could be dangerous,” he said. “So I think the logic behind the Chinese side’s actions is kind of warning that you should not expand it to other areas.”

But Professor Da also noted that there were real reasons for Chinese students to worry about going to the United States. Government officials under both Democratic and Republican administrations have accused Chinese scholars of being spies. Mr. Da said that he himself has been stopped for extended questioning at the U.S. border multiple times.

Florida has restricted public universities from hiring Chinese citizens. A bill in the House of Representatives would bar any Chinese nationals from studying in the United States, though it is unlikely to pass.

Republican lawmakers have also demanded that several universities provide information on the finances and research of their Chinese students.

Ms. Wang, the study abroad consultant, said the tensions had scared off even people who were most eager to build connections with the United States.

“Many students, even if they look up to the freedom, tolerance and rich academic resources of the United States, feel they have to change directions,” she said.

On her livestream, she urged her viewers to keep their options open by also applying to Australian or European universities as backup.

“Leave yourself a safety net, OK?” she said.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Hamas gunmen picked the female hostage out from a cluster of captives in an apartment in Gaza. They threatened her with a pistol and led her away into a separate room. Then they commanded Keith Siegel to follow.

It had been about a month since Mr. Siegel, the woman and roughly 250 others were kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, during the Hamas-led attack that set off the war with Israel. The conditions of their captivity in Gaza were unbearable, Mr. Siegel said. Meals were intermittent. Water was scarce. And any failure to follow their captors’ instructions risked violent retribution.

As Mr. Siegel stepped into the room, panic washed over him: He found himself in the audience of a “medieval-style” trial by torture, he said.

The woman had been bound, and the guards were beating her with primitive tools. They demanded that she “tell the truth,” Mr. Siegel said. He was instructed to assist with getting a confession.

“I was told to go into the room and to tell the person that the torturing will continue until they admit what they were being accused of,” he said.

The episode was one of many that defined the horrific experience that Mr. Siegel, an Israeli American originally from North Carolina, and his fellow hostages endured in captivity. Mr. Siegel was released on Feb. 1, after 484 days as a hostage, as part of a short-lived cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. Another 59 hostages remain in Gaza, with around 35 presumed by the Israeli government to be dead.

Since Mr. Siegel’s release, Israel has resumed its military campaign in Gaza. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave throughout the war, according to Gazan health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel during the 2023 attack that started the war, Israeli officials say.

In his encounter with the female hostage being tortured, Mr. Siegel felt powerless to assist. It seemed like nothing he said could dissuade their captors from continuing the abuse.

“I was feeling that I’m in a situation where I want to help this woman and to get her out of this horrible, horrendous situation that she’s in, that we’re in, and just felt helpless,” he said.

Now that he is free and working on his recovery, Mr. Siegel is determined to draw attention to the plight of those still captive in Gaza.

He and his wife, Aviva Siegel, who was also taken captive to Gaza but was released during a cease-fire in November 2023, have made frequent public appearances. On Israeli media and in an appearance on “60 Minutes,” Mr. Siegel has called for international help to secure the hostages’ release. Last week, he and Ms. Siegel appeared with President Trump at a National Republican Congressional Committee dinner to thank him for his role in the most recent round of hostage releases.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Siegel, 65, described the physical and psychological distress he and his fellow hostages endured at the hands of their captors. He outlined a pattern of abuse similar to what other released hostages have said about their time in captivity.

Some months after witnessing the female hostage’s torture, Mr. Siegel’s captors forced him to deliver a video message. He desperately hoped to use the opportunity to project strength to his family, he said, but he broke down in tears during filming.

Mr. Siegel hoped that his captors would cut that scene. Instead, it featured prominently in the final video, which he saw by chance a few days later in an Al Jazeera broadcast on his captors’ TV. Mr. Siegel was heartbroken and severely distressed, he said. He could not improve his circumstances, but he had at least hoped to allay his family’s anxiety.

“That was very, very hard for me to think that my family would see that,” Mr. Siegel said.

Rights groups and international law experts say that such hostage videos are, by definition, made under duress. On Wednesday, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another group involved in the 2023 attack on Israel, released a video that appeared to show one of the remaining hostages in Gaza. In it, a man pleads for his release. He describes severe conditions and shows wounds on his body.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group that represents the relatives of many captives, identified the man as Rom Braslavski, 21. Mr. Braslavski was working at the Tribe of Nova music festival in Israel, near its border with Gaza, on the day of the attack, the group said.

