In the news
■ Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra separatist group, had terrorism charges against him reinstated after Nigeria’s Supreme Court overturned a lower court dismissing them.
■ Jorge Preciado-Vasquez, 30, and Alexis Martinez-Preciado, 20, were sentenced to more than four years in prison for smuggling migrants out of Mexico, captaining a boat that capsized off the California coast, killing a 39-year-old woman and a 47-year-old man from Mexico who drowned along with an unidentified woman from Guatemala, authorities said.
■ Rusty Harlow, Tate County, Miss., Youth Court judge, sentenced a 10-yearold boy who urinated in a parking lot to three months probation and ordered him to write a two-page book report on the late NBA champion Kobe Bryant.
■ Upakit Pachariyangkun, a senator in Thailand, was released on $286,000 bail on charges involving narcotics trafficking, money laundering and association with a transnational criminal organization, said a statement received Friday from the attorney general’s office.
■ Beth Wood, former Democratic state auditor in North Carolina, was sentenced to one year of unsupervised probation and has paid $1,064 in restitution as part of a plea agreement for two misdemeanors for misusing a state-issued vehicle for personal activities.
■ Bobby Hayes, who owns Magic Carpet Cleaning, said he was able remove a baby owl from a Lexington, Ky., family’s Christmas tree and safely release the animal in the family’s backyard so the bird and his clients are “going to be able to have a merry Christmas now.”
■ Lee Roberts, the founder of a Raleigh, N.C.-based investment firm and a former state budget director who served under former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, was named interim chancellor of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to a news release.
■ Michael Cassidy, 35, a former Republican House candidate of Lauderdale, Miss., was arrested for fourth-degree criminal mischief, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said, after a Satanic Temple display inside the Iowa Capitol in Des Moines was destroyed. m Logan Clegg, 27, who was living in a tent in the woods in New Hampshire, was sentenced to up to life in prison in the fatal shooting deaths of a retired couple who had gone out for a walk.