Liam Stack

His death was announced by the Utah Department of Corrections, which did not give the specific cause. In a statement, the department said he died at the Utah State Prison in Draper, roughly 20 miles south of Salt Lake City.

The case against Lafferty, who was convicted of two counts of murder, became widely known after it was featured in the 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith” by Jon Krakauer.

The book, which detailed Lafferty’s brutal crime, messianic delusions and decades of appeals, was criticized as anti-religion by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Therese Michelle Day, a federal public defender representing Lafferty, said his legal team was preparing to appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court at the time of his death. Day said no execution date had been set, but Richard Piatt, a spokesman for the Utah attorney general’s office, said his execution most likely would have happened next year.

Lafferty had chosen to die by firing squad, but Day said he had not been mentally fit to stand trial.

“Mr. Lafferty believed his incarceration and conviction were the result of a conspiracy between the state, the church, and unseen spiritual forces, including the spirit of the trial judge’s deceased father, among others,” Day said. “He believed that all of his attorneys were working against him, and that one attorney was his reincarnated sister who later became possessed by an evil spirit.”

“A person suffering from this level of mental illness and delusional thinking is not competent to assist his counsel throughout his legal proceedings,” she added.

Sean D. Reyes, the attorney general of Utah, said in a statement that the state had “labored for decades to provide justice” for Lafferty’s victims.

“That the wheels of justice turn so slowly in cases like this is cruel and tragic,” Reyes said. “Now that Mr. Lafferty is facing his Maker, perhaps ultimate justice will be realized and there will finally be some closure for the family of the victims.”

The events leading to the killings began in 1983, when Lafferty was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for his increasingly extreme religious views, according to court records. Those views included an embrace of polygamy, which the church banned in 1890.

Angered over his excommunication and the collapse of his marriage, Lafferty formed a breakaway polygamous sect with his brothers called the School of the Prophets in 1984. The brothers claimed they received messages from God.

Lafferty said one of those messages told him his ex-wife, who left him and took their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.

In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.

God told him to kill all four of them, Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

They beat her, strangled her with a vacuum cord and slit her throat. Then they slit her baby’s throat, court records said.

But after killing Brenda and her child, they decided not to kill the other two people named in Lafferty’s vision. Instead, the group fled the Salt Lake City area for Nevada, where Lafferty and Daniel were arrested the following month.

(Daniel Charles Lafferty, 71, is serving a life sentence at Utah State Prison for his role in the killings, according to the Department of Corrections.)

Ronald Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.

He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.

Prosecutors again charged Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.

In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

At Lafferty’s second trial, his brother Daniel claimed to have killed both victims, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. But another member of the group, Charles Carnes, told the court that as the group drove to Nevada, Ronald Lafferty confessed to killing Brenda and thanked Daniel for killing Erica.

“‘I can’t believe I killed her,’” Carnes quoted Ronald Lafferty as saying, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. “‘Thank you, brother, for doing the baby because I don’t think I had it in me.’”

Lafferty filed several appeals at the state and federal levels, the most recent of which was denied in August. His lawyer, Day, said in a statement on Monday that he had never received proper treatment for what she described as a severe mental illness.

“Through it all Mr. Lafferty, himself, never believed that he was mentally ill or incompetent,” she said. “One expert said that if he was guilty of faking anything, he was guilty of pretending to be normal when he was not.”

This article originally appeared in

Ronald Lafferty, Mormon Cult Leader on Death Row for Murder, Dies of Natural Causes

Ronald Lafferty, a Mormon fundamentalist on death row for what he claimed were the divinely inspired murders of his sister-in-law and baby niece in 1984, died of natural causes in prison on Monday. He was 78.

“Like that Old Testament prophet, he stood against the corrupt leadership of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,” Clinton said, to a roar of applause from the congregation. “And he looked out for the vulnerable among us. He lifted up the next generation of leaders. And he even worked a few miracles.”

Cummings, D-Md., who was serving his 13th term in the House of Representatives, died last week in Baltimore at 68. As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he was a powerful figure in Washington and earned the ire of Trump for his role in the impeachment inquiry. The president did not attend the funeral.

