By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM and MATTHEW BROWN, Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The widow of a beloved Utah fashion designer who was fatally shot during a June “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City demanded Wednesday that someone be held accountable for her husband’s death after more than four months without any charges filed in the case.

Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, known as Afa, died June 15 when a man who was part of a volunteer peacekeeping team for the protest fired three rounds at a man who allegedly brandished a rifle at demonstrators. One round injured the rifleman, who did not fire any shots, and another struck Ah Loo, a protester who later died at the hospital.

The sign Ah Loo was holding that day read, “The world is watching,” said his wife, Laura Ah Loo.

“Afa always stood for those who needed justice the most,” Laura Ah Loo said during a Wednesday press conference. “And now I stand for him, on his behalf, for his sake and for all of us. The world is watching.”

Officers arrested but never charged Arturo Gamboa, the man with the rifle, saying at the time that he created the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death.

Police have not charged or publicly identified the safety volunteer who shot at Gamboa and fatally struck Ah Loo. But authorities have said they’re investigating whether that man was justified in firing his handgun.

Salt Lake City’s participation this month in another round of “No Kings” demonstrations — a nationwide mobilization against what participants see as a shift into authoritarianism under President Donald Trump — brought renewed attention to the open-ended case.

Thousands rallied outside the Utah State Capitol on Oct. 18 to share messages of hope and healing, and demand justice for Ah Loo and his family.

Attorneys for Laura Ah Loo said they will pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against the unidentified volunteer in coming weeks. They also said charges should be filed against the volunteer and called for more transparency from authorities.

“This is not a whodunit,” said Richard Lambert, a lawyer for Ah Loo’s wife. “We know who did it. We know who fired the fatal shot that took Afa’s life.”

Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said on Wednesday that he sympathizes with the Ah Loo family’s loss and suggested criminal charges are still possible. His office met with the family early in the process and explained that the investigation would take time, Gill said.

“We are carefully working through a complex and nuanced legal analysis,” Gill said. “We expect to reach a decision soon.”

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But legal experts say criminal charges are unlikely.

Utah gun laws expert and personal injury attorney Mitch Vilos has been following the case and does not expect criminal charges against either the safety volunteer or Gamboa.

The right to self defense and the right to carry a firearm are both strong in Utah, Vilos said, and prosecutors would face a high bar in trying to prove criminal charges against either man.

“It’s like friendly fire. It can happen,” he said. “It happens with the military, it happens with police.”

Prosecutors in a criminal case must convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred. But the bar in a civil lawsuit would be much lower, Vilos added, requiring simply a preponderance of evidence that a defendant was in the wrong or acted negligently.

Gamboa did not fire his rifle. It is unclear what he intended to do with it.

A lawyer for Gamboa has said he was attending the rally as a supporter and was lawfully in possession of the unloaded weapon. Gamboa was walking with it pointed at the ground before he was shot in the back by the volunteer, lawyer Greg Skordas said.

Brown reported from Denver.

Minnesota United added nearly $2 million in guaranteed compensation across its five new players brought in during the summer transfer window, according to data from the MLS Players Assocaition released Wednesday.

The Loons have two headliners making up the three-fourths of that total: attacking midfielder Dominik Fitz at $853,000 and defensive midfielder Nectar Triantis at $722,665.

Fitz comes in as United’s fifth-highest played player, while Triantis slots in as the eighth-highest. Midfielder Robin Lod remains the Loons’ highest earner at $1.6 million.

Since joining from abroad in August, Triantis has provided an instant impact, while Fitz is still looking to gain traction.

Triantis, a 22-year-old Australian, started the Loons opening MLS Cup Playoff game against Seattle on Monday and scored a penalty kick in the 3-2 shootout win at Allianz Field. However, Fitz, a 26-year-old Austrian, was an unused sub in Game 1.

That involvement mirrored their contributions to close out the MLS regular season. While Triantis and Fitz each played in five games, Triantis made four starts and accumulated 352 minutes, while Fitz made one start and played 151 total minutes.

Trianits also contributed two stunning long-range goals and two assists. His debut MLS goal at San Diego on Sept. 13 was a jaw-dropper estimated at 60 yards, while his powerful hit at Colorado on Sept. 27 was marked at 31 yards.

Both Triantis and Fitz have 4 1/2-year contracts with MNUFC through 2029, with club options for 2030.

