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.