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    Canada Delays Plan to Offer Medically Assisted Death to the Mentally Ill

    A parliamentary panel concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to properly assess patients.Canada is postponing a plan to offer people suffering from mental illnesses the option of a medically assisted death, two cabinet ministers said on Monday.The announcement by Mark Holland, the health minister, and Arif Virani, the justice minister, came after a special parliamentary committee looking into the plan concluded that there are not enough doctors, particularly psychiatrists, in the country to assess patients with mental illnesses who want to end their lives and to help them do so.“The system needs to be ready, and we need to get it right,” Mr. Holland told reporters. “It’s clear from the conversations we’ve had that the system is not ready, and we need more time.”Neither minister offered any timeline for the latest extension. Following an earlier delay, the expansion had been scheduled to come into effect on March 17.Canada already offers medically assisted death to terminally and chronically ill people, but the plan to extend the program to people with mental illnesses has divided Canadians.Some critics say the plan is a consequence of the inability of Canada’s public health care system to offer adequate psychiatric care, which is chronically underfunded and facing demand that outstrips its availability.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?  More

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    My Sister Chose the Day She Wanted to Die

    Should terminally ill people be able to choose how they die? Six years after being diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer, Julie Petrow-Cohen decided to use medical aid in dying — or MAID, as it is often called — to end her life. But for many Americans in similar circumstances, this is not an option. In this audio essay, the writer Steven Petrow shares the story of his sister’s last day and why MAID should be a right for everyone.Read Steven’s guest essay on Julie’s decision here.(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available by Monday.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Steven PetrowThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Joanna Pearlstein, Hans Buetow and the “Modern Love” podcast team. More

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    Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules

    The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month.Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.But the action by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which draws 4.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited museums in the world, sends a powerful message to the field. The museum’s anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, known for doing pioneering work under a long line of curators including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”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?  More

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    History Argues for Disqualifying Trump

    One of the most difficult things to ask a judge to do is issue a ruling that he or she believes is actually dangerous. Even if you can make a strong case that the letter of the law is on your side, judges are tempted to narrow the reach of disfavored laws or sometimes virtually rewrite them in order to avoid outcomes that are deemed too radical or disruptive.Thus, it’s incumbent on good lawyers to argue not merely in favor of the letter of the law but also for the underlying merit of the law itself. My newsletter two weeks ago focused mainly on the legal argument for disqualifying Donald Trump from the presidency on the basis of the text and history of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. I made the case that the plain language of the amendment should disqualify Trump regardless of the consequences, which many observers — including some strongly opposed to Trump — believe would be dire and violent.Today, by contrast, I will make the case that even the consequences argue for Trump’s disqualification. Or, put more directly, that the consequences of not disqualifying the former president are likely to be worse than those of disqualifying him. This is the lesson of history both recent — the Trump era and Jan. 6, 2021 — and more distant. The profound mistakes of the Reconstruction-era Congress, just years after the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th Amendment, teach us about the high cost of welcoming insurrectionists back into high office.I addressed these points briefly in a short post for our new Opinion blog, but they deserve more attention. Critics of applying Section 3 to Trump have correctly and eloquently argued that removing him from the race could trigger a convulsive and potentially violent backlash in the American body politic. Millions of Americans would feel as if their choice was taken from them and that scheming elites were destroying American democracy.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?  More

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    The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs

    The history of voting in the United States shows the high costs of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides that when it comes to election of the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many of the problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.The framers were skeptical of universal voting. The original U.S. Constitution provided for voting only for the House of Representatives, not for the Senate or the presidency, leaving voter qualifications for House elections to the states. Later amendments framed voting protections in the negative: If there’s going to be an election, a state may not discriminate on the basis of race (15th Amendment), gender (19th Amendment) or status as an 18-to-20-year old (26th Amendment).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?  More

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    A Potentially Huge Supreme Court Case Has a Hidden Conservative Backer

