A former Colorado sheriff’s deputy was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday in the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old man who called 911 for help as he was experiencing a mental health crisis on a dark mountain road in 2022.

In February, a jury found the former deputy, Andrew Buen, guilty of criminally negligent homicide after declining to convict him on the more serious charge of second-degree murder in the killing of Andrew Glass.

The case drew scrutiny of how the authorities handle crisis intervention, prompted changes to how officers are trained to handle similar situations and resulted in a $19 million settlement for Mr. Glass’s parents.

Before the sentence was handed down, Mr. Buen, a former Clear Creek County sheriff’s deputy, addressed the judge and members of Mr. Glass’s family.

“I wish I could take it all back, and it’s something I think about over and over,” he said through tears. “It’s my mistake that I took the life of Christian and I didn’t recognize that at the time, and it’s something I will always have to live with.”

“Part of the reason I wanted to get into law enforcement,” he added, “was to change the negative view of law enforcement. But my actions did the opposite. I will never forget that I let so many people down.”

Last year, Mr. Buen was found guilty of reckless endangerment in connection with the shooting, but the jury could not reach a verdict on a second-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 48 years in prison. That set up a second trial, which lasted two weeks in February.

Judge Catherine J. Cheroutes of Colorado’s Fifth Judicial District Court sentenced Mr. Buen to serve 120 days for the reckless endangerment charge concurrently with his three-year sentence for criminally negligent homicide.

“I think this was about power. It wasn’t a mistake,” Judge Cheroutes said before sentencing Mr. Buen. “It was about ‘You need to listen to me, because I’m in charge.’”

In imposing the maximum three-year sentence on the criminally negligent homicide charge, the judge said: “Mr. Buen doesn’t need rehabilitation. He’s not going to be a law enforcement officer again. He’s not going to have a gun again.”

Mr. Glass called 911 on the night of June 10, 2022, when his Honda Pilot became stuck on an embankment near Silver Plume, Colo., a former silver mining camp about 45 miles west of Denver.

He had become stuck while attempting a three-point turn and had panicked, his father told The New York Times after Mr. Buen was convicted in February. Mr. Glass told a dispatcher that his S.U.V. was stuck in a “trap,” that he was coming out of a depression, that he feared “skinwalkers” and that he needed help.

Officers from five law enforcement agencies responded.

Over the course of a little over an hour, they negotiated with Mr. Glass to get out of his vehicle and drop the knife he had in his possession. At one point, according to body camera footage of the episode, he turned to the closed window, cupping his hands in a heart-shaped gesture at the officers.

At other times, he kept his hands on the steering wheel but did not open the door or window, unlock the vehicle or get out, as the officers had requested. When he did not follow those orders, officers used a stun gun and fired beanbag rounds at him, according to the body camera footage.

Prosecutors said that Mr. Buen broke the front passenger-side window with a baton. Mr. Glass then swung an arm at the broken window, and Mr. Buen shot Mr. Glass five times. Mr. Glass was pronounced dead at the scene.

Lawyers for Mr. Glass’s family have said that the officers needlessly escalated the situation and used unnecessarily aggressive tactics during the encounter.

Mr. Buen returned to work with the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office after the shooting but was fired in November 2022 after an indictment against him was made public.

Just before sentencing Mr. Buen, Judge Cheroutes noted that when someone kills a police officer, the sentence is typically “extreme and uncompromising.”

“It’s really kind of amazing to me how Mr. Buen, as soon as you put a uniform on him and give him a gun, it changes everything,” she said.

Victor Mather, Rebecca Halleck and William Lamb contributed reporting.

Mehul Choksi, a wealthy diamond dealer whom India has sought in connection with a fraud case involving one of India’s largest state-run banks, has been arrested in Belgium, his lawyer said on Monday.

Mr. Choksi, 65, is wanted on charges relating to an attempt to defraud the publicly owned Punjab National Bank of nearly $1.8 billion in a case that caused a national scandal when it became public in 2018.

Mr. Choksi left India shortly before the authorities there went public with the accusations against him that year. He has been living in the Caribbean and in Belgium since then, according to the Indian news media.

Police officers in the Belgian city of Antwerp, a center of the global diamond trade, arrested Mr. Choksi on Saturday, according to the Belgian public prosecutor’s office, which said it had requested the arrest.

The Belgian authorities did not immediately provide details of the circumstances that led to Mr. Choksi’s arrest, but his lawyer, Vijay Aggarwal, said in an interview that India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, the main government investigative agency, had asked for Mr. Choksi’s extradition.

