In the news
Diana Reaves Costarakis, 70, of Middleburg, Fla., has been jailed on charges of criminal solicitation and criminal conspiracy on accusations that she met an undercover detective at a Home Depot store and offered him $5,000 to kill her daughter-in-law, whom Costarakis described as a drunk and a bad mother.
Marina Krim and her husband, Kevin, a New York couple who lost two of their children in an attack police blamed on their nanny, have welcomed a baby boy named Felix.
Peter Higgs, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, said he learned about the award while walking down the street in Edinburgh, Scotland, when a former neighbor got out of her car to congratulate him on the news, to which he responded, “Oh, what news?”
Heather Nicole Arnold, 19, of Church Hill, Tenn., faces 18 counts of identity theft on accusations that she bought pizzas on 18 separate occasions using a debit-card number stolen from an online boyfriend.
Kristopher Wenberg, a 25-year-old Kansas man who was walking along a Topeka railroad track wearing headphones, was hit by a train he didn’t hear approaching and then got up and kept walking, going to a hospital with cuts on his legs and shoulder, authorities said.
Adriano Chafik, a Brazilian rancher, received a 115-year prison sentence for ordering and taking part in the 2004 killings of five farmworkers who occupied his property in one of the poorest regions of the country, and his employee Washington Agostinho was sentenced to 97 years.
Susan Herman Alou, a 79-year-old Georgia woman who received a Best for Last certificate for making North Dakota her final destination in her quest to see all 50 states, said she didn’t visit the state last on purpose, “but I wasn’t really in a hurry to visit North Dakota, either.”
Mahdi Akef, an 85-yearold former leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, was charged with insulting the judiciary, which he called “sick” and “corrupt” in April during the height of a power struggle between then-President Mohammed Morsi and the courts.
Bryan Kawand Sims, who’s serving a life sentence in Georgia, sued the state Department of Corrections, saying that as a follower of the Rastafarian faith he should be granted a religious exemption to the department’s short-hair rule and be permitted to grow dreadlocks up to 3 feet long.