• Abdulaziz Al Sheikh, Saudi Arabia's top cleric, set off a heated debate among Arabic Twitter users for saying the game of chess is "forbidden" in Islam because it wastes time and leads to rivalry and enmity between people.
• Jason Melo, 24, of New York City was charged with assault and coercion after police said he beat his girlfriend and posted a video online of himself yelling insults at her as he forced her to walk naked along a Manhattan street because she had texted other men.
• Andria James, 32, a tutor in La Vergne, Tenn., is facing child-endangerment charges after police say she was taking 10 children to her house after a basketball game and ran out of seat room in her car, so she put three of the kids in the trunk.
• Justin Cox-Sever, a now- fired SkyWest Airlines flight attendant accused of putting a bag aboard a plane he was working on and reporting it as suspicious last fall, leading to the plane's emergency landing in North Dakota, is now accused of writing on a plane's restroom wall and reporting it as a threat, prompting the flight to Chicago to return to Charlottesville, Va., FBI agents said.
• Robert Lindlau, 38, an assistant manager of a Dollar General store in Clarksville, Tenn., was arrested on rape charges after two women told police he caught them shoplifting and took them to a locked room where he had them perform sex acts on him and then let them go.
• Roger Bradley, a 15-year Superior Court judge in Ellijay, Ga., is resigning after he was investigated by a state judicial watchdog group for referring to a witness by a racial-slur nickname during a hearing.
• Jonathan Horton, chief of police in Glencoe, Ala., said a driver, who was stabbed after he stopped to help a man he saw fall into the street, was likely a victim of carjackers who fled when the driver pulled a weapon from his vehicle.
• Andrew Cota, a lieutenant with the Police Department in Ansonia, Conn., said a 15-year-old high school student was pulled out of class after he substituted "ISIS" for the "United States of America" during the Pledge of Allegiance, and the case has been turned over to federal authorities.
• Becky Herrin, with the Monroe County, Fla., sheriff's office, said wildlife officers were called in to remove an unwelcome 8-foot-long American crocodile from a backyard pool in Islamorado.
A Section on 01/22/2016