Uganda’s president, who has been in power for nearly four decades, has appointed his son to head the country’s military, fueling long-held suspicions in the East African country that the leader is grooming his son to to succeed him one day.

The President Yoweri Museveni said this late on Thursday that he had appointed his son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, 49, as the country’s top military commander. General Kainerugaba had served as his father’s senior advisor, and so it had been participation in major rallies across the country to help position himself as heir apparent – ​​even as experts say Mr Museveni, who is 79, is unlikely to give up power in his lifetime.

General Kainerugaba had come into the global spotlight in recent years because of him erratic, late-night tweets. At least one of the general’s closest confidantes was also appointed to a top position in the Cabinet.

Mr Museveni, a chairman for six terms, is expected to contest Uganda’s next elections, in 2026, and continue to consolidate its grip on the lush, landlocked country. But his advancing age and tensions among his close associates in the military and the ruling party have reignited talk of an alleged plan from a decade ago that claimed he was grooming his son for power.

Mr Museveni has repeatedly denied such a plan, commonly referred to as the ‘Muhoozi project’.

Since coming to power in 1986, Mr Museveni an important Western allyhas ruled Uganda with an iron fist and cracked down on press freedom, the jailing of opposition leaders And to have his critics tortured. Mr Museveni, his son and other top Ugandan officials were accused of crimes against humanity in a complaint filed last year with the International Criminal Court.

Mr Museveni also signed a widely condemned man anti-gay law Last year, that included a life sentence for anyone engaging in gay sex, and was considered one of the punishments the heaviest in the world. In August, the United Nations human rights office in Uganda was closed after the government refused to renew an agreement that allowed it to operate in the country.

General Kainerugaba is the eldest child and only son of Mr Museveni, who also has three daughters. His first name, Muhoozi, means “the avenger,” the president has said. The son, who attended military schools in the United States and Britain, has also served as commander of the Ugandan army’s land forces and as head of an elite special forces unit responsible for protecting Mr Museveni and his interests.

In recent months, General Kainerugaba has sought to burnish his image and consolidate his support across the country. He has met with politicians and attended rallies, actions that critics say violate rules banning active-duty army officers in Uganda from participating in politics.

For months he has refrained from sharing provocative tweets, which has sometimes happened in the past made his father angry. He has also assumed the chairmanship of the Patriotic League of Uganda, a non-partisan group he says aims to promote national pride.

On Friday, some Ugandan observers said the appointment of General Kainerugaba allowed Mr Museveni not only to keep a close eye on the military but also to keep everyone in the dark as succession politics unfolded and elections approached.

“It appears that the son is being strategically positioned so that he can manage the family estate in case the father were to die,” Michael Mutyaba, a Ugandan researcher and political analyst, said in a telephone interview.

The president, Mr. Mutyaba added, “likes to remain unpredictable, and that is one of the ways he retains power.”

The Biden administration introduced new rules on Wednesday to bring the United States – the largest car culture the world has ever seen – into the era of electric vehicles.

With new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency, automakers will essentially be forced to make a majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States all-electric or hybrid by 2032. To meet the new standards, 56 percent of new cars sold by 2032 would have zero emissions and another 16 percent would be hybrids, according to the EPA’s analysis.

Electric vehicles currently account for just 7.6 percent of new car sales, so the targets represent an ambitious effort to overhaul one of the country’s largest industries in a remarkably short time.

A successful phase-out of gas-powered cars and trucks could also make a big dent in the fight against climate change; Automobiles and other forms of transportation are the largest source of emissions the United States produces due to global warming.

But there are plenty of things that could derail the White House plan.

Politics

Electric vehicles are now an integral part of the culture wars. a opinion research found that 71 percent of Republicans would not buy an electric car, compared to 17 percent of Democrats.

Former President Donald Trump has used increasingly bold language about electric vehicles and their effect on the US economy, claiming they will “kill” the US auto industry and calling electric vehicles a “killer of jobs.” It is almost certain that he will continue that theme in his presidential campaign.

Speaker Mike Johnson called the rule part of President Biden’s “crusade against American energy and gas-powered vehicles,” saying it would limit consumer choice, raise costs for consumers and increase U.S. dependence on China.

Lobbying and lawsuits

The fossil fuel industry also opposes the new EPA rule.

American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying group, has launched a major advertising campaign to politicize what it incorrectly calls “Biden’s EPA car ban” in swing states.

And a coalition of fossil fuel companies and Republican lawyers are expected to sue to block the rule. These challenges could end up before the Supreme Court, which has issued several rulings in recent years limiting the EPA’s authority.

Car dealers

American car dealers are a major obstacle to the transition to electric vehicles. Last year, two-thirds of American dealers did not have a single electric car for sale, he said a Sierra Club report. And about half of dealers said they wouldn’t offer an electric car even if they could.

There are several reasons for dealers’ resistance. Profit margins for electric cars are generally smaller than for gas-powered cars and their sales requires infrastructure investments. Perhaps more importantly, dealers earn almost half of their profits from servicing cars. Electric vehicles have fewer parts, require far fewer trips to the service department and are cheaper to maintain than gasoline-powered cars and trucks.

