Tropical Cyclone Zelia made landfall on Friday afternoon in northwestern Australia, bringing intense rain and destructive winds to a sparsely populated region of the country that is home to ports and mines critical to the global economy. The authorities ordered residents to stay indoors.

Australian meteorologists said the storm had made landfall at 12:30 p.m. local time 34 miles northeast of Port Hedland, a town of about 15,000 people in the Pilbara region, a desert that is home to some of the world’s largest iron ore mines. The storm was packing winds of 132 miles per hour, equivalent to a Category 4 Atlantic hurricane, according to the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

A tropical cyclone warning was in effect from Wallal Downs to Roebourne, about 150 miles from Port Hedland. Intense rain, flash flooding and wind gusts of up to 100 m.p.h. were expected in the area, said Miriam Bradbury, a meteorologist at Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology.

More damaging winds of up to 180 m.p.h. were forecast closer to the eye of the storm, powerful enough to destroy trees and permanent structures in its path, Ms. Bradbury said in a briefing on Friday morning.

The Australian authorities on Friday ordered residents in Port Hedland and surrounding areas to take shelter, urging them to stay away from doors and windows. They had also closed dozens of schools and roads in the region that could be flooded.

“Port Hedland is expected to avoid the very destructive core of the cyclone,” the Bureau of Meteorology reported as it announced that Zelia had made landfall.

Major ports were bracing for the storm in the Pilbara region, the world’s largest iron ore exporter, providing nearly 40 percent of the global supply. Port Hedland closed on Wednesday, and Dampier Port, used by the mining company Rio Tinto, and the Port of Varanus Island, a processing hub for oil and other fuel, closed on Thursday.

Zelia was likely to lose strength as it moves inland over the weekend, but heavy rain was forecast as it made its way south, Ms. Bradbury said.

Amy McIlquham was 21 when she was asked to go to Gstaad, Switzerland, for a long weekend with her boss.

Ms. McIlquham had joined Harrods, the luxury department store in London, in 1993. A Canadian on a work-abroad program, she was promoted from the shop floor to become a personal assistant to Mohamed al-Fayed, who co-owned the business with his younger brothers, Salah and Ali.

In early 1994, she recalled, she boarded the company’s private jet and flew to Gstaad to work as an assistant to Ali.

Once she got there, however, there was no work to do, she said. She was alone in the chalet with Ali and a housekeeper. Then Ali, who was in his early 50s, took her to a swimming pool. She remembers the black swimsuit and fake pearl necklace she was wearing.

“I just remember him pulling me in, the groping and the pulling in from the waist and my bottom, just grabbing and groping and pulling,” said Ms. McIlquham, now 52, in an interview. She believes it was the weekend of April 30, 1994, because she remembers the Eurovision Song Contest was on TV.

“I was molested, sexually molested, without a doubt. And he was just giggling,” she said.

A spokesman for Ali, who is now 81 and lives in Greenwich, Conn., denied the allegations from Ms. McIlquham and others. “The alleged incidents simply never occurred,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Mr. Fayed is not a perpetrator and will not be scapegoated. He will robustly defend himself against these unsubstantiated claims.”

In September, a BBC documentary revealed how Mohamed al-Fayed, the billionaire former chairman of Harrods, had abused women for decades before he died in 2023. More than 20 women shared accounts of having been raped or sexually assaulted by him, detailing how he used his companies to groom and exploit them. Harrods apologized, describing him as “an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated.”

But in the months since, several female former employees have come forward to allege that his brothers — Salah, who died in 2010, and Ali — also assaulted them, deepening a scandal that once appeared centered on one man.

As the last living brother, Ali could still face possible repercussions as the dark history of the Fayed family and the iconic department store they ran is unearthed. This month, the BBC published the accounts of three women, including Ms. McIlquham, who said that Ali sexually assaulted them while they worked for Harrods in the 1990s.

Ms. McIlquham said that she believes what happened to her in Switzerland took place within a broader system at Fayed-owned companies to exploit women. She said that Ali “operated this system to his advantage.”

In coming forward, Ms. McIlquham and others point a finger not only at Ali but also at the doctors, recruiters, human resource professionals and others who enabled the alleged abuse at the Fayeds’ businesses.