Mr. Aggarwal said that he would seek his client’s immediate release, arguing that he was in ill health and undergoing treatment for cancer.

“He is not a flight risk,” Mr. Aggarwal told a news conference in Delhi. “His medical condition is very precarious.”

Mr. Aggarwal has denied accusations of wrongdoing in the case. Since leaving India, he has also spent time in Dominica and Antigua, two countries in the Caribbean, according to the Indian news media.

Mr. Choksi’s nephew Nirav Modi, once one of India’s most prominent high-end jewelers, was arrested in London in 2019 in connection with the bank fraud. Mr. Modi, who has also denied wrongdoing, had fled India weeks before officials there accused him, Mr. Choksi and others in the fraud case. Mr. Modi has fought Indian efforts to have him extradited, and remains jailed in Britain.

The case against Mr. Choksi and Mr. Modi reinforced a perception in India that taxpayer-owned banks were financing the lavish lifestyles of a rising elite. Attempts to bring the two to justice have captivated the Indian public.

Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from Brussels and Mike Ives from Seoul, South Korea.

As he finished lunch in the private dining room outside the Oval Office on April 1, President Trump floated an astounding proposal: What if the government simply canceled every dollar of the nearly $9 billion promised to Harvard University?

The administration’s campaign to expunge “woke” ideology from college campuses had already forced Columbia University to strike a deal. Now, the White House was eyeing the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.

“What if we never pay them?” Mr. Trump casually asked, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

The moment underscored the aggressive, ad hoc approach continuing to shape one of the new administration’s most consequential policies.

Mr. Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.

Their effort was energized by the campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, demonstrations during which Jewish students were sometimes harassed. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump opened the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is scrutinizing leading universities for potential civil rights violations and serving as an entry point to pressure schools to reassess their policies.

It is backed by the influence of Stephen Miller, who is Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and the architect of much of the president’s domestic agenda.

The opaque process is upending campuses nationwide, leaving elite institutions, long accustomed to operating with relative freedom from Washington, reeling from a blunt-force political attack that is at the leading edge of a bigger cultural battle.

The task force includes about 20 administration officials, most of whom the government has not publicly identified, citing potential security risks. They meet each week inside a rotating list of federal agency headquarters in Washington to discuss reports of discrimination on college campuses, review grants to universities and write up discoveries and recommendations for Mr. Trump.

On a parallel track, a few powerful aides in the West Wing, including Mr. Miller, have separately moved to stymie funding for major institutions without formally going through the task force.

These aides have spoken privately of toppling a high-profile university to signal their seriousness, said two people familiar with the conversations. And they have already partially suspended research funding for more than twice as many schools as has the task force, according to those familiar with their work.

This account of the inner workings of the higher education pressure campaign is based on interviews with more than two dozen senior administration officials, university leaders and outside advisers for both sides. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations or because they feared retribution against their campuses.

The White House scored an early win with Columbia’s capitulation last month to a list of demands that included tightening disciplinary policies and installing new oversight of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department.

Since then, the Trump administration expanded its focus to six more of the nation’s most exclusive universities, including Harvard.

By the time Mr. Trump privately discussed stopping all payments to Harvard, the task force had opened a funding review. The administration soon demanded that the university impose bans on masking, cease admission policies based on race and “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces immigration policies. If not, Harvard risks losing public funds, among other penalties.

Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, has said nothing publicly about the government’s demands but wrote in a recent open letter that the university would engage with task force members “to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism.”

The scope of the administration’s campaign is poised to widen. The Education Department has warned 60 universities that they could face repercussions from pending investigations into accusations of antisemitism.

The push comes as public confidence in higher education has plummeted in the past decade, according to a Gallup poll in July. The decline was driven mostly by concerns of colleges pushing political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and the costs, the survey showed.

Still, university leaders have been stunned by the swift assault, with no clear sense of how the Trump administration chooses its targets, on what basis it is formulating penalties, or how to push back. Many see the effort as a widespread attack on academic freedom aimed at crushing the influence of higher education.

“I’ve never seen this degree of government intrusion, encroachment into academic decision-making — nothing like this,” said Lee C. Bollinger, who spent 21 years as Columbia’s president and more than five years leading the University of Michigan.

For their part, Trump administration officials and their allies say they are trying to hold accountable a system that each year receives about $60 billion in federal research funds while educating about 15 million undergraduates.

“We’re not looking to just file lawsuits — we want to compel a cultural change in how Jewish Americans are treated on college campuses,” Attorney General Pam Bondi, a member of the task force, said in an interview.

