Ryan Wedding, 43, was indicted with 15 others on charges of trafficking drugs into Canada and the U.S., the authorities said. He is believed to be living in Mexico.A Canadian snowboarder who competed at the 2002 Winter Olympics is wanted by the F.B.I. on charges of conspiring to ship hundreds of kilograms of cocaine into Canada and the United States and on suspicion of orchestrating multiple murders, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Central District of California announced in a statement on Thursday.The snowboarder, Ryan James Wedding, 43, born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, was indicted along with 15 others on charges of running a transnational drug trafficking operation that shipped bulk quantities of cocaine from California to Canada from about January to April 2024, the U.S. attorney’s office said in its statement. Mr. Wedding, a fugitive who was believed to be living in Mexico, was charged with eight felonies including one count of conspiracy to export cocaine and three counts of murder in connection with a drug crime.“An Olympic athlete-turned-drug lord is now charged with leading a transnational organized crime group that engaged in cocaine trafficking and murder, including of innocent civilians,” Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said.Last year, Mr. Wedding and another defendant, Andrew Clark, 34, directed the “murders of two members of a family in Ontario, Canada,” in retaliation “for a stolen drug shipment,” the U.S. attorney’s office said. Mr. Clark was arrested earlier this month, the statement said. The duo also “ordered the murder of another victim” over a drug debt in May, according to the statement.Mr. Wedding, who had aliases including El Jefe, Giant and Public Enemy, was the leader of the criminal network, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said. The Canadian police said methamphetamines had also been trafficked by the network. Mr. Wedding “is wanted by the United States and Canada on separate charges,” the Canadian police said.There is no lawyer listed as a representative for Mr. Wedding. In 2010, Mr. Wedding was sentenced by a U.S. judge to four years in prison for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, according to court records.In 2006, Ryan Wedding was named in a search warrant in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, in an investigation concerning large quantities of marijuana, but he was never charged, according to his athlete profile on Olympics.com.The F.B.I. is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for any information leading to Mr. Wedding’s arrest.A majority of the 16 people named in the indictment were captured by the authorities in the United States and Canada as part of an operation led by the F.B.I. called Operation Giant Slalom, the Canadian police said. Slalom is an Olympic event in which competitors are timed as they ski or snowboard down a slope while weaving through a flagged obstacle course.Mr. Wedding placed 24th in the parallel giant slalom snowboarding event in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.Sheelagh McNeill More

A very dry start to spring has helped set off wildfires across Scotland, Wales and England, and officials have warned of a potential drought this summer.Wildfires erupted across Britain over the past week amid the driest start to spring in nearly 70 years. Fires burned through forested areas in Scotland, Wales and England, coinciding with declining river levels and warnings of drought.In Scotland, a large forest fire near the village of Fauldhouse, west of Edinburgh, broke out late Saturday morning and was still burning on Sunday. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service deployed around 50 firefighters, supported by a helicopter dropping water over the woodland area. Mainland Scotland remains under an “extreme” wildfire risk warning through Monday, with officials urging the public to take precautions.Residents in nearby areas were advised by the police to keep windows and doors closed as emergency crews worked to contain the blaze.“Human behavior can significantly lower the chance of a wildfire starting, so it is crucial that people act safely and responsibly in rural environments,” officials said. In southwest Wales, a wildfire broke out on Friday evening on the Welsh Government Woodland Estate near Maerdy. Though it was brought under control, the blaze reignited in several places on Saturday morning before being extinguished on Sunday.Last week in England a major wildfire in Dartmoor, Devon, raged across more than 1,200 acres of land before being put out. Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service said at the peak of the blazes, crews from 13 fire stations were deployed to the area, as well as wildlife support officers and a police helicopter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The government announced his victory on Saturday, a day after a vote that many Iranians skipped, viewing it as rigged.TEHRAN — Iran’s ultraconservative judiciary chief, Ebrahim Raisi, has been elected president after a vote that many Iranians skipped, seeing it as rigged in his favor. The Interior Ministry announced the final results on Saturday, saying Mr. Raisi had won with nearly 18 million of 28.9 million ballots cast in the voting a day earlier. Turnout was 48.8 percent — a significant decline from the last presidential election, in 2017. Two rival candidates had conceded hours earlier, and President Hassan Rouhani congratulated Mr. Raisi on his victory, the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported.Huge swaths of moderate and liberal-leaning Iranians sat out the election, saying that the campaign had been engineered to put Mr. Raisi in office or that voting would make little difference. He had been expected to win handily despite late attempts by the more moderate reformist camp to consolidate support behind their main candidate — Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former central bank governor.The Interior Ministry said Mr. Hemmati came in third with around 2.4 million votes, after the second-place finisher, Mohsen Rezaee, a former commander in chief of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps who won around 3.4 million votes.There were also about 3.7 million “white” ballots, or ballots cast without any candidate’s name written in. Some Iranians said they turned in white ballots as a way of participating in the election while protesting the lack of candidates who represented their views.Voters lining up to cast their ballots in Tehran on Friday.