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    Man Who Killed Hundreds of Eagles and Hawks Gets Nearly 4 Years in Prison

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    Travis John Branson was part of a conspiracy that killed 3,600 birds, prosecutors said. He also trafficked and sold bird parts on the black market.A Washington man who killed hundreds of eagles and hawks in Montana that he later helped traffic and sell on the black market was sentenced to nearly four years in prison on Thursday, prosecutors said.From 2015 to 2021, the man, Travis John Branson, 49, of Cusick, Wash., traveled to the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana to help kill hundreds of birds in a “killing spree,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana said. In addition to his sentence of three years and 10 months in federal prison, Mr. Branson was ordered to pay $777,250 in restitution, prosecutors said.“Branson went on self-described ‘killing sprees’ for thousands of eagles and hawks,” Jesse Laslovich, the U.S. attorney for the District of Montana, said in a statement. Mr. Laslovich added that Mr. Branson “butchered” the birds “and sold the parts and feathers for profit on the black market.”Mr. Branson, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and trafficking charges in March, killed at least 118 eagles and 107 hawks himself, according to investigators who traced the killings to Mr. Branson through text messages. In total, Mr. Branson worked with others to kill about 3,600 birds, prosecutors said.In December, prosecutors indicted Mr. Branson and a co-conspirator, Simon Paul, who at one point lived in St. Ignatius, Mont. The two worked together to shoot, traffic and sell hundreds of birds, according to court records. Mr. Paul was also charged with conspiracy and wildlife trafficking charges in December but was a fugitive as of Thursday, the U.S. attorney’s office said.Court records quoted text messages and cited PayPal transactions that showed that Mr. Branson had sent photos and received text messages and payment for a golden eagle tail feather set.“Got that thang from Simon,” a buyer texted Mr. Branson, referring to feathers Mr. Paul had sent. “And the mirror feathers. Tnks.”In March 2021, law enforcement officers stopped Mr. Branson and recovered from his vehicle a golden eagle’s severed feet connected to long, obsidian black talons and feathers. Mr. Branson and Mr. Paul also killed deer to lure eagles to the area, court records said.From 2009 until 2021, Mr. Branson made between $180,000 and $360,000 by selling eagles’ feathers and parts on the black market, prosecutors said. How much Mr. Branson sold between 2009 until 2015 was not immediately clear.Lawyers for Mr. Branson and Mr. Paul did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.Bald eagles, which were among the birds Mr. Branson and others killed, are revered in the United States as a national symbol.“We are going to feel the impacts of the Flathead Reservation’s raptor loss for years to come,” Mike Dolson, the chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said in a statement. “Eagles are not only a treasured and important part of the Reservation’s ecosystem, but they also have a profound place in C.S.K.T. cultural and spiritual practices.” More

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      AT&T Passcodes for Millions Are Reset After Leak of Customer Records

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      Nearly eight million customers and 65.4 million former account holders were affected by the data breach, the company said.The telecommunications giant AT&T announced on Saturday that it had reset the passcodes of 7.6 million customers after it determined that compromised customer data was “released on the dark web.”“Our internal teams are working with external cybersecurity experts to analyze the situation,” AT&T said. “To the best of our knowledge, the compromised data appears to be from 2019 or earlier and does not contain personal financial information or call history.”The company said that “information varied by customer and account,” but that it may have included a person’s full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, Social Security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode.In addition to those 7.6 million customers, 65.4 million former account holders were also affected.The company said it would be “reaching out to individuals with compromised sensitive personal information separately and offering complimentary identity theft and credit monitoring services.”AT&T said it reset the passcodes for those affected and directed customers to a site with details about how to reset them. It also said that it was starting a “robust investigation supported by internal and external cybersecurity experts.”A company representative did not address specific questions about how the breach happened or why it went unnoticed for so long.TechCrunch, which first reported on the passcode reset, said it informed AT&T on Monday that “the leaked data contained encrypted passcodes that could be used to access AT&T customer accounts.”TechCrunch said it delayed publishing its article until the company “could begin resetting customer account passcodes.”In its report, TechCrunch said that “this is the first time that AT&T has acknowledged that the leaked data belongs to its customers, some three years after a hacker claimed the theft of 73 million AT&T customer records.”AT&T had previously denied a breach of its systems but how the leak happened was unclear, TechCrunch reported.AT&T said that it did not know whether the leaked data “originated from AT&T or one of its vendors” and that it “does not have evidence of unauthorized access to its systems resulting in theft of the data set.”The episode comes after AT&T customers experienced a widespread outage last month that temporarily cut off connections for users across the United States for several hours. The Feb. 22 outage affected customer in cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York.At its peak, there were around 70,000 reports of disrupted service for the wireless carrier, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks user reports of telecommunication and internet disruptions.A few days later, AT&T offered customers affected by the outage a $5 credit in an effort to “make it right.” More

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      Man Pleads Guilty in ‘Killing Spree’ of Bald Eagles in Montana

