Aurelia Butler

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    Man Hiding Tarantulas, Centipedes and Ants Is Stopped From Boarding Flight

    Officials in Lima, Peru, said the endangered spiders had been taken from the Amazon basin. The man was flying to South Korea.Something about a man who was trying to board a plane last week in Lima, Peru, caused customs officers at the international airport outside the capital to do a double take: He had an extraordinarily swollen belly.They asked him to lift his shirt.When he did, they found he was carrying 320 tarantulas, 110 centipedes and nine bullet ants. Each of the bugs was crawling around inside its own small plastic bag, where they were obscured by filter paper, according to the National Forest and Wildlife Service of Peru. The bags were reinforced with strong adhesive tape and attached to two girdles that were wrapped around the man’s body.In all, the man was carrying 35 adult tarantulas, each about the size of an average hand, and 285 juvenile tarantulas, the wildlife service said.All of the critters found were native to the Amazon region of Peru, said Walter Silva, a wildlife specialist for the government. The tarantulas are on the country’s list of endangered species, he added.“All were extracted illegally and are part of the illegal wildlife trafficking that moves millions of dollars in the world,” Mr. Silva said in a news release from the forest and wildlife service.The Peruvian authorities arrested the man, a 28-year-old citizen of South Korea who was traveling back to his country last Friday, with a planned stopover in France, they said. The National Forest and Wildlife Service said it had opened an investigation but did not specify any charges and did not release the name of the man they had detained.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

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    Shel Talmy, Who Produced the Who and the Kinks, Dies at 87

    Though he was American, he helped define the sound of the British Invasion after settling in London in the early 1960s.Shel Talmy, the American-born record producer who helped unleash the id of the British Invasion with a raw, grinding sound on proto-punk salvos like “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks and “My Generation” by the Who, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.His death was announced in a post on his Facebook page, where he had been sharing detailed reminiscences about many of his past recordings with a long list of acts, which also included Manfred Mann, Chad & Jeremy, the Easybeats and a teenage David Bowie (who at the time was using his given surname, Jones).Mr. Talmy’s climb to the top of the British music scene actually began in Los Angeles, where Mr. Talmy, who was born in Chicago, had lived since his teens. In 1962, he was working as a recording engineer at a studio in Hollywood when he headed for London for what he expected would be a five-week vacation, hoping he might scrape together enough work there to pay for the trip.Before he left, his friend Nick Venet, who produced the Beach Boys for Capitol Records, offered him the acetates of some of his hit records to help Mr. Talmy drum up work. In a 2012 interview with Finding Zoso, a fan site devoted to the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Talmy used on many sessions, he recalled that Mr. Venet had told him: “Help yourself to my discs, whatever you want to use you can use. You can tell them it was yours.”Once there, Mr. Talmy passed off hit records like “Surfin’ Safari” as his own in a meeting with Dick Rowe of Decca Records. “I thought, what the hell,” he said in an interview with the music writer Richie Unterberger, “I’m not going to be here long, I might as well be as brash as possible.” By the end of the meeting, he said, Mr. Rowe had told him, “You start next week.”Mr. Talmy had already notched his first hit, “Charmaine,” a country-inflected number by the Irish vocal trio the Bachelors, when his ruse became obvious. But, by that point, he was on his way.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

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    Biden’s Policies Offer a Starting Point for Trump’s Border Crackdown

    Mr. Trump has criticized the Biden administration for what he calls its lax handling of the border — but it has left him with tools he can use to shut down the border.President-elect Donald Trump has spent the last year railing against the Biden administration’s immigration policies, saying they left the border wide open and risked American security.But actions taken by President Biden in the past year, including a sweeping asylum ban and more streamlined deportation procedures, may make it easier for Mr. Trump to fulfill his promise to shut down the border and turn back migrants as quickly as possible.To be sure, Mr. Biden’s vision for immigration is different from Mr. Trump’s. While the White House has enacted stricter regulations at the border, it has also emphasized legal pathways to enter the country and offered temporary legal status to migrants from certain troubled countries.After promising a more humane immigration policy when he took office in 2021, Mr. Biden was confronted with a worldwide surge in migration that put pressure on the southern U.S. border. By his second year in office, annual border arrests topped 2 million.As chaotic scenes emerged of migrants crowding at the border, Republicans like Mr. Trump argued that the Democrats were unable to govern and protect American cities, and they urged a crackdown on immigration. Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent thousands of migrants by bus and plane to Democratic northern cities to highlight the border crisis.President Biden visiting Brownsville, Texas, in February, where he received an operational briefing from U.S. border officials. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWe 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

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    Trump’s Cabinet Picks, Panned in Washington, Thrill Many of His Voters

    Where Donald J. Trump’s critics see underqualified nominees with questionable judgment, his voters described them as mavericks recruited to shake up Washington.To his detractors, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet looks like a rogues’ gallery of people with dubious credentials and questionable judgment.His supporters see something different.“It’s a masterpiece,’’ Eileen Margolis, 58, who lives in Weston, Fla., and owns a tattoo business, said of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks unveiled over the past week. “If it was a painting, it would be a Picasso.”A “brilliant alliance,’’ is how Joanne Warwick, 60, a former Democrat from Detroit, described many of the nominees.“It’s pretty much a star cast,’’ said Judy Kanoui of Flat Rock, N.C., a retiree and lifelong Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump for the first time this month.Democrats, and even some Republicans, worry that these nominees for top positions in government are inexperienced, conflicted and potentially reckless. But in interviews with almost two dozen Trump voters around the country, his supporters were more likely to describe them as mavericks and reformers recruited to deliver on Mr. Trump’s promise to shake up Washington.In Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for health and human services secretary, Mr. Trump’s supporters see a crusader searching for new solutions to chronic illnesses, not a conspiracy theorist promoting questionable and debunked ideas about vaccines and fluoride.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

