Los Angeles • Henry Cejudo pulled off one of the most impressive upsets in mixed martial arts history at UFC 227.

T.J. Dillashaw simply repeated himself, only quicker.

Cejudo ended Demetrious Johnson’s nearly six-year reign as the UFC flyweight champion Saturday night at Staples Center, earning a split-decision victory over the most dominant active champion in the sport.

In the main event moments later, Dillashaw defended his bantamweight title with a vicious first-round stoppage of former champ Cody Garbrandt, beating his friend-turned-rival for the second time in nine months.

Cejudo (13-2) is an Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler who only started training in mixed martial arts five years ago, but he used five takedowns and relentless offense to earn the decision over the fighter widely considered the pound-for-pound best in MMA. Cejudo won 28-27 on two of the three judges’ scorecards to beat Johnson (27-3-1), who had won 13 consecutive fights since 2012 and had defended his 125-pound belt a UFC-record 11 straight times.

“This is a dream come true, from Olympic gold medalist to UFC champion,” Cejudo said. “I was born right here in Los Angeles, in a two-bedroom apartment. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you to these fans in California for their support.”

In the main event moments later, Dillashaw (17-3) exchanged furious strikes with Garbrandt (11-2) from the opening minute. Dillashaw finished it by stunning Garbrandt with a series of blows, dropping the challenger and then battering him against the cage until referee Herb Dean stopped it with 50 seconds left in the round.

Dillashaw and Garbrandt trained together in Sacramento until 2014, when Dillashaw left in a messy breakup with the Team Alpha Male gym. The fighters met for the first time last November, and Dillashaw stopped Garbrandt in the second round to take the bantamweight belt.

The rematch was just as violent, but even more decisive.

“This cements my legacy as the greatest bantamweight of all time,” Dillashaw said. “I could tell that Cody was already hurt when we started that exchange, and then I lined up the shot. I got a little excited when I should have slowed down and finished him, but I got the job done.”

Dillashaw held the 135-pound title belt for nearly two years before losing it to Dominick Cruz on a debatable split decision in early 2016. Garbrandt then took the belt from Cruz in December 2016, less than two years after he entered the UFC.

After Cejudo’s victory, the new 125-pound champ called for a superfight with the winner of the 135-pound main event. When Dillashaw was told of Cejudo’s challenge, he replied: “Henry Cejudo! Let’s go, baby!”

Johnson, who didn’t appear to be upset with the judges’ call, was the only flyweight champion in UFC history. Although successful in striking, Johnson didn’t have his usual resourceful performance in his return from a career-long layoff of 10 months. Johnson knocked out Cejudo in the first round of their first meeting in 2016, but Cejudo showed off everything he had learned in the interim.

Cejudo was born in Los Angeles, and he won an Olympic gold medal in freestyle wrestling as a 21-year-old phenomenon in 2008, becoming the youngest American to win a gold medal. He only started training in mixed martial arts in January 2013 — four months after Johnson first won his UFC belt.

Cejudo won his first 10 pro fights to earn his first shot at Johnson, but Mighty Mouse stopped him with a flurry of punches in the first round of their first meeting 28 months ago. Cejudo earned a rematch thanks to two straight rebound victories and the utter lack of more compelling contenders for Johnson, who had been content to stay at flyweight instead of chasing bigger-money bouts at bantamweight, where he fought earlier in his career.

Right before the title bouts on the top-heavy show, Brazilian featherweight Renato Moicano (13-1-1) finished Palm Springs veteran Cub Swanson (25-9) in the first round with a rear naked choke.

The show was the UFC’s first in three years in downtown Los Angeles, and the first since local entertainment conglomerate Endeavor bought the promotion for $4 billion in 2016. The luminaries at cageside included Matt Damon, Chris Pratt, Miles Teller, Mickey Rourke and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Cottonwood Heights • Imagine glimpsing the arm of Jesus’ grandmother or a robe from his father — well, stepfather.

Now 2,000 years later, you can — right here in Utah — as long as you have a believing heart.

A Greek Orthodox congregation in Cottonwood Heights recently acquired a bone fragment from Anna, the Virgin Mary’s mother, and, for good measure, picked up a swatch from Joseph’s robe as well.

The tiny relics — as they are known — rest side by side on a pedestal in the sanctuary of St. Anna Greek Orthodox Church, where worshippers can view, kiss and revere them.

Nestled together, the two hallowed remnants symbolize that congregation’s immense gratitude to St. Thomas More Catholic Church, which rents space to its spiritual cousins.

“It is divinely beautiful,” says the Rev. Anthony Savas, St. Anna’s priest, “for us to come together this way.”

Both Christian faiths see veneration of the early saints and martyrs as an essential component of their faith.

Like the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic Church has a “long and storied tradition of venerating the relics of the saints,” Savas says, which made the St. Joseph cloth an even more appropriate gift to express their gratitude.

And one that the Rev. John Evans of the Catholic parish “graciously accepted.”

Bodily belief

From the earliest times, Christians preserved these bodies or parts of them, Savas says, sometimes even hiding them in their homes or sequestering them in cemeteries.

Indeed, services often were held near such graveyards.

Because of the Christian belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead, he says, these relics have “spiritual value to the faithful.”

Most of the items have been housed for centuries in Catholic churches in Italy, particularly in Rome, while others have been handed down in what was once called Constantinople (now Istanbul) by the Orthodox.

Anna’s bone fragment came from the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, the priest says, where a cardinal prepared and distributed it in a 4-by-6 inch bronze “pyx” (or box), while Joseph’s fabric — classified as a “class 2” relic since it’s not from a body — was in an identical box and comes from Rome’s Church of St. Anastasia.

Both boxes have a wax seal, signed by a 19th-century Catholic cardinal, Savas says, and an unbroken thread, which help tie them to early Christians. Such continuity gives buyers confidence, he says, that what they have is not counterfeit.

“Our transcendent relationship with the sacred and the holy is actualized by the presence of authenticated relics,” Savas writes to his parish. “When the Saints afford us the opportunity to approach them in reverence and humility; through the veneration of their physical and sanctified remains, the heavens above and the world below are bridged together in harmonious song.”

Relics are “witnesses that our physical bodies are precious unto God,” the priest continues. “They are to be honored, revered, protected and adored. Even unto death, the physical attributes of man are still valued and cherished, for the sake of God's eternal glory.”

To have a permanent relic from Anna, the mission parish’s patron saint, Savas says, means worshippers can feel her presence and tenderness hovering over them like an adoring mother.

That this Orthodox community found such a sacred, albeit temporary, space inside a Catholic complex — the parish is raising money to obtain its own church — was sheer serendipity.

Godly accommodation

When Father John was assigned to minister at St. Thomas More in August 2014, the Catholic congregation had just finished building a massive center adjacent to its church.

“It was beautiful,” Evans says, “but came with a very large debt that had grown during the construction.”

The priest wondered how to meet the financial obligations and make the building pay for itself. He considered opening a full-time preschool or finding a renter.

As it happened, one of the parishioners was a real estate agent who worked for the same company as one of the Greek Orthodox members. They were friends.

The Catholic businessman discovered that the Orthodox parish was renting space in a commercial building in Midvale but was looking for a better solution.

St. Thomas More’s building had a large, unused storage space, which could easily be reconfigured into a place of worship — with chairs, an icon screen, an altar and even windows that could be covered to look like stained glass.

There also was a fellowship space the two could share for weddings, funerals and other gatherings.

Many times in the past, other faiths have rented buildings to Catholics, Evans says. Here was a chance to pay it forward.

The arrangement helps both parties.

When the Greek church finally moved in, Evans presented parish leaders with a framed photo of Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.

In the shot, the Catholic pontiff is bowed before the global Orthodox leader, while the latter is bent over to kiss Francis’ head.

In return, the Greeks presented Evans with an icon of St. Peter, the first bishop of Rome, and St. Andrew, the first bishop of Byzantium. The two are embracing.

Like the relics, the two gifts hang side by side on the wall between St. Thomas More and St. Anna, Evans says, to symbolize the “filial love we have for each other.”

There is every reason to hate our current state of politics. The people who shout the loudest, the people who name-call, the people who refuse to consider other views, they are the people who often get the most attention.

These political tactics are not unique to the left or the right. Too often it seems that everyone has reverted back to a form of tribalism that halts the progress of society. Nothing gets done with this, “You are with us or you are against us,” mentality.

