In the news

■ Spenser Merwin, the executive director of the Montana Republican Party, said in a statement that the party wholeheartedly condemned comments by state Rep. Rodney Garcia, who said the U.S. Constitution calls for people who identify as socialists to be jailed or shot.

■ Gerardo Moctezuma, 40, a Texas man who suffered from headaches and fainting spells, had a tapeworm removed from his skull after an MRI revealed the 1½-inch parasite lodged next to his brain, with a neurosurgeon surmising it may have been there more than a decade.

■ Kyle Webb, vice president for finance and business affairs at Rhodes College in Memphis, said in a campus message that all 110 drinking fountains on campus were tested, and four will be removed and two others will be replaced after elevated levels of lead were found, the Daily Memphian reported.

■ Rochelle Hines, a former Associated Press reporter who spent 22 years with the news agency’s Oklahoma City bureau covering stories that included the 1995 federal building bombing and tornadoes that killed dozens of people in 1999, is one of 20 people who will be inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

■ Mike Swafford of the Morgan County sheriff’s office in Alabama said a pay increase from $31,000 to $32,000 annually will reward school resource officers, and officials hope to attract more job candidates to the county district, which has empty positions in eight of its 14 schools.

■ Lenin Moreno, Ecuador’s president, has apologized for comments suggesting women tend to complain about sexual harassment when it comes from ugly people, after women’s-rights activists and others expressed anger.

■ Heather Pierce, a mathematics lecturer at Emmanuel College in Boston, noting the rarity of Sunday’s date — 02/02/2020 — as a universal palindrome, said that “it’s pretty cool to have one in your lifetime,” with the next one not occurring until Dec. 12, 2121.