The Loons’ other three additions are considered projects.

Paraguyan midfielder Alexis Farina ($172,500) is on a one-year loan from Cero Porteno and has been contributing on MNUFC2.

Costa Rican winger Kenyel Michel ($104,000) signed a 2 1/2-year deal in August and was loaned back to Costa Rican club Alajuelense for the rest of the 2025 season.

Center forward Momo Dieng ($83,769) was signed from Hartford Athletic to help replace Tani Oluwaseyi. Dieng, a 21-year-old from Senegal, has played only 114 minutes across four matches and stayed on the bench for the first playoff game.

With Oluwaseyi transferred to Spanish club Villarreal, his guaranteed compensation of $558,750 in 2025 comes off United’s book.

By CLAIRE RUSH and GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A federal trial over whether President Donald Trump can deploy the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, was underway Wednesday, with police officials expected to testify that federal agents at the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building have inflamed protests in recent weeks through excessive force.

U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, will preside over the trial in Portland. The trial stems from a lawsuit filed by the city and state against the Trump administration in a bid to block the troop deployment.

Immergut has already issued two temporary restraining orders in the case blocking the troops pending further litigation. She found that Trump had failed to show he had met the conditions set out by Congress for using the military domestically. She described his assessment of the situation in Portland, which Trump called “war ravaged,” as “simply untethered to the facts.”

One of Immergut’s orders was paused last week by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals. But late Tuesday the appeals court vacated that decision and said it would rehear the case before an 11-judge panel.

The complex case comes as Democratic cities targeted by Trump for military involvement — including Chicago, which has filed a separate lawsuit on the issue — are pushing back. They argue the president has not met the legal requirements to deploy troops and doing so would violate states’ sovereignty. The administration argues that it needs the troops because protests have impeded law enforcement operations.

Portland’s ICE building outside downtown has been the site of nightly protests that peaked in June when police declared one demonstration a riot. Smaller clashes have also occurred since then, and federal officers have fired tear gas to clear crowds, which at times have included counterprotesters and livestreamers.

During the trial, witnesses are expected to take the stand for both sides and face cross-examination. The federal defendants will call officials from ICE, the Department of Defense and the Federal Protective Service, the agency that provides security for federal buildings.

The administration argues that it has had to shuffle Department of Homeland Security agents from elsewhere around the country to respond to the Portland protests, showing that the city has been unable to enforce the law with regular forces — one of the conditions set by Congress for calling out the National Guard. It has also characterized the protests as a “rebellion” or “danger of rebellion” — another of the conditions.

The state and city argue that federal officers have at times used force that appears to be “needless and arbitrary.”

“They have deployed tear gas and pepper balls on small numbers of nonviolent protesters outside of the ICE building repeatedly, in some cases without apparent need or provocation, and without first exhausting de-escalation or other less-aggressive options,” the plaintiffs wrote in a trial brief.

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Portland police have also been “gassed by federal law enforcement” and, on at least one occasion, hit with a crowd-control projectile, the brief said.

The Trump administration says the Portland Police Bureau has been unwilling to help control the protests, describing authorities in a trial brief as “unhelpful and at times hostile.”

“The record is replete with evidence of the PPB failing to provide assistance when federal officials have requested it,” Justice Department attorneys wrote.

The police say they have made arrests when crimes have been committed, but that they also must respect protesters’ First Amendment rights.

Communication between local and federal authorities worsened as federal agents surged to the building “without a clear command and control structure,” the state and city said.

“To list just one illustrative example, at one point pepper balls were shot in the direction of a PPB officer,” the trial brief said. “When confronted, federal officials responded, ‘help or get out of the way.’”

In Chicago, police officers have similarly been exposed to tear gas deployed by federal officials against protesters.

The Portland trial is expected to last three days.

Johnson reported from Seattle.

This month, President Donald Trump released new federal guidance encouraging private employers to include fertility treatments in their insurance coverage and announcing an agreement to reduce the cost of some IVF-associated drugs.

For those dealing with the disheartening struggles of infertility, this is good news. Republican Sen. Katie Britt said it was the “most pro-IVF thing that any president in the history of the United States of America has done.”

But from a regulatory perspective, it’s more gas in a car without a steering wheel. We barely have regulations on the books about IVF. Yet IVF is the opening gate for a new world of reproductive technologies, ethical quagmires and designer babies.