Accounts given to The New York Times by another three women who said that they had been targeted by Mohamed or Salah, together with court filings, signal a pattern of exploitation at Harrods and at the Ritz Paris, a hotel the brothers also owned. Documents, emails and corroborating details from other women provide additional evidence of their allegations.

Harrods, which is now owned by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, said it would not comment on individual cases but “supports the bravery of all survivors in coming forward.”

“Their claims point to the breadth of abuse by Mohamed Fayed and raise serious allegations against his brothers, Salah and Ali Fayed,” a spokesperson for Harrods said.

The women were recruited into positions where they would be vulnerable.

The Fayed brothers, who were born in Egypt, founded a shipping business together and then amassed oil, banking and real estate interests around the world.

They bought the Ritz Paris in 1979 and Harrods in 1985. When Mohamed moved to London in 1974, he added “al-” to his name, though his brothers still went by Fayed. Mohamed later became known for the romance between his son, Dodi, and Diana, Princess of Wales, who both died in a 1997 car crash. Salah and Ali remained lesser-known figures, but their business interests were intertwined.

All four women interviewed by The Times described being recruited into executive training programs that brought them closer to the brothers. Two women said that they had been targeted by more than one brother.

In October 1993, while working as Mohamed’s personal assistant, Ms. McIlquham was sent to Villa Windsor, the Paris mansion where Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson once lived, and which Mohamed had leased. After she went to sleep, she said, Mohamed entered her room with just a towel around his waist, and crawled into her bed.

“The groping, the panting, the touching, him just going in for you, it was awful,” she said. He eventually left when she mentioned her mother. Another Harrods employee, who asked to remain anonymous over privacy concerns, was on the trip with Ms. McIlquham and corroborated the stay at the Villa Windsor, and the date — Oct. 13, 1993 — which she had recorded in her diary.

Ms. McIlquham said that she hadn’t told anyone about the assault by Mohamed or Ali’s groping of her because she assumed that she would be blamed. She needed the job to pay her rent, and she continued working for Harrods until 1996, when she left Britain. “I had to distance myself from what was going on, and get as far away as I could,” she said.

Rachael Louw, now 53, joined Harrods in 1993 before being recruited the following year as a personal assistant to Salah. In the summer of 1994, she was told by a supervisor to accompany Salah to his yacht and was given money for new clothes. She traveled on a Harrods jet with Salah to France before a driver took them to Monaco.

“I thought I would be given files to file, paperwork to put away, maybe I would be making the travel arrangements,” she said. But there was nothing, she said.

Salah instructed her not to talk to the staff and propositioned her sexually multiple times. Each time, she rebuffed him. Then, one night, he climbed into her bed, she said. “He said, ‘I’m lonely, I just want to sleep with you,’” she recounted. “It was the longest night of my life. I just lay there and I couldn’t sleep.”

Afterward, Ms. Louw asked to return to her previous job on the shop floor and tried to move on with her life. But in 1996, she said that Mohamed summoned her to his Park Lane apartment for some paperwork. Once there, Mohamed put his hand up her skirt and groped her, Ms. Louw said.

Like Ms. McIlquham, she did not feel able to speak out at the time. “This was just a part of my life I put into a box and never opened up,” said Ms. Louw, who also spoke about her experiences with Sky News this month.

Other women have shared accounts in recent months of being abused by Salah, including in a November report by the BBC. In a lawsuit filed in London on Jan. 29, a woman, who was granted anonymity by the court, alleged that Salah drugged and raped her while she worked for Harrods and that he coerced her into “terminating a forced pregnancy,” according to court documents. She is suing the company.

The abuse extended to other businesses owned by the Fayeds.

Kristina Svensson, 56, worked at the Ritz Paris from 1998 to 2000 as a personal assistant to Mohamed. She said that senior staff at the Ritz knew that employees were being abused there, an allegation supported by an email seen by The Times.

“We were not hired for real jobs. We were hired to be abused sexually,” she said.

When she first met Mohamed, he forcibly kissed her, she said, shoving his tongue in her mouth. On another occasion when she was alone with him in an office, Ms. Svensson said he shoved open her legs with his knee and then thrust her head into his crotch.

