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      Rancher Gets 6 Months in Prison for Scheme to Create Giant Sheep Hybrid

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      Prosecutors said the Montanan illegally used tissue from a sheep from Central Asia and the testicles from a bighorn sheep to make large hybrids that he could sell at premium prices.An 81-year-old Montana rancher was sentenced to six months in federal prison on Monday for running a nearly decade-long scheme in which he used parts from protected wildlife to create a giant hybrid species of wild sheep to sell at premium prices, federal prosecutors said.The man, Arthur Schubarth, of Vaughn, Mont., illegally used tissue from a Marco Polo argali sheep from Central Asia and the testicles of a bighorn sheep native to the Rocky Mountains to make large hybrids of sheep that he could sell at high prices to shooting preserves, particularly in Texas, federal prosecutors said in a news release.Mr. Schubarth pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Montana in March to two felony wildlife crimes: conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantively violating the Lacey Act, which prohibits the trafficking of illegally taken wildlife.The Associated Press reported that Judge Brian Morris of the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana said that he had weighed Mr. Schubarth’s age and lack of criminal record to fashion a sentence that would discourage others from attempting to “change the genetic makeup of the creatures.”Mr. Schubarth’s sentence includes three years of supervised release, according to court documents. He was also ordered to pay a $20,000 fine to the Lacey Act Reward Fund, a $4,000 payment to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and a $200 special assessment.Before sentencing, Mr. Schubarth told the judge, “I will have to work the rest of my life to repair everything I’ve done,” The A.P. reported.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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      Kamala Harris es la única opción patriótica para la presidencia de Estados Unidos

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      Es difícil imaginar un candidato menos digno de servir como presidente de Estados Unidos que Donald Trump. Él ha demostrado ser moralmente inadecuado para un cargo que exige a su ocupante poner el bien de la nación por encima del interés propio. Ha demostrado ser temperamentalmente inadecuado para un cargo que requiere precisamente de las cualidades —sabiduría, honestidad, empatía, valentía, moderación, humildad, disciplina— de las que él más carece.Esas características descalificadoras están agravadas por todo lo demás que limita su capacidad para desempeñar las funciones de la presidencia: sus numerosos cargos penales, su edad avanzada, su fundamental falta de interés por las políticas públicas y su cada vez más extraña lista de asociados.Esta verdad inequívoca y desalentadora —que Donald Trump no es apto para ser presidente— debería bastar para que cualquier votante a quien le importe la salud de nuestro país y la estabilidad de nuestra democracia le niegue la reelección.Por esta razón, independientemente de cualquier desacuerdo político que los votantes puedan tener con ella, Kamala Harris es la única opción patriótica para la presidencia.En su nivel más básico, la mayoría de las elecciones presidenciales giran en torno a dos visiones diferentes de Estados Unidos que surgen de políticas y principios contrapuestos. En esta ocasión se trata de algo más fundamental. Se trata de si invitamos al cargo más alto del país a quien ha revelado, de forma inequívoca, que degradará los valores, desafiará las normas y desmantelará las instituciones que han hecho fuerte a nuestro país. More

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      Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War

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      The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.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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      A Patchwork of Cannabis Laws Creates Health Risks, Study Finds

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      A new report calls for public education and closing of legal loopholes to keep the public safe.The NewsAs more states have legalized the sale of cannabis, a fractured and inconsistent legal framework has emerged across the country that has prioritized sales income and tax revenue over public health, a new report finds.The report, issued Thursday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, describes an “urgent need for a coordinated public health response.” The academies, a nonprofit advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists, said that such a response should include a federally led campaign to educate parents, children and others about the risks of a drug that is increasingly potent.Among the other suggestions, the report also calls for a lifting of research restrictions on cannabis. In recent years, many claims have been made about the medicinal and other health effects of the drug but often without substantiation from science.Even as a patchwork of laws and regulations have emerged, the potency of cannabis products has surged.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesPotencyCurrently 24 states, the District of Columbia and two U.S. territories have legalized the sale of cannabis for recreational use, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures. In 13 other states, cannabis is legal for medicinal use.Even as a patchwork of laws and regulations have emerged, the potency of cannabis products has surged, as measured by the growing concentration of THC, the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. The rapid increases have left the public unaware of the health risks, particularly to young people, pregnant women and seniors, according to Yasmin Hurd, director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine and the vice chair of the committee that issued the latest report.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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      Nigel Farage’s Anti-Immigration Party Has Big Plans. Can It See Them Through?

