A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station at 1:35 a.m. Eastern time, paving the way for Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — two NASA astronauts who have remained in space for months longer than planned — to finally return home.

The Crew-10 mission, an international team of four astronauts from the U.S., Japan and Russia, joined Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore aboard the outpost in the early hours of Sunday. The crews will transfer duties before Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore return to Earth, along with two colleagues.

It has been a long journey for the pair, who initially arrived at the International Space Station last June on what was meant to be a brief, dayslong test flight of a new Boeing Starliner spacecraft. Instead, after malfunctions in the capsule, NASA scientists opted to leave the astronauts at the space station and bring back the Starliner empty.

Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore have lived on the space station for nine months, awaiting new crew members to relieve them of their duties so that operations can run smoothly. The capsule’s trip was due to launch in February but was delayed until this month.

Nine months is not an unusually long stay in space — many astronauts on the space station live there for months, and some have even lived there for more than a year. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore have used the time to conduct experiments, many exploring what the absence of gravity does to a body.

The pair’s unexpectedly long stay in orbit has intrigued space nerds, hobbyists and members of the public alike, fascinated by their fate. Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore have embraced their circumstances, broadcasting regularly from the station and speaking fondly about their layover in space.

“It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,” Ms. Williams told “The Daily” last week.

After the crews conduct handover duties, the pair will begin their journey back to Earth, possibly as early as Wednesday morning.

Greenpeace is among the most well-known environmental organizations in the world, the result of more than 50 years of headline-grabbing protest tactics.

Its activists have confronted whaling ships on the high seas. They’ve hung banners from the Eiffel Tower. They’ve occupied oil rigs. A (fictional) activist even sailed with Greenpeace in an episode of “Seinfeld,” in hopes of capturing Elaine’s heart.

Now, Greenpeace’s very existence is under threat: A lawsuit seeks at least $300 million in damages. Greenpeace has said such a loss in court could force it to shut down its American offices. In the coming days, a jury is expected to render its verdict.

The lawsuit is over Greenpeace’s role in protests a decade ago against a pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. The pipeline’s owner, Energy Transfer, says Greenpeace enabled illegal attacks on the project and led a “vast, malicious publicity campaign” that cost the company money.

Greenpeace says that it played only a minor, peaceful role in the Indigenous-led protest, and that the lawsuit’s real aim is to limit free speech not just at the organization, but also across America, by raising the specter of expensive court fights.

The suit comes at a time of immense challenges for the entire environmental movement. Climate change is making storms, floods and wildfires more frequent and more dangerous. The Trump administration has commenced a historic effort to overturn decades of environmental protections. Many of the movement’s most significant achievements over the past half-century are at risk.

And in recent years the potential costs of protest have already risen.

The International Center for Not-for-Profit Law has tracked a wave of bills proposed since 2017 that toughen penalties against protesters. Many became law in the wake of the demonstrations against the pipeline at the center of the Greenpeace case (the Dakota Access Pipeline) and also the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose to prominence after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 by a police officer in Minnesota. More recently, the Trump administration has moved to deport international students who protested the war in Gaza.

Sushma Raman, interim executive director of Greenpeace USA, has called the trial in North Dakota “a critical test of the future of the First Amendment.”

Energy Transfer, one of the biggest pipeline companies in the country, has said that the lawsuit is over illegal conduct, not free speech. “It is about them not following the law,” the company said in a statement.

Founded in Vancouver in 1971, Greenpeace was hugely successful early on at what is now called “branding,” with its catchy name and daredevil stunts. But it has also faced major challenges: infighting, missteps, legal battles and questions about how to widen its base and remain relevant as it became an institution.

The larger environmental movement has grown, but also has struggled to gain attention in an increasingly fractured media landscape and as it has pivoted to the issue of climate change, which can be less tangible than previous targets of activism, like say opposing logging or oil-drilling in specific places.

“What they made their name on was the media spectacle, especially the ability to conduct a high-profile action that requires incredible tactical organization,” said Frank Zelko, a history professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and the author of “Make It a Green Peace! The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism.” That became “less efficacious” over time, he said, as competition for eyeballs grew and spectacular images, whether real or not, abound.

Greenpeace was founded as an offshoot of the Sierra Club based on the principles of ecology and anti-militarism. But pulling off daring stunts in pursuit of those principles, while also operating as a worldwide professional network, has always been a delicate balancing act.

After friction and fights for control of the organization in the late 1970s, Greenpeace International was established in the Netherlands as the head office, coordinating the activities of independent Greenpeace offices around the world, including Greenpeace USA.

The activities of its American branch are at the center of the lawsuit. Greenpeace International says its role was limited to signing one open letter. Greenpeace International has also countersued Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, seeking to recoup its legal costs under European laws that essentially allow it to challenge the Energy Transfer lawsuit as a form of harassment.

In Greenpeace’s Washington office, the Energy Transfer case has contributed to turbulence in the group’s highest levels.