I spent a few months working on a state house campaign that was trying to change that. Our field strategy was unique. Traditionally, volunteers are asked to learn a quick pitch and to sell the candidate at the doorsteps of voters. There is no conversation, there is no listening, it is just, “Vote for my candidate” and move on.

Instead, our campaign used a technique called Deep Canvassing developed by the Leadership Lab, an LGBT activist group in Los Angeles. Canvassers are trained to ask questions, listen and engage in lively conversations with voters. The premise is that each voter is more than just a vote, that voters are people with opinions, with emotions and with stories. Stories that need to be heard.

Our campaign’s goal was to engage in a process of community building, a process that changed the way we think about politics. Through my time knocking on doors I learned that politics isn’t just a battleground where progress is measured in wins and losses. It is also about those stories. Stories allow people to empathize. They help us to recognize that we all really want the same things. We want to feel safe, we want to have opportunity, we want to feel empowered.

I’ve lived in House District 24 my entire life. I feel like I have driven on every street and walked past every house in the district. But it was only in the past few months, working for the Igor Limansky campaign, that I felt like I discovered my community. Knocking on hundreds of doors has taught me about reaching out to people, empathizing and engaging with them.

On July 10, the official results of the primary came in. We lost by 55 votes out of a 4,878 vote total. That’s a little more than a 1 percent margin. Yes, that stings. But, trust me, this isn’t the last time you will be hearing about Igor or his team.

Election Day was unbelievably hot. In our final push to get out the vote, everyone on the campaign was out of the office and knocking on doors by 11 in the morning. Later that afternoon, after having knocked on what felt like my thousandth door, I remember stopping by a local coffee shop to cool off. I noticed the barista wearing a red “I Voted” sticker.

“I voted for that guy today” she said, glancing down at my blue campaign shirt. She continued, “I’m not really interested in politics, I do not like to talk about it very much. But a friend of mine told me that these local elections are where I can actually make a difference.”

She’s right, if there is any election where your vote will make a difference, it is a local election.

Walking out of the coffee shop I thought: Things are changing. It might take a while. People feel angry, people feel disenfranchised, but things are changing. What better place to start that change than at the doorsteps of the people in our community.

Isaiah Poritz, Salt Lake City, graduated from Rowland Hall High School in June and will be attending Emory University this fall.

Jeffrey Whitman feels like he got a raw deal.

It's true that Whitman, a contractor in central Ohio, has had a rough last few days. His life, he says, has been "completely and thoroughly ruined." He doubts he'll ever work in Columbus again.

That may be an accurate prediction, given the scalding scorn his name engenders online. He is reviled on Twitter, loathed on YouTube and his Yelp reviews have become simply brutal, including images of the Nazi swastika and the battle flag of the Confederacy. "Service was amazing," one person snarked. "He brought his own cross, lighter fluid and hood."

It seems that Whitman, who is white, followed an African-American driver, Charles Lovett, for almost two miles after a traffic dispute, parked at the end of Lovett's driveway and told him, "I just want to let you know what a nigger you are." It went on like that for three minutes, Whitman dropping N-bombs, Lovett calmly defending himself while capturing it all on cellphone video, including the name and phone number of Whitman's heating, cooling and refrigeration business on the side of his van.

One viral video later, that business was facing a PR firestorm and Whitman was leaving weepy voicemails for Columbus Dispatch columnist Theodore Decker:

"It was an awful mistake," he said, which is true if, by "mistake" you mean "deliberate action." But Whitman wasn't done yet. "I don't know how to explain it, and it's ruined my life and it's ruined my family's life." He insisted he's not a bigot which is, of course, something white people often say when caught being bigoted.

Whitman seemed bewildered at the suddenness with which his life has turned to poo. "I just don't understand the intensity of the hate," he complained. Whereupon irony turned a triple somersault, straightened like an exclamation point and fell stone dead.

If Whitman is confused, though, it may be because America has been sending mixed messages. After all, these are boom times for bigots. One of their own is in the White House and they are well represented in the Republican Party. The judiciary has sapped black voting rights. In Fox, they have their very own “news” network. And, perhaps most importantly, so long as you remember to use approved language — gripe about “political correctness,” for example — you can express bigotry again in polite company for the first time in years.

But the boom in bigotry has come simultaneously with a boom in social media raising virtual mobs to shame the shameful. Bigots are being outed and confronted as never before. Demand that strangers speak English, ask for a permit to use the pool, commit a little innocent racism at the foot of a black guy's driveway and suddenly everybody, everywhere is calling you out.

There's a word for this, a word once thought to have all but disappeared from the English language: "consequences." Not that seeing the speak-English guy running from cameras, the pool permit Nazi out of work or Whitman's business in trouble is any substitute for a national commitment to root out systemic bias in media, government, business, finance, education and law. And granted, maybe there is something a little facile about fighting for equality via Yelp review.

But as the White House, the GOP, the judiciary and Fox "News" try to make a world safe for racism, it is gratifying to see consequences arrive in real time for bigots, if only as a reminder that the world those folks seek is one the rest of us will never accept. We have long memories. We stand millions strong.

And we're pretty picky about who provides our heating, cooling and refrigeration services.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. lpitts@miamiherald.com

At the time of writing this, five wild horses from the Cedar Mountain Herd Management Area in Utah have been killed as a result of a Bureau of Land Management roundup currently underway that is being sold as an effort to “save” these animals from drought.

While there are some areas in the West that are experiencing drought, the BLM is using drought as an excuse to remove hundreds of wild horses from the range as an “emergency,” thereby bypassing legal requirements for analysis and public comment. These roundups occur even though the agency’s own handbook classifies droughts as events, not emergencies, that “can be detected in advance and are managed through the normal planning process.”

The flimsiness of the agency’s “emergency” excuse for large wild horse removals was recently on full display in Nevada, where an emergency removal of horses due to lack of water in the Antelope HMA was only temporarily halted due to flooding from heavy rains.

Truth be told, there has always been an issue with water within the Cedar Mountain HMA. Historically, the BLM has mitigated the situation by hauling water to the horses in the summer, which keeps the horses wild — something that 80 percent of Americans want — and doesn’t burden the taxpayer nearly as much as rounding them up.

The five horses who have died so far from this operation are the casualties of the BLM’s failed approach. So too are the 250 other wild horses who will lose their freedom and join the 46,000 wild horses already in government warehouses across the country.

Instead of proactively managing these horses in the wild through fertility control and range stewardship (e.g. protecting and restoring water sources), the BLM has once again reverted to its unsustainable practice of roundup, remove and stockpile. This is the same “business as usual” approach to wild horse management that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded in 2013 was “expensive and unproductive for the BLM and the public it serves.”

We are faced with an Interior Department that is marching to the tune of the industry special interests — in this case, the livestock lobby that views wild horses as competition to cheap taxpayer subsidized grazing on our public lands. As D.C. issues directives for more roundups and trapping operations — including a roundup of Utah’s incredible Sulphur wild horses beginning Aug. 1 – it’s taxpayers and our wild horses who are paying the price.

When it’s over, nearly 10,000 wild horses will have lost their freedom this year alone. There’s a more sustainable path — the NAS confirmed that — but the lack of leadership and will to reform goes straight to the top.

Suzanne Roy is executive director of the American Wild Horse Campaign.

Salt Lake Tribune photographers documented some of Utah’s biggest news in July.

Fires broke out across the state, destroying homes and causing evacuations.

Staff members participated in the weekly 999 Ride after the death of a cyclist the week before.

July also brought big events, including the Utah Championship, the Utah Miss Rodeo pageant and the LoveLoud Festival.

Keep up with our photographers by following The Salt Lake Tribune on Instagram.

Left: A plane dropping retardant is dwarfed by smoke from the Dollar Ridge Fire in Duchesne County on July 3. Right: Joann and Brent Yorga, pictured in Fruitland, watch as their home in Serenity Ridge appears to be consumed by the fire.

McKaylie Richins competes in the Miss Utah Rodeo pageant horsemanship competition at the Golden Spike Arena in Ogden on July 19.

Cameron Champ from Sacramento, Calif., plays his final hole of the Utah Championship at Oakridge Country Club in Farmington on July 15. He was the 2018 champ.

Utah’s 2018 Montmorency cherry harvest is underway at Cherry Hill Farms. Although they are a mainstay in cherry pies and cheesecakes, tart cherries — pictured here on July 26 — are also dried, frozen, canned and juiced for their nutrient density and health benefits.

