The State Department has ended funding for the tracking of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and American officials or contractors might have deleted a database with information on them, according to a letter that U.S. lawmakers plan to send to Secretary of State Rubio on Wednesday.

The work on the abducted children by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab was frozen when President Trump signed an executive order in late January halting almost all foreign aid spending. Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and an official under him, Pete Marocco, have ended the vast majority of foreign aid contracts, including the one to the Yale lab.

The congressional letter, organized by Representative Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, said “the foreign aid freeze has jeopardized, and may ultimately eliminate, our informational support of Ukraine on this front.”

The State Department and the Yale center “had been preserving evidence of abducted children from Ukraine it had identified, to be shared with Europol and the government of Ukraine to secure their return,” the letter said, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times. Europol is the main law enforcement agency of the European Union.

“We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted,” it said. “If true, this would have devastating consequences. Can you please update us as to the status of the data from the evidence repository?”

A person familiar with the work of the Yale Center said the details in the letter were accurate.

The Yale lab was one of several recipients of $26 million in congressional funding over three years through the State Department to track war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine. That work began in 2022 under a program called the Conflict Observatory.

The lab did research into abducted children and the “filtration sites” they and others were taken to in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where Ukrainians were interrogated and prepared for deportation to Russia. The researchers used open-source information and commercial satellite imagery.

Yale researchers were compiling the database, called Caesar, so the State Department could share information on abducted children with Europol and the International Criminal Court, which could eventually bring charges against Russian officials. In 2022, after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. accused the Russians of committing “genocide.”

Ukrainian officials say Russia has abducted 20,000 children from Ukraine. Yale researchers said in earlier reports they have tracked 30,000 children to sites outside of Ukraine. They have put information into the database on 6,000 children taken to Russia and more than 2,400 to Belarus. The database has detailed information on 314 kidnapped children in Russia: their names and photographs, and dossiers of 20 to 30 pages on each child.

Some of the findings were previously disclosed in public reports from Yale. The center also gave information on the children to the Ukrainian government.

The main contractor for the State Department project is the MITRE Corporation, a nonprofit that mainly does work for the U.S. government, including for intelligence agencies. The Yale lab had a contract under it.

The State Department did not reply to a request for comment about the project and the status of the database. The MITRE Corporation also did not reply.

In July 2023, a Russian official said Russia had brought 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia.

The Yale researchers have not been able to work on the project since the funding freeze began in late January. When the U.S. government halted weapons aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after President Trump berated Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Feb. 28, the president of Ukraine, the Yale researchers lost access to satellite imagery.

The Trump administration restarted the intelligence sharing and weapons aid after a meeting in Saudi Arabia this month between U.S. and Ukrainian officials. But the Yale researchers still do not have access to satellite images.

Mr. Trump is trying to align with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and the two spoke on the phone on Tuesday. Mr. Trump said he wants to arrange a 30-day cease-fire in Ukraine, which the Ukrainians have agreed to, but Mr. Putin said he would only halt strikes temporarily on energy infrastructure.

Details of the State Department’s termination of its contracts for the research into potential Russian war crimes in Ukraine were earlier reported by The i Paper, a British news site and The New Republic.The Washington Post first reported details of the congressional draft letter on Tuesday.

With the addition of 2024, yet another record-hot year, the past 10 years have been the 10 hottest in nearly 200 years of record-keeping, the World Meteorological Organization reports.

“That’s never happened before,” said Chris Hewitt, the director of the W.M.O.’s climate services division. It marks the first time since record keeping began that all of the 10 hottest years have fallen within the most recent decade.

2024 was the single warmest year on record, surpassing even 2023’s wide lead over other recent years. The planet’s surface was approximately 1.55 degrees Celsius warmer than its average during a reference period that approximates the preindustrial era, from 1850-1900.

The annual report from the W.M.O., a United Nations agency, includes input from dozens of experts and institutions from around the world and sheds further light on the record-breaking heat of 2024 and places it in the context of Earth’s long-term warming from climate change.

The extra energy in the atmosphere and the oceans helped fuel climate-related disasters around the globe. Extreme weather events like drought, storms and wildfires displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, the report says.

Atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases released from fossil fuel combustion continue to rise. In 2024, the concentration of carbon dioxide hit amounts unseen in at least two million years, according to the report.

Concentrations of two other important greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, reached levels unseen in at least 800,000 years. Homo sapiens, or modern humans, emerged around 300,000 years ago, so our species has never before experienced an atmosphere so laden with planet-warming greenhouse gases.

When countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, they agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

“While a single year above 1.5 degrees C of warming does not indicate that the long-term temperature goals of the Paris Agreement are out of reach, it is a wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and to the planet,” Celeste Saulo, the secretary general of the W.M.O., said in a statement.

The new report estimates that long-term warming has reached 1.25 to 1.41 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, although the margins of error for some estimates extend beyond 1.5 degrees. The report authors estimate that last year, El Niño and other factors contributed an additional 0.1 or 0.2 of a degree of temporary warming.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern that tends to slightly raise the overall surface temperature of the planet. Record warmth, however, continued into 2025, even through El Niño’s transition into the opposing pattern, La Niña.