    The case, to be argued by lawyers linked to the petrochemicals billionaire Charles Koch, could sharply curtail the government’s regulatory authority.The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday that, on paper, are about a group of commercial fishermen who oppose a government fee that they consider unreasonable. But the lawyers who have helped to propel their case to the nation’s highest court have a far more powerful backer: the petrochemicals billionaire Charles Koch.The case is one of the most consequential to come before the justices in years. A victory for the fishermen would do far more than push aside the monitoring fee, part of a system meant to prevent overfishing, that they objected to. It would very likely sharply limit the power of many federal agencies to regulate not only fisheries and the environment, but also health care, finance, telecommunications and other activities, legal experts say.“It might all sound very innocuous,” said Jody Freeman, founder and director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former Obama White House official. “But it’s connected to a much larger agenda, which is essentially to disable and dismantle federal regulation.”The lawyers who represent the New Jersey-based fishermen, are working pro bono and belong to a public-interest law firm, Cause of Action, that discloses no donors and reports having no employees. However, court records show that the lawyers work for Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by Mr. Koch, the chairman of Koch Industries and a champion of anti-regulatory causes.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?  More

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    This Border Deal Is a Political Trap for Democrats

    For the past two months, a small group of senators from both parties has been negotiating a deal to address the crisis at our southern border. The lawmakers are united in their desire to stop unauthorized migrants from entering the United States — an ambitious objective that has eluded past administrations.But the policies under discussion are likely to drive more unauthorized migration to the border and make President Biden’s immigration challenges even worse.In December border officials processed some 300,000 migrants — the most recorded in a single month. Over the past decade, Republican leaders in Congress have failed to come to the table to negotiate on immigration policies that Americans support, and yet they have created the false perception that Trump-era policies can solve the border crisis. Mr. Trump’s record on immigration shows it’s just not that simple.The negotiations demonstrate how far the immigration debate has shifted away from solutions that once defined bipartisan immigration reform efforts, like a 2013 Senate bill that would have prioritized border security and a path to legal status and eventual citizenship for the estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.In 2016, Donald Trump killed broad support in his party for this type of deal by casting immigrants as threats to our nation. As president, he restricted the number of immigrants coming to the United States, separated families, and dismantled our immigration courts, hampering the ability to process asylum seekers at the border. And yet in 2019, under his watch, there was a 90 percent increase in migrant apprehensions along the southern border compared to the year before.Today, as the crisis is being felt not just along the border but also in cities across the nation, voters strongly disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the border. His administration has not taken meaningful action to stop Republican-controlled states from sending buses full of asylum seekers to cities with no advance notice or to step in with a federal solution. As a result, Democrats are now more open to working toward a solution that reduces unauthorized immigration.The proposed deal would simultaneously restrict and expand executive authority. For starters, Mr. Biden could lose key powers that presidents have used for decades to regulate immigration in times of crisis. Worse, if Mr. Trump is re-elected, he will have new tools at his disposal that he could use to terrorize immigrants and make the chaos at the border even more acute.As a former government official who has worked in the executive and legislative branches to identify solutions to mass migration at the southern border, I agree with lawmakers that the status quo is unsustainable and that reforms are needed. But this deal will not alleviate Mr. Biden’s border challenges unless Congress