Mihir Zaveri

But it was a far-right group — unsatisfied with the conservative positions of the event’s organizers — that most conspicuously disrupted Trump’s talk.

The group that organized the event, Turning Point USA, had previously canceled the question-and-answer portion of the event because it suspected the far-right group might cause a disturbance.

On Sunday, in a raucous scene captured in widely viewed videos, some in the audience yelled and booed during the talk, interrupting Trump and demanding that he take questions.

At one point, when Trump contended that conservatives do not disrupt liberal speakers on college campuses, one person yelled out, “Q&amp;A.;” Trump responded by saying that a Q&amp;A; portion sometimes gets hijacked by those looking for a “sound bite.”

“You have some people spreading nonsense, spreading hate to try to take over that room,” he said. “That’s the real issue.”

More yells followed. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality who was also speaking at the event, responded, “You’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive and discourteous.”

Guilfoyle, who is Trump’s girlfriend, then added, “I bet you engage and go on online dating because you’re impressing no one here to get a date in person.”

A spokesman for Trump declined to comment Monday.

The exchange prompted some to suggest that the far-right group had forced the event, which ran for about 35 minutes, to be cut short. A listing for the event shows it was scheduled to last two hours. The remaining time was allocated for book signings, organizers said.

Turning Point USA, a nonprofit conservative youth organization, said in a statement Monday that “it was our organization’s call to cancel the Q-and-A portion days before the event, after we were made aware of a preplanned effort to disrupt the event.”

The conflict that unfolded Sunday appeared to stem from an ongoing campaign led by Nicholas J. Fuentes against Turning Point USA.

Fuentes hosts a show called “America First” broadcast on YouTube and other online platforms. He has argued for “Christian nationalism” and against immigration, and has criticized Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, over Kirk’s views on immigration.

Fuentes, who attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 at which a man who had espoused white supremacist views fatally struck a woman with his car, has said that the First Amendment was not written for Muslims or immigrants, according to the Chicago Tribune, which interviewed Fuentes in 2017. He has also said that some members of the media should be hanged or sent out of the country for what he determined was intentional false reporting, the Tribune reported.

A message left at a number listed for Fuentes was not immediately returned Monday.

On his show Monday evening, Fuentes said his intention was not to disrupt the event at UCLA. But he said the demonstration was successful.

On Sunday, he wrote on Twitter that the protest was not aimed at Trump, whom he called a “patriot.”

He said Monday on Twitter that the head of Turning Point USA “is a total failure that continues to be humiliated by real nationalist conservatives.”

“He’s lost control of his own events &amp; he has lost the confidence of young Trump supporters,” Fuentes said. “It’s unfortunate Don got swept up in this but thank Kirk for that!”

This article originally appeared in

Donald Trump Jr. Event at UCLA Disrupted by Far-Right Group

Donald Trump Jr. went to UCLA on Sunday to talk about a central message of his new book: how liberals are trying to silence conservatives with claims of political correctness.

The clerk, Anwar Ghazali, 30, was convicted of second-degree murder in August after a four-day trial.

Prosecutors said the teenager, Dorian Harris, grabbed the beer from a cooler around 10 p.m. March 29, 2018, and left the store, the Top Stop Shop, without paying. Ghazali then pulled a 40-caliber handgun from under the store counter and chased after Dorian, firing several rounds before returning to the store, prosecutors said.

Ghazali did not call police, prosecutors said. A bullet hit the femoral artery in the back of Dorian’s left thigh, and he bled to death. His body was found nearby two days later.

Lori Fowler, one of the prosecutors in the case, previously said that Ghazali “took it upon himself to be the judge and jury and the executioner over a $2 beer.”

Ghazali was sentenced Thursday by Tennessee Criminal Court Judge W. Mark Ward. His prison term includes no possibility of parole.

“It hurts,” Sylvia Harris, Dorian’s grandmother, told WMC Action News in Memphis after the sentencing hearing. “I will never, ever be able to see my grandson again. None of us will. This is a pill I just cannot swallow, but I am glad justice was served and my grandson can still rest in peace.”

The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday evening.

Blake Ballin, Ghazali’s lawyer, said in an email Thursday that Ghazali was “disappointed” that he was not given the lowest possible sentence — 15 years in prison.

At the sentencing hearing, Ghazali expressed remorse to Dorian’s family and said that he did not mean to harm Dorian, Ballin said.

