The Hamptons International Film Festival announced Monday morning the winning films in its competition categories, among other prizes.

"All Good" by Eva Trobisch won the best narrative feature award. Alexis Bloom's "Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes" won for best documentary. Both examined themes and stories related to the #MeToo movement. 

Geralyn Dreyfous, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Linus Sandgren were the jurors for the narrative feature award, which comes with a $3,000 cash prize and goods and services valued at $100,000. Rory Kennedy, Jamie Patricof, and Alissa Wilkinson made up the documentary feature jury. That prize is also $3,000, with goods and services valued at $30,000.

"Fence," directed by Lendita Zeqiraj, won for best narrative short film, and "Guaxuma," directed by Nara Normande, took best documentary short. Each received a $500 cash prize and will now qualify for Academy Award consideration.

Other awards included a special jury prize for Eva Melander and Eero Milonoff, the actors in "Border," which has been selected as Sweden's entry for best foreign film at the Academy Awards.

Isold Uggadottir's "And Breathe Normally" won the 2018 Brizzolara Family Foundation Award for a Film of Conflict and Resolution, accompanied by a $5,000 cash prize.

The $3,000 Vimeo Staff Pick award went to "Cross My Heart," a short by Sontenish Myers.

Suffolk County awarded its $3,000 Next Exposure Grant to "Only the Wind Is Listening," a narrative short directed by Emily Anderson and filmed in Montauk.

"The Cat Rescuers," directed by Rob Fruchtman and Steven Lawrence, won the $2,500 Zelda Penzel Giving Voice to the Voiceless Award, which recognizes films that address contemporary social issues, such as ethical treatment of animals and environmental protection.

The Victor Rabinowitz and Joanne Grant Award for Social Justice went to "The Silence of Others," directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. The $1,500 prize goes to films that demonstrate "the values of peace, equality, global justice, and civil liberties." It is named after a prominent civil rights lawyer and his wife, an author, filmmaker, and journalist. 

Anne Chaisson, the executive director of HIFF, presented Terry Lawler, the outgoing executive director of New York Women in Film and Television, with the first Industry Advocate for Women Award.

The audience award will be announced tomorrow, after the screened movie ballots are counted. Previously announced award winners included Alan Alda, who won the Dick Cavett Artistic Champion Award, and the three breakthrough artists, Kayli Carter, Cory Michael Smith, and Amandla Stenberg.

Those who believe in a woman’s right to choose are amply concerned about the decades-long effort to erode and even obliterate that right. As the battle to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court intensified last week amid an accusation of sexual assault, the struggle reached a new level: Judge Kavanaugh’s statements to questioning senators were vague, and in the minds of abortion rights activists, evasive. Abortions rights in the United States, they fear, may hang in the balance. 

Planned Parenthood Federation of America provides a variety of reproductive health services, to women and men alike, at clinics across the country. Those services, however, have been limited in some regions by antichoice activists who seek to outlaw abortion and, in the meantime, make obtaining one as burdensome as possible. Some have resorted to violence to achieve that goal. 

One 16-year-old activist wants to help protect a woman’s right to choose, and with the help of some very talented and successful musicians and artists, her ambitious plan will come to fruition Friday night at 7, when Nona Hendryx, Vernon Reid and Friends, and the Zach Zunis Band perform at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. The concert, and an art auction, will benefit Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic’s programs and services on the East End. 

Rock for Our Rights in the Hamptons is the brainchild of Bronte Zunis of the South Fork. “It just came about that I really wanted to do something for people who didn’t have money for the health care they deserve, especially in this time,” she said last week. “Our rights as people, as women, are being ripped away from us. We haven’t even gotten to equality. That was a big thing, it really struck me as something important that I could do for the community.”

Bronte works as an intern for the photographer Michael Halsband, and took note of a button he was wearing that displayed the Planned Parenthood logo. “He very nicely introduced me to the director of development,” Jenifer Van Deinse, “to get this whole event started.” 

“This event is really vital for us for a number of reasons,” Ms. Van Deinse said, “not only with the constant assaults on funding and the threats we receive. We provide a vital service to individuals, particularly on the East End where their options are somewhat limited.” The nearest Planned Parenthood clinic is in Riverhead. 

“We provide their care no matter what, regardless of whether they have insurance or can pay for the services provided,” she said. “We’re there for them.”