Even from his hospital bed, Cummings was said to be joining strategy discussions with colleagues. Clinton, the former secretary of state, alluded to that determination, even in his final days, in her remarks Friday.

“Toward the end of his life, he said, ‘I am begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on, because if you want to have a democracy intact for your children, and your children’s children, and generations yet unborn, we have got to guard this moment,’” she said. “‘This is our watch.’”

She added: “‘When we are dancing with the angels, the question will be asked,’ he said, ‘In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?’”

Cummings’ body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, where he was praised by lawmakers from both parties. He was the first African American lawmaker to receive such an honor.

“Elijah wrote his funeral program and decided who he wanted to do what,” Bishop Walter Scott Thomas, the pastor, said after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, read from the Bible. “Some of you may be wondering why you are not doing anything, so I wanted to give you clarity.”

The funeral was held at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, where Cummings could usually be seen seated in the front row on Sundays. The church seats 4,000 people but was expected to draw far more for the funeral Friday.

Cummings was raised in Baltimore by parents who were former sharecroppers in South Carolina. He graduated from Howard University in Washington, earned a law degree at the University of Maryland and was first elected to Congress in 1996. After his first election, he never faced a serious primary or general election challenge.

Cummings was revered in his district, and widely respected on Capitol Hill, for his integrity and moral vision, which Clinton alluded to in her remarks. She called him “a fierce champion for truth, justice and kindness in every part of his life.”

“His integrity and character, his can-do spirit, made him a guiding light in the Congress,” she said. “He pushed back against the abuse of power. He was unwavering in his defense of our democracy. He had little tolerance for those who put party ahead of country or partisanship above truth.”

Hillary Clinton Urges Defense of Democracy at Cummings' Funeral

Speaking at the funeral of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Hillary Clinton offered a forceful defense of democracy and compared the late congressman, a leader in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, to the prophet Elijah.

“Like that Old Testament prophet, he stood against the corrupt leadership of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel,” Hillary Clinton said, to a roar of applause from the congregation. “And he looked out for the vulnerable among us. He lifted up the next generation of leaders. And he even worked a few miracles.”

Cummings, D-Md., who was serving his 13th term in the House of Representatives, died last week in Baltimore at 68. As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, he earned the ire of Trump for his support of impeachment and investigations into the president’s finances.

Even from his hospital bed, Cummings was said to be joining impeachment strategy discussions with colleagues. Hillary Clinton alluded to that determination, even in his final days, in her remarks Friday.

“Toward the end of his life, he said, ‘I am begging the American people to pay attention to what is going on, because if you want to have a democracy intact for your children, and your children’s children, and generations yet unborn, we have got to guard this moment,’ ” she said. “‘This is our watch.’ ”

She added: “‘When we are dancing with the angels, the question will be asked,’ he said, ‘In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?’ ”

Cummings’ body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, where he was praised by lawmakers from both parties. He was the first African American lawmaker to receive that honor.

Bill Clinton pointed to Cummings’ bipartisan friendships as proof of his commitment to a free and diverse society.

“No matter how hard he fought or how passionately he argued, he tried to treat everyone the way he wanted to be treated,” the former president said. “The way he thought Americans should be treated. You can’t run a free society if you have to hate everybody you disagree with.”

In addition to the Clintons, other prominent politicians who spoke at his funeral were former President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a presidential candidate.

“Elijah wrote his funeral program and decided who he wanted to do what,” Bishop Walter Scott Thomas, the pastor, said after Warren and Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, read from the Bible. “Some of you may be wondering why you are not doing anything, so I wanted to give you clarity.”

The funeral was held at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, where Cummings could usually be seen seated in the front row Sundays.

“I love this man,” Bill Clinton said, gesturing toward the coffin. “I loved every minute I ever spent with him, every conversation I ever had with him. I loved his booming voice. But we should hear him now at the quiet times of night, when we get worried, and we get discouraged, and we don’t know if we can believe anymore.”

Again referring to the story of the prophet Elijah, Bill Clinton said Americans should remember Cummings as “a still, small voice that keeps us going, keeps us grateful, keeps us happy and keeps us moving.”

Cummings was raised in Baltimore by parents who were former sharecroppers in South Carolina. He graduated from Howard University in Washington, earned a law degree at the University of Maryland and was first elected to Congress in 1996.