Kyle Beckerman, pictured here on July 19, is still charging forward as Real Salt Lake’s captain in his 19th MLS season.

The crowd cheers as Imagine Dragons play at the Loveloud Festival at Rice-Eccles Stadium on July 28.

Cyclists begin the weekly 999 Ride, which starts at the corner of 900 South and 9 East in Salt Lake City at 9 p.m. on July 26. The social ride happens year-round on Thursday nights, with riders often pedaling into the early morning hours. Cyclist Cameron Hooyer was killed after being struck by a FrontRunner train during the ride the week prior.

An evening thunderstorm brought much-needed rain to the Wasatch Front, as seen from the Bonneville Shoreline Trail in Davis County on July 10.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, alongside the Utah Commission for the Stewardship of Public Lands and oil industry executives, is currently pushing for the creation of wilderness in Southern Utah. And it’s all a front to insure oil drilling and mining in the area for years to come.

Confused yet? Let me explain. It all started with the formation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah that’s beauty can only be rivaled by its size. The creation of this monument blocked off access to coal mining, so the industry started to think of ways to insure future access to Utah’s fossil fuels and uranium. And this is when it hit them. If they could just create a “pseudo”-wilderness area that carved out access to these dirty fuels, they would be free of the threat of another monument. Thus, H.R. 5727 was born.

Ray Peterson, Emery County’s public lands director, said, “We were very careful, we didn’t want to eliminate any resource use to create wilderness” at a public meeting held on June 19. Beforehand, Peterson had talked about how he met with executives from the fossil fuel and mining industry many times before drawing the lines of the wilderness designation, making it clear the industry and deregulation are the true purposes behind the designation. Moreover, this bill is but a Trojan horse, disguising itself as wilderness but seeking deregulation and destruction.

Emery County Commission Chair Lynn Sitterud, an advocate for the bill, said at the meeting, “I would rather not have one acre of wilderness in the state of Utah.” Yet he hopes that this pseudo-wilderness area will block the creation of a monument in the future. It is clear that this bill is in no way environmental and that it will lead to the destruction, not protection, of our precious public lands. Furthermore, this bill also calls for multiple use, opening up adjacent areas to not only mining and grazing, but logging too.

Ron Dean, the eastern Utah director for Hatch, and an avid advocate of H.R. 5727, went as far as calling Bears Ears National Monument an injustice. Clearly, the man hasn’t the slightest idea what the term “injustice” means, as Bears Ears National Monument is to be managed by the Five Tribes Coalition, a coalition of Native American tribes that have all suffered from systemic environmental injustices. And environmental injustices will only be exasperated if H.R. 5727 is to pass. By creating this pseudo-wilderness in Emery County, and pushing for the proliferation of mineral, uranium and fossil fuel extraction, environmental injustices will spread throughout the land. The externalities will be felt in all of the surrounding areas as all of the profits flow out of Utah and into the hands of oil industry executives, only to return as donations to political campaigns.

It is scary that we live in a time where “wilderness” is being used as a tool to destroy the fragile ecosystems we all adore. These lands are public lands for a reason. Their beauty inspires millions to visit Utah each year. Many of us find peace and security just knowing that these public lands exist. Others travel across the world just to climb and hike in these areas. Because of these reasons and countless others, we must do what we can to stop H.R. 5727, insuring access to these public lands for generations to come.

Alec Quick, Holladay, recently graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in environmental and sustainability Studies, minors in geography and political science.

A young Latina from the Bronx and an old white dude from New England are taking what may be a premature victory lap around the country, making the point that a philosophy of government that has come to be called “socialism" — or, to make it sound less menacing, “democratic socialism” — is an idea whose time has come.

The previously unknown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a lock to be elected in the bright blue 14th Congressional District of New York, having out-hustled a 10-term incumbent old-school Democrat in the primary. She’s had time to go on tour, getting rock-star welcomes at rallies from Kansas to California.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has openly identified as a socialist since he was the mayor of Burlington back in the 1980s, is riding shotgun. (That’s a really funny line because the fatal flaw in Sanders' history for many Democrats is that he’s supposedly soft on gun control.)

It is amazing to some folks, Republican and Democrat, that anyone would stand up and call themselves a socialist and, even more astounding, that they would win elections. Sanders notwithstanding, it is kind of a generational thing. Most older folks identify the word with things like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which actually was about as socialist as the Spanish Inquisition was Christian.

Didn’t expect that, did you?

A younger generation is more likely to associate the term with, well, the civilized world. The United Kingdom, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc., etc. Nations where the democratically elected government serves its constituents by setting tax rates high and putting the money toward a wide range of public services, everything from clean and efficient public transit to extended paid maternity leave to universal health care provided through one or another pipeline.

If socialism sounds radical — pleasantly or not — it is because the U.S. is so much like a Third World kleptocracy where all is set to transferring income from the bottom to the top that anything that isn’t welfare for the rich has that label attached to it.

Governments come and go, coalitions assemble and fall apart, taxes go up and down and the level of public services provided wobbles around a bit. That’s the democratic part. But the idea that a society provides some level of those services is not questioned and the contest is between parties and leaders who claim to have found the right mix. That’s the socialist part.

They treat health care and other social supports the way we treat our defense budget. We argue about just how much money the Pentagon needs, whether it should be emphasizing aircraft carriers or missiles or special ops or cyberwar. But nobody expects to win an election by promising to do away with it.

The rich in these civilized nations put up with it, mostly, because they are outnumbered, because votes count more than campaign contributions, and because the affluent are mostly smart enough to see that they benefit from living in a country where they don’t have to pay their taxes and step over homeless people in the streets and have to come up with lots of money to put their kids through college and live in a nation where public health suffers because private health care isn’t up to the strain.

And because they have less fear of being the first ones up against the wall come the revolution. And less fear of what might happen to them, or their grandchildren, if they fall into the clutches of the Nordic version of Bernie Madoff and wind up depending on the social safety net they’ve been paying for all those years.

In this country, the new socialist push centers around health care, specifically the Medicare-for-All idea that is gaining ground in direct response to the Republican drive to destroy Obamacare despite its unappreciated attempt to keep private, for-profit providers and insurance carriers in the loop when, by all logic, they should have been thrown overboard from the outset.

You may have read that studies show that Medicare-for-All would cost a megaton of money, even by federal government standards. Maybe $32 trillion over 10 years. But that’s $2 trillion less than we are likely to spend — covering fewer people and paying for the worst outcomes in the First World — as a nation on our current track.

Neither Obamacare nor Medicare-for-All is socialist in the Marxist workers-control-the-means-of-production sense. That would be a system where the government owns the hospitals and hires the doctors. Like the jealously guarded British National Health Service, which even Margaret Thatcher dared not touch. Or the highly rated, if still too expensive, University of Utah Health System. (Ooops. I probably wasn’t supposed to tell you that. Never mind.)

Health care belongs in a more socialist model because it isn’t what the private sector is good at. Free marketeers are good, really good, scary good, at stuff. Cars, phones, TVs, mini-fridges, toothpaste, laptops, junk food, T-shirts, toys, scratching posts, novelty coffee cups. Stuff that can be thought up and test-marketed and focus-grouped and manufactured in such amazing bulk that the unit prices drop to a level that most people can afford. And if they can’t afford it they can do without. And if the company selling it goes out of business, it was a rational market decision.

Heath care is not stuff. It is life. It absolutely, positively has no place in a free market because the customer cannot walk away. If you can’t walk away, you aren’t a customer. You’re a victim.

That’s why the funding, if not the actual provision, of health care belongs in the same bucket as public safety, justice, due process, transportation infrastructure and the University of Utah. (Ooops. I did it again.)

Some people, both for and against, will call that socialism. The proper term for it is civilization.

George Pyle, the editorial page editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, doesn’t think of himself as a socialist because it sounds like being social. Which he’s not very good at. Unless there’s ice cream. gpyle@sltrib.com

When a student at Brigham Young University-Idaho reported being sexually assaulted in July, she thought she could not be punished under the Mormon school’s Honor Code.

BYU-Idaho and other colleges owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints promise amnesty from school discipline to students who report sexual misconduct. The 2017 change was part of sweeping reforms that began at BYU in Provo after the university came under scrutiny for punishing victims of sex crimes — expelling them in some cases — if they had broken school rules that forbid alcohol and coffee, restrict contact between male and female students, impose a strict dress code and ban “homosexual behavior.”