A family friend connected Bronte and her father, Zach Zunis, who works at The Star, with Danny Kapilian, a music and live event producer. “He came up with a couple of names that we thought would be perfect” for the concert, Bronte said. The Grammy-nominated Ms. Hendryx may be best known as a member of the trio Labelle, of “Lady Marmalade” fame. Mr. Reid won two Grammy Awards as a founding member of Living Colour and has enjoyed a long career as a solo artist and producer. Mr. Zunis is a guitarist who has played with blues artists including William Clarke, Billy Boy Arnold, Janiva Magness, and the Red Devils. 

Bronte is producing the event. Mr. Kapilian is the evening’s music producer, and Nitchie Zunis, Bronte’s mother, is serving as event coordinator. 

Tickets for Rock for Our Rights in the Hamptons are $30 and $75 and are available at baystreet.org. Guests bearing the $75 ticket have been invited to a private pre-concert cocktail reception and art auction at Tutto Il Giorno restaurant, also in Sag Harbor, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Curated by Pamela Willoughby, the auction features works by more than 20 artists including Eric Fishl, Steve Miller, April Gornik, and Dalton Portella, which will be available for bid there and at Paddle8.

Bronte is among the groundswell of activist youth asserting their rights, be it to the availability of health care, reproductive freedom, or safety from gun violence. The midterm elections are less than six weeks away, and their outcome, and the future composition of the Supreme Court, will in large part determine the country these young people will inherit. 

“It’s hard,” she said, “but it’s really important to be optimistic while also being realistic in the way you go about it, to have an understanding of how much this will affect people’s lives. Lives will be lost without health care, period.”

Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy D. Sini took a hard line with restaurant owners at a press conference last week after a major drug bust in Montauk. 

On one hand, he said there was no evidence that restaurant owners were involved in the racket, but, he added, “what is clear is that there is a culture of complacency among the commercial establishments in this area. There is an infrastructure put in place to facilitate this criminal activity.” 

On a video screen, he displayed photographs of five restaurants: Swallow East, 668 the Gig Shack, Shagwong Tavern, Liar’s Saloon, and O’Murphy’s Pub and Restaurant. Photos of some of the restaurants immediately appeared on websites of Newsday and The New York Post.

“We are seriously concerned that the businesses knew, or at least that some of the businesses knew, exactly what was going on, and that maybe there was a business incentive to allow this to go on. If you can get a steak dinner, a glass of wine, and a bag of coke, maybe you can attract more people than if you are just handing out hot dogs and hamburgers,” Mr. Sini said.

While he said he was not suggesting the owners had committed a crime, he made it clear that his office would get to the bottom of whether the businesses were complicit. “We want to send a very clear message: We will not allow greed to ruin our communities in Suffolk County,” he said.

At least two restaurateurs have since denied having any knowledge of what has been alleged and took exception that their businesses were called out.

Janice Kordasz, who has owned O’Murphy’s for 14 years with her husband, Chester Kordasz, said they were shocked when they heard one of their employees was arrested and that the D.A. had mentioned their business.  

“We did have someone who worked at the restaurant, who worked in the kitchen, who was arrested,” Ms. Kordasz said by phone this week of Elvin Silva-Ruiz, who is being held without bail on a high-level drug charge and is expected to be indicted this week. “We work very hard and so does our other staff,” she said. “We had no involvement, never did, never would, and there wasn’t any soliciting of drugs in our establishment,” she added, calling O’Murphy’s a family restaurant. 

She and her husband found out that Pito, as she called him, was arrested in Queens as part of a large drug bust. This was his first summer at O’Murphy’s; he lived at the former Zorba’s Inn in Montauk, in housing he paid for himself, she said. 

“Whatever he did, he did outside of work. He never went to the back door. He never had visitors at the back door. He never talked to anyone about any drugs. We’re not fools. We’re always in our kitchen,” Ms. Kordasz said. 

She was surprised by the D.A.’s stance last Thursday. “My husband and I are in our 70s,” she said. “I was totally shocked. We have nothing to do with this. I’m not surprised of all the drugs — you do hear there are drugs out here — I’m just surprised the D.A. started blaming us,” she said. 

Lawrence Kelly, an attorney who said he was retained by the owners of Shagwong, was present at the press conference last Thursday, and asked if any of the defendants had criminal records. If they did, he asserted, employers could have considered that when deciding whether or not to hire them. 

Mr. Sini acknowledged that they had no significant criminal histories and all were in the country legally. Puerto Rico, where many live for the rest of the year, is a United States territory.