And dealers are politically influential, with donations heavily skewed toward the Republican Party. In many states, they are protected by laws that prohibit automakers like Tesla from selling directly to consumers.

Lukewarm question

Early adopters drove sales of Teslas and other all-electric hits like the Ford Mustang Mach-E. But demand has declined in recent months. Ford said in December that this would be the case scaling back production of the acclaimed F-150 Lightning pickup – the electric version of the best-selling vehicle line in America – by half.

EVs are still the fastest growing segment of the U.S. auto market, but many consumers remain reluctant to leave their gas guzzlers behind. Electric vehicles generally remain more expensive than their conventional counterparts, and there are fewer models to choose from, as well as fewer SUVs and pickup trucks, the most popular categories in the country.

Prices could eventually drop, especially if that happens in China new generation of cheap EVs makes it to the United States. But given the Biden administration’s increased scrutiny of Chinese electric vehicle imports, that seems unlikely at the moment.

Charging infrastructure

American motorists, especially those in rural areas, are concerned about the range of electric vehicles. And charging an electric car outside major cities can still be a major challenge, as I discovered on an ill-fated reporting trip last year.

Not all EVs can be charged at all EV chargers, it can take hours to top off a battery, and there are few chargers left in much of this vast country. For anyone who doesn’t have a charger at home, or is planning a trip of more than a few hundred miles, charging is a big problem.

The federal government should help with this. In 2021, Congress appropriated $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of EV chargers across the country. But from December not one was installed.

Why the new standards could work

Despite the many obstacles, there is also reason to believe that the EPA rule could work – or at least make a big difference.

Automakers have been slow to introduce new EV models, but a wave of cheaper, better-performing electric vehicles are expected to hit the market in the coming years. The charging infrastructure is being standardized and car companies are investing their own money in developing a better network.

And while the EPA rule will likely face legal challenges — and Trump has pledged to “end” the Biden administration’s climate rules if he is re-elected — it cannot be easily undone.

Persistent heat from India to Brazil

This week, the heat index in Rio de Janeiro reached 144 degrees Fahrenheit, or 62 degrees Celsius, the highest ever measured in the city. The national government has issued health warnings due to the extreme heat in several cities.

In South Sudan, temperatures were forecast to reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the 90 degrees typical of the dry season from December to March, as my colleague Abdi Latif Dahir reported.

In Bengaluru, India, water supplies are running lowand last month Ghana and Nigeria issued heat warnings to the public.

We don’t yet know whether all these events were caused or exacerbated by climate change. But we do know that human-induced global warming was the cause of many of the extreme heat events that helped make last year the hottest on record. A recent study also concluded that climate change made the extreme heat that West Africa experienced in February ten times more likely, my colleague Delger Erdenesanaa reported.

What is abundantly clear is that many of these developing countries are not prepared to protect people from this kind of heat.

Most schools in South Sudan are overloaded, underfunded and lack infrastructure such as air conditioning. And in West African countries, about half of the urban population lives in informal housing, including houses built with sheet steel, which retains heat.

Maja Vahlberg, one of the authors of the West Africa study, told Delger that this means that “people have very limited options for individual coping strategies, such as using air conditioning and drinking or showering more often.” — Manuela Andreoni

A sweeping effort by government regulators to figure out why homeowners insurance is so expensive and difficult for customers to obtain is already facing challenges as some crucial states say they may opt out of the call for data.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, an umbrella group representing state insurance regulators, said on March 8 that state agencies were asking insurers for detailed data on how they treated their customers, including information on the types of coverage they offer in different zip codes, recent history of claims payouts in those areas, the size of insurance customers’ deductibles and their options for discounts by repairing or upgrading parts of their home. At the time, a top NAIC official said the goal was to “address the critical challenge of the affordability and availability of homeowners insurance and the financial health of insurance companies.”

The group said data requests would reach more than 400 insurance companies and provide insight into about 80 percent of the plans of all homeowners in the United States, as measured by total insurance premiums. Some of the data would be shared with the Treasury Department to help identify where homeowners face the highest risks and costs of living. State and federal officials called the effort a turning point for the insurance industry. The request is the largest and broadest request for information insurance companies have faced from a regulator in decades. Such detailed data has never been collected at a national level.

But each state regulator can decide whether to participate in the data call, and some states where homeowners are most at risk of damage from severe storms and where insurance markets are most turbulent — such as Louisiana, Texas and Florida, where Republican politicians regularly hesitate on climate change policy – ​​can share limited data or opt out of the program entirely.

Regulators say that even without full participation, the program is still a huge advance in their quest to understand what’s happening with homeowners’ insurance. But the states’ reluctance to participate could leave a significant hole in the picture regulators are trying to piece together about homeowners insurance markets across the country. It could hamper their efforts to decide exactly how to deal with the tangle of problems caused by inflation and increasingly severe weather events due to climate change that have led some major insurers to exit states such as Florida and California. In those places, and others hit hard by catastrophic events like storms and wildfires, some homeowners unable to afford rising insurance costs have reduced their coverage.

