In the news
■ Mohamed m spokesperson for Egypt’s loss-prone national soccer team, says a cow has been sacrificed to bring more luck at the Africa Cup of Nations, with the meat being given to some of the needy in Cairo.
■ Seif Asi, 21, a Palestinian-American student at the University of Central Florida, faces three felony counts of intimidation and making credible threats to a person wearing a religious item after he was accused of making death threats against three Jewish students.
■ Kyle Atkins-Weltman, author of a paper published in the journal PLOS One, wrote that fossilized bones of a bird-like dinosaur found in South Dakota “suggests that this dinosaur group was not declining in diversity at the very end of the Cretaceous.”
■ Nathan Weeden, 23, of Houghton, Mich., was found guilty of conspiring against rights and damaging religious property for defacing one of Michigan’s oldest synagogues with a swastika and symbols associated with The Base, a white supremacist group, in 2019, prosecutors said.
■ Alberico Crespo, 48, a former special agent who worked as part of a task force involved in health care fraud, was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for his role in an illegal prescription painkiller operation in South Florida, according to court records.
■ Marcus Eriz, 26, of Costa Mesa, Calif., was convicted of second-degree murder and shooting at an occupied motor vehicle in the death of a 6-year-old boy who was riding in the back of his mother’s car on a busy freeway.
■ Laura Belin, who works as a reporter for a radio station based in Ames, Iowa, was granted press credentials for the Iowa House of Representatives, days after a federal lawsuit was filed by the Institute for Free Speech on her behalf against House Chief Clerk Meghan Nelson.
■ Jayson Boebert, ex-husband of U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., was formally charged with several misdemeanors and petty offenses after two separate confrontations with family members in early January, a court supervisor confirmed.
■ Donald Hopkins, the Carter Center’s senior adviser for Guinea worm eradication, credited communities affected by the disease for taking necessary precautions to “keep their water sources safe … because they care about their communities, families, and the people they love.”