When Mr. Kelly asked Mr. Sini to identify any of the individuals who had worked at Shagwong, he demurred. None of the men arraigned in East Hampton Town Justice Court last Thursday afternoon acknowledged working at his client’s establishment. 

“It was only after my questions at the press conference that an individual employee from Shagwong’s was arrested later that afternoon,” Mr. Kelly said, referring to the arrest of John Doherty Valentin, who was charged with seven counts of criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree, a felony. 

“This arrest of a Shagwong’s employee appeared to be, literally, an afterthought on that afternoon,” he said. 

Mr. Kelly said that Shagwong has an extensive security video system in place and tight security. “Screening for underage customers, limiting service to anyone possibly over-imbibing, limiting roughhousing, which could lead to injury, these are the anticipated risks security is employed to handle on a daily basis,” Mr. Kelly said. 

“We are willing to have discussions and review the videos from the time period of the government investigation with any investigators in a cooperative effort to learn lessons on what the restaurant/tavern could do to enhance supervision of an individual employee,” Mr. Kelly said. “If anything, with the benefit of hindsight, what does the video record show about the employee’s interactions? Is there a basis for any inference that a private business has the capability to completely screen out employee misbehavior?” he asked. 

“Until then, any statements of a culture of complacency, with regard to the management of Shagwong’s specifically, seem unfortunate,” he said. 

Owners of Liars’ Saloon, the Gig Shack, and Swallow East could not be reached by press time.

Three days after a plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Amagansett, police are back in the water looking for two missing victims and parts of the aircraft. 

"With inclement weather forecast for later today, and winds already picking up, we are still launching at least one vessel this morning and will be working to coordinate mapping of the area off Indian Wells Beach in hopes of narrowing down the search field and placing markers," East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo said by email Tuesday morning. 

A Piper PA-31 Navajo carrying four people crashed at about 2:40 p.m. Saturday. Debris was found about a mile and a half off Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett. The four people on board were identified as Ben Krupinski, his wife, Bonnie Krupinski, their 22-year-old grandson, William Maerov, and the plane's pilot, Jon Dollard. Two bodies were found shortly after the crash, though police are waiting on word from the Suffolk County medical examiner's office to confirm their identities. 

The Coast Guard suspended its search Sunday afternoon as conditions worsened at sea. The police kept up a search along the shoreline, looking for any debris from the crash that may have washed ashore. 

"When the conditions are appropriate for divers and submersible sonar, we can optimize the resources available in the coming days," Chief Sarlo said. "A full operations plan for recovery has been developed which is both weather dependent as well as dependent on location and condition of what wreckage is found."

Chief Sarlo updated the East Hampton Town Board on the recovery efforts Tuesday afternoon, saying the department hopes to be able to recover the two missing bodies.

"Even though there aren’t high seas, it's very choppy conditions," he said, adding that the difficult conditions remained unsafe for divers. He hopes to drop physical markers to map out the area "so that when the conditions do break and we do have optimal conditions, we can maximize the use of time, shrink down the search area, and hopefully be able to pinpoint where the remaining wreckage is."

He again asked that commercial fishermen not drag or drop equipment in the area of the crash site.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc thanked those involved in the recovery effort. "Everyone involved deserves very high praise under what were very, very difficult circumstances. We are fortunate to live in a place that has so many dedicated volunteers and staff, " he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the plane crash. Terry Williams, a spokesman, said Monday afternoon that the N.T.S.B. is in the early stages of its investigation. A preliminary report will be issued in about a week, but it will not include information on the cause. "It will take approximately a year or more before the investigation is complete," Mr. Williams said.

With Reporting by Christopher Walsh

Dambite Morency, or Ted, as he is known, was 5 when he left Haiti with his mother and three siblings. In January, 13 years later, the Ross School senior returned for the first time as a member of Wings Over Haiti, the Sag Harbor nonprofit organization founded by Jonathan Glynn after the 2010 earthquake. The group is currently raising money to build its second school in the country, this time in a remote farming village with no access to education for its approximately 300 children.

For Ted, joining Wings Over Haiti offered the perfect opportunity to give back to his traumatized homeland. Four months after he officially joined the team, he became the largest fund-raiser within the organization, acquiring almost $20,000 through self-organized initiatives and by approaching potential benefactors. 

Then came the invitation to travel to Haiti with Mr. Glynn and other board members, such as Arthur Bijur and Magalie Theodore, a Haitian-American whose family has bequeathed the land on which the new school will be built. But with the invitation came a multitude of conflicting emotions for Ted.

