In the news

In the news

• Clay Higgins, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, said he isn't going to the Washington, D.C., Mardi Gras festivities put on by the state's congressional delegation in late January because of covid-19 screening requirements being imposed on attendees.

• Eric Adams, 61, New York City's mayor-elect, said he's bound for Africa, declaring that his time as a police officer has made him unafraid of traveling to the continent despite concern over the new omicron coronavirus variant detected there.

• Father Sergiy, 66, a rebel Russian monk who castigated the Kremlin and denied that the coronavirus exists, was convicted of encouraging suicides by urging believers to "die for Russia" and sentenced to 3½ years in prison, prosecutors said.

• Shannon Blackman, fire marshal in Columbus County, N.C., said a 9-year-old girl, who wasn't identified, awakened to find a space heater on fire in her bedroom, and roused her younger sister and alerted the rest of the family to escape the blaze, which injured three of the four adults inside the home.

• Lina Axelsson Kihlblom, 51, who was born a man and transitioned in the 1990s, was appointed by Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson as school minister in a new female-majority Cabinet, becoming Sweden's first minister who has gone through a gender transition.

• Lee Price III, 30, of Houston, Texas, convicted of fraud and money laundering after being accused of using federal covid-19 relief funding on a Lamborghini, a Rolex watch and trips to strip clubs, was sentenced to more than nine years in prison, prosecutors said.

• Aceon Ja'shun Hopkins, 20, a Mississippi murder suspect recovering from multiple gunshot wounds who sneaked out of a Pascagoula hospital to escape police, is back in custody after surrendering to a family friend, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said.

• Moshe Porat, 74, former dean of Temple University's Fox School of Business in Philadelphia, was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy for using fake data between 2014 and 2018 to boost the school's national rankings and increase revenue, prosecutors said.

• David Ratcliff, 55, a serial Florida bank robber once dubbed the "I-4 bandit" for a string of robberies in the late 1990s, has been arrested in a holdup at a Clearwater bank branch just five months after his release from federal prison, police said.

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