• Kristen Visbal, who created the bronze Fearless Girl that's by the Charging Bull at the New York Stock Exchange but is caught up in a legal squabble, says she's "beyond grateful" and pledged to help find a permanent solution as the city's Public Design Commission ruled the statue may stay there for now.
• Alex Triantaphyllis, Aaron Dunn and Wallis Nader, staffers of the Harris County judge in Texas, were indicted on charges of steering an $11 million contract for covid-19 vaccination outreach to a political consultant with ties to local officials.
• Cortavious Benford, 28, of Atlanta pleaded guilty to helping recruit homeless people to cash counterfeit business checks in several New England states in exchange for small payments, with the evidence including a computer program to design and print checks, a printer and blank check stock.
• Keith Carnes of Missouri thanked God and his supporters as he was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned because prosecutors conceded the evidence was "tainted from all directions" and they would not retry him in the shooting death of a rival drug dealer.
• Karl Skala and incumbent Roy Lovelady are locked up at 1,102 votes apiece in the race for a City Council seat in Columbia, Mo., awaiting either a recount, an agreement to resolve the issue with a drawing or a special election.
• Anne Spiegel, a German Cabinet minister, resigned after it emerged that she went on a vacation shortly after floods that killed more than 180 people in Rhineland-Palatinate state.
• Daniel Sollenberger of Georgia's Natural Resources Department said "they can live almost anywhere and eat almost anything," particularly the eggs of turtles, alligators and ground-nesting birds, as the agency appealed for help spotting the black-and-white South American tegus, an invasive lizard.
• Emma Hebert of North Vermillion High in Louisiana turned an English class paper into an argument for lights and better signage on U.S. 167 after she lost her best friend in a head-on collision, "so nobody else has to go through what we went through."
• Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai were hit with a restraining order and a lawsuit by the University of Southern California over three YouTubed "classroom takeover incidents" that caused "terror and disruption," the most recent at a lecture on the Holocaust.