Cummings used his power as the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform to mount muscular investigations of the Trump administration. In the past year, Cummings issued subpoenas for Trump’s financial records (the president sued him in response) and summoned the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to testify about hush money payments to women who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.

In an interview with The New York Times in May, Cummings urged the president to commit his life to public service.

“I want to send a message that we have one life to live, Mr. President,” he replied. “This is no dress rehearsal. And that the American people simply want to live their lives without fear of their leaders. And we, as leaders, have a duty and a responsibility to keep our promise to them when we ran for office and won — and that is to make their lives better. While we’re all on this Earth, that’s my message.”

Cummings was revered in his district and widely respected on Capitol Hill for his integrity and moral vision, which Hillary Clinton alluded to in her remarks. She called him “a fierce champion for truth, justice and kindness in every part of his life.”

At Cummings Funeral, Bill and Hillary Clinton Urge Defense of Democracy

Speaking at the funeral of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, offered a forceful defense of democracy and compared the late congressman, a leader in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, to the prophet Elijah.

A four-count indictment accuses the financier, Low Taek Jho, of transferring more than $21 million from overseas to rapper Prakazrel Michel, known as Pras, from June 2012 through that November. Prosecutors contend that Michel then gave $865,000 of that money to a network straw donors who used it to make campaign contributions to a candidate identified as Candidate A.

While the indictment unsealed Friday does not specifically name the candidate in question — who is accused of no wrongdoing — it clearly refers to former President Barack Obama. The indictment includes allusions to Candidate A having a presidential administration and hosting an event at the White House that Low either “attended or arranged for his associates to attend.”

A spokesman for Obama did not respond to a message seeking comment Friday.

The indictment adds to a list of legal troubles for Low, who has been wanted by law enforcement in the United States and Malaysia for his alleged role in the theft of $4.5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. That case contributed to the electoral defeat and eventual indictment of the country’s former prime minister, Najib Razak.

Michel and Low have both been charged with violations of campaign finance law and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Michel has additionally been charged with concealing material facts and lying in connection with the conspiracy.

Michel pleaded not guilty Friday before s Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said Barry J. Pollack, his lawyer. He was not detained.

“Mr. Michel is extremely disappointed that so many years after the fact the government would bring charges related to 2012 campaign contributions,” Pollack said. “Mr. Michel is innocent of these charges and looks forward to having the case heard by a jury.”

The Justice Department said Friday that Low remained at large. A spokeswoman for Low, who declined to provide his whereabouts, denied the charges filed Friday.

“The allegations against Mr. Low have no basis in fact,” the spokeswoman said in a statement. “Mr. Low has never made any campaign contributions directly or indirectly in the U.S., and he unequivocally denies any involvement in or knowledge of the alleged activities.”

Prosecutors allege that Michel used checks, direct deposits and cash payments to send Low’s money to the network of roughly 20 straw donors that he recruited to make the donations.

Michel tried to cover his tracks by falsely claiming that the payments were remuneration for business deals or gifts, prosecutors said. They said he also used more than $1 million of Low’s money to make a large donation to an independent expenditure committee in his name and in the name of a company owned by Michel.

The indictment accuses Michel and Low of concealing the scheme from the candidate, his campaign and administration, and federal regulators. But prosecutors also said the two hoped their largess would buy them political influence, in part by making Michel look important.

The indictment alleges that Michel attended at least two events with the candidate in June and September 2012. In September, Michel took two of the straw donors and Low’s father to a fundraiser at a private home in Washington, where they met the candidate and took pictures with him.

The indictment alleges that Michel made false statements to the Federal Election Commission that claimed that he was the source of the money used in the $1 million donation. Prosecutors said his alleged deception also caused others to make false statements to the FEC, including a presidential joint fundraising committee and the committee that received the $1 million donation.

Law enforcement officials in Malaysia and the United States have described Low as an important player in the alleged theft of approximately $4.5 billion from 1Malaysia Development Berhad, a state-owned development company.

The scandal contributed to the electoral defeat of the former prime minister, Najib, last May. Najib was discovered to have $731 million of the pilfered funds in his own bank accounts and now faces dozens of charges in connection with the alleged theft. He went on trial last month in the first of several corruption cases.

