Five hours after a fire at an electrical substation knocked out power for Heathrow Airport and thousands of homes in western London, the city’s fire brigade said early Friday that it was still trying to bring the blaze under control.

By 4 a.m. Friday, half of a transformer remained on fire, the London Fire Brigade said, warning that the disruptions caused by the blaze would increase into the morning.

The blaze at the North Hyde substation, around two miles north of Heathrow, left more than 16,000 homes without power, according to the regional power utility, Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks.

“This will be a prolonged incident, with crews remaining on scene throughout the night,” Pat Goulbourne, assistant commissioner at the London Fire Brigade, said in a statement. “As we head into the morning, disruption is expected to increase, and we urge people to avoid the area wherever possible.”

The London Fire Brigade said it had deployed around 70 firefighters to the substation, where a transformer was ablaze. Thick smoke was seen rising from the burning substation in a photo posted on social media by the fire brigade.

Around 150 people were evacuated, and the authorities set up a 650-foot cordon around the substation as they tried to bring the fire under control.

The cause of the fire was not yet known, the fire brigade said.

London’s Heathrow Airport, one of the busiest in the world, was closed early Friday after it lost power because of a fire at a nearby electricity substation, the airport’s operator said.

Heathrow said it would be closed until 11:59 p.m. local time. It was not immediately clear how many flights would be affected.

Dozens of firefighters were trying to put out the blaze at the substation in Hayes, in western London, the London Fire Brigade said in a statement. A large number of businesses and homes had lost power, it said, without providing a number.

Around 150 people were evacuated from the area around the substation, Pat Goulbourne, assistant commissioner at the fire brigade, said in a statement.

Fire crews will be on scene throughout the night, Mr. Goulbourne said, adding, “As we head into the morning, disruption is expected to increase, and we urge people to avoid the area wherever possible.”

This is a developing story that will be updated.

A Delta Air Lines passenger jet that flipped over, burned and lost a wing after landing in Toronto last month was descending at what experts called an excessive speed when it touched down, according to a preliminary report from the Canadian authorities.

The report from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, an independent agency, found that a warning about the plane’s rapid descent had sounded just before it touched down, and the plane was dropping at nearly twice the rate that qualifies as a “hard landing” in the flight operations manual of the Delta subsidiary, Endeavor Air, that was operating the jet.

A descent greater than 600 feet per minute is considered a “hard landing,” according to the manual. Just before the crash, the plane was descending at 1,100 feet per minute, the report said.

When the plane landed, a part attached to the main landing gear on the right side broke, according to the report. In a matter of seconds, the jet rolled to its right, still skidding down the runway, the right wing snapped off, the plane burst into flames and it came to a stop upside down.

“It was descending much too fast,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former U.S. accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s possible that the rate of descent was so great that it exceeded the design stress limits of that landing gear.”

Despite the dramatic events, all 80 people on board, including 76 passengers and four crew members, were able to evacuate safely. After the plane was empty, there was an explosion near the left wing.

The report did not assign a cause for the Feb. 17 crash or the explosion, and the safety board said that its work was ongoing.

“Accident and incidents rarely stem from a single cause,” Yoan Marier, chairman of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said in a video statement.

The plane, a CRJ 900 made by Bombardier, had left Minneapolis and was arriving at Toronto Pearson International Airport in windy conditions, which aviation safety experts said can complicate the landing process.

According to the safety board’s report, the plane’s air speed increased, apparently from a wind gust, less than 15 seconds before landing.

The pilot reduced thrust, which experts described as a typical response. But, less than three seconds before landing, the alert sounded warning that the plane was dropping too fast.

The plane’s nose was also pointed upward at a one-degree angle, lower than the three to eight degrees recommended by the operations manual.

“Everything went to hell in the last seconds,” said Ben Berman, a safety consultant who is also a former airline pilot and federal crash investigator in the United States. The conditions the pilots faced that day can make flying “very difficult,” he added.

The captain of the plane, who was also a simulator instructor, had worked for Endeavor since 2007, and had 764 hours of flight time on the type of plane involved in the crash.

The first officer, who was flying the plane, had worked for the airline since January 2024 and had nearly 420 hours of experience with that aircraft model. Such experience is not unusual for pilots at smaller airlines like Endeavor, aviation experts said.

At least 21 people were injured in the crash. Passengers hung upside down in their seats after the crash, held up by their seatbelts, the report said.

Two days after the crash, Delta Air Lines offered each passenger $30,000, which the company said came with “no strings attached.” Passengers have filed several lawsuits against the company in the United States, and Vincent Genova, a Toronto-based lawyer, said his firm has been retained by 12 Canadian passengers.

The Pentagon is scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.

Another official said the briefing will be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.

Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to President Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.

It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.

Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country was to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.

The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.

A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr. Musk.

After The Times published this article, Sean Parnell, the chief Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”

The meeting reflects the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan. A choice of sharing lots of technical details with Mr. Musk, however, is another matter.

Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, are set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.

Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk will want or need to hear is unclear.

Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.

It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.

But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might need to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.

Take, for example, aircraft carriers. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.

Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.

Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.

Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.

Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make his access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.

Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.

Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.

Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.

Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive access to top Pentagon officials for a briefing like this, Mr. Harrison said.

“Musk at a war-planning briefing?” he said. “Giving the CEO of one defense company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest and is a real conflict of interest.”

Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and California.

The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.

In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.

Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)

Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.

Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.

Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.

The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.

Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.

The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.

In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.

“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.

In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.

That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.

The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.

On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.

Aaron Kessler contributed reporting.

Hamas targeted Tel Aviv with rockets

Hamas fired its first barrage of rockets in months into Israeli territory yesterday as Israeli troops expanded ground operations across Gaza. After the collapse of a two-month cease-fire, the fighting now looks as if it is escalating back to full-scale war.

Despite street protests in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to fire the head of Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency.

For some insight on the situation, I reached out to Patrick Kingsley, our Jerusalem bureau chief.

Patrick: We are back in a familiar standoff. Israel’s leadership wants both the safe return of Hamas’s hostages, as well as Hamas’s military defeat. But Hamas won’t hand over the hostages without Israel’s guaranteeing the group’s survival in Gaza. And Israel can’t defeat Hamas by force without harming many hostages. The cease-fire that collapsed this week was always likely to fall apart unless one of the sides softened its stance. But neither did. So Israel has returned to war in order to break Hamas’s resolve by force. And that leaves things roughly where they were before the cease-fire began in January: in a deadlock.

Do the protests in Israel feel more impactful this time?

For now, Netanyahu doesn’t seem swayed by the protesters calling for a new truce to save the hostages in Gaza. His biggest domestic priority is to pass a state budget by the end of the month. To do that, he needs the support of right-wing lawmakers, many of whom support the return to war and could abandon him if there’s another truce.

Is President Trump’s Gaza plan still on the table?

After proposing the expulsion of Gaza’s population in January, Trump has said that the idea was only a recommendation and that no Palestinians would be expelled. His aides also said that it was less a definitive plan of action than an attempt to provoke Arab leaders into suggesting a viable alternative.

Several Arab leaders, led by Egypt, did later propose their own plan for postwar Gaza — in which the territory would be governed by an apolitical committee as part of a Palestinian state. But the plan was vague, didn’t explain how Hamas would cede power and was swiftly rejected by the Israeli government, which seeks to avoid discussion of Palestinian statehood.

Russia and Ukraine traded strikes as talks are planned

Ukraine attacked an airfield deep inside Russia, officials said yesterday, as the U.S. worked to iron out a partial cease-fire. In Ukraine, Russian drones killed at least five people and injured 26 others, according to local authorities.

The Kremlin said yesterday that preparations were underway for a new round of Russia-U.S. talks that would be held on Monday in Saudi Arabia. Ukraine will also send representatives there to meet with U.S. officials.

A U.S. proposal: President Trump has floated the idea of controlling Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. What would it mean if the U.S. took them over?

How Trump is trying to consolidate power

President Trump is trying to cement control over the courts, Congress and even U.S. society and culture. But his latest target — the courts — has been described by constitutional scholars and historians as perhaps the most alarming power play to date.

• China: Four Canadians were executed over drug-related convictions, drawing condemnation from Ottawa for killings “inconsistent with basic human dignity.”

• France: A French scientist was prevented from entering the U.S. after U.S. border agents found messages on his phone about Trump’s policies on academic research.

• Indonesia: Defying student protests, legislators revised a law in order to allocate more civilian posts for military officers, a move that harked back to Suharto.

• India: A curfew was imposed in the state of Maharashtra following violence triggered by a Hindu group’s call to remove the tomb of a 17th-century Muslim ruler.

• Iran: Olivier Grondeau, a French citizen who was detained in Tehran for over two years on spying charges, was released this week.

• Syria: The Assad dictatorship kept lists of millions of wanted people. Now, Syrians named on any of those lists are sharing the news proudly.

• Canada: Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, has earned the nickname “Captain Canada” for defending his country against Trump.

• Philippines: Former President Rodrigo Duterte now sits in a cell in The Hague. Here’s how the high-stakes arrest unfolded.

• Africa: The M23 militia, backed by Rwanda, reigns over eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Once a ragtag group, it now behaves like a governing entity.

• Climate: Satellites orbiting above Earth’s surface show how solar and wind have taken off in recent years. Take a look.

Economy, finance and business

Sports

Three hours north of Manila, a small beach house built for Romana de Vera, the creator of the Philippines’ beloved Romana Peanut Brittle, was falling apart.

The family chose to resurrect it. One of her sons decided to help — but only if he could do it his way. As artistic tensions grew, so did the home. It’s now unlike anything else in the islands.

Lives lived: K.W. Lee, a pioneering Asian American journalist, died at 96.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

The enduring appeal of ‘Peep Show’

The British series “The Office” usually gets the credit for influencing cringe humor, but its contemporary, “Peep Show,” which ran for nine seasons until 2015, helped reinvent television comedy.

The show is not for the faint of heart: One episode ends with someone violently ill in a bathroom with no door, an entire party watching. But how does “Peep Show” maintain an ever-widening fan base, all these years later? “Fortunately,” one of the show’s creators said, “self-loathing is pretty universal.”