In the news

Mitt Romney, the Republican senator from Utah who is in self-isolation after colleague Rand Paul of Kentucky tested positive for the coronavirus, criticized a weekend gathering of hundreds of people at a Salt Lake City airport parking garage to welcome 900 Mormon missionaries returning from the Philippines, noting they weren’t following social distancing warnings. Pamela Baker-Masson, spokeswoman for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., said zoo staff used frozen semen from the zoo’s male giant panda, Tian Tian, to artificially inseminate its female giant panda, Mei Xiang, in hopes of getting her pregnant. Steven Chastain, a Georgia insurance adjuster, was charged with stealing more than $215,000 in insurance money he was supposed to send to a business to cover losses caused by Hurricane Michael in 2018, authorities said. Ashley Furness, 35, of Bartlett, N.H., a hiker injured when she fell about 200 feet as she descended the 6,288-foot-tall Mount Washington, was rescued with the help of the Cog Railway train that takes visitors up and down the mountain. Caine Brown, awaiting trial on charges that he sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue in Mandeville, La., in 2018, said he regrets his actions, rejects the neo-Nazi views he once embraced and wants to make an in-person apology to the congregation. Sam Mullet Sr., the leader of a breakaway Amish group in Ohio who served about seven years of an 11-year prison sentence for a series of beard- and hair-cutting attacks in 2011, will serve the rest of his time at home after his attorney argued the coronavirus puts the 74-year-old at risk. Jerry Varnell, 26, of Sayre, Okla., convicted of plotting to blow up an Oklahoma City bank with a 1,000-pound vehicle bomb in 2017 because he was unhappy with the government, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.