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      Travis John Branson of Washington State was indicted last year for illegally hunting and selling the birds. A co-defendant is still on the run.One of two men accused of shooting 3,600 birds in Montana, including bald and golden eagles, in an illegal “killing spree” pleaded guilty to taking part in a scheme to sell the dead birds on the black market, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.In a plea deal, Travis John Branson, 48, of Washington State, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy, two counts of illegally trafficking bald and golden eagles, and one count of violating the Lacey Act, a federal law prohibiting the sale of illegally acquired wildlife, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana said.Mr. Branson faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for the conspiracy and Lacey Act charges, prosecutors said.In December, a grand jury indicted Mr. Branson and his co-defendant Simon Paul, 42, of Montana, on 15 counts, most of them for illegal trafficking of eagles. Prosecutors agreed to drop 11 of those counts for Mr. Branson, according to the plea agreement.Mr. Paul, who did not appear at his arraignment, prosecutors said, is still on the run. His sentencing is set for July 31 at the U.S. District Court in Montana, prosecutors said.From January 2015 to March 2021, the two men routinely met on the prairies of the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana to hunt eagles that they would later sell, prosecutors said. Mr. Branson would travel from Washington State to meet Mr. Paul on the reservation, where he lived, prosecutors said.The men sold the eagles’ wings, tails and, on one occasion, a whole eagle, according to the indictment. Prosecutors did not say how much money the men made from sales, noting only that the bird parts were sold for “significant sums of cash.”At one point they devised a hunting strategy in which they set out a deer carcass to lure in the birds, according to the indictment, which also quoted text messages between Mr. Branson and buyers.In one message, Mr. Branson told a buyer that he was “on a killing spree” to stock up on eagle tail feathers. In another, he wrote that he was out “committing felonies,” according to the indictment.He also seemed to acknowledge in a separate message that shipping the birds internationally was illegal, prosecutors said.Mr. Branson’s public defender, Andrew J. Nelson, could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday evening. Messages left at a phone number and sent to an email address listed for Mr. Branson were immediately returned.A lawyer listed in court records for Mr. Paul declined to comment.The killing of bald eagles was seen as particularly flagrant in a country where the bird is the national symbol and was once considered an endangered species.It was unclear how many of the 3,600 birds prosecutors said the men killed were eagles. Clair J. Howard, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment. More

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      Hochul Pushes Proposals Cracking Down on Unlicensed Cannabis Shops

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      Legal retailers are struggling to get their footing in the face of a much larger illicit market.Gov. Kathy Hochul visited New York City on Wednesday to drum up support for her latest proposals for shutting down the unlicensed marijuana shops that have exploded in number in the wake of the legalization of recreational cannabis.There are more than 400 illicit weed shops in Manhattan alone — outnumbering Starbucks stores in the borough and far surpassing the few dozen licensed cannabis retailers in the entire state.At a news conference at the governor’s office in Midtown Manhattan attended by several owners of licensed dispensaries, Ms. Hochul sought to allay concerns about a return to the heavy-handed enforcement tactics of the war on drugs while pushing for measures that she said would give “some teeth” to the so far ineffective efforts to wipe out the unlicensed shops.Her appearance came as state lawmakers were considering her proposal to strengthen the hand of local agencies by giving them the power to padlock stores. She was joined by licensed dispensary owners who said that the legal market could not compete with the cut-rate prices in illicit shops. The governor and business owners also called on search engines and social media companies like Google and Yelp to remove content about unlicensed shops, which they said added to the confusion among consumers about what weed shops were licensed and which were not.The governor said that the illicit shops posed a public health hazard and undermined the state’s effort to build a cannabis industry that could provide opportunities for people harmed by the war on drugs. She said that efforts to deter the stores with raids and fines over the last year had been concentrated in the hands of too few agencies and had not been effective. Her proposal would make it easier for the state’s Office of Cannabis Management to obtain court orders to padlock stores and would allow for the orders to be executed by local agencies that had more personnel.“More and more cash keeps going in their doors and not the doors of our legitimate operators — and that’s what needs to change,” she 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

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      The Sunday Read: ‘How Do You Make a Weed Empire? Sell It Like Streetwear.’

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      Jack D’Isidoro and Elisheba Ittoop and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyThe closest thing to a bat signal for stoners is the blue lettering of the Cookies logo. When a new storefront comes to a strip mall or a downtown shopping district, fans flock to grand-opening parties, drawn by a love of the brand — one based on more than its reputation for selling extremely potent weed.People often compare Cookies to the streetwear brand Supreme. That’s accurate in one very literal sense — they each sell a lot of hats — and in other, more subjective ones. They share a penchant for collaboration-based marketing; their appeal to mainstream audiences is tied up with their implied connections to illicit subcultures; and they’ve each been expanding rapidly in recent years.All of it is inextricable from Berner, the stage name of Gilbert Milam, 40, Cookies’ co-founder and chief executive, who spent two decades as a rapper with a sideline as a dealer — or as a dealer with a sideline as a rapper. With the company’s success, he is estimated to be one of the wealthiest rappers in the world, without having ever released a hit record.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More