A Montana man has been sentenced to four years of probation for threatening to assault former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

FILE - In this April 4, 2013, file photo, a mechanized shovel loads a haul truck with coal at the Spring Creek coal mine near Decker, Mont. – A judge says U.S officials downplayed climate change impacts and other environmental costs from the expansion of a massive coal mine near the Montana-Wyoming border, in a case that could show how far the Biden administration is willing to go to unwind its predecessors' decisions. She gave the government until October to do a new analysis of the mine's climate impacts and other environmental effects. Environmentalists sued after the expansion was approved, claiming climate change hadn’t been fully considered under the Obama administration. That led to a 2016 order for officials to re-examine the environmental impacts, and then another lawsuit when that study was completed.

Circuit Court of Appeals on June 17, 2020, upheld a federal judge's ruling that said dinosaur fossils are part of a property's surface estate in an ongoing battle over ownership of millions of dollars of fossils unearthed on an eastern Montana ranch. Dinosaur fossils worth millions of dollars unearthed on a Montana ranch belong to the owners of the lands surface rights, not the owners of the mineral rights, a U.S. appeals court ruled. The surface rights where the fossils were found are owned by Mary Ann and Lige Murray. In the meantime, the 2019 Montana Legislature passed a bill stating that dinosaur fossils are part of a property's surface estate unless they are reserved as part of the mineral estate. In a 4-3 ruling last month, the Montana justices said dinosaur fossils are not considered minerals under state law.