In the news
■ Faron Hamblin, a member of the Warsaw, Va., Town Council, said he wore blackface, complete with a blue suit, curly wig and dark makeup, for a social media post out of “love” and “respect” to pay tribute to a character played by actor Eddie Murphy in the 1988 film “Coming to America.”
■ Gary Freedman, 49, in a 40-minute solo effort, became the first person to fly across New Zealand’s 48-mile-wide Cook Strait, which separates the nation’s two main islands, in a small, two-seat electric plane that has a flight time of about an hour.
■ Odunayo “Baba” Oluwalade, 25, of Maryland, accused of being one of three men operating a fake Moderna website to sell coronavirus vaccine at $30 per dose, faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, federal prosecutors said.
■ Marcus Williams, a Tennessee construction worker, faces a first-degree murder charge in the shooting of his supervisor last year after the two argued when Williams was told that he couldn’t have a handgun at a construction site in Cordova, authorities said.
■ Robert Durst, 78, the real estate heir serving a life sentence in California for murder, was indicted by a New York City grand jury on a second-degree murder charge in the death of his first wife, Kathie, who disappeared nearly four decades ago, prosecutors said.
■ Donald Ingram, 70, an Illinois man who pleaded guilty after a fellow passenger alerted authorities that Ingram looked at child pornography on his cellphone during a commercial flight to Florida, was sentenced to five years in prison, federal prosecutors said.
■ Randy Jinks, 65, a probate judge in Talladega County, Ala., was removed from office by state judiciary officials after being accused of racist and sexually inappropriate behavior that included demeaning comments about women and saying George Floyd “got what he deserved.”
■ Jon Lancaster, a firstterm state lawmaker from Houston, Miss., said he wanted to give his constituents “a real seat at the table” by switching from Democrat to Republican in a state where the GOP holds a supermajority in the 122-member House.
■ Maria Blancas y Garcia, a great-great-grandmother who worked as a teacher in Mexico for decades, earned a university degree in business education at age 93 after going back to school in 2016, saying she now wants to earn a degree in theology.