For the Utah Jazz last season, Donovan Mitchell stepped in at the most important times to get his team to the second round of the NBA playoffs.

Turns out he’s now doing that off the court, too.

The brother of Jazz fan Andrew Simeona (who declined to be named for this story) visited the City Creek Apple Store in Salt Lake City to get his iPhone repaired. While he waited as the technician looked at the device, he unknowingly struck up a conversation with someone else waiting at the store: Mitchell.

Later, the Apple store technician returned and delivered some bad news: that the phone would be a relatively expensive fix, one Simeona couldn’t afford. When Mitchell overheard the story, he volunteered to pay for the service.

“He was super happy that he had the repaired phone,” Simeona said.

All love ✊🏽 glad I could help! https://t.co/DS0Rd6wcZi

— Donovan Mitchell (@spidadmitchell) August 2, 2018

It was only after the transaction was completed that the Apple rep told Simeona’s brother that the man who helped him was really the Jazz star.

“Most of our family are big basketball fans. Seeing what Donovan has done, coming into the community, he just dove in,” Simeona said. “That it happened to our own brother gives a big feeling of gratitude, but I wasn’t surprised in the least.”

The story has gone viral, too, with ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and other outlets picking up the story.

Mitchell has traveled the world this summer, but is now back in Utah. He hosted his basketball camp in Draper early this week.

The Inland Port Authority has its first real meeting, during which one board member asks for fewer comments about environmental concerns. Utah’s request for a Medicaid waiver likely won’t be addressed until after voters weigh in on adopting full Medicaid expansion. And Sen. Mike Lee says plans for 3D-printed guns shouldn’t be kept from the public.

At 9 a.m. Friday, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Benjamin Wood, senior managing editor Matt Canham and columnist Robert Gehrke join KCPW’s Roger McDonough to talk about the week’s top stories.

Every Friday at 9 a.m., stream “Behind the Headlines” online at kcpw.org or tune in to KCPW 88.3 FM or Utah Public Radio for the broadcast.

Farmington, N.M. •The city of Farmington says Great Lakes Aviation failed to pay landing fees and terminal fees before the company ceased Four Corners Regional Airport service.

The Daily Times of Farmington, New Mexico, reports Farmington filed a complaint in state district court last week asking for the court to order Great Lakes to pay the alleged unpaid fees.

The city alleges Great Lakes owes $693.88 for landing fees and $2,584.49 for terminal rent in September. It also alleges the airline owes $394.25 in landing fees and $2,311.72 in terminal rent for October.

The Cheyenne, Wyoming-based Great Lakes Aviation offered commercial flights to and from Farmington until November 2017. The airline cited a pilot shortage as the primary reason for leaving the Four Corners Regional Airport.

Great Lakes Aviation CEO Doug Voss says he has not seen the lawsuit.

Grand Junction, Colo. • Authorities say rafters on the Colorado River helped rescue the pilot of a small plane that crashed into the water near the Colorado-Utah border.

The Mesa County Sheriff's Office in Colorado says the river rafters came upon the crash and took the 59-year-old pilot to safety Tuesday afternoon.

Authorities say the man is injured but is conscious and breathing. His name has not been released. He was transported to a hospital by helicopter.

The plane crashed into the river on stretch between Fruita, Colorado, and Westwater, Utah.

Deputies and National Transportation Safety Board investigators are working to access the crash site and conduct an investigation. Authorities say the Kitfox aircraft is partially submerged.

Gallup, N.M. • A western New Mexico city that bills itself as the gateway to Native American culture is experiencing a tourism boom.

Officials in Gallup, New Mexico, say the city has seen a 7 to 10 percent increase in visitation over last year, mostly thanks to foreign tourists, the Gallup Independent reports.

Helping drive the interest is a favorable exchange rate that makes it economical for foreign tourists to visit in the summer, and promotions that tout outdoor recreation, and Native American arts and crafts, tourism officials say.

Bill Lee, director of the Gallup-McKinley County Chamber of Commerce, said the area is seeing visitors from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France and Belgium.

"I'm getting really excited about the numbers we are seeing," Lee said. "We are seeing increases from Asian countries as well."

Lee also credits the tourism bump to a partnership among the chamber, the city of Gallup and tourism marketing manager Jennifer Lazarz.

For the past two years, the city has been promoting the region with the "Gallup. Real. True" campaign that includes images of climbing among red rocks, hiking and biking, nightly Native American dances, jewelry and museums.

Area officials also have been attending large trade fairs on tourism and pushing for more travel tours in the Gallup region. The city that sits along historic Route 66 borders the Navajo Nation. Zuni Pueblo lies to the south.

Overall, New Mexico has seen tourism increases statewide. New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez recently announced that 35.4 million trips were taken in New Mexico in 2017 — breaking the record set in 2016 of 34.4 million.

It was the sixth-straight year the state saw record-breaking tourism numbers, based on survey data from New Mexico visitors collected by the research firm, Longwoods International.

Martinez launched the “New Mexico True” campaign to draw out-of-state visitors in 2011.

Washington • Days after making a plea for more civility in public discourse, Sen. Orrin Hatch said Thursday he was tired of the “dumbass” partisanship surrounding the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We can’t keep going down this partisan, picky, stupid, dumbass road that has happened around here for so long,” Hatch said at a news conference where Republican senators berated their Democratic counterparts for demanding tens of thousands of documents Kavanaugh dealt with as staff secretary to then-President George W. Bush.

“I’m tired of partisanship,” Hatch declared, “and, frankly, we didn’t treat their candidates for these positions the way they’re treating ours.”

A former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who has vowed to “lift heaven and earth” to confirm Kavanaugh, Hatch had steadfastly opposed holding a hearing for President Barack Obama’s pick to fill a high court vacancy with D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland in 2016. Hatch had called Garland a “fine man” and said there “was no question” he could be confirmed to the Supreme Court before Obama’s announcement.

Hatch took the Republican Party line at the time that the confirmation process should wait until after the presidential election. Garland never got a hearing, and his nomination expired when Obama left office, allowing President Donald Trump to name Neil Gorsuch to the high court.

Hatch has scolded Democrats for their instant opposition to Kavanaugh before they had a chance to review his rulings or meet with him. For his part, the Utah senator released a video touting the nominee minutes after Trump announced the pick.

