In the news
■ Karla Ruiz MacFarland, education secretary of Tijuana, Mexico, and then the city’s first female mayor, got to serve less than a month before former boss Arturo Gonzalez Cruz returned and demanded his job back, saying he plans to stick around while he awaits a decision from his political party on whether it will back his bid for higher office.
■ Lynn Spruill, mayor of Starkville, Miss., said aldermen have approved a plan to compensate employees who took pay cuts for two months because of the coronavirus pandemic, adding that it’s “incredibly important to make those people whole” as “a matter of fairness and equity.”
■ Henry Bell, 63, and his longtime fiancee, Antionette Brown, 48, finally said their vows in the parking lot of Orange Park Medical Center in Florida, eight weeks after Bell was admitted to the hospital with covid-19 and a day before his anticipated release from the facility’s rehab center.
■ Rick Berry, mayor of Lexington, Ga., said the historic, city-owned Beth-Salem Church, built in 1892 and now used as an events center, has been awarded a $4,000 grant to repair the building’s 14 windows.
■ Jonathan Batista, 18, was arrested on a charge of manslaughter with a deadly weapon after Hialeah, Fla., police said he accidentally shot his friend in the chest as the two “were simulating a rap video.”
■ Mike Hubbard, former Alabama House speaker, is undergoing a 14-day quarantine before being transferred to prison to serve four years for his 2016 conviction on ethics charges, including leveraging his office to obtain clients and investments.
■ Louis Winston Scott will stay in prison for life under a habitual offender statute after the Mississippi Supreme Court declined to set aside his conviction for trying to kidnap a woman by simulating a flashing police light to pull over her car in Lee County.
■ Raven Leilani, the author of “Luster,” a debut novel about a young Black woman in publishing who has an affair with a married white man, is this year’s winner of the Kirkus Prize for fiction, along with $50,000.
■ Yao Yan, manager of Beijing’s Yaoji Chaogan noodle restaurant, expressed happiness about the idea of a Joe Biden presidency as he recalled the time when the former vice president and a U.S. ambassador stopped by for a bowl of noodles and dumplings in 2011 in what Chinese newspapers dubbed an instance of “noodle diplomacy.”