“I had been living in a bubble,” he said, sitting in Sag Harbor one day last week after school. Besides his immediate family, who live in New Jersey, Ted said he had mostly lost touch with the Haitian community and felt estranged from his roots. “I knew going back there would mean finding out what it’s really like to be Haitian.”

Transplanted from Port-au-Prince to Ewing, N.J., a predominantly Polish immigrant community where his uncle and grandmother lived, he remembered crying on the way home from school every day because he spoke no English, only Creole. His mother worked as a chambermaid in various nearby hotels while putting herself through nursing school. For the last 10 years, she has worked as a nurse’s assistant at an elder care facility. Ted’s father has never been a part of his life.

He was in seventh grade when a representative from an education opportunity program called New Jersey SEEDS came to his school and spoke about the possibility of high-performing students getting placed in top-notch independent schools around the country, tuition free. He was told that the Ross School in East Hampton, an international day and boarding school, was offering scholarships to Haitian children. He applied, and joined the private school five years ago as a boarding student.

“Ross was my first trip out of New Jersey,” he said, laughing, an attempt to disguise the disconnect he felt about suddenly living in one of the most affluent areas in America and being surrounded by children from families with seemingly endless wealth and resources. 

“I’ve always been the only black kid in my grade,” he said. “But while Ross is not too diverse in terms of minority students, it’s really intellectually diverse, so I made a lot of friends from all over the world, which, for the first time, forced me to realize who I really am in a global context, and where I come from.” 

This fall, Ted will attend Cornell University’s School of Human Ecology, where he hopes to study policy analysis and management, which he explained was a hybrid of economics, health care, and public policy. He received full financial assistance from the prestigious Ivy League school, something that makes Ted happy, “because it won’t be a burden on my mom at all.”

In January, with acceptance to Cornell secured, and his trip to Haiti during a school week wholeheartedly greenlighted by the head of the Ross high school, he was left only to grapple with the conflicting emotions about returning to a ravaged homeland of which he knew little, outside of his grandmother’s stories.

“It was a massive shock,” he said of his first drive through Port-au-Prince, the capital city. “I didn’t expect to see the streets totally covered in trash or people living in such terrible conditions.” But he also noticed a resilience among the people he met at the first Wings Over Haiti school, which now has over 137 students. “They were not beaten down,” he recalled observing. “They didn’t appear to see themselves as victims.”

Ted said he made the trip for himself and for his twin sisters, who graduated a few weeks ago from Rowan University in New Jersey and hope to attend medical school. He FaceTimed his sisters daily so that they could experience his journey simultaneously. He also felt emboldened to do something positive, he said, after hearing President Trump refer to Haiti as one of the “shithole countries.”

He was the group’s official translator during the five-day trip, which included a visit to Ranquitte, a farming community in the northwestern part of the island, where plans to build a second Wings Over Haiti school are already underway. As he spoke with many of the kids who live in the village, he connected with several and learned about the dire circumstances in which they live.

“Almost all their stories involved fatherless homes, no economic opportunities, and absolutely no mobility out of their circumstances,” he said. “I felt both really grateful that my mom had got me out but also extremely guilty that I’ve had all these incredible opportunities and will soon go off to a great college, while most of these kids won’t even make it past fifth grade.”

Education has always played a big role in his life, he said, and his plan is to take what he learns at Cornell to help him further understand the issues that plague Haiti and, he hopes, how to formulate a solution-oriented approach to making a change, especially in its education system. About 90 percent of the schools in Haiti are private, making education prohibitive for most families. 

Mr. Glynn, Wings Over Haiti’s founder, believes that Ted will not only run his nonprofit one day, but also the school he is helping to build. 

“I’ll definitely go back to Haiti,” Ted said. “I have to. All those kids have my WhatsApp number, so they’ll track me down if I don’t.”

And since he promised those kids a school in their village, he is now helping organize the annual Wings Over Haiti art auction benefit at the Watermill Center on June 30. The team hopes the event will raise as much as possible toward the approximately $250,000 needed to fund and run a prekindergarten through 12th-grade school.

In his downtime, when he isn’t trying to save Haiti, Ted reluctantly admitted that he can be found in front of an Xbox, trying to save himself from elimination in Fortnite, the video game craze of the moment.

An enormous oil painting of Queen Elizabeth I hangs, rather fittingly, over a fireplace of Tudor-era proportions in the Northwest Woods house of Merle Hoffman, a pioneer in women’s reproductive health care who established one of the first ambulatory abortion centers in the nation in 1971 in Manhattan.