Amnesty, the school said, would encourage reporting and keep victims in college.

But the man accused by the BYU-Idaho student told their bishop she had been drinking at the time of the alleged assault. The bishop, she said, characterized the assault as “irrelevant” and revoked her ecclesiastical endorsement, which is required to attend the university.

The school suspended her even though her sexual misconduct complaint was upheld.

The high-profile policy changes at Mormon-owned schools did not address ecclesiastical endorsements: annual reviews in which clergy, usually an LDS bishop, verify that a student is “living by Church standards,” according to instructions on BYU’s website.

Bishops can revoke students’ endorsement at any time, effectively kicking them out of school — a power that critics say pokes holes in amnesty and can be easily exploited by abusers who have compromising information about their victims.

“It sounds to me like the system has a built-in loophole that would facilitate retaliation,” said Steven Healy, co-founder of the campus safety consulting firm Margolis Healy, which often advises schools on sex assault response.

“What’s the message you’re sending to people who want to report that they’ve been assaulted? It says to folks, ‘Don’t come forward because you’re going to be punished — in another system, but nonetheless, you’re going to be punished.’”

LDS Church officials declined to answer questions about whether ecclesiastical endorsements weaken the schools’ promises of amnesty, whether there are safeguards to prevent sex offenders from using the threat of bishop discipline to jeopardize a victim’s education as blackmail or retaliation, or how the church’s lay clergy is trained to respond to such cases.

But in a prepared statement, spokesman Daniel Woodruff defended the endorsement requirement.

“Students who study within the Church Educational System have wonderful and unique opportunities for learning and growth. All students agree to demonstrate high moral conduct, act with integrity and honesty, and adhere to standards of dress and grooming. Bishops have an important responsibility to help them live in this manner and continue to grow spiritually.”

BYU-Idaho declined to comment on a list of questions submitted by The Salt Lake Tribune and said it supported the church’s statement.

‘Did you know I was assaulted?’

At an apartment last month in Rexburg, Idaho, a group of students was lying on the floor, watching a movie, said the BYU-I student, who asked to be identified by the pseudonym Maria. The Salt Lake Tribune generally does not identify sexual assault victims.

It was no secret that she had been drinking beyond the point where she could reasonably consent to sexual contact, Maria said. Her speech was slurred and she had been stumbling before she settled under a blanket the group was sharing, next to a man she described as a casual acquaintance from her LDS student congregation, Maria said.

She said she was in and out of sleep, facing away from the man, when he began groping her both over and under her clothes. Maria said she tried to tell him “no,” but isn’t certain she was coherent.

“I know sounds came out,” she said.

The man said he also “was in and out of sleep the whole time.” In an interview with The Tribune, he said he woke up to find Maria next to him on the floor.

“I started touching her, and … yeah,” the man said. “I think at the very beginning we thought, yes, it was consensual but I guess I started touching her more how she didn’t want me to.”

When the others had fallen asleep or left the room, she said, the man tried to get on top of her and pull off her clothes. She said she pushed him off.

He left for a while but later returned, she said.

“He explained he’s just not himself when he’s tired, and he’s engaged and he shouldn’t have done that,” Maria said. “I said he knew I was drunk and he had no excuse.”

The next day, Maria told Rexburg police the man had assaulted her. The agency confirmed that her case exists but said it would not release records because an investigation was pending. The man said police have not contacted him.

Maria also reported to BYU-I’s Title IX office, which handles complaints about sexual misconduct and gender bias.

“I asked them specifically, ‘Am I going to get kicked out of school for reporting this?’ Point blank, multiple times,” Maria said. “I made sure it wouldn’t be communicated to the Honor Code Office, that amnesty and leniency would be applicable, before they even started an investigation.”

Two days after he was contacted by Title IX investigators, the man Maria accused met with their bishop in Rexburg.

A detailed confession, the man said, was important so the bishop could help both him and Maria.

Maria said she believes he reported to the bishop to retaliate against her for her Title IX report.

The man denied that.

“I knew I was in the wrong, I knew she was in the wrong,” he said. “I only went to the bishop so I could work on what I needed to work on. I didn’t go with any intentions to report her and retaliate. I was hoping she could work on her stuff, too … so she can be helped with drinking and following the Honor Code.”

Maria was called to the bishop’s office next.

“He said I needed to come in, or my ecclesiastical endorsement would be at risk,” Maria said. She said she told the bishop she didn’t want to discuss the matter because a police investigation was underway.

“I asked him point blank, ‘Did you know I was assaulted?’” she said. “And he said yes, and that it was irrelevant.”

She said the bishop told her the man she accused was remorseful and was working to get his temple recommend — a bishop’s authorization of worthiness to enter an LDS temple for certain ceremonies — in time to get married in August (the engagement has since ended, the man said).

By contrast, she said, the bishop was frustrated she wouldn’t focus on her drinking.

“He told me he wished I would open my heart more and be less ‘bitter,’” she said. “Of course I’m bitter; I was assaulted.”

In a letter, which The Tribune has obtained, the university suspended Maria for two semesters because her bishop withdrew her endorsement.

The bishop, Jay Ellis, would not discuss her discipline. Ellis said he believed her assault allegation, saying, “My heart goes out to her for that” — but he said it was unconnected to his decision.

Three days after Maria was suspended, she received another letter, this one from the Title IX office. Her assault complaint was substantiated and the man also was suspended; he said he also lost the bishop’s endorsement.

Maria said she asked her Title IX investigator for help when her bishop first called her and said her endorsement was at risk.

“He said Title IX [amnesty] protections cannot be applied in an ecclesiastical setting,” Maria said.

‘Could it undermine amnesty?’

In 2016, BYU in Provo convened an advisory council to review its practices after a dozen current and former students told The Tribune they were investigated for potential Honor Code violations as a result of reporting sex crimes — and dozens more said they didn’t report for fear of discipline.

The council, which included faculty and administrators with backgrounds in nursing and psychology, outlined 23 changes that would improve how BYU responded to sexual misconduct. Among its recommendations was providing amnesty from school discipline if someone who reports sexual misconduct had committed Honor Code violations when the misconduct occurred — and “leniency” for unrelated violations that may surface during an investigation.

Those provisions were extended to BYU schools in Idaho and Hawaii, as well as LDS Business College in Salt Lake City.

But some victims said at the time that the reforms didn’t go far enough, pointing specifically at ecclesiastical endorsements.

The council recommended that the findings be shared with the LDS Church. But it did not suggest any new training or guidelines for bishops, who still could revoke the endorsement of any student.

“The withdrawal of a student’s ecclesiastical endorsement automatically results in the loss of good Honor Code standing,” which means a student cannot enroll or graduate, according to BYU-I’s website. At BYU in Provo, a withdrawn endorsement means a student “must discontinue enrollment.”

Benjamin Ogles, dean of BYU’s College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences and head of the council that recommended amnesty, said bishops’ endorsements were outside the council’s assignment to review campus policies.

“We tried to stay focused on that part of it and not to get into the business of telling the church how [to] handle their things,” Ogles said. “We didn't feel like it was our place to tell ecclesiastical leaders how to handle these situations.”

But Ogles acknowledged that BYU’s requirement for bishops’ endorsements could create “double jeopardy” for students who have broken the Honor Code.

“Could it undermine amnesty or leniency [for assault survivors]?” Ogles said. “I suppose it could.”

He pointed to a survey on sexual assault, given to students at the Provo campus in spring 2017, five months after amnesty for assault victims was announced. More than 90 percent of respondents still believed that if they were assaulted, they would be investigated for Honor Code compliance — and 45 percent thought their ecclesiastical endorsements would be questioned.

Healy said he’s “shocked” that the council didn’t take bishops’ power over a student’s enrollment into consideration when it was addressing the issue of amnesty.

“It is a back door to retaliation,” he said. “I would hope that reasonable minds should be able to understand how we’ve set up a system that’s revictimizing victims.”

That’s how former BYU student Colleen Payne Dietz said she felt after she told her bishop she had been kidnapped and assaulted by a man when she was a freshman in 2001. She said the bishop gave her a copy of “The Miracle of Forgiveness,” a now-discontinued book on sin, with a controversial passage instructing the reader: “It is better to die in defending one’s [virginity] than to live having lost it without a struggle.”

Then, she said, he told her he would have her expelled from BYU if she were to become pregnant.

BYU’s new policies for amnesty and leniency wouldn’t have offered her any protection, she said.

