In the news
■ Ryan Buras, deputy director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, has been accused of sexually harassing a former employee and when she asked him to stop he “cut me off from all the resources that I needed to do my job,” the lawsuit states.
■ Charles Grassley, 90, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, was hospitalized with an infection, is receiving antibiotic infusions and will return to work “as soon as possible following doctors’ orders,” his office said in a statement.
■ Melvin Butler, 39, accused of shooting two New York City police officers, was characterized by Mayor Eric Adams as “a very violent and dangerous person” who “attempted to harm our police officers, but they responded accordingly.”
■ Heather Mack, 28, of Oak Park, Ill., was sentenced to 26 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $262,708 in restitution and a $50,000 fine for helping to kill her own mother and stuffing the body in a suitcase during a vacation in Bali.
■ Nicholas Alahverdian, 36, who authorities say faked his death and fled the U.S. to avoid rape charges in Utah, denied in court that he is the suspect and called allegations that he wasn’t giving his legal name “complete hearsay.”
■ Katelyn Jones, 26, of Epping, N.H., was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison for texting threats to the Republican chairwoman of the Wayne County, Mich., Board of Canvassers, and her family, after a November 2020 meeting to certify local results in that year’s presidential race.
■ Nathan Woodyard, 34, who put Elijah McClain in a neck hold during attempts to detain him in 2019, but was acquitted in the 23-year-old’s death, resigned from the Aurora, Colo., police force, city spokesman Ryan Luby confirmed.
■ Golriz Ghahraman, New Zealand’s first refugee lawmaker and former member of the country’s Green Party, was charged with two counts of shoplifting a day after she resigned without referring to the specific allegations, saying that “stresses relating to my work” led her to act “in ways completely out of character.”
■ Nathaniel Maloney, 20, of Morton, Ill., Andre Street, 19, of Groveland, Sage Raeuber, 21, of Morton, and Dahlia Bolin, 17, were sentenced for their roles as teenagers in Bolin’s murder-for-hire plot that killed her mother and critically wounded her father.