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Judge orders psychiatric exam for pilot
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LUBBOCK, Texas — A federal judge on Wednesday ordered a psychiatric exam for the JetBlue Airways captain from Richmond Hill accused of interfering with a flight crew when he disrupted a Las Vegas-bound flight after he left the cockpit and screamed about religion and terrorists
The order U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson in Amarillo signed will send Clayton Osbon to a medical facility for federal prisoners for tests to determine if he was legally sane when passengers wrestled him to the floor after witnesses said he ran through the cabin yelling about Jesus and al-Qaida.
The exam also will determine if he’s competent to stand trial.
The prosecution’s motion filed Wednesday comes the day Osbon’s attorney asked another judge to reschedule a Thursday detention hearing. That judge set the hearing for Monday.
The motion seeking the psych exam states that events enumerated in an FBI affidavit “establish a likelihood that Osbon may be suffering from a mental disease or defect.”
In a motion filed earlier this week, prosecutor Christy Drake asked that bond be denied to Osbon to assure the “safety of any other person and the community,” according to court documents.
Osbon, 49, is alleged to have committed a “crime of violence” and should remain in custody until his trial, documents say.
Osbon was taken to a hospital for a mental evaluation March 27 after the plane he
was piloting made an emergency landing in Amarillo. Passengers had restrained him with seat-belt extenders and zip-tie handcuffs for about 20 minutes until the plane landed.
A call to Osbon’s attorney, Dean Roper, was not immediately returned. Drake declined to comment.
Under federal law, a conviction for interfering with a flight crew can bring up to 20 years in prison. The offense is defined as assaulting or intimidating the crew, interfering with its duties or diminishes its ability to do operate the plane.
Investigators say Osbon told his co-pilot “things just don’t matter” and incoherently rambled about religion shortly after the flight departed from New York. His behavior became more erratic as the flight wore on, prosecutors say, and ended with a tense struggle in the cabin after Osbon abruptly left the cockpit.
Passengers said the pilot seemed disoriented, jittery and constantly sipped water when he first marched through the cabin. Then, they said, he began to rant about threats linked to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan after crew members tried to calm him down in the back of the plane.
A flight attendant’s ribs were bruised while trying to restrain Osbon, but no one on board was seriously hurt.
A day after the incident, JetBlue suspended Osbon pending a review of the flight. Osbon was in the custody of U.S. marshals at the Randall County Jail on Wednesday.

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Book review: Author digs into mining's complicated past and present in 'River of Lost Souls'
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Jonathan Thompson will speak about his book "River of Lost Souls" at the King's English Bookshop on Tuesday, April 3 at 7 p.m. - photo by Amanda Olson
"RIVER OF LOST SOULS: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Spill," by Jonathan Thompson, Torrey House Press, 275 pages (nf)

Plenty has been written about the very small world of a mining town and the very broad reach of a beleaguered industry. From Loretta Lynns iconic song "Coal Miners Daughter," to the 2010 nail-biting coverage of 33 trapped Chilean miners, to the hit Broadway musicals "Paint Your Wagon" and "Billy Elliot," mining is a global story, and its one of heartbreak, hard work and hard times.

Jonathan Thompsons "River of Lost Souls" examines the many facets of risk involved in taking resources from below the earths surface. An environmental journalist, Thompson has reported on southwest Colorado for over 20 years. This book is special, however, because the Four Corners area of Colorado is his current and ancestral home. Thompson is writing about minings ecological, social, financial and political impact on his land, his landscape, his water, his people. That makes "River of Lost Souls" more than a regular reporting job.

Thompson begins with the Gold King Mine wastewater disaster of 2015, which the EPA caused while attempting to drain water near the mines entrance. The spill sent 3 million gallons of waste and tailings into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River and part of the San Juan River watershed which drains into the Colorado, affecting the Utah, Colorado and New Mexico parts of that watershed as well as the Navajo Nation.

From there, Thompson jumps into far stretches of time to 1765, when a Spanish explorer named the Animas River; to 10,000 years earlier, when Paleo-Indians roamed the rivers valley; to the meridian of time, when the ancestors of the Zuni, Hopi and Rio Grande Pueblo people inhabited the land for 500 years; to the mid-1800s and the Swedes who came to Silverton, Colorado, to mine.

Its a grand scope, but telling any story of landscape is telling a very grand story.

It also makes a complex story difficult to follow. Thompsons time warps are important, but they are jarring. His time jumps need clear dates, and Thompson doesnt always make them available. A map would also be useful. Thompsons writing is good, but his sentences can be dense and require readers to do their own mining for the riches the writing embeds. The work is worthwhile, however, as there are many moving parts in any story about mines land, culture, policy, history, money, inevitable disaster and Thompson works to examine all of them.

"River of Lost Souls" is a thoughtful read, but not a quick one. Because Thompsons writings come from 20 years of his newspaper reports, the overall feeling can be disjointed and sparse, which is distracting if one is expecting to follow a tenable thread. This is not a typical narrative with a cast of characters and a traditional story arc. Readers should approach this text as the investigation it is: puzzle pieces of a larger-than-life story that is eons old. If you are the kind of reader who wants it laid out cleanly, this is not that book. But, to Thompsons point, nothing is clean about mining that has never been the case.

Thompsons best writing is in his descriptions of people and places. His telling of how he came to Silverton is familiar and engaging. If readers approach the book with care and attention, they will be rewarded with savoring these descriptive passages when they happen.
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