In the news
■ Patrick Rausch, a teacher put on leave in Rochester, N.Y., argues in a lawsuit that he was falsely accused of telling his seventh grade social studies class of mostly Black students to pick seeds out of cotton, saying he just used a bag of unprocessed cotton to demonstrate how difficult it was to pick the seeds out by hand.
■ C. Jack Ellis, former mayor of Macon, Ga., declared, “This era is dead, dead and gone,” but it took years to overcome the lawsuits, until finally two Confederate monuments are being moved from downtown to a park by a cemetery where 884 Southern soldiers are buried.
■ Amee Johns, who had been paddleboarding at Lovers Point Beach in Pacific Grove, Calif., said “I was nervous, I have to admit” while swimming and kicking as one of the rescuers who towed a swimmer to the beach on a surfboard after he was seriously injured in a shark attack.
■ Jonathan Branham, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s sergeant, said a 52-yearold woman and the two dogs she was walking near the San Gabriel River in Pico Rivera were killed by lightning as thunderstorms pounded the region.
■ Glenn Darren Rucker of Kansas City, Mo., was sentenced to 20 years in prison for fatally shooting a 41-year-old woman as she rode an ATV down a city street while her dog walked alongside.
■ Ike Ekweremadu and a fellow Nigerian were charged by London’s Metropolitan Police with conspiracy to arrange or facilitate travel of another person with a view to exploitation, “namely organ harvesting,” and a child was rescued.
■ Tammy Hudson McDonald of Columbia, S.C., former director of a nursing facility, awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to lying to federal agents about providing covid-19 vaccination cards to family members and others who she knew hadn’t gotten shots.
■ Natalie Don of the Scottish National Party launched a bid to “right the historic wrong” and “a deplorable miscarriage of justice” by posthumously pardoning thousands convicted, vilified or executed under the 1563 Witchcraft Act, which remained law until 1736.
■ Angie Starkel, a member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, hailed “a good homecoming and a good step … to get back to our identity” as a tomahawk once owned by Chief Standing Bear, a pioneering American Indian leader, was returned to his tribe from a museum at Harvard University.