On Monday, Hatch wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for Geneva Conventions-like guidelines for the culture wars. He was responding to recent events where White House officials were asked to leave or faced protesters at restaurants in the Washington area.

“While our politics have always been divisive, an underlying commitment to civility has usually held citizens on both sides together,” Hatch wrote. “As the partisan divide deepens, it becomes clear that we need to take meaningful steps toward de-escalation. Something must change before anger succumbs to violence.”

Hatch had made a similar call for civility last year, noting that he had said things in the past that he regretted but that “we must avoid this temptation.”

“Our words have consequences, and in an age of retweets, viral videos and shareable content, those words often echo well beyond their intended audience and context,” Hatch wrote in Time magazine. “It’s incumbent on all of us, then — from the president to Congress on down — to be responsible for our speech.”

In March, Hatch apologized after calling Obamacare the “stupidest, dumbass bill that I’ve ever seen,” and adding that supporters of the Affordable Care Act are “the stupidest, dumbass people I’ve ever met.”

“Yesterday, I made a poorly worded joke about Obamacare supporters — a joke that was not reflective of my actual feelings towards my friends on the other side,” Hatch said a day later. "While I occasionally slip up, I believe that my legislative record reflects my commitment to bipartisanship and civility much more than my flippant, off-the-cuff comment.”

Also Thursday, Hatch wrote an op-ed for USA Today arguing that Democrats were treating Kavanaugh like they treated one-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, whose appointment the Senate rejected.

“Never mind that the reputation of a decent and honorable man lay in tatters — liberals had claimed their first scalp in the full-scale politicization of the Supreme Court confirmation process,” Hatch wrote. “So vicious and low was the left’s treatment of the good judge that a description of this behavior found its way into the everyday parlance: to Bork. To Bork public officials is to vilify them for political gain. It is to strip them of their humanity, tear their public image to shreds, and depict them as evil incarnate. It is to do to a person exactly what Democrats are attempting to do to Judge Brett Kavanaugh.”

Hatch’s office did not respond to The Salt Lake Tribune’s request for comment.

South Salt Lake police arrested a man Thursday after, they say, he robbed an Uber driver and barricaded himself in a hotel room.

Officers took the man into custody shortly after noon, according to FOX 13, ending a three-hour standoff at the Ramada Inn at 2455 S. State.

The man offered the Uber driver an extra tip if he helped carry luggage up to his room, said Gary Keller, a spokesman for South Salt Lake Police. When both were out of the car, the man allegedly demanded cash from the driver and threatened him with a stun gun. Uber drivers are paid electronically and are not known to carry much cash.

When the driver said he didn’t have any money, the man took his phone, Keller said, and ran inside.

“He looked down at my phone and that’s when survival mode kicked in,” Lansing Reavely, the driver, told FOX 13.

See more at FOX 13.

President Donald Trump is firmly standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, even though his tweets and fawning performance at a joint news conference create the opposite impression, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, said Thursday.

“When you look at this administration’s actions, they have been clearly willing to confront Vladimir Putin,” Stewart, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a speech to the Sutherland Institute and during follow-up questions.

That’s why Trump’s tweets and news conference performance are “so frustrating to me because it clouded that reality, and fell into this image that he prefers a strongman like Vladimir Putin, who we know is a KGB thug,” he said.

Trump “makes my job harder with some of his tweets.” Stewart added Trump was wrong when he sided more with Putin than the U.S. intelligence community about Russian interference in elections and wishes his corrections were more forceful.

But Stewart listed several reasons why he still sees Trump as tougher on Russia than was former President Barack Obama.

“Here is a president who went to NATO and said, ‘You have to increase your spending on defense,’ and the point of that, of course, is Russia. Who is the president who said to the United States, we are going to increase our spending on defense…? And one of the points of that is to counter Russian aggression,” he said.

“Who is the president who said we are going to drive down the cost of energy and make the United States the most efficient oil exporter in the world…? If you want to put an economic sanction on Russia, that’s the most powerful thing we could do because they are so dependent on the price of energy … for their foreign currency.”

Stewart added, “Who is the president who said we are going to back up our allies in the Ukraine when the previous administration” would not sell it weapons. “This president said, ‘We will give you the tools to defend yourself.’”

Stewart said he expects more Russian attempts to interfere with U.S. elections, saying that weakening trust in the United States here and abroad is part of Putin’s strategy to expand Moscow’s influence.

“Russia is going to continue to do this," he said. “They have done it in Europe, they’ll do it in 2018 here, they’ll do it in 2020.”

In 2016, after Stewart was treated poorly during a visit to Russia, he predicted on his return that Russia would attempt to interfere with U.S. elections later that year — possibly by cyberattack.

Of course, Russia did interfere, but “we don’t have any evidence at all that they were able to penetrate any voting machines," he said. “Not a single vote was changed, so far as we can tell.”

Stewart said when he made his predictions, he was asked about whom he thought Russia wanted to win the election.

“I said, ‘I don’t think they care. They just want to break down the foundations of democracy, break down trust in our electoral process. They want us to distrust and defeat each other.’ And if that was their goal, and I believe that it was, I believe they have been very effective,” he said.

Stewart has stuck with that view — that the Russian attacks weren’t aimed at helping one candidate — despite the U.S. intelligence agencies all concluding that the aim was boosting Trump’s candidacy. Putin even seemed to acknowledge as much at the news conference following the closed-door summit in Helsinki.

Stewart on Thursday said election interference led to improving firewalls around election systems. “That was the easy part,” but he said the tougher part is recognizing efforts in social media to create division.

“Facebook has billions of ads and posts, and millions are added every day. How do you monitor those?” he said. “At the end of the day, what we have to rely on is the intelligence and goodwill of the people to be able to self-filter, and for them to be able to see, hopefully, that some of these things are intended to be divisive.”

Stewart also said that America’s adversaries, including Russia and China, will never be able to defeat America directly. “All they can do is assist us if we decide to commit suicide.”

Democrat Shireen Ghorbani — Stewart’s challenger in the 2nd Congressional District, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in the former Soviet republic of Moldova — criticized his comments.

