ROME — An Italian appeals court Wednesday upheld the convictions of two American men in the slaying of an Italian plainclothes police officer during a botched sting operation but significantly reduced their sentences.

The new verdict, ordered after Italy’s highest court threw out the original convictions, drew acceptance from the men’s families and disappointment from the officer’s widow.

Finnegan Lee Elder and Gabriel Natale-Hjorth had been found guilty in the July 2019 slaying of Carabinieri Vice Brigadier Mario Cerciello Rega, and after the first trial, were both sentenced to life in prison, Italy’s harshest penalty.

Those sentences were reduced on appeal before Italy’s highest Cassation Court last year ordered a new trial altogether.

On Wednesday, the appeals court convicted Finnegan and sentenced him to 15 years and 2 months in prison; it sentenced Natale-Hjorth to 11 years and four months, along with an $863 fine.

Teenagers at the time of the slaying, the former schoolmates from the San Francisco Bay area had met up in Rome to spend a few days vacationing. The fatal confrontation took place after they arranged to meet a small-time drug dealer, who turned out to have been a police informant, to recover money lost in a bad drug deal. Instead, they were confronted by two officers.

Cerciello Riga was stabbed 11 times with a knife brought from the hotel room.

In ordering the retrial, the Cassation Court said it hadn’t been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants, with limited Italian language skills, had understood that they were dealing with Italian police officers when they went to meet the alleged drug dealer.

The defense had argued that the defendants didn’t know they were facing law enforcement when the attack happened, an argument repeated during the new trial.

Rosa Maria Esilio, the widow of Cerciello Rega, was “devastated” by the verdict, said her lawyer Massimo Ferrandino.

The killing of the officer in the storied Carabinieri paramilitary police corps shocked Italy, and Cerciello Rega, 35, was mourned as a national hero.

Medal of Honor: President Joe Biden on Wednesday awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry to two Union soldiers who stole a locomotive deep in Confederate territory during the Civil War and drove it north for 87 miles as they destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines.

Army Pvts. Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson were captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. Biden recognized their courage 162 years later with the country’s highest military decoration, calling the operation they joined “one of the most dangerous missions of the entire Civil War.”

“Every soldier who joined that mission was awarded the Medal of Honor except for two. Two soldiers who died because of that operation and never received this recognition,” Biden said. “Today, we right that wrong.”

On April 12, 1862, 22 of the men in what was later called Andrews’ Raiders met up in Marietta, Georgia, and hijacked a train named the General. The group tore up tracks and sliced through telegraph wires while taking the train north.

Confederate troops eventually caught the group. Andrews and seven others were executed, while the others either escaped or remained prisoners of war.

Giuliani bankruptcy: Rudy Giuliani’s creditors, including two former Georgia election workers who won a $148 million defamation judgment against him, are opposing his attempt to convert his bankruptcy into a liquidation, saying they’ll likely ask that the case be thrown out instead because of what they call his flouting of bankruptcy laws.

The comments came Wednesday during a status hearing on Zoom before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane in White Plains, New York.

The former New York mayor and Donald Trump adviser filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in December, days after the former election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, won their defamation case. They said Giuliani’s targeting of them because of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen led to death threats that made them fear for their lives.

Philip Dublin, a lawyer for a committee of Giuliani’s creditors, and Rachel Strickland, an attorney for Freeman and Moss, accused Giuliani of failing to turn over financial documents, ignoring bankruptcy court orders and trying to delay the process through litigation tactics. They said they’ll likely ask that the bankruptcy case be dismissed at another hearing July 10.

India stampede: Severe overcrowding and a lack of exits contributed to a stampede at a religious festival that killed at least 121 people in northern India, authorities said Wednesday, as the faithful surged toward the preacher and chaos ensued among the quarter of a million attendees.

As police searched for the organizers of the event, an attorney for the preacher said he would cooperate with authorities. More than two dozen injured people were still being treated.

The event had been permitted to accommodate 80,000 people. It’s not clear how many made it inside the giant tent set up in a field in a village in Hathras district in Uttar Pradesh state.

Deadly Israeli strike: An Israeli strike in southern Lebanon on Wednesday killed a senior Hezbollah commander as tensions between the two sides continue to boil, a Hezbollah official said.

The strike near the southern coastal city of Tyre took place as global diplomatic efforts have intensified in recent weeks to prevent escalating clashes between Hezbollah and the Israeli military from spiraling into an all-out war that could possibly lead to a direct confrontation between Israel and Iran.

A Hezbollah statement identified the dead commander as Mohammad Naameh Nasser, who went by the name “Abu Naameh,” his nom de guerre. A Hezbollah official said Nasser was head of the group’s Aziz Unit, one of three regional divisions in southern Lebanon.

Japan sterilization case: In a landmark decision, Japan’s Supreme Court ordered the government Wednesday to pay suitable compensation to 11 victims who were sterilized under a now-defunct Eugenics Protection Law that was designed to eliminate offspring of people with disabilities.

An estimated 25,000 people were sterilized between the 1950s and 1970s without consent to “prevent the birth of poor-quality descendants” under law, described by plaintiffs’ lawyers as “the biggest human rights violation in the post-war era” in Japan.

The court said the 1948 eugenics law was unconstitutional and rejected the government’s claim that the 20-year statute of limitations should prevent it from paying restitution.