In early 2023, the organization celebrated the appointment of Ebony Twilley Martin as sole executive director, calling Ms. Twilley Martin the first Black woman to be the sole director of a legacy U.S. environmental nonprofit. But she left that role just 16 months later, a development that two people familiar with the matter said was in part over disagreements about whether to agree to a settlement with Energy Transfer.

Born in ’60s upheaval

Greenpeace was born out of a moment of fear and upheaval, amid the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, acid rain and smog blanketing cities. Rex Weyler, 77, an early member, chronicled the history in his 2004 book “Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World.”

In Vancouver, Mr. Weyler met Bob Hunter, a columnist for The Vancouver Sun, and Dorothy and Irving Stowe, older Quakers who had left the United States in protest over war taxes and weapons testing. They were meeting like-minded people who saw a need for an ecology movement that would employ nonviolent direct action, following the examples of Mohandas K. Gandhi in India and the civil rights movement in the United States.

They would soon become an offshoot of a more traditional environmental group, the Sierra Club, after a disagreement over protest tactics.

Their first campaign was a mission to block U.S. nuclear weapons tests on Amchitka, a volcanic island in Alaska. An idea this group had floated within the Sierra Club — to sail a boat to stop the bomb — had been reported in The Vancouver Sun, though the head office of Sierra Club in San Francisco had not approved that plan.

“The Sierra Club was not amused when they saw this story, because they said, ‘You know, a lot of our members are just tree-huggers, and they don’t care about nuclear disarmament,’” said Robert Stowe, son of Dorothy and Irving and a behavior neurologist. “Had the Sierra Club agreed to do this, Greenpeace could probably never have been founded.”

The name Greenpeace came up during a planning meeting, when Irving Stowe said “peace” at the end of the gathering and another activist, Bill Darnell, replied offhandedly, “Make it a green peace.”

“Greenpeace” was emblazoned on the fishing boat they used. Irving Stowe organized a concert by Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Phil Ochs to raise money for the trip.

The boat set sail in September 1971. The Coast Guard intercepted it, and the vessel never reached Amchitka. But the stunt garnered considerable public attention, a core part of the group’s strategy in the years since.

‘Save the whales’ era

Greenpeace’s next campaign is perhaps its most well known: saving the whales.

The idea came from Paul Spong, who had studied orca whales and argued that the highly intelligent creatures were being hunted to extinction. That led to a copiously documented, dramatic sailing expedition to confront Soviet whaling ships.

A worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling has been in place since 1986. Greenpeace and other groups who worked on the issue have claimed it as a major victory.

The group also tried to stop seal hunting in northern Canada, a controversial move that alienated a large number of residents, including in Indigenous communities. Greenpeace Canada apologized to the Inuit people for the impacts of the campaign in 2014, and the organization said it did not oppose small-scale subsistence hunting.

The ship Rainbow Warrior, a crucial vessel in the anti-whaling campaign, was added to the fleet in 1978. That ship was protesting French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1985 when it was bombed by agents for the French spy agency D.G.S.E., killing Fernando Pereira, a photographer, and igniting international outrage.

France later apologized and was ordered to pay $8 million in damages to Greenpeace, and reached a separate settlement with Mr. Pereira’s family.

A new Rainbow Warrior is now one of three Greenpeace vessels in operation. It is sailing this month in the Marshall Islands to “elevate calls for nuclear and climate justice,” the group said, and to support research on the effects of past nuclear weapons testing.

Growing pains

By the 1990s, Greenpeace’s attention-grabbing environmentalism was capturing the imagination of a new generation of people like Valentina Stackl, 39, who learned of its exploits as a girl in Europe. She worked with Greenpeace USA from 2019 to 2023.

“The idea of Greenpeace ships, and save the whales and hanging off a bridge or something like that was truly magical,” she said. “And on the best days Greenpeace really was like that. Of course, there’s also the slog of the day-to-day that is less sparkly.”

One constant concern was fund-raising: Greenpeace USA is largely funded by individual donations, which can fluctuate. Tax filings show its revenue has been stable in recent years.

The group’s priorities shifted to climate and how to incorporate what is known as “environmental justice,” the fact that pollution and other environmental hazards often disproportionally affect poor and minority areas. The historically mostly white and male-dominated organization had to grapple with how to increasingly collaborate with a diverse range of other groups. And it had to reckon with historical tensions with Indigenous communities over its whaling and sealing campaigns, as well as other missteps.

One of those mistakes occurred in Peru in 2014, when there was an uproar over a Greenpeace action that damaged the Nazca lines, ancient man-made patterns etched in the desert. Activists from Greenpeace Germany entered the restricted area to place a protest message about renewable energy. The Peruvian cultural minister called it an act of “stupidity” that had “co-opted part of the identity of our heritage.”

The organization apologized, and the episode prompted Greenpeace USA to adopt a formal policy on interactions with Indigenous communities, according to Rolf Skar, the group’s campaigns director. In short, Greenpeace would not get involved in struggles led by Indigenous people unless specifically asked to do so.