“To suggest that the Russians interfered to break down our democracy without wanting to pick winners and losers is false. Our president was standing next to Putin in Helsinki when he was asked ‘Did you want President Trump to win and did your officials help.’ The answer was clear as day, Putin responded, ‘Yes, I did. Yes, I did.’”

She added, “As we see our relationships with NATO strained, North Korea continuing to build missiles, and the ripping up of the Iran nuclear deal putting us on a crash course to a more nuclear and more volatile Middle East, I’m frankly surprised that the representative wants to claim that we are strong on security in any way at this point.”

The allegation levied against Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer by the ex-wife of one of his former assistants is bad enough, with Courtney Smith questioning Meyer’s claim that he was unaware of a 2015 domestic-abuse allegation she levied against her ex-husband, recently fired Buckeyes wide receivers coach Zach Smith. Ohio State’s job now, as it conducts an investigation into what Meyer knew and when, is to determine if that allegation is bad enough to result in Meyer’s dismissal, should it be proven true.

Based on the NCAA powerhouse’s past history with scandal, it most certainly is. And the fact that Meyer has led the storied program to a national title and suffered only eight losses since his first season in 2012 shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

Jim Tressel achieved iconic status at Ohio State in 2002 when he led the Buckeyes to a 14-0 record and a stunning upset of Miami in that season’s Fiesta Bowl, giving the program its first consensus national title since 1968. Tressel would lead Ohio State to seven more top 10 finishes, twice ending as national runner-up. Still, he was forced out in 2011 after it was revealed that he had failed to notify both school officials and NCAA investigators about his players' longtime involvement with the owner of a local tattoo parlor, who gave the players cash and discounted tattoos in exchange for signed team memorabilia and championship rings, a violation of NCAA rules.

Seven years earlier, Ohio State fired men’s basketball coach Jim O’Brien, who in his second season in Columbus led the Buckeyes to their first Final Four appearance since 1968. O’Brien’s dismissal followed his admission that he had provided a $6,000 loan to the mother of Aleksandar Radojevic, a Bosnian recruit who signed a national letter-of-intent to play for the Buckeyes in 1997. Radojevic would never play for the Buckeyes, however, after the NCAA discovered he had been paid to play by a Montenegrin professional team in 1996, and O’Brien claimed he loaned out the money only for humanitarian reasons after discovering that Radojevic would never play at Ohio State.

While the NCAA did find that O’Brien was aware of improper benefits given to another European recruit, effectively ending his big-time coaching career, O’Brien would later sue Ohio State for improper termination, with a judge finding in his favor and awarding him $2.4 million in back pay.

Covering up a tattoos-for-merch scheme. A shady-looking loan that turned out not to be shady. As misdeeds go, those fall pretty far down the questionable-morals list. But Meyer is being accused of something else entirely: Knowing about an assistant coach’s violent tendencies and doing absolutely nothing about it.

There’s also the matter of Meyer’s contract, which was amended earlier this year with clauses that outline the ways the school can fire him for cause — in other words, without paying a buyout that currently sits at $38.1 million. As detailed by USA Today, Meyer’s contract states that he can be fired for cause for failing to report incidents of abuse to the school, including “violations during employment of Coach at Ohio State or any other institution of higher learning.”

This would seem to cover Meyer’s past employment at Florida, where a 2009 incident between Courtney Smith and her husband, then an intern on Meyer’s Gators staff, took place. Meyer said he knew about that incident but not one that happened six years later, when Zach Smith was his wide receivers coach in Columbus.

Add it all up — Ohio State has not hesitated to fire big-name coaches in the past for much less serious allegations, and it appears to have the authority to do so now without incurring a sizable financial hit — and it isn’t hard to read the tea leaves, should the allegations against Meyer prove true.

Washington • Tad Devine, during his run as chief strategist for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, railed against the corrupting influence of money in politics.

He repeatedly echoed the Sanders message that "our economy is rigged," that "special interests" buy politicians, that "all of the new wealth is going to the top of America," that there is a "corrupt system of campaign finance" of which Hillary Clinton offered an "egregious" example. Sanders, by contrast, "supported the little guy."

Those who heard Devine's interviews and watched his Sanders TV ads therefore may be surprised to know that, in the years and months leading up to the Sanders presidential campaign, Devine was making gobs of money to secure the election of one of the world's most corrupt political figures and then his allies.

Thanks to Robert S. Mueller III's prosecution of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman and sometime business associate of Devine, we now have an unusual glimpse into the role the Democratic ad man had in electing and preserving the power of Ukraine's Viktor Yanukovych, a crooked pro-Putin autocrat. Though American political consultants routinely rake in cash from foreign leaders — even shady ones — Devine's seamless pivot from advocate for antidemocratic thug to champion of a principled democratic reformer shows extraordinary flexibility.

Yanukovych's fraudulent election in 2004 as Ukraine's president was invalidated, but not before his opponent was poisoned by dioxin. Yet testimony in the Manafort trial and documents released by Manafort's lawyers show Devine helped Manafort on Yanukovych's comeback as prime minister in 2006 and successful presidential run in 2010. Devine produced a memo of advice for Yanukovych's party in 2012, even though by then Yanukovych had thrown the leading opposition politician in jail and had built a $100 million mansion — complete with zoo, helipad, golf course and replica galleon on an artificial lake — while his people were, in Devine's own words, struggling with "joblessness, hunger and the general despair."

Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 after he halted Ukraine's movement toward the European Union, yet Devine offered to help Manafort's efforts in the 2014 Ukraine election — for a price. "We are ready to take on this project," he wrote to Manafort partner Rick Gates, for $100,000 per month (payable in advance), $25,000 per week of runoff, a $50,000 "success fee" and expenses including first-class airfare. In June 2014 — even as talks about the Sanders presidential run were getting underway — Devine went to Ukraine to help remnants of Yanukovych's party reforming under a new name. "My rate for something like this would be $10,000/day, including travel days," he wrote to Gates.

As Sanders likes to say, let me be clear: Manafort is the one on trial for money laundering and other crimes. Devine is a witness for the prosecution; as prosecutors pointed out when he testified Tuesday, he wasn’t the one with a bank account in Cyprus. There is no hint Devine did anything illegal — only cynical.