“I was so, so afraid, and I couldn’t get away,” she said.

She felt unable to speak out, she said, because of the threat of losing her job. But eventually, she said, she told a senior executive at the Ritz Paris about the abuse and informed them that she was planning to resign. Days later, she was fired.

Ms. Svensson outlined her allegations against Mohamed in a 2003 letter to a lawyer representing another hotel employee who said she had also experienced sexual assault. In the letter, seen by The Times, she noted that she had reported the sexual abuse to senior staff before leaving the Ritz Paris.

At least one other woman, Pelham Spong, told the Ritz that Mohamed had assaulted her, in an email exchange seen by The Times. Ms. Svensson’s account was included in the BBC documentary last year, and Ms. Spong has previously spoken publicly about her assault.

Ms. Spong, who is American, was 23 and living in Paris when a recruiter asked in 2008 if she would consider a job as an assistant to the Fayeds in Monaco. “I remember thinking — I’m a woman with ambition. I think I’m fairly smart, and this sounds amazing,” Ms. Spong said. In London, she was given a gynecological exam that the company doctor said would remain confidential — a process that many victims of Mohamed also recounted.

She was found to have an infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Afterward, she was sent to Mohamed’s office. “He sat me down, and he said, ‘You saw the doctor. Did you take care of that problem?’” she said. “I was humiliated.”

He offered to send her to business school, pay her rent and give her cash, she said, in exchange for sex. Then, she said, he grabbed her face and forcibly kissed her. On returning to Paris, she reported the assault to the recruiter, who shared the information with executives at the Ritz. Ms. Spong was told that she was no longer needed for the job. Emails between the recruiter and the Ritz Paris, seen by The Times, corroborate her account.

The Ritz Paris said it was conducting an investigation led by outside counsel. “We are alarmed by the recent testimonies and allegations of abuse,” the Ritz said in a statement. “We do not tolerate any form of violence or sexual coercion and would like to express deepest sympathy to the brave women who have come forward.”

The Metropolitan Police in London have received more than 100 allegations against Mohamed al-Fayed since the BBC documentary aired. In November, the police said they were investigating at least five people who may have facilitated the abuse.

Sigrid McCawley, managing partner of Boies Schiller Flexner who is representing Ms. Spong and has represented some of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, emphasized the importance of focusing not only on the abuse, but also on the system in which it occurred.

“What we’ve seen with the Fayeds’ story is just a saga that smacks of these enablers,” she said. “Because we’re seeing this systemic abuse is happening, and this well-oiled machine of all of these very sophisticated individuals that helped him commit these crimes.”

Sarah Hurtes contributed reporting.

At least six people were killed and 25 others injured on Friday in a fire at a construction site for a luxury hotel in Busan, a port city in southeastern South Korea, fire officials said.

Fire officials received the first report around 10:50 a.m. local time of a fire, which apparently broke out in the swimming pool area on the ground floor of the 12-story building, said Hong Moon-sik, the fire chief for Gijang County. Fire officials said the hotel is a Banyan Tree resort.

The fire spread quickly, and dark smoke billowed from the building by the time rescuers arrived, Chief Hong told reporters. The six people who died were found unconscious in the pool area, where insulation material was on fire, creating black fumes that made it hard to evacuate, he said.

The injured people were found throughout the building, which has three basement levels in addition to the 12 stories, Chief Hong said, and emergency workers rescued 14 people from the roof. The fire was under control by 1:30 p.m., fire officials said.

Hundreds of firefighters and more than 120 fire trucks were deployed to the scene, they said.

“The cause of the high number of casualties was that the fire had already spread by the time we arrived on the scene,” Chief Hong said outside the construction site. He added that the cause of the fire was under investigation.

The hotel is owned by the Banyan Group, a Singaporean company. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The hotel was set to open this year, and construction was almost complete.

This is a developing story.

Vice President JD Vance told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that all military and economic options were on the table if Russia did not agree to negotiate in good faith to end the war in Ukraine.

“There are economic tools of leverage, there are, of course, military tools of leverage” available to the United States against President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Vance told The Journal in an interview published late Thursday. Mr. Vance is expected to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Munich on Friday.

