In the news

Maria Alekhina, a jailed member of a Russian punk group whose members were convicted last year over a protest against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral, was hospitalized on the seventh day of a hunger strike that she held to protest what she calls a persecution campaign against her.

Helen Fielding, the English author, is writing Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the third novel in her Bridget series, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf and due out Oct. 15 in the U.S.

Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, was released from a federal prison in western Maryland with about five months left on his four-year sentence handed down when he pleaded guilty to false statement and other charges.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, urged Australia during a speech in the capital, Canberra, to boost foreign aid in the wake of the country’s announcement that it was delaying a pledge to increase overseas-aid spending.

Bill McKibben, an American environmentalist who founded 350.org, an international movement that has representatives in some 190 countries and whose aim is finding solutions to climate change, won the $100,000 Sophie Prize, created in Norway in 1997 to reward efforts for a sustainable future.

S.H. Kariyawasam, Sri Lanka’s top meteorology official, apologized for naming a deadly cyclone after fourth-century king Mahasen, who was venerated as a god after he built irrigation reservoirs and canals that still are part of the system in that nation’s north-central region.

Edward MacKenzie Jr., a Boston church official who claimed in an autobiography that he was a leg-breaker for reputed gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, pleaded innocent to charges that he looted assets at the Boston Society of the New Jerusalem Church, whose members belong to the Swedenborgian denomination.

Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said senators plan to start work during the week of June 10 on legislation to revise U.S. immigration law and create a path to citizenship for illegal aliens.

Max Clifford, 70, a celebrity publicist who has represented O.J. Simpson, David Beckham and Simon Cowell, pleaded innocent in London to 11 sexual-offense charges involving girls as young as 15 over almost two decades.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/29/2013

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