In November, Low and two former Goldman Sachs bankers, Roger Ng and Tim Leissner, were indicted in the Eastern District of New York on charges of conspiring to launder billions of dollars and to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Justice Department said.

Ng, who had been in custody in Malaysia, was extradited to the United States and pleaded not guilty last week. Leissner, his former boss, pleaded guilty to money laundering and foreign bribery charges in August. Low has denied the allegations made in that case.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/us/pras-michel-jho-low-campaign-finance.html" id="70a6aa90-6707-3ea2-af16-2ea42904123b">The New York Times</a>.

One of the founding members of the hip-hop group the Fugees and a fugitive Malaysian financier have been charged with conspiring to violate federal campaign finance law by funneling millions of dollars worth of foreign money into the 2012 presidential election, the Justice Department said Friday.

Fugees Rapper Pras Michel and Financier Charged in Illegal Scheme to Raise Money for Obama

The man, who was not publicly identified, was trying to get a better look at the cliff edge when he lost his footing. He fell 70 feet into the caldera, or crater, of Kilauea, a destructive volcano whose monthslong eruption last year spewed ash, gas and lava into the air and destroyed an estimated 700 homes on the island of Hawaii.

Kilauea is not currently erupting, the U.S. Geological Survey said in its weekly report from the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. But it said in a statement that Kilauea “ranks among the world’s most active volcanoes and may even top the list.” The Geological Survey has ranked the volcano’s threat potential as “very high.”

“Visitors should never cross safety barriers, especially around dangerous and destabilized cliff edges,” John Broward, chief ranger at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, said in a statement. “Crossing safety barriers and entering closed areas can result in serious injuries and death.”

The man fell into the caldera around 6:30 p.m. near the Steaming Bluff overlook area, a grassy meadow marked by cracks and steaming fractures in the ground, the park said in the statement.

Park rangers and rescue workers from Hawaii County Fire Department said they did not locate him until around 9 p.m., when they found him lying on a narrow ledge below the edge of the cliff.

The park said the man was seriously injured but did not provide further details about his condition. The last time a person died in a fall there was October 2017, park officials said.

Rescue personnel used ropes and a Stokes litter to extricate the man, “with support from a Department of Defense helicopter,” the park said in a statement. “The man was airlifted to Hilo Medical Center for urgent care.”

The Geologic Survey said that Kilauea, which is traditionally considered the home of the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele, has had some form of continuous “eruptive activity” since January 1983. The volcano takes up the entire southeast corner of the island of Hawaii.

The eruption sequence that began last May was the most destructive in recent memory, spewing 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of lava across 13.7 square miles of the island, according to a study published last year in the journal Science. It also triggered a wave of earthquakes, including one that was magnitude 6.9.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/man-falls-hawaii-volcano.html" id="524c52fa-2d08-3479-ae66-7b8cedec4a9b">The New York Times</a>.

A man survived a 70-foot fall into one of the most active volcanoes on Earth on Wednesday after he climbed over a metal guardrail at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, authorities said.

A Tourist Wanted a Better Look at an Active Volcano. Then He Fell in.

The ruling is the latest turn in a long-running battle over the statues of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Some, including the city of Charlottesville, which was sued after the City Council initially voted to remove the Lee statue, see the statues as monuments to racism. But others, including a group of citizens who filed the lawsuit six months before the 2017 rally, argue that they are Civil War memorials.

Judge Richard E. Moore of Charlottesville Circuit Court said in a letter dated April 25 that the statues can be viewed as both monuments to the war and as symbols of racism, but only because both sides in the case agree that they depict Confederate military leaders. That inherently makes them war memorials, he wrote.

“While some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy, others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders in a difficult time,” the judge wrote. He added, “In either event, the statues to them under the undisputed facts of this case still are monuments and memorials to them, as veterans of the Civil War.”

The lawsuit named the city, the City Council and individual councilors.

The white nationalist rally in August 2017 was organized to oppose a City Council vote to remove the statue of Lee. It resulted in the death of a counterprotester, and two state troopers were killed in a helicopter crash as they monitored the event.