builds legal migration pathways that weaken cartels who have profited the most from new asylum restrictions.Take the reported expulsion authority that Senate negotiators are considering. The policy would allow border officials to expel migrants without asylum screenings. That may appear to be an effective deterrence measure but similar asylum restrictions, including Title 42, have proved otherwise. When I served on the National Security Council, I examined whether expulsions played a role in reducing smuggling activity. The data showed that not only did more people attempt to cross than before, but they also took more dangerous routes, guided by smugglers who profited handsomely.Instead of what is on the table now, Democrats should learn from past mistakes and fight for a plan that would create more legal pathways, incentivize people to seek asylum at our ports of entry, expedite asylum claims so that people who are eligible can work and contribute to our economy, and deport people who do not have valid legal claims to stay in the United States. Congress must grant Mr. Biden’s request for funding to hire agents and asylum officers to process migrants in a humane and orderly fashion — which a majority of voters support.The most nonsensical demand in the current border deal is that Senate Republicans want to restrict the president’s parole authority. In January 2023, Mr. Biden announced a series of measures aimed at stemming unauthorized crossings, including new legal pathways for migrants from Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua. The president invoked his powers to extend parole to people from these countries who had an American sponsor, giving them permission to work and apply for asylum if they hoped to stay beyond two years. And it worked. The data shows that apprehension of these migrants declined by 92 percent within a year.Democrats may think that it is worth embracing punitive immigration policies for the hope of improving Mr. Biden’s polling numbers. But if these lawmakers really want to stop people from coming here, they must also address the drivers of migration.Deteriorating conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean guarantee that more migrants will be forced to seek refuge in the United States. Democrats should incentivize countries across the region to build capacity to protect asylum seekers, create legal pathways and increase foreign aid and humanitarian assistance to help would-be migrants live safely closer to home.In the short term, the White House can demonstrate leadership by using every tool at its disposal to accelerate the processing of asylum cases, work with regional partners to find protection for migrants before they make their way to the border and develop a federal response to help cities buckling under the strain of absorbing tens of thousands of migrants. An administration capable of welcoming more than 70,000 Afghans and coordinating their arrival in communities around the country is equally capable of coordinating the arrival of asylum seekers and identifying temporary federal housing to relieve communities struggling to provide housing.There is too much at stake for Democrats to accept the terms of this Senate proposal. While it is understandable to want to fix the vulnerabilities at the border, Mr. Trump and his advisers have been clear that terrorizing immigrants is central to their second-term agenda. He has promised to round up immigrants in camps and conduct mass deportations. He has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”Mr. Biden has begun his re-election campaign with a promise to protect our democracy from these harms. Yet by compromising on policies that are likely to increase unauthorized migration at the border, he risks emboldening Mr. Trump and his ilk to step up their attacks on immigrants. On Jan. 5, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in a radio interview that the state isn’t “shooting people” illegally crossing the border because “the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”Mr. Biden must help voters understand that the border won’t change until Congress builds the immigration system our country needs. This political moment demands ambitious solutions that can address the scope of today’s migration challenge, not a set of policies that will keep us stuck in the same failed legal framework of the past decade.Andrea R. Flores is the vice president for immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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    Gabriel Attal Is France’s Youngest and First Openly Gay Prime Minister