“Mr. Ghazali has always maintained that his actions were reckless and he intends to file an appeal of the verdict and the sentence,” Ballin said.

Dorian’s death in March 2018 drew national attention as yet another case of a black boy being killed over something seemingly trivial. Many noted that it occurred in Memphis, a city that has long grappled with deep racial divides and is also where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech before he was killed.

“If we don’t value black lives and believe that Dorian’s life is worth far more than an allegedly stolen beer, then we’re not authentically honoring my father,” Rev. Bernice King, King’s daughter, said on Twitter in 2018.

Memphis Clerk Sentenced to 22 Years for Killing Teenager Who Stole Beer

A Memphis, Tennessee, store clerk was sentenced Thursday to 22 years in prison for fatally shooting a 17-year-old who had shoplifted a beer, authorities said.

The ordinances, announced in December, include an assault weapons ban, a ban on large-capacity magazines and a measure that empowered courts to stop people from possessing firearms if they posed an imminent threat to themselves or others.

But Judge Joseph M. James of Allegheny County said in his opinion in the Court of Common Pleas that state law “preempts any local regulation pertaining to the regulation of firearms,” despite the “large amount of energy” the city put into arguing that its ordinances were lawful.

James’ decision came just two days after the first anniversary of the massacre. On Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman opened fire at the synagogue and killed 11 people after the authorities said he had spewed anger toward Jews and immigrants online.

The decision also came as local officials nationwide are increasingly pushing back against similar state-imposed restrictions on the ability of cities and counties to enact gun control policies. As of late last year, 43 states had pre-emption laws that bar local governments from enacting nearly any gun regulation that would go beyond state law.

Joshua Prince, a lawyer for the gun rights groups and others who sued the city, said James’ decision showed that Mayor Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh, who championed the measures, and the City Council are “neither above the law nor a special class of citizens that may violate the law with impunity.”

“The city’s gun control sought to eviscerate the inviolate right of the residents of the commonwealth to keep and bear arms and ensnare law-abiding citizens through a patchwork of laws,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

Peduto said on Twitter that the city planned to appeal James’ decision.

“The city and its outside legal counsel have always expected this would be a long legal fight, and will continue to fight for the right to take common sense steps to prevent future gun violence,” Timothy McNulty, a spokesman for the city, said in an emailed statement Tuesday night. “We will appeal.”

The measures were announced in December and immediately faced pushback from gun rights groups.

In January, the Allegheny County district attorney, Stephen A. Zappala, wrote a letter to a City Council member stating that he did not believe the council had the authority to pass the legislation and even suggested that council members who voted in favor of it could be prosecuted.

Peduto signed the ordinances into law in April. Three gun rights groups — the Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearm Owners Against Crime and Firearms Policy Foundation — and three individuals quickly sued.

The Court of Common Pleas stayed the ordinances in May as the case proceeded.

In an interview with CityLab in February, Peduto said he was aware of the legal hurdles the city faced.

“But we feel we have to do something to change the temperature in Harrisburg,” Peduto said, referring to the state capital of Pennsylvania. “If this were to be followed by 50 other cities around Pennsylvania doing the same thing, it puts the pressure on the state legislators to act. We feel it’s worth the legal fight.”

He said that he believed the U.S. Constitution gave the residents of Pittsburgh and other cities the right to “domestic tranquillity” that is taken away by gun violence, referring to a line in the Constitution’s preamble.

“So there’s this realization that it’s an uphill battle, but it’s a battle that has to happen, and it has to start somewhere,” Peduto told CityLab. “I really do believe it’s going to happen by cities saying enough’s enough."

He added, “If you’re going to try and stop us from doing it ourselves, we’re going to go to court and we’re going to do it over and over until common sense prevails.”

Judge Strikes Down Gun Laws Enacted in Wake of Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

A Pennsylvania judge Tuesday struck down three gun control ordinances enacted by the city of Pittsburgh after the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue last year, saying that state law prevented the city from regulating firearms.

The protest started as a five-man blockade in July and grew to include dozens before it was disbanded last month. Labor activists, local politicians and the governor of Kentucky visited. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Mitch McConnell offered public support. The Department of Labor intervened.

And now, the miners have received good news. In a series of settlements made public this week in federal courts in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, Blackjewel agreed to pay about 1,100 workers some $5.1 million in unpaid wages.

“I’m really happy,” said Jeffrey Willig, 40, who helped start the protest. “It’s the whole reason we took our stand. We just wanted the money that we worked for.”

