In the news
Kenneth Storey, fired from his position as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Tampa in Florida, said he made a “heartbreaking” mistake in describing the destruction from Hurricane Harvey as “instant karma” for Texans who voted Republican last year, saying his Twitter post, though “poorly worded,” was meant to critique the GOP’s resistance to funding climate-change research.
Raelin Scurry of Pittsburgh gave birth to her son, E.J., while in a vehicle on the way to a hospital — with the 11-weeks-early baby still in the amniotic sac, a water-filled protective membrane that nearly always bursts in the early stages of labor.
Daniel Oates, the Miami Beach, Fla., police chief, tweeted “suspect apprehended!” after officers captured a 6-foot Burmese python that had slithered near an Exprezo convenience store.
Tariq Debardeleben, 19, of Ohio pleaded innocent in the beating death of his girlfriend’s 15-month-old niece, whom he’d been baby-sitting, saying the child went limp while he dressed her after a bath.
Joseph McInnis III, 21, and Tyree McCoy, 22, were quickly apprehended in the robbery of a bar outside Baltimore, and off-duty officers who were there for a retirement party chased and arrested them, police said.
Charles Emery, 82, and two of his brothers, ages 80 and 78, face child-pornography charges after Seattle police said a relative cleaning out the garage of the home her uncles had shared for 55 years discovered explicit images of children, along with children’s toys and clothing.
Joe Sertich, curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, said a fossil of a triceratops found by construction workers along the Colorado Front Range in Thornton likely has been there at least 66 million years.
Lt. Greg Abbott is being fired, the Cobb County, Ga., police chief said, after dash-camera video from July 2016 but recently obtained by television station WSB-TV showed Abbott telling a person at a traffic stop “you’re not black” and “we only shoot black people.”
Roger Grigsby’s O’mei Szechuan Chinese Restaurant in Santa Cruz, Calif., was forced to close after 40 years after a boycott and online backlash against Grigsby’s $500 donation to Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s unsuccessful 2016 U.S. Senate campaign in Louisiana, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.