• Brad Pennington, a park ranger in California, said a 6-year-old girl escaped with minor injuries, including a couple of puncture wounds in her leg, after she was attacked by a mountain lion on a trail in Cupertino and was rescued by a man who punched the animal, driving it away.
• Jacob Mustoe, 20, who pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for killing a friend by running over him with a car just before crashing into a house north of Kansas City, Mo., after the two got into a fight, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
• Shaheen Borna, a white professor who teaches marketing at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., was suspended for the rest of the semester after he called police to his classroom when a black student refused to change seats, school officials said.
• Nelson Gibson, a Port St. Lucie, Fla., man undergoing kidney dialysis three times a week, said he is upset that he was told by a dialysis center that he can't have a life-sized cardboard cutout of President Donald Trump for emotional support during the 3½-hour treatments.
• Byron Williams, an Orleans Parish, La., criminal court judge, has resigned amid an investigation into accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior in the courthouse, including allegations that he groped and harassed clerks and commented about the appearance of a female attorney in open court.
• Brock Miller of Myrtle Beach, S.C., a former pastor at Angley's Grace Cathedral in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, reached a confidential settlement in a suit he filed accusing 98-year-old televangelist Ernest Angley of sexually abusing and harassing him over a decade beginning in 2004.
• Scott Swift, pop singer Taylor Swift's father, who fought with an intruder he discovered in his penthouse in St. Petersburg, Fla., identified the suspect in a photo lineup, enabling police to arrest a 30-year-old man on burglary charges.
• Mike Smith, mayor of Waveland, Miss., said police are investigating a possible hate crime after a mother reported that a man on a Mardi Gras parade float handed her 12-year-old daughter a black doll with beads forming a noose around its neck and told the girl, "That's you."
A Section on 02/18/2020