The video appears to match Mr. Siegel’s description of worsening conditions in captivity as the war progressed. After the collapse of the cease-fire in which Mr. Siegel’s wife was freed, the militants became increasingly agitated and violent toward him, he said.

Days and months passed. Over the course of his time in captivity, different guards cycled through, and Mr. Siegel was whisked between hiding locations over 30 times, he said. He was sometimes kept with fellow hostages, other times for months on his own.

During a stretch in a tunnel more than 100 feet below the streets of Gaza, Mr. Siegel found himself gasping for air, desperate to get out.

“I thought about death many times in that tunnel,” he said.

One day in late January, as Mr. Siegel was lying down in a small, dark and windowless locked room, one of his captors approached him, clutching a pistol and insisting that Mr. Siegel take it from him, Mr. Siegel said. When he declined to do so, his captor pointed the pistol at Mr. Siegel’s face and threatened to kill him.

“He pretended as if he was shooting me, and he said, ‘Now you’re dead,’” Mr. Siegel said.

The captor then turned the gun on himself. In that moment, Mr. Siegel worried how the other captors would respond if he pulled the trigger.

“If he kills himself, the other terrorists will be sure that I shot him, and then what’s going to happen to me?” Mr. Siegel said he had thought to himself.

The man laughed and left, locking the door behind him.

Throughout his time in Gaza, Mr. Siegel’s captors would spit on him and scream at him, he said. They would kick him as he lay on the floor and withhold food from him and other hostages, even as the captors ate.

To try to cope with the persistent stress, keep his mind sharp and pass the long stretches that he spent alone, Mr. Siegel made sure to keep track of the date and the number of days he had been in captivity, repeating it to himself several times throughout each day.

The hostages still in Gaza have been there 558 days. Mr. Siegel cannot rest, he said, until the count has ended and all the hostages have returned.

“This occupies me, my mind, every day from morning to night and throughout the night when I wake up many times,” he said.

The Supreme Court in Britain ruled on Wednesday that trans women do not fall within the legal definition of women under the country’s equality legislation.

The landmark judgment, which said that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, is a blow to campaigners for transgender rights. It could have far-reaching consequences for the operation of single-sex services like domestic violence shelters, as well as to equal pay claims and maternity policies. And it comes amid intense public debate over the intersection of transgender rights and women’s rights.

However, the five judges involved in the ruling emphasized that they were not commenting more broadly on whether trans women are women, saying it was not the role of the court to adjudicate on the meaning of gender or sex. Instead, the judgment is limited to the precise meaning of language in the 2010 Equality Act, which aims to prevent discrimination.

The decision will likely be welcome news for Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain. Some legal scholars had theorized that the court might refuse to rule and instead force his government to weigh in on a thorny and divisive issue. The government said in a statement Wednesday that it had always supported the protection of “single-sex spaces based on biological sex” and that the ruling brought “clarity and confidence” around the provision of services in hospitals, domestic violence shelters and sports clubs.

What did the court say?

Announcing the decision on Wednesday, the deputy president of the court, Lord Hodge, said: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex.”

He added: “We counsel against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not.” He said the ruling “does not cause disadvantage to trans people” because they continue to have protections against discrimination under another part of the Equality Act.

The act includes a range of “protected characteristics,” which include race, religion and disability. The Supreme Court said its ruling meant that trans women would receive the law’s protections under the category of “gender reassignment” rather than sex.

Lord Hodge acknowledged the fraught national conversation about transgender rights, and described trans people as a “vulnerable and often harassed minority,” while noting that women had long fought for equal rights with men.

“It is not the task of this court to make policy on how the interests of these groups should be protected,” he added, but “to ascertain the meaning of the legislation which Parliament has enacted.”

Although the case was focused on the legal definition of women, it also applies to trans men because the Supreme Court ruled on the broader meaning of “sex” as being “biological sex” under the Equality Act 2010.

How is the court’s decision being received?

Speaking outside the court afterward, Susan Smith, the co-director of For Women Scotland, the activist group that had brought the legal challenge, said the judgment would ensure that “services and spaces designated for women are for women.”

She added: “Everybody should be protected by the Equality Act. This is not about prejudice or bigotry, as some people would say, it’s not about hatred for another community. It’s just about saying that there are differences, and biology is one of those differences, and we just need protections based on that.”

J.K. Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter series, supported For Women Scotland in their legal campaign. She said she was “proud” of the group in a post on X, and claimed the case had “protected the rights of women and girls across the U.K.”