Under state law, local governments have the authority to authorize the building of war memorials, but they are forbidden from removing, damaging or defacing them. That power rests with the state government.

One remaining question is whether prohibiting the removal of the statues violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Virginia and U.S. Constitutions. Another is whether elected city councilors can be sued for votes they cast while in office.

Moore said in his ruling that he would address those arguments in the coming days and weeks.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/charlottesville-confederate-statues.html" id="1278a02f-6a27-3309-a1c4-e1c442e7b0c5">The New York Times</a>.

A Virginia judge has ruled that local authorities in Charlottesville cannot remove two Confederate statues because they are war memorials protected by state law, a decision that came nearly two years after a deadly white nationalist rally there that was nominally organized to protest a plan to move one of the statues.

Charlottesville Confederate Statues Are Protected by State Law, Judge Rules

The ruling is the latest turn in a long-running battle over the statues of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which has included a flurry of legal filings and a rally that rocked national politics.

The lawsuit named the city, the City Council and individual councilors. Neither lawyers for the plaintiffs nor for the defendants responded to messages seeking comment Tuesday night.

The clash drew renewed attention to the presence of dozens of Confederate monuments across the country, many of which were taken down in the weeks and months that followed. But two years later, a legal debate continues in Charlottesville about whether the statues that incited the movement are actually monuments to the Confederacy.

That question is central to whether the city has the authority to remove them, said Richard Schragger, a law professor at the University of Virginia who has followed the case.

Under a 1904 state law that was amended in 1997 to apply to cities, local governments have the authority to authorize the building of war memorials, but they are forbidden from removing, damaging or defacing them. That power rests with the state government.

The City Council was sued in March 2017 by a group of citizens who said councilors had acted unlawfully when they voted a month earlier to move the Lee statue, even though the statues — which were briefly covered with plastic sheets — were never actually moved. (After the rally, the council voted to also remove the statue of Jackson. The lawsuit was then amended to include both statues.)

Bob Fenwick, a former council member who is named in the case, told a local CBS affiliate Monday that he remained “very comfortable” with his votes to remove the statues.

“It’s based on a flawed law, so the law doesn’t make much difference; it was a public process, it was a lawful process, so that’s our case,” he said.

The city argued in a court filing in January that the law did not apply to these statues because they were not really war memorials. It said the statues were instead symbols of white dominance erected during the Jim Crow era to promote a romantic vision of the antebellum South.

“The statues were part of a regime of city-sanctioned segregation that denied African-Americans equal access to government and public spaces,” attorneys for the city wrote. “The fact that certain Charlottesville residents are unaware of the statues’ history does not change that history or the messages the statues send.”

In his ruling, Moore said the motive of the people who erected the statues “does not change what they are.”

Schragger said that the judge’s ruling “didn’t come as a surprise to anyone” and that the case was widely expected to eventually head to the state’s Supreme Court. But before that can happen, the judge must rule on a few more elements of the case, he said.

One remaining question is whether prohibiting the removal of the statues violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Virginia and U.S. Constitutions, he said. Another is whether elected city councilors can be sued for votes they cast while in office. That could be a problem for the defendants if a judge decides to award the plaintiffs damages, like the cost of their legal fees.

“I think it is somewhat troubling to hold individual city councilors personally liable for votes that they take as members of a public body,” Schragger said.

Moore said in his ruling that he would address those arguments in the coming days and weeks. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, which Moore said he would use “for the announcing of any rulings or a status update on them.”

That bird — a hulking, flightless cassowary with a daggerlike claw on each foot — will go up for auction Saturday alongside about 100 other exotic animals that Hajos, 75, kept on his property near Gainesville, Florida. (Several other cassowaries are also slated to go on the auction block.)

Hajos fell between two cassowary pens on April 12 and was attacked through the fence by at least one of the birds, said Jeff Taylor, the deputy chief of Alachua County Fire Rescue. When rescue workers arrived they found him grievously injured on the ground between the two pens. An angry bird stood in one of the pens.

“A couple of people from our crew had to dodge the bird themselves,” Taylor said. “The bird was obviously agitated and was trying to come at them through the fence, but they were quick enough to get themselves out of the way of the bird.”

