Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
In the news
■ President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by other Russian officials, went spearfishing in southern Siberia, shooting a pike after a two-hour hunt, with Russian state television releasing photos of him at times also bare-chested with a fishing rod.
■ Kenny Grubbs of Portales, N.M., who faces felony cockfighting charges after a raid in west Texas in which officers seized 107 birds and sharp blades that can be attached to the legs of roosters, told reporters that the event was a private poultry show. ■ Michael Kellar, 56, of Tacoma, Wash., was charged with solicitation of a sex crime after a preschool teacher sitting behind him on a flight to San Jose, Calif., noticed him “texting about sexually molesting young children,” and alerted the flight crew, police said.
■ Ron Cornelius of Durango, Colo., joked that he doesn’t usually get up at 5 a.m. “unless there is a bear driving a car down the street,” after a bear broke into and trashed an SUV, somehow causing it to roll out of a driveway and crash into a mailbox in Cornelius’ neighborhood.
■ McKenzie Boyd, with the Darrington School District in Washington state, said the district hopes to start the academic year on time as it repairs $500,000 in vandalism at two schools, which court records say a 13-year-old girl intended as revenge on a principal who had suspended her.
■ Mary Mattingly created Swale, a garden of vegetables, apples and herbs on an old barge that docks in different areas around New York City, saying she wanted to give apartment-dwellers the opportunity to forage for free food, something that’s illegal in the city’s parks.
■ Mark Kmatz, a former sergeant for the Bernalillo County, N.M., sheriff’s office, filed a complaint alleging employment retaliation, saying that pictures of naked women he looked at on the Internet, which led to his firing, were research for his job.
■ Steve Prator, the Caddo Parish, La., sheriff, said an Oklahoma woman who was a passenger in an SUV was killed on Interstate 20 when a wheel from a truck and trailer came loose, bounced across the median and crashed through the SUV’s windshield.
■ Adam Mayr, 39, an ex-English teacher at a Deptford, N.J., vocational high school, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for secretly recording “upskirt” videos of at least 24 female students, most of whom were about 14 years old.