In the news
■ Calvin Bautista , a 38-year-old New York City man, was sentenced to a year of probation and fined $5,000 as a result of admitting to smuggling three Burmese pythons in his pants through a U.S.-Canadian border crossing on July 15, 2018.
■ Eric Rudolph, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic bomber, was denied a new sentence by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who ruled he was still bound to the terms of his plea agreement.
■ Patrick Schobel, a 38-year-old German citizen, was remanded into custody in Russia after being accused of smuggling drugs when he was detained at a St. Petersburg airport, allegedly carrying cannabis gummies with him.
■ Nicolas Sarkozy, a former president of France, was sentenced to a year in prison with six months suspended by the Paris Court of Appeal for illegal campaign financing in his failed reelection bid in 2012.
■ Eric Gallagher, a Democratic N.H. state representative from Concord, explained that “branding is actually something that organizations take really seriously” as he filed a bill to amend state law to include an official pronunciation for the capital city.
■ Robert Thibodeau, 52, was arrested after police in Plattsburgh, N.Y., stopped him in his truck where a loaded semi-auto shotgun was discovered as Thibodeau’s brother warned them that he had been recently fired from a local hospital.
■ Joel DeBellefeuille, parent of a 13-year-old boy, issued a legal letter to a Montreal-area teacher and school board after he and other parents claimed that the teacher, Mario Perron, had been selling artworks made by his junior high school art students online and claiming they were his own work.
■ Bryan Vidal Lorenzo, a Broward County, Fla., sheriff’s sergeant, was arrested at Miami International Airport on charges of importing MDMA into Florida after Miami-Dade police and Customs and Border Patrol officers said they found the drug inside the pocket of a pair of ski pants in Lorenzo’s luggage.
■ Joyce Boston, an 89-year-old resident of Loveland, Colo., said that “I love doing volunteer work. It keeps me, gives me a reason to keep living,” as she and a group of volunteers worked to stamp Valentine’s Day cards with a special postmark saved exclusively for the “Sweetheart City” that had been re-mailed to their town.