Cassowaries are emu-like birds that can stand up to 6 1/2 feet tall. They have an almost prehistoric appearance. Their bright blue faces are topped with a hornlike ridge and their bodies, which can weigh up to 130 pounds, are covered with dark feathers. Their two muscular legs each sport one dangerous claw up to 5 inches long.

“My understanding is these birds are fairly shy around humans but if they are provoked or they have an opportunity they will be very aggressive,” Taylor said. “It may be they saw him fall and had an opportunity and decided to attack.”

Cassowaries have a violent reputation but human fatalities appear to be rare. According to Scientific American, the last recorded cassowary-on-human killing happened in April 1926, when a bird slit the throat of a 16-year-old boy in Australia who had fallen while running from it.

The birds are indigenous to Australia and Southeast Asia, not Florida. Authorities in Alachua County on Tuesday expressed almost universal surprise at both their presence in the county and their role in a local death. Hajos’ son did not respond to messages seeking comment Tuesday.

Bill Grotjahn, who investigated the death for the Medical Examiner’s Office, said Hajos had died from trauma inflicted by the bird. He called it “such an unusual situation.”

“I’ve been doing this for 18 years and I’ve never had a thing like this,” he said. “I’ve had them killed by alligators and snakes but never by a bird like that. I know ostriches and emus have their moments, but cassowaries are an extremely, extremely dangerous bird. You don’t want to fool around with them. They have no sense of humor.”

Grotjahn said he heard that Hajos might have gone to the cassowary pens on the day he died to check on their eggs.

“The female cassowary, which is the larger of the two birds, saw he was messing with the eggs and you know how that goes,” he said. “It is like a bear protecting their young.”

It was not clear why the bird that killed Hajos was not put down after the attack.

In an email, Rob Klepper, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said cassowaries were considered “Class II wildlife and can pose a threat to humans.” But he said Hajos did not need a permit for his cassowaries because he “employed an agricultural exemption for his possession of cassowaries for agricultural use.”

Klepper said they could be bred for meat, eggs and live animal sales.

The organizers of the animal auction, Gulf Coast Livestock Auction, said it would be open to the public. But on Facebook they said the media would be barred from the event and risked the destruction of their equipment if they tried to attend it.

“There will be no videoing in any part of portion in whole of this auction,” the group wrote. “Anyone seen video taping in any capacity will be deemed trespassing and will be escorted out by security. Your video equipment may or may not be confiscated until all video recordings are destroyed.”

Jammi Wilson, the group’s office manager, said Hajos’ family had asked them not to release any information to the media.

“I’m sure you’re looking for the cassowaries, right?” she asked a reporter Tuesday. “We’re not releasing any answers or releasing any news releases or making any statements.”

Wilson said the group organized Saturday’s auction because Hajos wanted the animals to be sold after his death. Elsewhere on the group’s Facebook page, condolences poured in for the Hajos family. A video posted there showed a man identified as Hajos riding a camel on a gravel parking lot under a cloudy sky last February.

“He was a great friend,” Wilson said. “This was a total accident.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/us/cassowary-bird-florida.html" id="212fb24c-0e1d-31a6-a16f-3c241a5b2bdc">The New York Times</a>.

There will be colorful macaws, lithe lemurs and cackling Kookaburras for sale at an event billed by organizers as “the dispersal of the animal estate of Marvin Hajos.” But the animal that is likely to get the most attention is the giant bird that killed Hajos this month.

A Giant Bird Killed Its Owner. Now It Could Be Yours.

Their study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests that microplastics — long known as a source of water pollution — may also travel by air, spreading their ill effects far from dense population centers.

Deonie Allen, one of the lead researchers, said the five-month study was “the first step toward looking at microplastics as an airborne pollutant.” Steve Allen, another researcher, called their findings “scary.”

“We kind of expected to find plastics there, but we certainly were not prepared for the numbers we found,” Allen said in an interview. “It was astounding: 11,400 pieces of microplastic per square meter per month, on average.”

— What are microplastics?

Microplastics are pieces of plastic debris that measure less than 5 millimeters long, roughly the size of a sesame seed, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But they can also be much smaller than 5 millimeters. The fragments found by the Pyrenees study were generally 10 to 300 microns across, with most clocking in at roughly 50 microns, Allen said. For comparison, a human hair is about 70 microns wide.