Groups that campaign for trans rights expressed concern but also appealed for a calm and careful assessment of what the court’s ruling did and did not change.

Scottish Trans, which campaigns for gender-identity rights, cautioned against misinterpreting the decision. “We’d urge people not to panic,” it said in a post on social media. “There will be lots of commentary coming out quickly that is likely to deliberately overstate the impact that this decision is going to have on all trans people’s lives.”

And Sacha Deshmukh, the chief executive of Amnesty International UK, said it would take time to analyze the full implications. “There are potentially concerning consequences for trans people, but it is important to stress that the court has been clear that trans people are protected under the Equality Act against discrimination and harassment,” he said in a statement.

However Simon Blake, the CEO of Stonewall UK, an LGBTQ+ charity, said that although the Supreme Court had confirmed that trans people were legally protected against discrimination, “it will be incredibly worrying for the trans community and all of us who support them.”

Why did the Supreme Court weigh in?

The origins lie in a law that the Scottish Parliament passed in 2018, aiming to increase the proportion of women on government agency boards to 50 percent. As part of that legislation, the government said that trans women could count toward the target.

For Women Scotland took the Scottish government to court, arguing that trans women should not be included in the quotas. The government amended its guidance to say that only trans women with a so-called gender recognition certificate met the definition of a woman under the Equality Act of 2010, and could therefore be included in the quotas.

Gender recognition certificates are legal documents that can be granted by the British government to people who have lived in their acquired gender for two years and intend to do so for the rest of their life, and who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The process, which has not been changed by Wednesday’s ruling, grants successful applicants the right to update their sex on official documents such as birth certificates, and to marry in their affirmed gender.

The For Women Scotland group continued to challenge the Scottish government in a series of court cases. In December 2022, a judge in Scotland’s highest court, Lady Haldane, rejected the group’s arguments, saying that the definition of sex was “not limited to biological or birth sex” for the purposes of the act.

For Women Scotland appealed to the Supreme Court, which is Britain’s highest court, and the court ruled in its favor on Wednesday.

Elation overcame Andrei Kuznechyk when he was freed in February after three years in a Belarus prison on charges of leading an “extremist organization,” the authoritarian government’s byword for his work as a web editor at the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Pangs of sadness soon followed. He said he realized, after being blindfolded, driven to the border and handed over in a deal orchestrated by Washington, that he may never return to his homeland, Belarus, again. When he reunited with his 5-year-old son, the boy did not remember him.

And after Mr. Kuznechyk, 46, arrived in Lithuania to live in exile, the president of the U.S.-funded news media outlet took him to buy new clothes (he had lost more than 30 pounds in prison) and relayed some difficult news: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty may close.

Mr. Kuznechyk had worked for more than a decade at the outlet, which began broadcasting in the early 1950s behind the Iron Curtain. The organization has long coped with challenges from authoritarian governments while reporting on human rights and corruption. Now, for the first time, the biggest threat is coming from Washington.

A month after his administration secured Mr. Kuznechyk’s release, President Trump issued an executive order demanding the dismantling of the outlet’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, through which Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty receives funding from Congress.

The news did not come entirely out of the blue for Mr. Kuznechyk. In his final days in prison in Belarus, he had seen a gloating state news broadcast reporting that Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s government-cutting czar, had called for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to be shut down.

In a post on X, Mr. Musk called the media outlet, which is now primarily online, “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves” and something that “nobody listens to.”

“Europe is free now (not counting stifling bureaucracy),” Mr. Musk wrote. “Hello??”

In prison, Mr. Kuznechyk said, he heard a similar message from the state — everyone has forgotten you, no one reads you, no one needs you. State propaganda dismissed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a fixture in Belarus dating to the Soviet era, as irrelevant and sinister.

Mr. Kuznechyk knew otherwise. In August 2020, when protests against the leader of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, swept through the capital, Minsk, after a presidential election widely condemned as rigged, the media outlet’s service in Belarusian recorded 24.8 million views on YouTube. It was big traffic in a nation of 9.1 million. Current Time, its 24-hour channel in Russian, Belarus’s second official language, received more than 86 million views in one week alone in that month.

Mr. Lukashenko, who has kept an iron grip on power for more than three decades, responded with an intense crackdown.

Security officials raided and sealed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s office in Minsk. Its journalists were arrested, with one snatched during a live broadcast.

The outlet was designated an extremist organization. Mr. Kuznechyk, though he worked an editing job without regular bylines or on-camera appearances, was apprehended on a bike ride. Another journalist from the outlet, Ihar Losik, is still in prison in Belarus, as is Ihar Karnei, a former contributor.

