• Michelle Obama, the first lady, praised the movie American Sniper at a veterans-focused event in Washington, calling the biopic of the late Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle "complex," "emotional" and a realistic "depiction of a veteran and his family."
• John Kerry, the secretary of state and a Boston resident who fell behind on his snow shoveling after this week's blizzard while attending the funeral of King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, intends to pay a $50 fine after failing to clear part of the sidewalk at his red-brick mansion in Beacon Hill, a spokesman said.
• David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, told a Louisiana radio show he may run for Congress against the No. 3 House Republican, Louisiana's Steve Scalise, who recently apologized for a speech he gave in 2002 to a white supremacist group founded by Duke.
• David Esopenko, who leases a house in an upscale neighborhood of Arlington, Texas, disputed city officials' claim that the property houses a swingers club and said he'll appeal after the city ordered a stop to parties at the nearly $500,000 house, dubbed Eutopia.
• Seth Jackson, 29, of Wichita, Kan., was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for involuntary manslaughter after his 10-month-old foster daughter died in July after he left her in a hot car while he and his domestic partner smoked marijuana.
• Gina McCarthy, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, told reporters that her aim in visiting with Vatican officials was to show the Vatican how aligned President Barack Obama and Pope Francis are on climate change.
• Robert Mugabe, 90, the longtime leader of Zimbabwe, was appointed the new chairman of the 54-nation African Union during the bloc's two-day heads of state summit at the organization's headquarters in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa.
• Richard Malley, a member of the Arizona Minuteman border-watch movement, was sentenced to six months in jail for pointing a rifle at a sheriff's deputy he mistook for a drug smuggler.
• Guneet Banga, a Hong Kong businessman who failed to show up for an arraignment in Montana on charges of felony criminal mischief and misdemeanor criminal trespass, is accused of breaking into a home after getting drunk at a wedding and causing extensive damage in a case a judge says "reads like a Hangover movie."
A Section on 01/31/2015