The Iron Rock’s journey from the depths of space ended with a thud in a dense pine forest about an hour north of Stockholm, around 10 o’clock on a November night four years ago.

In an unusual move, its trajectory was recorded on several cameras in the region used to track meteoroids. That led to a weeks-long hunt and an even longer trial over an unusual question: who owns an unearthly object that falls to Earth?

The lawsuit took a new twist Thursday when an appeals court ruled in favor of the landowner, overturning a decision that had sided with the two men who recovered the meteorite.

Days after the rock landed, Anders Zetterqvist, a geologist, found the spot where it first hit the ground. After several weeks of searching, his friend, Andreas Forsberg, a fellow geologist, found the 30-pound piece sticking out of the moss where it had rebounded, about 70 yards away.

“For me it was the find of a lifetime,” he says. “It was so spectacular. And to know that it was only a few weeks old.

Most meteoroids that reach Earth’s atmosphere burn up upon entry, leaving only a trail of light, called a meteor, in the sky. So-called fresh-fall meteorites are compared to old meteorites found in the ground. The meteorite north of Stockholm, made of iron, was the tenth meteorite found in Sweden and one of the few iron meteorites found in the world, Mr Forsberg said.

After a few weeks, the men took the stone to the Swedish Museum of Natural History, where it has been kept since 2020.

“We were afraid that hundreds of people from all over the world would show up looking for more,” Mr. Forsberg added. “Better and bigger pieces could leave the country before we knew it.”

Dan Holtstam, a senior researcher in the museum’s geosciences department, said, “It’s a textbook example of an iron meteorite.”

“Falls of iron meteorites are rare worldwide – this is the only observed fall of an iron meteorite in Sweden,” added Dr. Holtstam added. “In almost forty years in geosciences, it was the first time I had gotten my hands on a freshly fallen meteorite.”

In addition to their scientific value, meteorites are prized by collectors. On the global private collector market, such a person could fetch tens of thousands of dollars, said Dr. Holtstam.

About a week after the geologists made their find public, the owner of the property where the meteorite was found, Johan Benzelstierna von Engestrom, sent a letter to the museum claiming ownership.

The legal battle ensued.

Laws governing ownership of found meteorites vary from country to country. There are none in Sweden. In France and Morocco, by contrast, “the first person who gets their hands on it owns it,” said Dr. Holtstam. In Denmark they are owned by the state. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management outlines rules for meteorites that have fallen on public lands.

In December 2022, the The Uppsala court ruled in favor of the geologists, where the meteorite is considered movable property. “A newly fallen meteorite is not part of the terrain on which it landed,” the judge wrote in a statement.

Mr. Benzelstierna von Engestrom appealed. Thursday is the The appeal court in Stockholm ruled in favor of the landowner.

Judge Robert Green, one of four judges on the case, said the appeal court ruling concerned two questions: whether meteorites can be considered “real property” and the extent of a Swedish customary law known as “Allmansrätten”, which provides the right of public access.

The laws governing real estate – houses and land – are clear, the judge said.

“The premise with real estate is that the landowner has a right to it,” he said in an interview Friday. “But we don’t have a specific law regarding meteorites, which made this case special.”

Everyone’s rats gives everyone in Sweden the right to move in nature, including walking, cycling or camping, even on private property.

“That includes the right to take berries and even small stones from other people’s property,” Judge Green said.

Although the plaintiffs argued that the right to pick up small things could also include amber and more valuable objects, the judges ruled that because the meteorite was not made of materials foreign to the Earth, it should be considered part of the Earth . . So they decided it was real estate.

One judge disagreed, stating that while the meteorite should be considered real property, in this case common law also applied, and should be interpreted to include the right to remove a meteorite from private property to get.

“Allemansratt has far-reaching consequences for everyone, so it was interesting and important for us to try this,” Judge Green said.

The landowner, Mr. Benzelstierna von Engestrom, praised the ruling, saying in an interview: “I want to retain ownership of it, but give it on permanent loan to a Swedish museum.”

He did not specify which museum, but said he wanted the public to benefit from it.

The geologists have not yet decided whether to appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court.

Mr Forsberg said they were disappointed by the appeal decision.