In the United States, the outlet ran into new trouble on March 14, when Mr. Trump issued the executive order.

The president tapped Kari Lake, the Republican former news anchor, as a senior adviser to oversee the dismantlement of the outlet’s parent organization. In a recent interview with Newsmax, she likened her task to killing a venomous snake with a shovel.

Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that he had tried to speak with Ms. Lake, and was ready to discuss accusations of bias and irrelevance, but that his efforts to secure a meeting had failed.

“If there was a conversation about ideology or about focus or about prioritization, we take our responsibility seriously,” he said. “Let’s have a good honest conversation about the size of the organization and what we do. But we haven’t even been afforded that courtesy and respect.”

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in federal court against its parent organization, arguing that it would be illegal for the Trump administration to subvert Congress and withhold the rest of the $142 million appropriated for the outlet this fiscal year.

A judge ruled in its favor, but the organization has still not received this month’s tranche of funding, which was supposed to arrive on April 1. As a result, Mr. Capus reluctantly has begun to furlough staff.

Last week, the Trump administration set out onerous new requirements for the outlet to receive its money, including demands that the organization says would violate a U.S. law protecting the outlet’s editorial independence. In response, the outlet filed a new court request for emergency relief.

Because the news outlet is classified as a nonprofit, it in theory can receive private donations. Some European officials have floated the idea of stepping in to save the outlet. But Mr. Capus said those proposals were still hypothetical and may come too late.

“We desperately don’t want to have even an hour where we have to go silent,” Mr. Capus said, citing a duty to the outlet’s weekly audience of 47 million.

He has struggled to make sense of the cognitive dissonance as the Trump administration went to what he called heroic lengths to help free Mr. Kuznechyk while simultaneously eviscerating his employer.

On a recent day, Mr. Capus arrived at the organization’s headquarters in Prague to find that officials in Washington had cut the satellite feed carrying Current Time, a joint project with Voice of America. Current Time reaches its audience in Russian primarily online, receiving 2.4 billion views across social media in 2024. But the cutoff still hurt.

Mr. Kuznechyk said he could not understand why Washington would shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at a time when Belarus and its patron Russia have curtailed freedoms to a degree unseen since the Soviet era.

“Why make this gift” to authoritarians, he asked. “What will the world be like next?”

Started in the early days of the Cold War, what was known as Radio Free Europe in the Warsaw Pact countries and Radio Liberty in the Soviet Union was conceived by Washington as a “surrogate free press.” Beamed in over shortwave radio, it would show, through reporting, talk shows and cultural offerings in local languages, what the media would be like if the country were democratic and free. In Belarus, for example, listeners in the 1980s tuned in to figure out what was really happening after the nearby Chernobyl nuclear accident, which Soviet authorities initially covered up.

Today, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still focuses on places where media freedom is absent or threatened, reaching 23 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as Iran and Afghanistan, in 27 languages.

The outlet often undertakes investigative journalism in places where local media are too fearful, state-dominated or underfunded to do similar work.

In Iran, it posts on women’s rights protests in Persian to 4.6 million followers on Instagram. In Central Asia, its journalism reaches millions and exposes high-level corruption. In Ukraine, its reports have revealed the perpetrators of war crimes and the secret foreign real estate holdings of top officials. And in Russia, its cultural streaming platform, Votvot, is hosting documentaries, stand-up comedy and musical performances by people targeted or exiled by Moscow.

Zakir Magomedov, the editor of the unit covering the North Caucasus region in Russia, which includes Chechnya and Dagestan, leads a team out of Prague. Like many of the organization’s journalists, he cannot go back home if it disappears.

“It cost me the loss of my family,” Mr. Magomedov said.

Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist who was jailed in Russia for more than nine months before her release last year in a prisoner swap, keeps in touch with the families of imprisoned journalists from the outlet.

“What am I going to tell them next time?” she asked.

Mr. Kuznechyk refuses to believe it will cease to exist.

“It doesn’t fit into my idea of the world,” he said. “It just cannot be — at the peak of repression against journalists, at the peak of the threat to freedom of information, which we now see is a very fragile notion.”

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will become the latest in a line of European leaders to flock to Washington with the goal of currying favor and improving relations with President Trump.

But Ms. Meloni’s trip this week has stirred more hopes — and fears — than the visits of some earlier European leaders to the White House because of the unique position she holds on the continent.

