National Roundup

Mississippi
Man accused of stealing bell from outside historic church
OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — The bell of justice may be tolling for one north Mississippi man.

Lafayette County Sheriff’s Major Alan Wilburn tells The Oxford Eagle 33-year-old Michael Lippert was arrested Monday arrested on grand larceny charges, accused of stealing a historic church bell.

It’s unclear if Lippert has a lawyer or has seen a judge.

The bell, which stands outside the Sand Springs Presbyterian Church in rural Lafayette County, was reported stolen over the weekend. Deputies on Monday posted a picture of the recovered bell, which sits on the ground mounted to a masonry stand.

Wilburn didn’t say how Lippert would have managed to remove the bell or why he might have wanted to take it.

The church, established in 1854, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Texas
Teenager sentenced to 20 years for aiding terror group
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — A Texas teenager has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for recruiting fighters on behalf of a Pakistan-based terrorist organization.

Eighteen-year-old Michael Kyle Sewell was sentenced Monday in federal court in Fort Worth after pleading guilty in May to a charge of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

Authorities say Sewell tried to recruit a fellow American to join Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind a 2008 attack in India’s financial capital of Mumbai that killed 166.

Sewell put the person in contact with someone he thought would facilitate overseas travel to join the terror group.

But authorities say that third person was an undercover FBI agent .

Prosecutors say Sewell had posted numerous online messages threatening to attack people who he believed opposed his radical beliefs.

Maryland
Judge tosses out lawsuit over law center’s hate group labels
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit that accused leaders of the Southern Poverty Law Center of trying to financially destroy one of the organizations that it has labeled as a hate group.

The Center for Immigration Studies’ lawsuit is devoid of any allegation that the law center made a false statement about the Washington-based nonprofit, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C., said in her ruling Friday.

“The upshot of the complaint is that defendants advanced a conclusion that was debatable, and that this expression of a flawed opinion harmed plaintiff’s reputation,” Jackson wrote.

The research group accused the Montgomery, Alabama-based law center’s leaders of conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act when they designated it as a hate group in 2016. The judge, however, said the suit improperly attempts to “shoehorn” a defamation claim into the framework of a RICO case.

The law center’s attorneys asked the judge to impose monetary sanctions against the group for filing claims that it said were frivolous and designed to “censor constitutionally protected speech.” The law center also argued that the First Amendment barred the suit’s claims.

Jackson refused to impose sanctions, concluding the lawsuit wasn’t “completely frivolous.” The judge also said she didn’t need to rule on the law center’s First Amendment arguments because she found that the suit failed to state a claim under the RICO statute.

On its website, the law center describes the Center for Immigration Studies as the “go-to think tank for the anti-immigrant movement” and says it has a history of circulating the work of white nationalist and anti-Semitic writers.

The research group says on its website that it has a “pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.”

Mark Krikorian, the group’s executive director, said in an email Monday that the group hasn’t yet decided whether to appeal.

The law center’s interim president, Karen Baynes-Dunning, said the group stands by its listing of CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.

“As groups like CIS continue to infect the mainstream with their hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric, we will continue to call out their hate and bigotry whenever we see it,” she said in a statement.

The law center has tracked far-right extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, for decades. Other organizations have sued over the law center’s list of hate groups.

In January 2018, a federal judge in Virginia ruled that the First Amendment protected a charity tracking website’s use of the law center’s hate group labels.

The founder of the far-right Proud Boys sued the law center in February for labeling the organization as a hate group. That federal case is still pending in Alabama.

In June 2018, the law center apologized to a London-based group, Quilliam, and its founder, Maajid Nawaz, and agreed to pay $3.4 million in an out-of-court settlement after labeling them as anti-Muslim extremists.

New York
Weinstein attorney: He’s a sinner, but not ‘a rapist’
NEW YORK (AP) — An attorney for Harvey Weinstein said on Tuesday that her client is not without sin — but he’s also not “a rapist.”

Donna Rotunno, speaking on “CBS This Morning,” said she feels strongly that the evidence will exonerate the movie mogul of any criminal wrongdoing.

Weinstein is scheduled to go to trial in January on charges alleging he raped an unidentified woman in his Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and performed a forcible sex act on a different woman in 2006. He denies all accusations of non-consensual sex.

The trial will occur amid the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, which was fueled by dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct against Weinstein.

“I’m not here to say he was not guilty of committing sins,” she said. However, “I don’t think he’s a rapist.”

“I think in many ways there are good things about #MeToo,” the lawyer said. However, the empowerment movement “allows the court of public opinion to take over the narrative” in a way that can’t be corrected or challenged, which can result in the accused being “stripped of your rights.”

“It’s really about making sure those issues don’t cloud our ability to pick a fair jury,” she said.

No matter happens at trial, she said, Weinstein “will pay the biggest price there is,” because his life is ruined.