“My situation 100 percent was handled by my bishop,” Dietz said. “I was made to feel worthless and unworthy of taking the sacrament. I didn't receive any of the comfort that I went to receive. I received exactly the opposite.”

‘An enormous amount of power’

The authority that clergy have over students at LDS Church-owned schools is rare in higher education, even among religious colleges, said Michael Austin, a BYU graduate who has studied sexual assault responses at faith-affiliated campuses. He now oversees investigations as executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Evansville, a Methodist school in Indiana.

While many religious universities require pastoral references for admission, LDS schools require endorsements to be renewed annually. And they have formal procedures for clergy to withdraw endorsements at any time.

“I don’t know of any other university that does that,” Austin said. “Your bishop can kick you out of school, and if you’re a professor, your bishop can fire you. As a university administrator, to give up that much power is … deeply problematic and at the very least should have some kind of an appeal procedure.”

In 2015, BYU slightly relaxed its rules for exemptions from ecclesiastical endorsements, removing language that had limited exemptions only to “unusual circumstances” and ending a requirement that students seeking exemptions allow school officials to consult with their bishops.

But it’s not clear whether sexual assault is “compelling grounds” for an exemption; the policy change came about amid criticism that BYU was discriminating against students who lose their faith in the LDS Church. The window for appeal is brief — five days after notification at BYU in Provo and two days at BYU-Idaho — and already has expired in Maria’s case.

BYU-Idaho’s website also indicates that a withdrawn endorsement can be appealed to a stake president — a step above ward bishops in the church hierarchy. Maria said her bishop told her he had consulted with the stake president before revoking her endorsement, and that both agreed it was the right course of action.

LDS bishops are lay clergy who are unpaid and aren’t required to attend professional seminaries, Austin noted. A lack of training or expertise can be particularly hazardous in cases of sexual assault, where criminal investigations may be pending, victims may be traumatized and predators may be looking for leverage over victims, he said.

“Ecclesiastical endorsements give an enormous amount of power to an untrained leader who may or may not be understanding about things,” Austin said. “Ecclesiastical endorsements, for both faculty and students … open up the door to a fairly horrific level of possible blackmail.”

In the 2017 survey at BYU in Provo, 6 percent of students who reported being assaulted in the previous year said that their assailants coerced them by threatening to talk to the Honor Code Office or the person who signed their ecclesiastical endorsement.

That’s what one former student said her assailant did to force her to submit to his repeated assaults in 2012.

Julie, who asked to be identified by her first name only, said she was raped by a neighbor whom she knew from her student ward in Provo. Before the assault, she said, the man noticed she was unhappy at church, and she confessed she was losing faith.

For months after the rape, Julie said, he used that information to coerce her to go out with him and let him reach under her clothes, threatening to tell the Honor Code Office about her faith transition if she didn’t submit. BYU did not offer amnesty at the time, so the man didn’t need to threaten to go to the bishop, she said. But he did force her to attend church with him, in a ward where he was well-liked.

“He would take me to go say hi to the bishop in the halls, putting his arm firmly around my shoulders and smiling the whole time,” Julie said.

She knew those interactions would undermine her with the bishop if she ever tried to say the man had raped and coerced her, she said.

“It was a power play, and he didn’t have to say a word,” she said.

Amnesty is a good start, but It would be naive to assume that untrained bishops all will respond to assault appropriately, Julie said.

“Some bishops would breeze through interviews and others would ask detailed, invasive, personal questions,” she said. “Everything was left to interpretation, and my whole life hung in the balance of that interpretation being understanding.”

For now, after suspensions at BYU-Idaho, Maria and the man she accused are deciding what to do while their schooling is on hold.

The man said he felt his bishop and the Title IX office handled the case well.

“I do want to go back,” he said.

Maria, on the other hand, wants to make other plans.

“In all honestly, I don’t even know if I will be going back to that school,” she said. “It’s a terrible place. I don’t feel safe there.”

I am an immigrant citizen with a long and successful history in international business. I abhor President Donald Trump yet agree that our immigration system is broken — but not his solution!

Trump’s policy is built on racism and receives widespread support from areas where unemployment is high and immigrants congregate.

That’s not dissimilar to the U.K. and France. For many years in the U.K., citizens from Commonwealth countries could immigrate freely — with the result that certain neighborhoods have a majority of nonwhite Jamaicans and Pakistanis. Some cities have even attempted to replace English law with Sharia law. The recent influx of East Europeans competing for low-paying jobs proved the last straw and led to Brexit. A similar situation exists in France, where millions of immigrants from their African colonies are concentrated in their inner cities.

We don't need a border wall — especially as roughly 50 percent of illegal immigrants simply overstay legal short-term visas. What we need are immigrant quotas backed by immigrant licenses — similar to driver licenses.

Employers should be required to apply for permits to hire immigrants (as Trump does at his hotels and golf courses) after demonstrating that they can't attract citizen applicants. Large fines and other penalties should accrue for employers who cheat. Employers who need seasonal workers or don't want to pay enough to attract citizens (Trump, for example) should be able to apply for temporary visas. A similar system has worked well in Switzerland for decades — but was rejected by Republicans here several years ago.

Finally, all employers should provide classes in English for their employees and their spouses and/or readily available computer or phone based lessons free of charge.

In addition, there are plenty of volunteer organizations or school districts who will provide instruction — also free of charge. My wife spent 30 years doing this. Reasonable progress in learning English should be a requirement for visa renewal and will result in better integration into the community.

Frank Fish, Park City

The Jim Winder article got me thinking. Where would police departments get most of their equipment? Would they use the budget from Unified Police Department? Would the government give them money? Or would they use the 1033 program?

If they choose to do the latter, it will be more terrifying to the people in the community because it provides weapons that were made for war. The 1033 program allows police departments to get surplus military equipment, from microwaves and radios to rifles and drones that were manufactured for military purposes. That’s why I would like to ask Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee to co-sponsor S1856, or the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act. The bill would limit what the police departments can get, resulting in diminished use of dangerous weapons made for war and not for protecting our families and communities.

Salvador Oregon-Torres, Salt Lake City

Yeah for the two people who received grizzly bear hunting permits and aren’t going to use them for hunting, but for photographing the grizzly bears in Wyoming. Shame on Wyoming for giving out more grizzly bear hunting permits.

Annette Davis, Murray

As demonstrated in the fair-minded piece by Lee Davidson titled “Trump is really tough on Putin, despite their recent meeting, says Utah Rep. Chris Stewart,” the congressman has a mind for foreign affairs. Whether constituents agree with his stance on President Donald Trump’s relations with Vladimir Putin or not, his commitment to improving the international community is clear.

Recently, Stewart supported in the House an increase for USAID’s tuberculosis account. His counterparts in the Senate supported a much smaller increase in funding. The additional $41 million allocated by the House would save 19,000 more lives. From his support on the House bill, it is clear that he understands the impact this money can have to save lives both abroad and domestically.

Please encourage Rep. Stewart to continue fighting for the full amount possible to be targeted to ending tuberculosis worldwide. To let Rep. Stewart know you support his advocacy to his colleagues in Congress, please call one of his offices or submit a letter on his website.

If Orrin Hatch wants to go out with a reputation as a wise elder statesman, he doesn’t have much time left.

The lame-duck senior senator from the state of Utah reared his hypocritical head the other day, restating his claim to be the poster politician for a lot of what is wrong with out hyper-partisan, gridlocked Congress. And he managed to draw all the more opprobrium for the fact that, only a few days before, The Wall Street Journal published a commentary with Hatch’s byline arguing that there is a crying need for more “respect and civility” in our national politics.

Specifically, Hatch and a few other Republican senators, including Utah’s Mike Lee, were attacking their Democratic colleagues over the Democrats' call to slow down the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Supreme Court. As is often the case with high court nominees, the party backing the nomination argues that great deference should be given to the president’s choice and that the other party is being ridiculous and obstructive.

Apparently, in this situation, “respect and civility” are for wimps. Hatch went off on the Democrats, saying, "We can’t keep going down this partisan, picky, stupid, dumbass road that has happened around here for so long.”

Everyone plays this game to some degree. Both parties argue deference and cooperation when it serves their interest, and roll out the invective and attack dogs when that suits them.

But one might have hoped that a long-time senator such as Hatch, who has no need to stir up the red-meat base because he isn’t running for re-election, could have made his partisan argument without such derision. Or that he might have realized that he was hardly in a position to cast the first stone.

