In the news
■ Jill Biden, a lifelong teacher, dressed as her cat Willow to help President Joe Biden give away books to trick-or-treaters at the White House “Hallo-READ!” event that also featured story readings, candy and appropriately gloomy skies and rainy weather.
■ Gavin Newsom concedes that he needs to work on his balance after the California governor collided with a 10-year-old Beijing boy in a basketball game, prompting plenty of online referees to call foul.
■ Joseph Andrew Garton has settled for $125,000 his lawsuit against Tennessee authorities claiming his freespeech rights were violated when he was arrested for posting a meme depicting two people urinating on the gravestone of a Dickson County sheriff’s deputy killed on the job in 2018.
■ Susan Alberts, a biologist at Duke University, says “beautiful” data in Arizona State University primatologist Kevin Langergraber’s study has convinced her that chimpanzees are the second nonhuman animal, after a few species of whales, to undergo menopause.
■ Molly Corbett and her father, ex-FBI agent Thomas Martens, have pleaded no contest and guilty, respectively, to North Carolina manslaughter charges in the fatal beating of her husband, a man she met while working as an au pair for his children.
■ Craig Lancaster remains under scrutiny and faces a lawsuit a year after the Chicago officer, off duty and visiting his schoolteacher girlfriend, struck an eighth-grader as the teenager walked to class arguing with another boy about a basketball game.
■ Brian Thompson, a captain with the Los Banos, Calif., Fire Department, says he hopes somebody would do the same for his kids as word spread that he and his crew made breakfast for three children after their mother was taken to a hospital with pregnancy complications and their father needed three hours to get home from work.
■ Mike Reynolds, a National Park Service supervisor in Death Valley, is warning that road repairs have uprooted wildlife after a wreck caused by Swiss tourists who braked suddenly to avoid squashing a tarantula.
■ Paola D’Agostino, director of Florence’s Medici Chapel, says it’s unresolved whether charcoal drawings on the walls of a hidden 33-by-10-foot space were done by Michelangelo as the museum prepares to open the room to the public.