Her right-wing background has long positioned her as a potential ally of Mr. Trump’s, and she was invited to attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration, unlike other European leaders. Those credentials have helped stoke speculation that Ms. Meloni could visit the White House with an Italy-first approach, looking to strike deals for her country and threatening to undermine European unity.

But many diplomats and officials push back on such concerns, in part because Ms. Meloni has made a name for herself in recent months as a collaborative player on the European stage.

To Ms. Meloni’s fans, this is a moment ripe with opportunity. To others, it is an important test of whether she can use her affinity with Mr. Trump to help Italy, and Europe.

“Italy will find out how much it can claim a special relationship with the United States,” said Giovanni Orsina, the head of the political science department at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.

The visit unquestionably comes a time of high stakes: The 27-nation European Union relies on the United States as its most important trading partner, and Mr. Trump’s trade war threatens to upend that.

Mr. Trump’s threats of imposing punishing tariffs, beyond those already in place, could dent demand for everything from Chianti to chemicals — and the European economy hangs in the balance, as leaders try to persuade Mr. Trump to relent.

“She will play a facilitator,” between the European Commission and the United States, Italy’s minister for enterprises, Adolfo Urso, said in an interview. He added that Ms. Meloni could count not only on a long-established bilateral relationship between Italy and the United States, but also on “a personal relationship that was consolidated between Meloni and Trump.”

Top-level European Union officials have struggled to meet with their American counterparts. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has not been able to speak with President Trump since he retook office, despite trying.

National leaders have had better luck, at least in winning an audience. France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s leader Keir Starmer and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin have all met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

Many see Ms. Meloni’s trip as a continuation of those efforts.

“Any outreach to the U.S. is welcome,” Arianna Podesta, the European Commission’s deputy chief spokeswoman, told reporters on Monday about Ms. Meloni’s trip, adding later that the trip was also “closely coordinated.”

Ms. Podesta said on Wednesday that Ms. Von der Leyen and Ms. Meloni spoke by phone on Tuesday evening, and called having contact with the Americans “extremely positive.”

Still, Ms. Meloni’s visit has caused unease in some quarters. French Industry Minister Marc Ferracci told a French broadcaster that there was a risk that the visit could break the continent’s unity. In Brussels and in Italy, opponents have said that Ms. Meloni’s visit to Washington will reveal how loyal she is to Europe, at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies continue to portray Europe’s leadership as feckless.

“This is the moment of truth for our prime minister,” Italy’s former development minister and opposition politician Carlo Calenda said in a statement. “We will see whether she is a leader that keeps the European front united, or if she will give in to the flattery of the US president.”

For weeks, Mr. Trump’s actions — threatening widespread tariffs and tilting toward Russia — have increasingly strained Ms. Meloni’s delicate balancing act.

A nationalist conservative, she has called Elon Musk a friend and received praise from Mr. Trump, who has called her a “wonderful woman.” And she has often sought to have it both ways, nurturing bilateral ties with Mr. Trump while preserving Italy’s role within a united E.U.

But every new step by Mr. Trump has highlighted her attempts not to strongly take a side. Although she has been a strong supporter of Ukraine, she did not, like other European leaders, rebuke Mr. Trump after his dressing down of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. She also spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in February, and called for the E.U. not to escalate or retaliate on tariffs, and she has continued that mantra even after Mr. Trump threw the world into a tailspin with wide-ranging tariffs.

On the other hand, she has often fallen in line with the rest of Europe at crucial moments. When European nations voted to impose counter tariffs in response to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum levies, for instance, only Hungary opposed the move. Italy joined the 25 other member states in supporting retaliation. (Europe has since walked back those retaliative tariffs, at least temporarily, in response to Mr. Trump’s decision to hit “pause” on some tariffs for 90 days to allow time for negotiations.)

Ms. Meloni also has said that Mr. Trump’s tariffs were “wrong,” and, in the run-up to her trip, she did not signal any intention to obtain special carve outs for Italy.

“Europe’s industrial supply chains are now intertwined,” Mr. Urso, her minister for enterprises, said. “We certainly do not want to divide Europe.”

European officials are currently trying to push their American counterparts to negotiate. Officials are offering economic carrots, including the possibility of cutting tariffs on cars and other industrial goods and ramping up European purchases of natural gas, while also threatening to retaliate if no deal can be reached.

Even those who are skeptical of Ms. Meloni have pointed out that she has good reason to toe the European line in Washington on Thursday: Italy may be a large economy, but the E.U. as a whole is more powerful in winning concessions when it is united.

