In the news

■ Charles, a Los Angeles County man who did not want his last name used, said his brown tabby cat Brandy, which disappeared 15 years ago, immediately began purring when the two were reunited after he got a call from an animal shelter 40 miles away that used the number from a microchip implanted when he adopted her.

■ Ronald Mann, 33, accused in the 2018 stabbing death of a motorist who stopped to help when Mann crashed his getaway vehicle after forcing a couple to withdraw money from an ATM near Holtville, Ala., pleaded guilty to capital murder to avoid a potential death sentence.

■ F. William Cullins, a judge in Montgomery County, Kan., who cursed at courthouse employees so often that a trial clerk kept a “swear journal” to document his outbursts, has been suspended for one year by the Kansas Supreme Court.

■ Javier Lopez Marcano, a tourism official in Santander, Spain, said 44-year-old Joaquin Gutierrez, a nature park zookeeper, died when a female elephant struck him with its trunk as he cleaned its enclosure, causing him to hit his head against the pen’s bars.

■ Linda Williams, 52, of Memphis, an Internal Revenue Service tax examiner, was charged with preparing fake tax returns for friends and relatives to inflate refunds by claiming more than $500,000 in false deductions and keeping a portion for herself, prosecutors said.

■ Kofi Osei, a native of Ghana who lives in Randolph, Mass., is accused of using romance scams to bilk three women he met online out of more than $500,000 by telling them he worked on oil rigs and needed money to get out of foreign jails, prosecutors said.

■ Kyle Dixon, 54, of Jackson, Miss., accused of driving in the wrong direction on Mississippi 25 in Rankin County when he crashed into a vehicle, killing a woman and two children, was charged with three counts of manslaughter, police said.

■ Donald “Dick” Donovan agreed to temporarily step down as the district attorney for Paulding County, Ga., after he was charged with improperly seeking to dismiss a shoplifting charge against a female employee whom he is accused of sexually harassing.

■ Elizabeth Galarza, 56, a New York woman accused of punching a 2-year-old boy in the head as she argued with the child’s mother who asked her to keep six seats away while riding a Manhattan subway train, was charged with assault, police said.