It is already standard practice at American fertility clinics, for example, to screen embryos for gender and disease. But new Silicon Valley companies such as Orchid are taking it one step further, quite literally scraping off genetic material from embryos to allow for a full gamut of embryo comparisons, including disease probabilities but also things like BMI, depression risk, hair color and more.

Ethical quagmire aside: Who wouldn’t want to implant the healthiest, strongest, happiest embryos? It’s the ultimate MAHA move; improving the health of your child before they are even in the womb.

Investors also see the appeal. More than $1 billion has been poured into fertility start-ups in the last decade, according to the New York Times.

But this, too, is only the beginning. Soon it may not only be selecting the healthiest embryos to implant, but altering them — and thus all future generations. Already, scientists are able to go into the genome itself to alter disease-carrying genes. This year, a Pennsylvania baby was the first human patient ever to undergo gene editing therapy to treat a life-threatening genetic disorder. Nothing short of miraculous.

Scientists are on the brink of even preventing some diseases — not just treating them — at the sperm, egg and early embryo stage, with technology called germline editing. The catch is that this procedure permanently genetically modifies the person and all of their future offspring: the generational consequences of which remain unknown. China’s already waded into this murky water.

It’s the sci-fi of tomorrow. Forget the rich paying off Ivy League schools to let their children in; we’re not so far away from designing embryos who can get in on their own (engineered) genius.

Which raises all sorts of questions, some of which were on display in a recent Free Press debate, “Is designing babies unethical or a moral imperative?” Observing it, I was struck by how unwittingly the debate still hinged around President Bill Clinton’s abortion framework from 30 years ago: safe, legal and rare. (And what a time we’ve had holding onto something as seemingly simple as that.)

Safe, because when we think about “designer babies” we tend to think of eliminating disease and negative health outcomes. But in the debate, Lydia S. Dugdale, a physician and ethicist at Columbia University, emphasized the complexity of the human genome. She questioned whether germline editing will ever be completely safe given the endless potential interactions and unseen consequences of toggling inheritable genes — not to mention the “safety” of the unchosen embryos left indefinitely on ice.

Legal, because we don’t have the best track record when it comes to regulating reproductive technologies. It’s mostly been a free-for-all for IVF. The regulatory landscape for abortion is one of extremes that don’t reflect public opinion, which tends to be pro-choice during the first trimester with a sharp drop-off after.

But “rare” seems to be the public sticking point around the morality of reproductive technologies. Polling from Pew Research confirms a general public wariness of using any new technologies to create “superhumans.” For example, only 5% of Americans support their use for making a baby more physically attractive. There’s more openness to germline editing if it’s therapeutic, medicinal in the traditional sense; but even then, public opinion is closely divided (30% for, 30% against) with the largest category of people being “unsure” (40%). Most (84%) believe that germline editing will end up being used in morally questionable ways, even if it’s used in good ways too.

This quandary was on full display in the aforementioned debate. Allyson Berent, a veterinarian and chief science officer at the Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics (FAST), spoke of her daughter born with Angelman syndrome, a devastating diagnosis for which there is no cure. The disease is caused by a single gene, which if altered would fully eliminate the disease.

Her debaters warned of a slippery slope. How the same technology used for seemingly clear-cut, medicinal reasons for very specific outlier diseases could also be used to select desirable traits. But the audience, in the end, shifted in Dr. Berent’s direction, with 35% believing that designer babies are not only ethical, but a moral imperative.

We are people with bleeding human hearts. When it comes to reproductive technologies, in a culture that celebrates freedom and self-actualization while increasingly eschewing ancient moral restraints, sympathy-inducing individual stories have a way of making regulatory lines seem arbitrary, or even cruel.

But I can’t help but think that holding some type of line still matters. The obvious one is allowing a little bit of scientific tampering for therapeutic, but not cosmetic, reasons. Yet we’ve already moved past this in IVF (by letting parents choose the baby’s sex). The therapeutic line will always be an ambiguous one, as we’ve seen with the furious debate over medical exceptions to abortion bans.

No wonder many people are simply unsure of what to think about the gene editing technologies on our doorstep, whether it’s a good idea or bad idea for society to have this power.

Which means that we’re likely to keep barreling ahead with the democratization of new technologies and the opportunities that they create. The hard ethical questions will wait on ice — maybe indefinitely.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute. She wrote this column for Bloomberg Opinion.

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