In the news

Angeline Colin, a 13-year employee at Ameristar Casino in Kansas City, Mo., who won $15,000 for being named the casino’s employee of the year, is sending most of the money to her family in Haiti.

Sen. Scott Brown, RMass., doesn’t want to seek criminal charges against a camp counselor who he says sexually assaulted him 40 years ago on Cape Cod, said Cape and Island’s District Attorney Michael O’Keefe.

President Felipe Calderon

of Mexico, in a speech praising the army’s fight against drug cartels, promised minimum monthly pensions worth about $830 for the spouses of soldiers killed in the effort.

Sarah Brown, the wife of ex-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told the Daily Mail that she once saw Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi ask for model Naomi Campbell’s phone number at an official dinner, but she did not specify whether the 74-year-old Berlusconi, who faces allegations that he paid for sex with an underage girl, directly approached Campbell.

Chris Christie, 48, the Republican governor of New Jersey who has long struggled with his weight and whose suits are becoming noticeably looser, won’t say how many pounds he has lost in his first year in office but attributes his body’s changes to working with a trainer and eating better.

Maksim Gelman, 23, was indicted in Brooklyn, N.Y., on allegations that the Ukrainian immigrant fatally stabbed his stepfather, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, then killed Yelena Bulchenko and her mother, Anna, stole a car and stabbed its owner, and then ran down and killed a pedestrian.

U.S.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, 67, a fifth-term New Mexico Democrat, said he won’t seek re-election next year, becoming the fourth member of the Democratic Senate caucus to decide not to face voters in 2012.

George Soros, a billionaire hedge-fund manager who has donated millions to Democrats, said on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS that President Barack Obama “has lost control of the agenda” on the U.S. economy.

Jerry Paffendorf, who helped organize Detroit-NeedsRoboCop.com , which in six days raised $50,000 to produce and install in Detroit a 7-foot-tall iron replica of RoboCop, the crime-fighting cyborg from the 1987 movie of the same name, said he hopes the project will show that “crowd funding” can make a difference in a city where so much needs to be done.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/20/2011

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