“It’s been really quite extraordinary to see that warmth continue for so long,” John Kennedy, the scientific coordinator and lead author of the report, said during a call with reporters.

This warmth is especially apparent in the oceans, where key indicators of climate change are now accelerating.

The oceans have so far absorbed around 90 percent of the additional heat trapped inside Earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases. The oceans’ heat content — a way to measure this warmth throughout different depths — also reached a record high last year. Over the past two decades, from 2005 to 2024, the oceans warmed more than twice as fast as they did from 1960 to 2005, according to the report.

Increased ocean temperatures have had devastating consequences for marine life. By April 2024, warm-water corals had been bleached in every ocean basin where they grow.

Global average sea-level rise also reached a record high in 2024, according to the report. The speed at which the seas are rising has also more than doubled in recent years: 4.7 millimeters per year in the past decade, from 2015 to 2024, compared with 2.1 millimeters per year from 1993 to 2002.

The World Meteorological Organization’s work depends on international cooperation among its 101 member countries, including the United States.

“If you look at how weather has progressed since the initiation of the W.M.O. in 1950, you can now see that you can have the forecast on your smartphone,” said Omar Baddour, the W.M.O.’s chief of climate monitoring. “You cannot believe how much collaboration is behind this.”

Data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which recently lost hundreds of staff positions as part of the rapid, large-scale cuts to the federal bureaucracy the Trump administration undertook beginning earlier this year, are included in the W.M.O.’s new report.

In the biggest bullfighting city in the largest bullfighting country in the world, Mexico City lawmakers overwhelmingly voted on Tuesday to ban traditional bullfighting — a move that was supported by Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, but was fiercely opposed by backers of the centuries-old custom.

The legislation, approved by a 61-1 vote, prohibits the injuring or killing of bulls for sport, in or outside of the arenas. It will allow for what proponents call “bullfighting without violence,” in which rules determine how long a bull can be in the ring and limit bullfighters to using only capes.

“My heart always beats for animal welfare,” said Xochitl Bravo Espinosa, a Mexico City legislator who helped spearhead the effort.

But Ms. Bravo Espinosa said that legislators tried to find a balance in which the bullfights could go on, albeit modified, so that people who made a living off the industry could continue working. She pointed to people who sell gear and food around La Plaza México, the largest bullfighting arena in the world, which opened in 1946 in the heart of the city and seats 42,000 people.

Bullfighting proponents denounced the legislation, protesting outside the Mexico City legislature’s building on Tuesday morning.

“This is just the beginning of a fight for our bullfighting,” four bullfighting groups said in a joint statement later in the day.

Raúl Pérez Johnston, a lawyer for Tauromaquia Mexicana, a national bullfighting organization, said in an interview that there were a number of remaining questions about the implementation of the law, which is expected to go into effect in the coming days, and that the group planned to challenge it legally.

In a statement leading up to Tuesday’s vote, La Plaza México said that the proposal to alter bullfighting was “a clear threat against one of the most deeply rooted cultural traditions in our country.” It said the changes “completely distort the essence and go against the heart and origins of this tradition.”

Bullfighting was at the center of a major legal fight over its return to Mexico City just last year. A human rights group successfully convinced a federal judge in 2022 to approve a suspension of bullfights at La Plaza México. But arena officials appealed the decision, and Mexico’s Supreme Court revoked the suspension, paving the way for bullfights to return with much fanfare in January 2024.

Bullfighting, spread by Spain throughout its colonies in Latin America in the 1500s, has faced a mounting, existential crisis over the years.

Despite a steady decline over the decades because of prohibitions and deepening opposition, the practice continues in at least five other countries beside Spain and Mexico: France, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, where a ban doesn’t begin until 2027.

Mexico’s first recorded bullfight was in 1526, and over 300 bullfighting plazas remain. But since 2013, five of Mexico’s 31 states have prohibited bullfights.

The battle over bullfighting has come to symbolize a larger culture war between tradition and more modern views on animal cruelty.

According to Mexico City’s legislature, 168 bulls and steers were killed at La Plaza México in 2019. Proponents of the tradition have argued that represents a very small percentage of all bulls born in Mexico and that the bullfighting industry creates tens of thousands of jobs in the country.

The new legislation decreed that bullfighters will only be allowed to use the traditional large cape and the smaller red one to lure the bulls. It also determined that individual bull fights last only 15 minutes, with only six such bull fights per event.

Mayor Clara Brugada of Mexico City, who proposed the violence-free option, welcomed Tuesday’s vote with “great happiness.” In recent days, Ms. Sheinbaum said she, too, was in favor of the violence-free bullfights and called them “a very important step.”

Some animal rights groups also applauded the legislation — but argued it hadn’t gone far enough.

“Bloodless bullfighting is just the beginning,” said Animal Heroes, an organization that started a “Mexico Without Bullfighting” campaign six years ago. “We will continue fighting until we achieve its total abolition.”

Ms. Bravo Espinosa, the legislator, said that within seven months, the city government will issue the new bullfighting regulations, with input from all sides, on exactly how the new bull events can be held.