“It is an important moment for Italy,” Mr. Orsina, the analyst, said. “And it may be an important one for Europe, too.”

As for Ms. Meloni, she seems to be under no illusions about the import of her meeting with Mr. Trump.

“I am feeling no pressure for my next two days,” Ms. Meloni joked on Tuesday afternoon as she spoke at an awards ceremony in Rome. “We will do our best,” she said, adding: “I am aware of what I represent, and I am aware of what I am defending.”

Israel’s defense minister warned on Wednesday that the war in Gaza would soon escalate with “tremendous force” and an extended humanitarian blockade if Hamas did not quickly release hostages amid stalled cease-fire negotiations.

The blunt and detailed statement by the minister, Israel Katz, came as a growing list of former Israeli security officials accused the government of prolonging the war at the expense of the surviving hostages who remain in Gaza.

At the same time, the United Nations warned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was likely at its worst since the conflict began in October 2023, and that the population was once again on the brink of famine.

Mr. Katz said Israeli troops would remain in the territory in Gaza that the military had seized last month after the collapse of a six-week cease-fire. During the truce, Hamas freed about 30 living hostages and returned the bodies of eight others.

He said the Israeli military would use “tremendous force, from the air, land and sea” to destroy Hamas bunkers both above and below ground, and keep up the evacuations of Gazans who again are being forced to leave their homes to escape the strikes. Already, hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents have been displaced.

These measures aim to “bring about the release of all the hostages,” Mr. Katz said, while carving out a path to defeat Hamas later.

“If Hamas persists in its refusal, the activity will expand and move to the next stages,” Mr. Katz said.

An American proposal, introduced last month by the Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff, would require Hamas to release some living hostages without guarantees from Israel that it would permanently end the war — something Hamas has been demanding.

Hamas has rejected the U.S. plan as well as demands that it disarm as part of an eventual settlement.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, said on Wednesday that the group was ready to negotiate a settlement that would lead to the end of the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.

“Whatever illusions Netanyahu promotes to his people to prolong the war are paid for by everyone, especially their prisoners,” Mr. Naim wrote on social media, referring to the hostages held by the armed group.

But frustration is mounting against Hamas in Gaza, where Palestinians have increasingly taken to the streets to demand that the group give up control of the enclave so the war can end. Such protests were once rare, as they risked violent retribution by Hamas.

On Wednesday, crowds of Palestinians gathered in the city of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, chanting anti-Hamas slogans and calling for an end to the war.

Israelis are also increasingly arguing that their leaders should reach a deal with Hamas to bring home the remaining hostages — even if that means ending the war. Critics of the government say the ramped-up war is putting the remaining hostages in greater peril.

On Wednesday, hundreds of former senior Israeli police officials joined a group of nearly 1,000 active-duty and reserve forces who had earlier called for a negotiated agreement to free the hostages immediately.

And U.N. officials said time was running out for the nearly two million Gazans who depend on foreign aid for survival.

The aid that was delivered to Gaza during the cease-fire that ended last month has “practically run out,” said John Whyte, the acting deputy director of the Gaza operations for UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians.

“We are facing once again the prospect of famine,” Mr. Whyte warned on Tuesday.

Separately, the main U.N. agency for humanitarian affairs said that Israel’s intensified military operations, aid blockade, evacuation orders and disruption of health care “are driving what is likely the worst humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.” It cited vast food and water insecurity and attacks on hospitals that have disrupted “an already decimated health system.”

Mr. Katz said that while the Israeli military would continue to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, he also called for “creating an infrastructure for distribution through civil society later on.”

That prompted an immediate backlash from rival officials in Israel’s government who accused him of giving into Hamas, which has some control of how food is distributed in the territory.

“Cutting off aid is one of the main levers of pressure on Hamas, and returning it before Hamas gets on its knees and releases all of our hostages would be a historic mistake,” Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, said on social media.

Mr. Katz said his comments were being distorted by “those who try to mislead.”

“Israel’s policy is clear and no humanitarian aid is about to enter Gaza,” he said in a follow-up statement.

Gabby Sobelman, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.

The gaping pit alongside a tiny town in rural Brazil has all the elements to solve the West’s sudden problem of finding critical rare earth metals — vital for building electric vehicles, wind turbines, guided missiles and robots.

Opened last year and backed by American investors, it is the only mine outside of Asia producing significant quantities of some of the hardest-to-find rare earths.

