In the news

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Bob Sampson, the principal of Bellingham Christian School, a private, nondenominational school in Bellingham, Wash., said the promise of nice spring weather and the lack of snow days this winter prompted him to give students a “sun day” off to re-energize, adding, “In a world that’s got a lot of hard things going, it’s fun to create a moment of joy.”

Ricardo Calderon, 42, the prize-winning chief investigative journalist at the Colombian news magazine Semana, was attacked by two gunmen who got out of a car and called his name when he stopped at a toll booth southwest of Bogota, but he escaped uninjured, editor Alejandro Santos said.

Deborah Gratz, a 59-year-old Northern California preschool teacher, pleaded no contest to an attempted child endangerment charge after she was caught slipping sleeping pills into toddlers’ water cups because she wanted them to take longer naps.

Niall Ferguson, a Harvard history professor and author, apologized for saying during a question-and-answer session at an investment conference that economist John Maynard Keynes didn’t care about the future because he was homosexual and had no children.

Nigel Evans, Britain’s 55-year-old deputy House of Commons speaker, was arrested for questioning on suspicion of rape and sexual assault.

Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, a Republican, signed a bill meant to improve protection for victims of domestic abuse by reducing the time it takes to get a protection order.

Sergio Quintero, 44, the owner of a Chicago auto yard, was indicted on 58 felony charges in the theft of eight 40-foot-long buses that were dismantled for scrap metal, leaving what one police official said was “a pile of shredded school buses about two stories high.”

Cecile Kyenge, Italy’s first black Cabinet minister who was targeted by racial slurs after her appointment, said “Italy isn’t a racist country” but that some Italians are ignorant of other cultures.

Charles Francis Gaskins, 48, a member of a white-supremacist group that required its members to attack anyone with a history of child molestation, was sentenced to 26 years to life in a California prison after pleading no contest in the slaying of Neil Hayes after Gaskins’ wife discovered on a website that Hayes was a registered sex offender.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/05/2013