Manafort, who worked for the world's sleazebags, made no pretense of scruples. But Devine was the guy molding the Sanders campaign as a righteous, everyman's insurgency against the corrupt, wealthy establishment.

Devine, through an employee, declined to comment Wednesday.

Devine wrote with Manafort a January 2006 memo when Russia was cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine, showing Yanukovych how to ride his "good neighbor" policy toward Russia to victory. He became prime minister. Devine drafted a presidential victory speech for Yanukovych in February 2010 ("We are all Ukrainians first," the American wrote) and later that year wrote talking points showing how Yanukovych and his party could attack the opposition.

By April 2012, Yanukovych had jailed his opponent and become an international pariah. Devine told Gates, "I regret that we will not be able to work with you" on Ukraine's parliamentary elections. But four months later, Devine wrote a strategy memo for Manafort. "The number of people who admit they are having difficulty feeding their family throughout Ukraine today is stunning," he wrote, urging Yanukovych to "signal" his concern and calling for his party to attack. "I would recommend a roughly 3:1 negative to positive ratio in the advertising," he wrote.

In March 2014, Devine sent Gates a $100,000-per-month proposed agreement "to work on the election in Ukraine." In court Tuesday, Devine said Gates had recruited him to work for the man who is now Ukraine's president, billionaire Petro Poroshenko, but Devine didn't wind up working on the project.

Just as well. It was almost time for him to launch the anti-corruption campaign of Bernie Sanders.

Dana Milbank is a Washington Post columnist. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank.

The prospect of ordinary people making guns at home on their 3D printers seems scary. Even President Donald Trump, a strong Second Amendment supporter, has tweeted that it "doesn't seem to make much sense." Attorneys general in eight states and the District of Columbia agreed, and sued to stop the website of Defense Distributed from publishing instructions for printing out plastic firearms. A federal judge recognized the harm Tuesday night and issued a temporary restraining order.

But the attack on freedom of speech is also scary here. Even as he acted to block the gun plans, U.S. District Judge Robert S. Lasnik recognized there are "serious First Amendment issues" at play.

Under current interpretations of the Second Amendment, the government could almost certainly prohibit unregulated home manufacture of guns. The First Amendment, however, might well protect the distribution of the computer code that functions as the recipe for the 3D printers.

The threshold question is whether computer code is a form of speech at all. This question raises philosophical questions about whether computer code written in a programming language is effectively an object — not ordinarily regulated by the First Amendment — or is more like a set of written instructions from one person to another, which would typically be considered a form of speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never definitively answered this tricky question. But the lower courts have mostly held that code counts as speech. In an influential 2001 decision to that effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit said that "a recipe is no less 'speech' because it calls for the use of an oven, and a musical score is no less 'speech' because it specifies performance on an electric guitar."

That brings us to the second legal problem: whether speech that instructs the public how to commit a crime is subject to free-speech protection. Here, too, the Supreme Court has not given a definitive answer — and the legal landscape in the lower courts is not that clear. In an important 2005 article, First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh pointed out that some courts have held that free-speech law does not extend to cover “speech that knowingly facilitates bomb-making, book-making, or illegal circumvention of copyright protection.”

Yet Volokh, who tends to prefer very strong free-speech protections, cast serious doubt on most of the rationales that could be used to prohibit speech that tells people how to commit crimes. In particular, he pointed out that such information often has other, noncriminal uses. And he strongly emphasized that the internet changes the landscape for such regulation, because sources outside the reach of U.S. law could almost always post the same information, which would then be available to American users notwithstanding any ban.

The best way to think about the question is to ask whether the government should be able to ban "The Anarchist Cookbook" or other works that describe how to make Molotov cocktails or simple bombs. Logically, the answer is almost certainly not. How-to guides for criminal activity aren't like classified information, such as how to build an atomic bomb or make a biological weapon. The information is widely available and may have legitimate uses.

The value of free speech outweighs whatever benefits may come from making it a bit harder for people to figure out how to make illegal weapons.

Today, First Amendment law is substantially more speech protective than it was in 2005, when Volokh was writing. The Supreme Court now would almost certainly find that a ban on the distribution of 3D printer code to be "content-based."

As a consequence, the court would say that a ban on distributing 3D gun code could only be upheld if the government could show that it had a compelling state interest in the ban and that the ban was narrowly tailored, using the least restrictive means to achieve it.

A code ban would probably fail to meet this exacting standard. The government might conceivably have a compelling interest in prohibiting the manufacture of unregulated guns, but there are so many guns already being made that this argument isn't a sure winner.

In any case, the ban probably isn’t narrowly tailored enough, because the government can prohibit the actual act of printing — a prohibition that would be much more narrowly tailored to the evil of the guns than a ban on how they can be printed. So the Supreme Court would probably consider a ban on distributing the code to violate the First Amendment.

You might think this conclusion is a sign that judicial doctrine has gone too far toward protecting speech — and you might be right. But it’s important to remember that strong free-speech protections always have societal costs.

If you think that Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency deserved to be protected as free speech once they were published by newspapers, then you already think that lawbreaking and free speech can go together. Guns made on 3D printers may also cause harm, but that doesn't mean they should be outside the First Amendment.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His books include “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.”

Washington • White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday refused to distance herself from President Donald Trump’s assertions that the media is the “enemy” of the American people.

Pressed during a White House briefing on the issue, Sanders said Trump "has made his position known."

In a heated exchange with reporters, she recited a litany of complaints against the press and blamed the media for inflaming tensions in the country.

"As far as I know, I'm the first press secretary in the history of the United States that's required Secret Service protection," she said, accusing the media of continuing "to ratchet up the verbal assault against the president and everyone in this administration."

CNN's Jim Acosta, who has become a lightning rod for anti-media sentiment and was loudly heckled during a Trump rally in Florida on Tuesday night, implored Sanders to break from the president, who first decried the press as the "enemy of the American people" last year.

"I think it would be a good thing if you were to say right here at this briefing that the press, the people who are gathered in this room right now ... are not the enemy of the people," Acosta said, adding: "All the people around the world are watching what you're saying."

Sanders, reading from prepared remarks, responded with a critique of the press for resorting "to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger."