“That’s me,” Ms. Hoffman said, laughing and pointing to the portrait of Britain’s Virgin Queen wearing a magnificent gown and a faint, enigmatic smile. “Painted by my friend Linda Stein.” 

It all makes sense once she tells her story, which begins with a solitary, bookish child devouring historical tales and creating warrior fantasies that eventually materialized into real-life battles, power struggles, evil oppressors, and noble causes. 

Ms. Hoffman describes her entire career, which began while studying at Queens College in 1970 and working for a doctor who provided abortions, as a battle. “I’ve been on the front line for 46 years,” she said. 

The front line, that is, of the war waged over abortion rights, which still remains under ferocious attack 45 years after the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision made abortions legal across the United States.

In 1971, together with the doctor she worked for, Ms. Hoffman started Choices, the first legal clinic in the United States to provide abortions; they were legal in New York since 1970. It was her very first patient from New Jersey who altered her trajectory from a hopeful concert pianist to pro-choice crusader. 

“Imagine that,” Ms. Hoffman recalled in her waterfront home on the eve of Mother’s Day, “just across the river in New Jersey, abortions were illegal.” Her patient, she said, was white, married, Catholic, and so economically stressed that she could not have the child. “It was so powerful.”

And so, the rescue fantasy that consumed her as a child began to play itself out over her remarkable life. In 1977, she co-founded the first national professional organization of abortion providers, the National Abortion Federation, and became its first president. She publicly challenged anti-abortion leaders such as Jerry Falwell and New York City’s Cardinal John O’Connor by organizing the first pro-choice civil disobedience action on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989. She also founded the New York Pro-Choice Coalition and helped develop a national strategy for defending clinics against blockades, harassment, and attacks. She campaigned and protested relentlessly, always wielding her iconic six-foot-long coat hanger, a reminder of the illegal back-alley abortion industry.

In 2012, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the opening of Choices, she published her memoir, “Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion From the Back Alley to the Boardroom,” which chronicles all of the above as well as more personal details, such as her own decision to have an abortion as a young woman, her decision at 58 to adopt a daughter, her affair with and eventual marriage to the physician she worked for, her experiences running Choices, and constant death threats. 

In person, she spoke about being evicted from her LeFrak City office because Richard LeFrak, the son of the developer, had problems with the patient population. 

“There were always groups of people shouting horrible things like ‘Burn in hell,’ and he didn’t want that,” she said. Today, she has called these sidewalk protesters “the American Taliban,” comparing their religious beliefs to the Taliban’s “misogyny and fundamentalism.”

Until very recently, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman represented the escorts of women arriving at Choices against the “bullying” of protesters outside. 

In 2012, Ms. Hoffman decided to move Choices from Long Island City to a newly built “state-of-the-art facility” in Jamaica, Queens, where 78 percent of her patients are from. The center has become a full-service women’s health facility, offering complete gynecological ser­vices, a prenatal department, abortion services, as well as outreach programs for sex education and rape counseling. 

“We even offer seniors the services they need, because sex never gets old,” she said, laughing. 

In 2016, Choices was one of only four clinics across the U.S. where a groundbreaking new experiment was launched, allowing women to obtain abortion-inducing drugs through the mail.

The center is not, as one might assume, a nonprofit entity. Early-term abortions cost $425 and those close to the legal limit of 24 weeks cost $2,000. Insurance covers some while other women pay with cash. The fact that Ms. Hoffman has openly delighted in the fact that women’s business is her business has raised eyebrows among the most strident feminists, even though the clinic provides health care at reasonable prices, Medicaid is accepted, and it offers help for the undocumented. “We rarely turn anyone away,” she said.

“It’s an oasis. We have generational patients who come here for all sorts of gynecological treatments. Abortions are only 40 percent of our business,” she explained. There is no board of directors; she is the sole decision maker, a role she refers to as “a collective autocracy.”

The autocrat appears to be doing just fine, as her grand weekend house in the tony Cedar Point Park enclave attests. The Elizabethan Age theme echoes throughout the castle-like residence, which was rebuilt after a 2015 fire decimated the original. The F.B.I. was called in to investigate the incident, given her affiliations. 

Inside the hefty arched wooden doorway, it’s all soaring ceilings, winding staircases, and baronial chandeliers. There’s even wallpaper printed to look like excavated medieval bricks. It is a world that conjures an era of tallow candles and velvet draperies, menacing shadows, and distant footsteps echoing on flagstones. 

