A Florida couple’s trip to the Dominican Republic to attend a wedding turned into days of anxiety after they dropped off their 2-year-old son with relatives in neighboring Haiti and the boy ended up trapped due to the increasing unrest in that country.

After nearly three weeks, the boy, Julien, finally left Haiti and flew back to Florida on Wednesday, where he was reunited with his parents, Philippe-Olivier Armand and his wife, Olivia Turnier.

Their son’s evacuation was part of a growing number of hasty and ad hoc departures from Haiti, which has been ravaged by a wave of gang violence that has turned parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, into a war zone and is closing its main airport .

“It was going to be a 48-hour journey, but it turned into two and a half weeks of uncertainty and stress,” says 36-year-old Mr. Armand, a Haitian businessman who works in the financial and insurance industries and travels between Haiti and his home in Miami. . He said they left Julien in Haiti on March 1.

Julien, along with seven cousins ​​and six other family members, boarded a helicopter Wednesday morning in Port-au-Prince that flew them about 125 miles north to Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city. There they were met by a charter plane from the Florida Department of Emergency Management, which took them to Florida.

The U.S. State Department said Thursday that it has helped 160 Americans leave Haiti since Sunday, some on flights to the United States and others by helicopter to the Dominican Republic.

Haiti’s capital has been consumed by violence since a coalition of gangs launched a coordinated offensive against Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s government in late February, raiding police stations and other government buildings, looting hospitals and banks and attacking private homes.

Mr. Henry, who was unable to return to Port-au-Prince after an official trip and has been staying in Puerto Rico, has agreed to resign once a transitional government is installed. Negotiations over who will be part of that government are proceeding slowly.

As part of an international plan to stabilize Haiti, a mission of 1,000 police officers led by Kenya and approved by the United Nations should be deployed to the Caribbean country after an interim government is installed.

Gangs now control major roads in and out of Port-au-Prince and block access to the seaport, cutting off the supply of food, fuel and water to the city. This week, gang members have attacked more affluent areas, including the suburb of Pétionville, where many families from abroad live.

As of Tuesday, about a thousand Americans had filled out “crisis intake” forms as part of the process to seek a way out of the country, according to the State Department, although officials said evacuations would be dictated by security conditions.

The state of Florida is organizing its own departures, with Governor Ron DeSantis announcing Tuesday that the flight that brought the Armand family from Haiti to Orlando would likely be the first of many.

Mr. Armand said the ordeal began when he and several relatives left their children with relatives in Haiti. “All the parents traveled without their children, and it became a nightmare,” he said.

Relatives, Mr. Armand said, were given last-minute instructions Wednesday morning to go to a sand field in Pétionville, where the helicopter picked them up.

“It was not easy to find a place to land the helicopter,” said Philippe Armand, Julien’s 75-year-old grandfather, who lives in Miami and used WhatsApp to track the journey. “It was quiet, like a covert operation.”

The logistics were organized with the help of a Florida foundation run by Jack Brewer, a former National Football League player.

“It wouldn’t have happened without him,” Mr Armand said.

Americans on flights coordinated by the U.S. government must agree to reimburse the government, although the State Department has said the cost will not exceed the price of a commercial flight between the countries.

Mr. DeSantis said people who traveled on the plane that landed in Florida would not be charged.

With Port-au-Prince airport closed, evacuations have become increasingly dangerous. To reach Cap Haitien you must travel on roads controlled by gangs who regularly kidnap drivers and passengers and demand ransoms.

Many Haitians are calling with greater urgency for the United States to send military reinforcements to Haiti, and some are angry about the focus on evacuating U.S. citizens and diplomatic personnel from other countries.

“Instead of addressing the situation, we see embassies evacuating people,” said Reginald Delva, a Haitian security adviser and former minister of the Haitian government. “It is time to focus on the security situation.”

A political activist in Hong Kong, previously jailed under the sweeping national security law, said he had fled to Britain and would seek asylum there. This made him the second high-profile dissident this month to announce he was going into exile from the area.

The activist, Tony Chung, revealed on Thursday that he had arrived in Britain, and in several social media posting, said he had decided to leave Hong Kong after oppressive restrictions, pressure to act as an informant and severe stress following his release from prison in June.

Chung, 22, was sentenced to three years and seven months in prison in 2021 after becoming an outspoken supporter of Hong Kong’s independence – an idea that is anathema to the leaders of China’s Communist Party, which rules the territory . He was released early, but police officers continued to keep a close eye on him, he wrote in his account on Instagram. He got their permission to take a short vacation to Okinawa, Japan, and while there he bought a ticket to Britain, he wrote.