With China controlling most rare earths and now withholding the strategic metals amid an intensifying trade war, the U.S. government last month quietly disclosed that it wants to finance the Brazil mine’s expansion.

But there is one hitch. The mine is already contracted to sell its rare earths to China.

“They were the only customer who could process the product and separate the product,” said Thras Moraitis, chief executive of the company behind the mine, Serra Verde. “Prescient planning by the Chinese over many, many decades has put them in a position where they have very strong control.”

The Brazil mine lays bare that, when it comes to the minerals vital for tomorrow’s economy and battlefields, the West is way behind and has few good options to catch up.

China dominates the mining and processing of rare earths, a collection of 17 elements that are essential to the auto, semiconductor, aerospace and defense industries. While abundant in the Earth’s crust, they are difficult to extract and separate, and the United States and other Western nations have largely left the work to China.

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A Sudanese paramilitary group declared its own government on Wednesday, even as its fighters pressed an all-out offensive on a city in the western Darfur region that has sent hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing from a famine-stricken camp.

The announcement of a parallel government by the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., stoked fears that Sudan’s two-year civil war is rapidly pushing the country toward a potentially disastrous territorial split. The R.S.F. controls much of western and southern Sudan, while the military holds the north and east, including the capital Khartoum. Both sides have been accused of atrocities.

The R.S.F. leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, gave few details about the composition of what he called his “government of peace and unity,” other than to say it would include a wide range of ethnic groups reflecting “the true face of Sudan.”

Such calls for inclusivity echo longstanding demands by Sudanese pro democracy activists, who oppose the military’s tightfisted grip on power. But as often in Sudan’s brutal conflict, the R.S.F.’s high-minded rhetoric was at odds with the actions of its troops.

The paramilitaries launched a large-scale offensive on Friday, storming the Zamzam camp in El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur that the R.S.F. does not control, as part of a broader assault. On Tuesday, the United Nations said that at least 300 people had been killed and as many as 400,000 others forced to flee the camp in a matter of days.

Zamzam, which housed at least 500,000 people and where a famine was declared last August, is now largely empty, according to aid workers. They say that at least 30,000 people have fled to Tawila, 50 miles by road to the west — with many arriving dehydrated, malnourished and traumatized by the scenes they witnessed in the camp.

“They have nothing but the clothes they’re wearing, nothing to eat, nothing to drink,” Marion Ramstein, an emergency field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said in an email. “Many were in shock. They spoke of so many killings and corpses.”

Doctors Without Borders closed its own operations in Zamzam in February, saying that shelling, attacks on ambulances and a tightening siege had made it impossible to work there.

On Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said the United States “condemns in the strongest possible terms” the R.S.F.-led violence in El Fasher. But she declined to say whether the Trump administration would affirm the Biden administration’s determination that the R.S.F. had committed genocide.

The latest violence coincided with the second anniversary of the conflict, which started in April 2023 when fighting erupted between the Sudanese military and the R.S.F., a paramilitary group it once fostered.

The war took a sharp turn in recent weeks when the army drove R.S.F. fighters out of the capital, Khartoum. Many fled to Darfur, where the R.S.F. has regrouped and is now redoubling its yearlong effort to capture El Fasher.

Surging violence and poor communications have made it hard to get an accurate picture of the situation, but the estimate from the United Nations that nearly half a million people had been displaced in a matter of days was striking, even by the standards of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

The devastation has renewed focus on the role of the United Arab Emirates in the conflict. American and U.N. officials have accused it of supplying weapons, drones and other military assistance to the R.S.F. The Emirates has consistently denied providing any help to the R.S.F.

Sudan’s military-dominated government has brought a case against the Emirates, which opened last week at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing it of complicity in genocide. The Emirates asked for the case to be thrown out.

In Washington, members of Congress renewed calls for the United States to stop supplying weapons to the Emirates until it stops supporting the R.S.F.

“The U.A.E. should stop its materiel support to the R.S.F. now,” Rep. Sara Jacobs of California wrote Tuesday on social media.

American officials have said that senior Emirati leaders were more candid about their role in Sudan, including tacit admissions of support to the R.S.F., during private talks with Biden administration officials last year.

On Tuesday, hundreds of Sudanese massed outside the Emirati embassy in London to protest the alleged Emirati role in the war, in a demonstration that coincided with a major conference on Sudan hosted by the British government.

The European Union and Britain pledged $830 million in additional aid at the London conference, although Sudanese officials criticized the presence of Emirati officials who continued to press their denials about supporting the R.S.F.