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    Why Whoopi Goldberg Is Feuding With a Staten Island Bakery

    The left-leaning host of “The View” said the business in a Republican stronghold declined to take an order under her name. The bakery said politics had nothing to do with it.A small sponge cake topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry is the crux of a political skirmish between Whoopi Goldberg and a 146-year-old Staten Island bakery.Ms. Goldberg said Holtermann’s Bakery, in the heart of New York City’s reddest borough, refused to fill an order placed under her name, perhaps because of her liberal politics.The bakery’s owner said it wasn’t personal and that politics had nothing to do with it.Now, the bakery’s phone is ringing off the hook, and customers are lining up to show their support for a Staten Island institution — and their opposition to Ms. Goldberg.In the final minutes of Wednesday’s episode of“The View,” Ms. Goldberg said she was celebrating her birthday with an old-fashioned pastry, charlotte russe, that had been a favorite of her mother’s.“I should tell you, charlotte russe has no political leanings,” she said. “And the place that made these refused to make them for me.”The live audience gasped. Ms. Goldberg’s co-hosts Sunny Hostin and Alyssa Farah Griffin paused, stricken, forks frozen halfway to their mouths. Another co-host, Sara Haines, spit a forkful of the dessert back onto her plate.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

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    Texas Judge Finds Death Row Inmate Melissa Lucio Innocent In Daughter’s Death

    In a court filing, the judge said the conviction of Melissa Lucio, whose scheduled execution in 2022 was halted, should be overturned. The state’s highest criminal court will now decide.A Texas district judge declared that a mother on death row is innocent in the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter, according to court documents filed in October but made public this week.The decision in the case now stands with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, which in 2022 halted a scheduled execution of the mother, Melissa Lucio, to gather more evidence. That included asking the district judge in the original trial, Arturo Nelson, to file an opinion. An execution date has not been rescheduled.Ms. Lucio, 56, who lived in the border city of Harlingen, was sentenced to death in 2008 after her daughter, Mariah Alvarez, died as a result of what prosecutors said was the mother’s physical abuse. Ms. Lucio and her lawyers have long maintained her innocence, arguing that Mariah died from complications after accidentally falling down a flight of stairs. An autopsy said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.Judge Nelson sided with Ms. Lucio in his recent findings, writing that she was “actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter.”He added that, even regardless of that conclusion, Ms. Lucio had a right to have her conviction overturned because the state had used false testimony in her trial and withheld evidence that was favorable to her case. The judge also cited new scientific evidence that was unavailable during her trial.It was unclear on Saturday when the Court of Criminal Appeals would issue its ruling. Vanessa Potkin, one of Ms. Lucio’s lawyers and a special litigation director for the Innocence Project, said it could take a couple of months. Once that court rules, the case could be returned to trial court, at which point a prosecutor would decide if the case should be retried or the charges dismissed.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

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    Vladimir Shklyarov, Star Russian Ballet Dancer, Dies at 39

    The Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, which announced the death, did not say how or where he died.Vladimir Shklyarov, one of the world’s premier male ballet dancers, died on Saturday night, according to the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he was a principal dancer.The theater did not say in its announcement how or where Mr. Shklyarov, 39, died.Russia’s Investigative Committee, a federal law enforcement agency, began an investigation into Mr. Shklyarov’s death, according to RIA Novosti, a state-run news agency. “A preliminary cause of death was an accident,” RIA Novosti quoted the Investigative Committee’s office in St. Petersburg as saying.Over a two-decade career, Mr. Shklyarov gained international acclaim, performing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London and other prestigious theaters around the world.Born in Leningrad, Mr. Shkylarov graduated in 2003 from the Vaganova Ballet Academy, a famed institution with nearly 300 years of history. Its graduates include Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov.Mr. Shklyarov joined the Mariinsky directly out of school, and went on to perform in both contemporary and classical productions, including “Swan Lake,” “Don Quixote” and “Giselle.” He received multiple awards for his work, including the prestigious Léonide Massine International Prize in 2008. But the Mariinsky said that “the most precious for Vladimir” was receiving the title of an honored artist of Russia in 2020.Information about survivors was not immediately available. In 2012, Mr. Shklyarov married another dancer, Maria Shirinkina, who also performed with the Mariinsky, according to Russian news media.In a review of a performance during the company’s 2016 tour of the United States, a New York Times critic said, “The best moment came from Maria Shirinkina, supernaturally airborne, and Mr. Shklyarov, elegant and mournful, in a cobbled together extract from ‘Giselle.’ For a little while, they suggested another world.”A former ballerina, Irina Bartnovskaya, wrote on Telegram that Mr. Shklyarov had been at home, on painkillers and preparing for foot surgery before his death. She said that he went out to smoke onto “a very narrow balcony” and fell five stories in “a stupid, unbearable accident.”Her account could not be verified, but it echoed similar reports in Russian news outlets, including Fontanka, which quoted a Mariinsky Theater spokeswoman, Anna Kasatkina, as saying that he was on painkillers and expected to have surgery. More

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    Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.

    Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.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