"The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network, CNN," she told Acosta. She also cited the comedian who performed at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, saying the comic was brought in "to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender."

Acosta later walked out of the briefing in protest. Another reporter quickly filled his seat.

The exchange came hours after the president's eldest daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, broke with her father at an event hosted by Axios, and said that she does not view the news media as "the enemy of the people."

"I've certainly received my fair share of reporting on me personally that I know not to be fully accurate. So ... I have some sensitivity around why people have concerns and gripe, especially when they sort of feel targeted. But no, I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people," Ivanka Trump said.

The president regularly lashes out at news outlets and individual reporters, accusing them of spreading "fake news" — his term for stories he dislikes.

His attacks have drawn rebukes from free press advocates, human rights experts, professional journalism associations and the publisher of The New York Times, who said this week that he took Trump to task for "deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric" that is "not just divisive but increasingly dangerous" when the two met privately at the White House this month.

___

Associated Press writer Catherine Lucey in Washington contributed to this report.

This Pat Bagley cartoon appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Friday, Aug. 3, 2018. You can check out the past 10 Bagley editorial cartoons below:

• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/08/01/bagley-cartoon-bringing/" target=_blank>Bringing Copiers to a Gun Fight</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/31/bagley-cartoon-smoke-gets/">Smoke Gets in Your Eyes</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/31/bagley-cartoon-wilderness/">Wilderness Trafficking</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/27/bagley-cartoon-physics/">Physics for Dummies</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/26/bagley-cartoon-toting/">2A Toting Tots</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/25/bagley-cartoon-monumental/">Monumental Bull</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/23/bagley-cartoon-pioneer/">Pioneer Parade is for the Birds</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/21/bagley-cartoon-spy-who/">The Spy Who Did(n’t) Love Me</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/18/bagley-cartoon-gumby/">Gumby Government</a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/19/bagley-cartoon-inland/">Inland Port Parlay</a>

Want more Bagley? Become a fan on Facebook.

Bingham High School senior Tess Blair dominated her opponents in the 112th Women's State Amateur mainly by making a lot of routine pars.

One spectacular par turned the final match permanently in her favor Thursday at Bonneville Golf Course. Blair's chip-in after a taking penalty stroke on the par-3 No. 9 started her run of winning the last five holes, giving her a 6-and-5 victory over Jessica Sloot.

The victory followed the 2014 triumph of Blair's sister, Sirene, then a San Diego State golfer and now a professional. Tess Blair, who's committed to Sacramento State, was the qualifying medalist and never had to play beyond the 16th hole in any of her four matches.

That's impressive, for someone who wondered if she could compete with the college golfers in the field, including Sloot, a Davis High graduate who plays for Colorado State. “I didn't know if I had what it takes to win something like this,” said Blair, wiping her tears as she stood alongside the 13th green.

Blair is one of the youngest champions in the tournament’s history; Terry Norman Hansen also was a rising senior when she won her first title in 1980.

Sloot ended Kelsey Chugg’s bid for a fifth State Am title with a 4-and-3 win in the semifinals earlier Thursday (Blair defeated Xena Motes 3 and 2). Sloot was 1 down to Blair when they came to No. 9, where Blair’s tee shot went into the hazard on the right side and Sloot seemed likely to win the hole and tie the match.

But then Blair holed her pitch shot from about 20 yards short of the green and Sloot ended up bogeying the hole. “In match play, you kind of try to expect everything to go in … [but] it definitely shocked me a little bit,” Sloot said.

“I was really shocked,” Blair said.

Blair then made three pars and a birdie to win four more holes, while putting troubles kept Sloot from extending the match.

So the Blair sisters have two State Am trophies to go with their collective six state high school tournament medalist awards. Tess Blair won the Class 6A championship in May and will try for her third title next spring.

Sirene's influence is “really good for me,” Blair said. “A lot of people I know compare us a lot, and I'm OK with it. But in my mind, I don't think it's a fair fight. She's six years older than me. … I've learned so much from her.”

Blair and Sloot will compete in next week’s Siegfried & Jensen Utah Women’s Open in Provo. Chugg will play in the U.S. Women’s Amateur in Tennessee.

The University of Utah has cut ties with Papa John’s Pizza after the company’s founder came under fire last month for using the n-word in a conference call.

“The actions of this individual, from the top ranks of the company, clearly do not align with our beliefs, and we hope to find an alternative that is a better fit with us,” said Jerry Basford, the school’s associate vice president for student affairs, in a statement.

The university closed the Papa John’s location in its food court on July 20 — one week after John Schnatter’s racial slur was reported and one day after telling The Salt Lake Tribune that it was still considering whether to completely sever the relationship. Already, the school had removed all images of Schnatter from the eatery and from its pizza boxes.

Schnatter, too, has previously criticized the NFL for not cracking down on players who kneeled during the national anthem, claiming the protests hurt Papa John’s bottom line.

The founder later apologized for saying the n-word, though the company has still removed him from its board and professional sports teams — including the Utah Jazz — have dropped their business ties.

The U. took more time than most to make its decision. But it tweeted Thursday that no employees at the school’s food court lost their job with the closing. Instead, the university will replace the eatery with the Hive Express, which will serve pizza and pasta, too.

For those concerned about the welfare of #PapaJohns employees: no one lost their job as a result of the closing.

In fact, those who worked the PJ area were instrumental in developing our new pizza, pasta & wings restaurant, the Hive Express, which will open this fall. 🍕🍝🍗

— University of Utah (@UUtah) August 2, 2018

Move over, NFL and college football. Make way for a new event that reportedly is coming to Thanksgiving weekend.

It’s Tiger vs. Phil — or Phil vs. Tiger, depending on your point of view — for a boatload of money, according to ESPN. The showdown between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson will take place either Nov. 23 or Nov. 24 at Shadow Creek Golf Course in Las Vegas, ESPN’s Mike Greenberg reported. Rumors about the winner-take-all event have been swirling for a while, with a $10 million payout figure being tossed about. ESPN reported that the purse has not yet been determined, but these guys, you know, don’t work cheap.

The event will capitalize on a relationship that has thawed after years of frosty competitiveness and it’s a nod to the fact that Woods turns 43 in December and Mickelson is 48. It’s now or never. And who doesn’t like money?

