• Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh said he got hate mail for allowing church members to eat meat on St. Patrick's Day, which this year fell on a Friday during Lent, with one parishioner writing: "You're sending us to hell. Who do you think you are to be able to tell us we can eat meat?"
• Alan Gawel, a volunteer fire chief in Kent, Conn., said firefighters battling a 200-acre brush fire near the Appalachian Trail not only dealt with rough terrain but with more than a dozen timber rattlesnakes that fled their dens, including one that slithered between a firefighter's legs.
• Sam Lindsay, a Dallas federal judge, dismissed a civil-rights lawsuit filed by the father of a 14-year-old Muslim boy arrested in 2015 for taking a homemade clock to school that teachers thought was a hoax bomb.
• Christopher Putnam, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, said a polar bear dug her maternity den in a snowdrift along a causeway leading to an artificial island off Alaska's north coast, forcing an oil company to restrict its operations until mother and cub emerged three months later.
• Obasi Shaw, 20, a Harvard University senior from Stone Mountain, Ga., earned praise and an honors degree for his debut rap album called Liminal Minds, which he submitted as his senior thesis in the English Department.
• Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese art collector and e-commerce entrepreneur, paid $110.5 million at an auction held by Sotheby's of New York for an untitled 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that last sold for $19,000 in 1984.
• David Mayorquin and his father, Ramon, owners of a Tucson, Ariz.-based seafood company, were indicted in San Diego, accused of smuggling illegally harvested sea cucumbers worth more than $17 million into the United States and then selling the delicacies to Asian markets, prosecutors said.
• Dan Sivilich, president of a battlefield research group, said a piece of canister shot used by the Continental Army that was found at the site of the 1779 Revolutionary War battle at Monmouth, N.J., tested positive for human blood protein.
• Nicole Wells, 26, was charged with disorderly conduct after, police said, she wore an orange Tyrannosaurus rex costume and growled at two horses pulling a tourist carriage in Charleston, S.C., spooking them and causing the driver to fall and injure his leg.
A Section on 05/20/2017