But to Ms. Hoffman her house is simply “a physical manifestation of my consciousness.”

Instead of dreaming of a fantasy, she said she is actually living hers. “It’s today. This is my dream. My life is meaningful, challenging, stressful, and extremely exciting at times.”

The people of Ireland go to vote on Friday, May 25, on a referendum to decide whether or not to liberalize one of the most restrictive abortion regimes in the world. Only three days before that, here in America, President Trump will keynote the Susan B. Anthony List’s 11th annual Campaign for Life gala. Anti-abortion groups around the country have heralded the Trump administration for taking many actions targeting abortion, including his reinstatement of the so-called Mexico City policy, which prohibits federal money from going to international organizations that discuss, provide, or offer referrals for abortion ser­vices.

And Margaret Atwood’s disturbing dystopian tale of female subjugation, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is hugely popular on the small screen.

“We should have absolutely seen all this coming,” was Ms. Hoffman’s reaction to these strange times. “We should have been more strategic in our plans. Now we’re just defensive.”

And so her war continues. But luckily, she does seem to be blessed with the same sangfroid as her Elizabethan mentor.

For a time, Suffolk County was ground zero for immigrant issues, Vivian Viloria-Fisher told the audience at a Democratic congressional candidates forum in January. 

“We need to fulfill the promise that we made to young people” with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, she said that day. “The rug has been pulled out from under them by Donald Trump, and Lee Zeldin has not done anything to make their lives whole again,” she said. “We must have a comprehensive immigration policy because we can’t continue to have 12 million people, maybe more, living in the shadows.” 

An immigrant herself, Ms. Viloria-Fisher, a former Suffolk County legislator, is one of five candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge Mr. Zeldin, the Republican incumbent who is seeking a third term representing New York’s First Congressional District. A sixth, Brendon Henry, dropped out of the race last week.

Immigration reform is important, she said, and is among a range of issues she raised this week, along with a long list of examples that, she said, demonstrate Mr. Zeldin’s failure to represent his constituents. 

“I had always been involved in community activities, from the time I was very young,” said Ms. Viloria-Fisher, who lives in East Setauket. “In those days, it wasn’t something you put on your resume; you just did it because you did it. I continue to be very involved with the community.” 

That involvement includes 13 years in the Legislature — “I won seven races in order to do that,” she said — and more than 30 as an educator. “I’m the only one,” she said, “who’s lived in the district for almost 50 years. My legislative base is the base that would be very active Democratic voters.” 

As a small child, she left the Dominican Republic with her family. Her father, she said, had spoken out against the country’s dictator, Rafael Trujillo, and was therefore in mortal danger. After the family settled in New York City, she went to Stony Brook University to earn a master’s degree, and while there she was hired by the Middle Country Central School District. 

While teaching Sunday school, she came to know Legislator Nora Bredes, whose son was a student. “She had to leave her post,” Ms. Viloria-Fisher said, “and asked me to run. I’d never been in politics, but she said, ‘It’s obvious how committed you are to the community.’ ” In the Legislature, “the environment and social justice issues were important to me,” she said. Unable to continue because of term limits, she turned to volunteering, including with Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, the March of Dimes, the Food Policy Council, and as a teacher of English as a second language. 

Mr. Zeldin, she said, “seems to be tacking farther and farther to the right.” She noted his scores awarded by the League of Conservation Voters of 9 percent for 2017 and 10 percent lifetime. 

“People on Long Island care about our environment,” she said. “We stand on the water we drink and have to be protective about it. Although he’ll make noise about saving Plum Island, in the meantime he’s rubber-stamping” the Trump administration’s moves “to deregulate all protections we have for rivers, waterways. He thinks that Pruitt” — Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator — “is as terrific as Trump thinks he is.” 

Ms. Viloria-Fisher also called out the congressman’s “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, “and he is one of the biggest receivers of their bounty,” she said. Most of the First District’s residents, she said, understand that “we have to move toward sensible safety for our kids,” particularly in light of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February. “I haven’t met one person who thought it was a good idea to arm teachers with weapons, to have armed police officers in a building,” she said. “But we do have to look at these AR-15s, bump stocks, background checks.” 

Mr. Zeldin, she said, “is so extreme he wants reciprocity,” a reference to the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would allow a person with a concealed carry permit from one state to carry a firearm in any other state and on any federal land. Mr. Zeldin co-sponsored the legislation, which passed in the House and was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Should it become law, “it will really invalidate our New York SAFE Act,” she said of the state’s Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, a gun regulation law enacted after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. “We’ll lose control of our safety in New York.” 