But the effort has gone beyond addressing antisemitism, with schools targeted for diversity programs and supporting transgender athletes. In the view of some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers and key donors, leftists have seized control of America’s most powerful institutions, including pillars of higher education, and wresting back power is key to the future of Western civilization.

“The universities seem all powerful and they have acted as if they were all powerful, and we’re finally revealing that we can hit that where it hurts,” Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist who has championed the strategy, said in an interview.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Trump looked out from his rally stages and described a nation he viewed as rampant with discrimination against conservatives.

And for him, nowhere was political injustice as pervasive as on college campuses run by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”

Weeks after opening his third presidential bid, Mr. Trump had announced a “free speech policy initiative,” promising to strip federal research dollars and student loan support from universities involved in what he generalized as “censorship activities or election interferences.”

Six months later, he complained about “racial discrimination” in higher education, suggesting universities were increasingly hostile to white students. He vowed to open civil rights investigations into schools that promoted diversity, and he doubled down on those threats when the Supreme Court rejected affirmative action in college admissions.

At the same time, Mr. Miller, the longtime Trump adviser, was working on similar issues at America First Legal, the nonprofit he started during the Biden administration. The group has sued New York University and Northwestern University, accusing them of discriminating against white men.

Mr. Trump turned more forcefully to combating antisemitism as a political rallying cry after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants led an attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel in what was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. War in Gaza followed, and so did months of protests, particularly among pro-Palestinian students on college campuses. Thousands were arrested as they occupied presidents’ offices, harassed Jewish students, erected makeshift encampments and disrupted graduation ceremonies.

From the campaign trail, Mr. Trump cast the protests in personal terms, claiming that “raging lunatics” were demonstrating on campuses to distract from immigration issues central to his campaign.

“To every college president,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Waukesha, Wis., “vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”

The task force to combat antisemitism was announced on Feb. 1, with the stated goal to “eradicate antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” The exact metrics to measure that progress remain unclear.

The administration has declined to identify all members of the group, but its titular head is Leo Terrell, the senior counsel in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. A fixture on social media and Fox News’s “Hannity” show, Mr. Terrell is a Trump favorite.

The public face of the task force has largely been Linda McMahon, the education secretary. Other identified members include Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the General Services Administration, and Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel at the health department.

Coordinated through the Justice Department’s civil rights division, the task force also includes officials from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission is investigating “dozens” of antisemitism complaints on college campuses that could become part of the task force’s investigation, according to two task force members. The group also includes data specialists, civil rights lawyers and former academics in the government.

In February, task force members announced a special focus on 10 universities: Columbia; George Washington University; Harvard; Johns Hopkins University; N.Y.U.; Northwestern; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California.

The task force said it planned to visit each school and hold meetings with administrators, students, local law enforcement officials and community members.

By going after Columbia and Harvard early, the task force set the tone.

The goal, one senior administration official said, was to make examples of elite schools to intimidate other universities.

The White House also zeroed in on another five schools — Brown University, Cornell University, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, according to people familiar with the process.

All have had millions in federal funding suspended, threatening projects, laboratories and jobs, and upending a multigenerational pact between the government and universities. Since around World War II, colleges have been at the heart of the American research system.

The amount of research funding that has been targeted at each university has varied widely, and there have been few indications of how officials are landing on specific dollar amounts.

One task force member said the figures were determined as part of the group’s deliberations, which weighed the volume of grants and contracts promised to a school, the disparities in disciplinary policies, and the institution’s willingness to adopt changes and progress toward those goals.

Ultimately, the group recommends to Mr. Trump whether the government should cut funding, as it did before canceling contracts with Columbia last month, according to people familiar with the process.

In that case, the task force notified the school on March 3 that it was reviewing grants. Four days later, on March 7, it cited Columbia’s “continued failure to end the persistent harassment of Jewish students” and canceled $400 million in contracts and grants.

Ms. McMahon delivered the news in person that day to Katrina Armstrong, who has since left her post as Columbia’s interim president. Soon after, Ms. McMahon said, leaders of schools such as Harvard and Yale scheduled meetings with her.

“They wanted to make sure we knew they were reviewing their policies,” Ms. McMahon said in an interview. “The presidents that I’ve spoken to have been very cordial, but very sincere in their effort to make sure that they were doing everything that they needed on their campus to protect students.”

A Scramble to Respond

Some universities got wind that their institutions were under scrutiny only when stop-work orders for federally funded research trickled in. On one campus, a faculty member heard from a government program officer that a cut to research money was imminent — a warning that sent campus leaders scrambling.