Mr. Vance’s comments came after President Trump on Wednesday said that he had begun talks with Mr. Putin to end the war. Mr. Trump also said that it was unlikely that Ukraine would return to its pre-2014 borders, and that future NATO membership for the country was not practical.

Mr. Vance told The Journal that it was too early to talk about specific territorial arrangements or security guarantees for Ukraine. “There are any number of formulations, of configurations, but we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” he said.

Mr. Trump on Wednesday did not mention including Ukraine in the talks, an omission that caused concern among American allies in Europe that Ukraine may be sidelined from these negotiations. A day later, Mr. Trump said that “of course” Ukraine would be involved.

Mr. Zelensky also spoke with Mr. Trump on Wednesday. Mr. Zelensky has said that any agreements without Ukraine would not be acceptable.

“The president is not going to go in this with blinders on,” Mr. Vance told The Journal. “He’s going to say, ‘Everything is on the table, let’s make a deal.’”

Mr. Vance’s comment about military leverage against Russia came a day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the deployment of American troops in Ukraine would not be part of any security guarantee.

Hours after President Trump paved the way for upending the United States’ trade relationship with India with broad “reciprocal” tariffs, he and Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented a united front during a news conference on Thursday at the White House.

Mr. Modi became the latest head of state to seek to placate an increasingly power-flexing Mr. Trump by trying to accommodate his demands — even as Mr. Trump’s promised tariffs hung over the White House meeting. Mr. Modi heaped praise on Mr. Trump, using his motto “Make America Great Again” in English, despite mostly speaking through a translator, and applying the motto to India. “Make India Great Again,” Mr. Modi crowed.

The warm greetings also extended to Elon Musk, the constant Trump companion barreling through the federal government as the head of an initiative to reshape and cut down the federal government: The two had a meeting and photo op. Mr. Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, owns a number of companies, including Starlink, a high-speed internet service, that have sought to make an entry in India.

All the flattery concealed a number of tensions between the two nations, including on two of Mr. Trump’s signature issues, trade and immigration. Mr. Trump hinted at the biggest thorn when he said at the news conference that the United States had a nearly $100 billion trade deficit with India, though he inflated the number — in 2024, the figure was nearly $50 billion.

Just hours earlier, Mr. Trump had directed his advisers to devise new tariff levels for countries around the world that take into account a range of trade barriers and other economic approaches adopted by America’s trading partners. India is among the nations that could face particularly significant consequences from the tariffs.

At the news conference, Mr. Trump said that he had toyed with that idea during his first term, and noted that he could not get India to lower tariffs against the United States then. Now, “we’re just going to say, ‘whatever you charge, we charge,’” Mr. Trump said.

“I think that’s fair for the people of the United States,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think it’s actually fair for India.”

Despite the looming economic punishment, Mr. Modi opened his remarks by saying he was focusing on doubling bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030 and “concluding very soon a mutually beneficial trade agreement” with the United States.

Mr. Modi also said that India and the United States would create a framework for defense cooperation for the next decade and added that the two countries would also collaborate to develop semiconductors, quantum technology and artificial intelligence.

Even on an issue that has infuriated some of his constituents in India, Mr. Modi sought to placate Mr. Trump. At one point, Mr. Modi was asked about a U.S. military plane filled with migrants from India that the United States sent to the Indian state of Punjab last week.

Video posted by a top U.S. border official showed migrants in shackles, and prompted outrage in India.

Mr. Modi made no acknowledgment of that. “We are of the opinion that anybody who enters another country illegally, they have absolutely no right to be in that country,” he said.

Earlier in the afternoon, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Modi in the Oval Office, joined by some of the president’s cabinet secretaries. The two leaders sat in chairs, fielding questions from reporters.

Mr. Modi and Mr. Trump have enjoyed a generally friendly relationship. Mr. Modi welcomed Mr. Trump with an enormous rally during a presidential visit to India during Mr. Trump’s first term.

Before Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi met, the Indian prime minister sat down with Mr. Musk.

Mr. Modi shared photos on Mr. Musk’s social media site, X, that underscored Mr. Musk’s power within the Trump administration: The billionaire sat in front of an American flag next to the prime minister and the Indian flag, the kind of pose usually struck by a head of state and that Mr. Trump himself has assumed in recent weeks. Mr. Musk was accompanied by Shivon Zilis, who is a longtime adviser and the mother to some of his children, as well as three of his children, who appeared to exchange gifts with Mr. Modi.