Hatch’s paper trail of hypocrisy is even more obvious than most. Back in the day, he suggested that then-President Barack Obama might quell the storm of partisanship by nominating a clearly qualified, non-ideological judge such as, say, oh, Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Then, when Obama did exactly that, Hatch was among the Republicans who blocked so much as a hearing on the nomination because, well, Obama.

Now, when Democrats argue that the Republicans aren’t providing as much background detail about Kavanaugh as the Democrats did about nominees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Hatch and other Republicans basically argue that whoever is in the majority gets to play by a different set of rules.

One of the arguments against even considering the Garland nomination was that Obama was a lame-duck president and that the seat on the high court should not be filled until after the oncoming election.

If that argument were valid — which it isn’t — then a morally consistent and intellectually honest argument would be that a lame-duck senator like Orrin Hatch should butt out of this argument altogether.

You know what’s mind-boggling to me? The idea that preventing my kidlet from harm isn’t always the best parenting choice. That sometimes anticipating a negative outcome and allowing it to come to fruition at little Harvey’s expense is the right thing to do.

Doesn’t that sound nuts?

OK, phrasing it that way makes it sound particularly negligent, but I’m actually just talking about my recent efforts to quiet the whooshing thumps of my inner helicopter parent. (I hope you just made an audible helicopter sound.)

But the problem is: Letting toddler-legs-Harvey run so fast he’ll likely tank it goes against every fiber in my uptight, anxiety-riddled, mama-bear being. Hey, growing dude, are you maybe too tall to stand up under the table anymo — bonk!

Ugh.

And I don’t know if Harvey just bruises like a peach, if he’s particularly klutzy or maybe just a daredevil, but his legs and elbows are constantly covered with boo-boos. A friend noticed those adventure remnants recently and complimented Elenor and me for our son’s “summer knees.”

Turns out good parenting means not trying to stop your kid from being a kid.

It’s terrible!

The logic of it is antithetical to my emotional impulses, which drive me to keep him from anything other than joy and pleasure. Curbing those knee-jerk instincts takes serious commitment and mindfulness and, as it turns out, really toned facial muscles from all the grimacing I do while I watch him learn about such important things as gravity, momentum and consequence.

But life isn’t all Popsicles and bubbles (annoyingly), so while we’d like never to see our kiddo in pain, we have to allow him the experiences that will teach him to fear pain, anticipate challenges and bounce back.

And despite the overabundance of advice (backseat parenting) from the world at large (“Calm down, he’ll be fine” with an eyeroll or “I can’t believe you’d let him do that” with a report halfway filled out to child protective services), it’s tough to know in the moment which risks are good ones and which are not.

Do we let Harvey eat the thing off the floor? Do we let him walk on the pool cover? What about roughhousing on the couch even though one time he bonked his head and got a golf-ball-size forehead adornment? How about negotiating autonomously with other toddlers about toy ownership? Should he be banned from coloring because he eats crayons and licks markers sometimes?

Are there height specifications for things that are good for him to possibly fall off? Like, is couch-to-floor a good lesson but table-to-floor too high? (I know he shouldn’t be on top of the table, but let’s tackle one issue at a time here.)

Parenting is tricky enough when you think your job is to protect your kids, and it gets markedly more complex when you’re only supposed to protect them some of the time (and shrug coolly the other times like all of this is super easy and not a biggie).

And since there is no widely available manual anywhere nor a Helicopters Anonymous group around, I guess you’ll have to just wish us — perhaps particularly Harvey — mostly good luck.

Marina Gomberg is a communications professional and lives in Salt Lake City with her wife, Elenor Gomberg, and their son, Harvey. You can reach Marina at mgomberg@sltrib.com.

Although I nearly went insane a few times, I don’t regret serving a two-year Mormon mission. It did me a lot of good, although not necessarily in ways many might think.

First, it kept me alive. Of all the things I still have faith in, one is knowing that I would have been dead within those two years if I hadn’t gone.

Second, it gave me valuable insight into the kind of Mormon I could never be even if I wanted to — and that some deep believers should be avoided at all costs.

Third, and most important, my mission is where I met my wife.

I was thinking about these things in church last Sunday, while listening to sacrament meeting talks on the importance of young people serving missions. It almost sounded like serving a mission was a commandment.

It’s not. It’s strongly encouraged and even deemed an expected rite of passage for young LDS guys. In the stupidest of cases, it’s a condition of continued familial acceptance, but none of those really amounts to a celestial directive.

That brings me to the thing of which I’m most proud about my mission. It isn’t that I stayed the entire two years, that I managed to baptize a few people, or even how I learned to cope with some major squirrels for companions.

It’s that the whole thing — from start to staying to finishing — was entirely my idea. Mine.

My parents certainly didn’t expect me to serve a mission. Even today, they’ll acknowledge being surprised that I reached age 20.

Nobody in my family had ever served a mission. The Old Man didn’t go, being rather busy with the Korean War at the time. Mom had me first, so there were no older siblings to lead by example. And none of my closest drug-addled friends intended to go.

Worse, nothing I heard in church made missionary work sound fun or appealing. The older guys I knew who went came home changed. It’s like they went to some junior executive school.

I won’t go into details here about why I decided to serve a mission. The parts that aren’t boring remain personal. It surprised my parents, disgusted my friends and scared the hell out of the bishop.

The point that I’m doing a bad job of making is that something as significant as two years of a person’s life should be undertaken only on that person’s say-so.

If not, then serving a mission is more akin to being drafted, one in which everybody has the same number: 18.

Drafting people, or simply making something socially compulsory, is a good recipe for fielding a large force. But not so great for those who feel pressured against their own idea of the sort of person they want to be. That fosters resentment.

One particularly discouraging day on my mission, another elder lamented the fact that he didn’t really feel “called by God” to serve a mission. I told him that I was pretty sure I wasn’t either.

Him • “I was called by my parents, the ward and my girlfriend. Who called you?”

Me • “I did.”

So your daughter opted for marriage instead of a mission, or your son went to MIT instead of the MTC. You don’t have any right to feel disappointed. It wasn’t your call to make in the first place.

Washington • Rep. Chris Stewart spent 14 years as a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, claiming three world speed records.

So one might think that the Utah Republican would be steadfast in defending the Air Force’s leading role in space missions as President Donald Trump eyes efforts to create a Space Force to handle military operations outside Earth’s atmosphere.

“Some people kind of expected me to protect the Air Force entities, [because it could] weaken the Air Force if we separated. And I didn't take that position,” Stewart said in a recent interview. “I was like, 'Maybe it's a good idea. Let's look at it. But let's be thoughtful about it.'”

The Pentagon last week began to build Trump’s Space Force, though Congress will still have to take steps to make it a new branch of the military.

For now, the Defense Department is setting up three of the four parts of the Space Force, a new command structure, a joint agency to purchase satellites and an operation for possible war in outer space that will include military members from the four other service branches, Defense One reported Tuesday.

A draft Pentagon report, obtained by the publication, says the Defense Department would establish an 11th unified combatant command — similar to the U.S. Special Operations Command, which draws members from all branches — for the Space Force.

Congress, though, would have to pass legislation to make the Space Force a military branch on par with the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard.

It’s unclear if there’s support in Congress to pass such a measure.

“We’re still kind of weighing that,” Stewart said. “I really don’t know what the right answer is right now, but I want to be thoughtful about it. It’s worth considering, but it’s not something we should do overnight.”

It may take years, according to some.

A sixth branch

Trump, in June, directed the Pentagon to create a Space Force to ensure American dominance in outer space. The president said politics and bureaucracy have, for too long, “squandered” dreams of exploration and discovery, and it was important for America to be leading in space technology.

“We don’t want China and Russia and other countries leading us,” Trump said at a White House event with the National Space Council. “When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space. So important.”

Trump, as he promised in his 2016 campaign, said there needed to be a sixth armed forces branch and turned to Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to carry out the assignment.

“We got it,” Dunford replied.

“Let's go get it, general,” Trump said.

But there’s only so much the Defense Department can do on its own, such as changing the command structure to create a one-stop shop for buying satellites and bringing the military branches together on issues related to space.

The idea needs congressional buy-in and, so far, the House and Senate are biding their time.

Congress has already passed the defense spending bill for the coming year, meaning any funding for a new military branch — and authority to create one — will have to wait until 2019.

Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and a top member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Defense One last week that a Space Force may be a topic next year. Not that he’s a big fan.