“This also means that it will be impossible for me to return to my home, Hong Kong, in the near future,” Mr Chung wrote. “Although I previously expected this day to come, my heart still sank the moment I made a decision. Since I joined social movements from the age of fourteen, I have always believed that Hong Kong is the only home for the nation of Hong Kong, and we should never be the ones to leave it.”

Mr Chung’s departure from Hong Kong was earlier reported by The Washington Post. Hong Kong police did not respond to emailed questions about him on Friday.

Mr Chung joins a growing number of Hong Kong activists and pro-democracy organizers who have left since the territory imposed a national security law in June 2020 in response to massive pro-democracy protests there for much of 2019, which at times culminated in violent clashes between demonstrators and police officers. The law established the judicial and police apparatus to drastically restrict political freedoms in Hong Kong, a British colony until 1997. This colony retained its own system of laws after the handover to China and limited democratic competition for a share of seats in the city’s legislature.

In early December, Agnes Chow, a former pro-democracy student activist in Hong Kong who had served a prison sentence for a number of charges related to her political activities and was still under investigation for others, announced that she had gone to Canada and ignored instructions to file a report. to the Hong Kong police, a condition of her bail. She said that after her release, police took her on an indoctrination tour of mainland China, trying to convince her that Communist Party rule was only for the better.

“I may never go back in my life,” she wrote about Hong Kong.

Mr. Chung described similar efforts by the Hong Kong officers who surveilled him.

Mr Chung became the third person to be convicted under the security law after prosecutors accused him of secession by promoting Hong Kong’s independence, on social media and through a now-disbanded group, Studentlocalism. He was also convicted of money laundering in connection with donations he received in support of the group.

After his release from prison, he tried to regain his economic footing with a temporary job, but police officers ordered him not to take it, without explaining why. Agents offered to pay Mr. Chung to act as an informant, and at meetings they pressed him for details about the places he had been and the people he had met, including his elementary school classmates, he wrote.

The expansion of such informal surveillance of ex-prisoners shows how Hong Kong’s security police have at least partially adopted the methods of mainland Chinese authorities, said Thomas Kellogg, executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, which has investigated how the Chinese authorities national security legislation has been enforced.

“What we see with Agnes, Tony and others is the importation into Hong Kong of some of these elements of the police state,” Mr. Kellogg said in a telephone interview.

Hong Kong Democracy Council estimates that there are more than 1,700 people in the area have been jailed for protest activities, organized political opposition and related charges, including property damage, under the national security crackdown. How many have been released and how many have left the territory is less clear, experts say.

“You’re seeing a small stream of people who have decided to leave,” Mr. Kellogg said. “There are many different permutations, but the end result in many of these cases is the same: people run for the exit, if they can.”

Hong Kong activists can still face harassment abroad. In July, the territory’s government announced a bounty of HK$1 million, or about $128,000, for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of eight activists who fled abroad.

Such tactics mean that some activists who leave Hong Kong may choose to live under the radar, rather than expose their families back home to interrogations and pressure from police, said Patrick Poona visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo who monitors human rights in Hong Kong.

“But some others think, ‘Well, I don’t have any contact with my family in Hong Kong anymore,’” Mr Poon said. “Some young people in particular defy such threats.”

Mr Chung said he planned to study in Britain and suggested he could remain politically active. “I believe that as long as the people of Hong Kong never give up, the seeds of freedom and democracy will sprout back to life,” he wrote.

The Republican-led House of Representatives on Thursday concluded a year of paralysis and dysfunction with the latest in a series of failures to act on an urgent crisis, reversing a sweeping emergency spending measure to once again send money to Ukraine for its war against Ukraine. Russia.

It was a surprising outcome, but also a fitting finale to one of the most tumultuous and unproductive legislative years in recent history, marked by Republican infighting and a slim majority that left Republican leaders in the House of Representatives struggling to achieve even the absolute to do a minimum of governing.

The inability to reach an agreement with the Senate to support a key U.S. ally taking on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — even though there are clear majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate strongly supporting it — only underscored but the disorder.

Never mind that the House of Representatives left town without making a dent in a pile of unfinished work on spending legislation to keep the government funded and planned to return after New Year’s, with only eight business days to spare avoid a partial closure if they fail to complete it.

The first session of the House of Representatives of the 118th Congress will be best remembered for the unprecedented fifteen roll call votes it took in January to elect a speaker, who was then unceremoniously dumped by a Republican mutiny ten months later. That left the House leaderless and unable to work for weeks.

“This fall has been a very active stupid political climate because of a mistake and deception,” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, the North Carolina Republican who served as speaker to oversee the election of Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson.