“It’s a ridiculous amount of money,” Mickelson told Golf.com last month. “No matter how much money you have, this amount will take both of us out of our comfort zone.”

Masters champion Patrick Reed had perhaps the best idea: Let each guy put up his own money. Woods is No. 1 in all-time earnings and Mickelson comes in second with $87,000,000, according to ESPN. Woods, of course, wasn’t going for that.

“Of course that’s what he would like to see,” Woods said with a smile last month. “I would like to see him put up that money.”

Woods and Mickelson have mellowed in recent years with a rivalry that dates to junior golf and there was a time, Mickelson admits, when it “sucked” to have to play against Woods. They were grouped together in the first two rounds of the Players Championship this spring and their relationship has warmed to the point where they could do a little playful trash talking, with Mickelson suggesting a big-payday showdown.

“I love that we’re paired together, I think it’s really fun. We haven’t been paired together in years,” Mickelson said then. “As I look at the cover of the newspaper and the pairing is on there and the excitement that’s been going on around here, it gets me thinking: Why don’t we just bypass all the ancillary stuff of a tournament and just go head-to-head and just have kind of a high-stake, winner-take-all match?”

“Now, I don’t know if he wants a piece of me,” he cracked, “but I just think it would be something that would be really fun for us to do, and I think there would be a lot of interest in it if we just went straight to the final round.”

Woods had the perfectly snarky response: “Well, first of all, big picture,” he grinned.

That big picture would include Woods’s 14 major championships and Mickelson’s five. A reporter attempted to remind Woods that he’s only one-up on Mickelson head-to-head, which prompted Woods to respond. “How many times have we both — No, no, have we won on tour?”

That would be a commanding 79-43 “edge” for Woods. “It’s going to be fun playing with him again. We have both done this throughout our careers. We have always looked at each other and said, ‘Where is he on the board?’” Woods said of the Players grouping in May. “That’s what Arnold [Palmer] and Jack [Nicklaus] used to do all the time. They’d always try and find, ‘OK, what’s — what’s Jack at?’ And the same thing with Jack, ‘Where’s Arnie at?’ It’s been either way for our entire careers.

“Now that we have an opportunity to play against each other again on the first day when the gun blows, it’s going to be fun. I enjoy either competing with him on the first or second day or if it’s the last day. It’s always been a blast, and he’s one hell of a competitor, and it’s always going to be a challenge to try and beat him.”

If this all sounds dimly familiar, there used to be a Skins Game on the PGA Tour from 1983-2008 and Woods participated three times, in 2001, ‘04 and ‘05. He was the runner-up each time. The first Skins game featured Gary Player beating Tom Watson; in the second, Jack Nicklaus beat Watson. Four golfers were invited to compete and played to win individual holes (skins) in a match play format. Each hole was assigned a monetary value and the golfer who won the hole with the best score won the money for the hole. If there was a tie, the money carried over to the next hole. A tie after the final hole brought a playoff that didn’t end until one golfer won a hole outright.

As old social media posts have resurfaced and prominent athletes have been forced into public soul-baring in recent weeks, sports agents have undertaken emergency Twitter work, carefully excavating, scrutinizing and, if need be, deleting youthful indiscretions and ignorance.

Agents across multiple sports say recent headlines have prompted athletes to delve into their Twitter histories, searching for anything offensive or controversial that might have been sitting forgotten and unnoticed. One NBA team even reached out to representatives of all its players this week, according to an agent, urging them “to do a deep dive” through social media histories.

“If you told someone a month ago they need to look into this stuff, they’d say OK, whatever,” one agent said. “But you tell them right now, I think it has everyone’s attention.”

That reaction was prompted by headlines surrounding a trio of young baseball players. The Milwaukee Brewers’ Josh Hader, Atlanta Braves’ Sean Newcomb and Washington Nationals’ Trea Turner all used offensive language in posts made during their teen years, unnoticed at the time but belatedly bandied across the Twitter-verse after they were exhumed by internet sleuths.

Such scrutiny is not new. But Nick Chanock, senior vice president of baseball with the Wasserman agency, said the revelations of the past two weeks have sparked “a lot of dialogue” within the agency and among its clients.

“We’re having active discussions with all our players,” said Chanock, whose clients include Chicago Cubs infielder Javy Baez, Colorado Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado and New York Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton. The examples of Hader, Newcomb and Turner were unfortunate, Chanock said, but “we have to use them as an educational tool for our players.”

In interviews, several agents described both their vetting process for potential clients and their responsibility once they’re formally representing an athlete. Some requested anonymity so they could discuss the matter freely. Agents said it’s not unusual to root out ill-considered and immature social media posts, and that they’ve often cleaned up the accounts themselves, often erring on the side of caution.

“The problem if we didn’t scrub anything, I don’t think it would be an issue, but as you know in this day and age, words are powerful,” said one agent.

Cubs’ pitcher Jon Lester — via his own Twitter account — urged athletes this week to “please spend the 5 minutes it takes to scrub your account of anything you wouldn’t want plastered next to your face on the front page of a newspaper.”

But it’s not that easy, agents said.

Scrolling through thousands of old tweets could be tedious and cumbersome. An advanced search is required for older tweets, and relying solely on keywords could be incomplete. There are third-party companies that specialize in hunting out and deleting offensive old posts, but players might be hesitant to turn over the password for their account.

“It’s not a five-minute process, and Twitter makes it hard for you to do,” said a representative from one prominent agency. “I think there’s some misconceptions out there. That’s not to excuse any offensive tweet, but the process is not as easy as people think.”

And social media outlets can be a double-edged sword, the agents said: an essential brand-building tool for their clients, valued by sponsors, but also a particularly precarious platform.

“Whenever we actually are looking to recruit a client, we take a deep dive into what their social platforms are,” said one prominent NBA agent, “and frankly, with everything going on right now, we’ve gone deeper and deeper to things that might even be construed as any negative connotation.”

When the Chicago Bulls drafted Bobby Portis in 2015, an old tweet resurfaced in which he was critical of new teammates Derrick Rose and Pau Gasol. Portis huddled with his agents after the draft, according to Rachel Stein, who runs public relations for Priority Sports, and they came up with a response: a humble apology in which the young player asked his new teammates what kind of doughnuts they preferred. Then he brought doughnuts to his introductory news conference, “and a bad situation quickly became a running joke,” Stein recalled.

