In the news

▪ Fernando Sajche, a native of the Brooklyn neighborhood in Baltimore, helped lead efforts to create memorials for the workers killed in the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse that included home flags, saying “the flags are the pride of our country.”

▪ Adisson Pierre Maalouf, a 26-year-old American who makes YouTube videos about him visiting armed groups around the world, said that he was released from captivity in Haiti after having been kidnapped two weeks ago while trying to interview gang leader Jimmy Cherizier, aka Barbecue.

▪ Aimee Lang, a research biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, said “it’s nice to be able to report some good news the last couple of years,” as researchers indicate the gray whale population along the West Coast has risen five years after an “unusual mortality event” in 2019.

▪ Ibrahim Iskandar, the king of Malaysia, gifted a pot of honey to the Anti-Corruption Commission chief, Azam Baki, telling him that “as I said previously, my honeymoon is over, now go catch the bees,” to signal his shift to focus on tackling corruption.

▪ Andrew Hess, a 37-yearold from Livonia, Mich., will face a felony charge after being accused of making a comment at a December recount about how the director of elections in Oakland County, Joe Rozell, should be hung for treason.

▪ John Keenan, a Democratic Massachusetts state senator from Quincy, played his own April Fools’ joke as he made a video announcing legislation to ban all Starbucks in the state, saying, “We all know that America runs on Dunkin’, and Massachusetts is no exception.”

▪ Frederico Gutierrez, m the mayor of Medellin, Colombia, said “we have to recover the control of this area,” as he issued a six-month ban on prostitution to prevent the sexual exploitation of children.