In the news
George Weah, 51, a former soccer star, was sworn in as president of Liberia in the country’s first peaceful transfer of power in more than 70 years, and pledged to “end corruption in public service.”
U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority whip, returned to the Capitol after a surgery earlier this month, the latest in a series of operations that are part of a monthslong recovery after he was shot at a congressional baseball practice last summer.
Ashley Nicole Portis performed as part of a tongue-in-cheek candlelight vigil for a Taco Bell in Montgomery, Ala., that caught fire last week, reprising a parody video about the restaurant for more than 100 mourners.
Niels Hoegel, a German nurse who is already serving a life sentence for two murders, was charged in the deaths of 97 more patients between 1999 and 2005, after officials carried out toxicological examinations of dozens of patients who died at the hospitals where he worked.
Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei made a complaint of defamation to Indonesian police about an Instagram account that criticized the leader of Southeast Asia’s smallest nation, police officials said, adding that some of the comments “could cause hatred against the sultan.”
Mirah Horowitz, an Arlington, Va., lawyer who also leads an animal rescue organization, got Southwest Airlines to donate a roundtrip flight from Washington to Puerto Rico to carry supplies to the island and return with an airplane full of animals found abandoned after Hurricane Maria.
Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, 26, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for plotting to kill U.S. military members after receiving training from extremists in Syria, in what the judge said was a plan to free Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist convicted of shooting at two U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Red Fawn Fallis, 38, of Denver pleaded guilty to civil disorder and gun possession by a convicted felon in a deal with federal prosecutors who had accused her of firing a handgun at officers while she was being arrested during protests of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
Lisa Clair, a spokesman for the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Conn., said a toddler girl was bitten by a red-rumped agouti, a South American rodent about the size of a guinea pig, when she apparently stuck her finger in a gap between the panels of its enclosure.