    Gabriel Attal, 34, replaces Élisabeth Borne in a cabinet shuffle that President Emmanuel Macron hopes can reinvigorate a term marked by drift and division.PARIS — In a typically bold bid to revitalize his second term, President Emmanuel Macron named Gabriel Attal, 34, as his new prime minister, replacing Élisabeth Borne, 62, who made no secret of the fact that she was unhappy to be forced out.Mr. Attal, who was previously education minister and has occupied several government positions since Mr. Macron was elected in 2017, becomes France’s youngest and first openly gay prime minister. A recent Ipsos-Le Point opinion poll suggested he is France’s most popular politician, albeit with an approval rating of just 40 percent.Mr. Macron, whose second term has been marked by protracted conflict over a pensions bill raising the legal retirement age to 64 from 62 and by a restrictive immigration bill that pleased the right, made clear that he saw in Mr. Attal a leader in his own disruptive image.“I know that I can count on your energy and your commitment to push through the project of civic rearmament and regeneration that I have announced,” Mr. Macron said in a message addressed to Mr. Attal on X, formerly Twitter. “In loyalty to the spirit of 2017: transcendence and boldness.”Mr. Macron was 39 when he sundered the French political system that year to become the youngest president in French history. Mr. Attal, a loyal ally of the president since he joined Mr. Macron’s campaign in 2016, will be 38 by the time of the next presidential election in April, 2027, and would likely become a presidential candidate if his tenure in office is successful.This prospect holds no attraction for an ambitious older French political guard, including Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, and Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, whose presidential ambitions are no secret. But for Mr. Macron, who is term-limited, it would place a protégé in the succession mix.“My aim will be to keep control of our destiny and unleash our French potential,” Mr. Attal said after his appointment.Standing in the bitter cold at a ceremony alongside Ms. Borne, in the courtyard of the Prime Minister’s residence, Mr. Attal said that his youth — and Mr. Macron’s — symbolized “boldness and movement.” But he also acknowledged that many in France were skeptical of their representatives.Alain Duhamel, a prominent French author and political commentator, described Mr. Attal as “a true instinctive political talent and the most popular figure in an unpopular government.” But, he said, an enormous challenge would test Mr. Attal because “Macron’s second term has lacked clarity and been a time of drift, apart from two unpopular reforms.”President Emmanuel Macron reviewing troops in Paris last week. A reshuffle, he hopes, will invigorate his government.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf France is by no means in crisis — its economy has proved relatively resilient despite inflationary pressures and foreign investment is pouring in — it has appeared at times to be in a not uncharacteristic funk, paralyzed politically, sharply divided and governable with an intermittent recourse to a constitutional tool that enables the passing of bills in the lower house without a vote.Mr. Macron, not known for his patience, had grown weary of this sense of deadlock. He decided to force Ms. Borne out after 19 months although she had labored with great diligence in the trenches of his pension and immigration reforms. Reproach of her dogged performance was rare but she had none of the razzmatazz to which the president is susceptible.“You have informed me of your desire to change prime minister,” Ms. Borne wrote in her letter of resignation, before noting how passionate she had been about her mission. Her unhappiness was clear. In a word, Mr. Macron had fired Ms. Borne, as is the prerogative of any president of the Fifth Republic, and had done so on social media in a way that, as Sophie Coignard wrote in the weekly magazine Le Point, “singularly lacked elegance.”But with elections to the European Parliament and the Paris Olympics looming this summer, Mr. Macron, whose own approval rating has sunk to 27 percent, wanted a change of governmental image. “It’s a generational jolt and a clever communications coup,” said Philippe Labro, an author and political observer.Mr. Attal has shown the kind of forcefulness and top-down authority Mr. Macron likes during his six months as education minister. He started last summer by declaring that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.”His order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. In line with the French commitment to “laïcité,” or roughly secularism, “You should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them,” Mr. Attal said.The measure provoked protests among France’s large Muslim minority, who generally see no reason that young Muslim women should be told how to dress. But the French center-right and extreme right approved, and so did Mr. Macron.Éisabeth Borne, the departing prime minister, delivering a speech during the handover ceremony in Paris on Tuesday.Pool photo by Emmanuel DunandIn a measure that will go into effect in 2025, Mr. Attal also imposed more severe academic conditions on entry into high schools as a sign of his determination to reinstate discipline.For these and other reasons, Mr. Attal is disliked on the left. Mathilde Panot, the leader of the parliamentary group of extreme left representatives from the France Unbowed party and part of the largest opposition group in the National Assembly, reacted to his appointment by describing Mr. Attal as “Mr. Macron Junior, a man who has specialized in arrogance and disdain.”The comment amounted to a portent of the difficulties Mr. Attal is likely to face in the 577-seat Assembly, where Mr. Macron’s Renaissance Party and its allies do not hold an absolute majority. The change of prime minister has altered little or nothing for Mr. Macron in the difficult arithmetic of governing. His centrist coalition holds 250 seats.Still, Mr. Attal may be a more appealing figure than Ms. Borne to the center-right, on which Mr. Macron depended to pass the immigration bill. Like Mr. Macron, the new prime minister comes from the ranks of the Socialist Party, but has journeyed rightward since. Mr. Attal is also a very adaptable politician, in the image of the president.The specter that keeps Mr. Macron awake at night is that his presidency will end with the election of Marine Le Pen, the far right leader whose popularity has steadily risen. She dismissed the appointment of Mr. Attal as “a puerile ballet of ambition and egos.” Still, the new prime minister’s performance in giving France a sense of direction and purpose will weigh on her chances of election.Mr. Macron wants a more competitive, dynamic French state, but any new package of reforms that further cuts back the country’s elaborate state-funded social protection in order to curtail the budget deficit is likely to face overwhelming opposition. This will be just one of the many dilemmas facing the president’s chosen wunderkind. More