“It makes no sense to discount the 20 percent of the country with significant climate risk and associated consumer impacts, or to discount the types of insurance that impact the most vulnerable consumers,” said Birny Birnbaum , an insurance expert and executive director of the Center for Economic Justice, a nonprofit organization focused on equal access to economic opportunity.

At a Wednesday meeting of the Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance, attended by Treasury Department officials, insurance industry representatives and state regulators, Mr. Birnbaum told attendees that he feared as many as 10 states might refuse to share data .

Steven E. Seitz, director of the Treasury Department’s Federal Insurance Office, declined to name or discuss the states that did not participate, but said at the meeting that the data call was “a very positive first step in the data coverage”.

But Louisiana, Texas and Florida have already expressed reluctance to join the effort, with Louisiana pulling out completely.

John Ford, a spokesman for Louisiana’s insurance regulator, said its commissioner, Timothy J. Temple, had decided not to force companies operating in the state to share their data. Mr. Temple and his staff are “focused this year on regulatory and legislative efforts that will attract insurers to our state and stabilize the market,” Mr. Ford said.

Ben Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Insurance, said “Texas does not intend to collect new information” because it already collects data from insurers that “generally respond” to what the umbrella group requested.

Florida is considering what information to share, a spokeswoman said. A bill passed by the Florida Legislature this year would require insurers in the state to report zip code-level information about claim payouts. But they wouldn’t have to reveal the same kind of details about the policies they offered to their customers, such as the amount of their deductibles, that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ data call calls for.

Some information from states that opted out of the data call entirely could still find its way to the umbrella group. That’s because regulators in participating states, such as Pennsylvania, are asking national brands that operate in their states, such as State Farm and Nationwide, to share details about their homeowners’ plans wherever they are sold.

A spokeswoman for the NAIC said the group does not plan to publish a list of participating states.

In January 2013, a Montana cattle rancher returned to the United States from Kyrgyzstan to hide tissue from a Marco Polo argali sheep, one of the largest in the world, federal prosecutors said.

The worker took the tissue to Arthur Schubarth, 80, a farmer from Vaughn, Mont., who planned to use it to create a giant sheep hybrid that he could sell to shooting sanctuaries, according to prosecutors. They said Schubarth illegally used tissue from the animal, which is banned in Montana, to create the species for nearly a decade until 2021 — including in 2019, when he bought the testicles of a bighorn sheep to extract sperm.

His scheme was discovered by authorities after they learned he was using forged veterinary inspection certificates to transport sheep in and out of Montana, prosecutors said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Schubarth pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Montana to two wildlife crimes: conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act and substantive violation of the Lacey Act, which prohibits the trade in illegally captured wildlife, it said Ministry of Justice in one rack on Tuesday.

It was unclear exactly how authorities discovered Mr. Schubarth’s plot. The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks declined to comment, saying the investigation was still active. In a statement Tuesday, Ron Howell, the department’s chief enforcement officer, described the case as “complex.”

“The type of crime we have uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife in Montana,” Mr. Howell said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which also investigated the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

As part of the plan to create a giant sheep hybrid, an unknown livestock farmer returned to the United States from Kyrgyzstan in 2013 with tissue from the Marco Polo argali sheep, which was undeclared upon arrival, prosecutors said. The male Marco Polo argali sheep, native to the mountainous regions of Central Asia, can weigh more than 300 pounds and have horns that can be more than five feet wide, the Justice Department said.

Argali sheep are protected internationally, as well as in the United States, by the Endangered Species Act. According to the Department of Justice, they are banned in Montana to protect native sheep from disease and hybridization.

According to court documents, Mr. Schubarth contracted a laboratory in October 2015 to create cloned embryos using tissue from the Marco Polo argali sheep. About a year later, in November 2016, Mr. Schubarth received 165 cloned embryos, which he then implanted in ewes on his sprawling 215-acre farm, according to court documents.

In May 2017, one purely genetically male Marco Polo argali sheep was born, and Mr. Schubarth named it Montana Mountain King, prosecutors said. The following year, Mr. Schubarth began harvesting semen from Montana Mountain King, and was soon shipping straws of his semen to buyers across the country, court documents show.

Mr. Schubarth then teamed up with at least five other people across the country to try to create an even larger sheep hybrid — including in 2019, when he purchased the testicles of a bighorn sheep, according to prosecutors.

According to court documents, in July 2020, Mr. Schubarth agreed to sell 11 descendants of the Montana Mountain King to someone in Texas for $13,200. Mr. Schubarth and his co-conspirators were able to transport offspring of the Montana Mountain King across the country using forged veterinary inspection certificates that claimed the offspring were a legally permitted species, prosecutors said.

The co-conspirators who worked with Mr. Schubarth were not identified by prosecutors or in court documents. It was unclear Thursday whether they would also be charged.

Mr. Schubarth, who is expected to be sentenced on July 11, faces up to five years in prison for each offense, along with a fine of up to $250,000 and three years of supervised release, the Justice Department said.

A lawyer for Mr. Schubarth did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Todd Kim, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said in a statement Tuesday that Schubarth participated in a plot that could have harmed native wildlife in the United States.

“This was a bold plan to create huge hybrid sheep species that could be sold and hunted as trophies,” he said.