In the news

Will Coss, executive producer of the Macy’s Fourth of July show, says the event will return to pandemic-recovering New York City this year, with fireworks launched from five barges in the East River during a live NBC broadcast featuring the Black Pumas, Cold-play, OneRepublic and Reba McEntire.

Ivan Fischer, who leads the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Hungary, said people are ready to get out and socialize again, after five musicians with the orchestra performed Schubert, Mozart and Dvorak on a truck bed in afternoon traffic to urge people to return to concert halls.

Anwar Nasir is bound for New Orleans from the Omaha Symphony in Nebraska to lead the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra as executive director and plans to amplify the energy of the musician-owned co-op “and find new ways to bring music to people near and far.”

Muhammad Rauf Ahmed, 45, of Nevada faces a felony count of grand theft, specifically stealing more than 500 blank vaccine cards from a covid-19 center near Los Angeles where he was a contract worker, authorities said.

Crystal Ford, 29, of St. Louis pleaded guilty to felony child-endangerment charges and got a four-year suspended sentence after leaving her four kids alone in an apartment that caught fire, resulting in three of them going into cardiac arrest, although they all survived.

Debra Brown, a U.S. district judge who was nominated to the federal bench in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama, will become the first Black woman to serve as a chief judge in either of Mississippi’s two federal court districts.

James Stimac, 39, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for killing and beheading a 700-pound black bear on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota, breaking the law because he isn’t a tribal member and entered the reservation without permission.

Werner Neubauer, a lineman for Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative in Willcox, Ariz., says he went up in a bucket lift to talk to and nudge with a fiberglass stick a bear, successfully freeing the animal after it got tangled up in power lines.

Linda Oswald’s family and their 2-year-old border collie-red heeler mix, Tilly, were reunited two days after the dog was thrown from a vehicle during an Idaho highway accident and ran away, then was found on a family farm near Rathdrum, apparently trying to herd sheep.

Upcoming Events