“Since then, we have taken precautionary measures to monitor players’ accounts before they become professionals,” said Stein, who works with athletes specifically on their social media habits. Priority’s clients include Kirk Cousins, Gordon Hayward and Bradley Beal. “As soon as we sign a prospect, we access their Twitter account and sweep through all of their old posts,” she said. “We’ve also been in touch with all of our veteran clients about this issue now as well.”

Indeed, agents have used the recent headlines as a teaching opportunity, particularly for younger clients who were active on social media long before the spotlight ever found them.

“Our job is to help these guys and advise them,” said a representative of an agency that works across multiple sports. “The responsibility is theirs, but we’re here as a resource for them. In the end, it’s the player, it’s his timeline, it’s his responsibility.”

And the unearthing of potentially offensive tweets has become a recurring story line, as a generation raised with social media accounts enters pro sports. One day before the NFL draft, racially insensitive tweets from quarterback Josh Allen resurfaced, many using the n-word and dating back Allen’s high school years. He was still drafted No. 7 overall by the Bills, but not before a frenzied day of consternation, criticism and scrutiny.

Before last year’s NBA draft, prospects Zach Collins and Dennis Smith Jr., both had to answer for social media activity from their high school days. They were drafted in the first round, but Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said “one of the first things after we drafted Dennis, and I’m talking to him on the phone, I’m like, ‘Dude, I went through your Twitter account. It’s time to get on there and delete.’”

“And so, he went through it. And to his credit, they were gone,” Cuban said last year, during a Summer League broadcast. “He had a lot of stupid stuff on there.”

More recently, the Colorado Rockies selected Ole Miss sophomore Ryan Rolison in the first round of June’s draft, even though the team was aware of something Rolison tweeted the day president Obama was re-elected in 2012: “well we have one hope left...if someone shoots him during his speech.”

“If there was some sort of pattern of behavior, then we’d be talking about a whole different sort of topic,” Rockies’ general manager Jeff Bridich told reporters at the time, “but in this world we live in, in this Twitterverse and Twitter world, and all this social media, these sorts of things are going to happen.”

Which is why the monitoring starts before the professional level; at the University of Maryland, for example, the football recruiting office makes it a point to scroll through social media timelines.

“If we find something that doesn’t really line up, or it causes you to ask more questions, find out more, dig around a little more,” said Terrapins coach DJ Durkin. “If it’s something absolutely heinous in what it is, we may make a decision to stop recruiting a guy, which in our time has happened. But not very often. I think guys are more educated on that nowadays.”

Chanock frequently deals with teenage amateurs who are potential future clients, and said he always tells them they should assume their social media accounts are constantly “under a microscope,” with everyone from fans to internet trolls to MLB teams themselves monitoring what they are writing.

“I try to explain to these kids that there’s a responsibility required,” he said. “Clubs are researching ⅛social media posts⅜ extensively. It’s really about education. Once something is out there, it’s hard to get back."

Washington • Look at the non-political news these days: Deadly wildfires burn out of control in parched California. Unusually heavy rains cause devastating floods in parts of Asia. A punishing heat wave kills scores in Japan, South Korea and normally temperate parts of Europe, pushing temperatures into the 90s in Scandinavia. Can anyone fail to see a pattern?

With increasing confidence — and growing alarm — some leading climate scientists attribute this summer's bizarre weather to human-induced global warming. Meanwhile, the Trump administration wants to make it all worse.

This week we saw a juxtaposition of events that you couldn't make up. On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2017 was the second- or third-warmest year on record, depending on which data set is used, trailing only 2016 and perhaps 2015. The very next day, like some cat-stroking Bond villain, President Trump had his environmental vandals propose rolling back automotive fuel-efficiency standards, which would neuter one of the nation's most effective means of mitigating climate change.

Court battles will ensue, and it is not clear that the Trumpists will prevail. But there can be no doubt that this president, one way or another, is determined to spew as much heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere as is humanly possible. If you care about your children's and grandchildren's future, you'd better pay attention.

It bears repeating that the question of human-induced climate change has long been answered. By burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, we have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by more than 40 percent. Sixteen of the 17 hottest years on record have occurred since the turn of the 21st century, with 2014, 2015 and 2016 successively setting new all-time records. And 2017 came close despite a La Nina weather phenomenon that should have relegated it well down the list.

At least the deniers and charlatans who once claimed we were experiencing some sort of "pause" in global warming have had to shut up. But there is small consolation in being right.

You can choose what to worry about. Sea level rise — warmer water takes up more space than cooler water — threatens coastal cities around the globe. Arctic ice is melting, while Antarctic ice threatens to slide off the continent. Both the terrestrial and marine biospheres are being altered rapidly and perhaps catastrophically. The rapid thawing of permafrost soils in Siberia, Canada and Alaska could release vast amounts of methane, which traps more heat than carbon and would accelerate the warming process.

At the moment, you might be more inclined to worry about the weather, which has been weird — and, in many places, brutal. Climate scientists have always been careful to say that no one weather event can be definitively blamed on climate change; after all, there were hurricanes and heat waves long before the Industrial Revolution. But now, with more data and better climate models at their disposal, some researchers are beginning to calculate the extent to which global warming is making freakish weather events more common and more intense.

An international collaborative effort called World Weather Attribution — involving Oxford University in Britain, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the French Laboratoire des Sciences du Climate et de l'Environment, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, Princeton University and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research — was established in 2014 to make "the emerging science of extreme event attribution" into a useful tool.

The WWA consortium analyzed this year's blistering temperatures in northern Europe and came to the "confident" conclusion that such heat waves are now more than twice as likely in that region as they were before human activity altered the climate. By contrast, WWA looked at last month's torrential rain and flooding in Japan, which killed more than 200 people, and concluded that while climate change appears to have made such an event more probable, there is not enough data to make a formal statement of attribution.

This is how science advances — cautiously. It is our great misfortune to have a president who always lurches foolishly and recklessly, who does not believe in science, who wants to prop up the carbon-spewing coal industry while ceding leadership in clean-energy technologies to China and Europe — and who now wants to force California and other states to stop using gas-mileage standards as a tool in the climate battle.