That policy has come up in this month’s trial in North Dakota. Greenpeace argued that it had offered support in the Dakota Access Pipeline protest only after it was asked to do so by Indigenous leaders, and did not seek any major role in the demonstrations.

On Monday in a courtroom in the small city of Mandan, N.D., jury members are expected to start hearing closing arguments, after which they will consider Greenpeace’s fate.

Struggling to contain a raging measles epidemic in West Texas, public health officials increasingly worry that residents are relying on unproven remedies endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and postponing doctor visits until the illness has worsened.

Hospitals and officials sounded an alarm this week, issuing a notice explaining which measles symptoms warranted immediate medical attention and stressing the importance of timely treatment.

“I’m worried we have kids and parents that are taking all of these other medications and then delaying care,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, where many of the sickest children in this outbreak have been hospitalized.

Some seriously ill children had been given alternative remedies like cod liver oil, she added. “If they’re so, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital a day or two earlier,” she said.

The growing outbreak has spread to nearly 260 people in Texas. So far, 34 patients have been hospitalized, and one child has died. In neighboring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 35 and hospitalized two. Two cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.

Texas health officials believe the true number of cases is far higher. In all, there have been 301 measles cases in the United States this year, the highest number since 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.

In his first public statements about the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy faced intense backlash for minimizing the situation, saying it was “not unusual” and falsely claiming that many people hospitalized were there “mainly for quarantine.”

In the following weeks, Mr. Kennedy altered his approach, offering a muted recommendation of vaccines for people in West Texas while also promoting unproven treatments like cod liver oil, which has vitamin A, and touting “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.

There is no such cure for measles, only medications to help manage the symptoms. Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the infection.

While doctors will sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to help manage severe cases of measles, there is no credible evidence that supplements are effective for treating or preventing measles.

Experts also noted that antibiotics, which fight bacterial infections, may be used to treat secondary infections but do not stop measles itself, which is a virus.

In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the measles outbreak, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the area’s large Mennonite community, where most of the measles cases have been clustered, avoid interacting with the medical system and hold to a long tradition of natural remedies.

In the last few weeks, drugstores in West Texas have struggled to keep bottles of vitamin A pills and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves.

And this week, doctors at Seminole Memorial Hospital, which sits at the center of Gaines County, noticed that the number of patients coming in for measles symptoms suddenly dropped. Those who did show up were sicker than patients seen in previous weeks.

Even while cases in the community increased, Dr. Leila Myrick, a physician at the hospital, said she performed half the number of measles tests, compared with those the week before.

She worried that her patients were instead going less than a mile away from the hospital to a pop-up clinic, where a doctor from a neighboring city had been doling out alternative remedies, like cod liver oil and vitamin C.

The physician, Dr. Ben Edwards, is well known in the area for producing podcasts that often discuss the dangers of vaccines, and for his wellness clinic in Lubbock, which rejects central tenets of medicine, like the idea that germs cause certain diseases.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Kennedy said he had spoken with Dr. Edwards (whom he mistakenly called Dr. Ed Benjamin) and learned “what is working on the ground.”

In an email relayed through an employee, Dr. Edwards confirmed that he had talked to Mr. Kennedy for about 15 minutes in what he described as an “information gathering” phone call. Dr. Edwards declined to speak directly with The New York Times.

In the following days, hundreds of people from the Mennonite community lined up at Dr. Edwards’s makeshift clinic, held behind a local health food store, said Tina Siemens, who helped organize the event.

Mrs. Siemens said people seeking treatment for active measles infections and those who hoped to prevent one were in attendance.

To get enough supplements for the clinic, Dr. Edwards had enlisted one of his patients, a pilot, to fly to Scottsdale, Ariz., and pick up nearly a thousand bottles of vitamin C supplements and cod liver oil, both as a lemon-flavored drink and unflavored soft gels, said an owner of the supplement company, Patrick Sullivan.

“How much do you have in stock, and how quickly could you get it to me?” Mr. Sullivan recalled Dr. Edwards asking.

The treatments were free, Mrs. Siemens said. Members of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine nonprofit that Mr. Kennedy helped found before becoming health secretary, created a donation page online that has raised more than $16,000 to help cover the cost of “essential vitamins, supplements and medicines.”

Measles symptoms often resolve on their own within a few weeks. But in rare cases, the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, to get oxygen into their lungs. There could also be brain swelling, which can cause lasting problems, like blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities. Both complications can be deadly.

During this outbreak, hospitalized children with pneumonia have had to be intubated, Ms. Wells, the Lubbock health director, said. In those circumstances, timely care can mean the difference between life and death.

Unproven remedies have for decades made measles outbreaks more deadly, said Patsy Stinchfield, immediate past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.

She worked as a nurse practitioner at a hospital in Minnesota during a measles outbreak in 1989 that killed several children. Two of them arrived at her hospital in critical condition after their parents had tended to them at home with traditional healing therapies.

“They keep their child at home too long, and they try these home remedies,” she said. “They went straight from the E.R. into the intensive care unit and they died.”