In the news

■ Zoe Buhler, 28, a pregnant Australian woman accused of inciting activists online to demonstrate against a pandemic lockdown, said she didn’t know she had broken any law until she was handcuffed by police at her home in Ballarat in front of her children and led away in pajamas.

■ Jeff Sikich, a National Park Service wildlife biologist, said it will be interesting to watch young mountain lions adapt to the burned landscape of the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills west of Los Angeles after researchers reported finding five dens containing 13 kittens.

■ Vera Rivard, 16, of Springfield, N.H., became the second American to swim across the English Channel this year, taking more than 14 hours in what she called an “adventure” to swim 33 miles from Dover, England, to a beach near Calais, France.

■ David Sunderland, a 55-year-old Virginia shipyard worker who said he has worn ball caps supporting President Donald Trump to work every day for nearly four years, said he was fired for refusing to remove a hat after the company said it violated a rule barring workers from “campaigning” while on the job.

■ Joshua O’Keefe, 39, of Troy, Mo., accused of engaging in a fistfight on the shoulder of Interstate 64 near St. Louis that left a 68-year-old man dead, faces a second-degree murder charge, police said.

■ Jonathan Lawrence, a 28-year-old Georgia jail inmate awaiting trial, is accused of looking for someone to murder a sheriff’s deputy and was rearrested at the Troup County jail on a felony criminal attempted murder charge, investigators said.

■ Jessica Krug, a professor of Black history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., called herself a “culture leech” and said her “cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics” in a blog post where she admitted falsely claiming a Black identity despite being white and Jewish.

■ Kyle Oliver, a sheriff’s deputy in Richland County, S.C., was fired and charged with assault after body camera footage showed him yanking a handcuffed woman to the ground by her hair, Sheriff Leon Scott said.

■ Ovuoke Frank Ofikoro, 41, Bonmene Sibe, 27, and Trenice Hassel, 27, all of St. Louis, are accused of pretending to be high-ranking military officers deployed overseas in order to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from dozens of middle-aged and older women in what federal prosecutors called a “romance scam.”