As the nation’s biggest auto market, California is the tail that wags the dog — automakers comply with its rules. Gov. Jerry Brown said he will “fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.” Forgive him the redundancy, and pray for his success.

Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section. eugenerobinson@washpost.com

Seattle • Chris Petersen got a brief respite from the talk of the high expectations facing Washington on the eve of fall camp.

Rather than talking around questions about the Huskies being a likely top 10 team when the AP Top 25 is released later this month or about the opener against powerhouse Auburn, Petersen was able to deflect momentarily as jets roaring overhead allowed him to share a memory and show a side of himself rarely seen in a formal setting.

“Oh, they’re here,” Petersen said as the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels roared over the Washington campus Thursday. “That makes my stomach queasy. They made me throw up back in the day, but that’s a different story.”

Eventually there was some talk about the Huskies and what lies ahead before the Sept. 1 season-opener in Atlanta against Auburn. But sandwiched in between football questions was a highly entertaining story from the Huskies’ leader as the Blue Angels practiced over Lake Washington ahead of their weekend performances in Seattle.

The year was 2008. Petersen was the coach at Boise State and he was invited to be a celebrity passenger when the Blue Angels performed at the Air Magic Valley Air Show in Twin Falls, Idaho.

“I don’t even know how to explain this,” Petersen said. “I mean it was the most painful half-hour of my life. I mean, I was up in the middle of this going, ‘Please stop this ride, this is not fun.’ What it does gives you so much respect for those guys up there. Like when they would really be in combat, and maneuvering and I mean, I don’t even know how the guy was flying the plane, because I couldn’t even see. I was almost passing out half the time, and I had tears in my eyes, when I got off the plane I kissed the ground, it was like I made it.”

It didn’t help Petersen that he’s a bit claustrophobic and being strapped into the cockpit made him question his decision to participate even before takeoff.

“I don’t know if it was out of control, I mean I couldn’t lift my hands up and then I didn’t know where I was and he was like, ‘Open your eyes and look up,’ and I was upside down and I could see the Earth,” Petersen recalled. “And then all of the sudden the pressure was coming on. I mean, it was the most different feeling I’ve ever had.”

The flashback to 10 years ago, however painful, allowed Petersen to avoid what he loathes talking about.

The expectations on Washington as fall camp begins Friday haven’t been this high for more than two decades, thanks to an experienced roster led by quarterback Jake Browning, running back Myles Gaskin and one of the best groups of defensive backs in the country.

Washington is the overwhelming favorite to with the Pac-12 North and the Pac-12 title, and is No. 6 in the preseason coaches’ poll — its highest preseason ranking since 1997.

“You talk about all this experience, but I think teams change from good teams to great teams, or average teams to good teams, with how the old guys progress,” Petersen said. “We talk about that a lot. I’m just very adamant about that. So I’m anxious to get out there and see those guys that do have experience and have played with us, where their game goes in this next month. I really am anxious to see this.”

Petersen said the Huskies will be cautious early with players like left tackle Trey Adams (torn ACL) and wide receiver Chico McClatcher (broken ankle) who are returning from injuries suffered last season. The only player expected to be out for a majority of the upcoming season is tight end Hunter Bryant.

Flagstaff, Ariz. • The Federal Trade Commission is accusing an auto group in the U.S. Southwest of using deceptive and unlawful practices to sell vehicles to Navajos.

The complaint against Tate's Auto Group, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Arizona, says the company falsified consumers' monthly income and down payments on financing applications and contracts without them knowing. The complaint also says the company used deceptive advertising.

It's part of a push by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission to protect Navajo consumers. The commission has been collecting information from tribal members about business practices in towns that border the reservation, which spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. It issued a report in 2014 that showed more complaints were received about Tate's than other auto dealerships.

"The representation from the auto dealer is that 'we're helping your Navajo people,' " Leonard Gorman, executive director of the commission, said Thursday. "The reality is you're cheating our Navajo people."

Tate's Auto Group has dealerships in Show Low, Winslow and Holbrook, Arizona; and in Gallup, New Mexico. Owner Richard Berry said he was stunned by the complaint and rejected a settlement offer from the FTC earlier this year.

The company has safeguards in place to ensure it sells and services customers honestly and to the best of its ability, he said. "We are confident that we will be vindicated and appreciate the continued support of our community, staff and customers," Berry wrote in a statement.

Fraud reviews from third-party financing companies found that Tate's inflated customers' monthly incomes by hundreds or thousands of dollars, according to the complaint. One of those companies stopped doing business with Tate's in January 2016 after suffering financial losses when customers defaulted on loans or their vehicles had to be repossessed, the complaint states.

Tate's also misrepresented offers for vehicles and the terms to buy or lease them, the FTC says.

The commission is seeking relief that includes restitution and refunds to customers.

In another consumer protection case in federal court in New Mexico, a Navajo couple reached a $1 million settlement in a lawsuit against a Gallup, New Mexico, business that offered loans tied to tax returns. William and Sammia DeJolie had alleged that T&R businesses charged secret fees and hid true interest rates. The couple asked a judge this week to determine whether the settlement is fair and certify a group of about 14,950 people who could benefit from it.

Gorman said the dynamics of free enterprise in Western society often don't fit in with Navajo culture. Words are significant and important, taken at face value, he said. And on a reservation where banks are sparse and no car dealerships exist, extra time must be taken to ensure customers who often travel long distances — particularly limited English speakers — understand, he said.

Customers also have a responsibility, Gorman said. The commission has been educating Navajos about credit and financing. Navajos should assess their personal finances before heading to a car lot and be ready to say no and walk away if they don't like or understand the terms, he said.

They also should review agreements with the same diligence as purchasing livestock, something Navajo families have done for generations as part of a traditional lifestyle, Gorman said.

"When grandma purchases a sheep, she takes the time to assess the condition of that sheep," he said. "She'll look at the teeth, she'll massage the chest area of the sheep and grandma will make the decision. Is the sheep too old, too skinny?"

The FTC complaint highlights a need for economic development on the reservation where tribal laws cap interest rates at below those of neighboring states, ensuring fairness for the business and consumer, Gorman said.