“It’s very sad for me and my friend,” he said. “I have been passionate about collecting rocks and fossils all my life.” He added: “It’s sad for all the enthusiasts interested in finding new meteorites. If people think they won’t get a reward, how are we going to get people to search?”

The owner of Grimaldi’s Pizzeria and the manager of the Manhattan branch were arrested Thursday and charged with stealing more than $20,000 in wages from at least seven employees.

Over the course of at least four years, the owner, Anthony Piscina, 63, and the manager, Frank Santora, 71, lied to and exploited pizza makers, salad preparers, busboys and dishwashers, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg. said at a news conference.

According to court documents, the seven workers each owe between $500 and $8,000.

“What may seem like a relatively small dollar amount to some can have life-changing consequences when someone earns minimum wage,” Mr. Bragg said.

Both men pleaded not guilty to one felony count of fraud and seven misdemeanor counts of wage theft. They were released without bail after their arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court Thursday afternoon.

Gerard Marrone, a lawyer representing both Mr Piscina and Mr Santora, said the men were “blindsided” by the allegations and were not fully aware of the charges against them until hours after their arrest.

“It could be a misunderstanding between my customers and their employees. My customers run multiple locations of Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, but they probably don’t even know it,” said Mr. Marrone. “They have a payroll department that does the work for them, so they were completely unaware of that.”

Defrauded employees, almost all of whom were native Spanish speakers, sent numerous text messages to Mr. Piscina and Mr. Santora begging to be paid, court documents show.

“Please, I have an emergency, my grandmother passed away. I need my money please,” one text read, according to court documents.

“I definitely need money to pay my rent, please,” another message read.

But between August 2017 and August 2023, Mr. Piscina and Mr. Santora gave workers paychecks that later bounced, offered them less than minimum wage and in some cases did not pay them in full, Mr. Bragg said. In some cases, the men persuaded employees to continue working by sending them partial payments through the app Zelle and making arrangements with employees to pay owed wages, but then never showed up, prosecutors said.

One busboy was promised a rate of $10 an hour – well below that New York City’s minimum wage $15 an hour at the time, but was never paid and still owed about $8,000, prosecutors said.

After a former employee said he planned to hire a lawyer, Mr. Piscina boasted, “I have three complaints about me. The state is not going to do anything,” according to court documents. Prosecutors said Mr. Piscina told the same employee, who is Mexican, that he could not wear a hat with the American flag.

Grimaldi’s, which serves coal-fired pizza, first opened in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. The family business now has more than 40 branches throughout the country, according to the restaurant’s website.

Mr. Piscina and Mr. Santora appeared stunned at their arraignment Thursday afternoon.

“Oh my God, this is bizarre,” Mr. Piscina said as he walked out of the courtroom.

Their lawyer, Mr. Marrone, said Mr. Piscina and Mr. Santora were “good guys” who would be willing to pay workers the wages they are owed.

During the press conference on Thursday, Mr Bragg said many cases of wage theft go unreported.

“In these cases there is a power asymmetry. There is an understandable reluctance among many people to come forward,” he said. “It is devastatingly unfair to workers and others in the fair open market who play by the rules.”

Wage theft is a widespread problem, but low-wage workers who are undocumented or do not speak English as their native language are particularly vulnerable, said Tito Sinha, an attorney who leads the workers’ rights team at the nonprofit TakeRoot Justice.

“They are more likely to take work that is below the minimum wage, otherwise they may not know what the laws are,” Mr Sinha said.

Andrew Crispo, a once high-flying Manhattan art gallery owner who was brought down by a long string of tabloid-worthy scandals, including tax evasion, extortion and involvement in the gruesome murder of a Norwegian art student in 1985, died on February 8 in Brooklyn. He was 78.

His lawyer, J. Benjamin Greene, said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, had not been determined but that it came after a decline in Mr. Crispo’s health, including the discovery of an inoperable brain tumor. Mr. Crispo left no immediate survivors, and word of his death only recently emerged.

Mr. Crispo opened his eponymous gallery on the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street in 1973, and for the rest of the decade he was among New York City’s best-known art dealers. Although he had no formal art training, he was widely respected for his discerning eye, with which he identified promising young painters.