Lawyers for Blackjewel did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday evening.

Willig said he was shocked by the national and international attention the protest received.

“We were trying to get our point across: You delay our pay, we’ll delay your train,” Willig said. “We just thought we were going to be five guys blocking a train — it was going to be local news and that was it.”

Bankruptcies and layoffs have become routine in coal fields amid an industrywide decline. But the blockade held particular significance in Harlan County, Kentucky, a place once synonymous with bloody labor wars. It is also one of the poorest regions in the country, said Ned Pillersdorf, one of the lawyers representing the miners.

Blackjewel was 2 years old and owned mines in four states, employing more than 1,000 miners in central Appalachia, when it filed for bankruptcy in July.

Miners learned in the middle of an afternoon shift that Blackjewel was shutting down immediately and putting everyone out of work. The company did not file a mandatory 60-day advance warning and did not post a bond, required by Kentucky law, to cover payroll.

Workers did not receive pay for their last week on the job. Paychecks for two previous weeks bounced.

Hundreds of miners overdrew their bank accounts and faced looming mortgage and car payments and medication costs. Lawyers representing the miners in the bankruptcy proceeding estimated that Blackjewel’s employees in central Appalachia were each owed $4,202.91, on average, for wages and benefits earned.

On July 29, a train carrying $1 million worth of coal — that had already been sold — began rolling out of Blackjewel’s Cloverlick No. 3 mine in Harlan County to be transported to the buyer. Five quick-thinking miners set up the blockade. The protest swelled over the coming months and drew national attention.

The Labor Department intervened in August, asking the bankruptcy judge to block the train, which eventually led to this week’s settlements.

The department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday evening.

Pillersdorf said it was rare for workers to receive so much money out of a bankruptcy proceeding, while creditors also jockey for money.

Joe Childers, another lawyer representing some of the miners, said that the back pay still did not resolve all of the miners’ claims. He said it did not include vacation time, retirement contributions, health savings account payments and other types of compensation.

Still, he called the settlements a “step in the right direction.”

The workers have not yet received their checks. But Willig said that when he did, most of the money would go toward car and mortgage payments.

He said the whole episode had turned him away from coal mining. Willig hopes to get a job working for a railroad or in fiber optics.

“I’m 40,” he said. “My body has taken a toll from hard labor for most of my life. I kind of want to get something that’s not real hard anymore.”

Blackjewel Coal Miners to Get Millions in Back Pay After Train Blockade

For two months this summer, out-of-work miners blocked a train full of coal from shipping out of an eastern Kentucky mine, demanding weeks of unpaid wages after their employer, Blackjewel, suddenly went bankrupt.

A federal grand jury indicted Buck, 65, on Wednesday on one count of distribution of methamphetamine resulting in death for the overdose of Timothy Dean, 55, in January. Buck was charged last month in a criminal complaint with the same crime in the 2017 death of Gemmel Moore, 26 — a charge that was also included in Wednesday’s indictment.

The grand jury also indicted Buck on three other counts of methamphetamine distribution, saying that, for years, he had engaged in a pattern of giving drugs to men who performed sexual favors at his apartment.

“Buck exerted power over his victims, often targeting vulnerable individuals who were destitute, homeless, and/or struggled with drug addiction, in order to exploit the relative wealth and power imbalance between them,” the grand jury wrote in the indictment.

If convicted of either of the top two charges, Buck could face a sentence of up to life in prison without parole, prosecutors said.

Buck is in federal custody, prosecutors said. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday evening.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department began investigating Buck after Moore’s death in 2017. Investigators talked to other men who described disturbing encounters with Buck, including one man who said he believed Buck injected him with drugs while he was sleeping.

But no charges were filed until last month. After Dean died in January in the same way as Moore, the authorities began investigating Buck again.

They found more men who had encounters with Buck, including one who said Buck gave him a syringe that Buck said contained methamphetamine, according to last month’s complaint. But, after injecting himself, the man said, he believed the syringe contained a tranquilizer. He told the authorities that he could not move for more than six hours.

Buck was arrested in September after investigators said a third man had suffered an overdose in his home. The man survived.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office charged Buck in the third man’s overdose. The state charges include battery causing serious injury, administering methamphetamine and maintaining a drug house.

Shortly afterward, federal prosecutors charged Buck in Moore’s death. In a detailed complaint that accused Buck of repeatedly exchanging drugs and money for sexual favors, prosecutors said there were at least 11 victims in the last two years.

