In the news
■ Will Healey of Connecticut’s Environmental Protection Agency reminded people that “we all need to do our part to keep bears and other wildlife safe and wild” by ensuring garbage is property disposed of and secured, after wildlife biologists had to rescue a bear cub that got its head stuck in a plastic container.
■ Cameron Harsh of World Animal Protection says “wild animals want to be left to themselves,” after a 71-year-old Pennsylvania woman visiting Yellowstone National Park was gored by a bull bison in the third incident of its kind in a month.
■ Benjamin Talbott, who was on a sea cruise in Alaska, recalled “Boom, the whole ship shakes” and “Oh my God” as the Norwegian Sun was forced to dock in Seattle after hitting an iceberg near Hubbard Glacier.
■ Rob High of IBM noted, “When you don’t have anybody onboard, you obviously can’t do the mechanical, physical fixes that are needed,” as a crewless robotic boat retracing the voyage of the Mayflower landed near Plymouth Rock, Mass., after diversions and a Coast Guard-required tow into harbor.
■ Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, applied to hold a fireworks show at Mount Rushmore to celebrate Independence Day 2023, persisting even though the National Park Service has denied her requests for the past two years.
■ Daniel Seuzeneau, police spokesman in Slidell, La., said investigators think they “were scouting the area in order to carjack another victim” after five teens were arrested with an SUV stolen from an Uber driver who’d been wounded and left by the road in New Orleans.
■ Charles Johnson, a Washington Supreme Court justice, said “the apparent purpose of the remarks was to highlight the defendant’s perceived ethnicity and invoke stereotypes” as the court unanimously overturned a Hispanic man’s conviction for assaulting police and blasted the prosecutor’s comments as racist.
■ Gordon Ernst, a former Georgetown University tennis coach who once coached Barack Obama’s family, was sentenced to 2½ years in prison for taking $3 million in bribes to help wealthy parents cheat their kids’ way into the school.
■ Keven Ellis, chairman of the Texas Board of Education, said his panel directed a working group “to revisit that specific language” as a proposal to refer to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second grade social studies classes was unanimously rejected.