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesMr. Raisi, 60, is a hard-line cleric favored by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has been seen as his possible successor. He has a record of grave human rights abuses, including accusations of playing a role in the mass execution of political opponents in 1988, and is currently under United States sanctions.His background appears unlikely to hinder the renewed negotiations between the United States and Iran over restoring a 2015 agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs in exchange for lifting American economic sanctions. Mr. Raisi has said he will remain committed to the deal and do all he can to remove sanctions.Key policies such as the nuclear deal are decided by the supreme leader, who has the last word on all important matters of state. However, Mr. Raisi’s conservative views will make it more difficult for the United States to reach additional deals with Iran and extract concessions on critical issues such as the country’s missile program, its backing of proxy militias around the Middle East and human rights.To his supporters, Mr. Raisi’s close identification with the supreme leader, and by extension with the Islamic Revolution that brought Iran’s clerical leaders to power in 1979, is part of his appeal. Campaign posters showed Mr. Raisi’s face alongside those of Mr. Khamenei and his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, or Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the Iranian commander whose death in an American airstrike last year prompted an outpouring of grief and anger among Iranians.Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, voted in Tehran on Friday.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesMr. Raisi’s supporters also cited his résumé as a staunch conservative, his promises to combat corruption, which many Iranians blame as much for the country’s deep economic misery as American sanctions, and what they said was his commitment to leveling inequality among Iranians.Voter turnout was low despite exhortations from the supreme leader to participate and an often strident get-out-the-vote campaign: One banner brandished an image of General Suleimani’s blood-specked severed hand, still bearing his trademark deep-red ring, urging Iranians to vote “for his sake.” Another showed a bombed-out street in Syria, warning that Iran ran the risk of turning into that war-ravaged country if voters stayed home.Voting was framed as not so much a civic duty as a show of faith in the Islamic Revolution, in part because the government has long relied on high voter turnout to buttress its legitimacy.Though never a democracy in the Western sense, Iran has in the past allowed candidates representing different factions and policy positions to run for office in a government whose direction and major policies were set by the unelected clerical leadership. During election seasons, the country buzzed with debates, competing rallies and political arguments.But since protests broke out in 2009 over charges that the presidential election that year was rigged, the authorities have gradually winnowed down the confines of electoral freedom, leaving almost no choice this year. Many prominent candidates were disqualified last month by Iran’s Guardian Council, which vets all candidates, leaving Mr. Raisi the clear front-runner and disheartening relative moderates and liberals.A voter looking at the list of the candidates on Friday. Many prominent candidates were disqualified last month by Iran’s Guardian Council.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesAnalysts said that the supreme leader’s support for Mr. Raisi could give him more power to promote change than the departing president, Hassan Rouhani. Mr. Rouhani is a pragmatic centrist who ended up antagonizing the supreme leader and disappointing voters who had hoped he could open Iran’s economy to the world by striking a lasting deal with the West.Mr. Rouhani did seal a deal to lift sanctions in 2015, but ran headlong into President Donald J. Trump, who pulled the United States out of the nuclear agreement and reimposed sanctions in 2018.The prospects for a renewed nuclear agreement could improve with Mr. Raisi’s victory. Mr. Khamenei appeared to be stalling the current talks as the election approached. But American diplomats and Iranian analysts said that there could be movement in the weeks between Mr. Rouhani’s departure and Mr. Raisi’s ascension. A deal finalized then could leave Mr. Rouhani with the blame for any unpopular concessions and allow Mr. Raisi to claim credit for any economic improvements once sanctions are lifted. More

The president often expresses an open desire for aggressive law enforcement and harsh tactics when protests originate from the political left.When violent protests originate from the right — such as those in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, or at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — President Trump has chosen to downplay the violence or suggest the protesters have a noble cause and have been treated unfairly.But when protests originate from what he views as the political left, Mr. Trump often expresses an open desire for law enforcement and the military to harshly crack down on them.Over the weekend, Mr. Trump ordered that 2,000 National Guard troops be deployed on the streets of downtown Los Angeles to quell protests against his administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. That was followed by orders on Monday to send 700 Marines to join them, and then later in the day, with an order for 2,000 additional National Guard troops.Even though the demonstrations have been largely contained to specific areas and mostly peaceful, Mr. Trump claimed on social media that the protesters were “insurrectionist mobs” and that Los Angeles had been “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals.”In endorsing harsh law enforcement tactics against immigration protests, Mr. Trump is picking a political fight on ground that Republicans believe is advantageous terrain. Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, said on his podcast on Monday that the president’s response was “quite smart.”“He just won a massive national election on this very topic,” Mr. Bannon said, magnifying Mr. Trump’s showing in a race he won by less than 2.3 million popular votes. Mr. Bannon accused Democratic-led jurisdictions of inviting in undocumented immigrants and refusing to arrest violent protesters. “This is why President Trump has to bring in the National Guard and federalize them,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, warned that Donald Trump’s repeated claims the election had been stolen were causing damage, after two separate recounts confirmed Joe Biden had won the state. ‘We have now counted legally-cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged,’ Raffensperger said. ‘Disinformation regarding election administration should be rejected. Integrity matters. Truth matters.’
Georgia recertifies election results, confirming Biden’s victory More