“He could have been another Larry Gagosian today,” said Edward Ligare, an artist who represented Mr. Crispo in the 1970s, referring to the Manhattan megagallery owner. “He had such an enthusiasm for art and such good connections.”

Mr. Crispo eventually expanded his gallery to a second floor, with the interior decorated by his romantic partner, noted designer Arthur E. Smith. He owned an art-filled estate in Southampton, New York, and at one point had about $50 million in the bank.

Things were less rosy behind the scenes. His employees accused him of not paying bills and maintaining two price lists, one for artists and a higher one for customers, with Mr. Crispo pocketing the difference.

“It was a horror show,” Patricia Hamilton, who worked for him in the mid-1970s, said in a telephone interview. “I was convinced Andrew would never make it to next month.”

He developed a cocaine addiction and held after-hours sex parties at his gallery and in a nearby apartment. His carnal tastes tended toward the sadomasochistic, and he spent long nights in leather bars such as the Hellfire Club, in the meatpacking district of Manhattan.

On the night of February 22, 1985, he and an associate, Bernard LeGeros, met a 26-year-old model and student from Norway named Eigil Dag Vesti. They left the club and headed north to an estate in Rockland County, N.Y., owned by Mr. LeGeros’s parents.

What happened over the next few hours is unclear; all three men used drugs. But in the early hours of February 23, Mr Legeros shot Mr Vesti twice in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle. Mr. Vesti was naked except for handcuffs on his wrists and a zippered leather hood over his head.

Three weeks later, a group of hikers found Mr. Vesti’s body in an abandoned smokehouse near the LeGeros home. Forest animals had eaten away most of his flesh, except around his head, which was protected by the mask.

Mr. LeGeros was arrested on March 27. The case became a tabloid sensation; the news media dubbed it the Death Mask Murder. Mr. Crispo denied his involvement in the murder, and police never charged him. He also never testified, despite Mr. LeGeros’s insistence that Mr. Crispo had ordered him to kill Mr. Vesti, and despite the discovery of the murder weapon in his gallery.

“I’m honestly not shocked, but one of the most utterly ugly things to ever happen in the art world was Andrew Crispo being released without charge for the murder of Eigil Dag Vesti,” wrote Gary Indiana. told Interview magazine in 2020.

Two months after Vesti’s murder, Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros were indicted in another case, accused of the 1984 kidnapping and torture of a 26-year-old bartender named Mark Leslie. The case was not heard until 1988. Mr. LeGeros pleaded guilty, but Mr. Crispo was acquitted after convincing the jury that the activity he participated in was consensual.

Once again, some people believed that Mr. Crispo had gotten away with a crime — after the trial, Joel Seidemann, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, called him “a master manipulator who deals in art by day and tortures by night.”

While that trial continued, Mr. Crispo was accused of evading tax payments of $4 million on $10 million in income. He pleaded guilty and in 1986 began a five-year prison sentence, three of which he served. The Internal Revenue Service seized his art collection and auctioned off pieces of it for several million dollars to recoup his tax liabilities.

Mr. Crispo was released from prison in 1989. Just days after his release, his home in Southampton was destroyed in an explosion, along with the art inside. He sued the Long Island Lighting Company, claiming they had installed a gas line too close to the house. A jury awarded him $8.6 million in 1991.

With some of that money he bought one $2 million house in Charleston, S.C., where he said he planned to start a new business. But he soon had financial problems and, after going bankrupt in 1996, was forced to sell the house.

By then, however, he had managed to reclaim the remaining art that had been seized by the IRS. He sold pieces of it, raising $14 million, which he put into his comeback, an art space he said would be “the largest sculpture gallery in the world.” the world,” located in the meatpacking district.

“I really think I’m on my way to great success,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “and I don’t think I’m going to let anyone be disappointed.”

The gallery would open its doors in mid-1999. But in May he was arrested again, this time for threatening to kidnap the four-year-old daughter of a lawyer involved in his bankruptcy case.

Mr. Crispo had become enraged after the law firm, which managed the money during his bankruptcy proceedings, delayed sending him a $2,000 check. He told the lawyer that he had photos of her daughter at a playground, knew where she lived and that he would kidnap the child if the check did not arrive soon.

