In the news
■ Stephanie Popp of Louisville, Ky., a former eBay manager, was sentenced to a year behind bars for her role in targeting company critics with a harassment scheme that included home delivery of live spiders and a bloody pig mask.
■ Ben Sasse, U.S. senator from Nebraska, is the lone finalist for the University of Florida’s presidency, but he faced pointed questions and protests over his stance on same-sex marriage and other LBGTQ issues, with some students disrupting a meeting by yelling, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Ben Sasse has got to go.”
■ John Grismore, fired as deputy sheriff in Franklin County, Vt., but still the only sheriff candidate on the ballot, insists he did nothing wrong in kicking a handcuffed, shackled prisoner, but his campaign has lost the support of both political parties.
■ Paulette Dillard, president of Shaw University in South Carolina, said she’s outraged as she accuses law enforcement of racially profiling Black students by stopping a bus for a minor traffic violation and using drug-sniffing dogs to search luggage, and is considering legal recourse.
■ Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s president, faces an outcry over his comment on the revelation that several hundred people were victims of child sex abuse by the country’s Catholic clergy, saying “400 cases doesn’t seem to me to be a lot because in other countries … there were thousands of cases.”
■ Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador in Berlin, slammed a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany for appearing to dance on the country’s Holocaust memorial, saying he’d brought “shame upon himself and his party,” which promised to act.
■ Pedro Edmunds Paoa, mayor of Chile’s Easter Island, said the loss is “irreparable and immeasurable,” blaming people who burn grassland for starting a 104-acre fire that damaged some of the island’s iconic carved stone figures.
■ Fawzul Kabeer, who exports cricket bats to India, fears “there will be no bats produced in Kashmir in the coming years” with the dwindling of willow plantations amid the plywood industry’s preference for the faster-growing poplar tree.
■ Humam Saad of Syria’s antiquities agency hailed “a discovery that is rare on a global scale” after the uncovering of a large mosaic from the Roman era, saying the images are “rich in details” and include scenes from the Trojan War.