“I want to see sensible gun laws passed,” she said, “and I think we will when we get a Democratic majority. I want to be part of that blue wave and make this happen.” 

Like several of her rivals for the nomination, Ms. Viloria-Fisher decried the appearance of Stephen Bannon, formerly of the Trump campaign and administration, at a December fund-raiser for Mr. Zeldin in Manhattan. That, she said, demonstrated the congressman’s “utter contempt for the people that he’s supposed to be representing and his utter and complete loyalty to the president, to the exclusion of the duties that Zeldin has as a congressional representative to be someone who represents checks and balances.”

Ms. Viloria-Fisher called for a repeal of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “that Paul Ryan is so proud of, which is going to hurt the middle class and widen the huge gap between the poorest and richest in our country. It’s creating an oligarchy here. It’s totally out of line with what a Democracy should be about.”

In Congress, “I want to give people opportunities, to foster the basic values of the Democratic Party,” she said, “which is fairness and providing an equal playing field for all of us.” 

She can defeat her rivals and Mr. Zeldin “because I have a large base,” she said. “I’m known not only as a legislator but as a teacher, a parent, a person who’s devoted my entire life to this community, being part of the grain and fabric of the community.” 

“I have the electability, a proven record,” she said. “There is not one progressive position I can’t prove I have already acted upon. That’s why I’m going to beat Lee Zeldin.”

This is part of a series of profiles of Dem­ocrats vying to challenge Lee Zeldin in the lead-up to the June 26 Democratic primary.

A man was found dead in the snow at Sammy's Beach at Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton on Monday afternoon.

According to East Hampton Town police, two men walking their dog noticed Vincent D'Angelo, 73, alongside his Ford Explorer, which had become stuck in a snowdrift. They phoned police at about 4:20 p.m.



Police said that Mr. D'Angelo had left his house in East Hampton at about 3:15 that afternoon to go duck hunting alone at Three Mile Harbor. As he drove along a beach access road, his truck apparently hit the snowdrift and could not go any farther. Police said that he appeared to have collapsed while trying to free the vehicle from the snow.

East Hampton Ambulance Association personnel responded to the 911 call, along with town police. Mr. D'Angelo was pronounced dead at the scene.

The Suffolk medical examiner's office and town police detectives continued to investigate, a police news release said.

Visiting hours for Mr. D'Angelo are Thursday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton. A service for him will be at the funeral home at a time to be announced on Friday.

On Tuesday morning, Bill Crain, an animal rights activist and the president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, turned himself in at Sussex County Jail in New Jersey to begin a 15-day jail sentence for charges stemming from his protest against the state’s annual bear hunt.

Mr. Crain was arrested in October in Fredon, N.J., a township about 45 miles west of Manhattan.

“On Oct. 14, I walked out of the area designated for the bear hunt protesters, refused to return, and was arrested. It was a peaceful act of civil disobedience,” the 74-year-old Mr. Crain said in a statement he read in court. It was the eighth time Mr. Crain had been arrested protesting the hunt and the second time he had been jailed (in 2017, his sentence was a little more than a week).

According to news reports, Mr. Crain was also fined $2,500 during his sentencing in Andover Township Municipal Court in December.

“He’s doing okay,” said East Hampton Town Trustee Dell Cullum, who’s been in contact with Mr. Crain’s wife, Ellen Crain.

“They’re fixing to let him out a little early for good behavior," he said.

Mr. Cullum said he was not surprised that Mr. Crain has gone to such lengths to protect New Jersey’s bears. "Bill’s the real deal, he doesn’t eat meat, he doesn’t like hunting or agree with any kind of abuse of any animal, let alone wildlife."

"I’m proud of him. To go to jail for this is pretty admirable. Not only does he protect the animals of East Hampton to the best of his abilities, then he goes beyond and goes to New Jersey year after year to stand up to the slaughter of black bears,” he said.

Mr. Crain, a psychology professor at the City College of New York who, along with his wife, runs the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary in Dutchess County, has been active in fighting East Hampton deer-culling efforts, including leading a raucous 2014 rally protesting the use of sharpshooters to reduce the deer population.

Yuka Silvera, an East Hampton resident who became friends with Mr. Crain through the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, has launched a GoFundMe page to help Mr. Crain defray the cost of fines for his arrest and to raise money for the legal fight against deer culling in East Hampton Village. A donation, Ms. Silvera wrote, would “show our respect for Bill’s courage and efforts."