In a statement, Lana Nusseibeh, assistant minister for political affairs at the Emirati foreign ministry, accused both sides in the war of atrocities, and said the U.A.E. was issuing “an urgent call for peace.”

Siding with the Trump administration, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said on Monday that he would not send back a Salvadoran migrant, whom the U.S. authorities deported from Maryland in error last month, an expulsion that set off a legal battle that has reached the Supreme Court.

“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power,” Mr. Bukele said, sitting in the Oval Office beside a beaming President Trump.

Latin America experts scoffed at the idea that Mr. Bukele, whose government has ordered mass arrests and seized control of the country’s courts, would suggest he could not return one man — if he wanted to.

“I have no words,” said Ana María Méndez Dardón, the Central America director at the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group. “If he has any remaining commitment to democratic norms, he has an obligation to resolve this case.”

A federal judge in Maryland ordered the return of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to the United States, a decision that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld last week.

In refusing to return Mr. Abrego Garcia, Mr. Bukele is falling in line with the Trump administration and its deportation plans, helping to cement a strategy for dealing with legal challenges. The administration is arguing that deportees to El Salvador belong to terrorist gangs — and that after it turns the men over to a sovereign foreign nation, it has no right to interfere.

In the process, the administration is relying on Mr. Bukele’s cooperation — and on how powerful he has become in his country since he took office in 2019.

“President Bukele has, over the course of his administration, captured control over state institutions and eliminated any checks on power,” said Noah Bullock, the executive director of the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal.

Crucially, according to Mr. Bullock and others, Mr. Bukele has an extraordinary degree of control over who is imprisoned because of a state of emergency he imposed — and has repeatedly extended — that suspends normal due process rights.

Under the state of emergency, which was put in place after a number of killings in 2022, an estimated 85,000 Salvadorans have been swept up in mass arrests, according to human rights groups.

Mr. Bukele’s hard-line measures, which are credited with dismantling violent gangs and drastically bringing down crime in El Salvador, have earned him soaring approval ratings in his country and admirers around Latin America and beyond.

They have also given him a “mechanism to detain arbitrarily,” said Mr. Bullock, and “normalized things like almost indefinite pretrial detention.”

Under the state of emergency, writs of habeas corpus — legal orders meant to ensure people are not unlawfully detained — are routinely ignored. Of the 7,200 habeas claims presented to the Constitutional Court in El Salvador, less than 1 percent have been resolved, according to Mr. Bullock’s group.

“And that’s, unfortunately, the judicial black hole where Kilmar is now finding himself,” Mr. Bullock said.

Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, had entered the United States illegally but was granted legal permission by a judge to stay in the United States, and was never charged with or convicted of being in a gang, which he denied.

On Tuesday, the federal judge in his case in Maryland chided the government for having done nothing to secure his release. The same day, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, said that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation had in fact been purposeful and legal.

According to U.S. officials, Mr. Abrego Garcia is being housed with nearly 290 other detainees that the Trump administration is known to have sent to Mr. Bukele’s so-called megaprison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, outside San Salvador, the capital.

While the majority are Venezuelans accused of being affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, several dozen are Salvadorans.

Most of the deportees have been found to have no serious criminal history and were detained in recent months on flimsy evidence, such as tattoos and clothing that the administration claims are proof of gang ties.

The U.S. administration expelled some of the men under the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president the right to deport individuals who present a security risk in times of war. But many were deported under regular U.S. immigration law — including Mr. Abrego Garcia.

Writs of habeas corpus have been presented to El Salvador’s Supreme Court on behalf of the deportees, to no avail. Many of the men have American lawyers, who say they have received no information on their clients from the American or the Salvadoran authorities — even whether they are alive.

In El Salvador, the legal pathways to securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom “have been exhausted,” said Ms. Méndez, of the Washington Office for Latin America.

Virtually the only remaining avenue for securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release in El Salvador, she said, was “diplomatic pressure.”

In exchange for holding detainees sent by the United States, Mr. Bukele has said he is being paid $6 million by the U.S. government.

The Trump administration’s recent deportation operation has put a spotlight on the Salvadoran leader. If anything, experts say, the attention and the administration’s support have emboldened him.

When Mr. Bukele was asked by a reporter Monday at the White House if he would consider releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, he replied, “Yeah, but I’m not going to release him.”

He went on: “I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of the Western Hemisphere, and you want us to go back to releasing criminals?”

Julie Turkewitz and Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.