In the news
▪ Dusty Johnson , a South Dakota congressman, says the legislation is about real people and real places as the U.S. House approved his bill to preserve the site where more than 200 American Indians died in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.
▪ Steve Nimz, an arborist, is hailing as “very good news” signs of new growth in the roots of the giant, 150-year-old banyan tree scorched by the flames of deadly wildfires in Lahaina, Maui, and now showing a few green leaves.
▪ Alberto Fernández, Argentina’s president, says “the memory must be kept alive” in thanking a U.N. conference for including the notorious Navy School of Mechanics — a jail and torture site operated by the nation’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s — as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
▪ Sherman Jaquess says he only meant to pay tribute to the late entertainer Ray Charles when he wore blackface, an Afro wig and dark glasses at a 2017 Valentine’s Day event — a performance that, in part, prompted the Southern Baptist Convention to expel the pastor’s Ochelata, Okla., church.
▪ Rob Mercer of Vallejo, Calif., has been banned from the GoFundMe fundraising platform, which also refunded donors to his treatment fund, after the poker player admitted he lied about having Stage 4 colon cancer in order to finagle enough cash to sit in at Las Vegas’ World Series of Poker tournament.
▪ Lina Lutfiawati, a TikTok influencer and convicted blasphemer in Indonesia, is heading to prison for two years and must pay a $16,000 fine after she was videoed saying “In the name of Allah,” then eating a pork rind.
▪ Sonja Mandic, a zookeeper in Palic, Serbia, says no one knows where a female lion cub came from before it was found wandering along a road, malnourished, weak and friendly enough to let a police officer pet it.
▪ Kathy Guillermo of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says members are “cracking open some cold ones to celebrate” the decision by Anheuser-Busch InBev to stop docking the tails of the brewer’s Budweiser Clydesdale team.
▪ Luke O’Brien calls it “the most friendly infestation you could think of” as he and other residents around Rockefeller Township, Pa., continued another day of rounding up hundreds of tame and bewildered minks freed by vandals from a farm.