Canada has made a 6 billion Canadian dollar ($4.2 billion) deal with Australia to develop a cutting-edge radar for the Arctic that can detect hypersonic missiles and other threats over the curvature of the earth, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Carney also announced hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending to carry out year-round military exercises in the Arctic and to build up vital infrastructure for the Indigenous communities that make up most of the population there.

The new Canadian funding and operational plans come amid a crisis in the U.S.-Canada relationship as a result of President Trump’s continued threats to crush the Canadian economy through tariffs and to annex it to the United States.

Mr. Trump has also expressed an interest in annexing Greenland, part of a broader play for dominance in the Arctic, where Russia and China are also flexing their muscle as the region emerges as a new frontier for global competition.

Mr. Carney’s announcement Tuesday signaled Canada’s renewed interest in asserting its sovereignty over its immense Arctic territory, amid intensifying and shifting geopolitical pressures that raise doubts about his country’s core defense alliance with the United States.

“Canada is, and forever will be, an Arctic nation,” Mr. Carney said during a four-hour stop in Iqaluit, near the Arctic Circle, the capital of the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, on his way back to Ottawa from a quick visit to Europe.

“We are strong, united and sovereign.”

The new radar, which Australia has developed, is known as over-the-horizon-radar technology, and is expected to be delivered by 2029, said a senior Canadian official who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.

It will be deployed under NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the agreement between Canada and the United States to jointly manage and defend the skies over the two countries. The command was established in the early 1980s, when the prospect of Soviet missiles and bombers crossing the Arctic was considered the gravest threat to North America.

The decision to opt for Australia as a provider for the advanced radar technology was supported by the U.S. military, the senior Canadian official said, highlighting that, despite the now-rocky relationship between Canada and the United States, military cooperation has continued.

Developing military technology and maintaining personnel in the Arctic is a major challenge because of the extreme weather conditions. Conventional equipment does not work properly in Arctic conditions, and maintaining bases that can be staffed the entire year is a challenge because access to the area is limited.

Advancing Arctic defense has been a longstanding demand of Canada by the United States. Canada, which is also a member of NATO, has committed to spending more toward its overall defense budget to reach the threshold of 2 percent of its economic output — the NATO target for all member nations.

But as Canada tries to boost its military spending, it faces new challenges over the procurement of equipment.

Mr. Trump said last week that he would not allow Canada to use icebreakers that the United States has ordered unless it became the 51st U.S. state.

“If you’re a state, you can be part of the deal, but if you’re separate country, you’ve got to get your own icebreakers,” Mr. Trump said. That led to calls in Canada to cancel an order for F-35 aircraft from the United States.

Mr. Carney also announced on Tuesday that Canada had set aside 420 million Canadian dollars to carry out three to four new military exercises in different places in the Arctic, in order to enable it to maintain personnel there throughout the year.

He also said that the federal government would spend 253 million Canadian dollars to improve infrastructure for the local people, who are mostly Inuit. Nunavut, with a land area nearly the size of Mexico, has a population of about 37,000.

The parents of Sudiksha Konanki, the 20-year-old college student who went missing during a spring break trip to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, said they had come to terms with the possibility she had drowned, and asked for privacy to mourn her, according to officials and a statement to the media on Tuesday.

Their sorrowful statement came more than a week after her disappearance on March 6 grabbed headlines around the world, and led to repeated questioning of the last person seen with her.

“Sudiksha’s family has expressed their belief that she drowned,” the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia said in a statement on Tuesday. “While a final decision to make such a declaration rests with authorities in the Dominican Republic, we will support the Konanki family in every way possible” while continuing to review the evidence, the office said.

In a tearful Fox 5 DC video shared online, Ms. Konanki’s father said that they had accepted “that our daughter has drowned” and that this conclusion was “incredibly difficult for us to process.” Her mother sobbed as he read the statement. They also asked for “time and privacy to focus on healing” and their family, NBC4 Washington reported.

Ms. Konanki, a University of Pittsburgh student from Loudoun County was last seen nearly two weeks ago. She was spotted in the early morning hours of March 6 at a beach in Punta Cana with an unnamed friend who was “under investigation,” according to the authorities in the Dominican Republic.

The man, who was not named by The New York Times because he had not been charged with a crime, was present at a court hearing in the Dominican city of Higüey on Tuesday, but the outcome of the proceeding had not yet been disclosed by the authorities.

During the proceeding, the judge granted the man’s request to be able to move about freely and without police supervision.

Ms. Konanki stayed at the Hotel Riu Republica in Punta Cana with five friends after arriving in the Dominican Republic on March 3, the police said. Her disappearance sparked a massive search in the Caribbean nation, which is heavily dependent on foreign tourism.

When the United States Embassy in the Dominican Republic alerted the national police that Ms. Konanki had disappeared, officials began an exhaustive search of the beach and the surrounding area, using drones, helicopters, divers, boats, police dogs and other resources, the authorities said.

More than 300 agents have been searching for Ms. Konanki, the police said. The F.B.I. has been assisting in the investigation, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office.

Hogla Enecia Pérez contributed reporting from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.