The magistrate judge, Michael H. Dolinger, refused to release Mr. Crispo on bail.

“The defendant has certainly had a checkered history to date,” Judge Dolinger said, “and there is ample threat of irrational behavior.”

Mr. Crispo was convicted and in 2000 he was sentenced to seven years in prison. He left in 2005.

Andrew John Crispo was born on April 21, 1945 in Philadelphia. He never knew his parents, who placed him in an orphanage shortly after his birth.

By his late teens, he spent most of his time on the streets of downtown Philadelphia, working as a prostitute around Rittenhouse Square.

By the early 1960s he had attached himself to a particular client, Henry McIlhenny, a wealthy art patron and chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to David France, in his book “Bag of Toys: Sex, Scandal, and the Death Mask Murder” (1992), Mr. McIlhenny tutored Mr. Crispo in art, which helped him find a suitable student.

Convinced that art was his future, Mr. Crispo moved to New York City in 1964. He worked as an art runner, a kind of flipper who bought an undervalued piece from one gallery and immediately sold it to another for a profit. The work required charm, financial shrewdness and a keen eye for art, all of which Mr. Crispo possessed.

In 1967 he found a job at the ACA Gallery, a bastion of New York’s contemporary art scene. It soon became apparent that he had a better eye and sharper business sense than many of the trained older gallerists on staff, and by 1970 he was working with his own roster of artists.

He opened the Andrew Crispo Gallery after securing financing from a client, and he made an immediate impact. In the early 1970s, he organized a series of blockbuster exhibitions, with glittering openings that attracted celebrities such as Liza Minnelli and Leonard Bernstein.

While his reputation among collectors and artists grew, his standing among other gallerists was mixed. He was known to play loosely with rules about provenance and to delay paying insurance or shipping costs, if he paid them at all.

He was often involved in legal battles and was represented at least once by the lawyer Roy Cohn, involving a wealthy Romanian art collector over a Constantin Brancusi sculpture. Mr. Crispo won that fight and, after another complicated lawsuit with the Guggenheim Museum over the same piece, received a $2 million payment.

As the New York gallery scene moved downtown from the Upper East Side, Mr. Crispo found himself left behind — though he retained a few ultra-wealthy clients, including the Swiss industrialist Hans Heinrich Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. He closed his gallery in 1986, around the time he went to prison.

Mr. Crispo’s partner, Arthur Smith, died in 1997. Mr. Crispo lived in Mr. Smith’s apartment in Manhattan, but Mr. Smith’s family forced him to move out after the death.

After getting out of prison for the second time in 2005, Mr. Crispo bought a co-op apartment and two ground-floor spaces in a residential tower in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the intention of opening another gallery.

But his plans never came to fruition and in 2017 he was faced with bankruptcy again. He took out a series of loans from a real estate company, using his cooperative shares and some of his artwork as collateral. When he defaulted on the loans, the real estate company took over the shares.

Mr. Crispo refused to leave the apartment and set up a series of legal roadblocks to delay the eviction. At the same time he became erratic; he continued to use drugs and throw sex parties in his apartment, and was seen naked and defecating in the hallway at least once.

The real estate company ultimately filed an eviction notice on March 17, 2020, just as the pandemic broke out and not long before New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo imposed an eviction moratorium.

By the time the moratorium was lifted in 2022, Mr. Crispo’s health had deteriorated significantly. According to medical records he submitted to the court, he suffered from high blood pressure, heart disease and depression, among other conditions, and used his condition to further delay the deportation.

In September, a judge ordered the deportation to proceed, a decision Mr. Crispo appealed the next day. At the time of his death the appeal was still pending.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the wildly popular video app or face it being banned in the United States. The move escalates a standoff between Beijing and Washington over control of technologies that could affect national security, freedom of expression and the social media industry.

Republican leaders quickly moved the bill through the House of Representatives with limited debate, passing it on a 352-65 vote, reflecting broad support for legislation that would directly target China in an election year.