One victim said Buck was known as “Doctor Kevorkian,” and was “well known for compensating male prostitutes with drugs and money,” according to the complaint.

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that the federal case would proceed before the state case. They said that more charges could follow.

The case has raised questions about why the authorities did not arrest Buck before Dean’s death. It has also led to accusations that Buck specifically preyed on black men. Both Moore and Dean were black, and most of the 11 victims outlined in last month’s complaint were also black.

Ed Buck Is Indicted in Fatal Overdoses of Two Men at His Home

Ed Buck, a Democratic donor and activist already facing charges in the death of one of two men who fatally overdosed at his West Hollywood apartment, now faces charges in the other.

On May 13, the same thing happened at St. Patrick Cathedral. And June 15, authorities said, an incendiary device was thrown into the San Judas Tadeo Catholic Church, burning the church’s back pews.

The three cases of arson on the city’s west side remain unsolved, but authorities believe they are connected. On Thursday, the FBI said it would offer up to a $15,000 reward for information that leads to the identification or arrest of the person or people responsible.

Nobody was inside the buildings during the arsons and, aside from the pews at San Judas Tadeo, the churches escaped serious damage, according to the Catholic Diocese of El Paso.

Still, the crimes forced the city to confront adversity, two months before a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso left 22 dead, said Fernando Ceniceros, a spokesman for the diocese. Concerned residents banded together to help fix the churches and donate supplies.

“It wasn’t so much a sense of fear; it was more a sense of coming together,” he said. “Eerily enough, two months later we’d see that on a much larger scale in El Paso.”

Ceniceros said in all three arsons, which took place in the early morning, it looked as if someone had tried to throw something similar to a Molotov cocktail into the churches through the windows. A spokeswoman for the FBI declined Sunday to be more specific about the type of weapon used, beyond calling it an “incendiary device.”

In the Walmart shooting, which does not appear to be linked to the arsons, the man accused of carrying out the attack confessed that he had targeted Mexican people, police have said.

The FBI declined Sunday to comment on a motive for the arsons. Ceniceros said the diocese did not have any reason to believe that the churches were targeted because of the race or ethnicity of the congregations, which are heavily Latino, like the city of El Paso.

In the arson at St. Matthew, the device missed the church window and bounced off a wall, falling to the ground and scorching the sidewalk outside. At St. Patrick, the device hit a window, breaking part of it, but still bounced off the glass and hit the sidewalk.

At San Judas, someone broke a window and then threw a device inside, burning the pews in the back of the church and charring the ceiling, Ceniceros said.

“If it’s assumed that it’s the same perpetrator doing this, every attack, every attempted arson got better, if you will,” Ceniceros said.

He said the church was also offering a $5,000 reward in addition to the FBI’s reward.

“Just so that we have a sense of closure, if you will,” he said. “We want a resolution to this.”

FBI Offers Reward in Series of Unsolved Church Arsons in El Paso

In the early morning of May 7, when it was still dark, someone threw an “incendiary device” at St. Matthew Catholic Church in El Paso, Texas, authorities said.

The man, Hamid Hayat, 35, was sentenced in 2007 to 24 years in prison. He had served more than 14 years before Tuesday’s decision.

In overturning Hayat’s conviction and sentence, Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr., of U.S. District Court in Sacramento, California, said that Hayat had not been adequately represented during his trial. His lawyer did not use testimony from several witnesses who could have provided a credible alibi for Hayat, the judge wrote in his order.

“We are really in shock, the whole family, we really are,” Hayat’s sister Raheela Hayat, 24, said in a phone interview.

Dennis Riordan, a lawyer for Hamid Hayat, said he was now seeking Hayat’s immediate release from prison in Phoenix. He said Hayat’s release could be delayed if prosecutors appeal the case.

“Hopefully he comes out tomorrow or the next day,” Raheela Hayat said. "We’re all going to get together and cry, hug him.”

In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California said Tuesday, “We are in the process of reviewing the district court decision and assessing what steps, if any, should be taken and considering all our options.”

The closely watched case had put a spotlight on the farming town of Lodi, California, which is about 40 miles south of Sacramento, where the government said men were financing terrorist groups abroad and recruiting members.

“At the time that all of this happened, back in 2005, this was an international story,” Riordan said. “The FBI said there was a sleeper cell of al-Qaida in Lodi, California, of all places.”