J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s president, said last month that the university learned “through various news outlets” that the Trump administration was suspending about $175 million for research projects. Brown’s provost sent a memo about “troubling rumors” shortly before White House officials said, with little fanfare, that the administration planned to stop $510 million in funding.

After The Daily Caller, a conservative media outlet, reported that $210 million in research funding to Princeton was suspended, the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, wrote in a campus email that “the full rationale for this action is not yet clear.” When The New York Times asked the White House for comment, a spokeswoman replied with a link to a Daily Caller reporter’s social media post and only three words: “This is accurate.”

Some school administrators have said that murkiness has complicated considerations of court challenges.

They are left feeling in the dark, one university official said.

Mr. Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic last month that the Trump administration’s moves against Columbia were creating “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.”

“There is a pattern here of intrusions in academic freedom of strong universities that should be of concern to every American,” he said in an interview on “The Daily,” a podcast from The Times.

In the scramble for self-defense, some university leaders have reached out to Jewish activists to push back on what they view as the administration’s overly broad definition of antisemitism.

Other schools have focused on outreach to Mr. Trump through his allies. Harvard hired as a lobbyist Brian Ballard, a former Trump campaign finance chairman whose firm once employed Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, and Ms. Bondi, the attorney general. Dartmouth installed a former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee as the college’s top lawyer.

But it is unclear how much these connections will help. The key staff members on the issue inside the West Wing are Mr. Miller; Vince Haley, the head of the domestic policy council; and May Mailman, senior policy strategist — all three of whom are seen as hard-line culture warriors resistant to lobbying.

Seeking Generational Change

In the long run, the goal of Mr. Trump and his allies is to permanently disrupt the elite world of higher education.

“We want to set them back a generation or two,” Mr. Rufo said.

The administration’s zeal has flummoxed even some close Trump allies concerned that the pressure campaign could set a troubling precedent for future administrations that, for example, decide to “eradicate” sexism from college campuses or bigots from the faculty. Who gets to decide which people fall into what category and when?

Inside the White House, such worries are dismissed. That kind of thinking held back the first Trump administration, officials said. They are not concerned about what the political left might do in the future, they said, but instead are focused on setting in motion long-term change.

It has been a chaotic few weeks in geopolitics.

At the beginning of the month, President Trump announced tariffs that threw the global economy into turmoil. Investors panicked, stock markets plunged, and analysts predicted an imminent recession.

Mr. Trump insisted that he would not change course, even as trillions of dollars in investments vaporized. It was only when the markets for U.S. government bonds began to show signs of distress that he recently issued a partial, temporary reprieve.

Although global markets became somewhat calmer after Mr. Trump stepped back from some of his tariffs, his apparent willingness to provoke severe distress in the stock market raises a crucial question: When governments make unpopular or ill-advised decisions, what can force them to back down?

The benefits of soft limits over hard ones

In healthy democracies, and even in many stable autocracies, leaders usually come under soft pressure to moderate their policies. They’re influenced not just by elections, but also by warnings from advisers, allies and powerful constituencies like business owners.

“We think of accountability as something that happens at the ballot box, or in a courtroom,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a Columbia University political scientist. “We vote leaders out of office, or we bring charges against them.”

But in fact, she said, leaders are more often kept in check by other, less formal types of pressure and limits, such as advisers who threaten to resign if an ill-conceived policy continues, or fellow lawmakers who warn of electoral consequences.

But if leaders amass enough power, they can ignore that soft pressure and push through unpopular policies — even if they are catastrophically damaging. In those cases, they may only respond to tougher forms of pressure, like impeachment, mass uprisings or upheaval in the bond markets.

The recent histories of countries like Turkey, India and, to some extent, Britain, offer lessons in how this phenomenon plays out.

When leaders respond quickly to hard limits

In 2022, Liz Truss, Britain’s newly appointed prime minister, announced a plan for sweeping tax cuts financed by government borrowing. Markets reacted very badly: Stocks, the British currency and demand for British government bonds all plummeted.

(A quick primer on bonds: When governments, companies or other institutions sell bonds, they are borrowing money from investors. So bonds are basically I.O.U.’s.)

Leaders of nations tend to be especially sensitive to turmoil in the market for government bonds, because they use bonds to finance their operations.

Faced with a bond market meltdown, Ms. Truss, like Mr. Trump, was forced to reverse course within days, and she resigned two months later. Under Britain’s parliamentary system, Ms. Truss’s fellow lawmakers had an easier path to pressure her to step down as her party’s leader. Mr. Trump, by contrast, isn’t under the same constraints.