“I’m opposed to [creating a sixth branch],” Inhofe told the publication. “I know the president has strong feelings. I think we can do that without a new branch.”

Utah's members aren't sold on it either.

“I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to play the new-guy card and say, I don’t have a clue,” said Rep. John Curtis, a freshman Republican from Utah. “I haven’t got past the surface on that one.”

Rep. Rob Bishop is awaiting a report from the Defense Department before deciding whether to support the idea.

Rep. Mia Love’s office says she will review any legislation brought to the House and talk to experts before forming an opinion, but she does want to know how the United States can best protect national security.

“Representative Love is concerned about reports from the Armed Services Committee that there are nations who are researching ways to undermine U. S. satellite communications,” spokesman Rich Piatt said.

Sen. Mike Lee's office said he didn't have a position on the issue yet. Sen. Orrin Hatch's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., have been leading the charge for a separate Space Force, contending that the Air Force isn’t capable of combating the threat from other nations that have ramped up their efforts in space. They fear new foreign technology could shoot down GPS or spy satellites, leaving the military unable to see incoming missiles.

“We could be deaf, dumb and blind within seconds,” Cooper said in February at a space forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, according to The New York Times. “Seldom has a great nation been so vulnerable.”

A new military branch would cost money, of course, and create a whole new entity that requires administrative staff and support.

Small force, big job

Stewart, the Utah congressman who wants to know more about the Space Force before backing the idea, says he sees pluses and minuses with a new military branch.

For one, it would be far smaller than the other branches. The Army has 487,000 active duty soldiers, the Navy has 323,000 among its ranks, the Air Force about 307,000 and the Marine Corps 183,000, according to the Pentagon. The Coast Guard has 56,000 members, according to the branch overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.

Stewart expects the Space Force, if approved, to include some 30,000 to 34,000.

“My worry is that they’d be overwhelmed by the other forces if it were so much smaller and maybe not as important a seat at the table,” the congressman said.

On the other hand, consolidating space operations under one roof could help streamline its efforts rather than coordinating over various military branches, each with its own areas of expertise.

“There are some advantages to it," Stewart said. “One is a more clear command and responsibility: a force that has a specific mission and can be held responsible for the success and failure.”

Though Trump hopes to build his Space Force in the near future, the opposition may eventually hamper any quick resolution.

“It is a virtual certainty that it will be a huge undertaking that will consume a lot of time, effort, thinking,” former Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said recently, according to CNBC.

James, who served under President Barack Obama, said the new force could “zap” military resources that might be better applied elsewhere. And she said top military leaders are not on board but stuck in an unenviable spot.

“None of them [is] in favor of a Space Force, but they are stuck," she said. “The president has said it, and it will be interesting to see how they now deal with it.”

Bountiful • Lona Earl has never watched a movie on Netflix. Or Amazon Prime. Or Hulu.

“I’m one of those who has never streamed. Ever,” she said.

“But she has 30,000 movies here, so she's OK,” her husband, Lee Earl, added with a laugh.

The Earls own Top Hat Video in Bountiful — which is sort of a blast from the past. It’s a traditional video store stuffed full of DVDs, Blu-rays, 4K and video games.

Nothing rents for more than $4. Memberships are free. And the store is thriving.

“Growing up, we’d come in here all the time,” said Jessica Wilson Nish, a Bountiful native who now lives in New York City. “And every time I come back to stay with my parents, I’m like, ‘Is Top Hat still open?’

“It has everything. It's better than Netflix or Amazon Prime. The [streaming services] might not have a certain movie, and you know you can pretty much get any movie here.”

Make no mistake, Top Hat is not some sad little store with a paltry number of movies on dusty shelves.

“We have over 32,000 titles,” said Shanna Earl, the owners' daughter-in-law and longtime store manager. “The streaming world can't match us.”

Netflix’s numbers fluctuate, but it has about 4,000 movies and about 1,600 television shows in its lineup these days — more than 80 percent fewer than Top Hat.

And, to be clear, that's 32,000 titles at Top Hat, not 32,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. That's new movie releases, classics, family films and tons of TV series.

“I’ve been coming in here since I can remember. Since they still had VHS tapes,” said 19-year-old Ashton Luddington of Bountiful. “And you get more variety than at Netflix and places like that.”

If video stores seem sort of quaint in 2018, they were anything but when the Earls opened theirs 35 years ago.

“Oh, it was very cutting edge,” Lee Earl said. “We had 197 movies and 10 VCRs, and we thought we were pretty big stuff.”

“It was a big investment,” Shanna Earl said.

VCRs were big, clunky and cost $500 apiece; VHS movies cost about $100 each. But the Earls were convinced it was an idea whose time had come, so they took out a second mortgage on their house, spent $32,000 for an Adventureland franchise, rented 600 square feet at the Five Points Mall in Bountiful, equipped it with shelves and counters and opened their doors.

And business didn’t exactly boom.

“It was a slow build at first,” Lee Earl said. “She’d call me and say, ‘Hey, we haven’t even done $25 today. How are we going to pay the rent?’

“And I’d say, ‘Don’t worry.’”

They carried those big, clunky VCRs and VHS tapes to their neighbors, loaning them out for free “to convince them to at least try it.”

Lee Earl kept his job working for Dee’s Restaurants. Lona Earl ran Adventureland — renamed Top Hat a few years later — and they plowed all the money from the video store back into the business for eight years.

“We pretty much doubled the store each year,” Lee Earl said. “It gave us our foundation, and then I left Dee’s and went to work here.”

And then, about the time they left the since-demolished Five Points Mall for The Square at 2600 shopping center in 2001, they began facing heavy competition from national chains like Hollywood Video and Blockbuster.

“When Blockbuster came in, they wiped out probably three-fourths of our business,” Lee said. “That was scary.”

“Those were nervous times,” Lona said.

In the early 2000s, they were surrounded by three Blockbusters in Bountiful. Whereas a Blockbuster guaranteed the latest release would be available by having dozens of copies in each store, “We could never do that,” Shanna Earl said.

“We just accepted that,” Lee Earl said, “and said, ‘OK, what is our niche?’ And our niche was to have a variety rather than having 20 of the latest release.”

The variety at Top Hat is astonishing. Sure, they have the latest releases, but they also have hundreds of classic films. If you know who Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis are, you'll feel right at home.

(They don't carry NC-17 movies, and they'll occasionally pass on a hard R.)

But stand-alone Top Hat was competing directly with a company that had more than 4,500 outlets in the United States. And against all odds, Top Hat is still standing. Today, it has the same number of stores as Blockbuster — which is down to just one, in Bend, Ore.

And there isn’t a lot of competition for the movie/TV rental business anymore. There are Redbox automated kiosks, which feature mostly new releases, and the Salt Lake Film Society’s Tower Video, which features an eclectic mix of mostly older films.

Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are gone, and the days when seemingly every grocery store and gas station rented movies are over. But don’t use the word “survive” around the Earls.

“It's a success story, not survival,” Lona Earl said.

“I don’t think we’ve ever wanted to survive, we’ve wanted to thrive,” Shanna Earl added.

What keeps Top Hat going when virtually all of its competitors have closed their doors?

“We’ve established a really good, loyal customer base,” Lee Earl said — about 40,000 in the active customer base who have rented within the past two years. “We have customers that threaten us — ‘If you ever close, I’ll kill you.’”

It’s not just people who rented video before the advent of the Internet, although there are plenty of those.

“We have seniors that come in, and they don’t want to have to figure out streaming,” Shanna Earl said. “They just want to put it in their player and push play. We have people that were coming in in the ’80s that are now bringing their grandkids in.

“But then we have a lot of people in their teens and 20s who come in and say, ‘Whoa! This is so cool!’ They’ve never even heard of a store like this.”

The store has become “kind of a community hub,” she said, adding that she recognizes “most of the people” who come in. And, as a matter of fact, she readily identified the customers in the store on a recent afternoon.

Those customers recommend Top Hat to their friends.

“Come here!” Luddington said. “It's very homey, and you don't get this kind of experience anywhere else.”

Lona Earl said Top Hat has always emphasized customer service — that customers “spend hours just talking and asking these guys all kinds of questions about different movies.”

Kate Hanks and her family recently moved from Draper to Bountiful “and some friends told us about Top Hat and said, ‘You absolutely have to go.’

“They’re brilliant. They’ll help you. You can reserve a movie. They’ll work with you. If you’re running late, you can renew it for another day. The selection is tremendous, and it’s current. And they’re completely affordable.”