Hayat and his father were the only two people charged in connection with that investigation. Terrorism charges against Hayat’s father were dropped after he pleaded guilty to lying about the amount of money he took out of the country.

The case against Hamid Hayat was largely built around his confessions as well as testimony from an informant who was paid about $225,000 after telling the FBI that Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, once visited the Lodi mosque.

Hayat was accused of training at the camp between October 2003 and November 2004. A jury convicted Hayat in April 2006.

After Hayat’s conviction, McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento, said, “We have detected, we have disrupted and we have deterred, and whatever was taking shape in Lodi isn’t going to happen now.”

Yet Riordan said there were immediate questions about the case. Many, including members of Lodi’s Muslim community, questioned the validity of the prosecution and the quality of Hayat’s defense. Riordan said Hayat’s confession was “false,” made after hours of interrogation and based on promises of leniency.

A federal magistrate judge held hearings last year on whether Hayat’s original lawyer “failed to adequately investigate and present certain defenses on his behalf and to effectively represent him on certain issues during trial.”

Six witnesses at the hearings presented an alibi for Hayat, undermining the argument that Hayat had attended a terrorist training camp for several months. Burrell agreed with the magistrate judge’s findings that the witnesses were “sufficiently credible” and could have testified during the trial if Hayat’s lawyer “had adequately investigated a potential alibi defense.”

Hayat’s trial lawyer did not believe she could present evidence from certain witnesses in Pakistan, according to Burrell’s decision.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations-Sacramento applauded Burrell’s decision.

“At the time of Hamid’s case, the prosecution took advantage of anti-Muslim, post-9/11 bias to convict an innocent man,” the group said in a statement. “And this much-needed good news comes at a time when Islamophobia and bigotry as a whole is on the rise.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/hamid-hayat-wrongful-prison-sentence.html" id="964b8bda-195e-32d2-a012-ceab22f7ab8f">The New York Times</a>.

A federal judge Tuesday overturned the 2006 conviction of a California man accused of training in a Pakistani terrorist camp and lying to the FBI about it, undoing a case once heralded by federal prosecutors after the Sept. 11 attacks as a proactive victory against terrorism.

Hamid Hayat's 2006 Terrorism Conviction Is Overturned

The TSA said it found the weapon in a man’s checked luggage at Baltimore-Washington International Airport around 5:45 a.m. Monday.

The man, whom the TSA did not name, told the authorities that he was an active member of the military and wanted to take the missile launcher home with him to Jacksonville, Texas, as a souvenir from Kuwait.

How he even got it to BWI is not clear (as is how he acquired such unusual taste in memorabilia).

Yet the TSA said the weapon, which was “inert,” was quickly confiscated and turned over to the Maryland fire marshal for “safe disposal.” The man was then allowed to catch his flight.

“Perhaps he should have picked up a keychain instead!” Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokeswoman, said on Twitter, sharing a photo of the gray, cylindrical object lying on top of a pile of clothes, including what appear to be military fatigues.

The TSA did not answer whether this was the first missile launcher it had ever confiscated.

But it is not out of the ordinary for the agency to publicize unusual items that it finds.

The TSA’s Instagram account has close to 1 million followers. Some of the discoveries the agency has shared there include snakes concealed in computer hard drives, bricks of marijuana hidden in Christmas wrapping and replicas of Freddy Krueger’s bladed gloves.

Some confiscated items seem, on their face, benign. In 2012, the TSA barred a woman from taking a cupcake onto a plane, explaining that the cupcake was packed in a jar filled with icing and that the icing exceeded the amount of gel allowed in carry-on luggage.

Other items are more obviously dangerous. Every year, the TSA finds and confiscates thousands of guns — sometimes loaded — at airport security or in checked luggage.

Not everything is caught. In January, a Delta Air Lines passenger carried, by accident, a loaded gun through airport security at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. The passenger later discovered the firearm and alerted the authorities.

Not everything that is found needs to be confiscated. In June 2017, the TSA shared on its Twitter page a photo of a live, 20-pound Atlantic lobster a passenger took through security at Boston Logan International Airport.

It was unclear what became of the missile launcher. The Maryland state fire marshal did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday evening asking about its fate.

The episode, however, allowed the TSA to offer a reminder, for those who needed one: Don’t try to take a military weapon onto an airplane.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/us/tsa-bwi-missile-launcher.html" id="e15c3358-33e5-326c-ae0e-aafeb279772e">The New York Times</a>.

