In the news
■ Miles Walker, the owner of an auto repair shop in Peachtree City, Ga., who dumped 91,500 oil-covered pennies in an employee’s driveway as his final paycheck, was ordered by a judge to pay him $8,700 more for overtime and damages.
■ Sammie Lee Sias, a former Augusta, Ga., city commissioner, was sentenced to three years in prison for destroying records and lying about it amid a probe into the misspending of public money and other misconduct.
■ Abdulrasheed Bawa was suspended as chairman of Nigeria’s anti-graft commission and taken into custody following what the president called the “weighty allegations of abuse of office leveled against him,” while Bawa has long denied any wrongdoing and says, “Corruption is fighting back.”
■ Ryan Stuart Hadland of Phoenix could get up to six months in jail as he faces a misdemeanor charge of sending a threatening email to a Maricopa County, Ariz., supervisor who worked to bat down election misinformation.
■ William Dwyer, police commissioner in Warren, Mich., said, “This is not what we do; this is not who we are,” as one of his officers was charged with assault after video showed him punching a man in the face and slamming his head to the ground at the jail, with other officers intervening and reporting the incident.
■ Cole Bridges, a U.S. soldier who thought he was communicating online with a terrorist when it was really an FBI operative, pleaded guilty to seeking to tell terrorists how to ambush American soldiers in the Middle East and faces up to 40 years in prison.
■ Kim Dotcom, the founder of the once-popular pirating website Megaupload, continues fighting U.S. charges and the threat of extradition as two men who helped run the site were sentenced by a New Zealand court to about 2½ years in prison.
■ Mathias Pfeil of the state office for the preservation of historical monuments in Bavaria, Germany, said “the state of preservation is extraordinary” after the unearthing of a bronze sword made 3,000 years ago, adding that it “almost still shines.”
■ Justin Richardson, one of the authors of a children’s tale about a penguin family, said, “Our book has been banned because Tango has two dads” as he, his husband and co-author and a group of students sue a Florida school district and the state’s board of education.