In the news

■ Austin Rogers, a New York City bartender and Jeopardy winner whose onscreen antics and big bets have won him cash as well as a cult following, said the secret to his success is uncovering patterns in clues by watching hundreds of episodes of the trivia show.

■ Stiles Zuschlag, a transgender teen who was asked to leave Tri-City Christian Academy in Somersworth, N.H., because of his gender identity, said his “heart kind of dropped” when it was announced that he was homecoming king at his new school in North Berwick, Maine.

■ Robert James Kuefler, 60, of White Bear Lake, Minn., was charged after, prosecutors said, he couldn’t bring himself to report the deaths — of natural causes — of his mother and twin brother, and lived with the decomposing bodies in his house for about a year.

■ Kia Stewart, 30, who spent nearly a decade behind bars on a murder conviction that was tossed two years ago, was ordered to be paid $180,000 by the state of Louisiana, the New Orleans Advocate reported.

■ Tereasa Martin, on the same day that her 19-year-old daughter’s death was ruled accidental, filed a legal document complaining that a Chicago hotel had several padlocks available but didn’t use them to secure an abandoned kitchen’s walkin freezer, into which her daughter wandered while intoxicated and on a drug for treatment of epilepsy and migraines, and died of hypothermia.

■ Cesar De Leon, a Brownsville, Texas, city commissioner, submitted a letter of resignation, citing a conflict of interest with his duties as a lawyer, after drawing criticism for using racial slurs to describe two black assistant district attorneys.

■ Kenny Hetrick won’t be reunited with his six tigers and other confiscated exotic animals after a Toledo, Ohio, appeals court ruled that the state had the right to deny him a permit to operate a roadside animal sanctuary.

■ Deidre Matthews, 50, who was once named an adoptive parent of the year by the state of Oklahoma, was sentenced to four years in prison for child abuses, including forcing a child to kill a pet kitten, the Tulsa World reported.

■ Meredith Persky, a veterinarian with the Jacksonville Zoo in Florida, helped return a recuperated 15-pound bobcat to the wild on Jekyll Island, Ga., after hikers found it two weeks earlier partially paralyzed by a toxin secreted by ticks.