In the news
■ Julie Brinks, general manager of WOOD-TV in Michigan, apologized and said the station is “committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion” despite a memo telling reporters to cover fewer LGBTQ+ events during Pride Month because coverage could be “polarizing.”
■ Hayley Cain of Hamtramck, Mich., argued that “the Pride flag represents making space for all humans on all the spectrums,” but the City Council banned LGBTQ+ flags from public sites after a tense, hourslong meeting, with the comment period punctuated by a woman kissing the woman standing next to her.
■ Seann Patrick Pietila of Pickford, Mich., was charged with using social media to threaten a mass killing at an East Lansing synagogue on the anniversary of the massacre at two New Zealand mosques by a white supremacist.
■ Anthony Dew was paroled just as Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court vacated sex trafficking convictions against the Black Muslim man whose court-appointed attorney had a history of posting racially offensive and anti-Muslim vitriol on social media.
■ Dustin Passarelli of Plainfield, Ind., an Army veteran, was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the road rage shooting death of a Muslim man after witnesses said he hurled ethnic and religious insults at the victim before opening fire.
■ Alfred Megbuluba was sentenced to 15 years in prison in a voluntary manslaughter plea deal for killing a woman by throwing or pushing her out of a moving Lamborghini in Atlanta.
■ Pieter Van Dalen of Peru’s Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos said he discerned a ceremonial pattern when archaeologists found a pre-Hispanic mummy surrounded by coca leaves and seashells atop a destroyed clay temple on a hill in Lima.
■ Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit cited “great physical and human capital destroyed, and thousands of jobs lost” as he sided with commercial fishermen and said rules aimed at saving the vanishing North Atlantic right whale must be revised.
■ Cyndi Tuell of Western Watersheds said wolves “have shown, time and time again, that this purely political boundary is ecologically irrelevant” as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said a Mexican gray wolf found wandering in New Mexico outside a recovery zone was returned to the wilds of Arizona, after being named Asha by schoolchildren.