In the news
■ Jacinda Ardern, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, finally married her longtime partner Clarke Gayford after postponing their wedding from the summer of 2022 due to covid-19 restrictions on gathering sizes at the time.
■ Oleg Gumenyuk, the former mayor of Vladivostok, Russia, was released from his 12 year prison sentence for accepting bribes after he agreed to serve his country in the fight against Ukraine and signed a contract to be in Russia’s military.
■ Darrell Scraper, a police officer with the NYPD, was docked 25 vacation days after he was found to have unnecessarily fired his gun in an effort to stop a crime suspect driving a Honda CR-V during a 2021 pursuit.
■ Jamie VanValkenburg, the band director at Oakton High School in Vienna, Va., said winning a national marching band contest held by Metallica was “like nothing that’s ever happened to our program before,” after Oakton and three other high schools won.
■ Alvin Pettit, a sculptor from Jersey City, N.J., was unanimously approved by the Philadelphia Art Commission to have his concept and design for a new Harriet Tubman statue, titled “A Higher Power: The Call of a Freedom Fighter,” placed in the Philadelphia City Hall.
■ Winslow Dumaine, an artist from Chicago, said “It’s like a very viscerally silly thing to see,” as he described the Chicago Rat Hole, a concrete imprint on West Roscoe Street that has skyrocketed in popularity due to a photo Dumaine shared on X, formerly known as Twitter.
■ Kristina Karamo, a leading Republican in Michigan, called Saturday “a happy day of remembrance because it represents a renewed unification of spirit and purpose within the Michigan Republican Party” after a group of committee members voted to keep her as the state party leader, despite a previous vote doing the opposite.
■ Tonantzyn Oris Beltran, a 28-year-old California woman, was arrested in San Rafael after allegedly fatally stabbing her mother while broadcasting it live on Facebook, causing parent company Meta to work with detectives in taking the video down.