The action came despite TikTok’s efforts to mobilize its 170 million U.S. users against the measure, and despite pressure from the Biden administration to convince lawmakers that Chinese ownership of the platform poses serious national security risks to the United States brings.

The result was a bipartisan coalition behind the measure, including Republicans, who defied former President Donald J. Trump by supporting it, and Democrats, who also backed a bill that President Biden said he would sign.

The bill faces a difficult path to passage in the Senate, where Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been noncommittal about bringing it to a vote and where some lawmakers have vowed to fight it.

TikTok has been under threat since 2020, with lawmakers increasingly claiming that Beijing’s relationship with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, poses national security risks. The bill aims to let ByteDance sell TikTok to non-Chinese owners within six months. The president would sign the sale if it would solve national security problems. If those sales didn’t happen, the app would be banned.

Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who is among the lawmakers leading the bill, said before the floor vote that it “forces TikTok to break up with the Chinese Communist Party.”

“This is a common sense measure to protect our national security,” he said.

If the bill were to become law, it would likely deepen a cold war between the United States and China over control of key technologies.

On Wednesday, before the vote in the House of Representatives, Beijing condemned pressure from US lawmakers and rejected that TikTok was a danger to the United States. At a daily press conference, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, accused Washington of “resorting to hegemonic moves when it cannot succeed in fair competition.”

Mr. Biden has announced restrictions on how U.S. financial firms can invest in Chinese companies and has restricted the sale of Americans’ sensitive data, such as location and health information, to data brokers that could sell it to China. Platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are blocked in China and Beijing said last year it would oppose the sale of TikTok.

TikTok has said it has gone to great lengths to protect U.S. user data and provide third-party oversight of the platform, and that no government can influence the company’s recommendation model. It has also said there is no evidence that Beijing used TikTok to obtain US user data or influence Americans’ views, two of the claims lawmakers have made.

TikTok urged users last week to call their representatives to protest the bill, in an unusually aggressive move for a tech company. They said: “This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban on TikTok in the United States.”

TikTok has spent more than $1 billion on an elaborate scheme known as Project Texas, which aims to process sensitive U.S. user data separately from the rest of the company’s operations. That plan has been under review for several years by a panel known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

Two of the lawmakers behind the bill, Mr. Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat, said last week that lawmakers acted because CFIUS “has not solved the problem.”

Some experts said that if the bill were to become law, it would likely face First Amendment scrutiny in courts.

“The legal issues will require the production of factual evidence, and that evidence will be weighed against free speech concerns,” said Matt Perault, director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is funding has received. from technology companies, including TikTok and Meta.

He added: “That process looks very different from stamping out things in the political process and op-eds.”

There’s also a chance that even if the bill were to clear Congress, be signed into law, and survive the lawsuits, it could crumble under a new administration. Mr. Trump, who tried to ban TikTok or force its sale in 2020, publicly reversed his position on the app in the past week. In a television appearance on Monday, he said the app was a threat to national security. But he said banning Facebook, a platform he criticized, would help.

“There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without TikTok,” he said.

The Trump administration threatened to remove TikTok from US app stores if ByteDance did not sell its stake in the app. ByteDance even appeared willing to sell a stake in the app to Walmart and Oracle, where executives were close to Mr. Trump.

That plan backfired in federal court. Multiple judges have prevented Trump’s proposed ban from taking effect.

Mr. Biden’s administration has tried to find a legislative solution. The White House provided “technical assistance” to Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamoorthi as they wrote their bill, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing last week. When the bill was introduced, a spokesperson for the National Security Council quickly called the legislation “an important and welcome step to address the threat of technology that compromises Americans’ sensitive data.”

The administration has repeatedly sent national security officials to Capitol Hill to privately defend the legislation and issue dire warnings about the risks of TikTok’s current ownership. The White House briefed lawmakers before the committee’s 50-0 vote last week sending the bill to the full House.

On Tuesday, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department spoke to lawmakers in a classified briefing about national security concerns related to TikTok.

Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Krishnamoorthi had previously sponsored a bill to ban TikTok. The latest bill was seen as something of a last stand against the corporation for Mr. Gallagher, who recently said he would not run for a fifth term because “the framers intended for citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then would return to their private lives. lives.”