In the news
∎ Aaron Cooper , a 26-year-old ex-New York Police Department policeman fired for pulling his gun out during an argument over parking, was charged with vehicular manslaughter after crashing while under the influence of alcohol and killing his passenger.
∎ William Albert “Billy Jack” Haynes Jr., a 70-year-old Portland, Ore. man who formerly competed in the World Wrestling Federation, was arrested in the killing of his 85-yearold wife after police said he shot and killed her at their home.
∎ Selby Kiffer, the international senior specialist for books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s in New York, called a journal written by a Revolutionary War soldier “exceptionally rare” as it sold privately for an unknown price above $300,000 after an auction failed to hit the minimum needed.
∎ Josh Schriver, a Republican state Representative in Michigan, lost his committee assignment and staff as a result of sharing a post on X (formerly Twitter) that promoted a conspiracy theory claiming there’s a plot to lessen the influence of white people.
∎ Mike Azinger, a Republican state Senator in West Virginia, said “this is a cut at the fundamental rights of parents” after the state Senate passed and sent a bill to the state House that would fine anyone caught smoking or possessing a lighted tobacco product in a vehicle with someone age 16 or younger present.
∎ Courdarion Craft,a 20-year-old from Memphis, was arrested on charges including first-degree murder after being identified by police as having fatally shooting one man, wounding two women and carjacking two vehicles at four different locations in Memphis.
∎ Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, said he and a team of meteor hunters “found over 20 fragments” of a meteorite that fell and broke near Berlin on Jan. 21.
∎ Brian Hendricks, Fire Chief at a Mehlville Fire District station in St. Louis County, Mo., said a baby girl dropped off at a “Safe Haven Baby Box” at the firehouse was “just as healthy as could be.”
∎ Aaron Peskin, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said that “buildings could have been lit on fire,” after a Waymo self-driving car was vandalized and set on fire by a mob in San Francisco’s Chinatown during Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations.