In the news

■ Maura Healey, attorney general of Massachusetts, said families should not be trapped in “harmful, expensive and illegal” agreements as a California-based finance company agreed to pay $900,000 to settle allegations that it was leasing dogs to consumers as if they were cars.

■ Casey Lawhon, owner of In Memory Casket Wraps in Mississippi, said a teenager who died had dreamed of being “TikTok famous,” explaining his vision of a custom casket that’s black with splashes of teal and hot pink and depicts the girl with her friends and the phrase “Dancing in the Sky.”

■ Daniel Allen of Brookport, Ill., was sentenced to one year and one day in prison and must pay pay $10,000 after admitting he caught shovelnose sturgeon along the Ohio River out of season and with illegal mesh nets, selling the roe to a caviar distributor in Tennessee.

■ Douglas Christopher Gorman of Mississippi got 2½ years in prison and was ordered to pay back $1.53 million in Medicare payments after it was discovered he had no medical license despite practicing as a doctor in Biloxi.

■ Craig Godfrey, former band director at North Cobb Christian School in Kennesaw, Ga., was sentenced to 12 years in prison after engaging in a three-year relationship with a student that included sexual contact on school grounds and explicit photos via Snapchat.

■ Richard Burt, an English professor, is suing the University of Florida, alleging it violated his free-speech rights in stripping him of his teaching assignments and barring him from campus because he criticized the go-ahead for in-person classes when covid-19 cases were surging.

■ Tate Reeves, governor of Mississippi, is defending his decision to again proclaim April “Confederate Heritage Month,” two years after he signed a law retiring the last state flag in the U.S. that featured a Confederate battle emblem.

■ Greg Carswell, the suspended mayor of Waynesboro, Ga., was removed for good after pleading guilty to felony theft and forgery while working at a loan company and being sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to make restitution.

■ Michael Patrick Turland of Arizona faces animal cruelty charges after 183 dead dogs, rabbits, birds and other animals were found in his garage freezer, including some apparently frozen alive, with the tipoff being a woman’s complaint that he hadn’t returned the snakes she’d lent him for breeding.