In the news
Jack Markell, the governor of Delaware, has signed a resolution passed by the state General Assembly apologizing for Delaware’s role in slavery and for wrongs committed against blacks during the Jim Crow era.
Mikhail Kasyanov, a staunch critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said about 10 men surrounded him as he ate at a Moscow restaurant and began threatening him before one of them smashed a cake into his face.
Timothy Schmalz,a Canadian artist, said his statue of Jesus lying on a park bench that’s now outside a Tampa, Fla., church is meant to call attention to the homeless even though it sometimes prompted calls to police as it sat outside churches in 16 U.S. cities and one in Australia.
Maria Vaccarella of Howell, N.J., caught a break when a judge dismissed a charge of illegally possessing wildlife that was filed by state wildlife officers after she documented on social media how she nursed two abandoned baby squirrels back to health.
Michael George, a news reporter for WNBC-TV in New York, was delivering a live report in front of the Brooklyn Supreme Court about a police-involved shooting when a man waving a handgun appeared behind George and then left, authorities said.
John Feit, 83, of Scottsdale, Ariz., a former priest, appeared in court using a walker to face a murder charge filed by prosecutors in the 1960 killing of a 25-year-old schoolteacher and beauty queen, Irene Garza, who was last seen at the church in McAllen, Texas, where Feit once worked.
Trey Collins, a 19-yearold student at the University of Georgia in Athens, told police he was making a delivery when two people robbed him of $80 and a pizza, forced him into his car trunk and then drove him to a location where they fired 10 shots at the trunk, four of which hit him.
Ohood Al Roumi was picked by United Arab Emirates Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to become the Middle Eastern country’s first-ever “minister of state for happiness” as part of a shake-up of the federation’s 29-member Cabinet.
John Bercow, speaker of the British House of Commons, said lawmakers can call for a debate if they want to try to overturn a decision to end Parliament’s centuries-old practice of printing laws on calfskin parchment known as vellum to save about $116,000 annually.