It’s a family affair — and not just because the owners' son and daughter used to work there; their daughter-in-law manages the place; and their grandchildren work there part-time. Current and former staffers recently had a reunion, and several employees who work full-time elsewhere still work a shift or two a week.

“There’s something at Top Hat that runs through your veins,” Lona Earl said.

It’s not like the store hasn’t changed with the times. It started out with a mix of VHS and Betamax tapes … until Betamax lost that battle and disappeared from the shelves. There have been other failed forays (like Mpeg-3) on the way to DVDs and Blu-rays.

Now it’s 4K, and all the changes have been “positive in the end,” Lee Earl said. “At first, it was really difficult dealing with all that. It was, like — where do we go? But 4Ks gave us a shot in the arm. There’s a new format coming out, and none of the others have that yet.” The Earls aren’t planning any big changes, but they’re quick to point out that the store has been evolving since the day it opened.

“We have reinvented ourselves so many times,” Lona Earl said. “The layout of the store and what we bring in and how we deal with it.”

And they're open to whatever comes next — as long as they can keep the homey, customer-service aspect of the business alive.

“If the suppliers will supply us, and there's still demand, we'll stay. It's just that simple,” Lee Earl said.

“We could be here ’til doomsday, I guess,” Lona Earl said.

Berlin • A vintage propeller plane plunged near-vertically into a Swiss mountain, killing all 20 people on board as they returned from a two-day trip to southern Switzerland, investigators said Sunday.

The Junkers Ju-52 plane, operated by small Swiss company Ju-Air, went down Saturday on the Piz Segnas mountain above the Alpine resort of Flims in the country's southeast, at an altitude of about 2,540 meters (8,330 feet) above sea level.

There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash, and officials said they expect a complex investigation given that the 79-year-old plane was not equipped with black boxes.

Police said Sunday they had determined that the 17 passengers and three crew members on board the plane all died.

The victims were 11 men and nine women between the ages of 42 and 84— seven couples from various parts of Switzerland, a couple from neighboring Austria and their son, and the three crew members. Their names were not released.

The fully booked plane was flying the passengers back to its base at Duebendorf, near Zurich, from a two-day trip to Switzerland's Italian-speaking southern Ticino region. It crashed shortly before 5 p.m. Saturday, less than 50 minutes after taking off from Locarno's Magadino airfield.

Photos released by Graubuenden canton (state) police showed the crumpled wreckage of the plane lying on the mountain, with only the upside-down tail more or less intact.

Police said they were not aware of any distress call from the aircraft before it crashed.

"We can assume that the aircraft hit the ground near-vertically and at relatively high speed," Daniel Knecht of the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board said at a news conference in Flims.

He and senior police official Andreas Tobler said the vintage plane lacked "black boxes," the crash-resistant cockpit voice and data recorders that more modern aircraft have.

Knecht said officials expect the investigation of the cause to be "relatively complex, because we have to compare various indications, information and evidence and evaluate them."

There also are typically few radar recordings in mountainous areas such as the one where the crash site is located, he added.

Officials can essentially rule out a collision with another aircraft or an obstacle such as a wire, Knecht said. There also was no indication of any "external influence," he said, indicating that authorities don't suspect foul play.

The plane did not catch on fire before or after it hit the mountain, and investigators have not found any signs the aircraft lost parts or broke up in the air before the crash, Knecht said.

The area around the crash site, which is popular with hikers and skiers and includes a glacier, was closed to the public. Knecht said authorities would probably need "a few days" to complete recovery work.

Officials appeared dubious about suggestions that unusually hot weather in Switzerland, like other parts of Europe, might have been a main cause of the crash. Knecht said that while heat can affect an aircraft's performance, experienced pilots could deal with that.

Knecht also dismissed the idea that the plane's age was necessarily a problem.

"Older planes, if they are correctly maintained, can be operated safely," he said.

Nearly 5,000 Ju-52 planes, a product of Germany's Junkers, were manufactured between 1932 and 1952.

Ju-Air's Ju-52 planes are former Swiss military aircraft, built in 1939, that were retired by the air force in 1981.

Ju-Air started operating flights with the old-timers in 1983, and the plane that crashed — with the registration HB-HOT — had been in service with the company since 1985.

Chief executive and co-founder Kurt Waldmeier said the planes "are flown exclusively by very experienced professional pilots, and strictly checked and maintained by our own technicians."

The plane that crashed had logged 10,187 hours of flying time, he said, adding that it underwent maintenance after every 35 hours of flight — most recently at the end of July. He said it had its full annual service during the winter, and "we know of no technical problems with this aircraft."

The two pilots, who were 62 and 63-years-old, both had extensive experience with the Ju-52 and had long worked as airline and Swiss air force pilots, Waldmeier said.

The aircraft have three engines, one on the nose and one on each wing. Waldmeier said the pilots fly by sight along pre-planned routes.

"We cannot yet explain what led to the tragic accident on Piz Segnas," he said.

Ju-Air offers "adventure flights" for people wanting to experience Switzerland's landscape from vintage planes.

A brochure on the company's website listed the cost of the 2-day Locarno trip as 1,130 francs ($1,136), including meals and a night in a hotel.

The company, which operates two other Ju-52s, suspended flights until further notice after the crash.

It has been nearly two weeks since Brent Bookwalter returned to train and ride around Park City, a place he’s now so familiar with he knows the names of the streets, and all the twists and turns around town by heart. BMC Racing Team teammate Joey Rosskopf recently joked to Bookwalter that he’s made the annual summertime stop in Utah basically every year since he graduated from high school.

Since 2008, it has become engrained to Bookwalter’s schedule, too. The 34-year-old, who has represented BMC on eight Grand Tours since joining the team a decade ago and was part of the crew that helped Cadel Evans win the 2011 Tour de France, has a nostalgic connection to the roadways around the Beehive State.

“It’s a good dose of America,” he said. “It’s hot and it’s high and it’s dry and rolls into the race really well.”

It’s also where Bookwalter — who splits time living in Asheville, N.C., and Girona, Spain — once re-centered a young career that weaved so far off course so early on that the Tour of Utah always reminds him of how things could’ve gone wrong, but how he managed to overcome the most painful moment of his cycling career. Riding on the France-Belgium border in 2007, he crashed and suffered a compound fracture of his tibia. Bookwalter could see the bone burst through his skin.

A surgeon was called in from home and emergency surgery was performed while he was wide awake. Bookwalter, at one point, heard that the lower part of his leg might not be saved due to the severity of the break. The surgeon fixed his leg with power tools and just a sheet to keep Bookwalter from looking down. That was way back when, before he became a household name in pro cycling, before celebrating a teammate’s Tour de France victory, before eventually representing the United States at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

It wasn’t until after months of recovery, during his first pro ride in Utah in 2008 and his first year with BMC, that he felt truly back on track.

“I would say it was the first time that I felt like myself again,” he said. “I was racing at the front and putting in strong team performances and still finding that fire and feeling like my body was in a place where my mind was striving to be for so long, so that sort of cemented some strong sentiment and love for it.”

His career highlights have been topped with the elation in France, and the experience and pride of sporting the Stars & Stripes in Brazil, but Bookwalter says he’s often most comfortable in Utah, where he has had his share of success. In 2015, he finished third overall and in 2017, he had three Top 5 finishes at the Tour of Utah, including a win in the second stage and a second place in the seventh and final stage in Park City.

“Hopefully I’ve got more Tour of Utahs in me this year,” he said, “and for years to come.”

The TOU field has increasingly gotten stronger over the years. Bookwalter said the word is spreading overseas, too. He and his teammates have quipped in the past that when they travel to Europe, they try their best not to mention it to their peers who have yet to compete in the race.

“I think they sort of caught the bug,” he said. “The secret’s out a little bit. More teams are seeing [the Tour of Utah] as a great fit into their summer transition out of that midsummer season and setting them up for last races of the year.”

Bookwalter is already looking forward to — and also dreading — the signature climb up Empire Pass out of Midway and into Park City on the final stage of the race.

“That’s just such a world-class climb,” he said. “There aren’t that many climbs we do in the U.S. that are that demanding.”

The payoff, however, is thousands of fans lining Park City’s Main Street, making it one of the cooler sights in American cycling. And Bookwalter, who will compete in his fifth Tour of Utah this week, knows what it takes to get there.

“You don’t get there without going through everything up Empire,” he said.