• Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, posted on social media photos of her and musicians Ted Nugent and Kid Rock at a private White House dinner Wednesday hosted by President Donald Trump, and thanked Trump "for making it such a special evening."
• Nitin Gadkari, India's road transport minister, said government officials no longer can have red beacon lights on their cars to announce their presence to the public, saying too many used the lights to throw their weight around in traffic.
• Ian Nesmith, 28, an apprentice reptile handler in Ocala, Fla., has been charged with a misdemeanor by Florida wildlife officials for allowing a deadly tan-and-yellow monocled cobra to escape from its enclosure in a home and disappear.
• Bruce Wescott of Hull, Mass., said he didn't realize until Wednesday that a box of antiques he had bought a year ago included a live Civil War-era cannonball, and after he called authorities, a state police bomb squad took the munition to a landfill and detonated it.
• Jeffrey Merfeld, 50, of Peosta, Iowa, has been accused of padlocking a weighted chain around the waist of his 13-year-old nephew, a runaway, to keep him home last fall until his parents returned from a trip, and all three adults now have been charged with child endangerment, prosecutors said.
• Lauren Kirk-Coehlo, 30, of Davis, Calif., admitted that she broke windows, damaged bicycles and left bacon strips, a food Muslims are barred from eating, on the door handles of a mosque, the Yolo County district attorney's office said.
• Melissa Ziemba, 46, of Meriden, Conn., who spent nearly five years in jail awaiting trial on a murder charge in the 2012 shooting of her boyfriend during a drunken argument, pleaded guilty to a lesser count and was released after the state medical examiner agreed to change the cause of death to "undetermined."
• John Ellery, a British coroner, said investigators couldn't determine who hid more than 900 gold coins under the keyboard of an old piano that was donated to a school, and under English law, the hoard will be split between the school and the tuner who found it.
• Tammy O'Daniell-Howell called "heads" and won a coin toss to become village president of Colp, Ill., a community of about 250 people, breaking an 11-11 tie with her opponent in an April 4 election.
A Section on 04/21/2017