“These are invisible atmospheric pollutants,” she said.

Microplastics can come from a variety of sources, including everyday items like plastic bottles or disposable contact lenses that break down into smaller pieces over time. According to Allen, a lot of microplastic pollution comes from cities, landfills and farms that are sprayed with “wastewater treatment sludge, which is loaded with microplastics.”

Microbeads, which are found in some hygiene products like toothpaste, are another source of microplastic pollution. Concern over their environmental impact has led some governments, including Britain’s, to ban the manufacture of products that contain them.

— Where are they found?

They may be everywhere. Or, at least, wherever the water and wind can take them.

In the ocean, microplastics contribute to phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling gyre of more than 87,000 tons of trash that lies hundreds of miles from shore.

But the Pyrenees study, a collaboration between the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and the French National Center for Scientific Research at the University of Toulouse, suggests they may also be a source of pollution in the air and on land.

“At this point there is a lot of knowledge about oceans as a driver of microplastic pollution, which is creating some backlash against plastics,” Allen said. “But we are still learning that we can’t get away from it because it is also in the air.”

The study took place in a remote spot 4 miles from the nearest village and roughly 75 miles from the nearest city, Toulouse. Researchers, taking samples from two separate monitoring devices, found that 365 pieces of microplastic per square meter rained down from the sky each day.

Allen compared airborne microplastics to dust from the Sahara, which has long been known to travel by wind across the ocean to the United States and the Caribbean.

“At 450 microns, it can still travel 3,500 kilometers,” he said. “Plastics are not as dense, they are about half the weight and they are irregularly shaped, so aerodynamically, it is easier for the particles to be lifted into the air.”

— How much damage can they do?

Microplastics have been found to harm animals, including insects and marine species, in a number of ways, but more research needs to be done to determine their effect on humans, researchers said.

Allen said microplastics had been shown to “block up the gut” in fish and insects.

“The chemicals that make up the plastic, we know they have an impact on the animal endocrine system and the lymphatic system,” which regulate the production of hormones and the elimination of bodily toxins, he said.

In an example of plastic’s gut-blocking effects on a larger scale, a dead sperm whale washed ashore this month on the Italian island of Sardinia with 48 pounds of plastic in its stomach, including microplastics as well as larger items like a corrugated plastic tube and shopping bags.

Allen said microplastic could also change the chemical composition of the environment in small but significant ways, for example, by absorbing pheromones that fish and insects depend on to trigger their fight-or-flight response.

“When you put plastic into that environment, it absorbs that chemical, which means those protection or defense responses are no longer occurring,” she said. “It is not just about biological impacts inside the animal; it also impacts the environment it is living in.”

Researchers are increasingly confident about the ubiquity of microplastics in human life.

A study published in 2017 found microplastics in 83 percent of tap water samples collected from around the world, including 94 percent of samples from the United States, which had the highest rate of contamination.

A study published last year found a variety of microplastics in stool samples from eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Britain and Austria. Another study estimated that people who frequently eat shellfish could ingest as many as 11,000 pieces of microplastic every year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/science/what-are-microplastics.html" id="8efb3909-aa7a-32f4-ad86-132b2a0977f3">The New York Times</a>.

Researchers in France said this week that they found thousands and thousands of microplastic particles raining down on a secluded spot in the Pyrenees, 75 miles from the nearest city.

Ocean-Clogging Microplastics Also Pollute the Air, Study Finds

According to the criminal complaint, Thomas Alonzo Bolin, 22, was charged on Wednesday with lying to federal agents in an interview last week about whether he owned firearms, the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York said. He was already in custody on state charges filed Saturday.

The office said the FBI had been investigating Bolin, who lives in the Rochester suburb of Greece, New York, for possible violations of federal civil rights and firearms laws.

It was not clear on Thursday whether Bolin had made any specific plans for violence. But in Facebook messages he had praised the March 15 mass killing of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, according to the criminal complaint. He also discussed his desire to commit acts of violence in the messages, which were intercepted by law enforcement officials.