Soft limits, soft landing

In the past, softer forms of pressure than bond market crises have often been enough to restrain American presidents.

In 1973, for example, the “Saturday Night Massacre” of resignations from President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department provoked a surge in public support for impeachment, contributing to the chain reaction of public disapproval that eventually led to Mr. Nixon’s resignation from office less than a year later.

In subsequent years, just the threat of mass resignations was often enough. “In a normal presidential administration, threats to resign might happen, but actual resignations in protest are very rare,” said Ms. Saunders of Columbia. “Far more common — yet mostly hidden until reported later in the press or in history books — are the threats to resign that never actually happen.”

In 2004, for example, President George W. Bush agreed to change parts of his surveillance policy after senior Justice Department officials, including the attorney general and the director of the F.B.I., threatened to resign.

But to work as a constraint, such resignations must have the potential to impose costs, such as damage to the president’s chances of re-election, or limits to a policy agenda.

That does not seem to be true for Mr. Trump, because these resignations also remove internal critics who might act as roadblocks to his policies, and cost him little support. The lesson Mr. Trump and his inner circle appear to have taken from his first term is that in his second, he should be more careful to surround himself with people who are loyal to his agenda, and should fire or punish those who are not.

When Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned in protest of the Trump administration’s decision to drop criminal charges against the mayor of New York City, in what she called a political quid pro quo, her actions did not lead to a substantial fall in public support for Mr. Trump. Nor did her resignation impede Mr. Trump’s policy agenda. In fact, it may have smoothed its path. Another attorney dropped the charges against New York’s mayor, who remains in office.

For Mr. Trump, resignations “are an upside,” Ms. Saunders said. “They are part of the point.”

Hard limits after harder consequences

Insulation from most forms of pressure is more typical of semi-democratic “hybrid” systems, in which leaders often manage to amass so much power that they are no longer sensitive to soft limits — or even to many harder ones. If leaders are unmoved by dissent or public pressure, they may stick to damaging policies long past the point of disaster.

In Turkey at the beginning of this decade, for example, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pursued an unorthodox policy of cutting interest rates in the face of high inflation, the opposite of mainstream economic advice. He refused to change course even as inflation rates climbed to 80 percent and the cost of living soared. It was only after the 2023 election, in which he did worse than expected and had to go to a runoff against the opposition candidate, that he eventually changed course, installing a respected finance minister and a new head of the central bank to pursue a more traditional macroeconomic policy.

“I think Erdogan realized the extent to which economic grievances may have posed a threat to his re-election even on a playing field heavily tipped in his favor,” said Lisel Hintz, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies Turkish politics. But it was too late to reverse much of the damage. Turkey is still struggling with inflation, high government borrowing costs and a cost of living crisis.

The timing of elections can also blunt their effectiveness as a check. A leader years away from re-election may feel less pressure to keep voters happy in the short term. In India in 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a sudden policy of “demonetization,” in which he effectively invalidated the country’s paper currency overnight, without warning.

The consequences were severe, including a cash shortage so acute that it drove some citizens to suicide, and the policy failed to achieve its stated goal of punishing criminals and tax evaders. But by the time India’s next national election arrived in 2019, the pain of the crisis had faded, and Mr. Modi’s party won handily.

Sometimes leaders refuse to change course for so long that they encounter one of the ultimate hard limits: being forced from office by a mass uprising. In Sri Lanka in 2021, the government banned chemical fertilizers, one of many policies imposed in an effort to shore up dwindling foreign currency reserves caused by years of economic mismanagement. The government faced a relatively weak opposition, and refused to lift the ban despite an outcry from farmers. “Gotabaya Rajapaksa was leading the administration at the time, and he had appointed his brothers and his nephew to his cabinet,” my New York Times colleague Emily Schmall, who covered the crisis, explained at the time. “He didn’t take a lot of counsel from outside his family.”

By the time Mr. Rajapaksa reversed the policy seven months later, it was too late. Cratering crop yields contributed to an economic crisis and high inflation. The government struggled to borrow money, and imports became scarce, causing shortages of fuel and food that brought mass protests to the streets.

Soon, it was all over. Protesters overran government buildings, and Mr. Rajapaksa, whose family had held power for most of the previous two decades, submitted his resignation in 2022.

For Mr. Trump, the last few weeks have revealed that his tolerance for risk and chaos remain high, leaving Americans uncertain about the future. And that could be costly. As Diane Swonk, the chief economist of KPMG, told my colleague Talmon Joseph Smith, “uncertainty is its own tax on the economy.”