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      Nigel Farage, a Trump ally and Brexit champion, thinks his Reform U.K. party can become a major political force. At a conference on Friday, he will explain how.A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant activist whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage is set to address supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election. He is expected to lay out a plan to professionalize the party and build support ahead of local elections next year.His ambitions are clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.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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      What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me)

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      What does Kamala Harris think the United States should do about the Houthis, whose assaults on commercial shipping threaten global trade, and whose attacks on Israel risk a much wider Mideast war? If an interviewer were to ask the vice president about them, would she be able to give a coherent and compelling answer?It’s not an unfair or unprecedented question. As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush was quizzed on the names of the leaders of Taiwan, India, Pakistan and Chechnya. He got one right (Taiwan’s Lee Teng-hui) but drew blanks on the rest. It fueled criticism, as The Times’s Frank Bruni reported in 1999, that “he is not knowledgeable enough about foreign policy to lead the nation.”A few more questions for Harris: If, as president, she had intelligence that Iran was on the cusp of assembling a nuclear weapon, would she use force to stop it? Are there limits to American support for Ukraine, and what are they? Would she push for the creation of a Palestinian state if Hamas remained a potent political force within it? Are there any regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build three million new homes in the next four years? What role, if any, does she see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans? If there were another pandemic similar to Covid-19, what might her administration do differently?It may be that Harris has thoughtful answers to these sorts of questions. If so, she isn’t letting on. She did well in the debate with Donald Trump, showing poise and intelligence against a buffoonish opponent. But her answers in two sit-down interviews, first with CNN’s Dana Bash and then with Brian Taff of 6ABC in Philadelphia, were lighter than air. Asked what she’d do to bring down prices, she talked at length about growing up middle-class among people who were proud of their lawns before pivoting to vague plans to support small business and create more housing.Lovely. Now how about interest-rate policy, federal spending and the resilience of our supply chains?All this helps explain my unease with the thought of voting for Harris — an unease I never felt, despite policy differences, when Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were on the ballot against Trump. If Harris can answer the sorts of questions I posed above, she should be quick to do so, if only to dispel a widespread perception of unseriousness. If she can’t, then what was she doing over nearly eight years as a senator and vice president?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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      Trump Dislikes Ukraine for the Most MAGA of Reasons

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      It’s certainly understandable that many millions of Americans have focused on Springfield, Ohio, after the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. When Trump repeated the ridiculous rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were killing and eating household pets, he not only highlighted once again his own vulnerability to conspiracy theories, it put the immigrant community in Springfield in serious danger. Bomb threats have forced two consecutive days of school closings and some Haitian immigrants are now “scared for their lives.”That’s dreadful. It’s inexcusable. But it’s not Trump’s only terrible moment in the debate. Most notably, he refused to say — in the face of repeated questions — that he wanted Ukraine to win its war with Russia. Trump emphasized ending the war over winning the war, a position that can seem reasonable, right until you realize that attempting to force peace at this stage of the conflict would almost certainly cement a Russian triumph. Russia would hold an immense amount of Ukrainian territory and Putin would rightly believe he bested both Ukraine and the United States. He would have rolled the “iron dice” of war and he would have won.There is no scenario in which a Russian triumph is in America’s best interest. A Russian victory would not only expand Russia’s sphere of influence, it would represent a human rights catastrophe (Russia has engaged in war crimes against Ukraine’s civilian population since the beginning of the war) and threaten the extinction of Ukrainian national identity. It would reset the global balance of power.In addition, a Russian victory would make World War III more, not less, likely. It would teach Vladimir Putin that aggression pays, that the West’s will is weak and that military conquest is preferable to diplomatic engagement. China would learn a similar lesson as it peers across the strait at Taiwan.If Vladimir Putin is stopped now — while Ukraine and the West are imposing immense costs in Russian men and matériel — it will send the opposite message, making it far more likely that the invasion of Ukraine is Putin’s last war, not merely his latest.But that’s not how Trump thinks about Ukraine. He exhibits deep bitterness toward the country, and it was that bitterness that helped expose how dangerous he was well before the Big Lie and Jan. 6.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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      Harris Is Good on Abortion Rights. Now She Needs to Take It to 11.

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      Among the many critical issues at stake in the 2024 election, one will be central for many Americans: Whom do you trust to make medical decisions — women and their doctors, or Donald Trump and JD Vance?Vice President Kamala Harris cast the issue of abortion in stark relief in her first debate with former President Trump last week, striking a chord with voters across political lines. Ms. Harris’s answers on abortion emerged as her strongest moments onstage in a strong night for her overall — and provided a glimpse of a winning strategy for this election.That involves the Harris-Walz ticket turning the volume up to 11 on abortion. Ms. Harris, Gov. Tim Walz and their campaign surrogates must keep emphasizing — on the stump, in ads and at every chance they get — how Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are impossible to trust on these issues.They must refuse to let Mr. Trump and other Republicans suggest that leaving decisions about abortion up to the states is a benign proposition and continue to point to the wide-ranging impact of abortion bans on pregnancy care, miscarriage treatment and training opportunities for an entire generation of doctors.Ms. Harris would do well, even, to devote an entire speech to the issue, laying out her plan to take action in support of abortion rights, with or without Congress.At the same time, she should keep deploying campaign surrogates such as Kaitlyn Joshua, a mother from Baton Rouge, La., who described being denied care at not one but two emergency rooms in the midst of a painful miscarriage because of her state’s abortion ban. Personal stories like these can break through and reach voters more effectively than any campaign talking point. According to PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, exposure to these stories is helping to shift public opinion in support of reproductive rights — an imperative in this election and beyond.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