 

East Hampton Town moved forward this week on two projects that critics said would be an expansion of East Hampton Airport.

Following a Tuesday morning town board work session, officials were ready to authorize $2.1 million in borrowing to pay for an improved taxiway alongside the airport’s main runway. The town board is expected to vote on the authorization at a meeting in Town Hall tonight.

The board also began considering whether to relocate and increase the height of the airport’s control tower.

A taxiway extension has been planned since at least 2016, Jim Brundige, the airport manager, told the town board during Tuesday’s meeting. The goal is to connect two existing taxiways, bringing the airport more into conformity with other airports around the country, though the Federal Aviation Administration does not require it.

The project would include removing outdated and faulty lighting along runway 10-28, the main east-west landing strip, and other improvements. Durable LED fixtures would be installed in place of incandescent bulbs, which need frequent replacement, Mr. Brundige said.

Members of the town board, speaking at Tuesday’s meeting, were in general favorably disposed toward the taxiway work, which would cost about $800,000. Questions remained about whether the town might pay for it with the airport surplus fund instead of borrowing the money through a bond issue.

Supervisor Larry Cantwell said the airport surplus might be a better source of the money than borrowing. Len Bernard, the town’s financial manager, concurred, saying it would be preferential over adding debt. “It is the best practice to pay cash,” he said.

The airport fund swelled in 2017 from landing fees and leases paid to the town for the use of portions of the property. Several parcels of town-owned land at the airport are to be sold in January, which will add about $4.75 million to the fund, which stood at about $2.7 million as of this week, Mr. Bernard said.

Questions about the control tower spurred more heated discussion.

According to Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, who is the board’s point person on the airport, numerous complaints were lodged last summer about helicopters flying low over certain neighborhoods during inclement weather.

The controllers’ eye level is about 16 feet above the ground; the tower is roughly in the southeast corner of the airport, near a line of trees. The flights that caused complaints occurred when air traffic controllers directed helicopter pilots onto a northerly route because, given the tower’s relatively low height and location, the controllers were unable to see the approaches and departures.

During periods of bad weather, aircraft come into the airport lower than usual, well below a recommended 2,500-foot altitude, putting them out of visual contact with the controllers if they approach from the south. On bad-weather days last summer helicopters were sent over the Azurest area of Sag Harbor. Ms. Burke-Gonzalez said she had visited that area on a cloudy Friday afternoon in August and observed heavy helicopter traffic.

In all, air traffic controllers sent helicopters over the northern approach to East Hampton Airport on only about 15 days in 2017, Mr. Brundige said. Replacing the tower with one that is taller and in a better location would allow helicopters to avoid flying over populated areas more often as they approach the airport on visually difficult days, he said. “The question is, do we want to provide a tower that’s fully functional,” Mr. Brundige told the town board.

“Has the F.A.A. asked for this at all?” Councilwoman Sylvia Overby asked from the dais.

“No, not at all,” he said.

“I believe that the town board wants to reduce the amount of traffic,” Ms. Overby said. Supervisor Cantwell interjected, asking, “Does the tower encourage one more aircraft?”

“No, they are coming anyway,” Mr. Brundige said, adding that tower personnel are asking for it to be relocated and made taller.

“I see this as increasing traffic. This is an expansion of the airport. It’s a bigger tower,” Ms. Overby said. She went on to say the taxiway project also seemed to represent growth in the facility’s capacity. She questioned why the town would want to put more money into the airport while an F.A.A.-mandated noise study was getting underway. “If you build it, they will come,” she said, adding, “It should be up to the local community to decide how the airport should be used or not.”

Mr. Cantwell and Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc, who will be in the supervisor’s seat come January, wanted more detail about the number of takeoffs and landings that were out of eyesight before making a decision.

“This is definitely an expansion, one that we feared when they first put in the tower,” Kathleen Cunningham of the Quiet Skies Coalition said. “It’s all for the helicopters.”

Since East Hampton Town is trying to minimize the number of helicopter landings and takeoffs through the F.A.A.-mandated study, she said it made no sense to improve the control tower so that more, not fewer, could be accommodated in almost all kinds of weather. “It’s at cross-purposes. It does not make a whit of sense,” Ms. Cunningham said.

She supported the taxiway project as a necessary safety improvement for the airport, however. It also would eliminate the use of a secondary runway by large, heavy aircraft as they moved about on the ground, lengthening its serviceable life and holding off the day that the town would have to repave it.