The FBI said Bolin used the alias Peter Vincent to share video of the Christchurch attack, which was livestreamed by the shooter on Facebook and spread to Twitter, Reddit and YouTube. Bolin also used that alias to be active in white supremacist Facebook groups and discuss potential violence with his cousin, Austin Witkowski, the agency said.

A law enforcement official said Witkowski, who used the Facebook alias Ragnar Odinson, had not been arrested. The official said his whereabouts was unknown.

The FBI used Facebook messages to map out weeks of racist conversations between the two men, who appeared to share a specific hostile fixation on Muslims, according to the complaint.

On the day of the Christchurch attack, the two men also talked to each other about the manifesto published by the gunman and shared their hope that a similar massacre would happen in the United States.

The FBI said Bolin talked to his cousin about the New Zealand gunman, telling him, “Brugh dude killed 40 muslims.” Witkowski responded with a heart emoji and the word, “Lovely.”

Both men talked to other Facebook users about the Christchurch attack, the FBI said, and their desire to emulate it in the United States, although those other users are not identified in the criminal complaint.

Talking about the shooting with one of those unidentified Facebook users, Brolin said “there is a war brewing” and “realistically this was a small piece of a bigger picture now we wait for the retaliation.”

The criminal complaint alleges Witkowski made more specific threats. Speaking to an unidentified Facebook user, Witkowski said he wanted to see the Christchurch attacks copied in the United States and then said he was willing to “do something as of next week” in Baltimore.

The complaint said Witkowski told the other Facebook user to buy firearms, ammunition and food, and said that he would travel to meet him the next week. The complaint does not say if the meeting ever happened.

The day after the shooting, Bolin and Witkowski expressed frustration to each other that they had not been able to carry out an attack. According to the complaint, Bolin said he had broken his arm in a car accident.

Using an expletive, Witkowski responded that the broken arm would complicate an unspecified plan they had made. Bolin then reassured him, saying it only “takes one arm to fire a Glock.”

Witkowski wrote back saying he would carry out their plan himself. “I’m not waiting months and months or a week,” he said. “It was supposed to be done by Halloween.”

Later that day, Witkowski wrote to his cousin: “Words aren’t going to help. Violence is the key.” The FBI said Bolin then cautioned his cousin not to say anything more on Facebook.

“Yoooo chill,” he wrote. “Not on the fed book.” Witkowski replied that he did not care.

Using the Peter Vincent alias, Bolin managed a Facebook group called Odin’s Warriors, which did not appear to be active on Thursday. The FBI said Bolin and his cousin were members of a neopagan religious group called “Folk Odinism” that worships the gods of Norse mythology and limits its membership to white heterosexuals.

The criminal complaint said investigators linked Bolin to the Peter Vincent account by combing through Facebook messages, where Vincent once told someone that his “real name is Thomas Bolin, Peter Vincent is a character from a horror movie.” (That was most likely the 1985 vampire movie “Fright Night,” or the 2011 remake.)

Facebook provided the FBI with Bolin’s messages on March 21 as part of a “voluntary emergency disclosure of subscriber and content information,” the agency said. A representative for the company said it shares user information with law enforcement without going through a formal legal process only when it believes there to be an imminent risk of serious injury or death.

“White supremacy, hate groups, and hate speech are not allowed on Facebook, and we also recently announced a ban on praise or support of white nationalism,” the company said in a statement. “We remove any content that violates our policies and work with law enforcement when we think there is a genuine risk of real-world harm.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/nyregion/thomas-alonzo-bolin-white-supremacist.html" id="93de0675-2009-340b-a38c-7a8afbf75595">The New York Times</a>.

Christchurch Messages on Facebook Lead to Charge of Lying to FBI

A New York man who discussed an American re-enactment of the New Zealand mosque massacre with white supremacist friends on Facebook was charged Thursday with lying to FBI agents, law enforcement officials said.

Using an expletive, Witkowski responded that the broken arm would complicate an unspecified plan they had made. Bolin then reassured him, saying it only “takes one arm to flue a Glock.”

Facebook provided the FBI with Bolin’s messages on March 21 as part of a “voluntary emergency disclosure of subscriber and content information,” the agency said. Representatives for Facebook, which has taken steps to ban white supremacist content on its site, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Liam Stack

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