TSA Finds Missile Launcher in Man's Bag at Baltimore Airport

To the ever-growing list of deadly weapons, creatively concealed narcotics and poisonous creatures routinely found in people’s luggage and publicized by the Transportation Security Administration online, add something new:

The university said in a statement that it fired the officers for “egregious violations of the university’s code of conduct.”

“Every member of the Hampton University community must adhere to the university’s code of conduct,” the university said in an emailed statement. “After a full investigation, it was determined that the officers shared misogynistic, racist and other offensive remarks via social media.” The university said it had “zero tolerance for such behavior.”

The Hampton University Police Department employed 27 sworn officers in 2018, according to state figures. The department also employs 10 “security officers,” according to its website.

It was unclear Thursday what positions the fired officers had held. The university did not provide any further information about the violations or the identities, ranks or tenure of the officers. A person who answered the department’s phone Thursday evening said no one was available to speak about the firings.

The announcement came amid growing scrutiny over police conduct on social media and the prejudice such online posts might expose.

In June, the Plain View Project released a database that showed current and former police officers using content that was racist, misogynist, Islamophobic or otherwise biased. The project, which was founded by a lawyer, looked at social media activity from eight police departments across the United States.

That project prompted investigations and repercussions in Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis and elsewhere. The Hampton University firings did not appear to be connected to the project.

Earlier in the week, two police officers in Gretna, Louisiana, were fired, four days after one of them referred to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as a “vile idiot” on Facebook and suggested that she should be shot.

Hampton University was founded in 1868 as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and is known as one of the top historically black universities in the United States. Booker T. Washington earned a degree from the institution in 1875, and President Barack Obama delivered a commencement speech there in 2010.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/automobiles/hampton-university-fires-nine-police-officers-over-misogynistic-racist-posts.html" id="9df6dfac-8542-3924-a670-127aa4d190c2">The New York Times</a>.

Hampton University, a private school in Virginia, said Thursday that it had fired nine officers from its Police Department after a school investigation uncovered racist and misogynistic posts they had shared on social media.

Hampton University Fires Nine Police Officers Over 'Misogynistic, Racist' Posts

Brandon Bostian, 36, faced more than 200 charges in the May 2015 derailment, including one count of causing catastrophe, a felony, and several counts of involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, both misdemeanors.

Just before the derailment, Bostian had accelerated the train to 106 mph as it entered a curved section of track with a 50 mph speed limit. The train then careened off the track and into Philadelphia’s Port Richmond neighborhood.

In dismissing the charges, Judge Barbara McDermott of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas sided with Bostian’s lawyer in ruling that the mistakes he made did not constitute a crime. “The law recognizes we’re all human,” the judge said, according to The Associated Press.

Bostian erred after a local passenger train going the other direction was struck by a rock that broke that train’s windshield and made an emergency stop, said Bostian’s lawyer, Brian McMonagle.

“A mistake is never the basis for charging someone with a crime,” he said. “Otherwise, every doctor who commits malpractice would be charged with a crime.”

McDermott became the second judge to reject criminal culpability for Bostian in a case that has taken an unusually twisted path through Pennsylvania’s legal system.

More than 200 people were injured in the derailment, in addition to the eight killed. In October 2016, Amtrak agreed to pay up to $265 million to victims and their families in one of the largest settlements related to a train derailment in the United States.

The Philadelphia district attorney declined to charge Bostian in May 2017, saying he did not believe there was enough evidence to prove Bostian consciously disregarded a “substantial and unjustifiable risk.”

But then lawyers for the victims and their families learned of a Pennsylvania law that allows anyone to file a private criminal complaint in municipal court requesting certain charges against someone.

The families filed the private complaint against Bostian in Philadelphia Municipal Court. The district attorney’s office once again opted not to pursue charges, claiming it had a conflict of interest because it had already decided against pressing charges.

So Attorney General Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania brought criminal charges in May 2017.

In September 2017, a Philadelphia Municipal Court judge dismissed the charges, saying the episode appeared to be an accident and not the result of criminal negligence.

The attorney general’s office appealed to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, and in February 2018, the criminal charges were restored.

McMonagle said Tuesday’s dismissal came after he filed motions — citing new decisions in separate criminal recklessness cases — that supported the argument that Bostian should not be charged.

On Tuesday, the state attorney general’s office vowed to press on.