At the news conference, Mr. Modi said he had known Mr. Musk for some time.

It was Mr. Trump’s fourth visit from a foreign leader in rapid succession in the past few weeks, as he approaches foreign policy with an expansionist mind-set and a firm desire to push other countries to reimburse the United States for its military spending. He had already met with the leaders of Israel, Japan and Jordan.

Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.

Women are being turned away at clinics that provided maternity and reproductive care and cancer and H.I.V. treatment. Doctors and nurses have been placed on leave and told to go home. Across the globe, aid agencies say, decades of female-focused health care work has been “decimated overnight.”

Three weeks into President Trump’s suspension of all foreign aid, and already the impact on millions of women and girls is catastrophic and health care systems are “crumbling,” according to the United Nations and other women-focused global aid agencies.

“You can’t get treatment and you can’t get care because America has decided on a whim that you are not worthy, that is unfathomable,” said Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and chief executive of the Global Health Council. “We are in the fight for everybody’s lives.”

For example, as of Wednesday, about 2.5 million women and girls have been denied contraceptive care, said Dr. Elizabeth Sully, the principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. That number will balloon to 11.7 million by the end of the Trump administration’s 90-day review process for foreign aid.

The Trump administration has frozen nearly all foreign aid pending a review “to identify programs that work and continue them and to identify programs that are not aligned with our national interest,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week during a visit to the Dominican Republic. The United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., through which much of the aid for the women’s groups was distributed, has been essentially gutted and what remains will now be run out of the State Department.

At a panel organized by the United Nations Foundation, an organization that promotes the work of the U.N., representatives from the United Nations Population Fund, the Global Health Council, MSI Reproductive Choices, the Guttmacher Institute, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Universal Access Project at the U.N. Foundation said they had come together to sound the alarm.

They described a chaotic breakdown of operations along the health care supply chain, with decades of trust-building in communities having been decimated overnight.

The State Department did not respond to a request for a comment.

The United States has for the past five decades been a top leader in donations and investments in global health, providing some 40 percent of all donations for global family planning, mostly through U.S.A.I.D., said Dr. Sully.

Mr. Rubio has said that the United States will issue emergency waivers for humanitarian work and that lifesaving aid such as food and medicine are not included in the freeze. But global aid agencies contest that claim, saying that the waivers are nonexistent in the places where programs operate. Staff members who would process them are on leave, and pleas to U.S. officials have not been answered.

“If you are hearing from the U.S. government there is a waiver, that is a lie,” said Ms. Dunn-Georgiou from the Global Health Council. She added that for global health agencies, a top concern is that programs related to family planning and contraceptives could disappear permanently. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment on the waivers.

In the first week of his presidency, Mr. Trump reinstated a longstanding Republican anti-abortion policy that bars federal funding from going to any overseas nongovernmental organization that performs or promotes abortions.

“Already the Trump administration has attacked services and systems that keep millions of people safe and healthy in our country and around the world,” said Caitlin Horrigan, senior director of Global Advocacy for Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Dr. Carole Sekimpi, senior director of MSI Africa, a family planning agency that provides contraception and abortions to women, said fear and anxiety were prevalent with all the programs across Africa that receive aid from the United States closed and their staff members sent home.

She said in her country, Uganda, hundreds of physicians providing H.I.V. care have been told to go home. “Most of these organizations will collapse because they are one hundred percent reliant on aid from U.S.A.,” Dr. Sekimpi said.

The U.N.’s agency focused on women’s reproductive and health rights, UNFPA, said its programs across the world are affected because the United States provides 30 percent of the agency’s administrative costs and 50 percent of its humanitarian aid funding. For the past four years that amounted to $725 million helping provide mental health care to women in Ukraine, women displaced in Chad and maternal care for Afghan women.

Rachel Moynihan, deputy director of UNFPA’s North America office, said the suspension of services and breakdown of trust has jeopardized U.S. investments at the U.N. agency. It also put in peril local government’s investments in their own health care systems, which the U.N had encouraged them to do.