Like more than three dozen of his colleagues in the House of Representatives so far, Mr. McHenry, a 10-term veteran, has weighed in on the state of the House by announcing this month that he will not run for office next year eligible for re-election. On Thursday alone, two more retirees announced their plans to leave as Republicans and Democrats gave the House of Representatives failing marks for 2023 and went home for the holidays.

“It was historic and hysterical,” said Rep. Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, which helped block the election of Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, as chairman. “In one word I would say: ‘disappointing.’”

The House barely managed to avoid complete disasters of its own making. Congress narrowly avoided a disastrous federal default that far-right Republicans provoked by refusing to raise the debt limit without deep spending cuts. She also tried, without wasting time, to avoid a government shutdown, once again sidestepping the objections of the far right, while its members continued to refuse to budge without cutting spending and imposing conservative social policies. Their positions proved impossible to maintain now that Democrats had control of the White House and Senate.

Ultimately, Speaker Kevin McCarthy embraced legislation to avert both economic crises and was forced to rely on Democrats to get the debt limit suspension and relief bills on President Biden’s desk. His bow to reality led a handful of Republican opponents, led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, to force a vote to vacate the presidency, unseating Mr. McCarthy and sending the House of Representatives into a spiraling search for his successor ended up.

Speaking for the final time Thursday, McCarthy, who began his career as a rising Republican star in another era of factionalism in the House of Representatives, said he would take the same steps again even if he knew what the outcome would be. are.

“If your philosophy brings people more freedom, don’t be afraid it could cause you to lose your job,” he said as his California colleagues celebrated his time in the House of Representatives. “I knew that the day we decided to pay our troops as the war broke out rather than stop was the right decision.”

The House of Representatives ended the year with bipartisan approval of a sweeping Pentagon policy measure. But again, this could only be accomplished in the Republican-led House of Representatives with significant Democratic support. Far-right Republicans balked, unhappy that provisions aimed at ending what they considered “woke” military policies on abortion, transgender care and racial diversity were being dropped, and some members of both parties objection to an extension of supervisory powers without justification.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, took the opportunity to remind Republicans that what little they have done should be credited to Democrats.

“Everything that has happened productively in this Congress — which isn’t much, because of the extreme MAGA Republicans — has happened because the Democrats in the House of Representatives have taken the lead,” he said.

The far-right segment of Republicans in the House of Representatives started the year well, having won significant concessions from Mr. McCarthy in return for their support for his bid for speaker. They saw themselves in the driver’s seat when it came to spending and other policy issues. They flexed their muscles in non-traditional ways, including opposing the procedural motions required to bring bills to the floor, which have historically been strict party-line votes. That prevented their leaders from going ahead with the measures they opposed. Their party’s narrow margin of control gave them more power.

Mr. McCarthy often veered in their direction, but the path was usually a dead end, as the more extreme policies were opposed by both mainstream Republican conservatives and Democrats in Congress.

On spending, for example, Mr. McCarthy bowed to the far right and agreed to set levels lower than the debt limit agreement he reached with Mr. Biden, angering Democrats and Republicans frustrated. The conservative stance made it difficult to move forward on the legislation, and the appropriations process ended in a knot, despite a Republican promise to consider and pass twelve individual spending bills.

Given the impasse, McCarthy plowed ahead and kept the government open with Democratic votes in late September. Mr. Johnson, who quickly found himself in the same situation, also relied on Democrats in November to keep government agencies funded until January, when the question of a shutdown will resurface.

Growing Republican opposition to Ukraine’s financing slowed the Biden administration’s request for about $50 billion in additional security aid, while Republicans in the House of Representatives joined their Senate counterparts in demanding tough border policies in return support that. This led to an impasse that could not be resolved before the House left for the holidays.

Instead of what they see as a crucial foreign policy priority, Senate leaders decided to keep the House in session next week in hopes of reaching an agreement on border policy changes, even as success seemed like a long shot . Even if the Senate could reach an agreement on immigration changes, it was highly uncertain whether they would be enough to prevail in the House of Representatives.

There was no guarantee that 2024 would be better — and it could potentially be worse given the battle for control of the House of Representatives. Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Johnson have both tried to mollify conservatives in the House of Representatives with a focus on ousting Mr. Biden and challenging the administration on other fronts, but the ongoing internal strife seems likely to continue, especially given Mr Johnson’s inexperience.

“There’s no real sign that things will improve,” Mr Womack said. “They could even deteriorate.”

He added: “The rollercoaster has slowed down a bit and has leveled out a bit. But just around the bend here there will be some more twists and turns and a few loops and a few other songs that might have us reaching for the barf bag.

Kayla Guo reporting contributed.