“Nothing has changed from the position of our first appeal — accordingly, we will be appealing the decision,” Jacklin Rhoads, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office, said in a statement Tuesday.

McMonagle called the prosecution an “obscenity.”

“Now two judges have said the same thing, and not to mention the district attorney’s office that investigated it for two years that declined to prosecute,” he said. “I’ve yet to hear any reasonable explanation from the attorney general’s office as to why they continue this prosecution.”

In a 2016 report, the National Transportation Safety Board said Bostian accelerated the train after “he lost his situational awareness because his attention was diverted to an emergency situation with a nearby Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) train that had made an emergency stop after being struck by a projectile,” the report said.

The board said Bostian accelerated because he thought it was at a different section of the route.

“The reason that he made the mistake was occasioned by the chaos on the tracks,” McMonagle said.

Thomas R. Kline and Robert Mongeluzzi, lawyers representing victims’ families, said in an emailed statement that they disagreed with Tuesday’s ruling: “Our clients are hopeful that the ruling will be reversed on appeal, and that ultimately there will be public accountability of Mr. Bostian, whose recklessness caused the death of eight individuals and mayhem to the lives of hundreds of others.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/brandon-bostian-amtrak.html" id="f6da54a1-34d6-3f81-a89e-f367a6ea8011">The New York Times</a>.

For the second time in two years, a Pennsylvania judge Tuesday dismissed charges against an Amtrak engineer who was driving a speeding train that derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight people.

Second Judge Dismisses Criminal Charges in Philadelphia Train Wreck That Killed 8

The project, however, has long drawn the opposition of those who say it would desecrate the mountain’s sacred ground.

On Wednesday, that opposition had a new face: About 30 Hawaiian elders were arrested as they blocked a road leading to Mauna Kea’s summit to halt the construction, organizers said. They described an emotional but peaceful scene as the elders, who were sitting under tents on the road, were escorted by police officers to nearby white vans while dozens of other protesters chanted and cried. Some had to be carried.

“We have come to the point in time where enough is enough,” Leilani Kaapuni, one of the elders, said in a phone interview. She said she was arrested for obstruction of a government road but later returned to the blockade. “This mountain is sacred,” she said.

A state spokesman confirmed the arrests, but the authorities could not immediately provide numbers of how many were arrested and what charges they might face. Later Wednesday, Gov. David Ige, a Democrat, said at a news conference that he had issued an emergency proclamation that would allow the authorities to better manage roadways and cordon off certain areas on the mountain.

He said that the protests had created a dangerous situation, that roads were being illegally occupied and that the state would work to ensure that the telescope’s construction could begin.

With a primary mirror bigger than a basketball court, the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is expected to be the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, has faced opposition for a decade.

Astronomers say the telescope would be able to study planets around other stars and peer into black holes in distant galaxies better than the Hubble Space Telescope. It would be built by an international partnership called the TMT International Observatory, led by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology but also including Japan, China, India and Canada.

The TMT International Observatory declined to comment Wednesday.

Over the years, activists have staged protests and filed lawsuits to halt the telescope’s construction. Thirteen major telescopes already exist on the summit, and some have said that decades of telescope building on Mauna Kea have negatively affected cultural and religious practices.

Last week, a coalition of activists filed a legal challenge in the 3rd Circuit Court of Hawaii, seeking an injunction against the telescope’s construction.

Protesters had gathered on the road since last Friday, after Ige’s July 10 announcement that construction on the telescope would begin this week.

It was not clear how that timeline would be affected by the blockade, and Ige said at the news conference Wednesday that there was no concrete date by which construction was expected to begin.

“I think we are looking at being able to provide safe access of equipment to the site, and we are committed to do that,” he said.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, thousands of protesters were still in the area, organizers said, with some blocking the road. It was unclear whether more arrests were expected.

Kealoha Pisciotta, a protest organizer, said that she and other opponents did not intend to leave the road until the project was halted. She said Wednesday’s arrests were “extremely difficult to watch.”

“They are our elders,” she said. “They decided rather than having to see their young children and young people being arrested that they were going to take the arrests. They asked everyone to abide by their will to do this, on behalf of the people.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/science/mauna-kea-protest.html" id="098a4bb5-7498-3097-a337-2c10e37d0b0d">The New York Times</a>.

Construction was set to begin this week on a giant telescope on the barren summit of Mauna Kea, a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, considered the best observatory site in the Northern Hemisphere.

Mihir Zaveri

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